Below is the link to my Risk Assessment of my Living Gallery Piece
Link:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPuwQxS0EKdoeseu3UxisS2O0jV4ZgR_zmp6tW1AfVI/edit?usp=sharing
Monday, 20 February 2017
Evaluation
The performance went very well and we did not run into any technical issues besides the one I will discuss later on in this evaluation. I was able to complete my path during the sequence without any obstacles or need to alter my path in any way and the audience were still able to freely move through our piece on to the next and back, as well as viewing our piece more closely. I also felt that the fact that are piece looped flowed very well with the message that the piece was trying to communicate with its audience and I feel that there were points in the loops that it strongly resonated with both Louis and me. The recording of Louis' voice was playing from his phone which I held as I went around in my sequence. This actually worked EXTREMELY well as this resulted in the voice appearing far more personal than this omniscient voice that the speaker would have presented. This strengthened the audience's relatability to the piece and their understanding of the voice of Anxiety.
The main and only negative (which I feel turned out to become a positive) was that the speaker that we had initially planned to use to play Louis' voice stopped working and as a result on such short notice we were forced to use Louis' phone which I had to hold the whole time that I completed my sequence. I was initially irritated by this and felt that it reduced the quality of our piece and made it appear less refined and more rushed. However despite this the changes actually created a far more personal atmosphere within the piece as the voice felt more centred to the victim instead of everywhere around it. While taking all of this into account, I still felt that at times the recording was hard to hear during some of the loops due to the fact that Gloria's piece was fairly loud but this would not have been an issue if we had used the speaker.
I noticed that the majority of the audience were smiling or had a very "happy-curious" facial expression when they first began watching our piece. I couldn't clearly see their reactions or faces during the piece as I was moving in a circle, however by the end their faces gave of the appearance that they were in deep thought, either regarding what the piece was about or its message. A notable amount of the audience members even stayed to watch the piece a second or some even a third time. There was an audience member that stayed within our space watching us indefinitely, although I think that this was Louis' mom. I am confident that the majority of our audience grasped the piece's subject and its concept and I am confident that a smaller amount grasped the message of the piece and could even relate it to themselves easily.
I feel that the piece has further diversified and expanded my current knowledge on methods of performing and how different methods and mediums can be incorporated to together to not only enhance and strengthen the performance itself, but to better convey the message and themes of the performance to the actor and audience alike. This work has also given me more of an understanding regarding not only the mind and Anxiety in general, but also understanding those to elements within my own life and the role it plays in my own life as well as others. Funnily enough, despite the way we presented it, as a result of my research I have now come to the realization that Anxiety is not ENTIRELY negative as in actual a fact it helps to prepare us and aids us in anticipating not only possible danger or obstacles but things that are important to us in our lives such as a job interview.
The main and only negative (which I feel turned out to become a positive) was that the speaker that we had initially planned to use to play Louis' voice stopped working and as a result on such short notice we were forced to use Louis' phone which I had to hold the whole time that I completed my sequence. I was initially irritated by this and felt that it reduced the quality of our piece and made it appear less refined and more rushed. However despite this the changes actually created a far more personal atmosphere within the piece as the voice felt more centred to the victim instead of everywhere around it. While taking all of this into account, I still felt that at times the recording was hard to hear during some of the loops due to the fact that Gloria's piece was fairly loud but this would not have been an issue if we had used the speaker.
I noticed that the majority of the audience were smiling or had a very "happy-curious" facial expression when they first began watching our piece. I couldn't clearly see their reactions or faces during the piece as I was moving in a circle, however by the end their faces gave of the appearance that they were in deep thought, either regarding what the piece was about or its message. A notable amount of the audience members even stayed to watch the piece a second or some even a third time. There was an audience member that stayed within our space watching us indefinitely, although I think that this was Louis' mom. I am confident that the majority of our audience grasped the piece's subject and its concept and I am confident that a smaller amount grasped the message of the piece and could even relate it to themselves easily.
I feel that the piece has further diversified and expanded my current knowledge on methods of performing and how different methods and mediums can be incorporated to together to not only enhance and strengthen the performance itself, but to better convey the message and themes of the performance to the actor and audience alike. This work has also given me more of an understanding regarding not only the mind and Anxiety in general, but also understanding those to elements within my own life and the role it plays in my own life as well as others. Funnily enough, despite the way we presented it, as a result of my research I have now come to the realization that Anxiety is not ENTIRELY negative as in actual a fact it helps to prepare us and aids us in anticipating not only possible danger or obstacles but things that are important to us in our lives such as a job interview.
Tate Modern Gallery History
When Tate first opened its doors to the public in 1897 it had just one site, displaying a small collection of British artworks. Today Tate has four major sites and the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art, which includes nearly 70,000 artworks. A number of new developments are planned for Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate St Ives to ensure the galleries continue to expand.
Henry Tate
In 1889 Henry Tate, an industrialist who had made his fortune as a sugar refiner, offered his collection of British art to the nation. There was no space for it in the National Gallery and the creation of a new gallery dedicated to British art was seen as a worthwhile aim and the search for a suitable site began. This gallery would house not only Henry Tate’s gift but also the works of British artists from various other collections.
The gallery at Millbank, London
In 1892 the site of a former prison, the Millbank Penitentiary, was chosen for the new National Gallery of British Art, which would be under the Directorship of the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. The prison, used as the departure point for sending convicts to Australia, had been demolished in 1890.
Sidney R.J. Smith was chosen as the architect for the new gallery. His design is the core building that we see today, a grand porticoed entranceway and central dome which resembles a temple. The statue of Britannia with a lion and a unicorn on top of the pediment at the Millbank entrance emphasised its function as a gallery of British art. The gallery opened its doors to the public in 1897, displaying 245 works in eight rooms from British artists dating back to 1790.
Growth of the gallery
Since its original opening, the Millbank site has had seven major building extensions. In its first 15 years the Millbank site more than doubled in size, including the addition of seven rooms designed by the architect W.H. Romaine-Walker and funded by the arts and antique dealer J.J.(Sir Joseph) Duveen, built to display the Turner Bequest.
By 1917, the remit of the gallery changed. It was made responsible for the national collection of British art from 1500 to the present day and international modern and contemporary art Romaine-Walker was again commissioned to design the new Modern Foreign Galleries, which were funded by Joseph Duveen’s son, Lord Duveen. These opened in 1926 and a year later a series of murals by Rex Whistler were unveiled in the restaurant.
Tate Gallery
In 1932, the gallery officially adopted the name Tate Gallery, by which it had popularly been known as since its opening. In 1937, the new Duveen Sculpture Galleries opened. Funded by Lord Duveen and designed by John Russell Pope, Romaine-Walker and Gilbert Jenkins, these two 300 feet long barrel-vaulted galleries were the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture. By this point, electric lighting had also been installed in all the rooms enabling the gallery to stay open until 5pm whatever the weather.
In 1955, Tate Gallery became wholly independent from the National Gallery and discussions began on an extension that would increase the its exhibition space. A major extension in the north-east corner, designed by Richard Llewelyn-Davies opened in 1979. In the same year, the gallery took over the adjacent disused military hospital, enabling the building of the new Clore Gallery, designed by Sir James Stirling and funded by the Clore Foundation. It opened in 1987 and went on to win a Royal Institute of British Architects award the following year.
Tate Liverpool
In the 1980s Alan Bowness, then director of Tate, decided to create a ‘Tate of the North’, as the project became known. This would be a gallery with a distinct identity, dedicated to showing modern art and encouraging a new, younger audience through an active education programme.
A warehouse at the disused Albert Dock in Liverpool was chosen as the site for the new gallery. The dock, once a bustling site crammed with rich cargos from Asia, tea, silk, tobacco and spirits, was derelict. In 1981 the dockyard underwent a rejuvenation, with the Maritime Museum Leasing one of the warehouses and restaurants and bars opening.
In 1985, James Stirling was commissioned to design the new Tate Gallery at Liverpool. His designs left the exterior of the brick and stone building built over a colonnade of sturdy Doric columns almost untouched, but transformed the interior into an arrangement of simple, elegant galleries suitable for the display of modern art. It opened to the public in May 1988.
2008 marked the year Liverpool was named European Capital of Culture. To celebrate this, in 2007 the gallery hosted the Turner Prize, the first time the competition was held outside London. more than 600,000 visitors a year visit Tate Liverpool, cementing its position as a venue for major European exhibitions of modern art.
Tate St Ives
St Ives, a small Cornish town on the southwest coast of England, perhaps seems an unlikely site for a major art gallery. However, its artistic connections date back to Victorian times when numerous artists came to St Ives to paint, attracted by its special quality of light. Artists associated with the town include Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Alfred Wallis and Mark Rothko.
Tate had formed a close link with St Ives when it took over the management of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in 1980. By the middle of the decade it was decided a gallery should be built there to show works by artists who had lived or worked in St Ives, loaned from the collection.
In 1988, a building was chosen on the site of a former gasworks overlooking Porthmeor Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. The architects Eldred Evans and David Shalev were selected for designs that echoed the shapes of the former gasworks, including the rotunda that forms the heart of the gallery.
Building work began in 1991, funded by donations from the local community, the Henry Moore Foundation and the European Regional Development Fund. The Tate Gallery, St Ives opened in June 1993 and in just six months welcomed over 120,000 visitors – 50,000 more than the original target for the entire year. Since then, the gallery has been an outstanding success with an average of 240,000 visitors per year.
An exciting development is now planned for Tate St Ives, which will provide better exhibition and display spaces, new education areas and improved visitor facilities, allowing greater scope for understanding the heritage of the St Ives artists’ colony.
Tate Modern
In December 1992 the Tate Trustees announced their intention to create a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art in London.
The former Bankside Power Station was selected as the new gallery site in 1994. The following year, Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron were appointed to convert the building into a gallery. That their proposal retained much of the original character of the building was a key factor in this decision.
The iconic power station, built in two phases between 1947 and 1963, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. It consisted of a stunning turbine hall, 35 metres high and 152 metres long, with the boiler house alongside it and a single central chimney. However, apart from a remaining operational London Electricity sub-station the site had been redundant since 1981.
In 1996 the design plans were unveiled and, following a £12 million grant from the English Partnerships regeneration agency, the site was purchased and work began. The huge machinery was removed and the building was stripped back to its original steel structure and brickwork. The turbine hall became a dramatic entrance and display area and the boiler house became the galleries.
Since it opened in May 2000, more than 40 million people have visited Tate Modern. It is one of the UK’s top three tourist attractions and generates an estimated £100 million in economic benefits to London annually.
In 2009 Tate embarked on a major project to develop Tate Modern. Working again with Herzog & de Meuron, the transformed Tate Modern will make use of the power station’s spectacular redundant oil tanks, increase gallery space and provide much improved visitor facilities.
Rehearsal 5
We have chosen what masks we will use and I am using this rehearsal to create the final draft of Louis' dialogue for his role as the voice that he will record. Louis spent the rehearsal learning it. I also began analyzing the hazards of our piece as this would be a crucial part of our risk assessment that I would create later on. This rehearsal was spent doing a lot of admin work for our piece as all of the performance element have been decided and executed, all that needed to happen was Louis learning and then performing his dialogue in front of me so that we could both agree that his style of performance worked and he could go ahead and record it outside of rehearsal time. We did a few run throughs of our gallery sequence.
Rehearsal 4
This rehearsal has been used to discuss the relevance of using masks within our piece and we have decided that they would be used to make Louis' less relatable as a human character and more relatable as an entity, as the mask will be emotionless and will cover all of Louis' face. I will also wear a mask that will symbolize my connection to the entity of Anxiety, but will not cover my entire face but will only cover my eye area. I will go into further depth on the masks in a post dedicated to them. Louis' voice may have some editing to make it more ghostly or echoing, or we may just choose to leave it so its more raw. We will also incorporate a chair into our piece which will work as a starting and finishing point for the piece.
Rehearsal 3
We have decided that we would use masks as costumes but we are still yet to decide what kind of masks or what they'd represent or signify. We have both decided that a mirror would be our main experimental element and the focal point throughout the whole piece as a mirror would be the perfect literal and abstract method of control that Anxiety would use to control its victim. We are deciding if the mirror should be used in a way that it is in a fixed position or if it is somehow moving.
Rehearsal 2
During our second rehearsal we decided that we would incorporate sound into our performance and that we would use Louis' voice as a dialogue for the entity of Anxiety, but that it would be recorded and would be played back repeatedly. We also decided that there should be a focal point within the piece, an object or concept that allows the victim of Anxiety to be controlled by Anxiety. We are yet to decide on what sought of costumes that we want to use but despite this we still plan to incorporate them into the piece. I am currently drafting some dialogue for Louis' to learn and record. The dialogue is being created with influence from what actual people that suffer form severe Anxiety hear in their heads.
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