Performing arts

Over the last week or so i have been helping out some friends with setting up a drama society for the GSA and we all decided (with some funding that the Student Association kindly gave us) to hold two events to start it all up. The first thing we talked about was that the name was very important, we didn't want people to come along with a pre conceived view of what performance is. To get the ball rolling we thought it would be a good idea to arrange to have some artists give people an idea of what kind of things we could do within the society. It went really well and we will be having a follow up event to talk more about what people want to do with the society.

In all we had 4 performances. My friend James did a piece where he plugged in a wireless plug and continuated the end of the wire by drawing a line across the floor and encouraged people to follow him around, i think it worked really well but it too a while for people to realise that it was an interactive piece. He took the whole room (around 50 people) around Glasgow whilst following him drawing this line.

For me the performance by exchange student Marcel Spaarman was the highlight of the event. He started it by sitting down and making casual conversation with the audience/talking about himself and then revealed that he had just been improvising. He then started to repeat himself, saying 'I always repeat myself, i want to rebirth myself' and changing what he was saying but constantly repeating. I'd taken a sneaky peek at his blog before hand to look at his previous performances and noticed a similarity. He bought a mirror up infront of his face and reflected the audience whilst repeating himself, then suddenly he headbutted the mirror everyone was really shocked! It didn't break and he continued to repeat himself. He ended the piece by smashing the mirror over his head and walking out of the room, i loved how nobody knew what to do whether they should clap or just sit there contemplating what had happened.

This is a video of another piece he took part in which i came across on youtube.