The score presented to the performer
My score called “Phone piece” is a piece inspired by Yoko Ono and her cut score where my version was a modernization of said score. When I initially saw a performance of the cut score I thought that it was fairly easy to perform in todays day and age. This got me thinking about how I could modernize the piece and the first thing that came to mind was our technology and how glued we are to it. However I then ran into the problem which was also the point I was trying to make with the piece which was that we value our privacy and our phone more than our potential well being. I wanted to be able to give up my life practically and leave it in the hands of strangers (classmates in this case) but I couldnt do it without the assurance that they wouldnt A.) break my phone and B.) ruin my life. Luckily none of these problems came up and in fact everyone was increddibly tame when they had someone elses phone in their hands even though they were given the liberty to do whatever they wanted no one seemed to do anything even close to harmful. When asked why they were only doing mild things after the playtest the audience said it was because they felt a sort of social contract to be kind and many said that might be due to the fact that we were not complete strangers.
Some of the examples of how the audience used the performers phone included, taking a photo, playing a performers mobile game, texting a person from their contact and going through their photos. This also caused me to make the desicion to make the performer decide when to end the piece since there was a case in early playtest where a performer took their phone back from the audience which perfectly portrayed the piece.
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Audience member using the performers phone
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Audience member decided to take a picture of the performer
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Audience member decided to play a game against the performer
Even though this piece was based off of Yoko Ono’s cut piece the results reminded me a lot of the score that we talked about in class for a little bit by Marina Abramović where she invites people on stage to harm her because even though I agree that this piece likely could not be performed again in todays day and age I think the results were simillar. Where if you allow the audience to have full access to your phone for a longer period of time what they do with your phone would likely be more extreme. However due to this social stigma it seems like at least in this presentation the audience usage of the performers phone was very tame.
-Carlos Garza