It’s carnival time in my studio.
NOTE: Not sure why images are horizontal
Mikhail Bakhtin’s four categories of the carnivalistic sense of the world: 1. Familiar and free interaction between people: carnival often brought the unlikely of people together and encouraged the interaction and free expression of themselves in unity. 2. Eccentric behaviour: unacceptable behaviour is welcomed and accepted in carnival, and one’s natural behaviour can be revealed without the consequences. 3.Carnivalistic misalliances: familiar and free format of carnival allows everything that may normally be separated to reunite- Heaven and Hell, the young and the old, etc. 4. Sacrilegious: Bakhtin believed that carnival allowed for Sacrilegious events to occur without the need for punishment. Bakhtin believed that these kinds of categories are creative theatrical expressions of manifested life experiences in the form of sensual ritualistic performances.
La comedienne (The comedian), 2014
Coloured pencil
Four drawings of the series of photographs created with the lampshades. I like the deadpan of the expressions, the absurdity, the body languague. The movement was restrained with the lampshades, does this want to represent entrapment within the domestic house… ? The household objects become part of the body… like the Louise Bourgeois’s drawings in the Femme Maison series…
And I just found this video of Charles Aznavour singing La Boheme and I’m intrigued and astonished by the expressions of his hands and how we feels this song so much. This is pure passion. What a beautiful song. <3 La boheme…
Documention from previous post.
Inspired by the costumes of Louise Borgeois, Pablo Picasso and the Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer I start experimenting with the lampshades as costumes. Their shapes and how they adjust to my body remind me of shields and shells…
I see performance as a great medium to lose one’s inhibitions and at that point I think I needed a lot of that. My mentor is senior lecturer in the performance and theathre BA course at Brighton. He has encouraged me to work more in performance, to use my sense of humour and comedy in my work, throughtout dance and theatre and using my body to speak up. I still finding ways of achieving moving sculptures with this approach being one of them.
These photographs are only existing as photographs, there is not a thread here but purely just as experimental as the installations before.
I wonder If I’ve had being influenced at some point in my journey by theatre, specially Theatre of the Absurd, carnivals and Comedia dell’arte if I haven’t done this MA.
I’m also inspired by Dr. Brown, the anarchic mime/clown creation of Los Angeles-born performer Phil Burgers.
Doctor Brown is reinventing clowning and mime with a dark, unpredictable edge. Burgers’s physical comedy skills are impeccable, extracting laughs from simple, subtle movements, like a raise of an eyebrow, rather than big visual punchlines. Since seing Dr. Brown couple of years ago in the Fringe festival here in Brighton I have been interested in the absurd. I find inspiration in the absurd and in the tragycomedy of life. I love facial expressions, body languague and how we comunicate with our body without saying a word. It’s just fascinating.
This is a description (see below) about Theatre of the Absurd in Wikipedia which I love, but does human existence really has no meaning or purpose? I find this super interesting…
Theatre of the Absurd proposes that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.
And the biggest question; am I ready to act as a comedian in my practice? In flesh…?
