Posted on No Comments on These Bloody Train Lines: Kai Valentine – Final Blog Submission

These Bloody Train Lines: Kai Valentine – Final Blog Submission

THESE BLOODY TRAIN LINES: KAI VALENTINE – FINAL BLOG SUBMISSION

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Figure 1: a crowd gathering at the train crossing. (Bolingbroke, 2016)

FRAMING STATEMENT

Site Specific Performance

Site specific performance is defined by Pearson as ‘staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world.’ (Pearson, 2010, 7). The performance should link to the site in which you are performing in, and make a connection or create a response that may not be possible if the same piece was performed at another site. The high street was our given site. Even though it was an environment that I visit on a regular basis, I had not taken the time to stop, look around and indulge in my surroundings. On doing so we discovered the site that we wished to base our piece from. The train lines.

‘These Bloody Train Lines’ was a site specific performance, on the 6th May 2016. The tour took place three times at 11am, 11:30am and 2:30pm, lasting approximately 20 minutes in length. The performance involved two actors giving an informal and uninformed guided tour. The tour begins at St Mark’s Square, the site of a former train station, and concludes at the train crossing on the high street. Both sites have a rich history and link between each other, encouraging members of the tour to notice the history, then a comedic song is performed by myself with lyrics composed from a collection of responses of what would make people happy when waiting at the train line. The audience gathered at the crossing are given a lyrics sheet, encouraging engagement. The piece was performed by Francesca Bolingbroke, Christopher Clarkson and I, with accompaniment from guitarist Jordan Makin.

The train line that runs through the centre of Lincoln is a major geographic interest for many visitors. People aren’t exactly queuing up to go visit it, that honour is bestowed to the Cathedral and the Castle up the hill. Yet, the fact it not only through the centre of the high street, but also the University campus, is something that visitors often comment on and are baffled by. What drew me to this particular site was the anthropology behind it. People really don’t enjoy having their day interrupted by the loud signals, flashing lights and agonising waits as 26 carriages (yes I counted) of a freight train crawl past.

The high street is generally a happy place, conversely the misery that surrounds the train line is insurmountable. ‘It causes severe disruption and endless anger amongst residents of the city.’ (Santos, 2013)  If you get stuck there, expect an infuriating wait surrounded by road works, an overdue work-in-progress bridge and other irritated members of the public who have, like you, had their day forced to a halt.

Figure 2: The miserable train crossing. (Valentine 2016)
Figure 2: The miserable train crossing. (Valentine 2016)

Our aim was to make the wait at the train line not the melancholy situation it is at present, but instead a vibrant, happy, and dare I say, fun experience. The audience are an interesting part of our piece. The tour will be intimate, however the audience when at the crossing is unpredictable. Whoever is at the train line have no choice but to be there, if they want to travel to the other side. This creates an interesting dynamic as they could be either entertained and interested, our aim, or they could be irritated and actually more annoyed that we are there. Watching the different ways that people respond is one of the most fascinating parts of the piece.

PROCESS

History

The process towards our piece began with a simple walk up and down the high street. On this walk I took in information on the buildings, the architecture and things that I had never taken the time to notice before, all because I’d usually been pre-occupied or my mind elsewhere. It was on this walk I noticed the ‘British Railways, Lincoln, St Marks’ sign. This inspired the history tour side of our piece.

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Figure 3: Searching through the archives in Lincoln Central Library. (Valentine, 2016)

To develop the idea I spent three days scouring the archives of the Lincolnshire Echo. I discovered articles from when the station closed in 1985, due to the trains being diverted towards Lincoln Central Station, to ease issues with having two rail crossings and a change in how rail tracks could be formatted rendering St Marks Station useless. It would later reopen in 1996 as the shopping centre we see today after Debenhams announced they wanted to open a large store in the centre of Lincoln. This research was the historical stimuli for our piece.

Wrights and Sites influenced the tour aspect of our piece. We aren’t quite doing a ‘misguide’ tour like they do where they let the audience explore the site the entire time on their own, however we are allowing the audience to consider their own relationship with the site, the journey and time they are taking, something which will hopefully stick with them next time they return to the site.

Anthropology

In the second week, we watched John Smith’s ‘Girl Chewing Gum’. This piece inspired us to go out onto the high street and take the same journey that we did the previous week, however instead of concentrating on the architecture, and the history, concentrate on the people.

We embarked to the high street, stopping at different places, watching people, commenting on what they are doing, and describing their actions as if directing them, like Smith. Inspired by ‘Girl Chewing Gum’ when Smith makes the comment ‘Steele’s is situated in an area with a high immigrant population’ (ewwtubes, 2011), at moments in the activity I’d give random facts about the site and our surroundings that had no link to what the people around me were doing.

Smith’s interruptions and mentions of not only facts, but also personal comments like ‘Until recently I thought the jobs on the board were advertised in two languages’ (ewwtubes, 2011), was a groundwork inspiration for the role that Chris would play in the piece. Interrupting Fran’s historical information with quips of own experiences, asking questions and breaking away from the tour to buy chips.

In the early stages we discussed tacit agreements. ‘Tacit refers to something done or made in silence.’ (The Legal Dictionary, 2006). Tacit agreements are the decisions and rules that are made by ourselves, unwritten rules that are understood and not discussed. I’m interested in how these tacit agreements would link to the train lines, and most importantly, how we could break them. Sitting down, watching people, I realized quickly I’d broken my first tacit agreement. People don’t enjoy being watched and were quite wary of any interaction. Some also found it strange that I was sat down, in an area that people normally wanted to leave.

The train line crossing is a non-place. ‘A place that cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Auge, 1995, 77). The crossing isn’t somewhere people go to visit, they may pass through, or even get stuck there, but not on purpose. We aimed to change that by breaking the tacit agreements and understandings of waiting at the barriers. It has become understood that you don’t generally interact with people, as they’ve had their day interrupted and are usually irritated, but what if everybody was feeling the same? What if everybody is just too scared to interact and break these agreements?

By performing there, we’re breaking these tensions, people are encouraged to interact and take this action next time they are here once the performance is over. ‘After the ‘substantive’ notion of site, such site-specific work might even assert a ‘proper’ relationship with its location, claiming an ‘original and fixed position’ with what it is.’ (Kaye, 2000, 1). Once our piece is over, people will remember what they witnessed next time they are stuck at the train lines, and remember how we made them smile.

Misery into Happiness

We wanted to find a way to turn the misery into happiness. To do this this we gathered information by approaching the public with a simple question: ‘What would make you happy?’, only doing so when the barriers were down, at their most irritated. Responses ranged from ‘not to get a warning for being late to work’ to a young gentleman with his girlfriend, who proclaimed ‘her Dad to stop being a prick’.

Adrien Howells’ discusses in Salon Adrienne (2006) that he is ‘bonding with people and having a confessional exchange with them’. I kept this in mind when carrying out this task. For some people, answering this question was all they wanted to do, which we respected. Some people took this opening question and opened up a conversation that let us delve into their personal life and gather more information that gave us a well-rounded view on not only what made them happy, but why it made them happy.

We approached one lady, who struggled to understand English, however when she understood what we were asking her she replied that seeing her family and friends would make her happy. I asked her where they are and she explained that they were in Spain, she had recently moved to the UK and was still settling in. She told us about her children, and how they have felt since the move. In this moment, a simple confessional conversation about how miserable the train lines were had brought back memories of happiness for her, making her smile, whilst standing in a place of misery.

Having the audience co-author our piece was inspired by Howells and Farquhar. Farquhar’s ‘Onwards Tour’ depended on how the audience reacted live during the tour, and any questions that members of the audience ask in the present that cannot be predicted. Farquhar refers to this as ‘edited in the moment’ (2011). We had to prepare for this as due to the informality and intimate nature of the tour, like Onwards Tour, it was likely people would ask further questions about the history you are explaining or question the validity of your facts. Walking some volunteers through an early draft of the tour, whilst stood next to the tribute to the station inside the old entrance, one tour member asked whether where we were standing would have been the old platform, at the time Fran did not know the answer to this, she responded with an educated guess and asked the volunteer their opinion. The audience involvement makes the piece a ‘one occasion, and it is what it is.’ (ReCreative, 2011), with no two tours exactly the same.

Figure 2: Fran and Chris being questioned about the station wall by a tour member.
Figure 4: Fran and Chris being questioned about the station wall by a tour member. (Bolingbroke, 2016)

I believe that comedy is not only the best way to make someone happy, but the best way to keep attention. I was inspired to use comedy in our piece after watching Joshua Sofaer’s ‘What is Live Art?’. Sofaer breaks the social boundaries of a public performance, people aren’t really interested in what he is saying, but due to the comedy, attention is grasped and they may learn something. Humour is a vital part of performance, it draws in attention and makes people interested in engaging with you.

Early Forms to the Final Product

We had the information gathered, we knew that we wanted to give a historical tour and attempt to make the people waiting by the train line happy. Now we just needed to work out how we were going to achieve this.

Forced Entertainment’s Speak Bitterness inspired our initial idea to sit by the train crossing and every time the barriers came down we’d stand up and read out the verbatim responses we had gathered, creating amusement in an awkward, confusing, but entertaining moment. However we felt more audience engagement would be effective.

Care was a massive stimuli for the early planning of our piece. Howells discusses in Salon Adrienne (2006) how he wants to care for people. Our next idea was to have a gift stall by the train line where people would receive gifts at the end of the tour. These included a penny to represent money, cakes, McDonalds, all things people said would make them happy.

Our final idea was putting the responses we had gathered into a song. Taking the list I put them to the tune of Don’t Look Back in Anger by Oasis, this being a well-known tune that people would recognise and be able to sing along to. However we found that this lead people to think of pre-existing memories they had of Oasis, we didn’t want this, we wanted to concentrate on the site. I worked alongside Jordan Makin in re-writing the lyrics to an original tune. We decided the gift stall was not necessary to the final piece, as the song was a gift.

Figure 3: The final song lyrics composed by Kai Valentine (with Jordan Makin)distributed during the performance. (Bolingbroke, 2016)
Figure 5: The final song lyrics composed by Kai Valentine (with Jordan Makin) distributed during the performance.
(Bolingbroke, 2016)

The original plan was that Jordan and I would be at the end of the tour as buskers. Farquhar discusses ‘the idea of things not being known whether they are intentional, whether they were put there by me or not.’ (Re-Creative, 2011). We kept this in mind as the tour members wouldn’t know whether I was part of the tour or there by happy accident. In the final rehearsals we decided it’d be more effective if we joined the tour midway through, after becoming interested.

For the final rehearsal, Fran and Chris presented the tour to Jordan and me. We then performed the song when the barriers lowered. We didn’t envisage the barriers would lower for 20 minutes. Due to the long wait, it became our largest crowd to date. We took into account that if this happened the next day we’d need to keep performing in order to keep them entertained and create our aim of happiness.

  PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Figure 4: The barriers raising after a performance of the song. An audience member reads the lyrics smiling. (Bolingbroke, 2016)
Figure 6: The barriers raising after a performance of the song. An audience member reads the lyrics smiling. (Bolingbroke, 2016)

The way in which to measure this performance’s success is through audience reaction. We were working to two audiences, the small group of tour members, alongside the open audience stuck at the train crossing. Overall both showed signs of enjoyment. I would say the piece was successful.

Figure 5: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop.
Figure 7: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop. (Bolingbroke, 2016)

Tour members recalled that they found the historical nature interesting, they asked questions and informed us they hadn’t noticed the things they’d pointed out before. The audience at the crossing had a range of reactions. Some were enthusiastic to get involved, nodding along to the music, and afterwards threw money, gave a thumbs up and smile, and an old lady gave me a sweet and told me to keep spreading the happiness. Some people however did not enjoy our breaking of tacit agreements and became irritated by our presence, this interested me though as one person on the tour proclaimed that you can’t make everybody happy, which is very true. You can see in the video below that during this particular performance some people are actively trying to avoid engaging with us.

Figure 8: Performance of ‘These Bloody Train Lines’ by Kai Valentine and Jordan Makin. The 8th Performance of the day. (ChezzaXD, 2016)

In trying to keep the tour intimate we only invited a select amount of people, however as some people did not show, we had a maximum of three people on each tour. Next time we would take this into account. At the crossing, throughout performing the song 9 times, we performed to around 200 people. Alongside gathering the responses to the questions and rehearsing before-hand, hundreds of people were involved in the process.

The performance was still constantly changing. With small numbers, and generally the audience knowing I was a part of it, joining the tour mid-way felt acted and fake. In the later performances, Jordan and I sat by the chip shop when the tour came by, we didn’t acknowledge them. The tour would then move on without us, and we would follow on shortly. An interesting dynamic was created, the people who didn’t know previously I was part of the tour remembered spotting us at the chip shop earlier, and it was also a surprise for the people who knew I was part of the cast, as they were expecting me to become involved when they first came across us.

I’d be interested in seeing how the tour dynamic worked with a larger audience. I’d also like to have the performance at the crossing become a durational aspect, staying by the train lines and performing each time they lowered as it was fascinating that each audience responded differently.

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Figure 9: Kai and Jordan tagging on to the back of the tour. (Bolingbroke, 2016).
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Figure 10: Jordan (left) and Kai (right) performing the song for the 4th time that day. (Bolingbroke, 2016)

Working on site specific work has broadened my horizons to what theatre and performance can be and that there are so many different ways in which you can engage with audiences and create reactions that you cannot simulate in a traditional theatre venue. ‘‘Theatre in the mind’ may be made up of a physical memory of all of an individual’s previous performances’ (McLucas, 1993, 3). I have dropped the notions of what I once considered to be the boundaries of theatre. Performance has no limits.

Word Count: 2750

 

Citations and References:

Auge, M. (1995) Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. London: Verso.

ChezzaXD (2016) These Bloody Train Lines. [online video] available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwP0SJsTfeg [accessed 12 May 2016].

Ewwtubes (2011) John Smith: The Girl Chewing Gum 1976. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57hJn-nkKSA [accessed 11 April 2016].

Homotopia Festival (2007) Salon Adrienne. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmUn2ZTzeY0 [accessed 10 April 2016].

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

Legal Dictionary. (2006) Collins Dictionary of Law: Tacit Agreement. [online] Chicago: The Legal Dictionary. Available from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/tacit [accessed 2 May 2016].

McLucas, C. (1993) The Host and the Ghost. NLW: Brith Gof Archive.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

ReCreative (2011) Ideas Factory: Marcia Farquhar. [online video] Available from https://vimeo.com/28359607 [accessed 15 April 2016].

Santos, C. (2013) Lincoln’s past: A tale of two crossings. [online] Lincoln: The Lincolnite. Available from http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2013/02/lincolns-past-a-tale-of-two-crossings/ [accessed 20 April 2016].

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on No Comments on Record(ing): The development of art and an artist.

Record(ing): The development of art and an artist.

Framing Statement:

For our piece, we invited audience members to watch a 20 minute ‘tour’ of the high street starting at Churchills’ café following the high street all the way down until just past the train lines. This however was not an ordinary tour. We created a facebook event where allocated times were posted and it was up to the audience to say which slot they would like. After they did this we then devised a timetable so we knew what times people would be coming in order to allocate ourselves breaks and organise for the tablet we used to be charged. The audience member received instructions over facebook (on the event) as to what to do next. The description of the event was as follows –

“Recording the high street.

A record of the high street.

If you would like to attend this performance please post your preferred allocated time on this page, performances are an individual experience and will occur every thirty minutes starting on the hour.

Please ensure you arrive promptly as late comers may miss their slot.

Upon arrival, enter Churchills and wait to be greeted by a member of staff. Please make sure you let the waiter/waitress know you are here to see Record. You will then be taken to your seat.”

When audience members arrived at the café, they were shown to their seat by the waitress (after we negotiated the café’s involvement within our piece). Once the audience member was seated the waitress took their order, food and/or drink, and the experience could begin.

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After reading the ‘menu’ we created the audience member proceeded to put on the headphones provided and watch the video. This 20 minute video took people on a ‘tour’ of the high street from the comfort of a chair in a café, the film was shot from a point of view angle (POV) using a steady-cam camera and was shot in 4K HD (influenced by Janet Cardiff, but more about her later). Along the journey there was a constant sound track playing over the top of the video which were all artifacts we had found during the process of putting together our piece. These included a symphony from a classical album, an extract from a book called ‘Dames don’t care’ and instructions on how to start a car; all of which we found in the car park that comes in the middle of our piece. Once the audience member arrived at the car park in the video the audio track was then played in reverse as the camera went back up the high street to show how an experience of a place can be altered by small things such as music, we felt this gave a whole new feel to the environment. Once the video arrived back at the café, the audience member was then given a few extra minutes to relax and digest their experience and was told (on the instructions) that they could leave whenever they wanted, we wanted this experience to be a relaxing a reflective time for the audience member and we believe we achieved this.

Analysis of Process:

Friday 6th may 2016, it was our final performance. Because our performance didn’t require us to be actively involved in the piece it was a good time for us to reflect on our journey and the different events that led us to where we were.

 Site specific performance, for me, is using the space around you in a unique and novel way to enhance the experience or change a person’s perspective on how they view a space. To alter the relationship between a person and a place is the essence of site specificity and this was what my group wanted to achieve from the very start. In the first few weeks we looked at numerous different practitioners such as John Smith and Tim Etchells from ‘Forced Entertainment’. One thing I noticed whilst studying these site specific practitioners is how they use everything within that space whether that is the buildings, people and also acts of randomness, Mike Pearson also mentions this in his introduction to site specific performance “Places are thus not so much fixed as implicated within complex networks by which hosts, guests, buildings, objects and machinery are contingently brought together to produce certain performance in certain places at certain times. Places are about relationships, about the placing of peoples, materials, images and the systems of different that they perform.” (Pearson, 2010)

The site were were given was the high street, we began to explore the high street as much as possible, ranging from the main strip down to hidden passages we had never noticed before. We began to think of different kinds of performance we could do in this space using Carl Lavery’s ‘Instructions for Performance in Cities’ (2005). After trying out different activities for Lavery’s document we decided that one of the things we found interesting was personifying the buildings around us. For this we assigned a certain sound to individual buildings, for example some buildings would let out a large sigh and some would let out a scream that sounded angry. These sounds then allowed us to develop characters for each building as they all sounded individual to us. The following week in class we watched a video called ‘girl chewing gum’ by John Smith, this video was a film of a normal street in England with a narrator over the top. Because the narrator took on a directorial role, it appeared he was controlling the action. For example, if a woman wearing a hat was to enter the screen he would say ‘woman wearing hat enter from left’ and so on. Because John picked out tiny moments in this film to narrate such as a girl chewing gum, we thought that noticing the un-noticed was an interesting idea that we wanted to include in our own piece. We walked around the high street yet again but this time looking out for the un-noticed, things that we walk past every day but are too caught up in the busy hustle and bustle of our hectic working lives to notice. We wanted to discover these hidden gems on the high street in order to give our audience a brand new experience of such an ordinary place they have visited numerous times. Not only did we look out for the un-noticed, we also tried viewing the high street from different angles such as stood on benches to see if this gave a different feel as we were experiencing the high street for the first time from the point of view!

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After experimenting and having fun with our different activities we had developed we started to think about how we would present this performance, and like John Smith, we wanted to use technology (although ours would be more advanced). We thought about how we could use technology in a way that still gave an audience member a private experience, we then thought of QR codes. QR codes are square bar codes that you scan with smart pones that take you directly to an online link. We had decided to create a soundtrack made up of different interviews we had asked people. In these interviews the participants were asked a series of questions in a specific place, some of these questions were –

  • What do you think this place used to be used for?
  • If a significant event in your life happened here what would that be?
  • What does this place sound like if it could make a noise?

After we had collected enough interviews in different locations we then made multiple sound tracks (relating to Lavery’s 10th instruction of creating a symphony) and allocated them to the corresponding QR codes, these QR codes were then sellotaped to the site. Audience members would find the QR codes by looking at a map they were given with tiny QR codes representing the location of the real codes.

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Here are a few videos of our class trying out our initial performance –

After receiving feedback we discussed how we could further develop our piece by using images to make the piece more engaging for the viewer. We began doing some more research into site specific practitioners and found a woman called Janet Cardiff, using her work as inspiration we decided to change our piece from a stationary audio soundtrack to an audio and visual tour of the high street from a point of view perspective just like Cardiff’s ‘Alter Bahnhof video walk’. Using the influence of our two favorite practitioners (Cardiff and Smith) we began devising our final piece. We loved how Cardiff captured the site around her using a POV shot, this made the audience member feel more connected and because it was viewed through a smart film it almost looked as if the audience member was filming it themselves. However, in Cardiff’s work she has carefully placed performers working with her such as a band and a ballet dancer whereas we didn’t want that level of performativity in ours. We still really liked John Smiths acts of randomness as this enabled us to capture the natural beauty and buzz of the high street, combining the two practitioners gave us our final piece… Record(ing).

After discussing our ideas for the new audio/visual tour with our tutors we decided to keep the tour stationary. This is so the audience member could relax and be fully immersed in the experience from the comfort of one place, also so they didn’t have to hold a smart phone at eye level for 20 minutes as this would be extremely uncomfortable! As our group had spent a lot of time in Churchill’s café having meetings (and breakfast) we decided to have Churchill’s as the place where our audience would watch the tour. After much negotiating with Churchill’s staff and attempts to negotiate with the owner (although we never received an email back from him) we were able to secure two tables for the day of our performance. One for the audience member to watch the tour at and one hidden upstairs so we were out of view as we didn’t want to be in the final performance as that would have added a new level of performativity, we simply stayed in the café for security for the tablet and headphones we had provided so people could watch our piece. ‘Robinson in Space’ by Patrick Keiller was another inspiration for us as this was a beautifully shot film with narration over the top, the inspiration we took from this piece was incorporating the sound of birds when there was speech. Artifacts we had found in the car park in the middle of our film were recorded and edited together to make our soundtrack, this included an extract from a book called “Dames Don’t Care”, instructions we had found on a scrap piece of paper on how to start a car and the album cover for Symphony No.9 by Anton Bruckner. The soundtrack was a continuous and flowing piece of art carefully designed to relate to certain points in our film, for example when the camera looked at a church the music switched key to one more obviously Minor, and when the camera looked back to the high street switched back to major key thus provoking a more positive feel to the piece.

Our aim was to create a piece of art that altered a persons relationship with our site, through the careful design of the soundtrack, beautiful focus points in our film and the chance to take in the experience of the high street from the comfort of a café I believe we achieved this. Our film has turned what was once a regular high street into a piece of art for those who have seen our site specific piece, our work “incorporates documentation precisely in order to address the paradoxical relationship between its construction of a work and the site it seeks to uncover” (Kaye, 2000).

Performance Evaluation:

 In reflection upon our piece of work, it is rewarding to see all the positives that came from our hard work, yet also rewarding to see our failures as this gives us the opportunity to grow as young artists and practitioners.

Things that worked well in our piece –

  • The camera we used was excellent; it was a steady cam which meant by using gyroscopes in the machinery, the camera automatically steadied itself creating an extremely smooth show which was easy on the audience’s eye. Not only was it incredibly smooth, it was also shot in 4K HD which meant it was crystal clear too enhancing the rich colour and sights of the high street.
  • Using the environment of the café worked extremely well as it placed the audience in a situation where they felt comfortable, warm and could digest food and drink out of a large selection to better enhance the experience.
  • Having only one person at a time made the experience more personal as it felt as if it really was his or her own journey down the high street. Not only this, but being on your own without distractions from friends or other audience members allowed participants to become fully immersed in the video.
  • Using artifacts we had found to create the soundtrack made the video more unique as it wasn’t like any song the audience member had heard before as we created it ourselves. This also made the video strikingly more artistic as the soundtrack had been carefully designed to relate to visuals on screen.

Things that we would improve for next time –

  • Unfortunately the computers we used to edit the video simply weren’t good enough for the quality of camera. Because the camera was on loan to us from an events company we were only able to get hold of the camera the Tuesday before our performance (the Friday). Because of this short space of time we had to film, we tried (and failed) many different techniques of editing the video ranging from 3 different computers and trying to compress the file to a worse quality so our computers could cope with it. Finally it got the point where we had to gain access to an editing suite at University and stay in there until 3 in the morning one night. Without a doubt next time we would try using the correct computers to edit in the first place.
  • As we didn’t have performers in our piece and everything that took place in the video were acts of randomness, different shoots led to different events taking place. One of our shoots on the second day of filming was perfect; we had beautiful weather, a busy high street, musical buskers interacting with the camera, constant stopping and starting because of traffic all making the video extremely interesting to watch! Unfortunately right near the end of filming the camera ran out of room on the memory card so stopped filming and because we wanted the video the be taken In one take to make it as smooth as possible we had to reshoot meaning we lost all of the unique and beautiful moments.

 

Record(ing) the Final Piece…

Here is our final piece that we uploaded to youtube for those who didn’t manage to see our performance on the day.

This experience has opened my eyes to an entirely new world of performance, a world that I wish to explore more as I develop as a young practitioner. As an artist I no longer see performance to be something contained in a traditional environment such as a stage, performance can happen and is happening anywhere and everywhere all the time.

Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem… All the worlds a stage…

Joshua Pearson.

Bibliography –

Kaye, N. (2000) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palsgrave Macmillan.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities.

Posted on No Comments on Christopher Clarkson Final Blog submission

Christopher Clarkson Final Blog submission

City and Site

Framing Statement

Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made and demands have been issued. (Brueggmann, 1989)

Our final piece looks into the historical background of the train lines that used to be at St Marks and gives the audience some background to it, before we begin our tour. An element which we took as inspiration from Marcia Farquhar’s Onwards Tour. Except with ours being more fact than fact mixed with fiction which was often the case on her tours. As we made our journey through the town centre doing our informal tour, we were purposefully arguing about some of the facts in order to create the misery in the mind of the audience. This is what we wanted them to feel at the time we got to the existing train lines, thus taking  the audience to a non-place and turning it into a place. So that we could cheer them up with a song composed from the responses we got when we asked people what would make them happy whilst they were miserable at the train lines, a process taken from Adrian Howells’ Salon Adrienne (2007), where he prised information from them while having them in a comprising position, where they could do nothing but open up to him. So from the responses we got given we turned them into a song as our aim was to cheer people up while at the train line, having originally decided to also have a transaction element of it where gave people gifts.

However, the impracticalities of this meant that we decided not to go with this idea and to have the song as the ‘transaction’. As well as give out lyrics to the audience stuck at the train line so that they can remember the moment every time they are at the train line and feeling miserable. We felt that the performance would be more powerful having this as the transaction rather physically handing them a gift. After deciding what our final piece would be and entail, we decided that it wouldn’t work as a durational piece however we could do three performances of it with a small intimate audience for the tour.

Our original piece was going to be performed at 10.30 am on a Friday but it was vital for the train lines to be down in order for the musical element of the piece to really work and resonate, so we requested that it would be moved to 1.30 as from our research we knew this would be the best time for us to do it. The performance would begin at St Mark’s square by the old signal box, we would then take the audience on a journey up to the train line, we thought the piece would work best as a short 15 minute piece, that would end at the current train line it was important that whilst the song was being performed at the end we got a reaction from the audience, not just the people who came on the tour but also those waiting for the train barriers to go up so they could continue with their day. The reaction and response from the audience that what want is for them to be cheered up, this was the part that they played in the performance as well as using them to create the lyrics for the song in the first place.

 

 

Analysis of Process

From the beginning of our site specific performance, were we learnt about tacit agreements and what some of those may be on our site, the high street, I gained an interest into what site specific performance meant and what it was all about, Nick Kaye’s definition of sire specific certainly helped this“…articulate exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings were defined…” (Kaye, 2000, 1) this certainly helped us to  quickly realise that in order for something to be a site specific piece there has to not only to be a link in some way to the site where a meaning is defined but  the performance is to be performed in that space.

As the weeks of seminars went on and we learnt more about things such as hosts and ghosts, place and non-place.(Kaye, 2014) my interest and ideas, as well as an enjoyment for our site piece began to develop. This was more so particular when we looked at instructional pieces, particularly Carl Lavery’s essay on instruction for performance in cities (Lavery, 2005 ) . This was something that really took my interest and resonated with me, the idea that I wanted our group’s piece to form around. As our site was the local high street we looked at and tried out some of the instructions he gave in the piece and from this created our own and swapped with another group we then went onto site and had to follow these instructions. After trying to put this in practice we realised we needed more to work with so we went and sat in a local coffee shop and watched passers-by. Upon doing this we found that people were generally quite miserable at the local train lines that pass through the city. After noticing this we our aim was to make people happier whilst at the train line. We decided to take a route similar to that of Adrian Howells in ‘Salon Adrienne’.

(Adrian Howells,2007)

From this we tried something similar where we gained information from people  while they were trapped waiting to cross to the other side of the train tracks, we approached them and told them we believed that the train lines were the most miserable part of Lincoln high street, we then asked if they felt the same and how we could make them happier.

We were thus breaking the tacit agreement not to talk to people at the train line, and it was quite strange to realise how open people were to giving answers, particularly responses such as 100,000 pounds and make the weather better, however we did get some outlandish ones, one of which was a guy who said ‘stop my girlfriend’s dad being such a prick’, this was one that resonated with us in particular. After gathering lots of responses over a couple of weeks we then had to decide how we would use them.

From this we got to our initial more likely performance idea which was inspired by Forced Entertainment’s, Speak Biterness.I felt that the link between ‘Salon Adrienne’ and Speak Biterness were key as Forced entertainment had to go through Howells’ process, albeit in a slightly different way  and with a different outcome, after watching these pieces we feel that although we  follow the same process our piece  and what we did with our responses was very different, particularly from what we felt would be our final outcome.

(Forced Entertainment, 2014)

We tried to add some inspiration from this video into our piece by standing by the train lines and read out the responses, however after trying this realised it wasn’t of much impact and didn’t create the  response from the audience we had hoped for.  After thinking back to earlier sessions we thought why don’t we look into the history of our non-place, the train lines. After doing several hours of research and looking into the archives we realised that St Marks Square used to have a train line there too that lead to the same station. Kai and I thought why we don’t try a guided tour from the old train lines at St Marks to the ones that still remain. We wanted to use historical information as well as overlaying fictions onto a place, inspiration we took from Marcia Farquhar and her live art tour. When linking Speak Bitterness with Faqrquhar’s live art tour you see that Speak Bitterness takes you on an auditory tour, of the response they were given during their research stage, yet the live art tour offers the visual as well as the auditory, this we felt would work better for our piece.

(REcreativeUK, 2012)

As we got closer to the performance day we decided that the performance couldn’t stick strictly to one set of train lines and that a moving auditory history from one site to another would be best , particularly after reading Fiona Wilkie’s article on the ‘Mobility Turn’ where she states that‘…. site-based performance has developed a multi-layered relationship to mobility that has included transporting its audience to/from the site of performance (for example, The Persians, National Theatre Wales, 2010), undertaking a journey as the mode of performance/inviting us to think about what it means to be in transit / and conceiving of ‘site’ as inherently ‘restless and mobile’37 (Wrights & Sites, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere, 2006) (Wilkie,2012).  In this she mentions several links that we endeavoured to look further into as inspiration for our travelling piece, these were Wright and Sites, A Mis-guide to Anywhere. This is of course accurate to Marcia Farquhars live art tour, whose piece does exactly this, hence our inspiration to use something similar within our own piece.

 

 

Performance Evaluation

Come performance day we practised with a few run through’s on the site before we were assessed these two weren’t the best as we slightly under timed the travelling element of the piece, which meant we got to the train lines earlier than we needed to which lead to the composition element not having the same effect on that audience as it did in the final piece, which we timed perfectly and managed to perform the song made of audience responses several times. This meant that due to the train lines being down we attracted more audience numbers as they were essentially trapped in what would usually be referred to as a non-place. Therefore giving them no choice but to listen to the song while they waited. We gave out lyrics to the people on the tour as well as those waiting at the train line that were not part of tour.

This was so that they had a memory of the time they were made happy at the train line by the song which was written from responses as to what would make people happy, some of which were fairly comical. Even though we didn’t attract a large number of people to the informal tour element of the performance, this was good as we wanted this to be quite intimate, and for the majority of the audience to come from the train lines and to be feeling the misery there before cheering them up with a song at the train line, which we were hoping they would join in with, however this didn’t really happen.

We did get some reactions people throw money at us thinking we were busking, I heard people comment on some of the lyrics saying ‘yes I do wish that’, as well as people smiling and giving us thumbs up. There is a point in the song where we use the word prick, which I was worried may have got a bad reaction from the people at the train line as swearing in the street isn’t very politically correct, and  people may have been offended particularly if they had young children with them.

During the final performance we realised that it didn’t matter what side of the train line we were on, we would usually perform on the side of the train line were the church was, but on the day we performed both sides and it worked either way.  We also realised that even if the train lines weren’t down we could keep the people on the tour waiting in silent until it did go down before starting the song in order to make them feel the misery there, and use the song to show them that it can be a happy place, so these were new ideas that we thought about during and post-performance.

I think the informality of the tour worked really well, as if it was a proper tour, with proper tour guides who knew their information, it could perhaps have come across as acting and not being ourselves, however the fact that we were informal second guessing dates and buying chips mid piece, seemed to really work and for that reason will resonate with the audience. Had it have been done as a formal tour, audience will not have taken as much information in, and the fact it was informal and ‘Naff in  the all right ways’ as mentioned in feedback to us by our lecturer, this helped the audience to build in that misery making them feel much happier once they heard the song. We could have improved the final performance by trying to attract more of an audience in and finding a way to really get the audience at the train line to sing along to the song.

If I was to do the performance again I would maybe alter the route taken in order to show the audience a less familiar route and take them around to things that they may not have noticed before. So instead of going straight through town and to the train lines maybe take them  down a side road which lead to the train station and round that way. This would have allowed to have made the performance a bit more observational pointing things that we hadn’t spotted on that route before and seeing if the audience had spotted anything they hadn’t noticed before.

 

Figure 5: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop.
Figure 5: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop Important Plaque on the chip shop (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

 

Pointing out the plaque at the chip shop
Pointing out the plaque at the chip shop (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

 

(These bloody train lines- Site Specific Performance, 2016)

Research for Historical infoormation
Research for Historical infoormation (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

 

 

Word Count – 2300

Pictures courtesy of Chris Clarkson, Kai Valentine and Fran Bolingbroke

Works cited

Wilkie,F. (2012) Site Specific performance and the mobility turn. Contemporary Theatre review, 22(2) 203-213.

Kaye,N. (2000) Site Specific Art: performance, place, and documentation. London New York: Routledge.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25(3) 229-238. Available from  https://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-1155877-dt-content-rid-2084523_2/courses/DRA2035M-1516/DRA2035M-1516_ImportedContent_20150807123831/Carl%20Lavery%20article%20%281%29.pdf [accessed 13 May 2016]

Homotopia Festival (2007)  Salon Adrienne .Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmUn2ZTzeY0 [accessed 9th June 2016].

Forced Entertainment (2014) Forced Entertainment on Speak Bitterness . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjCjHvuCb_8 [accessed 10th June 2016]

REcreativeUK (2012) Marcia Farquhar- A live art tour . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 10th June 2016]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on No Comments on H2O – Final Blog Submission

H2O – Final Blog Submission

Framing Statement –

Site Specific Performance is a difficult to define area of art and performance because it’s definition is interpreted in many different ways, and thus lacks a concrete definition, as Mike Pearson writes in his book Site Specific Performance: “Although the search for a practicable, encompassing definition of site-specific performance has long claimed scholarly attention, it remains slippery.” (Pearson, 2007). However, the practice of site-specific art and performance art has been around since the mid-fifties, starting with “Happenings”. Art pieces such as “Baked Beans on a Car” and “Anti-War” birthed the earliest form of spontaneous, public performance. These works would later evolve into Site-Specific art such as “The Puddle and blue sky – A performance next to Hamburger Bahnoff, Berlin” (2001) by Nasan Tur – a three-and-a-half-minute loop of a performer lying in a puddle. Works such as this have become more and more popular in the twenty-first century and so Site Specific Art and performance has become a more popularised method and style, despite the challenges faced in creating it, which is something we would encounter in creating our own work.

However, this lack of a firm definition to Site-Specific left us all with quite a challenge. We were newcomers to the field and we had very little idea of what site-specific actually meant, but we endeavoured and experimented using the different practitioners that we were introduced to over the weeks. Initially, we were introduced to transactional theatre through Nick Kaye’s book, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation and we developed an interest in it from there, which inspired our early ideas.

 

Process –

When we started thinking about our project in performative terms, we decided to search the city for inspiration. After all, Lincoln is a city rich in history, both personal and traditional, so we thought we should investigate the city we live in. We explored the city and some of the landmarks that we had come to know in our time living in Lincoln. One of the most interesting things we had to consider a few weeks in was Marc Augé’s theory of Non-Place, which theorised that “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (Augé, 1995) We thought of the high street as a whole as a non-place because we felt that it could not be defined in these terms since we rarely saw people visiting the high street simply for the high street and not it’s shops. However, we felt that Site Specific performance could be something to change that and alter the perception of the public, adjusting the paradigm of the high street as a non-place.

We started to create this performance with the idea of local history and community in mind. Our original plan was an audio-based tour, based off of the work of Forced Entertainment, around an area of the high street to provide new context to it. However, we steered away from the idea of an audio tour when we began to investigate the High Bridge area of the high street.

We discovered that there was a lot of history to this small area of the high street that many would be totally unaware of. After all, there was no plaques or object of that nature to detail its history. During our research, however, we discovered that there used to be a chapel dedicated to Thomas Beckett after his assassination, and then that chapel was replaced by a fountain that gave water to the poorer half of the city. We had already liked the high bridge as a performance space because it received a lot of foot traffic during the afternoon, which meant we had plenty of public interaction when we experimented, using Forced Entertainment inspired questioning to the general public.

This public interaction inspired our first concrete idea for our performance, which was inspired by the history of the place, and combined it with the sense of community that we wanted to elude to. The concept of it was that we were going to ask the public what they valued most in life was, and then write that on a label (attached to a bottle of water) and create an installation piece based on a river and the flow of water. After an hour of displaying this piece, all the bottles would be given out to the general public.

We performed this twice, on a small scale, to see how the public would react to it.

Photograph taken by me. (Cummings, W 2016)
The photograph was taken by me. (Cummings, W 2016)

It garnered mostly positive responses in the two runs we performed, though it did still get some negative response from people who deemed us as nuisances. We did, however, always manage to hand out a great many bottles after we had displayed the installations we had created. And even handing out these bottles gave us interesting responses. One gentleman, who was homeless, initially took a bottle that said “Freedom” on it, because he felt that was poignant to him but decided to put it back because he felt that in his position, he was without freedom. But, upon a second search through our selection of bottles and labels, he decided to take the bottle he had originally picked up because he hoped that it would give him some freedom in some small way. This was the sense of community we wished to evoke from our performance.

And yet, upon consideration, we felt that our performance was lacking substance. Instead, we wanted to focus on the basic elements of it, and we felt that awaiting public interaction wasn’t visually interesting enough for our performance. Instead, we wanted to follow on from our aesthetic idea of flowing water, and create something visceral and flowing, and keep the element of water to tie in with our prior research about the history of the high bridge. We decided to make it a durational process, using the water. We explored how visual we could make water, using various different containers, including fountains made of water bottles and dye to try and make it a more visually stimulating performance, but we felt that this overcomplicated our idea.

However, as I mentioned previously, we had explored the concept of transactional theatre performance, and that concept was still stuck in our heads. Some of our early experiments in public interaction took a focus on exchange in terms of conversation and questioning. Though there was no physical transaction or exchange of items, the public was providing us with information, which we would then regurgitate back into our notes to further our own process.

This work was similar to that of Adrian Howells’ performance, Salon Adrienne (2006), the purpose of which was to have a conversation with somebody as he cut their hair, thereby having an exchange of information. Much of Adrian Howells’ body of work revolved around exchanges, including “Foot Washing for the Sole” (2010). Though there was no exchange of information in this performance, it was an act of charity for the audience member and it aided Howells’ work. The general public we encountered during our experiments offered us information, and on most occasions wouldn’t receive anything in return – though we would sometimes engage them in conversation, so that we could unpack some of their answers – which is something that we would change later on in our process.

However, though we moved away from public interaction, we still took some inspiration from Howells’ work, and the idea of exchange his body of work engaged with. Exchange as a concept was in our minds as we started to develop the basis for our performance. When we began to develop our new ideas, we knew that we wanted to utilise water, and we wanted an exchange to be involved.

At a certain point, we started to think about the water from the canal and how we valued it, similarly to how we had previously explored the high street as a non-place. The water in the canal is rife with dirt, animal faeces, litter and general filth, and most people wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it. We considered this to be interesting, because it added value to something that most people take for granted, though it adds a negative value, it is value nonetheless. We felt that this should be a core part of our performance and that our audience should reconsider the value of water. We realised that clean water obtains a positive value to a first world audience when it is contrasted with water of a negative value – in this case, canal water. This was inspired by the work of Bob Whalley and Lee Miller, whose piece “Into the Good Night (Go)” also focussed on exchanges of items that are generally overlooked – in this case, they exchanged bottles of urine for various items at the side of a motorway.

We decided that since we wanted our performance to act as a process, to make it become more visually interesting, we would show a process of cleaning the water through different stages. This process using natural material is similar to Giuseppe Penone, who created “Tree of 12 Metres” (1980), which aimed to revitalise a fallen tree back to feeling alive “Penone’s aim was to return the tree to the form it had had at an earlier stage of its growth, making visible natural processes which are normally hidden” (Manchester, 2000)

We intended to do something similar with our work with water, to bring it back to a state where people would look at it with a positive light, like the people who drank from the fountain hundreds of years before. We decided to clean the water – taken from the canal using a bucket on a rope – using a lengthy process, filtering it several times to ensure that the water was thoroughly cleaned, and then purified it. We were then at a loss with what to do with the water once it was clean, which then led us back to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in Maintenance Art, which had been introduced to us in our seminars. Ukeles’ belief was that everything people do is art and that maintenance shows the work that goes into something created, and renews the excitement to it. “Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again keep the contemporaryartmuseum groovy keep the home fires burning” (Ukeles, 1969) Since cleaning this dirty water was something that acted as development, which Ukeles believes is a novelty that wears off, we wanted to add a purpose to the water we were cleaning, and thereby use the maintenance part of her theory. We decided to clean the space that was using, both for sanitary purposes, but also to give the water function, thereby adding further value to it through the process. It also sustained the interest of the general public, which we saw when we were practicing our final idea, and working out any problems we may encounter with it.

The practice of our performance always seemed to draw the interest of small crowds, and we would often look into the café adjacent to where we were cleaning the water to find people watching us from the windows, and oftentimes, when someone would approach us, they would tell us that they’d been watching from the café. This helped us confirm that our work was visually interesting – which was our biggest problem with our original idea for our performance.

Performance Evaluation –

Our performance was on a hot May afternoon, which meant that there was plenty of foot traffic through the centre of town, and that meant plenty of public audience. We started earlier than planned to try and get the momentum of our performance going and to get a real feel for how our performance would go through the day, especially since the task of taking water from the canal was a strenuous one in the heat. However, even from setting up our containers and filter jugs, the public were stopping to see what was going on. Their responses were generally positive and enthused, they asked us questions about our performance and

Photo taken by a member of our invited audience (Walls, A 2016)
Photo was taken by a member of our invited audience (Walls, A 2016)

seemed genuinely curious to discover what our piece was about. It’s rare to see people stopping in the street unless prompted by salespeople, or by another person. However, a sizable number of the general public came to stop and watch us, which we found surprising. It even opened up discussion between other audience members, who were curious to find out what was going on, which harkens back to the sense of community we wanted to convey when we were first creating our performance.

However, there were some negative responses to our performance. One elderly woman seemed outraged that we were cleaning the water, claiming that were takinglife out of the water. Another woman, who was passing by, spat at us. However, these were the only negative responses we actually received.

Photo taken by a member of our invited audience
Photo was taken by a member of our invited audience

Overall, we had a large amount of people coming to watch, and we even had a little girl who wanted to take part in our performance. When we transitioned from job to job, we managed to maintain the flow and the momentum of the work and kept the performance visually interesting enough for the audiences to keep watching us. One audience member stayed for several hours to watch, which surprised us above all else.

We also questioned our audience on whether they’d had any interesting experiences with water to try and apply our research into questioning. Audience responses to our questioning was a little underwhelming, though we did receive some interesting responses. One husband and wife pairing told us about how their son had been buried at sea, whereas another told us about how he had dived into the canal to save someone, and how he had to be quarantined afterwards. These were the kinds of responses that we were looking for and the kinds of responses we had hoped to receive from all of our questionings, but unfortunately, it didn’t go that way.

Overall, we were pleased with how our performance had gone. The audience responses we had received were what we were looking for, and our performance was engaging to our audience, which is what we wanted from this performance. It was interesting to see how people responded to our performance, in terms of audience size and how often we received questions.

Video taken by an invited audience member. Peck, B 2016

References

Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso.

Kaye, N. (2000). Site-Specific Art – Performance, Place and Documentation. New York: Routledge.

Manchester, E. (2000, September). Tree of Twelve Metres. Retrieved from Tate Modern: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/penone-tree-of-12-metres-t05557/text-summary

Pearson, M. (2007). Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan .

Tun, N. (2012, March 5). The Puddle and the Blue Sky – Nasan Tur. Retrieved from Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/37951555

Ukeles, M. L. (1969). Manifesto for Maintenance Art.

 

 

Posted on No Comments on YOU LOOK LOVELY TODAY: SHANNEN JOHNSON: FINAL BLOG SUBMISSION

YOU LOOK LOVELY TODAY: SHANNEN JOHNSON: FINAL BLOG SUBMISSION

Compliment Bunting (Alex Revill, 2016).
Compliment Bunting (Alex Revill, 2016).

FRAMING STATEMENT

Every performance has underlining principles of performance methodology, the underlining theories that influenced and shaped site specific performance as we know it today include Happenings of the Late 1950s and 1960s, Fluxus, Situationist International from 1957-68 led by Guy Debord, and Land Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Though all of these are in a way relevant due to the way they have enhanced site specific performance in today’s context, for me, the most important was the idea of Fluxus. The Fluxus manifesto claims that their intention is to ‘purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art…’ (George Maciunas, 1963), this proves that Fluxus sought to change the history of the world, not just the history of the art. This was immediately appropriate to our group’s initial ideas of Site-Specific performance as we intended to create something with historical contextual meaning. Obviously our performance wouldn’t change the history of the world, but would have slight elements of the influence this had on us. We wanted to create a performance that changed the meaning of a place, and turned the place from a ‘non-place’ to a place.  Here we had the idea of the performance being palimpsest this is the idea of something being written, erased and then written over again with something new. The movement of most relevance was Situationist International as this explored ways surroundings can affect the emotions as you explore a space, which was something we were interested in as we had the idea of having multiple installations so as the audience moved around they may have felt different emotions depending on what they were moving past. The, who, what, where, when and how long are clearly key elements for devising Site-Specific performance. Marcia Farquhar was initially the first practitioner to spark our imaginations due to her celebratory nature in the streets, with various instillations to focus on. The ‘where,’ for us became the Glory Hole due to its extensive history and the fact that it is a busy place to guarantee audience viewers, this was vital as our performance intended to have the public as a crucial part of the performance, . ‘A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often and unusual one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere’ (Pearson, 2010, 7). When it came to thinking about how long our performance should be, we didn’t feel it was necessary to have a durational performance, nor did we feel the need to stay rigid to the 20 minutes minimum specification. Therefore we decided to start our piece half an hour before we were due to be marked and made the decision to continue on for as long as we felt necessary or until it began to die down in the streets.

The Glory Hole (Alex Revill, 2016).
The Glory Hole (Alex Revill, 2016).

 

ANALYSIS OF PROCESS

Initial Ideas: The first week of site involved a lot of new information, from Erving Goffman a sociologist who turns everyday events in to performance, ‘social interaction may be likened to a theatre, and people in everyday life to actors on a stage, each playing a variety of roles’ (Goffman, 1956) to Christian Nold who maps the emotions and changes in the body as we navigate our way through a space, for example his ‘Bio Mapping’ project. One of the first elements we explored practically was Carl Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities 2005. These were a set of instructions devised to use as ‘a stimulus, not a straight-jacket’ (Lavery, 2005, 230) for ways to think of the city as a performance space.  My group devised our own instructions in an elevator, we spent about 25 minutes in the elevator, moving up and down between floors as different people stepped in and out of the elevator.  This exercise left me intrigued with the way people interact with one-another in an elevator. Many people would step in the elevator and start a conversation with us from hearing what we were discussing, one woman shared that she had a Labrador.  It was the conversations that took place that inspired me and began to give me initial performance ideas. I found myself interested in proximity, how close can you get to people before it becomes uncomfortable. The word social; why is it that people start a conversation in a lift, but wouldn’t approach a 19 year old girl in a queue. Following this I began to think of words I was interested in too focus on as a performance, I came up with, darkness, silence, enclosed spaces, conversations, awkwardness, social, proximity, chance and coincidence. I decided my task now would be to begin to delve into practitioners that will reinforce these ideas such as, Robert Wilson and look for performances spaces that can allow this to happen.

Finding the right spot: ‘In relation to minimalism, as Douglas Crimp and Michael Fried’s analyses suggest, site-specificity is linked to the incursion of ‘surrounding’; space, ’literal’ space or ‘real’ space into the viewer’s experience of the artwork.’ (Kaye, 2000, 25)

As a group we looked around the perimeters of our site to see if we could source a suitable area for the ideas we were interested in. We decided that the Glory Hole would be an appropriate place due to its narrow and compact walk ways. Many associate the Glory Hole as a dark, claustrophobic and intimidating place to be, therefore we decided it would be an interesting place for the type of performance styles we were thinking of pursuing. Pearson stated ‘If site-specific performance involves an activity, an audience and a place, then creative opportunities reside in the multiple creative articulations of us, them and there.’ (Pearson, 2010, 19) therefore the fact that the Glory Hole is a busy place we decided not only does it relate to our themes of performance area but will also arise opportunities for an audience, thus hopefully creating a successful performance space. As a group we were set on the idea of performing in the Glory Hole, therefore we all decided to individually source contextual information of the history of the Glory Hole. Luckily we all began finding things that coincided with the original themes we were interested in. We found that the Glory Hole was formally known as the ‘Murder Hole’ due to the fact that, ‘according to local tales whenever a body was thrown into the Witham, it would often be washed ashore either under, or near, the bridge’ (Santos, 2016). The fact that we were able to find information like this gave us more of a solid basis for our performance.

From the first idea to realisation: Our initial idea at first seemed to gradually fall into place, however after a few sessions into the module we began to notice potential step backs in our idea. The theoretical context appeared to have come to a blockage, we were no longer finding inspiration and felt as though we didn’t have enough rational of the theorists who influenced the performance. In the seminar, we discussed cartography in depth and the practitioners who deal with this sort of work. This led to watching a YouTube clip of Marcia Farquhar’s Onward Tour, something I found particularly interesting about this was the way she used chance operations in her performance. As she lead the public around the site, she had staged some of the events herself whilst others just happened to be there, this made it so you were unable to tell whether they were practiced performance elements or not. After watching this the whole group was again re inspired with potential performances ideas. We liked the idea of almost having a party in the street, with multiple instillations happening at once. So we once again decided to research more into the Glory Hole to see what else we could find out that would associate with our new perception of performance concepts. Once again, we were lucky to find that there was relevant contextual sources to help frame and build our notions. In Medieval times the Glory Hole was an important centre for merchants. Fish was bought up from the coast and also caught locally in the Witham itself, and then sold on the bridge. Wool was loaded on to vessels and passed under the bridge, Farmers from the surrounding district bought fruit and meat by boat to be bartered with at the busy spot. ‘The bridge must often have assumed the appearance of an open-air market, swarming with life and activity.’ (Stokes, 2014) We now had the image of the Glory Hole as a busy, positive atmosphere, much like Marcia Farquhar’s A Live Art tour. Together, we were intrigued by the way the Glory Hole used to be compared to the way it is now. The Glory Hole used to be a place a destination for people to go to, whereas now it has become a place for someone to simply pass through to get to their destination. This is where Marc Augé’s places and non-places theory comes into play. This is ‘where we spend so much of our time: airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international hotel chains,’ (P.D Smith, 2009). However Marc Augé shows, ‘the anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-places offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive glimpse of a utopian city-world,’ (Auge, 2009). This implies that these non-places, much of the time, of places we use to pass through to get to another destination, to get to where we want to be. This evidences that the Glory Hole can be categorised as a non-place, therefore part of our performance element was to turn the Glory Hole back into a ‘place’ like it once was.

‘The site is a place where a piece should be but isn’t.’ (Smithson in Bear and Sharp 1996, 249)

I felt this was relevant as having an almost joyous celebration, would hopefully encourage people to remember the Glory Hole as a lively place where they interacted with market like activities as opposed to rushing through, thinking what an unsafe place it has become. In order to punctuate the flow of a performance in a particular site, the tacit agreements of that site need to be disrupted. Tacit agreements are something that is understood by everyone, but not necessarily written down. It is when people upset the tacit agreements of a site that situations become more interesting therefore, breaking the tacit agreements of creating a ‘place’ in a ‘non-place’ allows for more performance opportunities to arise.

Piecing the puzzle together: Now we had the basis of both the contextual influences and theoretical influences, we began to think of ways to incorporate our knowledge into a site specific performance. To begin with we looked at the way we could represent the farmers bringing fruit and meat in via boat. We decided to drag oranges through the Brayford and then fish them out, following this we would squeeze the oranges into cups as though were we making fresh orange juice for the public. To recreate the idea of trade and exchange we decided to have a piece of wool connecting one side of the Glory Hole to the other not only did this then create a sense of joining the two segregated sides of the Glory Hole together, but also incorporated the use of wool as this was another item traded at the market. This was used as a pull system to exchange the goods from one side of the glory hole to the other. Whilst researching we discovered that the Brayford was being made narrower and deeper so before this happened they placed wooden slats over the Brayford, joining the two halves together and allowed everyone to have a celebration, therefore we decided to have another instillation of someone placing down slats and dancing on them. Here the idea of palimpsest became apparent as we were almost taking the idea of something being written, then erased then written over again, our interpretation of this was that, the Glory Hole used to be place with a lively atmosphere, which then became erased and replaced with a place to pass through where the public felt unsafe, now we are trying to recreate the original atmosphere.

(Foster, 2016)
Oranges as Boats (Foster, 2016)
(Foster, 2016)
Squeezing the Oranges (Foster, 2016)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repetition: The most appropriate way to convey our performance was to perform all the individual installations at the same time, repeated over and over again. The idea of repetition confirms what we know, reiterate something, or things can become significantly different each time through repetition, thus adding layers to our performances and more room for audience interpretation.

New Directions: After showing our performance idea, it became clear that there was too much going on and we were almost trying to show too much contextual framing, consequently we had to strip it back. It was evident that the most successful and aesthetically pleasing part of the performance was the use of the wool and the exchange so we decided to make this the focal point, with the audience as the central protagonist. We wanted to condense the contextual framing so we took our key themes of celebration and exchange and instead of recreating the history, just taking those similar themes but changing it into something different, adding slightly different context to it.

Bottles as Boats (Alex Revill, 2016).
Bottles as Boats (Alex Revill, 2016).

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Performance Day: The final product, had drastically changed from our original ideas, however that is part of the process of narrowing down and re shaping, until you have created a sophisticated, well thought out piece of art. Overall I feel what we had intended to happen on the day did happen, however I felt at times it still felt dislocated. For me, the hardest part was not acting, I struggled to come to terms with just acting as myself considering the situation I was in, however I do feel I managed to portray this. We decided a must for our performance was to make it aesthetically pleasing, in rehearsals we only used one piece of wool across the Brayford for the exchange system, however we felt it would be more striking to create almost a web of wool even if not all of the pieces of wool we actually going to be used. We also took the new direction of exchange and made it into an exchange of compliments. We decided to drag a compliment in a bottle through the Brayford, this represented the way the boats used to pass through the Brayford with their goods for the market although the bottle didn’t clearly represent that however it was just used as a basis for our reasoning behind it. Once we had dragged the bottle through the Brayford, we took the compliment out of the bottle, we then attached the compliment to a piece of wool and transferred it across to the other side of the Brayford, again this represented the idea of the exchange that took place when the market was held at the Glory Hole. Once the compliment reached the other side of the Glory Hole one of us read the compliment to a member of the public, we then placed the compliment onto a piece of wool to create the image of bunting again portraying the themes of celebration. We repeated this process and did the piece for about 40 minutes. Overall, the public’s response was positive, most were willing to hear their compliment and were appreciative once we had shared it with them. This kind of atmosphere was again similar to one of our original stimuli, Marcia Farquhar’s Street Party. It also reinforced the idea of breaking the tacit agreement of a non-place being a place you would just use to pass through to get to your actual destination, my making it a place where we were inviting people to stop there and talk to us about their compliment, not only did this almost turn a non-place into a place, but also changed the stereotypes of the Glory Hole being a dark scary place to pass through, but for that moment in time turned it into to somewhere where the public would feel happy as they were receiving a compliment.

Webb of Wool (Ashley Walls, 2016)
Webb of Wool (Ashley Walls, 2016)

 

(Word Count 2689)

Works Cited

Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.

Bear, L. and Sharp, W. (1996) ‘Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim Smithson in Jack Flam’ (ed.) Robert Smithson: The collected writings, Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press.

Goffman, E. (1956). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Kaye, Nick (2000) Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, London: Routledge.

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

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Smith, PD. (2009) Non Places. The Guardian, 28 March.

Stokes of Lincoln (2014) History of the High Bridge. [Website] Lincoln. Available from http://stokes-coffee.co.uk/history-high-bridge/ [Accessed on 10 May 2016].