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YOU LOOK LOVELY TODAY: ROXY JARROLD: FINAL BLOG SUBMISSION

Framing statement:

Creating a site specific performance in any context has to have background researching and methodologies behind it to back it up. This is in order to show our influences, as well as making the type of ‘change’ we were trying to make. A variety of terms have stemmed from the term site-specific performance including “‘site-determined’, ‘site-referenced’, ‘site-conscious’, ‘site responsive’, ‘context-specific’” (Pearson, 2010, p.8). Our place being heavily influenced by Mark Auge’s lane and Non-lace theory, we were trying to take a pass-through place ad make it a destination. The methodology of Fluxus seemed relevant to our group, as they focussed on the history of a place before deciding o ideas and themes. Fluxus wanted a piece to be available to the masses rather than just the educated or the knowing. ‘Fluxus was one of the few art movements to use humour throughout history’ (Brecht, 2016). Throughout our rehearsals and even in our final piece, a main focus was on the history of the Brayford, and it influenced our piece heavily. Although our piece wasn’t using humour as such, we were attempting to create a relaxed and positive vibe. Situationist International was another movement we were particularly interested in relating to our piece. This is because one of their main focusses was exploring the city during the 1950s’-1970. This movement was primarily led by Guy Debord. Although they were predominantly a political movement their ideas behind this, for example location, served our piece extremely well. Although the style of our themes were not able to make into a ‘tour’ as such, the aspect of having instillations or fragmented sections was intriguing. We wanted to make it so the different elements made sense and were relevant on their own as well as together. Time was a particularly big issue for our group. To start with we really did not know how long our piece would be able to work for. We were not keen on making it a specific time for no particular reason. We decided to keep our piece going until we felt it right that it should be stopped, which depended entirely on the reaction of the public. According to Peter Brook, it is possible to ‘take any empty space and call it a bare stage’ (Brook, 1995). After we had set our area we began, and continued until there became a long enough gap whereby the public walking past had died down.

 

Analysis of process:

As a group during our first process of rehearsal, we were all equally intrigued about Carl Avery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities. During this we were given a set of instructions to complete. These instructions were to be taken at your own interpretation, meaning one group could have a completely different outcome to another. With ours, we  spent 25 minutes doing these sitting in an elevator whereby our outcomes surprised and equally inspired us. We wanted to research further the idea of proximity within a social context and small places. This lead on to thinking about why random strangers feel safer talking to others in certain environments rather than on a passing street. After leaving our first rehearsal as a group with so many ideas, we were able to expand on these with individual research. ‘It is argued that the process of negotiation –between performance, audience and place, and between site-specificity and `theatreness’ is doubly significant as both the discursive methodology of the thesis and the explorative strategy of the site specific theatre practitioner’ (Wilkie, 2004).
We explored the communal excitement for these ideas by taking a trip into the town to see if this sparked any place ideas or any area caught our eye. As we were about to enter the high street we walked through the glory hole, and we all really liked the aspect of walkways either side of the Brayford. Having a small but practical space became almost essential for us at this point, as we were all so gripped on the idea of proxemics and closeness between strangers. An idea of attempting to somehow bring the two sides together was brought up.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

This became a new interesting focal point, as although there was a physical barrier in between the two walkways, the aspect of making two sides interact in some way was intriguing.

Coming away with this new focus, we looked into the history of this area in Lincoln. We found the area used to have a ‘market atmosphere’. This was a place people went to as a destination rather than a passing to get somewhere else. This linked in really well with our next seminar on Mark Auge’s place and non-place. ‘If a place can be defined as a relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé et al., 1995). Boats used to pass by, trading goods such as vegetables, wool and fish. Young apprentices also used to stand on ledges wanting and pleading to be employed by boats that passed by. For the period of time the boats were there, it became a place of interaction and had a bustle-like atmosphere. The area didn’t have the enclosed or awkward feel that we were hoping to create. This then made us think about our idea and the relationship it had with the locations history or events. We had realised we’d got quite caught up on our first ideas of using awkwardness and closeness, rather than having an actual reason to stick to them.

Following on from this change of heart, Auge’s place and non-place theory stuck with us. We wanted to explore bringing our chosen site ‘to life’, making it a destination for people to watch a spectacle, rather than a pathway to a different area. We began looking into Marcia Farquhar, who conducted a Live Art Tour. The main focus of her work is to explore the history of a place to create a unique tour in relation to the historic research. Her work is directed towards the audience not knowing what part of the performance is and what is left down to chance.

This is where I picked up on the context of chance, and how valuable ‘in-the-moment’ response can be to a site specific performance. Farquhar’s influences began to become prominent with us the more we researched her. A poignant part of her work is to question the roles of the performers or tour guides, as what effect they can have. ‘Her performance persona in this context is very much herself, the outsider/ insider imbued with the understanding that history is in the process of being made and as such is always ‘half made’(Flaxman exchange, 2013). Although we weren’t trying to change history as such, we were starting to question our own roles and responsibilities within the current ideas we had gathered.

Our initial full idea came together gradually after bringing our individual research of the area together. The word ‘exchange’ cropped up several times, so we decided to continue forward with this. With the idea of the ‘market atmosphere’ as previously explained, we wanted to explore practically how we could pass items to one another making an exchange. However this needed to be one that is viable to a mass audience. We began doing this by simply throwing items such as vegetables and fruit to one another over the barriers, crossing the water. However by doing this, we realised the space we were in just wouldn’t aid the idea of throwing items, as each side was extremely narrow. We then began considering other opportunities for an exchange using the entire space. We wanted to incorporate both walkways either side of the Glory hole into this, meaning the only successful option would be to pass something along a carrying system. ‘The site is a place where a piece should be but isn’t’ (Smithson in Bear and Sharp 1996, 249). It was then that the idea sparked of using wool as the system for carrying items along to each side in order for an exchange to happen. Keeping an authentic feel was essential at this point for us, which is why the wool needed to be the ‘pulling system’ transferring fruit and vegetables.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

Creating a market-type atmosphere alongside the exchange seemed natural to be happening at the same time. We researched local markets and began adding ‘stations’, making our piece slightly fragmented, however this could have been a positive in aiding our final product. We ended with the exchange of vegetables through a pulling system made from wool, dancing, and creating of fresh orange juice. The orange juice idea was very important to our piece and was particularly unique. The act of pulling a bag of oranges through and along the water was completed, and in turn they were pulled out and squeezed into a jug. Pulling an item through the water with wool attached looked visually exciting, and we had many people ask us what and why we were doing this. With research, we also found that with the Brayford becoming shorter and narrower, people used to place wooden slats over the water to make one bit space, creating a dance floor whereby dances were held.

 

After completing these stations together, we began to see negatives to this option. The main issue was space. As our space was so long but lacking in width, it felt like we were almost too spread out for it to work. It became 3 different pieces which was not what we were aiming for. We also found that not incorporating the audiences reactions left us lacking in content for our piece. Using our contextual and theoretical influences we previously researched, we began to see how we could keep our theme of exchange, but edit our piece accordingly. Keeping with the main prop of wool we thought we could make an exchange of something by wool a poignant part of our final piece. Coming to the conclusion that dancing felt forced and acted, we decided to take it out. We were very hesitant of taking out the aspect of pulling an item along the Brayford, as it was so visually pleasing. So now we needed to decide on an item to pull along our wool system, and something to drag along the water. As well as this, we wanted to add a little focus on the public, as before in trials, we hadn’t put enough thought into how much their reactions can improve and add to a final piece. A thought came to mind of giving the audience something as part of an exchange. As we were trying to keep the market-place, celebratory feel to it, it had to be something positive we were giving them. Dragging something through the water also made sense to us for historical and visual reasons. Dragging an item to the pulling system to exchange sides in order for an audience member to retrieve it was attempted. This meant that every aspect of our piece would now be tied together in some way, and without one, the other wouldn’t be able to work.

Keeping the celebratory atmosphere involved pleasing the public that passed. An idea was pushed forward of compliments. Giving passing members of the public a compliment in some way was positive and would add happiness by chance. We began by handing out compliments on paper via our wool hand-made pulling system across the Brayford. The response to this was extremely positive, and we felt people left the area with a happier feel than maybe before. To make the compliments a ‘process’ rather than just an action, we decided to trying walking them through the Brayford in glass bottles. This was to signify the journey of the boats before they used to exchange goods in the past. The compliment went on a journey before it was given to someone. This idea was extremely successful on trial and we decided to stick and add more detail to it.

 

Performance evaluation:

Friday 6th may 2016 was our performance day. We began setting up from 9:30am, as the process of placing the wool was to take a considerable amount of time. We weaved the wool through the barriers of the Brayford each side of the walkway. We then continued on to make a ‘spider-web’ like shape above the Brayford, going across each side. This was alongside the pulling system for ferrying the compliments across the water. After rehearsing this previously we were able to successfully set this up efficiently.

(Walls, 2016)
(Walls, 2016)

Our other props were previously put together, so we began our piece. As an individual, I found it particularly hard to take away the aspect of acting within our piece, as it definitely needed to be about the visual representation of our piece rather than this. Speaking as a group after, everyone found this particularly difficult however I feel we managed to succeed in doing this. At times, for me, our piece felt almost too fragmented, as we were working with such a long space. However, with this came the bonus of being able to really use and feel the space we were in whilst we were in the moment of our piece. We found that the two group members dragging the bottles were asked by public members what they were doing. Walking further and seeing others pulling notes across the Brayford, they were then able to connect both pieces together. I really liked this concept as it almost seemed like two separate occurrences until you are able to see both closer and working as one group. During the part of our piece we were being marked, two boats passed through part of the water, which resulted in us having to lift our wool that was tied to each barrier, higher in the air. We had previously prepared for this, and was hoping it would happen as it would aid our piece. Whilst the boat was passing under the string, it brought out a great visual piece of art, as it seemed we were celebrating the boats passing through. This also linked in closely to the history of the area, with exchanges being made from boats rather than across string. Whilst the boats were passing we all stopped actions and stood still holding the string above them, as though the boat had a higher authority status than us. This lasted around 20 seconds each time, and the visual aspect of it was a complete success even though it was really chance of this actually happening during a slotted time period.

(Galley, 2016)
(Galley, 2016)

Giving out compliments via paper to the public was also positive in the majority. Many people then went onto ask us about the reason behind this, whereby we were able to inform them about our ‘exchange’ and prior research behind this. We were then able to include our idea of bunting within our reasoning. Placing the compliments along a line of wool, creating a bunting-style of compliments, added to our running theme of celebration and adding happiness to our site. This was placed higher on a slant, so passers-by were able to see and read the compliments as they were walking past. This meant even if they did not receive a physical compliment on paper, they were able to read some and maybe relate it to themselves.

 

 

 

 

(Word count: 2576)

 

 

Work cited:

Augé, M., Augé, M., Howe, J., Auge, M. and Aug, M. ? (1995) Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. New York: Verso Books

Wilkie, F. (2004) Out of place. Available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/823/1/fulltext.pdf (Accessed: 4 May 2016).

Brecht, G. (2016) Fluxus movement, artists and Major Works. Available at: http://www.theartstory.org/movement-fluxus.htm (Accessed: 12 May 2016).

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Brook, P. (1995) The empty space. Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/13520/the-empty-space/ (Accessed: 13 May 2016).

Flaxman exchange (2013) Available at: http://www.marciafarquhar.com/flaxman-exchange/ (Accessed: 13 May 2016).

Bear, L. and Sharp, W. (1996) ‘Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim Smithson in Jack Flam’ (ed.) Robert Smithson: The collected writings, Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press.

Stokes of Lincoln (2014) History of the High Bridge. [Website] Lincoln. Available from http://stokes-coffee.co.uk/history-high-bridge/ [Accessed on 10 May 2016].

 

“A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere” (Pearson, 2010, 7)

Compliment Example

Framing Statement:

We began our process by conducting historical research in and around Lincoln high street. We found a lot of interesting information about Stokes café, a Tudor building in the middle of the high street. This research eventually led us to our site – the two walkways either side of the Brayford behind stokes café.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

Most of the history around this area was negative. Our initial idea was to look at how the Glory Hole was “often referred to as the ‘Murder Hole’” (Santos, 2013) because it was the place to dispose of dead bodies. This made us consider Wrights and Sites and their ‘misguides’ practice. However once we discovered the area around the Glory Hole used to be a boat market, a bustling social area, we began to think differently about our site. Our own personal opinions and experiences walking through this area were mostly negative we believed this may be the case for many other people around the city. The idea of it being a vibrant place where people would go and interact with each other intrigued us and we wanted to bring that back. We thought about Marc Augé and his ideas about ‘places’ and ‘non-places’. We all thought of the Glory Hole as a ‘non-place’. It was never a destination for us simply a walkway, a means of getting to a ‘place’ – the high street. Our aim was to transform the Glory Hole from its current ‘non-place’ state to its original anthropological glory. We looked heartily to our marketplace research for inspiration. We moved from Wrights and Sites to Marcia Farquhar. Specifically we were influenced by her ‘A Live Art Tour’ .

We wanted the basic concept of people being lead around London to various sites and experiences to create a miniature version around the Glory Hole. We used our research to create multiple stations and points of interest on either side of the Glory Hole for our audience passers-by to visit. After running the whole piece in its entirety we found it did not give off the desired effect. We stripped the idea back to its basic principles ‘exchange’, ‘celebration’, and ‘connection’ in order to create our final piece. Our performance lasted just over one hour and remained at the back of Stokes café for the entire time. We got to the site early to cover it in wool (our method of connecting both sides of the Brayford) at around 10am and our performance began at 11am. We created a system of moving compliments in bottles through the Brayford and then passing the compliments across the Brayford using wool. These compliments were then offered to our audience members or put on our compliment bunting.

(Walls, 2016)
(Walls, 2016)

 

Analysis of Process

The start of our process was largely focused on looking for interesting pieces of historical information. Mike Pearson describes site-specific art as “engag[ing] intensively with the history and politics of that [site] and with the resonance of these in the present” (Pearson, 2010, 9). We were first drawn to our site the Glory Hole by an article we found in the Lincolnite where we discovered it had a dark and horrible past. The article explained how the Glory Hole was once referred to as the ‘Murder Hole’ because when “a body was thrown in the Witham, it would often be washed ashore either under, or near the bridge.” (Santos, 2013). This piece of research lead us to consider creating a tour around the Glory Hole and around the high bridge based on gruesome fictional tales of some of the murders that may have happened there. However we quickly moved away from this idea when we discovered “in medieval times the bridge was an important centre for merchants” (Stokes tea and coffee, 2014). This idea of a ‘boat market’ interacting with the people of Lincoln around the Glory Hole really changed our view of our site. The ‘Murder Hole’ article although quite shocking matched our negative ideas and experiences of the Glory Hole. The boat market, on the other hand, completely changed the way we thought of the Glory Hole. It was described as “swarming with life and activity” (Stokes tea and coffee, 2014) completely the opposite to how we felt it is today. It reminded us of Marc Auge’s ideas around place and non-place. He describes  ‘non-places’ as being

“spaces which themselves are not anthropological” (Auge, 1995, 78)

We decided we wanted to try and return the Glory Hole to the status of ‘Place’. A place of interaction between people instead of a means of getting to the high street. With the idea of a busy marketplace in mind we turned to Marcia Farquhar’s A Live Art Tour (REcreativeUK, 2012). In this piece of site-specific art Farquhar conducts a tour around London to a range of destinations linking to the Battle of Britain. At every destination there was something new to see and interact with for the audience members. We wanted to try and make this on a smaller scale around the Glory Hole. We took the idea of the boat market selling wares to people on the walkway and decided to create our own exchange using goods they may have sold these include, wool, meat, and fruits. We decided we would use the wool to connect to the railings either side of the water. One at pedestrian level and the other at the midpoint of some steps leading to the top of Stokes cafe.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

Once we had permission from the cafe to use the steps we practiced this method of transporting goods from one side to the other to find it was very effective and looked very visually interesting as well. We decided we would hand fruit out to members of the public as the boats would have done. We were also drawn to the idea of “porters stand[ing] around waiting to be hired” (Stokes tea and coffee, 2014) we thought it might be an interesting section of our piece to have some volunteers come and stand holding signs on a section of the walkway that was not accessible to the public.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

Another element of Farquhar’s tour that influenced us was the idea of handing cups of juice out to the audience. Instead of the lemonade Farquhar provided we wanted to hand out orange juice as we felt this fruit had closer links to the market we wanted to recreate. We liked the idea of squeezing fresh oranges with our hands to make the juice and experimentedwith the idea of dragging the oranges through the water. This dragging motion was really nice to watch and their was something very intense about squeezing the oranges by hand.

(Revill, 2016)
(Revill, 2016)

Another interesting piece of history we found on the Stokes website talked about “a celebration dance [that] was held under the bridge” (stokes tea and coffee, 2016) on top of planks that were placed over the river. We felt this connection of the two sides really resonated with our ideas so far and wanted to somehow include this dance as a section of our piece. We initially wanted to replicate the dance by getting planks of wood but this became too impractical so we scrapped the planks but kept the dancing. We practiced with various pieces of medieval music until we found one we liked.

We wanted to make the Glory Hole feel like a place of celebration. A place of interaction where we would talk to people and exchange our goods with them. It was only once we put all of these elements together for the first time we discovered it didn’t feel like that at all. The dancing was too uncomfortable for members of the group and it showed. It was also much harder than we thought to hand out pieces of free fruit to people and so very little exchange happened. The whole thing felt too fragmented and therefore did not create the buzzing atmosphere we first hoped for. The visual aspects of it where still very successful so we wanted to increase the amount of wool from just one line to cover the walkway as much as we could. The dragging element in the orange section also looked visually interesting but the orange juice stall itself was too isolated from the rest of the group. We realised we had stuck too closely to our historical research and it just didn’t work. We decided to strip back everything we had done so far to the key elements that we were trying to make: celebration, exchange, and connection. By increasing the wool we felt we increased the connection between both walkways. We still wanted the exchange to happen across the water but the fruit simply did not work. Instead we moved to compliments and moving the compliments through the water instead of the oranges. If the

“non-place … promotes solitude rather than social relations” (Govan, 2007, 127)

then we wanted to make create as many social interactions as we could. When we tested handing out compliments we found people were so much happier to receive them and speak to us compared to when we were trying to hand out fruit.

Evaluation: 

On reflection I think if we could start the whole process again we would still look as deeply into the history of the place as we did but not get so tied up in the technicalities of it. Although history is a great way of getting into a site it had too much influence over us while we were making our piece. We may have come up with something much more our own if we had allowed ourselves more creative license with the research we had conducted. For our final performance Shannen and Tabby would walk up and down either walkway dragging a glass bottle tied with wool in the Brayford behind them. As audience members made their way to the performance area Shannen and Tabby would place rolled up triangular pieces of card into the bottles. They then walked these bottles toward the Stokes café where myself, Roxy and Alex were standing. Shannen and Tabby would pull the bottle out of the Brayford and hand us the unravelled pieces of card. One or more of us would then attach the piece of card to a wool line stretching across the Brayford and the person over the other side would pull it over to them. They would then show the piece of card to a member of the public revealing the compliment it had written on it.

(Galley, 2016)
(Galley, 2016)

The audience member then had the option to keep the compliment or allow us to hang it as bunting over the ‘Glory Hole’. This sequence was repeated for the entirety of our performance. Not all of the passers by opted to take part in our performance however we did have a great deal of people who were very interested in what we were doing and were delighted to receive a compliment from us. One man was very excited by the whole idea and requested his girlfriend receive one as well. He also asked if he could attach the bunting to the wool line himself. This was not something we had at all expected an audience member to do and it was a great feeling to see he was so intrigued by our performance. Setting up the wool across and up and down the Brayford attracted almost as much attention as the actual performance itself. Many people would stop and ask us what we were doing and take photographs almost as many people that interacted with us in the final performance.

(Galley, 2016)
(Galley, 2016)

This made us wonder if we had missed a performative element of this section alone as it seemed to reach a lot of people. Perhaps instead of speedily wrapping the wool around the railings trying to get set up our performance as fast as we could we should have made more of this element and really made it part of performance.  In the actual performance I think the wool element worked particularly well and was the most successful part of our piece. People joining the walkways could see it from very far away and I think it looked particularly striking. This was the main element that attracted audience members to interact with our performance. One element that didn’t work as well as we had practiced was dragging the water bottles up and down the Brayford to transport the compliments.Unfortunately in practice the walkways were very quiet and there were few passers-by so we were able to keep up the pace and give almost everyone a compliment. On the actual day of our performance there were a great deal more people using the walkways and the message in a bottle method was too slow for the amount of people walking by. If we could do the performance again I think we would re-think this particular element, so that we could hand out compliments much faster than we did. This lack of pace detracted from the overall celebratory feeling we were trying to create. However, I feel we did create a positive atmosphere in the Glory Hole and succeeded in making it an anthropological ‘place’ of interaction and exchange.  If site specific art is about

“changing the way people perceive places” (Pearson, 2010, 9)

then I believe we succeeded.

(Walls, 2016)
(Walls, 2016)

Bibliography 

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Emily Vickers Final Submission

FRAMING STATEMENT 

Site Specific performance  instantly made me interested in how a piece of live art can be created in a space entirely inspired by its surroundings. Our performance took place in Speaker’s Corner on the High street, where we discovered at the beginning of our process that a Suffragette’s rally took place there. It was then that we had the idea to base our performance on its historical setting, which is a common stimulus of Site Specific Performance, as stated by Patrick Pavis – “a large part of the work has to do with researching place…one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere”. (Pavis, 1998, p337-8) So we decided to take this on board and create a piece of live art that was based around the power of  freedom of speech and protest. However we also incorporated a juxtaposition into the power of silence, and how it can affect a piece. For our actual performance our mouths were covered with duct tape to emulate our silence, as a metaphor that we are giving people the power to speak their minds.

Figure 3: Speaker's Corner. Credit: Emily Bikerdike (2016)
Figure 1: Speaker’s Corner. Credit: Emily Bikerdike (2016)

Our performance contained one-to-one interactions which relied totally upon audience participation, as we did not communicate vocally. Each audience participation lasted approximately two minutes and their written responses were then installed into the rest of our durational performance, either in the form of placards, or they could destroy it in a paper shredder. We then planted the shreddings into the soil of the placards. The placards were in plant pots to symbolise growth and how the power of words can grow. The only communication we could offer was the instructions written on a piece of paper. This further supported our methodology as Adrian Howell writes a lot about one-to-one interactions. He also has a great interest in transactions which was another key theme of our performance.  Through the transactions of written words we gave each audience participant the chance to have their voice heard or destroyed. Our main aim was for them to recognise that their voice has power and that they have the ability to have their opinions seen.  The idea of growth highly influenced the aesthetics of our piece which incorporated the methodologies and took inspiration from different performance artists. The main practitioners we based our performance on were Susan Lacy who has created a lot of feminist works that focus on women’s rights. The other main artist we took inspiration from was Adrian Howell who makes performances around transaction. Other artists included the work of Dee Heddon.

PERFORMANCE PROCESS

Getting Started:

Our journey began when we first researched into Speaker’s Corner. We discovered that it was filled with history surrounding the Suffragettes Movement, because a Suffragette rally took place at the Cornhill in 1908. This allowed us to brainstorm ideas surrounding women’s rights. We knew that when the suffragette rally took place, women had no voice and little rights. We discussed the concept of time, transitions and how the site has changed over the years from a place of protest, to a place of mass consumerism. We came up with the idea of creating a performance that showed the past, present and future of the space using each of us as a representation of each. But we soon realised that we wanted to focus on the present day, as it would be more relevant and engaging to our audience. We wanted to show how  even though the women’s rights movements were over a hundred years ago, their voices are still having an impact on our society today and that they are not forgotten. We wanted to almost reincarnate their message and show that there are still flaws within our society and women are still oppressed.

I researched into the Suffragettes website which shows a chronological order of events and movements. Around the time of the Rally in Lincoln, across the country many things were happening: “1909- First hunger strikes by suffragettes. Forcible feeding introduced May: Votes for Women Exhibition, Prince’s Skating Rink, Knightsbridge Formation of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Dissolution of Parliament following battles over budget”. (The Suffragettes, no date)

Observing the Space:

We looked at the buildings that surrounded the square and instantly noticed that the shops were mainly run by big corporate companies such as: banks like Santander, Halifax, Lush, Mcdonalds. I conducted some research by going into every business in the sqaure to discover that the majority of the shop’s managers were male. This supported our ideas for women’s rights, and we toyed with the idea of creating a performance that shows that women are still oppressed and that we live in a still very patriarchal society. We then discussed the idea of basing our performance around capitalism and consumerism. We discussed how we could link it women’s rights and freedom of speech. However after much consideration, we considered that when it comes to class and capitalism, men are still just as much oppressed as women are, so we decided to create a performance that was based on men and women in society and how we are all slaves consumerism.

Situationists:

One empty building stood out to us in the square, because we thought that it reflected our capitalist society. It was a local business which was forced to close due to it not making enough profit. This really stood out against the big companies that surrounded it that make so much capital. It was then that we first looked into Situationists- the movement that believes in creating art from everyday life that goes against capitalism. They focus on how we live in a class divided world where we are distracted by consumerism. We wanted our performance to reflect this notion of every day life, and to wake people up from the capitalist trance that they are under. I took inspiration from one particular Situationist, Raoul Vaneigem. He argues how people are being drained by companies that provide them joy, and that we live under an illusion that society is fair. He highlights how we protest about the wrong thing and ignore the power of the Every Day – He states, “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.” (Vaneigem and Nicholson-Smith, 1994, 4) He means that people are dead to their own thoughts, because they refuse to see the truth about the capital controlled world that they live in.

Figure 2: Empty Shop. Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)
Figure 2: Empty Shop. Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)

 

Force Feeding:

We continued research into the suffragettes in our early stages of development, to find that force feeding was a common punishment for suffragette women. The Guardian discusses the impacts the suffragette’s are still having on today’s society, and how some of their works have also been forgotten. The most striking fact was of one particular suffragette, Kitty Marion, who “was force-fed more than 232 times in prison for her beliefs.” (Lewis et al., 2016) This then prompted us into the idea of force feeding. We discussed how because we wanted it to be a silent protest and that we would be gagged. At first we thought with cloth, to stay authentic to the times of the suffragettes, however it did not seem practical as it would need to be in our mouths for a long period of time, which would get uncomfortable. So we experimented with tape instead.We took photographs with the tape took and videos of us force-feeding each other cake. The force feeding would represent the idea of society being force fed consumerism which again links into Situationists.

Transactions:

After again reviewing the physicality’s of our site, we realised that the shops were all lit up with neon lighting, big colourful logos which pointed to consumerism. This triggered the idea for transactions, which is something that takes place in the square a lot, from the banks. We discovered that neon lighting is a symbol of immediate gratification and money: arcades, cash machines and fast food. All of these things you can get quickly and easily. We then began to research practitioners who used transactions in their performances, and we discovered Adrian Howells. He “structures his performances around dual notions of “transactions” and “transformation”. His performances “tended to be performed for a single spectator at a time”(Heddon and Howells, 2011, 4). This gave us the idea to serve people in a customer type manner but a silent transaction.  We discussed what type of transaction we wanted to create, and we decided that it would be the transaction of words, in exchange for us giving the participant the power to have their opinions seen.

Suzanne Lacey:

For further development ideas, we researched into Susan Lacey, whose pieces of live art often pathed the way for protest and women’s rights. She created a piece of live art that projected the sexual objectification of women and rape called From Reverence to Rape to Respect (1978) Like our performance it was a durational piece that used placards that had statements about rape on them, and women held them up along with “a media campaign including two billboards, local press coverage, and a half-hour PBS documentary, created broad community exposure to the issues of the performance”. (Early works, no date) Here, I saw the power that writing words on placards can make, as it is simple yet effective and it draws attention to the eye.

Figure:From Reverence to Rape to Respect (suzannelacy.com, 1978)
Figure 3: From Reverence to Rape to Respect (suzannelacy.com, 1978)

Placards:

We experimented with placards in the square, as a way of testing people’s reactions to them. We sat on the benches and watched to see if people would read them. We realised that it would look more effective if we had lots of placards filling the site, and the writing would have to be big enough for people to read from a distance.

 

Figure: Chloe placing placard in center of the square. Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)
Figure 4: Chloe placing placard in center of the square. Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)

 

The power of Silence

After deciding that we would be silent for the duration of our piece, we researched into other performance artists who did the same. Adrian howells used silence in his piece, Foot Washing for the Sole. He used silence because he wanted to find out the question, “Is “body language” confessional?” (Howell and Heddon, 2011, 8) . We did not want to communicate our bodies, so we decided that the person (Emily B) would sit very still as a way of expressing that our role in the performance would be merely functional and symbolic. We hoped that the tape covering our mouths would indicate to the participants and audience that we were trying to give them a chance to speak.

Howell also explores silence in another one of his pieces of live art, The Garden of Adrian.

“exchange became a more solitary and internalized monologue – an exchange with/for self. I remained, though, a catalyst for the participant’s silent journey.” (Howell and Heddon, 2011, 9)

Figure: Me demonstrating silence.Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)
Figure: Me demonstrating silence.Credit: Emily Bickerdike (2016)

This highly relates to our final performance idea because we were catalysts for our participants, allowing them to make the art. We just provided the material. The garden in his work also links to our roots and the idea of growth.

Experimenting

Our initial idea for transactions was that  we would give people free cake in exchange for them answering our question “How much power do you feel you have in society?” We would have instructions telling them what to do. So we took the idea into the space, however we did not try it in silence. We spoke to members of the public who were willing to approach us. Our idea behind this was that we wanted to get a general consensus of how the public’s opinions surrounding how much power we have in society. We created signs saying “Free cake”. We realised that the word “free” enticed people towards us as it was instant gratification which again supported our consumerism Situationist research.

Figure 3:'Free Cake' (Vickers, 2016)
Figure 4:’Free Cake’ (Vickers, 2016)

When we took our findings back to the classroom but we were told by our classmates how they thought the free cake was not necessary or essential to our piece, and it was a little distracting and took away from the overall message. We thought about giving free advice, but that did not have a strong enough to our process either. Instead we chose to give cards with a link to our blog page written on them if they wanted to find out more information. That way we still maintained our ideologies of exchange and transactions, as the participant is giving us their time and opinion, and we are giving them the power to have their voice heard or destroyed and also teaching them about the history of the site.

We came up with the idea of growth. Once the participants  had answered our question, it could be planted it would be planted into the soil, their voice could grow and spread. We came up with the idea of the placards being placed in plant-pots and soil for a number of reasons. The first being that it would catch people’s attention and encourage them to read the placard. The second reason was that it gave us a function in the space and we each had a role. We could be nurturing the placard plants for the duration.

Figure: The mixing of soil (Vickers, 2016)
Figure 5: The mixing of soil (Vickers, 2016)

Performance Evaluation

After extensive research and practicing in the square using just soil to hold up the placards, we found that the soil was not heavy enough. Therefore  we had to use sand to make sure that the placards remained stood up. Although the sand remained underneath the soil, so that the theme of growth and visual aesthetics were not ruined due to contingencies. On the day of the performance we set up 10 plant pots filled with soil, carefully placed around the square. Two wooden chairs were placed opposite each other in the centre; one for the participant and one for Emily B. Chloe’s role was to draw the roots on the ground in chalk coming out of the plant pots once a placard had been placed into it. My role was to collect the shreddings every ten minutes and to nurture the plants by adding the shreddings to the soil. This symbolises plant food and growth.

Figure: The final performance. Credit: Jack Briggs (2016)
Figure 6: The final performance. Credit: Jack Briggs (2016)

Our performance went exceptionally well. It lasted two and a half hours, although i would have liked to have done it for longer if i had the chance to perform again.This would have given more time for more participants and the placards would have looked even more effective with more written on them. Our strengths was the aesthetics of the piece; the plant-pots worked very well to signify growth and the placards were read by many people. The silence worked well because it allowed people to write their opinion and leave without feeling the pressure to explain themselves. We used the space effectively and the timings of collecting the shreddings worked well, as it looked like we always had something to do and that we really were working the ideas into the soil. Site Specific performance has taught me that you should stop and think about a place and always observe your surroundings. It has also taught me to question things about our society, and how we can use art to reflect it in a powerful way that sends a memorable message- the power is truly in our hands and voice. If we were to perform this piece of live art again, we could have had more signs saying “take a seat” to encourage more people to participate. We could have even been holding the signs ourselves.

Figure: Nurturing the soil. Credit Rebecca Fallon (2016)
Figure 7: Nurturing the soil. Credit Rebecca Fallon (2016)

 

 

Word count: 2650

References:

 

Early works (no date) Available at: http://www.suzannelacy.com/early-works/#/reverence-to-rape-to-respect-1978/ [Accessed: 13 May 2016]

Heddon, D. and Howells, A. (2011) ‘From talking to silence: A confessional journey’, PAJ: A journal of Performance and Art, 33(1), pp. 8-9. doi: 10.1162/

Lewis, H., Hadley, T., Rose, J., Crompton, S., Christie, B. and Holmes, R. (2016) Why the suffragettes still matter: ‘They dared to act as the equals of men’. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/19/suffragettes-why-still-matter-abi-morgan-film-writers-reflect [Accessed: 13 May 2016]

Pavis, P., Shantz, C., Carlson, M. and Carlson, preface by M.  (1998) Dictionary of the theatre: Terms, concepts, and analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

The Suffragettes (no date) Available at: http://www.thesuffragettes.org/history/key-events/ [Accessed: 13 May 2016]

Vaneigem, R. and Nicholson-Smith, D. (1994) The Revolution of Every Life. 2nd edn. Welcombe, England: Left Bank Distribution.

 

 

Posted on No Comments on Record(ing) – Samantha Miles, Final Blog Post

Record(ing) – Samantha Miles, Final Blog Post

Framing Statement

As a group of creative students who were new to Site Specific Performance and the art which it produces, I personally felt apprehensive about how I could create a site specific performance that was both fresh and captivating. It has been a vastly different creative process to anything I have ever worked on before and, at times, it has been incredibly frustrating but now that our performance has been and gone, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to learn a new art form and study some great creative people along the way.

The overall message our group sought to reflect in our performance was ‘noticing the unnoticed’, which our group constantly embraced throughout the creative process. Georges Perec is a novelist who heavily communicates this through his book An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris (Perec, 1982) in which he, while sat in a public street, states everything that captures his attention, whether it be big or small. Our group read Perec’s book very early on in the process and admired how simple of an action it is to point out the seemingly insignificant details. While reading about and imagining the “… man shaken, but not yet ravaged, by tics…” (Perec, 1982, 19), it instils a sense of curiosity and appreciation for the secret lives being led around you. This effect on the audience was something our group was interested in recreating with our own performance, having felt the effect of it ourselves.

John Smith’s Girl Chewing Gum (Smith, 1976) is another piece of art that similarly identifies the overlooked elements of a busy street yet also incorporated a juxtaposition between the urban street and country field. The way in which Smith makes the audience feel an appreciation for the peacefulness of the country after listening to a busy high street inspired our group to include video into our piece with a seemingly mismatched piece of audio layered over it. For example, the use of Anton Bruckner’s ‘Symphony No. 2’ played over a gentle walk down the Lincoln high street seems slightly amusing for the first few seconds but after a time the video and audio begin to form a connection and guide the audience into discovering a sense of brilliance about the high street.

Our final performance took place in Churchill’s Café on the high street. This café served as a place for the audience members to experience a journey down the high street in a comfortable and calm environment. Assigning Churchill’s as our performance location allowed our group to take a sense of ownership over our performance as this café served as a meeting point for our group to discuss creative ideas throughout the process. We were able to reserve a single seated table which our audience members could book out for half an hour to experience our final creation, a video tour, individually. This enabled the audience members to make their own discoveries on the high street separate from any outside influences.

Analysis of Process

During the second week of our Site Specific module, Steve introduced us to Carl Lavery and his 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities (Lavery, 2005). It was these instructions that served as a foundation for our final performance. As we began to write our own instructions for the high street, I suggested we attempt to personify the buildings by giving each one a particular sound that we think that building would make. This sound would reflect what kind of personality the building has and in turn we would bring the high street alive. In the third week, we furthered this process by assigning even larger profiles to the buildings including job, marital status and my personal favourite, health. Here is an example of two buildings that had completely opposite profiles:

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While we did not go on to use these profiles in our final performance or even take them past week third week, it was these experiments that led us to start looking closer at the buildings along the high street. We began to photograph the buildings closer, picking out insignificant elements that are so often overlooked. These ranged from something as small as a crack in the wall, to something as large as a section of new bricks where a window once was.

John Smith’s Girl Chewing Gum (Smith, 1976) was something that our group greatly admired for its ability to entertain, intrigue and confuse the audience simultaneously. It is clear to see the impact he had throughout our creative process as he ‘directs’ the most insignificant actions and in turn magnifies the most intricate details of this street. The juxtaposition of the sound of the field over the video of the street was also a creative element that we found gave a new wave of creative energy to the piece by mixing an urban setting with the sounds of the country. This is reflected in our own final performance as we have the busy yet anti-climactic Lincoln high street against the audio of a grand symphony.

When trying to think how we could further our idea, particularly the format of our performance and how we were going to deliver it to the audience, we started to look at artists such as Marcia Farquhar. Her creation of a live art tour appealed to us because it seemed like such a simple idea from an audience point of view yet you were able to tell the amount of work that had gone on behind the scenes. Blast Theory are another group of artists who influenced our work with the way in which they utilise technology. Their use of mobile phones in A Machine to See With (2010) subverted the audience member’s everyday life by utilising an object they are completely familiar with and turning it into a novel means to convey their narrative. This use of technology was something our group wished to incorporate into our own performance because it is such a modern element. We felt that if we were to create a tour of the Lincoln high street which the audience members knew so well, we would rather them experience it in an unfamiliar way in order to make the high street a place of exploration for them again. In the same week, a member of our group stated how easy it was to make your own QR codes online and scan them using a downloadable app on a smartphone. We were able to create individual QR codes which, when scanned with their smartphone, linked the user to the URL which we assigned to that code. The use of QR codes as a means to deliver content now enabled us to step away from being physically in the piece, just as Blast Theory are physically absent in A Machine to See With (2010) and the audience could feel like the whole experience and interactions were just between them and the locations.

Being set on the idea of creating a tour delivered through QR codes, we set about the high street in search of different locations that we felt had certain effects on people, such as passing under the Stonebow arch, yet still had elements about it that were often overlooked. We managed to gather four locations for our tour to start with, they were:

  • The Stonebow arch
  • Peter’s Passage
  • Opposite High Bridge café
  • The car park behind British Heart Foundation

As we enjoyed the use of audio in Girl Chewing Gum (Smith, 1976), we came to the decision that our QR codes would link the audience members to an audio track that revolved around that particular location. Instead of having us ‘direct’ the location as Smith does, we proceeded to interview members of the public who were passing near, or through, our locations. We designed these questions in order to get appropriate responses from the public that we could then overlay together. Questions such as what is the most insignificant thing about this place and if something significant were to happen to you here, what would it be? By only using their responses to the questions, we hoped to create a short audio track which would confuse the listeners as to what the significance of these words meant while still encouraging them to make connections with the space. I specifically wanted to ask the public that ‘If this building could make a noise, what would it be?’ as it related back to our initial experiments in Site Specific. This also proved useful for our audio tracks as we were able to elongate the noises underneath the other responses to give it almost a musical aspect.

We now began to collect ‘artefacts’ from the locations that we could possibly include into our audio tracks. The artefacts consisted of Dames Don’t Care, a book by Peter Cheyney, hand-written instructions on how to drive a car and Anton Bruckner’s ‘Symphony No. 2’. Although we knew these items would become greatly beneficial in our attempt to channel the energy of these locations, we were not yet certain of how to incorporate them.

Just before we were due to showcase our creations to the rest of the group, we designed this map that would lead our audience members around the tour:

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This was still in the very early stages of development and so we only included two locations on the map. However, we hoped that by splitting the rest of the group up into two and sending them off separately, it would be clear that we wanted our final audience to explore the map by themselves and experience our performance as an individual. At the end of our performance, we found it difficult to properly gather constructive critisism as, even though the group were split into two, there was still about 8 members in each group and so they were not able to experience our performance the way we would have hoped. As you can see in this video, most of them are paired together:

After numerous discussions on how we could bridge the gap between each location on the map, we started to look at works by Janet Cardiff, most specifically her Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012). Including video was not something we had taken into account until now and so the next two weeks saw our performance change rapidly. We experimented by creating our own videos similar to Cardiff and while we knew we would not necessarily be using these videos in our tour, it had a largely positive impact on us as creators. We now knew that a visual aspect in our performance would be key in portraying the high street in a way the audience had never seen before. The following week, we came away from a meeting with Conan with some great feedback and a push in the right (albeit different) direction.

Conan suggested we film one 20-minute video tour down the high street and that we have our audience members watch this video in a comfortable environment rather than having to wander around outside on public paths. Churchill’s Café street had been a place of discussion for our group throughout the previous weeks and so it seemed only fitting to have our tour start and end there. Our group was able to take advantage of the great equipment Josh’s father had in order to keep the video looking professional. We managed to film from Churchill’s all the way down to the car park behind the British Heart Foundation and back again using a steady-cam. Over this video, we included sounds we had recorded along the high street that had been cleverly warped to sound abnormal so the audience were able to experience the everyday sounds of the high street on a whole new level of creativity. This when our ‘artefacts’ from earlier on in the process showed their true worth. We recorded ourselves speaking extracts from the book and the car instructions and then warped them to instil a sense of uneasiness into the listeners, a feeling the audience would not usually feel when walking down their city’s high street. The symphony was, in my eyes, a blessing for our piece. The grandeur of the orchestra against our typical high street echoed our early inspirations from Girl Chewing Gum (Smith, 1976).

After our piece was created, we began to book individual time slots for audience members to experience our video in the comfort yet isolation of a single seated table in a quiet café. We arranged a Samsung tablet to be left on the table with the video on and some headphones with this information sheet:

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Performance Evaluation

Our final performance took place on Friday 6th May and continued from 10:30am to 4:00pm. Our group arrived at Churchill’s café just after 9am in order to have a quick informal briefing with the waitresses and set up the video on Jay’s tablet. All members of the group then sat quietly on the first floor of the café so we were out of sight of the audience members and ordered a full English breakfast, a very good start to performance day.

Over the course of the day, there were six audience members that came and viewed our video tour. We were all a little disheartened by the lack of people who came to view our performance although just six audience members still took up 3 hours of the day so we were not able to have more than 4 or 5 other people anyway. I personally think the lack of viewers was because it was an individual performance that lasted half an hour and audience members tend to be more comfortable approaching a performance with a partner or in a group. Our performance was not necessarily experienced by our examiners exactly as we had hoped due to timing issues. Steve and Conan were scheduled to mark other Site Specific performances throughout the day and so originally gave a half an hour slot to preview our performance. With our individual slots being half an hour long, it would have taken an hour for both Conan and Steve to experience our performance as we wished. Due to their schedule, Conan had to view the 20-minute video then immediately wait for Steve in the cafe as he proceeded to watch the video rather than leaving the café entirely after a few more minutes. While this was not a major set-back for us and we had to take into account the other performances on that day, it was not entirely how we wanted the examiners to experience our performance.

An element to our final performance that we were not able to anticipate until performance day was the sounds and ambience of the café breaking through the headphones and into our audience’s ears while watching the video. We created the audio assuming that these would be the only sounds the audience would hear but after testing it on ourselves with the noise of the café, it actually enhanced the experience. The café also touched on the other senses of audience members. For example, when the video reaches a busy road and you expect to smell car fuel, you instead smell coffee beans and toast. While we initially wanted the audience to be taken away and transported through the video tour, these elements brought a new sense of authenticity to our whole performance.

If I were to create this performance again, I would perhaps think of a way audience members could enter the performance in a group yet still view the video individually as I feel the isolation from other people was key to the experience. Overall, while I struggled to come to terms with creating a performance in a non-traditional venue, my research and experiments throughout the creative process has enriched my understanding of Site Specific and the influence it can have on an audience.

Works Cited

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25 (3) 229-238.

Perec, G. (1982) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Cambridge: Wakefield Press.

Smith, J. (dir.) (1976) Girl Chewing Gum. [film] London: Royal College of Art.

Blast Theory. (2010) A Machine to See With. [performance art] Canada: Banff New Media Institute.

Cardiff, J and Miller, G. (2012) Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. [performance art] Germany: Kassel Train Station.

Posted on No Comments on Final Blog Submission: Record(ing) – Jay Petherick

Final Blog Submission: Record(ing) – Jay Petherick

Framing Statement:

At 10.30am on Friday 6th May, the first audience member came along to Churchill’s Café on Lincoln high street, to experience the individual site specific performance of ‘Record(ing)’. The audience member arrived at the time they had previously been given having expressed an interest in viewing the performance. Half hour slots were allocated throughout the day via a private Facebook event that was made by myself and the other creators of the piece; Simon Panayi, Samantha Miles and Josh Pearson. The performance itself took the form of an audio and visual tour that gave the audience an experience of Lincoln’s high-street. The audience member was taken on a journey from inside the café, to a car park further down the high street and then back again. However, this wasn’t done by asking the audience member to physically travel this route, but instead the performance took place from within the café as the viewer sat and watched the journey via an electronic tablet. Upon arrival, the participator would enter Churchill’s and wait to be greeted by the waiter/waitress. When acknowledged, the audience member would say “I am here to see Record”. They would then be shown to a reserved table within the café, upon which they would find a tablet, wireless headphones and a sheet of instructions explaining what they are to do. From that point the audience member would sit and follow the instructions that would eventually lead them to watch the 19-minute performance whilst enjoying a warm drink or plate of hot food, should they have chosen to order something.

Our performance had two main goals behind its contextual meaning. Firstly, to encourage the audience to ‘notice the un-noticed’ as they voyaged the high-street. We felt that we often make similar journeys to travel to and from particular destinations. But, we rarely notice minute details or stray from the usual path in order to experience certain aspects we wouldn’t usually come across. And as Govan say’s “in this period of globalisation and cyber space, theatre practitioners are interested in rethinking how people relate to land-scape and place” (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2007, 136) and this was exactly what we wanted to do. We also wanted to give the seemingly insignificant aspects of the highs-street, significance. Whether this be objects that were found on journeys of the high-street, parts of buildings that appear to have no meaning, or places that seem to serve no purpose and look un-maintained. In doing this we hoped to change people’s perceptions of everyday occurrences and journeys. We hoped to encourage them to realise that whilst on first glance something may appear boring and mundane, all of these aspects have potential for meaning and relevance to the place they are found or experienced in.  We wanted them to appreciate that perhaps these features give us a clue to the sites past or give us information about the sort of people that have passed through the location. You just have to take the time to analyse or explore them.

My biggest influence during this process was Georges Perec and his site specific work ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’. He spent 3 days sat in a café, sitting, observing and capturing the outside world using only a pen and paper. His intentions were to point out “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds”. (Perec and Lowenthal, 2010, 3) He described his findings as the ‘infraordinary’. It was because of this personal fascination of his work and the idea of the ‘infraordinary’, which guided us in the right direction to reach our final performance. After researching his work in detail, we began thinking about how we might create a similar style of performance that instead investigates Lincoln’s high-street.

Analysis of Process:

We began by investigating the high street using Carl Lavery’s instructional method. This technique used a specific question such as “Take photographs of ten buildings in the city that fill you with inconsolable sadness” (Lavery, 2005, 233) in order to explore the city in a new way, or experience a part of it you have never been to before. (Lavery, 2005, 233) We carried out this instruction and photographed buildings that made us feel this way.

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Saddening Buildings(Miles, 2016)
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Saddening Buildings (Miles, 2016)

This was a big step for us as a group, as up until this point we had struggled to really get on board with site specific performance. However, after getting over the initial silliness of the experience, we began to think seriously about why these buildings made us feel this way and analyse them in much more detail. This led onto our next stepping stone as we began to consider how the buildings might react if they were to be given human qualities. In particular, we experimented with what a building might do if it was to make an impulsive sound or noise to show how it was feeling.  Furthermore, I suggested that we select particular visual features of the buildings that we found insignificant and discuss why. I explained the concept of Georges Perec’s work ‘An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris’ and suggested we include the topic of ‘noticing the un-noticed’ as theme/stimulus for our piece. We agreed that it would be interesting to try and change people’s perception of a place they probably frequent regularly. Or, at least highlight elements they had never experienced before.

Having photographed the buildings in previous weeks, we had since developed on this by also photographing what we considered insignificant aspects of the buildings.  Our next step involved us contemplating how we might go about turning these ideas into a performance. We had recently been introduced to the site specific work of Marcia Farquhar and her live art tour at the Festival of Britain which took place on the South Bank. I enjoyed her work, whist others in the group did not. However, we agreed that weren’t so interested in the topics of her tour, which included ideas of history and memories. But more so, in the inspiration she had given us to create a tour of the high street and as Marcia puts it “layering… and how places do sort of resonate with what has happened”.  (REcreativeUK, 2012)

 

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Insignificant Features (Miles, 2016)
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Insignificant Features (Miles, 2016)

 

This idea of layering, led us to think about creating an audio tour that would give the audience a personified view and experience of different buildings or places that the tour took them to. By literally layering audio, we knew we could show the complexity of each buildings characteristics, its’s insignificant features, how it may be feeling through resonating sounds and what might have happened in or to this building in the past. Therefore, fulfilling the concept of changing people’s perceptions of the high-street by encouraging them to ‘notice the un-noticed’ and appreciate the seemingly less important features.

For a while we became stuck, we couldn’t figure out an innovative way to run the tour. Eventually, we stumbled onto the topic of QR codes. We discussed them as a means of the audience logistically accessing our audio, which we would place independently at each of our locations. And so, we set about trialling this over the course of feedback week.

Having successfully tested the idea at two of our locations; the archway and the car park, we reflected heavily upon what worked and what didn’t. The tour was designed to be an independent exploration of the high-street. For this reason we gave the audience a map and placed a QR code at each of these locations which gave the audience clues as to where they had to go. They could then choose the route they took to get the locations. Once they had arrived at the destination on the map, the audience had to find the QR code that was located somewhere in the area. Once they found it they had to scan it using the pre-downloaded app which we had asked them to install before trailing our piece.  They would then listen to around 2 minutes of carefully layered and edited audio that expressed the location.

We carefully evaluated the success of this tour and sought to improve it. For me, there were several flaws that needed drastic development. Firstly, I noticed that many of the audience struggled to find the QR code after arriving at the destination. In fact, the majority of them were only successful in doing so because they saw others scanning it. Secondly, no one seemed to realise that they could also scan the QR codes on the map. As well as showing the audience where they had to go, these were also a link to another audio file which included the resonating sound of the location. This was my idea as I felt it offered an insight to the location before the audience arrived there. Thirdly, I noted that whilst the audience walked to and from the destinations they didn’t appear to be engaging with the city around them. Instead they just continued checking their phones or talking with those around them. This didn’t meet the aims of our piece. Finally, I received feedback from some audience members who said that whilst the content of the audio was very interesting, it was hard to know what features were being discussed. Consequently, some audience members didn’t end up noticing the aspects they should, as they didn’t know what to focus on. This meant our current piece didn’t successfully achieve the goals of our idea.

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QR Code Tour (Petherick, 2016)
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QR Code Map (Petherick, 2016)

After considering our feedback, we attempted to re-fresh our ideas towards the logistics of the tour, by going back to the drawing board and each researching more site specific practitioners in detail. Simon suggested we take a look at the site specific work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. They created a video experience where “overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in the viewer’s brain”. (Cardiff Miller, 2012) The viewer watches a video, of another video that is displayed on an iPhone in front of them. Both videos are focused on the same spot in Anhalter Bahnhof, a former railway terminus in Berlin. However, both show different things within them as time has clearly elapsed since the first recording was shot. In addition, they choose to include performers within the piece to add elements of surprise and abnormality. For example, a ballerina enters the shot and begins performing a ballet sequence. This is visually stimulating as you generally wouldn’t expect to see this at a train station. As the experience progresses “the real sounds mix with the recorded adding another level of confusion as to what is real and what is fiction”. (Cardiff Miller, 2012) We loved the concept of incorporating video footage into our piece, as we knew it would give us the opportunity to further alter the viewers experience of the high-street. Just as Cardiff did. We began experimenting in the style of her work.

Having gained an immense amount of knowledge over the past several weeks and experimented with different ideas of site specific work. It was now time to begin to finalise our ideas and create our end product. Firstly, we discussed exactly what we wanted to achieve with the tour’s audio. We agreed that it would be made up of all the artefacts that we had gathered from our key location, the car park. We chose this site because of our own fascination and curiosity towards it, as well as being somewhere none of us had ever noticed despite travelling the high-street many times. We wanted to share this location with our viewers. Some of the materials we found at this location included; the book ‘Dames Don’t Car’, the Vinyl ‘Symphony Number 2’ and a set of instructions outlining how to operate a car. We felt these items gave us plenty of interesting information to create an audio track that gave the audience an experience of the site. However, we agreed that we would edit and manipulate our recordings in order to generate an ‘infraordinary’ experience. It also acted as a way of presenting the artefacts that we had specifically ‘noticed’. We wanted use the audio to show them to our audience as they would have probably usually gone un-noticed.

In terms of the video, we came to the conclusion that we would record a single journey that began at Churchill’s café. We chose Churchill’s as the location for our performance as it seemed appropriate having discussed so much of our devising process there. The recording would then travel all the way down the high-street, ending up at the car park and the returning back up to Churchill’s where it began. This was important, as it would give the audience an opportunity to explore the video and notice aspects of the high-street they hadn’t previously before. Whilst the audio accompaniment would not only affect the mood, but create a feeling they may not get on the usual journey of the high-street. Furthermore, we used the audio to highlight moments within the video. By fitting the timing of the two together, the sounds drew the audience’s attention to the movement.The only thing we specifically didn’t want in our tour was staged performers. Whilst Farquhar and Cardiff purposely added them in, we felt it would draw the audience away from noticing features of the high-street. Hence, during the performance day we remained out of sight upstairs in the café.

An Example of Our  Visual Footage (Petherick, 2016)

Evaluation:

Miwon Kwon suggests that the site itself offers “a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements: length, depth, height, texture”. (Kwon, 1997, 85) Our piece offered the opportunity to explore these areas of the high-street and discover it as a site.

Our final performance was an individual experience that one audience member viewed at a time. We hoped that they would find the experience both unique in its approach to a tour of the high-street, as they remained inside the comfort of Churchill’s café. But also, offering a fresh, insightful view of it, that they probably haven’t experienced or considered before. Once seated, prepared with the tablet in hand, headphones placed comfortably on head and video started. The audience would witness the view of Churchill’s that they would currently see in front of them, but through the screen of the tablet. Giving them a ‘point of view’ shot’. The video then continued by rising and leaving the café, giving them the impression that it is in fact them leaving Churchill’s and continuing on the journey down the high-street. Whilst travelling they would have heard music, recorded dialogue and sounds of the landscape accompanying the video. However, it had been edited and manipulated to alter the viewers experience and give them an original and new understanding of the high-street.

I feel that the strongest aspect to our performance was the incorporation and portrayal of the materials, artefacts and sounds that we had gathered during the creative process. These were combined using the audio and visuals in such a way that challenged the audience’s usual perception of the high-street. For example, we recorded the sound of the alarm warning pedestrians that the crossings will be coming down shortly due to the presence of a train. We then drastically slowed the speed the sound was played, which gave a resulting effect similar sound of turning waves. We then chose to play this sound as the video crossed the road. Whilst crossing the road is usually a process that requires a lot of concentration and awareness, the sound of waves changed my impression of this and made me feel much calmer and relaxed. Successfully altering my perception of the high-street at this point and what I associate with the journey.

Having evaluated the outcome of our performance and assessed whether it successfully does what we intended it to do. There is one particular aspect I would change. I would have chosen to specifically highlight features of the high-street I deemed insignificant by zooming in and focusing on them. Or, by including some form of sign that points out the insignificant details to the viewer. Whilst I feel our final performance gave the audience the opportunity to notice the ‘un-noticed’ themselves, by actively scanning the footage. I feel it may have been more successful had we offered them specific examples throughout the tour.

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The Starting View (Petherick, 2016)
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A View of the High-Street (Petherick, 2016)

 

 

Bibliography

Cardiff Miller (2012) Alter Bahnhof Video Walk. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkQE7m31Pw [Accessed 09 May 2016]

Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington, K. (2007). Making a performance. London: Routledge.

Kwon, M. (1997). One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity. October, 80, p.85.

Lavery, C. (2005). Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25(3), pp.229-238.

Perec, G. and Lowenthal, M. (2010). An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Wakefield Press.

REcreativeUK (2012) Marcia Farquhar – A live art tour. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 09 May 2016]