The Mind - Lesson 3 - Tuesday 24th January 2017

We managed to construct most of our show today. We began by watching a video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hRBPrfDQVI ) where a man was testing a women for dementia. We noted some of the questions such as:
- What is 100-7?
-What is your name?
- Repeat after me: Apple, Penny, Table
- What year is it?

Things we added to our performance:

We placed ourselves behind a curtain and sat with our naked legs and toes sticking out. This gave the piece a morgue type look which created powerful imagery and in my opinion represents how we all end up, whether we’ve got dementia or not, we all have one inevitable ending. To add authenticity to this section, we are also hoping to get little tags to place around our toes.

We added sections to our physical piece however there’s not much teamwork within the group and only one person's ideas seem to be being echoed throughout our piece. The whole thing is also quite messy however we have plenty of time to tidy it up. Although I’m not completely sure that the piece has any relation to the vietnam war. Overall it looked good however it’s relevance was slightly amiss.

We then went on to constructing our piece by creating a moment in which we got into pairs and one person had to imagine that they’d forgotten how to put on an item of clothing. I chose to try and put on a shoe. At first I studied the shoes and then played around with it, pretending it were a baby, tying the laces around my wrists, putting my hands inside of it but never quite allowing myself to understand where it was meant to go. Next our partners came out and helped us put our item of clothing on. At first I was hesitant and reacted in the way that a child might if you tried taking their favourite toy off of them. I moved away a bit and moved the shoe away from them. Slowly I allowed her to take the shoe off of me and help me. My partner put the shoe in front of me and indicated towards my foot and then the shoe so I naturally lifted my foot up and put it straight on top of my shoe. This made me think about how we’re all so used to doing complicated tasks like putting on shoes that we forget about how the mechanics of it can be difficult. For instance I know that it took me an extremely long time to learn to tie my laces and so for individuals suffering with alzheimer's putting on a shoe could be the equivalent to that. The brain doesn’t understand things it doesn’t know and I think it’s very scary to think that at any age you could potentially forget to do what seem to be the simplest everyday task.

We form the brain at the back of the room by clustering together and intertwining our arms and weaving in and out of one another. We plan on having fairy lights wrapped around our arms as we do this which will help to emphasise the pulsing of the brain and symbolise it’s power.