As the Director, my initial vision for the performance is to create a piece revolving around the topic of identity and the use of social media. As a company we want to demonstrate the effect that social media and technology can inflict on society, and people’s insecurities. I hope as a company that we create a piece that will relate and impact on the audience and make them rethink what they post on social media and how far they are willing to go to make themselves ‘perfect’. To support our process, we looked into previous theatre companies and artists that use multimedia and share the same topicality of our performance, the use of social media and identity.

One of the first influential performances that inspired ‘Username’ was Pretty Ugly by Louise Orwin. The piece is a ‘research project that aims to arouse critical debate and new insights into our relationship with the internet and social media through performance, activism and workshops with teenage girls’. (Orwin) Orwin shares her research and shares that ‘advertisments, magazines, film and television had been spoon-feeding images of unattainable ‘perfection’ to young girls, it now appeared that it was the girls themselves that were perpetuating these dangerous myths about body image with the constant reblogging, retweeting, regurgitating.’ As a company we also wanted to explore a current generation’s fascination with various social media. In particular we took inspiration from the fact that this piece “seeks to bring awareness to the way we are beginning to use online platforms; becoming relentless self-editors and communal co-creators of our online and offline identities” (Orwin). We also hope to raise awareness regarding the effects that social media has on us as a society. We want to explore the public’s obsession and fascination with their body image and identity, and how they search the internet to learn how to become a ‘perfect’ identity on social media. We intend to send a message to the audience by representing the insecurities, obsessions and destruction of a desperate woman in today’s society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Additionally, Orwin uses TV screens, projectors and a handheld live-streaming camera which projects close-ups of her face which screams live to screens at the back of the stage. As a company we would like to explore with a live streaming handheld camera to display close up’s of our faces.

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Gudge, C. [rehearsal] 2015

Orwin, L. Pretty Ugly. [online] Available from: https://prettyorugly.wordpress.com/about-the-project/ [Accsessed 7th April].