Day: February 17, 2016

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].