In response to my own one on one encounter I looked for other performances that have experimented with kissing and this mainly resulted in iconic kisses from movies and Andy Warhol’s Kiss (1963). Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara stick in my mind as sharing the most iconic of movie kisses from Gone With The Wind (1939). However, where Butler and O’Hara’s kiss, it seems memorable to me because of the dialogue, we want our performance to focus on the action more than the speech.
In comparison to our performance, Warhol’s work was 50 minutes of just kissing with various couples. Couples of opposite and same sex kiss for approximately three and a half minutes as a response to the censors on Hollywood kissing. These censors stated that kisses on screen were allowed to be three seconds and no longer. The video below is the full version of Warhol’s Kiss.
It is clear, from watching Warhol’s work and from reviews, that the kissing is seen to be a lot more passionate that what I want to create. However if I am asking people to kiss me, I need to be prepared to be kissed for as long as the spectator wants.
I believe that the act of kissing is an art and I also think that by involving kissing in performances framed by beautiful surroundings, you are encouraging others to see kissing as an art form. I would personally like people to leave our performance being under the impression that kissing is an art.
The media is a huge social entity, affecting a mass number of people worldwide. In terms of intimacy one would consider that it can only be found through physical acts and states of mind between two people, however one would argue that the media embed images have connotations of intimacy through all platforms.
Can we truly be intimate with a media text?
Laura Mulvey who is a film theorist, argued that Hollywood cinema was a male dominating industry.
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” (Mulvey, 1975, p. 8-9)
Because a media text has been constructed through ‘appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact.’ We then become voyeurs, taking pleasure from what we then see, but only for the male gaze perspective. Through this, we become intimately focused and engaged within that media text.
Films especially can have a profound impact on our most intimate dark and hidden desires, through use of visual, sound and camera perspectives. A way a camera pans across a room following characters or a way it is angled to have emotional impact on a characters perspective. All these things are essential in order for the audience to feel intimacy through a lens. Surely a visual by itself cannot have a profound effect on us? So a combination of these elements (music, pace, acting, style, colour) placed together intrigue and create these subtle intimate moments.
An audience initially can derive pleasure whether it be subconsciously or consciously through these techniques, notice at 1:18-1:42 how sadistically intimate the sequence is, the audience also feel this intimacy as they are essentially spying on the woman changing too. The use of dark tones colours, and close up camera angles can reinforce some real intimate moments.
However, because of social change and role changes within society film itself has changed, cinema now targets a much broader audience, targeting the female gaze in which displays images of the ideal masculine man, for example, Sex and the City (2008).Women especially now are becoming a lot more interactive and intimate with media platforms and texts.
Gammon and Marshment (1988) suggest that in recent years a number of texts have represented men as objects for the female gaze.
Pornography, especially is an example of a media platform that the viewers regularly engage in a intimate act whilst watching.. Especially as now most media platforms tend to be more interactive and at times intimate within communication, there always seems to be something intimate about communicating online on a messenger at night between two people. We can communicate but we cannot touch or see each other, is this still intimacy? I believe it is.
Although media texts cannot really affect us physically, they can affect us psychologically and emotionally, especially through intimate acts displayed on screen in full front view of everyone else watching. Individuals all have different ways of reacting to intimate moments, we either try to hide and not project our intimate feelings, we can become embarrassed by the content on screen or it can bring us together as human beings.
Written By Jordan Tallis, edited by Leanne McKettrick
Works Cited:
Mulvey, Laura (1975) Visual Pleasure and Narative Cinema. Online: http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html (acessed: 9th December 2012)
The Paper Cinema is a theatre company who have created performances using 2D pictures. They have created a show called Odyssey, which they are touring around the UK throughout 2012. This is based on Homer’s Odyssey, the story of a man’s journey home to his family after the Trojan War. On their website they describe their work:
“A troupe of multi-instrumentalists perform an orchestrated score, including all sound effects, producing an immersive soundtrack. The puppeteers use multiple cameras to augment their range of visual storytelling techniques, bring the 2D drawings to life to create an ambitious, richly textured show. Capturing the fast passed action and movement as the story unfolds audiences are able to watch the entire workings of the show before their eyes” (The Paper Cinema, 2012).
Before viewing this I was slightly worried that, due to the fact that they tell the story with no speech at all, I would not be able to follow the story. However, they use amazing, yet simple, methods of creating sound effects. For example, to make the sound of walking along a beach, they had a box full of pebbles which they stood and walked on. They created all of the sound effects live on stage so they were visible to the audience. All of their music was just right to fit their performance as when tension needed to be built the music was a fast tempo whereas in more serious moments, it was slower. The music brought out the intimacy within the piece. For example, during the sad parts when the lost father is trying to find his way back to his family, the music made his emotions clear. It revealed his desperateness to get home and exposed his feelings of despair and anguish. This performance opened our eyes to the varying range of C.E.P’s and it has shown how different each performance can be. Mostly this performance made me realise how important sound and music are to a production. Even the lack of sound can be effective when the performance calls for it.
Works Cited
The Paper Cinema (2012) About the Show, Online: http://thepapercinema.com/shows-2/about-the-show/ (accessed 11th November 2012.)
Thinking about ideas of performance during a workshop, I began to think of ways that would take the simplistic things we do in life that could show some form of intimacy. I had thought of the idea of having a phone call and how communication could become engaging and intimate. I left a piece of paper on the floor and on that piece of paper said:
I seem to have lost my way, can you ring me please and guide back to the LPAC Studio 2? (with a phone number underneath).
I calmly waited outside, waiting for someone to ring my mobile phone, and suddenly it did. I answered to find Gina Radford, a peer, asking me where I was, I began to describe my surroundings as if I hardly knew where I was. Once Gina started directing me back to the LPAC, it felt to me, like she was becoming more and more involved with the devised piece. The longer we were on the phone, the more calm and responsive Gina became.
“Mobile communication has putatively affected our time-space relationship and the co-ordination of social action by weaving co-present interactions and mediated distant exchanges into a single, seamless web.” (Arminem, 2009)
This suggests how integrated a telephone call is in our modern lifestyles. You can phone up a love one to tell them how much you love them, or even to phone your mum to find out what she is cooking for tea. Just listening to one’s voice on a phone can make you feel intimate with that person.
This relates in a way to how we perceive to sound, and it could be argued that hearing voices of friends or family through a phone can result in a differing response dependent on what the content is.
Films such as Scream (1996) use telephone calls as a device to intimidate the person on the other end. Rather than to create an intimate moment with.
Whereas, the phone call in this clip in the film Stepmom (1998) expresses the intimacy of a phone call. The scene below shows a phone call between a mother and son, the mother is ringing her son, as she does every night when she is not with him, however this time the mother is in hospital having treatment for cancer and her life is in jeopardy, a fact her young son is not aware of.
This highlights the intimacy a phone call can have on a person, especially when this is someone we love. Just by hearing a certain voice on the phone we can immediately feel connected to that person, even though we can not see them physically.
Where I think that telephones can be used to create intimacy with another person as shown in the second clip, it is also evident from the first clip that a telephone has multiple uses in creating an effect on the listener.
Written by Jordan Tallis, Edited by Demi Morrison and Leanne McKettrick
Work Cited
Arminen, Ikka (2009) Mobile Presence and Intimacy. Online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216608002269 (Accessed on 10th November 12.)
During our last rehearsal Wes attended, and we discovered that we needed to develop our performance slightly. After Wes had explored each of our sections of the path we had a discussion about them. For Jordan’s section, of just sitting with the audience, we were advised that, rather than just having a blank wall for them to stare at, we should actually place something there for them to look at. We thought about maybe having a table with a vase of flowers, however, due to the lighting that we are using it may be too dark for them to be able to see the flowers. We have decided that we will use either a lava lamp or a candle (we will experiment with both to see which best suits our piece). We feel that this will be good visual stimuli for the audience to look at as it will make the atmosphere less awkward.
For my section, of holding hands with the audience members, we decided that the chairs that we use need rearranging. This is due to the fact that when they were side by side and we all agreed it was awkward. So now we will be angling them towards each other with a small gap in the middle of them in which I will place my hand, after saying the beginning speech, for the other person to hold if they want to. This just makes it easier for both myself and the participants. Previously I placed their hands inside my own which then made it awkward for them when they wanted to leave as it made them feel somewhat trapped. This then made it seem like I had ownership over them. Whereas now, by holding just one of their hands in the middle of us both, it makes us equals in the relationship.
Leanne’s section, of cuddling the audience, has not really changed much. The only thing that we have altered is that fact that there will only be one chair now, which is for her to sit on whilst waiting for someone to come to her. She will then stand up and deliver the beginning speech of asking them if they want to partake in the piece. We decided to remove the other chair as then she did not have to ask them to stand up.
While discussing Demi’s section we realised that for the audience to kiss her it will take a lot of commitment on their part. We wanted to give them something at the end to thank them for joining in in our experiment. We also wanted them to have a souvenir that they could keep to remember the performance so at the end Demi will give them a napkin, which she will have kissed while wearing red lipstick, which they can take away with them. We also decided to change the angle of the chairs in this section to give equal ownership to the action. Whereas before, the chairs were positioned so that Demi would have to lean in towards the person, which could be a bit imposing.
