Breakdown of Artistic Statement

After going through all my research and trying to decide what parts of it are useful and will be interesting for an audience, I have found that I am going to drop the idea of terrorism and trying to help people deal with things. When I thought it through I realised that I didn't know enough about these topic and also my heart wasn't in it. When researching the performances on 9/11 the performers had a significant experience with the attack where as I didn't. And so I began to think about the things I do have significant experience with and also that I am interested in.
Although I have cut out the idea of terrorism I still want to keep the idea of endurance performance and movement. I think my initial idea for the performance was trying to incorporate too much and thus would create a confusing and less emotional performance. I have decided to focus on one idea and explore all the dimensions of that idea and believe this would create a far more interesting and personal performance.

I have done some automatic writing to help me create my artist statement. I am going to put it on here to help me collect all my ideas together and then do some research.


Artist Statement
What you want to do?
I want to show a piece of theatre that will explore the physicality's of my own body and the extent to which I can push it. In order to do this I want to look into my own personal interests and incorporate them into my work. I want to show that the body is capable of doing anything with the right training and the right mind set.

My interests.
Last April I applied to do the Great North Run in order to impress someone. When that person left my life I thought there was no way I was going to do it. I started pushing my body, training as much as possible and began to realise it wasn't the body that couldn't do the activity but it was the mind that was stopping me. As a result, I realised I needed to change my mind set and start training and eventually managed to complete the 13 mile run. Ever since then I have been extremely interested in running and also pushing the body to the limits, questioning whether the theory of mind of matter is true.
Another interest I have is musical theatre. I find that most people either love or hate musical theatre but I think it is fantastic. I am interested in the colours, the bright lights and the dancing and when they are all mixed together I think they make a brilliant combination that can't help but make you smile. I am extremely interested in putting this into my performance. Brian Lobel has done some work on musicals combined with endurance and this work interests me a great deal and I want to explore it further.
Another thing I am interesting in is the body, especially the female body. I am interested in how it looks and how it moves and want to incorporate this idea into my performance.
My final interest would be the colour red. Anyone who knows me knows that I love the colour red and I thought this could be interesting to maybe explore further into my performance.

Research
In order to explore the things above I first need to do some research. The things I am going to look at are:

• Pushing the body to the limit -Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty'
• The Female Body - Biology of the female body, how the female body is meant to look due to magazines and catwalks etc, feminism and femininity.
• Musicals - Production, staging, costume etc. Brian Lobels performance on musicals and endurance
• Running - Theory of mind of matter
• Movement and Dance
• The colour red - What it stands for and what it can mean to people.

Research Questions

1. Is the concept of mind over matter true or does our human body stop us from doing certain activities?
2. Is the human body meant to look a certain way or have social norms made us believe there is a perfect body?
3. Can musical theatre put a smile on anyones face?
4. Can the colour red attach an emotion to it?