My performance last Thursday was predominantly centered on endurance, anticipation, dedication and time perception. The performance was designed mainly as an event or ordeal that I decided, as the performer, I was going to go through. What initially began as an idea for a (pre-determined) full text reading was scaled down to a 300 hundred-page reading or skimming (for practical reasons, I couldn’t accommodate for the time that it would take to complete the whole book in one sitting), where, for the most part, only prepositions and conjunctions would be spoken. As far as the structure of the performance, for every fifty pages that was read or covered there were three sets of air horn shots. In total, it took more than nine hours to finish.
Overall, I wanted to create a performance where I attempted to be completely dedicated to a seemingly senseless action and for the most part, except for a few key choices, I didn't really want to take the audience into consideration. When the performance began I tried to pretend as though the class wasn't there so that I wouldn't be tempted to make certain decisions such as sounding the air horn at an inappropriate time or speeding up or slowing down the reading, and aside from a few glances, I really didn't notice many reactions except for when a few people left the room. After the first three sets of air horn shots I placed the air horn on the ground and this seemed to signal the end of my performance because Corrine and Daryl began doing separate performances. I expected this to happen since I had already been going for what seemed like an hour and the annoyance of the air horn seemed to have ceased. I didn’t pay attention to either performance though I did catch snippets of Daryl’s dialogue, which made it hard to concentrate. As time progressed it became much harder to locate prepositions in the text and my memorization of the 48 most commonly used prepositions was beginning to fail.
After everyone left the room I continued, and remained in my chair until I was finished. The only change made was that I decided to use a pair of earplugs since there wasn’t anyone left in the room. Initially I was going to use ear plugs throughout the whole performance but decided before I started that I wasn’t going to because I felt that if the audience was going to have to endure it then I should have to as well. Also, my hearing is one of the most important things to me and I’m willing to compromise a performance in order maintain it. As far as how the rest of the performance proceeded, it became much more interesting due mostly to the absence of a clock, the uncertainty of how long it would take to finish, and the fact that I was very exhausted. Over the course of the next six and a half hours (maybe more?) while maintaining my initial demeanor, I went through intense waves of confidence, anxiety, anger and uncertainty. There were moments where the reading became incredibly difficult for me and then there were long stretches where I was reading as though I were an automaton until it was time to sound the horn, which felt louder each time I had to use it.
Overall this experience felt as though it was a work in progress, a test, or practice for future events. There were elements that seemed to work very well and others, due to poor planning and time constraints, didn’t go the way I saw them going. I am pleased that I was able to complete the goal that I set before myself and learned a lot about what I am capable of and what I may be able to do in the future.
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