(un)familiarity: when is a house no longer a home?
One of the things that drew me and Haeyoung together was a shared fascination with the tipping point between the familiar and unfamiliar, and how and why that line is crossed.
The term we used for this was (un)familiarity.
This is a term I had begun to develop and play with during Practices, where I defined it as a sense of dislocation: objects, actions, or situations that are familiar in isolation, but somehow unrecognisable when combined. Juxtaposing these things drains a mundane or ordinary moment of its expected meaning, and refills it with something slightly ‘off’ to create a disorientating or unheimlich effect on the viewer. This idea is influenced by ideas of the uncanny, surrealism, thing theory, and folklore.
Haeyoung and I are both also very interested in urban and domestic spaces. As constantly inhabited spaces, we felt it was a perfect setting in which to explore ideas of (un)familiarity. One of the first things we did was make a list of ways in which this could be done.
This ‘unfamiliarity list’ became the basis for a lot of our rehearsal experiments: one by one, we conceptualised the items on the list in theatrical terms and tried it. For example, ‘mis-seeing objects’ led us to experiment with casting frightening shadows with every day objects; ‘unexpected sounds’ ultimately led to a lot of our sound design choices; ‘audience position’ led to scenographic experiments about how set design and positioning could make the audience feel voyeuristic; ‘dead objects’ formed the basis for most of our object-based rehearsals; ‘disproportionate reactions’ was the original inspiration for workshopping scenes with the puppet in incredibly mundane and boring situtions.
Through these rehearsal explorations however, we quickly realised the impact of refamiliarisation: the sense of dislocation could ebb and flow, primarily based on how long a performer or audience was exposed to it. In particular, our experiments with the dripping sound confirmed this. But this was really, really interesting! It meant that we would have to take a cumulative approach to building (un)familiarity, and gave us scope to re-emphasise certain elements (like the drips, or the thingness of objects, or the capabilities of the puppet) at moments we felt would be impactful. We began to deliberately play with the idea of refamiliarisation through repetition and recontextualisation.
Thinking cumulatively, and drawing on the experimental ethos of ATP, we wondered if the impact of dislocation or destablisation could be paralleled and further explored in our use of form or genre.
We knew that to create unfamilairity, there must first be familiarity: as our initial scenes had to therefore be very ‘normal’ before disintegrating, why not echo and explore this by beginning in the theatrical norm of naturalism and then introducing unexpected elements of absurdism, lyricism, fable, and horror. We evoked these both through performance mode, text-movement interplay, and scenography. Alex, our dramaturg, was incredibly helpful in developing this strand of the work.
