Thursday, October 28, 2004

Why Do They Do It?

I just wanted to add something else on the nomads, which I didn't get a chance to say in class. In the modern day, it seems that there are two very different types of gypsies. The 'real' gypsies, who work in travelling circuses and all that entails and then the 'travellers', who live in buses, campers and lorryies. These people still withhold the main ideals of the nomads, in the sense that they value jobs in which money can be made quickly, they move with the seasons and they are, in some respect, in touch with nature. Below is a quote, which I thought captured the main thoughts and feelings of these people:

"It was the self containedness. It was all there on four wheels, and you took your whole home with you, where ever you went. The idea of being one hundred percent mobile and that you have to reduce everything you own to fit into you living space. It's just breathtaking and exciting"
Julia Angeli

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Sing Me Back Home # 2

Your musical suggestions for 'home' songs:
  • 'Home on the Range' (various)
  • 'Sweet Home Alabama' Lynyrd Skynyrd
  • 'Feels Like Home' Norah Jones
  • 'Our House' Madness
  • 'In My Place' Coldplay
  • 'My Little Town' and 'Blues Run the Game' Simon & Garfunkel
  • 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' [?]
  • 'Daydream Believer' The Monkees ['... and a homecoming queen'!]
  • Polonaise Chopin [Anna to supply more information]
  • 'Little Girl Blue' Janis Joplin
  • 'Next Year' The Foo Fighters
  • 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' Peter, Paul and Mary

Then I asked for songs that took you back home:

  • 'Όμορφη Θεσσαλονίκη' [Omorfi Thessaloniki] (various)
  • 'Drive' Incubus ('reminds me of all my boyfriends')
  • Tapesty Carole King ('we always had it on the car stereo coming back from holiday')
  • Anything by The Beatles ('you can't avoid it if you come from Liverpool')
  • 'Slave Song' Sade
  • 'Mercedes Benz' and 'Me and Bobby McGee' Janis Joplin
  • Anything by The Eagles ('my dad')
  • 'Chariots of Fire Theme' Vangelis
  • 'Sinner Man' Nina Simone
  • Rhythm of the Saints Paul Simon
  • 'In Da Club' [?] 50 Cent ('when I was in LA every party I went to it was always playing')
  • 'Yellow Submarine' The Beatles
  • 'Strange is this World' Czesław Niemen
  • 'Last Summer' Lost Prophets ('it's the song we'd go out to'(
  • 'Air Hostess' and 'Year 3000' Busted ('the only band that everyone liked, for the cheese value')
  • 'Little Mermaid - Under the Sea' Disney ('we just played it for comedy value, we had a party with like ten of my friends and we were all dancing')
  • 'Time of Your Life' Green Day (General assent)
  • 'Mad World' Gary Jules
  • I Get Around' The Beach Boys ('in the summer you just drive around. You don't do anything.')
  • 'Little Star' Stina Nordenstam

Dan Rebellato

Huis-sick

I managed to ring my mum up and find out about the words needed in Afrikaans:
  • Home = huis
  • Sick = sick, pronounced 'suck'
  • Like many other languages there is not an actual word for homesickness'.

I was thinking about all the suggestions for our final performance and the music idea really fascinated me. I think that at some point in the piece to either break up sections or be on its own in complete darkness, every person could sing or hum their own 'homely' songs gradually rising in volume. This could sound really distorted and make quite a good impact. Also, the quotes that Dan has been collecting could be said by the relevant person to open a section of the performance to aid the understanding of the audience.

Kelly Barton

John Peel (1939-2004)

I've just heard the terribly sad news of the death of DJ John Peel. Thinking about his influence on the music I listen to, I remembered going to university. Dropped off late afternoon by my mum, I put my clothes in the cupboard, notebook in the drawer, a couple of posters up and some books on the shelf. Just as one of you put in your automatic writing exercise, it was strange seeing those few familiar things in their new surroundings. I guess I felt isolated and unsure, not homesick as such, but conscious that I was away from home. That night I went to bed and put on the radio. John Peel was introducing 'US 80s 90s' by, as he always said, "The mighty Fall" and I was at home.

Dan Rebellato

Monday, October 25, 2004

Doctor! Doctor! Homesickness Strikes!

From the lesson, I really began to run with some ideas about our actual performance. Through my research about Interior design (which I'll share more with when I do my presentation no doubt), I've found some stuff out about colour psychology. I thought it would be really interesting to reflect the meaning of colours in either the lighting or the costumes that we wear in order to reflect a mood perhaps. I really liked the idea of using a particular movement that is stylised so that it might recur after someone has used it. Or perhaps when someone is feeling home sick?!

I was just wondering, weather anyone has actually felt really homesickness before (hope that's not too personal?!) because I know I have and I thought I should share it with you.

It was this summer when I went away with a group of my best friends, which we had been looking forward to for ages. When we arrived we were full of excitement and it was so great being on your own for that long without the nagging of parents (ahhh uni life!!). But as the week progressed, we slowly became tired of each other and myself, I really began to miss home. I did the whole ringing home in tears thing, being the drama queen that I am (well surely we all are right?!). I was really bad towards the end of the week, I didn't want to talk to anyone and I couldn't be bothered to do anything either. I just deflated and was not myself. But I think it was the whole experience of being with people for such a long time which really begins to exaggerate their faults.

Which led me to the question; is homesickness caused by the new surrounding , or the absence of the old ones? Perhaps if I had been away with different people I wouldn't have felt homesick. I mean, I haven't once felt it since starting RHUL, so that makes me think that homesickness is perhaps caused by the new surroundings rather than missing home. Thats my opinion anyway! Blogtastic!

Claire Stainer

Class: Week Four

We built on the work that you've been doing throughout the course, generating more material, trying out new situations and configurations.

We started with sharing some more information. You suggested a supplementary list of 'home' songs. You also suggested some songs that reminded you of home, even if they didn't specifically mention home. (I'll post all these separately.)

We got some words for Home; I've added a couple:

  • Casa (Italian, Spanish and Portuguese)
  • Dom (Polish)
  • Haus (German)
  • σπίτι [spiti] (Greek)
  • Huis (Afrikaans, Dutch)
  • дом [dom] (Russian)
  • Hus (Swedish, Norwegian)
  • Domus (Latin)

We got some words for sick; again, I've added a couple

  • Malato (Italian)
  • Enfermo (Spanish)
  • Chory (Polish)
  • Sick (Afrikaans)
  • Zieken (Dutch)
  • Sick (German)
  • άρρωστος [arrostos] (Greek)
  • больно [bolno] (Russian)
  • Sjuk (Swedish)
  • Syk (Norwegian)
  • Aeger (Latin)

We couldn't come up with another language that had the exact word 'homesick'. We suspect that German has one though. Other languages have words that include some of this sense:

  • nostálgico (Spanish)
  • nostalgie (French)
  • ?νοστός [nostos] (Greek)

Other language have to use a phrase to express the concept, e.g. 'sentire molto la mancanza di casa' (Italian).

I then asked you to come up with some places in which people might gather and be homesick for various different places. You came up with the following:

  • A trench
  • The moon
  • A space capsule
  • A kibbutz
  • A plane
  • A truckstop
  • Mecca/Vatican
  • A brothel
  • A hospital
  • A cemetery
  • An expedition
  • A conference
  • A reality TV show
  • A foreign exchange
  • An army mission
  • A concentration camp
  • The Olympics
  • A travelling circus
  • A boarding school
  • A cruise ship
  • A university
  • A movie set
  • A jail
  • An hotel
  • Castaway on a desert island
  • A lift
  • A homeless shelter

You then did some automatic writing, beginning with the phrase, 'The first time I felt at home was...' Some lovely material emerged from this exercise and I pick, entirely at random, a few lovely moments (apologies if I've misread them!):

  • in all these mountains when you walk close to the edge you feel small among all the surroundings you look up into a sky and see a cloud of fog coming towards you covering the landscape ... milk, milk is everywhere and this small visible part of your route becomes a private piece of life.
  • I came back from my first holiday [...] I was six years old. The reason why I felt like my home was really my home was because I had never really left it before.
  • I arranged my things around my new room; it was really strange to me to see all my familiar things that belong somewhere else.
  • Because we only rented houses before, I couldn't change anything about the room I was stuck with. I even had to put up with racing car wallpaper at one house.
  • It's strange how you can't really recognise your own home smell when you're there but other people can and they say 'oh that smells of you blah blah'.
  • Snuggled up on the couch with my mum, my forever friends, wallpaper at last! no turtles wohoo! my own room.
  • Two days before we moved, me, my mum, and my sister were sitting in our living room and all our stuff was in boxes. I remember thinking how weird it all was, the place looked bare and unfamiliar [...] anyway my mum looked around and said, "It just goes to show your possessions belong in your home".
  • Lots of coming home from holidays spring to mind. All the week in France or sometimes even first days at school, coming home after a long day for a five-year-old.My house in Tuscany [...] which was built mostly by my dad and my grandad when I was born [...] I love sitting here during the evening, around 7pm. During the summer it gets way too hot because the mortar stones soak up all the heat and it's only during the night that it begins to cool down. Late into the evening when the sun is going down, orange rays will fall into the room and you can see all the dust particles floating around, captured in the light.

I then chose three of the scenarios you'd come up with for a durational improvisation. You did twenty minutes of improvising as characters in:

  • The Olympic Village in Athens 2004 (during a lockdown because of a terrorist alert)
  • A space capsule on the way to the moon (at the point when the capsule first turned to reveal the whole of the earth in the observation window)
  • A UN Conference on Refugees in Mexico City (at the reception party the night before the first day of meetings)

It was great to see the seriousness and imagination you displayed. The discussions of UN refugee policy positions was often impressive and you seemed to have the mannerisms of globetrotting UN apparatchiks off pat. I enjoyed seeing the astronauts' conversation fall silent and the simple looks of wonder as you stared at the earth. (And then the hilarious attempt to photograph each other 'holding' the earth, and the communcal singing that this provoked.)

I then asked you to become these characters' children (your own age). This produced some very interesting, imaginative material. Fragments I enjoyed:

  • US astronaut's daughter: I read, like, a whole article about your mom. I was, like, 'oh wow'.
  • Four Olympic daughters listening to the sounds of a table.
  • UN Delegate daughters:

- It was a nuclear kind of family then.
- (All that changed, yeah yeah.)
- Yeah [clicks fingers] It's kinda exciting though.
- And you get to see all those places

  • Astronaut's daughters:
- Would you like to be an astronaut?
- No. No. No way.
- God, really? How about you?
- [thoughtfully, looking into the sky] I don't know. I'd kind of like to be up there. I don't know if I'd like to get up there.
  • UN Delegates daughters:
- My mum got me one of those phones, those cellphones, where you can call other countries, like all of them.
- (simultaneously) Triband.
- (simultaneously) Triband.
  • One Olympic daughter to another: You've never had a TV? You've never had a milkshake?
  • UN delegates daughters:
- My boyfriend's called Carlos.
- Oh wow. Very Latino!
  • Astronaut's daughters:
- What about the food?
- Ohmygod, ohmygod.
- You tried it?
- They told her to get used to it and she brought some home and like ohmygod it was so gross.
- Like that episode of The Simpsons with the potato chips and they got onto the ants

In the last hour of the class we talked about Airport and looked at a sequence on video, considering the effect of the bilingual text, the fragmentation of the narrative, the gestural movement sequences, and the music. This led us into a discussion of our performance, and I asked us to provisionally take stock of where we were to think about where we had got to and what we thought we'd like to retain that we'd come up with so far. Some of the following were mentioned specifically:

  • The floor patterns, perhaps with music added rather than words
  • Using the Timeless device of present/past/future.
  • Expressing transcendental values (!)
  • Different languages
  • Integrating the fragments of dialogue that I've been noting
  • Gestureal work
  • Maybe using the experience of coming to university and adjustment
  • Build up a set of different associations with home that we can use throughout the performance
  • A universal symbol of 'homeliness'? A log fire? The smell of baking bread?
  • Personal testimonies (in the manner of Lament)

We then had two research reports, on Nomadic peoples, specifically Gypsies, and on Tourism. This post is getting very long, so I'll leave it to the researchers to post up their stuff.

I was very intriguing, however, by the story of the fanatically Anglophile eighteenth-century Frenchman who eventually abandoned his plan to visit London because the act of travelling would ruin his pleasure...

Next week:

  • Please pick up from the office a copy of Lament and my article on Suspect Culture (which ends with a discussion of Lament)
  • We'll have the remaining research reports next week (Homesickness, Liminal Spaces, and Interior Design).

Dan Rebellato


Protecting Our Own

In response to 'united statesians' I have to say that I think I understand.
  • I think we all feel some kind of connection to where we're from, and we can
    say whatever we want about it but as soon as someone else says anything bad about it we feel insulted, angry, feel the need to protect it.
  • I think its kinda like family. I know that I can sometimes say something not very nice (:p) about my sister, or someone, and thats ok; but if someone else even for a second thought of insulting my sister I would kill them! I think its the same thing, even though everyone's entitled to their own opinion, we still feel like they just SHOULDN'T have gone there! lol!
  • I guess 'family' means something that we belong to, and a country...well, it kind of fits in there.

Just trying to make some sense out of it all, i guess.

Dana Karic

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Camping Experiences

In response to Elina's question about camping here is a little bit of information about my own personal experiences with camping...

My family and I always used to go on camping holidays, whether it was for 3 days or 3 weeks. As a child growing up with camping holidays I grew to really love the experience. It may sound silly but for those few days or weeks that tent really felt like home to me. We would always refer to it as our 'home' when we were camping and even though we would often drive on to another campsite every night, I always looked forward to setting up the tent and snuggling up on my inflatable mattress and in my sleeping bag! So it was never the campsite itself that I considered to be homely, just the tent itself and the little embellishes my mother used to make to make us all feel more at home. For instance, I always used to love setting up the mattresses and sleeping bags because even just an extra pillow or a cuddly toy would make me feel at home.

One vivid memory I have from when I was younger is when we were camping in a dreadful storm somewhere down in the south of England and I was woken up in the middle of the night by my parents telling me to get in the car due to the bad weather conditions. So we spent most of the night in the car and I can remember watching our 'home' being torn from the ground and blown away by the storm! Even though it was just a tent I do remember feeling very distraught that I had lost my home and belongings that night. I know it's not at all comparable to someone losing their house to a fire or belongings due to a burglary but it was still surprisingly upsetting for us all to lose a house made from canvas!

So anyway this little nugget of information from my childhood is just a way of saying that anywhere in the world can feel like home if you let it be in your home in your mind. I think you have to fully embrace your home as yours in your mind to be able to feel at home ... if that makes any sense at all!

Kim Varvell