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.