Day 14
Successfully prototyped painting flesh tones onto icing yesterday before succumbing to illness that arrived with the immediate fear of swine flu, but it’s just a bad cold. Cheered myself up by researching into male and female erogenous zones and ordering exotic teas online. The somewhat gratuitous connection between tea and sex is causing a momentary anxiety, but the endless nose wiping combined with the disbelief that one body can produce this amount of snot, is preventing me from starting script development in earnest. As with all these leaps of faith I am sure the connections will come through the making.
Salivated at images of tea at the Berkley Hotel, (cold has clearly not affected appetite) where they serve cakes influenced by seasonal haute-couture collections. Challenged by thoughts of how to take this tea experience beyond the commercial or merely trite undertaking. One of the keys as always lies in the quality of interaction and realise that what I have been doing in my interactive performances can have a resonance here afterall.
My character development is also beginning to play on my mind. Kindness or authority? Kindness with authority? Oh Lord not Princess Di? Hers is one of the first names I wrote down in week one, with reference to the collective grief witnessed at the time of her death. Attempts to understand the public outpouring, have turned to the concept of a manifestation of a collective unconsciousness in the Jungian sense; the phylogenetic response to the influential role of the archetype. Suddenly feel tired, must get another Lemsip and more tissue.
Day 13
Oh dear, lots of information to add since my last posting, as is always the way, being in the process has been all consuming and the production, reflection and documentation sit side by side, my desire to summarise daily was taken over by being deep into the development of a clear direction for the work. The sense of panic eased four days ago when I realised that the voice of the people as a stand in for God was going to be very useful indeed. The consensus of opinion from the public was that as God, we should tell the people to ‘be kind’. I have taken this on board as my mantra, and I am finding it very hard indeed to be kind at all times. I am far from a saintly human being. I have also realised why I have been having so much trouble with the first rule “Love the extraordinaire”, it is, quite frankly, grammatically incorrect. Extraordinaire is both an adjective and a title, as in Chef Extraordinaire, Piss Artist Extraordinaire, therefore one cannot love it, that’s like saying love the brilliant, love the quickly. In conversation with fellow artists we observed that it is therefore the ‘the’ that is the focus of the love, and following this through that ‘the’ if accented (a slight cheat) becomes Thé. Love Thé Extraordinaire makes complete sense and is also true. I do indeed love thé.
With this realisation, the work has progressed at a swift rate and hence the absence of blogs.
I am creating acts of kindness for my audience in the shape of tea and cakes, extraordinaire, I am researching into tea ceremonies and information about the subject in order to generate material for a script. I am also learning to sugar model in order to create individual cakes for my audience. The work of fellow artists Tom and Katherina has been inspirational in their focus on the body, Katherina is skipping and hoola hooping, Tom is drawing images of the body onto fabric, and I am making cakes in the shape of explicit body parts.
