Month: February 2016

From our prior experiments over the last few weeks, myself and my group decided that the place in which we would create and perform our piece of site specific work would be the High Bridge section of the high street. We studied the context and the history of our site by researching the history of it. From sheer observation it can be argued that the High Street itself can be described as being a non-place. It is transitory,  and it’s use is for easier access to specific destinations i.e: Home or shops for either work or shopping.

From researching the history of the High Bridge it became clear to us that the site is more signifcant then we thought before. There was once a chapel situated on the bridge, built and dedicated to St Thomas Beckett. It was taken down during the period of the reformation. What was also interesting is that a stature or ‘obelisk’ as it is generally referred to was built in place of the chapel when it was taken down in 1762/3. The obelisk was present on the bridge and later moved due to fears of it’s weight on the bridge.

 

Here is a picture of the obelisk now in St Marks Shopping Centre. It was removed from the High Bridge in 1939 and rebuilt here in 1996. This is significant to us as the High Bridge represents re-construction and travel. The bridge itself was refurbished with stone instead of wood for extra stability, and as stated there is a pattern of refurbishment: A chapel was built in dedication and taken down. An obelisk was built in place of that chapel and subsequently taken down and moved and now on the high bridge there is nothing there apart from an old Tudor coffee shop and a transitory place for people to walk up and down almost ‘zombie-like’ as described by a man that we interviewed on the High Street as part of one of our experiments. We will be using the obelisk and the history behind it for our work. Nick Kaye describes site-specific work as articulative and it “define[‘s] itself through properties, qualities or meaning produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position ir occupies” (Kaye, 2000, 1). From this it can be said that our “object” is the obelisk itself and we are exploring what it means. The obelisk was used as a well to supply water to the population of lincoln and this year it is the 20th anniversary of when it was rebuilt, and naturally this renders the object and the site with a level of historical significance.

We moved ahead from our prior experiments to exploring the high street’s mode of response through signs to specfically being based on the High Bridge. We wanted to portray this idea of community. Community has a broad context but the meaning which underpins our understanding of the word, in context to our performance is this from the Oxford English Dictionary:

 

“The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.”

 

The people along the high street do not represent a community. There is hardly any communication, no interaction just movement. It follows it’s own tacit agreements in the sense that you keep on moving. For instance, if you’re talking you move and walk and you never really stop and take notice of anything for too long. This provided the basis for our experiments in asking direct questions through the use of signs. We took inspiration from Forced Entertainment’s Nights In This City whom of which we have already decided to use as one of our influences for our work. In Nights In This City they gave guided tours with fictionalised questions and statements along Sheffield and Rotterdam respectively. that posed “questions which implied generic narratives or events linked to dramatic themes: ‘If you had killed someone and had to dump the body where would you take it?'” (Kaye, 2000, 9).  They began to write over the city, to give it a more interesting context. Tim Etchells in Certain Fragmennts Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment suggests that the city “is both a map of space and a map of states of mind” (Etchells, 1999, 77). We wanted to see the reactions to these states of mind, and to a degree begin to map out the space of the high street and what the high street means through the community.

Firstly, I held up a sign saying “What would the high street be like in the future?” We got responses such as tired, knackered and the idea that the history and the ‘vibe’ of lincoln has began to dissipate and arguably has already dissipated. One man suggested that that the historical is merging with the corporate. That the buildings are becoming chain businesses and independence in business within Lincoln is faltering. This of course coincides with reconstruction as once something is out of use it is moved or made into something new. From reflection we did not get much attention from a simple and arguably mundane question. So we decided to ask something out of the ordinary:

“If Aliens came to Lincoln where would they land?”

This question met with a lot of varied response, whilst I was stood central to the oncoming traffic of people, Jack had began to make observations of what people’s reactions to me were and what they were saying.

                                                                                                                                                             ( Photo credit: Jason Lodge)

In the image, my ‘costume’ arguably gives off a certain vibe, this was intentional. The responses to the question were varied. More often than not people saw me as being weird, one woman thought I was part of a cult. Someone took a selfie, when I held the sign high above my head just to experiment with the proxemics of where the sign was I got more response and more people stared. What was interesting was that as soon as the sign went down for when I spoke to people, the crowd just walked on by oblivious to the event. From this experiment alone we were able to draft up the most interesting responses from people along the street.

Possible locations for aliens to land:
– “High Street”
– “tell them to fuck off”
– “that house”
– “Dover”
– “top of the hill”
– “brayford”
– “castle” x2
– “cathedral” x3
– “big tesco car park”
– “Pavs”
– “horse field”
– “somewhere around here”
– “avoid Lincoln”

Although this was an experiment it can be said that a basis of community was being created here, people were stopping contributing to the event that we had created. This was not just a verbal communication between people but a contribution of people actually taking time out of their transitory state of mind to notice the sign and the event.

Reference List:

Etchells, T. (1999)  Certain Fragmennts Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. Abingdon: Routledge.

 Kaye, N. (2000) site-specific art performance,place and documentation. Oxon: Routledge.

The last week we as a group finalised our site location. The location of the high bridge, which is located on the centre of a high street, which could be referred to as a non-place. After dwelling into the history of the site, we learnt a lot about the site, such as the bridge once held a church, which was built in honour of Tomas Beckett. So this site has holy history, after the church as removed a statue placed, called the Obelisk. This statue was removed off the high bridge during the 1930’s due to fears that the high bridge structure could not maintain the weight of the Obelisk; in 1996 the structure was rebuilt lower down the high street.

Having this history on our site, has opened a lot of options for our group piece, the idea of a piece around the Obelisk. The history of the structure once was a source of water for the locals of Lincoln. As it has been 20 years since the rebuilding of the Obelisk, and due to it begin a source of water, our groups plan is to rebuild the structure to as closely as possible to the actually size, width and depth but out of water bottles. We would also right people’s answers on the water bottles of random questions that could be stuck to each of the water bottles. This could nicely immerse the audience in the performance, as well as bringing in forced entertainment elements, as we will be gathering these weird and wild answers from the public. In addition, we want people to be involved in the overall performance, by asking them to help us to build the structure or knock it down or anything in between. Now we need to move further with our answers from the public and now we need to look into practitioners that can aid our performance.

 

 

Often having lots of ideas can be a good thing to have and can lead to vast amounts of work being created. However, on reflection there always seems to be a hidden idea or a hidden underlining theme which links all those initial ideas together. As a group we can came up with a multitude of ideas which on reflection could all be substantial as ideas for performance in the Site of the high street, however, in analysing the through-line of these ideas it was evident that words, the personal and interaction were the principals which anchored these ideas. What I found excting about this process was that by identifying these aspects it led us as a group to create a brand new idea that we were all ready to jump at and experiment with.

We knew that certain elements of this idea had been performed before in a prior year such as to ask for free hugs and hi fives in the high street, but we still wanted to use this method as an experiment in order to gauge how participatory our audience on the high street could be. We started off at the bridge area of the high street (where we believed to be the busiest part). However, in order to prove this, we moved the experiment after some time further up the high street, beyond the arch into the more rich district of Lincoln. The engagement of people on that part of the high street proved to be less so than people that were passing by the bridge. So in essence, through this experiment we found our site and to a degree saw that a participatory performance in that space on the high street could in fact work.

Our idea that we experimented with on the high street was to use paper signs that invited the audience to interact with his. Our starting points was when I stood in the middle of the high street holding a sign in front of me that I had no idea what was written on it. I personally thought this was particularly interesting as all I could really judge on the signs nature was the audience’s reactions as they passed by. Some were smiling and laughed, others looked fairly confused and it was hard to gauge what kind of statement or question was written on the piece of paper that I was holding.

In the second session of Site Specific Performance, we began to think about what could classify as performance.  We looked at the work of Marcia Farquhar, a site specific practitioner who in her Live Art Tour explores and engages with the history of the festival of Britain.  Her work attempts to represent history through a tour which features both planned instances of performance and what we can refer to as being accidents. For instance, it is unclear whether the busker playing Starman was a part of the performance but it is an element which arguably enhances the atmosphere. Nick Kaye for instance in site-specific art performance, place and documentation suggests that “the urban landscape offers a profusion and complexity of signs and spaces where the condition of recepton… might be countered by an excess of information” (Kaye, 2000, 33). Kaye argues that a city or a more urban space contains a lot more information and traffic compared to that of a gallery; which we might asscociate with emptiness. This information and “profusion” of signs and spaces blurs into site specific performance and would certainly do so  for when we perform on the Lincoln high street.

In further exploring how performance could be made in the city we as a class took influence from Carl Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities. Lavery in the article lists multiple ways in which performance can be created. Experiments such as to  “take a video camera into the city and follow a dog or a cat for as long as you can. Make a film out of this” (Lavery, 2005, 236), was something that led us as a group to develop an instruction which was to follow an animal wherever it went and upon seeing another animal, follow that. We found that the more simple the instruction was the more easier it was to perform. To walk into a shop for instance, and ask for something that they wouldn’t normally sell was interesting as arguably it subverted the norm. In today’s society we associate particular brands with selling specific styles of merchandise, and by going into paperchase and asking for a hot-cross bun rightfully caused a reaction of confusion from the woman at the till. Similarly, asking for directions to a place that wasn’t real was bother interesting and entertaining. We went into both Office and Game and asked where the places Lindon and the Shady Hut were and the cashiers although not knowing what we were talking about still went to ask their supervisor officials to see if they knew.

 

Citations:

Kaye, N. (2000) site-specific art performance,place and documentation. Oxon: Routledge.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 35/3/229-238.

REcreativeUK. (2012) Marcia Farquhar – A live art tour [online video] Availiable from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 7 February 2016].