As part of our second seminar we looked at Carl Lavery’s 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Within this, we were given examples of “exercises or improvisations” (Lavery, 2005) to conduct within a city location to evoke material for creating work. These included:
- “Deliberately get lost in the city.
- Ask a friend to guide you through the city via instructions given on a mobile phone.
- Negotiate the city by bus, car, bike, and on foot and document your impressions.
- Collect lost or abandoned objects in the city streets and try to imagine narratives about them.”
(Lavery, 2005)
From this stimuli we were asked to adapt these or create our own to form set of instructions that we then swapped among the groups and were challenged to follow out on the high street. We created our own instructions such as “follow an animal for 5 minutes, note where it goes and how it moves”, and were given instructions like “go into a shop and ask for something they clearly don’t sell, gauge their reactions”. Primarily, this was the instruction we followed, but we also altered it slightly by going into a shop and asking for directions to a place that doesn’t exist – we found that most people tried to help us by guessing what this place was; a pub, a restaurant, a clothes shop? We created an imaginary place and through misdirection, made people question what they knew to be a fact, that this place didn’t exist.
Works Cited
Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25 (3) 229-236.
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