A basic recliner chair sits in a beige room. It faces a TV propped up on an overturned bookcase. The books are in a pile in the corner. Paradise is just outside the window.
This paper will explore the beginning stages of a new autobiographical solo performance work with a working title of “The Chair.” This work is contributing to a living archive of the 2020 lockdown experience, but it’s documenting and presenting my own archive, my own story. As I enter my past, what narratives do I choose to include or reject in order to tell this story for an audience and not just for me? Using Clarke Baim’s model of The Drama Spiral, a practical decision-making tool to help practitioners navigate the use of personal stories, I will be creating a work that explores the resolved difficulties of my experience (120). I will discuss the initial phase of making where I will use Flemmer et al’s Empathetic Partnership framework to build a collaboration between the performer and a live musician on stage. By investigating and unpacking this story on stage, I could be at risk of unearthing unexpected feelings, tipping from theatre into therapy. So, how can I keep myself as the performer from sites of radical self-exposure? How can I devise a performance that explores a potentially traumatic event that everyone experienced while still taking care of my audience? When we are confined or alone what is it that we need to survive?