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caitlinhawkerblog · 3 years

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Making a performance 1 Blog entry 5

1. What are the main steps Bryony Kimmins talks about in her devising process when describing developing 'Sex Idiot'?

To break it down into a more simple form, Bryony Kimmins (Kimmins) seemed to have four main points to her devising process whilst developing ‘Sex Idiot’ and within her interview they were described as ‘the stories and the actions and then there is putting them together - composition.’ (Misri, 2018: p.24) and then the final device was layering. Kimmins starts describing her process for developing ‘Sex Idiot’ by talking about how she had come to a decision with the story. At the time, she ‘had got chlamydia’ (Misri, 2018: p.21) and wanted to find out who had given it to her and began to realise ‘if my life is consumed with that thing, and everything I am thinking about that is creative is coming from that thing, then naturally my practice should be about that thing.’ (Misri, 2018: p.21).

Kimmins then goes on to talk about how she includes a powerful action within the piece that could be described as obviously summing up the whole story. For example, she talks about how she ‘smashed the flowers over my head, really violently and the piece was called ‘The Headfuck of going out with Steve Morris’ (Misri, 2018: p.23), it's a large and angry action to take to the stage but in a way, beautifully sums up the entire piece.

Moving forward to the composition of the piece, Kimmins does not always believe that the first performance has to be the creation of a solid piece of work, she says ‘I started to just string them together haphazardly as they were made, first of all, and do these sharings, which I still do now. Because I sit in the studio and imagine lots of things. Then I have to figure out if they technically work.’ (Misri, 2018: p.24). Summing this up, Kimmins likes to create then present and then go back, edit her work and then present again, this quite often leads to having different versions of different pieces of work.

Finally, the concept of layering within Kimmins work often adds more meaning to the piece, she talks about how ‘Often it is movement that becomes the last layer.’ (Misri, 2018: p.25) and that it is normally added to create emphasis on what she is saying. She perfectly describes this concept when saying:

‘I said ‘slutshaming’ early on in the show and I did a movement with it. That movement comes back two or three times, at the end of something where you may have forgotten or be judging me as that kind of slut. But you may have forgotten that we had already told you that this is about the disgustingness of slutshaming.’ (Misri, 2018: p.25)

Adding layers as her final piece of her development process brings the power and strength to her work. It often reminds people of why they are there and what they are meant to be learning from this piece.

2.a Explain what Bryony might mean by saying 'instead of egotistically driving forward to make another show, the form will be dictated by the subject matter.’ [Dey, Misri.Making solo performance : six practitioner interviews ]

What Kimmins is saying here is that she did not want to focus on making a show but instead she wanted to create many different things, such as movements, clips and sounds that will all link back to the overall focus of attention. This way, she would not get caught up in impressing the audience and how the overall performance looked and instead she would be able to focus on her message getting across to the audience.

2 b give specific examples from a few of her shows where the form comes directly from the content.

One of my favourite examples of this situation is when Kimmins was creating her piece ‘Heartache Heartbreak’, as she had just been broken up with, she was heartbroken and found that when she would cry in the streets, people would come up to her and try to help her, she goes on to say ‘Then I started to provoke those scenarios, so I’d go into shops and cry and then ask the person behind the counter, ‘Give me some advice, I am dying of heartache’. It became a kind of game. I started to enjoy the conversation’. (Misri, 2018: p.33) she said that she went on to find ‘the unification of two human beings over the act of being heartbroken and the way it softens communication between people’. (Misri, 2018: p.33). This then goes onto be her main layer of the creation of ‘Heartache Heartbreak’.

Another example of this was in her piece ‘Mummy Time’, she simply stated that ‘I was in it sometimes and sometimes I wasn’t in it’ (Misri, 2018: p.30). Because this piece was about her life, she did not want to get lost in the fear of needing to impress the audience and losing the subject matter due to this and therefore simply decided not to always be in the piece of work.

3.Looking at the practical work Tom Marshman did with you and the wider work within his showreel, what are the crossovers/ similarities between Tom Marshmans work and Bryony Kimmins work,in form, subject matter and process?

I do believe that there are many similarities between Tom Marshman (Marshman) and Bryony Kimmins’ work within form, subject matter and process. They both often form their work in an autobiographical way, drawing on moments within their lives throughout the piece they are creating.

Alongside this, they both mainly focus on the subject matter when making a piece. They will both choose on one subject matter and draw on their own experiences and memories alongside other peoples stories that relate to their subject matter. This then overall creates a main focus on the subject matter rather than getting lost in one set story.

Finally, in ways Marshman and Kimmins have similar processes whilst making work, like spoken about previously, they both pinpoint a subject matter before creating anything. They then go onto creating actions from other reference points that are linked to that particular subject matter and then they go onto pulling it all together and layering it on stage. Both Marshman and Kimmins will adapt their pieces between shows and will draw on other ideas they have had whilst performing, to create the most effective piece for the audience.

4. What kind of autobiographical/ archival work would you like to make?

I used to believe that I did not have an exciting story to tell, until I had the workshop with Tom Marshman and I wrote down specific moments from my life that I remember and suddenly after just ten minutes of writing, I had a whole page full of my stories. After completing this exercise, I think one day I would like to create an autobiographical piece of work, based upon my upbringing with a single mother and the challenges we faced to keep ourselves in a stable situation. Although it may feel like the piece has an emotional story behind it, I would want to fill it with family humour and a warm atmosphere as that is how we seemed to approach it as a family. I would mainly like to spread the message that children from a single parent household are not always misbehaved and unequal, like a lot of people believe.

Bibliography

Misri, D. (2018) Making Solo Performance. Red Globe Press, pp. 17-51.

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