After all of this talk about autobiographical performance and needing to include yourself in your performance, I began to misunderstand the concept. I believed that I needed to talk about deep emotional issues to be able to pull off a solo performance and I started thinking of different ways that i could represent my own psychological flaws. I was thinking of ideas based around performance art and thinking of representing the lack of social identity that I feel and the anxiety that has grown in me through the years. My idea was if it is true and emotional then it will effect the audience and therefore be a compelling performance.

However as I started looking at more and more solo performances I realised that the ones I enjoyed the most were the more implicit performances that incorporated story and metaphor to convey reason. Then thinking back to my ideas of opening up to an audience in a way that is very unlike me, I decided that it was the wrong thing to do. I do not talk about my deeper feelings so it would make no sense to speak of them now as this is not autobiographical in my opinion. That would be playing a character that speaks about my issues which would overwhelm audiences and could make them feel more uncomfortable that entertained or emotionally affected.

I need to stop thinking about deep emotional issues residing within me and start thinking about who I am and what a performance means to me.

STOP THINKING ABOUT WHAT WILL GET GOOD GRADES AND START THINKING BACK TO WHY YOU LOVE PERFORMING!!!!!

Watching solo performers from the detailed story telling of Spalding Gray to the performance art of Marina Abramovich it is clear that control is an important aspect.

Spalding Gray is a solo performer who is extremely good at controlling the atmosphere, tone and pace of his performances. One of the ways he achieves this is through the way he controls his voice and dialogue. He controls his own styles and switches them according to the effect that he is trying to achieve. For example he could be telling a faced paced story and telling it as if he was in a panic himself. Then he would come to a climax and slow down, deepening his voice slightly to create a release of tension in the story and within the mood of the audience. This creates a more interesting performance for the audience as the story heightens at points and then drops creating new atmospheres for the audience to consume.

I have taken influence from this style of story telling and have planned some key points within my stories that I am going to heighten and drop at specific moments to create a captivating performance for my audience.

Another feature of Spalding Gray’s style that I plan on incorporating within my performance is when he becomes extremely informative and seams to lift factual information about a specific subject which then comes into the rest of the performance. I plan to use a similar device in my performance except instead of listing off fact and figures in the style of a lecture, using maps and diagrams, i am going to be incorporating media within my performance. To truly give the audience a sense of setting for my stories I have taken pictures and filmed videos of the places my stories took place. I plan on projecting these pictures and videos on a wall behind me and acknowledging them, by coming out of a character to explain the situation, then going back into a character to tell the story.