Month: March 2016

Victoria Melody’s Hair Peace was a creative masterpiece exploring the roots of human hair (pardon the pun). Melody takes the audience on an entertaining journey into the world of beauty and to the extent people will go in order to feel and look ‘good’. Melody journey’s to India in an attempt to find out where many of the “real human hair” (Melody, 2016) extensions actually come from.

Her journey began from the end of her last show Major Tom, where she entered her dog in to Crufts style competitions. This prompted her in to an exploration of beauty pageants. Melody entered herself in to these pageants in an attempt to uncover what it is to be attractive and how ‘natural’ beauty holds up to a lesser more artificial one. Her time in beauty pageants led her to the realisation that hair extensions, a common tool used by aspiring queens, were acquired from real people in eastern countries.

Hair Peace took us on a journey from England to India documenting the miles a single strand of hair will rack up on it’s way to another person’s head. Whether it came from an street market vendor who bought hair from the deceased or whether it was salvaged from an ancient ritual in relationship to God:

“There is a saviour in the shape of a Bollywood financier, the most expensive wedding to have ever taken place, a Celebrity Big Brother contestant, and hair.Lots of hair. Sacks of it” (Melody, 2010)

What I learned from Hair Peace

Victoria Melody’s semi-autobiographical venture allowed me to see the benefits of using autobiographical elements in a performance in order to further contextualise the topic that is brought to the table. The show’s concept is brought into the realm of human feeling by the autobiographical and biographical element that Melody includes; using the stories of Melody and her friends and family allows the topic at hand to be brought right in to the forefront of the audience’s mind – rather than keeping the topic of hair and  the emotional journeys the religious pilgrims go through in order to have their hair removed for purposes of worship.

Melody makes no attempt to persuade the audience that she is anyone else, her performance contains no character work and it allows the audience to see a personal viewpoint on the subject at hand: “She is totally herself on stage, finding out about the world and discovering herself in the very act of performance. Her openness and disarming directness make us warm to her” (The Guardian, 2015).

Works Cited.

Melody, V. (2016) Hair Peace. [performance] Paul Hodson (dir.) Lincoln: LPAC, 2 March.

Melody, V. (2010) Hair Peace. [online] Warwick: Parachutes and Puzzles. [Accessed 8 march 2016]

The Guardian. (2015) Hair Peace at Edinburgh Festival review – the secret life of locks. The Guardian, 24 August.

All Solo performers are storytellers, each show is merely another session in which a performer can share a few thoughts and feelings with an audience. As is seen in the majority of Solo shows the audience coexists with the performer on stage much like that of a storyteller and a group of listeners sat around them.  The art of the monologist is a difficult one to master – the feeling of being alone on stage can encapsulate and swallow you whole and destroy the show you have created; it is with this information that the Solo artist must feed off the audience’s energy by bringing them in to the action on stage in some way shape or form. Whether that includes bringing them up on stage or merely speaking directly to them; “their energy resonates with that of the lone artist, and their presence in the room can trigger not only new levels of performance, but, more interestingly, new material” (Bonney, 2000, xiii).

In my performance, I wish to play upon the presence of storytelling in monologue. The character of Madame Arcati often finds herself telling the other characters a story about her life or someone else’s. She thrives off the other characters as a way of giving herself power and credibility. Madame Arcati uses her audience as I want to use mine. “It is [the audience] who must give you even more than you give them in the way of imagination and creative power” (Draper, cited in Bonney, 2000, xiii).

I will be using character work from different plays that I have recently performed in and/or studied including Blithe Spirit and A Kestrel for a Knave (Play adaptation) in order to give my work an “infectious, raw energy of spontaneous storytelling” (Bonney, 2000, xiii) to which I can keep the audience engaged and entertained throughout.

Works Cited:

Bonney, J. (ed.) (2000)  Extreme Exposure: An anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century, New York: Theatre Communications Group