Just one thing, before I start. These past 12 months have taken away too much from me and all of us already.
THE STORY SO FAR:
THE IDEA:
What if a DJ’s playlist wasn’t just a playlist, but a whole exhibition of different artforms, all linked and curated by the music.
Using a popular mass art form to add in more nich artforms. It’s a business module.
A Space – Reference to Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, the idea that a dancefloor, a club, is a space to express yourself.
A melange of experimental film, verbatim and dance. Ask the Dance Society in Aberystwyth if they want to collaborate. You bring all the recordings with you. Go on a tour of clubbing, that would be best (can I get Arts Council Funding for that hehe 😉 )
Similar experimental documentary style, overlapping with docu about Drama students and Kelsey’s world. Maybe this analysis of the underground club culture scene is good research, excellent research, along with the Dystopian Cabaret and Musical Theatre performance, it’s what I need.
Wait, what? No, it’s where we’ve come to shake and shidadle. Get drunk
Start off as a film looking into various clubs. Make it look like a normal documentary about clubs, then it gets weirder and weirder, insight into this alternative culture. This is my journey and look actually, my search for the perfect club for me (put I won’t state that directly)
Keep cross-cutting between people’s comments and dancers. This originated from the idea that you’re not allowed to film inside the Villa. Could record other clubs, haha, all other clubs apart from that one, the final/the best one? Don’t know if it’s the best one, got to keep looking.
Could make both a shorter film just about the Villa as a start, and then the bigger film about wider club culture and alternatives
Interview people what they look for in a club. Do some differentiate between just drunk fun and artistic experience. Are any of them looking for artistic experience. Ask them how they dance, how do they feel in clubs, do they feel safe? Do they stay together, in a pack (great image for dancers)
The issue of sexual harrassment, and maybe look at it from a different angle, not to just sympathise the purpetrators, but wondering where does this pressure, this need to pull people in clubs come from, pressure on men, toxic mascunility.
(My own experience, close-up of my arse, and then my crotch being grabbed by that drunk girl in Babas, and maybe even show my arm being bit by that crazy girl in Bierkeller)
DEVELOPPING
Thinking of De La Guarda, and what if that was injected into a normal night out. So this could be a concept for my perfect night out, connected with the arts (look at Circo in Liverpool, and the most degenerate and shittest example is)
So this is going away from like just clubs, but creating an alternative world. Maybe these are two films, the docu and the dream film (again strongly linked to Kelsey, dance, film and online)
EXAMPLES:
COMBATING OLD AGE:
AND THEN ACTUALLY CREATE A SPACE
It’s all about scenography, next to the music as well.
Ask people to dance and truely express themselves. Film it,
Have dancing turn into choroegraphed movement and even physical theatre sometimes.
Mix live concert performances and gig cultures
Add live stream element
Can make this somewhat site specific, look at the history of the Arts Centre and raves and other music events, and look at the history and culture of raves in Aberystwyth and the Ceredigion area.
Could be inside or outside, where that tent is. Could have two parts, is there enough space on the grass
Also on the walls, can do it in chalk, write and draw symbols of music and club culture (like symbols of breathe for my sound installation, and a bit like the tattooed couch, and like that chalk wall in the TFTS Timeline Photo)
MUSIC:
In Chains – Tigerskin’s No Sleep Remix Edit
Just the first two mins before lyrics start but prolonged to 5-10 mins
Would be cool to dub it under the breathing of
Elektrokardiogramm by Kraftwerk:
…
Dirty Laundry by Don Henley:
Start with machine like stumping at 1.33-1.40, then come with the “Kick em when they’re up, kick em when they’re down”, there a few different lots of those, play around in different orders.
The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails:
more electronic part roughly 2.30-3.30, have that start, and then bring in the beginning, have the beginning be the climax with the actual end together
Don’t Play by Halsey:
Maybe have “Motherfucker don’t play no game” and/or maybe even better “Women don’t play no games” interspersed in the track before
This Is America by Childish Gambino
The darker moments of This Is America, could be quick flashes of all of USA’S dark moments, light and upbeat moments commercials that hide all this.
Goo Interview by Sonic Youth
The Dirty Boots part, images of Trump and America at the part of the voters, then the American landscape from Cracked Actor for touring on the road
Dirty Boots by Sonic Youth
Some melancholic rock ‘n roll
Kool Thing by Sonic Youth
Add the Goo Interview part, rock n roll was invented by girls
Mildred Pierce by Sonic Youth
a moment where we can all scream and let it all out, maybe as leading into that have Dr Benway’s House, and add some text from William S. Burroughs (can’t here him on that track, oh he also made music, look into that)
As the end?
Smells Like Teen Spirit, cover by
Have a slow melancholic dance piece that will get sweaty (company at beginning of year)
Smells Like Teen Spirit, original by Nirvana
“This is for every rock fan who’s sick to only listening to remixes of this song with other tracks when in clubs”
Have the people helping out wear T-Shirts, create a brand for your club, or is it more rock and roll and more Pixies if they just wear what they want? Question is do we have a banner?
It’s also about creating a business concept for artists
Creating a montage of artwork, film and photography (Does it work, how would artists feel about this, maybe they feel their work doesn’t fit in here?)
It’s about having an excerpt of Waiting For Godot
Have the track Animals by Martin Garrix, and I’ll do a collage of the 10 animal performances I’ve done over the week. But the animal performance can also first be its own thing, be a regular practise
CATS: Li
DOGS (Wolves, Foxes
(What I loved most about
So that’s what I’ve got as a safety structure, still my practise of body and movement, and using Animals. That should be enough.
Lights set up? Jake & Carys?
It’s the relationship between music and other artforms, music
PHIL LAUDE LIKE FICTIONAL DOCUMENTARY ABOUT PERSON WHO HAS THEIR OWN CLUB ON THE EDGE OF NORTH BEACH
ASK PEOPLE ABOUT NIGHTLIFE DANCING
Do they feel creatively fulfilled? Every moment they’re dancing. Vibes and rapport, and community feeling.
Strawberry Lipstick
Me dancing with showdance, was fun, and I get more confident even though I don’t know quite a few of them. But yeah, contrast to me on Pier losing it to Strawberry Lipstick, dancing around to lamps and benches, and being looked at weirdly by passers by (do it real or fake actors, we’ll see). But the last minute especially is good for that vibe. Use some In All Languages
Do some dancing to Mr Tembo
Why do I keep going out?
Be nice to get off with someone
But also Im waiting got something to happen. Connections, not just sexual but spiritual
Repetition: WHY DO I KEEP GOING OUT???!!
WHY???
I GOT GROPED, AT THE BALLS. NOT COOL. (NEEDS TRIGGER WARNINGS OF SEXUAL HARRASSMENT AND ASSAULT)
I don’t like scrolling through Facebook
I don’t really like going out
I never have time for costumes
THE IDEA
- PART 0: Pier, I hate Pier, the shitty club, keep switching between the idyllic club and the others
- PART 1: Have my favourite club night, with extra dance performances, and experimental film, be it a collage of other people’s work, what I want my club to be
- PART 2: Do a performance about a club, and a documentary
- PART 3: Band perform Songs of a Pandemic, and other artists coming, with multimedia, but might not be time for extra multimedia
NOTES BEFORE MODULE:
- Lucky’s Luke 18. to 19.12, they started playing mainstream music, I didn’t quite like it, went with it, but wasn’t mine. But I realised this was also a DJ playing with expectations, shame I can
SORT OUT:
- This needs a performance space that can act as a club, the larger the better because of Covid maximum capacity
- Tech support, someone to do the tech, can I ask Sam if he could do the gig once. I asked Sam, he seems down, though obviously don’t know 100% if he can do it timewise
- Who am I gonna work with film-wise?
- Who am I gonna work with performance wise?
- Lights, do I buy them, do I get someone who has lights and can do the design really well?
- It’s a club where people can enter and dance, then I need a separation of stage
- Copyright of playing songs, that’s fine isn’t it? Or is it different for a public exhibition context
- Edit videos to tracks, can I have someone else some too, Roaring 20s Tremelo Remix, to not Covid but all the other technological and social advances, maybe not all good, some serious Years & Years TV Show Shit, (have some quick blips, that’s a recurring thing with you, oh have a blip that’s just teasing and not giving too much away, but is it actually already telling not showing?)
WEEK 1: have a structure of the event, and research what clubbing is, interview people, do a history of clubbing, and art pieces connected to clubs. Create a playlist that you love, and one mainstream one that you hate, Band practise, work on songs.
WEEK 2: more research, the arts centre. Think about how the theme fits in, do more interviews, start building that documentary. Band practise, work on songs
WEEK 3: do the moving in clubs, how do you move in a club, film other people
WEEK 4: how do you move in clubs. Actually, need to interview and do movement practise at the same time, so 4 weeks of interviews
WEEK 4: (bare in mind it’s HSM showweek), focus on the movement
WEEK 5: do a club night at the end of the week, or in reading week
WEEK 6: If Reading week Editing, and create a script and structure for performance
PREFACE
This is me both wanting to explore myself as a performer and a multimedia artist, music, but also invite other artists into a collaborative space, communitas as Mags would put it.
“The theatre is in the city and the city is in the world and its walls are of skin”
Maybe it isn’t quite fitting
But communitas is. Here are definitions of Wikipedia:
Communitas is a Latin noun commonly referring either to an unstructured community in which people are equal, or to the very spirit of community. It also has special significance as a loanword in cultural anthropology and the social sciences. Victor Turner, who defined the anthropological usage of communitas, was interested in the interplay between what he called social ‘structure’ and ‘antistructure’; Liminality and Communitas are both components of antistructure.[1]
Communitas refers to an unstructured state in which all members of a community are equal allowing them to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. This term is used to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. There is more than one distinction between structure and communitas. The most familiar is the difference of secular and sacred. Every social position has something sacred about it. This sacred component is acquired during rites of passages, through the changing of positions. Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position.
Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. This brings everyone onto an equal level: even if you are higher in position, you have been lower and you know what that is.
Turner (1969, Pg.132; see also [2]) distinguishes between:
- existential or spontaneous communitas, the transient personal experience of togetherness; e.g. that which occurs during a counter-culture happening.
- normative communitas, which occurs as communitas is transformed from its existential state to being organized into a permanent social system due to the need for social control.
- ideological communitas, which can be applied to many utopian social models.
Communitas as a concept used by Victor Turner in his study of ritual has been criticized by anthropologists. See John Eade & Michael J. Sallnow’s Contesting the Sacred (1991)
Edith Turner, Victor’s widow and anthropologist in her own right, published in 2011[3] a definitive overview of the anthropology of communitas, outlining the concept in relation to the natural history of joy, including the nature of human experience and its narration, festivals, music and sports, work, disaster, the sacred, revolution and nonviolence, nature and spirit, and ritual and rites of passage.
This leads to utopia
SOME QUOTES FOR THE FILM ABOUT CLUB
I know who this is about, listening to Papa New Guinea by Future Sounds of London.
“He was always about, it was his territory. I wondered how he had the time and the energy for it. I still feel it’ll be his territory, maybe that’ll be the nicest thing about being in that place of tyranny….I can’t help feeling the tyranny, why do people focus so much time. Or am I focusing so much time. Time, energy and presence. In the arena. Is it 29th it? “