All Dressed Up! – Ourselves and the space…

Our costume consists of myself wearing a white robe with high heels and Juliette wearing a long dress barefoot. The reasoning behind this costume is to show different aspects of femininity and contradicting them.

During this rehearsal we explored our new ideas of writing on the mirror in red lipstick when reading our performance text aloud still focusing on ourselves, and focusing on each other and applying the berries to the opposite person’s face.

Reflection on how it went:

We struggled to apply the berries onto each other’s faces as it felt quite comedic. We have also decided to scrap the writing on the mirror as, although it looks effective, it is too explicit and we began repeating the words that we wrote.

Instead we have decided that we will have raspberries covering the entirety of the sink, wear jammy dodgers on our nipples (to show the sexualisation of women) and I will put jam into my high heels during the performance before putting them on. This will symbolize the pain that women go through to wear them.

(With thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou, photographer)

(With thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou, photographer)

We will be dressing up the rest of the space as at the moment it looks quite bare and we are only situated in front of the mirror. We are going to wallpaper the middle cubicle with pages from recipe books and etiquette books for women. This will help hint towards the stereotypes of women that we are addressing – the ideal of women as mothers, housewives and as sexualised objects. The two cubicles on either side will have our shoes poking out from underneath to look effective.

(With thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou, photographer)                (With thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou, photographer)

After practicing putting jam in my shoes I have realized how hard it is to walk with them on so I will remove them as part of our performance and will wash my feet in a saucepan of water.

Spectator’s Experience…

The final issue we encountered was who our audience will be and how they will be able to experience our piece. As the toilets we use will not be open to the public we will have to entice them down.

We sourced mini jars to attach our framing statements to which will be incorporated at the start of our performance to make the experience more exciting to spectate. We have decided Juliette will begin at the top of the stairs and will gather a maximum of two women to be our audience for each interval we will perform. She will ask them to balance a raspberry on a teaspoon to carry down the stairs towards me, I will ask them to drop the raspberry into the jar I’ll be holding, which will then be placed within the middle cubicle. The reasoning behind this is because we want them to feel a part of the experience.

(With thanks to Fenia Kotsopoulou, photographer)

Our framing statement is as follows:

On our performance day we will have signs showing the audience where to wait at the start of each interval.

The three intervals will be at: 12:30 – 12:45, 12:45-1 and 1-1:15.