more images on flickr
14 June 2010
10 June 2010
08 June 2010
30 May 2010
Research & Development plans
'Of Photography' is a solo-piece using technology, the body and the audience. It premiered in April 2010 at Plateaux Festival as a Plateaux co-production.
Score: The audience are instructed to photograph the performer who stands naked and still in the middle of the space, and then to place the photos on her. The audience uses three compact cameras and the photos wirelessly transfer to print on sticky photo-paper. At an improvised point in the performance, the performer unplugs the printer. She then walks up to individual audience members and offer them to peel one sticker off to keep before leaving the space.
For concept, see the post Of Photography.
The first ideas for the piece came over a year ago but the main development of the performance took place during a week's residency at Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt.
One week to develop a live performance is not very much. Even for a conceptual, action based piece like 'Of Photography'.
I discovered a few things during my residency:
The audience is an exciting 'material' to work with but it's also a huge material. I feel I have only started scratching the surface...
With just one audience test prior to the performance, the actual performance experience felt compromised and limited for both performer and audience. This has not been a problem in earlier, intervention type work.
The audience needs to be part of the rehearsal process. This is tricky for several reasons. A 'real audience' rarely happens apart from at actual performances, and rehearsals with an initiated, small audience will only provide insight up to a certain point.
'Of Photography' has a strong concept. The challenge is to make it work as a live piece.
After feeling disappointed with how the performances went, it felt natural to begin a studio research once back in Brighton. My starting point will be this piece and its base concepts, and build on my work from the past year. I am not calling it anything yet, apart from perhaps 'Nightingale Sessions'....
With the kind support of Nightingale Theatre, my two-month research and development will start there on June 7th. It will be a time to experiment and play in a dedicated space, with great people to help me! See NEWS section for audience rehearsal dates if you want to join (just let me know).
Time has come to complement - and counteract - last year's over-used 'thinking about it'.
03 May 2010
01 May 2010
04 April 2010
Review of Your Face, Your Fortune at NVT Theatre Jan 2010
The play 'The Ugly One' was followed in the bar by 'Your Face, Your Fortune', a collaboration between performance artists Tamar Daly and Sara Popowa, where, through photography and masks, rather than surgery, the audience could change their own faces, explore their identities and further develop issues raised in the play.
Your Face, Your Fortune is stylish, well played and well choreographed. The energy and interplay between Daly and Popowa as performers, combines with a mix of technology and sticky paper to define and drive this work where photographs of the audience are printed onto masks with press-out, peel-off features.
How does it then feel to then see the results of moving your own features on a mask of you face, or exchanging your features with another’s? Build comic, or tragic, composite identities that would confuse the most sophisticated facial recognition software. Maybe even try to test the town centre CCTV operators’ skills on the way home?
It is reassuring that in these times of often over complex computer solutions, Daly and Popowa have brought together the very different components of Your Face, Your Fortune without letting the technology distract from the essential fun of their performance.
Andy Towers
February 2010
Read the review on the New Venture Theatre website here.
19 February 2010
Of Photography
Photo: Gabriel Harju
Of Photography is an audience-participatory performance which investigates the relationship between photographer, image and the image's subject matter.
This concept started as a reaction towards excessive photography of performances - or any event with some public 'photo-value'. In this piece, the general acceptance of and participation in documenting or recording of an event is isolated and turned into the performance itself.
Of Photography draws on life in a time of online social networking, mobile phones and digital cameras - where 'mediated' often equals or replaces 'first-hand' experience. Using our visual/social digital tools, our view seems infinite and with all the time spent on/with it, there is a sense of real engagement. However, this engagement or relation to the mediated does not involve touch, location, smell... nor direct responsibility towards what or who is at the other end.
In Of Photography, I aim to merge the mediated and the direct experience of the audience both visually and experientially by connecting photographing, the actual photograph and physical touching of a live subject. Maker, motif, observer and observed are blended together to possibly provide a situation where the audience may test... their own boundaries of those.
Premier at the Frankfurt Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Thur 29 April with a second performance Sat 1 May during the international live art festival Plateaux. Conceived by Sara Popowa and realised with co-production from Plateaux Festival and The Basement, Brighton, UK.
From the Plateaux festival programme:
Eine Performerin setzt sich einem weißen Raum aus, einem Publikum, einem Blick, einer Kamera. In „Of Photography" ist das Publikum aufgefordert, den Körper Sara Popowas mit den eigenen Blicken zu überschreiben, zu verhüllen, bloßzustellen, zu verändern. In Zeiten von Handycams und sogenannten social networks verschwimmen zusehends die Grenzen von Selbstwahrnehmung, Autorschaft und dem Recht am eigenen Bild. „Of Photography" nimmt den Ball auf und verhandelt Fragen nach gesellschaftlich determinierten Bildern, Kunstklischees und wechselseitiger Verantwortung für Wahrnehmung. Popowa führt in ihren minimalistischen Arbeiten eine Performancetradition weiter, die sich mit dem Verhältnis von Performerin und Publikum beschäftigt; unwiederholbar entsteht jede Aufführung aus dem Moment der Begegnung. Die Performance stellt Fragen nach Unmittelbarkeit und Dokumentation, einem kollektiven Gedächtnis performativer Momente und ob sich seit Yoko Onos „Cut Piece" wirklich etwas verändert hat in der Wahrnehmung von Räumen, Körpern und Sensationen.
Review and pics of Your Face, Your Fortune at NVT Theatre Jan 2010
The play 'The Ugly One' was followed in the bar by 'Your Face, Your Fortune', a collaboration between performance artists Tamar Daly and Sara Popowa, where, through photography and masks, rather than surgery, the audience could change their own faces, explore their identities and further develop issues raised in the play.
Your Face, Your Fortune is stylish, well played and well choreographed. The energy and interplay between Daly and Popowa as performers, combines with a mix of technology and sticky paper to define and drive this work where photographs of the audience are printed onto masks with press-out, peel-off features.
How does it then feel to then see the results of moving your own features on a mask of you face, or exchanging your features with another’s? Build comic, or tragic, composite identities that would confuse the most sophisticated facial recognition software. Maybe even try to test the town centre CCTV operators’ skills on the way home?
It is reassuring that in these times of often over complex computer solutions, Daly and Popowa have brought together the very different components of Your Face, Your Fortune without letting the technology distract from the essential fun of their performance.
Andy Towers
February 2010
11 January 2010
06 January 2010
An evening of drama and visual performance,
featuring the play ‘The Ugly One’, directed by Mike Stubbs
and continuing with
‘Your Face, Your Fortune’,
created by Tamar Daly and Sara Popowa in response to the play.
New Venture Theatre, Bedford Place, Brighton
bar opens 6 pm, show starts 7:45 pm
16, 17 (matinee 2:30), 19, 20, 21, 22 January
Premiere Saturday 16th
Tickets £8 or £9 final Fri/Sat. All tickets £6 on Tuesday.
Reserve online at www.newventure.org.uk or phone 01273 746118.
‘The Ugly One’ is a sharp and bizarre comedy on beauty, identity and getting ahead (or a face) in life. Lette thought he was normal. But to everyone else, including his loving wife, he is ‘unspeakably ugly’. When the extent of his ugliness is revealed he turns to a plastic surgeon for help. But after the bandages come off, Lette soon learns that there is such a thing as too beautiful. This play owes glancing debts to the Marx Brothers and Kenny Everett and laughs at our obsession with external beauty.
‘Your Face, Your Fortune’ extends the themes of ‘The Ugly One’ into a live happening. It toys with the possibility of changing one's fortune by changing one's face and invites the audience to participate in a 'photographic facial surgery'.
Be prepared for it to get a little sticky….
01 January 2010
NEW YEAR FORTUNE
I went to an amazing, happy party at Pop-up Studios, Lewes, organised by friends p&i (who are cycling to Japan in 2010-12, this night was their fun & fund-raiser). They spent weeks doing up an unused and junk-filled part of the studios, making it into a perfect party-space; two dance floors, a bar, two chill-out spaces and even a wardrobe!
I arrived just before midnight to do a 'anti-countdown-performance'. The night then continued into the next day, full of wonderful friends and people enjoying what may be the best new year party I've been to since my clubbing days in Tokyo (and that's more than a decennia ago!)...
After a snooze at the studios on New Year's Day, we went for an epic walk in the downs, climbing iced-moss-covered hills with clear sky and stunning views. Having no walking-shoes with me, I looked stylish on the hilltop in heels as pictured above :)
For the midnight performance I used the idea of o-mikuji, literally meaning 'sacred lottery'; fortunes printed on strips of paper, popular in Japanese shrines and temples.
By email I asked people I know to give me 10 words to use for the paper strips. The words were collected in the last 24 hours of 2009, printed, cut strips, and attached with yarn to a gorgeous white dress. 168 words in total!
Entering the main space of the party minutes before midnight, I wore a black detachable dress over the white one (have no photos..). At 12, in the middle of the space, i ripped the black dress off revealing all the paper fortunes hanging from the white dress. The next hour or so I moved around in the crowd, offering people to pick their fortune off the dress. Here are some of them:
Here are all the words people sent me.
I asked for words that make you happy or you wish for
18 participants (living in 7 different cities/towns, and 3 different countries)
Korg microphone holidays sun water dreams spring swim south music
warmth love intimacy pink lime green clean clear sparkle taste plant
mas fuerza, mas energía, mas amor, mas hacer el amor
yes friends too play remember soft love path today unfenced
お父さん、お母さん、すし、うなぎ、そば に うどん ありがとう
Mesmerification Dodecahedonism Talismanagement Sausages Second rate Woody Grill Kinichiwa Singapore noodles Ember viridian
belong in the wind
belong in the snow
belong to the trees
the rain and your love
belong to the water
belong to the sun
belong to everyone
and no one at all
mountains flow dance faith clarity kisses love openess stars hope
ים שמש אהבה שלווה בריאות חברות יצירה הגשמה שלום חלום
chocolate charcoal skin eye lashes lips rain primavera planetas air landing
Blessing upon harmony of action and inaction reaching lasting beauty
transformation mysticism friends myth adventure growth enlightenment schpongle-juice doitch 'oh' wheels cranks fast cars & bitches loveguns pistonpower pistonlegs
tweek rising sun together regenerate east
amal, baraka, rahma, farah, iman, salam, wahab, ihsan, rachid, noor
Vårmorgonsgryning i skånsk skogsdunge. Dofter. Ljus.
Uppvaknande fåglars intensiva sång. Svensk naturromantik.
Hälsa, Pengar, Strand, Hav, Himmel, Sol, Växter, Min docksamling, Opera, Skönhet i alla former, Vackra ting, Lieder, Måla, Skapa
let your blossom blossom and everything else will follow too.
your passion will transcend into a flowering process within and outside of you
peanut-butter morning better later keys Earl Grey act car snow soup
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