Underbelly Arts 2010: Public Lab & Festival retrospective

So here it goes, a reflection on producing Snail Piece at Underbelly Arts: Public Lab and Festival 2010.

We began by intending to develop a piece I had performed at an Appleloft late last year where I essentially implied that I was going to kill this snail but, lacking an ending, I asked the audience whether I should. Once we’d started work during the Lab period we also began a two-week process of negotiating our position and finding out exactly how we would create this piece, and what it would look like by the Festival. We tried various discussion/decision making models, and by the second week had settled in to a plan and a way of working with the Lab format, which invites audiences in twice a day to observe/work with artists, to produce the final piece. It was a rewarding and educational experience professionally, and a great experience personally.

One of the most valuable experiences we had over the course of the project was negotiating, as a team, our changing understanding of the opportunity we were working with. Snail Piece began during our work on Sexy New Urban Design Team… Erskineville at the Tiny Stadiums Festival. This was the first major project Applespiel had undertaken, and bolstered by our perceived success, we looked around for the next opportunity. Submitting Snail Piece to Underbelly Arts was a move to keep producing more Applespiel work, and most importantly, to show the public more of our work.

Halfway through festival…

We’ve reached our halfway break up here in Serial Space, three performances so far and another three to go. We rode straight through first half, performing, talking and then heading out to the festival. I Can Draw You A Picture have their magazines complete, which I’m very excited to pick up, and we’ve particularly enjoyed finding the In The Cracks stuff, some of it very tiny and hidden. The Co-op is plying a successful and delicious soup trade. As well as the pieces we’ve seen, we’ve had a very friendly and educational experience, with lots of people eager to share their impressions and engage us in conversation about our piece.

As for the piece itself, the large audience sizes gave us a lot to work with for the first two pieces. The last audience was smaller, and the different size produced a very different dynamic, between themselves and in regards to our own role. Following the piece we discussed recognizing when and how to take a more pro-active role.

One standout moment has been a small girl stepping on stage to take the snail home as Duffy hovered a hammer over it.

– Joe

Two Snails Saved.

Today’s first performance is just over. It was great for me to watch it, I haven’t been around all week so it was pretty much a whole new show using the ideas we’d played with before.

Audience was great, everyone really got involved and there was some lovely voting about inside or outside. Also because we all kind of wanted to see as many scene changes as possible.

We’ve got our second performance in about fifteen minutes, and Mark is wandering around looking at some things. We have a camera but no cord (whoops). There’ll be another post in about an hour.

First Snail Piece Performance

The snail is saved and taken home by a lovely lady with kids. Not the result i was hoping for but still…

Our Underbelly Blog Guest Post

This is the piece that Rachel wrote for the Underbelly blog for last Friday. The blog has a bunch of posts from various artists and the people behind Underbelly Arts Festival, and is well worth checking out.

GUEST BLOGGER: RACHEL ROBERTS from Applespiel

Applespiel is a very young performance collective. We try to use this to our advantage when applying for new residencies and talking ourselves up: ‘young, emerging collective’, ‘fresh, young artists’, etc. No matter how young and sexy we are, though, we can’t fake experience. Underbelly Arts: Public Lab and Festival is giving us an invaluable opportunity to spend a fortnight in a lab environment where we can experiment and devise for an ever-changing audience and get as much feedback as possible.

The lab portion of Underbelly is the most appealing to me. When I see a new performance, artwork or creation I am usually more interested in the process of how it came into being and how it was pieced together to become the final product. As a relatively new artist I want to learn from the work of others. Plus it’s incredibly interesting and exciting to see something being created. There is no standard recipe for how to create something. There are common methods, like brainstorming and impulse work, but the more serendipitous events are often a mystery. Things happen by accident, through mistakes, collisions and mishap. The process of creating is open to the public in Underbelly Arts and I think everyone could gain something from coming on a lab tour during the week.

Particularly beneficial to a young collective of artists/performers is the space and time to make mistakes. My fellow Applespielers and I have decided that considering our experience and the nature of our project, Snail Piece, total honesty between ourselves and our audience (whether in person, in performance or on our blog) is for the best – no use in trying to cover up our mistakes during the lab. If we trial a new idea and it doesn’t work out, great! As long as we can pick it apart and figure out why, document that process and then build upon it, that mistake have worth to us. For the first week of Underbelly Arts, we tried a few different approaches to Snail Piece – gansta rap, forums, mock trial, gallery-style experiences and sharing circles. Some worked better than others – some aimed for different things. Some ended up going in completely the opposite direction to the one we expected. Snail Piece originated from a small performance in a garage in Wollongong, with Joe Parro informing us of the mating habits of snails to the music of The Notorious B.I.G. and then asking us to complete his performance for him by deciding whether or not he should smash his snail with a hammer. The arguments that ensued became our focal point for out Underbelly work – group decision making processes and audience debate. During the next week of Underbelly we’ll be trialing several other methods of presenting the snail dilemma before the Festival on Saturday.

Applespiel, along with several other projects in this year’s Underbelly crowd, rely on audience participation and interaction to develop their works, so we really value every audience member who comes along to a lab tour to see the ‘behind-the-scenes’ process. A big thank you to everyone who has supported and continues to support this fantastic arts festival, and a special thank you to the team working at Underbelly Arts for all the hard work. We hope dealing with Arts Law for us (are we allowed to kill the snail yet?) hasn’t been too bad.

Underbelly Arts Festival tomorrow!

We’ll have a post up later today probably from Joe, recounting the last few days of the Underbelly labs, but just a quick reminder that tomorrow is the festival! We hope you can all come along and see the work we’ve been developing over the last two weeks, as well as some other great pieces.

As a great taste of what you’ll see, here’s a video from Dylan Behan who came by on Saturday and filmed bits and pieces from the day.

The festival goes from 2pm-10pm, and tickets are around the $20 mark. This is for a groovy 16 performances and installations, many of which are interactive. It’s 2 minutes walk from Central, and there’s a couple of great eateries nearby, including the ultra-delicious co-op Should be a great day. Particularly if you spend most of it having fun at I Can Draw You A Picture, like I want to.

You can get all the information you need about the festival, including tickets and the schedule/map, from the Underbelly website, which is here.

As I said, I’ll be blogging from the festival, documenting our own experiences but also looking at the rest of the festival. But that won’t compare to being there! Hope to see you tomorrow.

“But maybe it’s better to die knowing love…” Underbelly Arts Lab, Monday and Tuesday

Over the last two days at Underbelly Arts we’ve been developing a new, and thus far final, model for Snail Piece. We kept it under raps for Monday’s public tours and tried it out on Tuesday, with very positive results. It is a simple, workable model that focuses on and exercises audience discussion and decision making, and in the remaining three days leading up to the festival we expect to have a lot of fun tweaking, creating and refining.

Lab Saturday!

Yesterday at Underbelly Arts was Lab Saturday, with tours spread over the afternoon and a talks session at The Clare Hotel to discuss the role an audience can play in creative development. Nathan and I took part in the talks on behalf of Applespiel, and got to witness the other artists discussing their past and current works. Several ideas, I wish I had thought of. At the end of the first week, we have a chance to reflect on our experience so far.

Arts Lab: Public Tours 3 and 4.

Tonight’s lab began with some discussion of what worked and what didn’t from Thursday’s lab tours, with some brainstorming and mindmapping with Duffy’s textas. Various ideas were thrown in an we decided to take advantage of the upcoming lab tours and churn out something completely different to the previous night. The space was cleared, chairs rearranged, Joe made a picture guide to snail romancing (which is actually quite violent) and there was chicken. Too much chicken.

We were playing around with a kind of gallery style piece. Troy led in our audience and gave them some OH&S tips for Serial Space, Duffy led a group circle discussion on animal death – seeing animals die, killing animals, etc. Simon gave a quick tutorial using Joe’s snail romance guide and set up some lovely/horrific youtube clips, and Joe explained to Rachel (me) the reasons he became a vegetarian, while Rachel ate some crispy KFC chicken into a microphone. There is nothing sexier than hearing yourself chew on mic.

Underbelly Arts Lab – first public tour!

We’ve all just arrived for the second day of the Lab, this time with an abundance of snails thanks to my dad (thanks dad!). Yesterday we worked with the public for the first time, an excellent experience: for the first tour we tweaked the original Snail Piece model, re-distributing text between us in an attempt to open out the space, and nervously proposed the kill/don’t kill decision, to a resounding “don’t kill! Why would you kill?”

Before our second run we discussed techniques to invite the audience into discussion, spending time sharing personal animal related stories and working towards creating an invitational, as opposed to a coercive, dialogue. Once the audience arrived they were keen to join in, and after hearing a lot of interesting animal stories, we turned to the kill/don’t kill question. The decision was still unanimously don’t kill, but just… conversations afterwards revealed that some audience members were close to proposing a more oppositional stance. Indeed, later at the pub, conversation continued along amongst a few of the audience and, encouragingly, opened up. The desired discussion was at least arrived at, only in a sort of time lag way.

End report. Now to form today’s battle plan.

-Joe