The Girl in the Display Case: Innovation Installation - Creative Performance Practice

Last week (Wednesday 20th February 2019), one of our students climbed into our largest library display case for an afternoon.  As you can imagine, this provoked quite a bit of interest, both in the Library, and online!  (You'll remember that we blogged about it at the time, here.)

We asked Anna how she felt it had all gone, and we thought it would be nice to share her comments with you:-

"glad to hear that the installation provoked interest. Here's some thoughts after the installation:-
 What does sustainability mean? That has been one of my main questions during the performance research project that I am currently focusing on. 

Sustainability by the definition of  Bruntland Report for the World Commission on Environment and Development (1992) refers to 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.'

As a part of this research I installed objects found in nature alongside myself in a glass display in the Whittaker Library. This durational performance lasted almost six hours. The performance, named Still Life, was a performance of stillness, of plastic and sustainability. The task of being as still as possible soon became the main performance; the limited space of the display restricting my poses made it hard to maintain one for a long period of time. By changing my pose time to time I managed to find sustainable poses that then became the pattern of the movement of the performance. To my surprise I managed to give a fright so couple of people by breaking the stillness I had been maintaining. 'Is that a real person?' was a question I heard many times.

After a couple of hours inside the glass display I started to feel like the glass walls were the polluted atmosphere of the earth, and I represented the overpopulation of the planet, sharing my space with objects that no longer were useful to us and thus were thrown away and forgotten about.

How to live our lives as sustainably as possible? After this experiment I'd say that it takes a lot of re-arranging, re-configuring and re-adjusting to the existing conditions. It is a continuous process of discovering better ways to maintain and preserve what we have. It is an ongoing conversation rather than a question with an answer. We are accustomed to a certain comfort in our lives - which is natural - but when it comes to sustainability there are certain choices we have to make - if not for ourselves then for the future."

 

Unfinished Histories 

Check out a new website dedicated to recording the history of Alternative Theatre in the UK (mostly London) in the 1960s, 70s and 80s through interviews and the use of archive materials.

The companies involved were among some of the first Black, Asian, lesbian, gay, women’s, disabled, political, experimental, TIE and community-based theatre groups seen in Britain.
With work ranging from experiments in physical and visual theatre or performance art, to vernacular drama, agit-prop and satire. This website is championing a generation of artists whose work has influenced and shaped present day theatre.

Click Here

Innovation Installation - Creative Performance Practice (Wednesday 20th February 2019)

We're delighted to say that we will be hosting a live installation performance piece in the Library, next Wednesday, 20^th February. A third year CPP student will be installing themselves in the entrance way display case for 5 hours, in a piece aimed at understanding how durational performance, sustainability and activism can inform an arts practice.  The performance piece will take place between 12 noon and 6 pm.

 

We are very curious to see what will be done with our display cabinet!!!

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Aspects of Love: February in the Library

Since this is the month of love, the Library are thinking about all the different types of love that are out there - not to mention how we can love ourselves better!

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Let us inspire you!

Come and have a look at our displays including our selection of self-help books, or use our eResources listed below!

 

Drama Online has over 500 plays looking at the theme of love (use advanced search, and you can limit your results by theme).  How about ...

 

A Brief History of Women / Alan Ayckbourn

  

A Brief History of Women charts the life of Anthony Spates: from his first job as an adolescent footman at a country manor house through to his retirement as manager of the hotel the manor house became. Over the course of six decades, the play follows him and the remarkable women he has loved, left and lost over the years.

 

Roles: Male (13) , Female (11) , Neutral (0)

 

Hushabye Mountain / Jonathan Harvey

Danny is a young man, waiting to be let into heaven. There seems to be some difficulty about it, but Judy Garland reassures him as she passes by in a boat full of stars. Away from the dreamlike and unexpected version of the afterlife, the people who were closest to Danny struggle with his death from AIDS. Hushabye Mountain reveals a world full of love, pain, laughter and friendship.

Roles: Male (6) , Female (7) , Neutral (1)

 

 

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Be mindful

We have Mindfulness e-books ... try Mindfulness for Dummies or Mindfulness in the Academy

 

Enjoy a ballet or opera

Watch full length ballets and operas about love by composers who struggled with mental health on Medici TV ...

 

Such as Swan Lake by Nureyev after Petipa, music by Tchaikovsky (performed here by

Amandine Albisson, Mathieu Ganio, François Alu – Corps de Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris)

 

Or Berlioz's Béatrice et Benedict - a whimsical and nostalgic take on Shakespeare’s great comedy Much Ado About Nothing, on the stage of Glyndebourne in 2016.  

Be as kind to yourself as you are to your friends

We've picked a few articles and book chapters looking at mental health and the performing arts - if this interests you, why not use our catalogue plus search to find more?

• Performing Depression: The Workman Theatre Project and the Making of Joy. A Musical. About Depression (Kirsty Johnston) Joy was a result of a unique five-year development and dramaturgical process which involved many artists and consultants. The production sought to engage a wide public audience in rethinking depression, antidepressant use in society, and the way in which depression is performed.
• Music Performance Anxiety in Instrumental Music Students: A Multiple Case Study of Teacher Perspectives (Crystal Sieger) The purpose of this multiple case study was to investigate the strategies and methods utilized by middle and high school music teachers to address the music performance anxiety experienced by their students.
• Coping with Stress (Linda Hamilton) which looks at ways of how ballet dancers can deal with common stresses during training, performance, overuse of injuries and problems associated with dieting.
• Staging Schizophrenia: The Workman Theatre Project and Terry Watada's Vincent. (Kirsty Johnston) which discusses the representation of mental illness in Terry Watada's play “Vincent".
• Mindful Music Listening as a Potential Treatment for Depression (Kristen J. Eckhardt and Julie A. Dinsmore) which proposes a combined intervention called Mindful Music Listening, during which clients with depression use mindfulness skills while listening to music to notice, label, discuss, and learn to manage their emotions. 
• Alexander Street Press has even got an album entitled Stress Coping Music!

  

Love is in the Air at Whittaker Library

Archival Object of the Month - February in the Whittaker Library

Unrequited Correspondence ...

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February’s Archival Object of the Month showcases a series of letters between the twentieth century composers Kaikhosru Sorabji and Erik Chisholm.  Chisholm was an alumnus of the Conservatoire, a composer, conductor, educator and impresario who founded the Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music in Glasgow in 1930, which was responsible for bringing composers such as Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith to Scotland to perform and premiere their own works.

Love poems and a lock of hair

 

Around the same time, Chisholm established a correspondence with the Avant-garde composer Kaikhosru Sorabji.  Initially they discussed musical theory and analysis, however soon a bond of friendship developed.  By 1933 the exchange had become more personal and Sorabji’s romantic feelings toward Chisholm began to emerge.  On display in the Whittaker Library are examples of this unrequited correspondence (Chisholm was married), including two love poems written by Sorabji to Chisholm and a lock of Sorabji’s hair.

 In the 1930s homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom, and these letters would have been enough to convict Sorabji of indecency as some of the content is particularly revealing.  The complete correspondence from Sorabji to Chisholm is held by our Archives & Collections (archives@rcs.ac.uk). 

 

A complete catalogue of the Chisholm collection can be found here.

 

Stuart A. Harris-Logan
Archives Officer 

Benedict Morris, We're Proud of You!

As you may know, one of our trad musicians, Benedict Morris, has just won the Young Traditional Musician of the Year 2019 award.  We found this clip on YouTube, so we thought we'd share it with you. 

We're proud of you, Benedict!  Congratulations from the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.