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.