In this week’s session, my group and I had to create a presentation on Spalding Gray, an American actor and writer who is known for his autobiographical performances in the 80s and 90s.

In this presentation, we decided to focus on Gray’s life and work the techniques he used to create his performances. I found Gray’s focus on the self and storytelling particularly interesting and may be a potential influence for my performance. However, if I were to create a piece similar to Gray’s, I would want to make the performance more interactive and involving for the audience. I would allow the audience to move around the space freely– as if they were sharing the memory with me as opposed to Gray’s style of simply telling the audience. I would however want to make use of Gray’s vocal techniques that he used to establish different ‘characters’. Below is a SlideShare of the PowerPoint we created:

This week’s reading, John Howell’s Solo in Soho: The Performer Alone, also contained some useful information and aspects of solo performance. An idea that caught my interest was concerned about coming across as self-indulgent. Howell writes that ‘speaking as “oneself”, of course, will seem either honest or indulgent, but it at least appears to be more by its being less “aesthetic”‘ (Howell, 1979, 153). What I took away from this is that it is important for a solo actor to remain honest in their performance and personally I would not want my performance to come across as self-indulgent. It is therefore important to strike a balance in a solo performance that does not make the perform appear as entirely self-indulgent. Gray combated this by being self-mocking, which is a technique I may also want to use.

Another section of the reading that I found interesting concerned Robert Wilson’s monologues that he converted into a more traditional stage performance by performing on a ‘proscenium stage with actual furniture, taped monologues, and slide projections’ (Howell, 1979, 155). This work was of interest to me as it contained a similar aesthetic and ideology to my own idea- taking an autobiographical monologue and placing it onto a stage in a more traditional theatrical manner. As such, I would include set pieces to establish locations relevant to the story that was being told.

This week was therefore very useful in terms of establishing ideas that I may wish to use in my performance. I feel I now have a clearer perspective on what I would like to perform which will only be cemented by research into more solo performers.

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Spalding Gray Image:

The New York Times (2010) The monologuist Spalding Gray onstage at the Performing Garage [Online]. Available from https://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/01/17/arts/17soderbergh_span-CA0/articleLarge.jpg [accessed 15 April 2017].