Going back to the roots of solo performance, Chris Goode -in his piece The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley– produces a piece “storytelling at its finest”.Chris Goode PowerPoint

Though Wound Man is not Chris’ first solo performance, I believe that it is one of his most touching, and although not strictly grown from a autobiographical root, there are aspects of this piece which appear to have been influenced and crafted around certain events which had great influence on his past.

Creating and telling a story without unnecessary grandeur is something which Goode does with ease; making the audience feel at ease and welcome within the space he inhabits while telling a heart warming and engaging tale.

Although Chris Goode is not the only solo performer to still use this technique, his work comes as a breath of fresh air (alongside such artists as Tim Crouch, Laurie Anderson and Spalding Gray) compared to other performance artists whose techniques don’t stem from the idea of story telling: artists such as Marina Abramovic and Stelarc. Although viewed by some as art and as ground breaking material, the work these artists produce, for me, is at times questionable. What makes an ‘artist’ is a label which is almost always in contention when being applied to new/different/abstract pieces of work. Through investigating artists from varied practices, although all appreciated within their own merit, as an ‘artist’ now myself, I am leaning towards taking my work in a storytelling route.

Telling stories is, I believe, the most important aspect of being a performer. Stories come in all sorts of media and forms, and it is the generic area of storytelling which I want to explore as my process and into a final performance. Although an exact idea will inevitably change and morph beyond its original conception, the captivation which I feel when recounting/reading stories will be the foundation of ideas and concepts of my final solo performance.

Works cited
Hull Truck Theatre (2013)  The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirely, dir. Chris Goode & Company Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5jsvC1x4g (accessed 4 February 2014).