What A Great Day!

Having learnt our lesson the hard way with the last piece - we had a performance but no photos, no trailer, no website - we've decided to 'get on the case' with this one! So we're at a critical point in the devising process but we have some great publicity photos and actually setting aside the time and energy to organise this gave us a great boost - and we had a great day's rehearsal on Sunday to boot!! It took us a while to think carefully about what we wanted from the photos; when we suddenly found ourselves in a meeting with the photographer we suddenly realised that the photos were an entirely different product to the piece we were making and needed an entirely different approach. It was a case of shifting our heads sideways and we both recalled Cindy Sherman's series of 'film stills' which we'd talked about way back at the beginning of this process. We looked up film stills of Marnie (still a major influence in this piece) and decided to try to reproduce the Sean Connery/Tippi Hedron pose which advertised the film. We both liked the idea that we would be quoting the film from quite a distance, but we brought no cynicism or irony to the task, rather we both worked hard to source appropriate costumes, find good locations and we committed ourselves completely to what it is we love about the film. The results are intriguing, dramatic and strangely dissociated from the present without being historical. It is as though the present and the historical are sitting side by side.
The other idea we played with was that of the 'spirit photo'. I've always been terrified of those photos that look like bad snaps until you realise that lurking in the background is a face watching the entirely unaware 'live' subjects. We talked a great deal in our process about the omnipresence of our mothers (who are both very much alive) in everything we do, and about the fact that our relationship to our mothers has arrested during an adolescent stage of our development. We decided, therefore, to try to create a photograph which had as its essence a 1970s adolesence; we wanted the quality of a 'snap' rather than a studied photograph, and then we wanted to superimpose the face of an older woman into the background of the picture, watching us. The process of getting these shots was really good fun; we approximated 70s clothes and found a wall sporting a 1970s mural - which incidentally matched my jumper - but it was also very strange to revisit a part of your life by posing for pictures in the way that you had then. At one point the photographer got caught up in the spirit of the moment and became our 'dad' urging us to 'smile a bit more'.
It was fascinating to look at the two sets of photographs (Marnie and 70s) straight after the shoot; there were two sets of bodies in play, quite differentiated, living in different worlds, having different experiences. This is what we're interested in capturing in this piece, the idea that the body transforms constantly as it experiences the world in different ways and according to different desires.
And there were no planes in the sky!