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.
“Cornhill in Lincoln’s city centre, the scene of huge Suffragette rallies a hundred years ago. The Speakers’ Corner Committee subsequently decided to create its Speakers’ Corner on the High Street part of Cornhill.”
(Speakers’ Corner Trust, undated)
Speaker’s Corner is a corner of the high street which has been developed into an area that people can go to demonstrate, protest, and exercise freedom of speech. The Speaker’s Corner is “a joint project between the University of Lincoln’s Take Part programme and the Speaker’s Corner Trust” (BBC, 2010), sited “close to where a suffragette demonstration took place nearly a century ago” (BBC, 2010). Speaker’s Corner was opened by former Labour politician Tony Benn, followed by students from the university “who were among the first people to debate at the site” (BBC, 2010).
“This will remind people that we have the right to speak.”
(This is Lincolnshire, 2010)
This has sparked ideas such as recreating a Suffragette rally, but perhaps rather than using signs such as ‘votes for women’, focusing on more contemporary issues that still oppress women today. Setting this contemporary demonstration in a place with such rich history of similar themes will echo the ghosts of those women there before us.
On a similar note, rather than holding a physical protest in the style of Suffragette rallies, a more peaceful, if not slightly haunting method of demonstrating would be to use silence – the exact opposite of the loud, sometimes violent protests of times gone by. Not only would this be safer in terms of our safety and also the publics, but it would also serve as a comment that women are still very much silenced in many aspects of society; a Suffragette rally without the chaos would be unnerving. A more metaphorical approach through different aspects of performance (i.e. the body, visual work such as video, etc) would serve us well.
Artists/work that have inspired me:
“Pioneer of multimedia environments Aldo Tambellini put on collaborative performances such as 1965’s BLACK ZERO,which incorporated live performance, poetry and projection and had strong revolutionary and social change messages, commenting on the racial situation in America. BLACK ZERO is the cry from the oppressed creative man. There is an injustice done to man which is not forgivable.”
(Beaven, 2012)
“Other artists associated with Fluxus (as Ono was) often took their actions into the street, aiming to break down the barriers between art and life, and bring the revolution to the everyday. In Prague, Milan Knížák and others in the AKTUAL group were often stopped by the police as they built environments or performed personal and participative acts in the streets of Prague, such as his Demonstration for One 1964. “
(Beaven, 2012)
“French students were exposed to and took on anti-establishment Situationist ideas such as Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, which argued (the Marxist idea) that consumer society had reduced everything from direct experiences to mere appearances, and that the avant-garde and mainstream life should be brought together. Students in Paris went on strike, leading to confrontations with the French police and street battles in the Latin Quarter, and then a general strike across universities and industry. Painted graffiti appeared around Paris, with slogans such as‘Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n’as pas besoin de lui’ (The boss needs you, you don’t need him) ‘Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho’ (I am a Marxist, of the Groucho tendency) and famously, ‘Sous les paves, la plage!’ (Under the pavement, the beach!) came from Situationist ideas of play and freedom.”
(Beaven, 2012)
THIS GAVE ME AN IDEA FOR AN AESTHETIC OF A PERFORMANCE:
Bickerdike, 2016
I created this rough sketch to demonstrate my aesthetic ideas inspired by Debord’s Society of Spectacle. The text on the banner would be painted on in red (connotations: blood, danger, lust, Communist red) and the balloons would be coated in newspaper clippings (adverts/tabloid headlines to symbolise consumption and the public desires under Capitalism) – the balloons themselves, the dress and the stuffed teddy bear present the main figure in the picture to be childlike, young and innocent (a description of humanity under the Capitalist structure/the harmful effects of consumerism on the youth – children evoke emotions amongst the public – ‘what if it happened to my child?’ – presents Capitalism to be HARMFUL.
Could possibly work in the Cornhill –
“Female artists also focused on their lived experience, making public those parts of a woman’s life that had been seen as taking place behind closed doors. Judy Chicago taught on the germinal feminist programme at the California Institute of the Arts, along with painter Miriam Schapiro. Rejecting both her maiden name and that she had taken on her marriage, she changed her name to Judy Chicago in 1971, signalling her move into a feminist art practice, and a rejection of male domination. The influential installation Womanhouse1972 took place throughout a house in Los Angeles, and showed the work of 26 students as well as Chicago and Shapiro, including Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom(a bathroom with a bin overflowing with bloody tampons) and a series of performances exploring the lives, activities and roles of women. Chicago’s most well-known work, The Dinner Party 1974–9 came from previous works such as herGreat Ladies series and her realisation of the erasure of female achievements throughout history. The Dinner Partyis a triangular open table set with thirty-nine places, each commemorating an important female historical figure or goddess, resting on a tiled floor inscribed with the names of 999 other important women. The Dinner Party was exhibited in 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of over one million people, amking it an important touchpoint in the history of feminist art.”
(Beavan, 2012)
Works Cited
Beaven, K (2010) Performance Art 101: The Angry Space, politics and activism. [online] Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/performance-art-101-angry-space-politics-and-activism [Accessed 5 February 2016].
BBC (2010) Tony Benn has officially opened Speakers’ Corner [online] Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/lincolnshire/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8872000/8872171.stm [Accessed 5 February 2016].
Speaker’s Corner Trust (undated) Roadtesting the Speaker’s Corner Site at Lincoln’s Cornhill [online] Available from http://www.speakerscornertrust.org/library/videos/roadtesting-the-speakers-corner-site-at-lincolns-cornhill/[Accessed 4 February 2016].
This is Lincolnshire (2010) Speakers Corner given official new home in Lincoln’s High Street [online] Available from http://www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk/Freedom-speech-new-home-Lincoln-High-Street/story-11200935-detail/story.html [Accessed 5 February 2016].
