A Few Performance Art Installations

Signatures was curated by Wits scenographer Jenni-Lee Crewe. Her students were the artists, and each had to create a piece involving their take on what performance art is today. I provided most of the lighting - there was one piece that defied lighting as it's performance was all smell and tactile work. One piece used large maps of differing translucencies and a ceiling of ever-changing map projections and post-it-notes to locate memories. My photos of that unfortunately did not come out. Three of the pieces were on the amphitheatre stage which shared the same setting, including a rectangle of glossy black on the floor. In one case it was a duck pond, and in another it was a barrier for the performance.

This piece involves heavy metal safes, white gloves, ear phones, and things inside the safes that you could look at and consider. The safes were presented on white pedestals with white fabric leading down to them from the ceiling.

There were seven of these safes, all presented as if they were in a gallery. Very audience-friendly.



Across the room from the safes was this cut-out tree with all the good and bad terms for "woman" painted on it. A woman in yellow sat underneath with a huge pile of lemons, eating lemons like they were going out of style.



At the end of the room was a room-sized box of paper with a doorway and a window and a moveable lighting instrument. Participants could draw or paint the outlines of their shadows. In some cases, outlines were enhanced with paint after being drawn in pencil. This could be viewed from above, through the door or window, and through the walls from outside since the walls were just thin paper.



Here is the artist outlining a particpant's shadow onto one of the walls as seen from the outside of the box.



One of the performances in the Amphitheatre used masks, and sound effects came from the actors. The glossy black rectangle was a fishing pond with ducks in it for this one.

One of the Amphitheatre performances used only the glossy back rectangle, with dance-like movements contained tightly by the rectangle. Notice, too, the rectangular mirrors in the upper right reflecting the activity.

In this third Amphitheatre performance art piece, the actor's movements were directed over a loudspeaker by someone in the lighting booth, who changed the procedure every performance.

In the final installation, the audience was invited to go outdoors to watch and hear the boys in blue commune with a blue-wrapped tree against the sodium vapour lights of the city.

I should add that if and when I can get other people's photos of the smells and the maps installations, I would love to post them here as well. I would also love to get a close-up of the masks used in the duck-pond performance. They were papier-mache masks, very lightweight.

The Artist's Creation Space

The Prague Quadrennial, or “Quadriennale” as the international world says it, is a place for sharing the scenography of visual and performing arts. In the 1988 exhibit from America, the exhibit designers John Conklin, Douglas Schmidt, John Lee Beatty, Carrie Robins, and Jennifer Tipton, chose studio spaces as their theme for the background of the artwork, including video, being displayed. The staff and students at the North Carolina School of the Arts executed the design.

This was a most effective creation of a world by design. It was even more than that. It was a world within a world for the display of yet even other worlds. "It was in part a gentle parody of official exhibits of official design," explained Conklin in American Theatre. It was also "an attempt to show design as process, not an end in itself." (Arnold, Aronson. “PQ 87: Stimuli and Responses,” TD&T: Theatre Design & Technology 23:4 Winter, (1988) p. 17.)

The creation of this world was so believable that attendees actually took designer's research books off the shelves of the exhibit, sat in the designer’s chairs or stools in the exhibit and read them. They obviously felt right at home. Indeed, most of the research books “were stolen over the course of the PQ by information hungry viewers from Eastern-bloc countries.” (ibid: p. 16.) Clearly the created and the real worlds collided through the exhibit.

The website of the 2010 PQ exhibit is http://www.pq.cz/en/. It is a dense and exciting website available in several other languages. The photo of the exhibit above was supplied courtesy of TD&T, Winter 1988, photographer unknown.