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Reflective Statement

My major 2 project is surrounding the subject of loneliness and the art of monologues. I wrote three monologues which focus on inter-personal relationships and shameful confessions. The first monologue, entitled ‘Sexy Bunny’, surrounds the idea of a relationship told in very specific and vague memories. The second monologue, entitled ‘Studmuffin’, describes the guilt of a son who feels as though he ruined his parents’ life with his selfish behaviour. By the end of the piece, the piece is less of an apology but rather a piece about self-flagellation. The third piece, entitled ‘Pampered Princess’, describes the reader talking to her father asking him to go the supermarket and admitting to him that she makes herself sick on purpose in order to get attention and affection.

My main research began with reading plays from different theatrical eras such as Brechtian and absurdist theatre. I read a number of plays such as ‘The good person of Szechwan’ and ‘Waiting for Godot’ in order to discover different forms of monologue writing and story-telling. I was also inspired by the book ‘Brief Interviews by Hideous Men’ by David Foster Wallace. Artists who were the biggest inspiration for the visuals were Vito Acconci and Andy Warhol. Acconci’s intimate and sensual monologues which he directs to his audience were extremely important to me to show me an interesting way of delivering monologues; as were Warhol’s ‘Screen Test’ series.

All of this led me to decide that I would centre it around the idea of an almost surreal chat-room experience which I named ‘ChitChatroom’. Currently there is an insurgence of long form YouTube vlogs and streaming such as Instagram live which feeds into a narcissism that many people have due to its one-sided nature. I then decided to use my friends, and myself, as the actors in these chat-rooms and present stereotypical ‘sexy’ personas. We were to dress in a sexual and intimate nature; however, we would dispel all of this as soon as we began to deliver the monologues as there is such a strong contrast.

I then had to decide how I was going to display the visuals, which, from the outset, I had already decided was going to be in some kind of a Catholic confession booth setting. I looked at a number of installation pieces, some similar to this idea but also others that used toilet cubicles and voting booths. In the end I settled for a three walled wood boarded booth with a curtain separating the audience from the rest of the gallery space. The monitor would then be placed in the booth with a mouse to allow the audience to choose which monologue they would like to listen to and view from the opening selection video. I shot the piece on my web-cam on my laptop in order to properly give it the look of an authentic chat room that you would find online.

I am happy with my piece as I was able to explore something, I am passionate about which is writing and monologing and then pair it with moving image. I am very interested with the subject matter and believe that loneliness and constant titillation that many desire is very culturally relevant. Perhaps I could have made more of an effort to make the monologues more cohesive with one another but I actually enjoy the almost randomness that they present. So, therefor, the audience can have a completely different experience for each one.

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Screenshots from 1) the option screen in the main video 2) Studmuffin 3) Pampered Princess 4) Sexy Bunny 

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How my project was affected by Corona Virus Lockdown.

I would be lying if I said that my project wasn’t strongly affected by lockdown restrictions. This is mainly due to the fact that I am in lockdown in a very small apartment with my two friends which doesn’t allow much privacy for doing long days of work. I also don’t have any equipment with me and therefor had to improvise with the webcam on my laptop or my iPhone camera. The lack of equipment was definitely the hardest hurdle of this whole experience as I couldn’t use a microphone, monitor, lighting etc.. I feel like I came up with a good alternative by making my project about cam girls and chat rooms allowing the webcam effect to make sense and actually add to the experience. 

My laptop is also very slow and I therefor usually go to university to edit segments of my past projects that I knew would be too much for my laptop to take. However, I was not able to do this and therefor ran into a lot of editing issues and had to strategies making this work for me by limiting the size of files and keeping the editing simple. 

The fact that I wanted this to be an installation but was not able to test it out or follow up with that idea was also very difficult. Due to the limited space of where I am in lockdown I was not able to make any form of installation space in order to test anything and film it for my blog. Therefor, that entire section of my project had to be scrapped and simply made hypothetical. 

I also suffered from a great deal of lack of motivation due to the circumstance and I found it quite hard to focus my mind on the project. Due to the fact that university was closed and the degree show was cancelled etc.. made me slightly lose the excitement and drive I had to complete the project. This is also due to the fact that I felt as though I would not be proud of the project no matter what and I would feel as though my standards would be very low. This was very hard for me to overcome and just remember that I need to do the best I could. 

In the end I am quite proud of the work I produced under the circumstances. I am very fond of my idea and how I made the visuals a reality. The whole experience, although challenging, was very interesting and definitely taught me a great deal about motivation and how to do the best you can with what you have. 

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MOVING IMAGE PROJECT 2 MAIN VIDEO FINAL DRAFT 

The video that the audience would be shown on a monitor that allows them to choose which video chatroom they would like to watch first. 

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This is the third and final complete video for my overall project. This is one of the ‘Chatrooms’ that you can ‘choose’ from in my project

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Third and final monologue - final draft

Dad has to go to Dunnes to get the madeira cake. You know the one wrapped in cling film? We’ll have it with tea.

Dad will you go get the Madeira cake from Dunnes?

Dad? Daddy I really need the Madeira cake.

Dunnes will close soon and we need the Madeira cake.

Dad is going to go to Dunnes to get the madeira cake.

The nice one that we can have with tea. Dad will you get that one please?

And then I’ll cut a slice for you and put in on your mother’s plate and we can eat the madeira cake together.

That would be nice Dad, wouldn’t it? And you can say ‘mmmmm this madeira cake is lovely’.

So just go to Dunnes and get the madeira cake, daddy and we’ll eat it together.

Dad? Dunnes is shutting soon and we don’t want to miss getting the madeira cake.

You can get the madeira cake and then maybe a steak and potato pie for lunch; just don’t forget the madeira cake daddy.

It’s no problem dad? I’m happy with the madeira cake so just get that.

I know how much you like the madeira cake and I would be happy to eat it for tea with you.

Just remember to go to Dunnes and get the madeira cake.

Alright dad?

I can put the rat poison in the Madeira cake and then you can take care of me for the week or the month, however long it lasts.

Ill put the rat poison in the Madeira cake so I can get the feeling of after I’m sick, the exhaustion, lying in bed, when you fall asleep the second your stomach stops aching. And you can check my fever whenever you want, give me a peanuts comic to read because it always made you feel better when you were sick as a child.

Sometimes I’ll argue with you on purpose just so we can make up after and be happy I call you names and scream at you so we can have that moment where we hug and cry. Just a little suffering for the good bits. It’s all worth it in the end, I think. But now I can’t really get to sleep anymore without the pain in my stomach.

Dad has to go to Dunnes to get the madeira cake. You know the one wrapped in cling film? We’ll have it with tea and I’ll put a but of rat poison in it, a little bit more than usual because I’m growing immune.

Just go to Dunnes and get the madeira cake.

The Madeira cake, yes, the one wrapped in cling film.

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This is the second  complete video for my overall project. This is one of the ‘Chatrooms’ that you can ‘choose’ from in my project.

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This is the first complete video for my overall project. This is one of the ‘Chatrooms’ that you can ‘choose’ from in my project. 

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Another famous Andy Warhol screen test that inspired my project from the filming and the emotion from these simple videos. 

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Andy Warhol’s famous screen tests which heavily inspired my visual pieces with the monologues for my project.

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Andy Warhol art videos of him eating that inspired portions of my first monologue video ‘Sexy Bunny’ 

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Stills from ‘Cam’ a 2018 Netflix thriller surrounding cam girls and online personas. This is very interesting to me as I would like to make my monologues and the way I film the pieces to be a sort of distorted cam girl service. 

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Final Project Update

I have finally come to a final decision in terms of how I will film my project. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t felt very stressed and anxious when it comes to this project and due to the circumstances of being in lock down, I have not been confident about any of my ideas surrounding how to film my monologues. When it comes to the Zoom recording idea, I have decided to take a different angle due to the fact that I would require more of a curated performance from the people delivering the monologues with actors which is not possible due to the fact that I will not be able to properly direct and conduct the performances if these people are not with me in person. Therefor the people who will be featured in the piece will be me and the two other people I am in lock down with currently. I have also decided to make it more on the basis of loneliness which is very relevant with many people at the moment who are staying at home during lock down. Therefor I want to focus more on the conversational aspect of my piece and film it as if the people on camera are having a one sided conversation with the audience. This is almost reminiscent of services that you can pay for, especially men paying for women to speak to them in a sexual manner, where the speaker has a set script that they are delivering to the customer without expecting a reply, almost like an interactive fantasy. That is the illusion I want to give off with my pieces, obviously mine will not be sexual, but I like this example of the sort of ‘cam girl’ approach as the only real need people have for these services is in order to appease them sexually if they are feeling lonely. This is mainly due to the fact that people who are lonely wouldn’t pay for a service that is the equivalent of someone emotionally unloading on them or confessing something dark to them. I feel like this would therefor be an interesting spin on the idea and I would like to play with it by making it seem like a paid service you can get to hear these strangers talk about their lives. 

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My third completed monologue - Final Draft

Me and my brother used to play with the digital camera all the time. We would take pictures of every single thing. The furniture, the cats, each other pulling a silly face. We were young and only had just realized that girls don’t have penises and we found it so funny. The same way you would giggle uncontrollably staying up too late to watch one of the dirty cartoons. One day we were hyper and took pictures of each other’s genitalia. We laughed and laughed. The idea of our anatomy so hilarious and inappropriate. Falling into the same category as piss and excrement. We stopped laughing after the police showed up at our front door questioning my parents as to why they had brought picture of children’s genitalia to get developed at our local chemist. They had no idea why we had done it and my father burned the pictures in the fire place when the police had left and we were allowed back in the room. These two innocent people who showered us in love and life only for us to cause a child pornography investigation to occur on one of their relaxing Saturday mornings. You think that would have made us better children? Maybe we could have learnt from our mistakes, but it didn’t. We continued our tirade of angst and irritability. Spoiled little shit. Annoying whingey brats. I would have beaten me, deprived myself of food and toys. But no. Not my wonderful parents. They just gave us a warning and told us ‘no harm done’. They didn’t beat us or stop feeding us. They continued showering us with too many gifts at Christmas, gifts that we would still show disdain to no matter their price or sentiment. We would simply pick the one we liked the most and all the rest would collect dust under our beds until the next Christmas when the cycle would take place once more. 

Tempered little animals. Selfish ungrateful idiots. Our easy, lazy lives. Born into the perfect situation. Billions of people who come out of their mother already feeling lost and trampled on by the world and we were the lucky ones. We were so so lucky and we spat on that privilege we didn’t realise or we were too awful to care. Little fucking sociopaths. The nerve we had to talk back to our primary school teachers and demand more chocolate cake for dessert to put into our fat, bulbus stomachs. I cringe at the thought. The injustice. The lack of humanity. The stains still on my parent’s carpets from the paint and juice we would carelessly throw around, not giving a shit for my poor mother, with her scabbing and weak knees rubbing against the floor, scrubbing and scrubbing, unsuccessfully begging the stain to disappear. Stupid little failed abortions.

No excuse. No ‘oh we were just children; we couldn’t have known’. That’s not good enough. That doesn’t make everything we did ok. Me and my brother screaming at each other in the dead of night, pulling each other’s hair, while my parent’s eyes get darker and darker from lack of sleep. No one should be allowed to do that. But our parents, our lovely innocent parents. They loved us so unconditionally, how I will never know, always trying to calm us down and put aside enough time to play with us despite both of their full-time jobs. Working and working for what? Just to fund their brainless children’s useless desires. They should have locked us in the shed and left us there for a week or two. Feed us food and water through a tube. Let us shit in the corner and gag at the smell. Then maybe we would have learnt. Maybe then we would have seen how great our lives were, how good we had it. Or maybe we were too stupid even for that.

My mother, after having my brother and I, gained so much weight, so much so that throughout my early life she would only dress herself in huge, baggy tracksuit pants and massive jumpers. I used to look at pictures of her before she had us when her and my father were in love and smiling. Wearing clothes that she liked and her lips covered in red lipstick because she wanted to and it made her feel beautiful. After we were born, she no longer wore her red lipstick or did her hair the way she liked but instead let the grey strands spread and spread and her body hair grow and grow. We caused her to binge and starve and binge and starve making her body no longer her own. She gave her body to us when she had us and we refused to give it back. We held it and kept it captive from her. Her body, the one thing she should have been entitled to her whole life but we couldn’t even allow her that. We took every single thing. Her joy, her freedom, her career, her relationships, her health, her money and after all of this, we took her body, we took every part of her and she gave it to us freely and without question. Like we deserved it. Like she was only put on the planet to act as a vessel for us. And we took that vessel and trashed it and ripped it apart, like a house party we crashed and broke all the furniture. It was not her duty to do this, it is not our right to take it from her, she did not benefit from her allowing us to take it, it was completely for us. She breathed life into my brother and I, and we resented her for it. Allowed us to feel sad and sorry for ourselves just because we could while she filled the dishwasher and washed our disgusting clothes. She was the god to us but gave us too much autonomy, and in doing so we took hers. She became our child. Trapped and bound to the house, only let out when we saw it fit. Feeling relaxed or agitated according to our moods. We were her masters and she was our dog. We would walk her on a leash and dunk her head in her food bowl. We would look at her in disgust for her flees and smell, thinking that we were so superior. Godless fucking monsters.

Screaming in pain as we came out, my brother even being so selfish to come out the wrong way around, causing my mother’s hips to crack from the force. Could you imagine that pain? And looking to the eyes of your son and knowing how much pain went into giving him life and him stamping his feet and demanding more chocolate. Greedy Lazy Pig. During my birth, I refused to come out and made my mother have a C-section leaving a nasty scar on the bottom of her stomach which never seemed to have healed properly. Could you imagine that? Have a mark on your body for the rest of your life as a reminder for the scalpel going through your stomach only to pull out this bitch? This antichrist? What a joke? What a waste of time? The wet nurses who spent their hours taking care of us those first couple of nights in the hospital when they could have been doing something useful. Something that was actually worth anything at all.

And what did I leave my mother with, at the end of it all? Alone and depressed, staring at the wall all day. I could have spoken to her surely; I could have picked up my phone when she called. But oh no, my busy, important existence made me unavailable. While the scar on her stomach, still itchy occasionally, throbbed and throbbed. A sad reminder of the shit that she had to carry and birth all those years ago. Not even when she broke her leg did I give a shit. One visit where all I did was talk about my irrelevant opinions. While she had to prop her leg on a pillow all day, eating ready made meals and struggling to even take a piss. Could I have even offered to cook her a meal? In the same manner she has done for me my whole life? Far longer than most children should be granted such a privilege. But no, no one should expect such humanity from me.

Not even my death would be relief for my poor parents. I could put them out of their misery and end it all but due to the natural order of things, they would be heart broken. No matter how awful we are, we are their children, their DNA, and they therefor are not capable of wishing us any harm, no matter how much they should. If I could, I would strip these emotions from them and set them free, but they’re disposition fights against this. Ending things would be worse than staying. I must wait, wait and wait until they hopefully die before me so they can welcome death as a final respite from me and my brother. The worst things to ever happen to them. Worse than death. Then they no longer have to suffer at the hands of us. They can die knowing that they did the best they could, that they showered us in love and we only turned out like this because we were to evil to understand that love. That we, maybe one day, will have children of our own, and with all the hope in the world we will also shower them with affection and care and in return they will spit in our faces and spend their whole lives waiting and waiting for the day we also, finally die.

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Monologue Updates

After reading over all my monologues I have decided to make some changes. The first one being that the second monologue which surrounds the idea of a mother explaining to someone the obsessive superstitious routine that the children need to go through everyday. After reading over it with the other monologues I have decided to not stick with it and to cut it from the finished selection of monologues due to the fact that I don’t think it is cohesive enough with the other pieces. The other monologues are more of specific emotion directed at the audience and follow more of a monologue recipe whereas this piece seems more like a short story. By cutting this monologue that will mean that there will be a total of 4 monologues. This is at least 2 less than what I originally set out to have, but at this point I’m actually happy with this number of monologues as the overall piece could have been too overwhelming and messy with 6 completely different pieces. I also do not have enough people to read the monologues due to the current situation. Also, now I am able to give the four that I am confident about the attention and direction that they deserve. 

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Skype name: francescabucky

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My first Zoom recording test for Monologue 1 to see how it looks to record the screen on zoom. I am very happy with this idea now and feel confident about it and am excited to experiment more and more with it.