Performance making report
Agreed panel report: Assessment criteria: 1. Articulation of practice-as-research embedded investigation through live and written presentation 2. Open and reflective approach to your practice-as-research, and an ability to critically engage with your work 3. Demonstration of considered judgements regarding context, composition and staging/presentation of work 4. Articulation of levels of investigation in the work You have done a lot of work to bring this performance under control. What you showed was an enjoyable, energetic and humorous performance with some interesting highlights and a good vehicle for demonstrating your particular strengths as a performer.
The panel appreciates that you have made great efforts to edit down the vast amount of ideas and material, as well as scenographic devices and concepts and themes orbiting this piece. In this regard you have adequately met assessment criteria 3 (above). There is more work to be done in this department however. Your main aims as a performance maker, and as a student, going forward, should be concision and focus. Your written material was longer than the given word counts and the performance considerably over-ran the allotted time. This is, in both cases, an indication of a lack of discipline, focus and critical engagement. You did address some of the notes from tutorials leading up to the assessment. In particular, in the opening scene you found a useful and appropriate way to bring the audience into your world and introduce the idea of the wishes and wish making. You also fixed the issues surrounding the inherent pretense of the stage world by talking during the spotlight sequence. These were imaginative and useful solutions to problems discussed in tutorial. You are starting to put on stage what is intentional and planned. You should harness this and be willing to narrow down further the field of investigation. The piece began well, with an interesting use of space and a good transition onto the stage – a place of fear and apprehension. The taking off of clothes remains an added extra that did little to the piece and towards the end of the work you became indulgent and improvisatory in a way that did not advance the work. The journey could have been ended with a more precise goal for what the experience of the audience should be over what the experience of the performer should be.
The idea that you raise of self-sabotage was interesting but not fully explored and not given enough scope. The strongest of the multiple threads of dramaturgy was that concerning stage fright. As a single line of investigation this could have produced a more focused work that nonetheless still used some of the material you had created. Part of the issue which caused you to hold onto material and ideas was in not properly engaging with the RSVP process. Sometimes we have to let go of ideas and material or reuse them in another show. We shouldn’t try to get too many ideas into one short piece – as you did here. There were just too many ideas circulating. In the viva, you did not adequately demonstrate critical engagement with practice-as-research (assessment criteria 2). You were not able to succinctly address issues of process and or product. In the written work, again there is just too far ranging ideas, and too superficial engagement with those ideas. The writing flits from subject to subject without adequately exploring ideas and unpacking positions. You spend a lot of time referring to sessions and devote too many words to describing the narrative of your journey on the module rather than discussing directly your research and its impact on the work you produced. You also need to take care of vocabulary – some terms are not necessarily interchangeable. If the research question is something about how can you demonstrate the journey of the fragmented person to a more complete person in a performance, then perhaps you would benefit from investigating other practitioners or practices that do this and take from them some techniques that you could explore. This would be stronger research. As it was, your research concerned you and your position, and while there are research methodologies that allow this – autoethnography, heuristic – you did not demonstrate that you had researched these and followed any of the methods for employing them (assessment criteria 1). There is a sense in which you have achieved something in producing this performance and there are some moments of clarity that you should build upon. However, you need to be much more disciplined in your engagement with written and performance work; you need more focus, and more critical analysis. Take one idea and investigate it deeply from many angles rather than taking many ideas and seeing how they sit together (assessment criteria 4). On balance the low scores on three assessment criteria but a good score on one allow the work to pass. There is much room for improvement here.
50/100
