In order to expand upon my current ideas for my performance, I decided to look at Sean Bruno and Luke Dixon’s Creating Solo Performance, a book that contains many useful exercises that have allowed me to develop my ideas and understanding of what it is to perform on my own. Furthermore, the book provides many questions that have helped form my piece and the direction I want it to take.

For instance, a section I found particularly useful was a list of creative questions such as “Do you have a story to tell?”, “Is a solo performance the best way to tell the story?”, and “Does your material… lend itself to solo performance?” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 27). By asking myself these questions, I was able to better understand the form that my piece should take. I am still interested with working autobiographically, so I am currently considering telling a story from my own childhood. For my following lesson, I have to prepare a story to tell the class for which I am considering explaining one of my trips in Menorca (a part of my childhood that I remember fondly and believe would make an interesting story). Depending on feedback, I may wish to make this a theme I look at for my performance.

An exercise I thought was unique and enlightening was ‘being’ my audience. Bruno and Dixon advocate that a solo performer needs to see their work as “a show for an audience, not words on a page” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 28).  I began to think about what I want my audience to see when they come in – currently I am thinking of a spectacle that relates to the performance, but I have no concrete ideas in place. As I continue to work on my performance, I will refer back to this exercise to help inform my decisions about what I want the audience to see and get out of the performance.

Another section that will be useful later on in the process is “forming your script” (Bruno and Dixon, 2015, 32). Though I do not have a clear subject in mind, I think I would like my performance to focus around storytelling, similar to Spalding Gray. I think of lot of work will therefore be based around making a text and re-writing it until I am happy with the story.

Whilst there are several other sections of Creating Solo Performance I have found useful, I have listed the ones I have found most informative at this stage and throughout the process I will continue to use the book so that my performance is as good as it can be.

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Bruno, S. and Dixon, L. (2015) Creating Solo Performance. London: Routledge.

Giggs, J. (2015) Menorcan Greenery. Unpublished Photograph.

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].