CONTEXT



IMPORTANCE OF TALKING ABOUT SCREEN-USE


There are over 6 billion smartphone subscribers in the world today and the number is growing (O´Dea 2021). Smartphones and other digital devices are here to stay. So are the positive and negative aspects associated with them.


Research screen use
  • Per day: Adults use 3-5 hours on screen. Kids 0-8 year use 3 hours on screen. Kids 8-12 year use 5 hours. Teens use 6-9 hours (Screened out 2020).
  • It is not the phone itself that is addictive. Some apps developed to be addictive. The apps give us rewards that we never know when will come, so we keep on going hoping for the next rush (Screened out 2020).

Research screen use negative aspects
  • We move less, and obesity levels have gone up. This is also related to other screen use, such as jobs involving sitting in front of a computer (More screen time, more obesity, no date).
  • Higher percent of mental issues after smartphones. Anxiety, depression and self harm (Screened out 2020).
  • Connection with screen use and anxiety depression amongst children and adolescents (Twenge and Campbell 2018).
  • Since the smartphone revolution our capacity to concentrate has fallen from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Goldfish has 9 seconds (Screened out 2020).
  • Phone addiction is real (Stanborough 2019).
  • We lose time to “mind-wander”. Makes us less creative and problem solving (Screened out 2020).
  • Kids can develop addictive personalities (Screened out 2020).
  • It is users that get punished from screen use instead of firms behind the technologies. Example China you get points of use on screens. If you do not use it enough, you lose access to society goods. In South Korea, a “Cinderella law” forbids citizens to play on computers after darkness (Screened out 2020).
  • 2018 Apple got screen time. Shows that technologies can take more responsibility in the future (Screened out 2020).
  • Selfie deaths are accidental deaths that occurred while taking a selfie. Common selfie deaths are taking pictures on train tracks, with a gun and a wild animal. Also falling down from high level, drowning and electrocution. Common in India, USA, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nepal, Croatia, Romania, Russland. Selfies are 5 times higher and more deadly than shark attacks (List of selfie-related injuries and deaths 2021).
  • Pokemon go deaths. Deaths occurred because users used the Pokemon go app and acted less conscious (Revell 2017).
  • Myopia: worse long sight because we are more often close to screens (Guardian 2020).
  • The body effect using screen: shoulders, neck, back (Goldwaser no date).
  • More false information spreading with social media (Hills and Menczer 2020). 

Screen use positive aspects 
  • You can find funny videos and filters. We can laugh with friends and loved ones using digital platforms to see each other. People love to laugh and screens can make us laugh. Laughing could add 8 years to your life. Laughing also makes you more creative (Leasca 2021).
  • Playing video games makes you more creative (MSU Today 2011).
  • It makes us feel less lonely: Reach out to friends, family and community (Thomson 2021).
  • If you move while using the phone, it is less likely for obesity (Lanningham-Foster et al 2006).(Be aware of where you walk while using it, so you don't become part of the statistics of selfie deaths. See list of negative effects).
  • Smartphones have created political change through social media. As Arabic spring, body movement, promotes better health, Black lives matter, etc. (Onook, O., et al 2015), (Korda, H. and Itani, Z.2011), (Mundt, M., et al 2018).
  • Technology of screens has made us safer. We can stay proactive with conditions like diabetes and arthritis. (Technology In Our Life Today And How It Has Changed 2021).
  • Personal and professional branding is readily available. Even the pope has his own Instagram and Twitter account (Engen 2020).
  • Smartphones give us easy access to entertainment, social life, shopping and work.

Notes:

Some of the positive aspects of screen use goes against the negative aspects. Somehow funny and somehow tragic.  

The covid-19 pandemic isolated us as individuals and forced us to use more digital platforms. A finding from a Norwegian student survey revealed mental health problems are close to almost half of the Norwegian students. 8 out of 10 students point to lack of contact with other students as the reason for their challenges. 35 % answered they used more than 10 hours a day in front of a screen. 4 out of 10 students fulfills the requirements for insomnia. 44% miss being with someone (Bazaz et al 2021). This is one result of the pandemic. This could also be looked at from another perspective. What would isolation feel like without a digital plattform? How would you cope if you could not communicate with your loved ones at all?

We have been happy users of the screens and now we are starting to see research on the side-effects of this. Nevertheless, there is still conflicting information on the topic. The media often presents smartphone technology in a negative light and parents should limit their children's screen time -  however, being told not to do something, often leads to the opposite. In our performance we aim to inspire youth through a balance of humour and sincerity to reflect on the topic instead of judgement and blaming.

Screen use in media

  • How to use less our phone (Laingen 2021)
  • Adults see the children's use of the screen as something “bad”, but youth see it as an important tool (Eliassen, H.Ø et al 2021)
  • Guidance for how parents should take responsibility for children's phone use (Nettvettreglene 2019)Compare screen use and use of drugs. (Vold 2019)

CLOWN/COMEDY


“If you can't explain it simply, you don´t understand it enough”. - Albert Einstein

This year I learned about clowning. It made me understand I had been practicing clowning for the last year without knowing it. It subsequently became important for me to give space to these aspects of myself as an artist by transposing my research into a comedy and clown performance. This was also the shift in my focus towards the topic of screen use.

Clowning for me is difficult to describe. I had an expectation that a clown would wear a red nose, big shoes and a forced smile. Acting on childish and simple humour. My prior experience with clowning as an audience mostly consisted of uncomfortable and dry laughs in kindness to the clown performer.

Learning about clowning, made me aware of the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq concept of ‘one’s own clown’.

“Playing with one’s weakness, vulnerability, naiveté and ridiculousness, we find our clown” (Lecoq 2002 as cited in Irving 2013).

It was a pleasurable experience to take advantage of my skills and weaknesses. In clowning I can work with characteristics I value as important in art. Listening, breathing, honesty, physical language, playfulness, serving the audience, rules and breaking them.

My notes and reflections from the clowning course:

I don't have a clue what I am doing, but it is alright.
Don't force.
If it doesn't work, change.
The clown falls down, so we do not have to.
See the world for the first time.
Stay in the shit.
Use your flop to something funny.
Listening to the moment.
Beats and rhythms.

I realized how many different clowning and comedy styles there are.

The red clown, a more “stupid” and naive clown.
The white clown, a more strict and responsible clown.
The dark clown, more grotesque about serious topics.

I learned about different laughs.

Recognizable (the office).
The visual (slapstick).
Bizarre (Monty Python).
Surprise laugh (here I want to write boo, but that's more recognizable humour).
(Comedy and chaos class with Rachel Karafistan and Robert Rodgers, Eden Studio, March 2021)

The performance IRL has elements of red clown and visual laugh.

The clowning that I was most fascinated by was russian Slava Polunin and Theater Licedei. Polunin´s Slava Snow Show poetic world. The style of female clowning in the performance “Claudia”  by Theatre Licedei. 



Both of the performances showed me that clowning could be poetic performances. With aesthetic scenography and costumes. In the performance IRL, the scenography and costumes were important. It was a wish to create an aesthetic scenography that related to the topic. We decided to use “cellophane” because of its transparent quality. Representing being inside and outside at the same time. As with screen use, we are often in the real world at the same time we are in a digital world. Also Gecko Theatre inspired us with aesthetic, physicality and use of language.

The clown has a naive and simple way of seeing the world and behaving. The naiveté of the clown makes the character live its fullest life. Both the weaknesses and skills. The perspective of the clown is simple, but the clown does touch big questions about life. The clown acts simple, and the audience projects the complexity in the simplicity. Transposing the research to a comical performance, we simplified the research material.

When we simplified the research material we chose to focus on contradicting topics. Smartphones create both connection and disconnection, social and isolation. This became the performance´s different masks and contramasks.


EDUCATIONAL COMEDY:

Early in the process we understood the research had an educational aspect. Comedy has the quality of laughing about a serious topic to make it more accessible. With clowning the audience laughs at the clowns, and so it is a distance between themselves and the topic. We wanted to create a performance where the audience laughed at the topic with a distance, and still connected with it. 

For us it is important to make the audience think about the subject and reflect about it themselves. We do not want to give them any answers, but encourage them to question their own screen use.

The performance has a physical language and that broadens the target group; young kids, teens and adults. The performance´s subject has an interest to all age groups. It is important that kids and teens should have an opportunity to reflect about the topic. Adults have the responsibility to be good role models and carers for youths. Our wish is to tour a longer version of the performance as schools.


GENDERLESS CLOWN AND MEMES


Studying comedy, there are more men than females in the comedy and clown industry. For example watching the best of clown videos of Cirque du Soleil; Why was it no female clowns?

Margaret J Irving explains different aspects of why there are less female clowns in her research thesis "Toward a Female Clown Practice: Transgression, Archetype and Myth" (2013).

  • The discourse of history about clowns has focused on white men (Billington 1984 and Hughill 1980, as cited in Irving). Women looked less “humourless” than men.
  • Girls in many societies learns the values of an ideal female sex role. Women with aggressive behavior behold a treat to society. Women have avoided aggressive “slapstick” humour (Apte 1985, as cited in Irving 2013). 
  • Female clowns often play male clowns. Examples are Nola Rae and Angela de Castro from Britain (Peacock 2009, as cited in Irving 2013).

Inviting Katie-Rose Spence I took it for granted that I wanted to work with a female comedian and clown. Our humour is genderless and characters having both feminine and masculine principles. We are both naive, “beautiful”, aggressive and ugly. “Slapstick” humour is physical comedy and small forms of “violence”. “Slapstick” humour we often think about Charlie Chaplin and Mr.Ben. Contemporary “slapstick” is more known as MTV's Jackass (Bromley 2019). You can also see the tendency in social media to use “slapstick” humour to make a point or for laughs. On platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat you share short videos. The language in videos is often physical, few words, and funny with the goal to share information. The phenomenon of “memes” is an example of “slapstick” humour in social media. With social media gender is more fluid now than before and it gives a domino effect on humour. In social media females use “slapstick” humour and it less tagged as a “male” humour. Female clowns in a modern time are parallel with the time of society, more genderless. It is still more to work on gender in comedy, but it has developed. This is one of the positive perspectives of screen use.






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