The space of the piece is something that initially worried us. Studio one and two were repeatedly suggested to us because they made a good space for a gallery style performance, but we were adamant for the auditorium. This was originally because we enjoyed how the space felt: it’s used for more ‘official’ performances, and has proper seating and a more general theatre feel.
As the performance became more solid, so did our understanding of the space and its relation. We knew we wanted to use the whole room, with the chairs down, and had no fears that the size of the room would overwhelm the few installations we had planned. In becoming more aware of what our performance was going to consist of, it allowed us to build up a relationship between the space and the performance.
We knew that we wanted the installations to be linked to each other, be it with a narrative or some sort of physical path. It was in our reaearch that we found inspiration for the final idea:
(http://www.lostateminor.com/2011/02/10/labryinth-made-entirely-out-from-salt/) this piece by Motoi Yamamato used the salt’s Japanese “symbol of purification and mourning, and he started sketching with salt to honour his sister’s passing from brain cancer”. This deep association struck a chord with us, and we adored the aesthetics of the piece, especially the way it is clear to see how much effort has gone into the presentation.
From this we decided to create our own salt path: this helped reinforce our theme of black and white. It also assisted the message behind ‘Have a Nice Day’, being an interactive and live action version of these lines that started out crisp and white and got more and more messy as the day went on and the audience became less and less concerned with keeping in the lines.
The actual pattern of the salt lines took longer to think of. We ended up positioning each installation at a point in a giant ampersand, with an outline in which the audience was supposed to stay. Above this ampersand and outside of the public area was the word ‘trial’, and below was the word ‘error’. This was a technique that also reinforced the ‘Perspective’ part of our gallery, in that the audience was invited to go up to the balcony floor upon leaving the gallery, to get a birds eye view of the salt lines and the exhibition in general.
Having had no time to view the auditorium since the first few weeks of the module, when the day of performance approached, we were apprehensive to set up. This is because we didn’t feel like we had a complete awareness or plan of where everything would go in the space, but as one of our (heavily relied upon) mottos stated; ‘nothing we do is an exact science’. We recognised that it it perhaps wouldn’t go to plan, but having had problems with every installation so far, and finding that it usually improved upon them, we weren’t phased. The space ended up being one of the biggest contributers to the atmosphere created by the gallery, and the way that it wasn’t centralised to any particular point fit in with our idea of letting people choose to interpret or approach things however they felt most appropriate.