Multidicinipliary Artist (Website Still WIP)
Past Projects
'Spero' - Performance Art Installation
This was my first Performance art piece, created for the Live Art Assessment in late august of 2019.
After being introduced into the world of performance arts through the pieces of Franko B's 'I miss you and Marina Abramovic's 'The Artist Is Present' and training in certain performance styles such as pieces that revolved around time, space, distance, rituals and intimacy, I explored a variety of ideas to which I would create a piece at the end of the module.
I explored a variety of ideas, from a public performance loosely in the style of Eric Andre's skits in The Eric Andre Show, dressing as a grotesque Theresa May and selling missiles on the high street, to a Franko B-inspired numerical piece outlining the dedication most artists have to performance and their arts by painting a piece a day for a month using my blood.
After exploring and sharing ideas with the group and seeing everyone else ideas, I took an interest into perspective. As a person diagnosed with autism, I have taken into understanding different people and how their opinions, feeling thoughts and emotions will differ from mine, however, as a collective species, we have an embedded curiosity to create and for the spiritual and non-physical entities. Through this, I looked into the notion of hope and wanted to look at how people see hope as a physical manifestation.
The method of this piece was I used a large performance space in complete darkness, with a quiet playlist I created (Linked here) Using only a small percentage of the room lit with a soft spotlight and a par-can light shaped into a rectangle. Within the connected lights was a table with two chairs, one I was sitting on, the other on the other side of the table tilted diagonally for the audience member (performed with an audience capacity of 1) as a welcoming semiotic. As it was a big room I performed in, the member had to walk a far distance to arrive into the connected lights, this was used both as a style I followed to give the performance space the illusion that the room is inside of a time vacuum (and out of the reality of outside) to help remove the audience members connections, behaviours and personal defences people put up to protect themselves from judgement and insecurities.
Once sat we would loosely talk about how we are feeling, and talk about the piece, upon then I would produce a large box of Lego and ask the participant to create a physical manifestation of the word 'hope' and that there is no right or wrong answer. The art aspect comes from between the intimate moments we would share between building our views of hope together and the pieces themselves whilst discovering the reasons they see hope as this object they have created. I really enjoyed this piece as it helped provide both myself and the participant with a notion of self-discovery which most of the time, we as people often overlook. Finally, before they leave they have the opportunity to add their piece to a collection of other participants' versions of 'Hope' and see how unique and varied their views are, and to find a Lego brick in the box which they like, and to hold it for a minute and think about a time they felt alone or upset, and add it to a base-plate, which other participants have added their pieces. This part in itself was interesting to see where people would put their pieces on the plate. An example of this one person placed their brick on the furthest corner of the plate with the reason: 'I don't think anyone will ever feel the same way I felt at that moment'. In a beautiful turn, each other participant slowly placed their bricks to connect that furthest brick to the rest without any discussion between the participants.
Before they entered the room, I hung up a selection of inkblot drawings, commonly used in the
Rorschach test for psychologically interpreting the images into physical or ethereal manifestations. I used these to create a notion of intrigue as well as the audience before the performance to analyze the images themselves, allowing the beginning of their creative process to start before they entered the room.
I hope, if I can, would like to continue this piece, and continue the ideas within this piece. Participants' reviews of the piece afterwards were 'Thought-provoking' 'Emotional' and 'Therapeutic' with comments like 'Capturing childlike wonder and imagination of Lego/toys to combat the heavy subject of morality, spiritualism and existentialism through play and self-discovery'.
I intend to further develop this piece to look deeper into exploring how intimacy changes with larger participant size, audiences and other locations to perform.
Dada Assessment, Miscellaneous Titles.
This was my first introduction into the dadaist movement and it caught my attention almost instantly. The premise of dadaism from my understanding is that those that follow the dadaist movement are the 'shitheads of the art world' and I love it. A production which I can think of that dips into dadaism, obscurity and surrealism is 'Cabaret of the Shadows' By Teatro Productions
Through the performance the skits I was involved in were based around the destruction of language, gender, politics and social class. This was done by wearing ill fitting clothes, often incorrectly, pronouncing all words incorrect and breaking rules of theatre such as backs to the audience, nudity, and eating paper close to the audience until we are gipping and wrethcing from eating the news columns from 'The Sun' as a politician.
This was one of my favorite productions to be a part in. It was liberating to let my inner peevishness come out and have the capability to antagonize the audience, and to take down the status of theatre, art and culture. Through this it gave me a new perspective on performance and hopefully will be able to work on more projects such as this.
Baseball Sound Clip
As part of our final production audition process, we were tasked with creating something that was 2 minutes long which showcased some of our skills to place us into a good role for the production. For me, I decided to showcase my skills in sound editing and production. I did this by creating a mime piece of a baseball game, of a new fragile batter, and a old evil, strong bowler. I mimed this piece with the use of a baseball cap turned backwards or forwards with physicality to portray the different characters. I created this piece in 2 days, using Logic Pro X and all the addons and mixing effects that it provides, as well as royalty free sounds of audiences.
I enjoyed this opportunity to create a piece of work solo, as it provided myself a challenge in of that I had no one for feedback, devising or shared workload. It was refreshing to work solo as it was uncommon on my degree. It also helped me discover the contrast in nature of devising from solo to working in a group which are processes to consider when working.
(Above: video footage. Below: Original sound clip, created and mixed by Samuel Collinge)
((Feel free to use this sound for any performance purposes, just give credit and request by sending me a message))
Actors Workshop, The Argument, William Boyd/ Comedy of Error, William Shakespeare
As part of my actors workshop module, we looked into the Misener methods of acting and Stanislavsky.
We performed a scene from a classical piece and a contemporary piece, both exploring different character relationships, class, and time periods. We looked into heavily character relationships we had between each other and used them to our advantage for example the love-hate relationship I had with a fellow actor and played with opposites for example me having a higher status than another actor, although I am considerably shorter than him, this helped aid to the comedic effect and nature of Shakespears play 'A comedy of Errors.'
Bus Stop Piece (2020)
Originally created to be performed with 4 other performers in the centre of Chester at a bus stop. This piece focuses on the social bigotry on growing issues that will detriment progression and the future generations of mankind. These themes include the growing amount of plastic waste, global warming, over-consumption and the dangerous power of the media's influence. Relating to artists such as Abromaovic and Franko B through focusing this piece on time, further gives the theme of nothing really happens in the piece and that not one of the actors/ characters interact, talk or question that which they are representing. Further inspirations such as Orwell's haunting '1984' and loosely mocking Da Vinchi's 'Final Supper' painting, I use the idea of the centre person blindfolded scrolling through their phone as an ironic twist as the 'saviour' cannot physically see what is happening around them, only what is on their phone. This video piece was created for my Negotiated Study module in which I looked at different performance artists and how to apply them to my own work. However, with COVID-19 and lockdown taking place this video piece was created in its place instead of the original. I am planning to properly perform this work in the future, with some editing to fit the current global climate.
'Walk with a Friend' - Samuel Collinge Harrison Barnett
Created through lock-down in the UK through COVID, Myself and Harrison Barnett wanted to look at the notion of loneliness and how we can connect through it. Harrison was based in Gloucestershire and myself at the current time in Chester. We decided to wake up and take photos at the same time on a walk of nature and quiet roads. Although the photos themselves of empty roads and quiet paths it is interesting to think about the connection through disconnection to know that Harrison was doing the same on the other side of the country. The times we walked and took photos was 6am, 12p, 5pm and 9pm on the same day on the same route to catch the same places with different sun, to the right is a collection of a few of my images I would like to showcase. I enjoyed this piece to perform and gave a good outlook to lock-down through the sense of community and knowing loneliness is a natural and common for social beings in lock-down, caring for each other by locking themselves away.
And to you, and to me
Collaborative performance piece performed at New-Func's 'NEW WAYS OF: Hydrating'
Focusing on new ways of hydrating, I wanted to take the idea of communion through the act of collective, synchronised equilibrium between people, voices, liquids and shades.
This was done with 6 plastic glasses and 6 participants myself included. 3 of the glasses were filled to the brim with water containing a different food dye (Red, Green and Blue). We proceeded to pour water into each other's glasses to merge the colour of the water and distributed it equally between the 6 glasses in colour and quantity saying 'To you, and to me every time we pour.
once we felt all the glasses were of equal colour and quantity we say 'and now we drink' which we do (Food dye isn't tasty for the record.)
There were obvious flaws with the piece in terms of there was a little confusion and miscommunication on my half, but overall this is a piece I would be interested to explore in different environments, with different people and varied age groups, along with many many more people in the group to explore the politics on how we would resolve the situation we are given in which we have to equally distribute.
