Hello,
My name is Dawn Woolley. I moved to Cardiff a year ago after completing an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art in London. I am currently in the research and development stage of a new series of work called Visual Pleasure (I have attached a couple of small jpegs of my experiments so far). I would like to develop this work into a series of performances in order to concentrate on the relationship between the spectator and the subject.

I would like to create this work on the stage for a number of reasons; it is a site of construction and so it will reinforce the construction of the subject as an idealised image. In ‘Visual Pleasure’ the stage itself will be a metaphor for the internalisation of the gaze; whether the seats are full or empty the setting of the stage implies the presence of an audience. Like the panoptican prisoner the subject doesn’t really know if anyone is watching, but the performance must be upheld regardless.

Ideally I would like to I would collaborate with or seek advice from performers and theatre professionals to help me hone my performance skills and develop a body of work that responds to spectatorship theories, the panopticon overseer and the resulting state of perpetual exhibitionism.

If anyone would like to discuss this project with me or if you could recommend any theatres, or any other spaces with a stage that might be sympathetic to my requests please let me know!

(dawn.woolley@network.rca.ac.uk)

many thanks
Dawn