In terms of other performers and artists influencing me, there aren’t too many. However, a key influence on my piece has been Victoria Melody; she is a solo performer who I saw recently in her performance of Hair Peace. Like her, I am also centring my performance around my hair; although mine has nothing to do with its origin and originality. There are definite aspects of Victoria’s performance that I had thought about using before-hand and now I have seen her performance and the use of changing topics and time through movement [to different places, forward and backwards] I feel these are methods I can use confidently, as I have seen their impact in performance.
I really connected with Victoria’s style of performance, the piece seemed to flow easily from subject to scenario throughout. I found this method useful, as I would also be jumping from topic to topic throughout the course of my performance also. Nevertheless, I mainly felt impacted by the overall sense of the performance being somewhat informal; it felt more like a chat with friends rather than a performance. This sense of informality is something I hope to pick up on and adapt in my performance, as I don’t want my piece to seem serious and too intrusive, as this would get tedious and flat for me, let alone the audience.
An aspect I felt worked with some impact in the performance, was the use of media stimuli [TV’s set up around the stage to add either comedic value or to transport us to and from India]. Although I will not be using TV’s in my performance, I do hope to use multimedia in the form of projections. This will be to give the illusion of another person on stage [this other person will be my own projected face]. However, I will adapted my performance to create an actual sense of ‘the world of the play’ to give said scenes some originality and authenticity for the audience. As, Victoria kept this segment of her performance still somewhat informal which worked for her performance, but will not for mine.