Inspirations – Page 2 – Billy Cummock Solo 2016

March 17, 2016Billy Cummock 1 Comment

Hair Peace – Victoria Melody

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.

March 17, 2016Billy Cummock

The Phenomenon of Storytelling

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

February 23, 2016Billy Cummock

“Drama’s for Puffs” – Growing up fabulous in Rotherham.

I grew up in Rotherham, a town in the centre of England right smack-bang in South Yorkshire. Nobody really knows where Rotherham is, nor what it is really. When I tell people I’m from Rotherham they ask again:

“where’s that?”

and I would reply:

“Next to Sheffield, the Chuckle Brothers, Howard Webb the Referee and David Seaman the goalkeeper all come from there”

and, none the wiser, they say:

“oh right.”

With this reputation Rotherham, growing up in Rotherham never came with any ambitions. Everyone at school either wanted to be a mechanic, a plumber, a joiner or join the army. So imagine their surprise when I said I wanted to create theatre and act on stage – instead of being a mechanic like my father before me.

“Drama’s not even a real subject – and it’s for puffs!”

Now, no one needs to tell me they were wrong. I always knew they were but that didn’t make the pressure of wanting to go in to theatre any easier. Nor did I gain a resoundingly good message from my parents when I told them:

“why would you want to do that? You’d never get anywhere. There’s no money in it.”

This reaction took away some confidence – I didn’t want to upset my family nor chase something that wasn’t going to make me successful, but I had to try.

And so I passed my GCSE – C grade nothing more – It was a terrible grade now that I think about it but I managed to get a place on the Drama A-level course at my Sixth Form. All the while I learned more and more about Drama I pursued something else as a back up: Maths, merely because I had a nack for it. All the while this happened I kept getting the same comments – the same whimsical remarks that eventually led on to the basis for my personal statement – “Drama, is that even a real subject?” – ‘Yes it is dickhead’ is what I should have said in hindsight but I just laughed.

In the end the peripeteia of my life came about during my As Level drama performances. I was cast as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.

Theatre was always a huge part of my life – I had always wanted to perform. I performed as a Madame Arcati in front of my parents – I was Billy Elliot taking the stand in the sports hall where he used to box and dance. I performed in front of them like they weren’t even in the room – and it paid off. This stimuli will offer me some inspiration in order to create a piece of Solo performance – the experiences that people have when chasing their dreams from a working-class background.

February 12, 2016Billy Cummock

Time is of the essence – Audience Participation.

Time is complicated.

In order to develop ideas for shows and ways in which certain subjects can be approached in performance I took the idea of time in order to use an ambiguous subject in order to create a narrative for a show. Utilising this subject allowed me a freedom to experiment with audience participation.

When thinking about time I realised how finite the time we have is, such as the grand journey of life is but a simple blip in the four hundred thousand years that humanity and humans have existed. I decided in that sense to create a performance where the audience would learn for themselves how finite it is.

I started by compiling a list of things a person could in a five minute time frame. This is what I came up with:

Things you can do in five minutes:

Create a piece of art.
Destroy a piece of art.
Write a short review of a show.
Have sex.
Roll 5 cigarettes.
Play hangman.
Tell a convincing lie about yourself.
Perform a monologue – “To be or not to be” etc.
Practice holding your breath.
Recite a sonnet. “my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” etc.
Drink a pint of beer.
Tell someone about your day.
Watch a video.
Sing a song.
Do a presentation on the current war in Iraq.
Read aloud a page of a book.
Mug/Rob someone.
Offend the women in the audience.
Attack a man’s ego effectively.
Tell people all the things you can do in five minutes.

I decided that this alone could be a performance much like that of Spalding Gray. A series of points on a piece of paper in order to trigger immediate responses from my own pre-written text. This in turn would take the audience on a journey through a finite period of time and all the things you can/cannot do within that time constraint.

Moving forward from this idea I decided that it could be more beneficial for an audience if they were to try these things themselves with the performer, myself, as a medium to help them create these instances. Through this method I would be able to show the audience not what I can do in that period of time but what everyone can do in that period of time.

This process allowed me to understand the importance of audiences and their potential to contribute to a performance as much as the solo performer does themselves – in turn the audience and performer would form a ‘double act’ on stage maximising the understanding and lasting impact the show can have.

February 5, 2016Billy Cummock

O! NO.

The Overview

What could be better than a show about Yoko Ono? A show about Yoko Ono’s affect on the human condition. Jamie Wood’s O NO! was a easy going piece of theatre developed from the notion of what it is like to share a life with someone. He invented his performance taking inspiration from his relationship with his Wife, the relationship between his Mother and Father and the historic couple that is John Lennon & Yoko Ono.

He brought about a happening on stage that resemble the 1960’s feel good summer of love attitude – embracing the ‘hippie’ persona that John and Yoko so often were associated with. Ono’s artwork was a prominent theme throughout the show often creeping up in the form of a small book with many of Yoko’s art pieces within.

All in all Jamie Wood’s O NO! was a triumph of what the weird and wonderful can do to a solo performance. Wood’s use of comedy allowed the audience to feel at ease with themselves and the performance as well as open to whatever Wood was doing on stage.

The Inspiration

O NO! has shown me that in performance, a solo performer can in fact use his ‘alone-ness’ to his advantage – manipulating an audience to create the performance themselves. Through a laid back comedy approach brought about through the topic of study I can see that a performance can have many levels of mood – ranging from the down-right bizarre hilarity that Wood brought to the stage; all the way down to crushing seriousness where a member of the audience is willing to open his heart and spill it out in to a bag – only moments after getting in the raw merely because it was one of Ono’s art pieces.

I have decided that because of the impact that O NO! had on audience that I would like to create a piece of theatre from the weird, wonderful and less understood regions of the Avant Garde. I will lead on from this by rediscovering art movements such as DADA, Futurism and Surrealism and see where these movements take me – whether I move forward and create a wacky show is merely down to what I discover in the Future.