First of all we were split into our small groups of 10 and went off with different teachers. The first place my group and I went to was the beach area and the long walkway. Here we worked in our pairs and came up with a few of our own ideas. Tania and I came across a large window which had these massive bars on them. With the idea of weak anarchy in mind we decided that it would be a good idea to film me climbing it. The meaning behind this was to challenge the norm and what is expected of us as a society, to see the reaction of the public around. Some people decided to film us and take photos of us while we were performing as well as other students recording at the same time to get different perspectives of the performance.
Another idea we had was actually taken as inspiration from one of Tom Pope’s Weak Anarchy photographs. Here I hid in a bush to see how any spectators would perceive it. We didn’t manage to get the spectators on camera but some people came by and took photographs and left. This one wasn’t the most successful footage but was some good experimentation anyway.
Mr Toft came up with the idea to go sit on a bench with a man and mimic his pose. After Sophie and I volunteered we went and sat right next to him. I greeted him in French and sat down and copied his pose. We sat there for about a minute but the man didn’t catch on to what we were doing and I could tell he felt uncomfortable. I think that this was a fun thing to do although I did feel bad that the man was so uncomfortable. I thanked the man for his time and walked away.
We had the idea to draw on the walls down at the beach area with chalk. We simply wrote ‘St Malo 2015’, this was just to start off the final montage video of all of our performances. This wasn’t very interesting to do and no one really saw but still it was a way to start us off on the beach and so that anyone later on in the day would be able to see that we were there.
On the beach there were a pair of two men playing with a bat and ball so Tania and I decided that it would be an interesting idea to go and stand in the middle of their game to see how they would react. This was successful as they reacted well by laughing it off and they just carried on playing around us. This was one of the most interactive performances that we ended up doing and actually worked well.
I did attempt to just walk alongside a woman on the beach as she strolled along but this wasn’t successful because I felt awkward just following her and I could see that she felt uncomfortable so I walked away. I did however go up to a couple who were sat on the wall eating, sat next to them and started drawing. This worked ok as the could just looked at me once and didn’t seem to be bothered by me. This also showed that the two didn’t feel like their space was being invaded even though I was quite close to them.
On the next hour we lacked ideas and inspiration. We were walking along a large walkway and there was just nothing around that I felt inspired by or interested in. We did a few group performances. The first of which was pretending to be the statue and mimicking it. This for me wasn’t very interesting and didn’t really have anything to do with our idea of weak anarchy. It had no real reason and spectators just did not care at all.
The second thing that we did as a large collective was for one person to go and sit on the bench, put down an object and walk away. The next person would pick up that object and replace it with something of their own. This for me was boring and didn’t really make sense. A few people were looking at us but I think this was only because there was a large crowd of us photography students all taking photographs of the same thing, spectators wanted to see what all the fuss was about and if they too should be taking photographs of what is going on. I feel like this sort of worked as it did get some audience attention but it wasn’t overly successful with actually being interesting or much of a movement within performance photography.
For the final hour we worked alongside Tom Pope. This was a great hour for doing work as a large group. The first thing that we did was walk backwards in a busy street. We each filmed from our own perspective of the walk which is interesting to watch back. This was fun to do as we all just walked through the street and people had to move out of our way in order to avoid bumping into us which is different to how we spent most of the day when we were the ones who were avoiding French workers and students.
Another collective idea that we had was to carry one person round the streets of St Malo. Here we nominated Holly with other students carrying her as she navigates everyone around. This got a lot of looks and people from all around were watching us as we did this.
We decided that it would be a great idea to navigate our way around St Malo with a map from Jersey St Helier. Here we just walked around in a large circle and came across as small shop with a load of wooden swords which we battled with and Tom Pope photographed on his film camera and as other students filmed and took photos of. This was fun and we were able to mess around for a good minute before the owner of the shop told us to stop. So on we went with our map and navigated around the streets of St Malo right up until we got ice cream and have to leave for the Harbour to get the boat back home to Jersey.
Currently I am working on making a montage video of the entire day in St Malo as well as performance videos. This should be completed in the week. Over the day I made short little clips so that I could use them for documentation of the whole trip as well as recording all of the performances we decided to create. For my first video I am just going to show little clips of everything that we did in the day as a teaser for the actual performance videos. This includes snippets of my performances as well as other groups performances. We thought it would be a good idea to help each other out and record each others performances so that we have different perspectives of things and different approaches to looking at them. We also decided to film the spectators reactions as performance photography is all about the audience and who is there at the time to see you and your performance.
I like looking at the images, created from the videos, in black and white instead of colour because it allows the spectator to focus on what is going on in the image rather than being distracted by all of the different colours in the background that are not important.
Tourist Stuff
These six photos were just extra photos that I decided to take on my phone so that I had a record of the different places that we went to in St Malo.
