2016 – Page 5 – City and Site

May 2, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

The final stages

Throughout the past two weeks, the build up to the final performance has been very hectic and incredibly stressful. We have been trying, experimenting, developing, failing and creating.

The first hurdle we had to combat when experimenting was the sheer amount of props/set/objects we have in our piece, and how to source and build them. A big problem we keep returning to is the structure of the placards – the change in weather means they keep blowing over. We have experimented with building the placards from different materials, initially using broom handles as the main ‘stem’ and planting them into a compost-filled plant pot. After this was unsuccessful, we moved on to using bamboo sticks in compost, but again, whilst these were slightly more stable than the broom handles, once the wind picked up they eventually fell over. Instead, for our next experiment we aim to use bamboo sticks in a plant pot filled with sand, weighing the structure down more.

We also found that the cardboard part of the placards blows about in the wind, yet we are unsure if this is a hindrance or a nice aesthetic choice if kept; it gives the placards more of the natural theme we are trying to infer, as though they are plants blowing in the wind. It creates more of a visual spectacle for passers by to view, and even acts as a distraction in their line of sight, inviting them to have a closer look.

We had lots of difficulty sourcing tables and chairs for our experiments, and had to conduct them without. By doing this, we realised how integral they are to our piece, as without them we cannot have an intimate connection with our audience-participants, nor can we make them feel comfortable and at ease. Without this sense of ease, we are less likely to get audience-participants that open up and write down the more personal answers we are hoping for. As a result of this, we haven’t yet been able to have any interaction with audience-participants. Instead, we have been conducting the piece without the audience element, creating the placards from answers we have previously received in earlier experiments. We hopefully be running the piece as it should be, with audience-participants, in a couple of days.

Over the past few weeks, we have done closer experiments with individual elements of the piece. An example of this is the shredding element. To recap: our idea is to shred the answers that people wish to destroy, and to turn these shreddings into compost by mixing it in with soil. A development we made through trying and testing was to allow the audience-participants to shred their own answers; this is to provide absolute confidence that their answers are destroyed as they are doing it themselves, as well as ensuring our role is more background, and the audience-participant is placed at the centre of the piece.

We also looked at ways to draw the roots from the plant pots – we used chalk to slowly and methodically make the roots ‘grow’ from the pots as the piece progressed, embedding the placards into the space. Once we had taken the placards and pots away, we noticed how the roots remained, and appeared almost alien to the space. The idea of the roots remaining with no context for passers-by is intriguing as it will make them question why and how they got there, allowing them to engage with and notice the space in a way that perhaps they never had before. Furthermore, the idea that the roots remain links in with our aim of planting something in the audience-participants’ (and even passers by) heads that will grow and develop into action. The roots in the space link up with the roots in the minds of those involved – they will always be connected to Speakers’ Corner in a way they never had been before.

Additionally, we created a blog page giving information about Speakers’ Corner and the aims of our performance. This will be given in the exchange between audience-participant and artist in the form of a hand-written note. The audience-participant, it is hoped, will then follow that link after they have left the site, taking the performance with them into their every day lives in a more physical sense – it doesn’t simply leave them once they leave the space; another way we are rooting thought and action into their minds. To end our piece, we want to take photographs of each placard/post-it note and document them on that same blog site – this gives them a permanent place in the world, long after we have dismantled the placards, and even after the cardboard has been recycled into something new. We are doing this because we believe the thoughts people will be expressing are so important, and must remain alive by any means. As we cannot leave the placards in the space, we will ‘install’ them online in a more permanent way.

In his book, Site-Specific Performance, Mike Pearson asks the question: “How can site-specific performance play a role in an active engagement with place, helping make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from landscapes and memories?” (Pearson, 2010, 56). “Active engagement with place” (Pearson, 2010, 56) is what we want our audience-participants to achieve; discovering the intended purpose and history of the site, and being inspired to act upon this in the space. The “multiplicity of meanings” that resonate from our site are what we hope to metaphorically show in our piece through the placards, roots, watering, gagging and shredding. All of these elements emulate the ghosts of the Suffragette rally gone before, the emptiness and natural beginnings of the site as a field, and we hope that enough of these will shine through to an audience. This idea of layering histories comes from Cathy Turner’s notion of palimpsest, where “no space is truly empty, as left at site will be traces of what has happened there before” (Gleave, 2011), an idea that has shaped our piece from beginning to end, and will continue to inspire us as we develop further in the final stages.

Works Cited

Gleave, J. (2011) The Reciprocal Process of the Site and the Subject in Devising Sitespecific Performance. MPhil(B). Univeristy of Birmingham.

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

April 15, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

Going back to the roots

We decided to meet up and discuss the logistics and meaning of our piece, writing everything down in an attempt to be fully clear, as individuals, on our roles and the meanings behind them. We realised when doing this that we were over-complicating our piece; we needed to strip it back to our original idea. Whilst we were simplifying our overall piece, we found it hard to plot out what each person would be doing at what point, so we decided to focus exclusively on the idea of growth – growth of ideas, growth of confidence, growth of voice.

Whilst remaining with the idea of watering each placard to nurture the ideas and make them bloom, we decided it would be a good idea to show this growth in some way throughout the duration of the piece. One person at a time would be given this task and then would rotate when everyone’s task changed over. The person responsible would walk to a filled plant pot and begin to draw chalk roots on the floor. These roots would eventually fill the space around one plant pot, at which point whoever drawing them would move on to another plant pot. Each time the artists rotate, the roots would be drawn longer and around more plant pots as they were filled, creating and interweaving map of thought and growth. The lack of permanence around this idea echoes the entire piece; the roots will be washed away with the rain (if this is the case in the performance, the artist starts over), much like how the cardboard would wilt and the writing would run. This element of temporality emulates the life cycle of plants: they grow, they are nurtured, they wither, they die. However, the ideas on the placards remain. Once they are revealed to the world, they cannot be removed.

Continuing with this idea of growth and nurturing, we decided to incorporate the ‘destroyed’ answers into this natural cycle. Using a hand-powered shredder, we will shred the ‘destroy’ answers into strips of paper, and it will be one artists’ job to turn that paper into compost. They will travel around each filled plant pot and mix the paper in with the soil using their hands. This raw, ritualistic-style action adds another layer of nature to our piece, and shows that all ideas can fuel the desire for protest and change.

As a group, we also made a big decision regarding the audience of our piece. We decided to bring our work closer to that of our main influence, Adrian Howells, and make the piece a one-to-one experience. One at a time, an audience-participant would come up to the table, sit, and make eye contact. At which point, the artist sat at the table would produce a piece of paper with the first set of instructions on it; the audience-participant reads it; they make eye contact; they are handed the question and paper/pen; they write; they are given the last set of instructions; they are given a card; they put their answer into one of the two boxes; they leave; the next person sits down. And so on. This one-to-one experience gives the piece a much more personal feel, and delivers the idea we strived to achieve of making the audience feel connected to the piece in a deeper way, which allows them to give much more honest answers. By giving a one-t0-one experience, the audience-participant feels valued and are given time away from their lives for a couple of minutes to engage in collective catharsis, just as Adrian Howells does in many of his pieces. The idea of non-verbal conversations that Howells and Dee Heddon talk about is also present in our piece through the use of eye contact – not only does our lack of speech and purely aural communication tell the audience we are taking a step back (this is not about us, but about them), but allows them to search deeper into themselves via an intimate experience.

We went out into Speaker’s Corner to experiment with the placards and work out the logistics of them. We also wanted to find out, by using just one placard, whether people stopped to read it. We placed the placard in the centre of the square, and covertly sat on a bench on the other side.

We realised that the placards were rather unstable in the wind as it often fell over. We believe to counteract this, we need larger (deeper) buckets with a brick in the bottom of each to keep them weighted.

In terms of a reaction, most people who walked by reacted to the placard in some way. Most simply glanced at it, but some did stop to read it. When people walked by us in groups, we realised we’d created a talking point; people were answering the question, whether they knew it or not. They were talking about it to each other and giving answers without even realising. Most of the conversations we over heard suggested people were confused by the placard, and mainly believed that they had very little power at all.

March 18, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

“Free Power”

I conducted some further research on the work of Adrian Howells as I wanted to know more about his performances and how he uses different types of transaction. Currently, the transaction in our piece takes place in the form of cake being given to the audience-participants for helping us with our performance. However, I felt this type of transaction to be too impersonal and too forced rather than artistic and meaningful, yet the use of the cake as an incentive problematises this notion of meaningfulness, as it’s meaningful to us to get people to take part.

As a result of this, I read the article From Talking to Silence: A Confessional Journey by Dee Heddon and Adrian Howells, in the hope of finding out more about transaction. Heddon discusses how “the boundary between performer and spectator dissolves in the process of exchange, an exchange that asks for a very committed and at times vulnerable sort of spectatorship” (Heddon, 2011). Not only that, I found that in most of Howell’s work, exchange is “consistently dialogic […] performed within a wider cultural context of the mass-mediatization of the personal and private made public” (Howell, 2011). The use of dialogical exchange in Howell’s work is primarily used to help the audience-participants feel comfortable with sharing.

On Wednesday we wet out into Speaker’s Corner with signs advertising “FREE CAKE”. To our surprise (and contrary to similar experiments we have done in the past) a lot of people came over to talk to us. We generated more interest than ever before, simply by advertising something for free. I was delighted that we finally had participants, but somewhat disheartened with the lack of sustenance in our part of the transaction. Us giving out free cake lacks meaning and generosity, whilst somewhat telling people we’re only doing this for us, not them – the opposite of our purpose. So, we decided to ask our classmates.

Back in the seminar room we talked our classmates through our performance and our ideas, and asked them specifically about our use of transaction – what do you think to it? What does it say to you? What could we do instead? Some suggested that the transaction from our side is giving them the means to protest, giving them “free power”. Could we give them something physical to symbolise this? Perhaps a slip of paper with something written on it. Another person suggested giving them “free advice” on what they’d written down, like an advice slip you get from a cash machine, which are so present in Speaker’s Corner (this too plays on the idea of ‘transaction’ as that is what a cash machine is built for). Other more general ideas around our performance were born through this discussion, such as the placing of the placards into plant pots and allowing the audience-participant to do that themselves if they so wished – they are letting their idea grow and are nourishing/nurturing it. This triggered the idea of someone – perhaps one of us – going round at certain intervals and watering the soil each placard is planted in. Furthermore, the idea arose about having smaller signs branching off the larger placards once we run out to create a physical representation of a tree.

Works Cited

Heddon, D. and Howells, A. (2011) From talking to silence: a confessional journey. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 33 (1) 1-12.

March 15, 2016Kieran Spiers No Comments

Creating the performance

Over the past few weeks / months we have been thinking, experimenting and devising work. Initially we wanted to create a strucutural representation of the obelisk located in St Marks Square, but we realise that we could go further both themeatically, metaphorically and artistically.

Our aim for our site specific work is to bring in the community. The High Street as said previously, is a communal non-place. It is a transitional place. People move in and out and walk and don’t stop for anything other than to look inside a shop window or briefly speak to someone that they recognise on the street. The obelisk can be argued to be a centrepiece to the halting of the transitional atmosphere as it’s purpose was a fountain. People would drink from this place, it was a source of life. It was a source of nourishment. Now it is a memorial. A homage to those that have done extraodinary talents to lincoln. It has been stripped of it’s purpose which was to serve as a fountain but also a homage to St Thomas Beckett chapel that was demolished in the late 1700s.

Attracting an audience is often a tricky tact to do in a performance and in traditional theatre. Over the past weeks we have been experimenting with different questions and approaches to people on the high street and noted down best practice. We wanted to engage with the people on the high street, connect with them. See who would react to what specfic question and which methods / texts were being ignored. It became clear very early on that the broader, more complex questions got more responses such as: “If aliens were to attack the high street, where would they land” proved to be a favourite amongst people. We got distasteful reactions, responses were always interesting, funny looks, actual places such as the cathedral, tesco car park and “that house” were also given and all managed to contribute towards this initial experiment.

What we were creating through our experiments were episodic forms of Street Theatre rather than a piece of work that reflected Site-Specificity.

“Theatre should be product of the community” (Bim Mason, 133, 1992)

Our performance needed and is now currently underpinned by the historical significance of our specific site, as well as upheld via our practitional influences which as previously mentioned are Forced Entertainment, Michael Fried and John Newling. We are not dealing with performance of acting as such. We do not play characters, nor do we intend to. To play a character in our piece is would detract from the entire intention of our site-specific performance. It wouldn’t be organic and nor would it entice the audience i.e the community walking by, stopping, talking, writing labels on the bottles or our invited audience of our peers.

To frame our work as a whole I would argue that this is a type of exhibition. An organically built exhibition built through us as the performers and the audience that wander through the labelled bottles and infact the witnesses. The witnesses in context to this perfromance are those members of the public that contribute their suggestions to our final and only question:

In one word, what do you value most in life?

They witness their bottle being taken from them and / or placed down by themselves. The bottle is either placed in conjuction to the formation of the bottles placed by us – the performers, or it is infact placed totally different, distrupting the formation altogether but in doing so, making it a more organic piece. Something that is not orchestrated by us, but orchestrated by the audience.

It can be argued that when we are performing in this kind of site specific work we are not really performing. There is the assumption that we are as we are engaging with people as if they are an audience, we have our ‘stage’ we have our ‘props’ our ‘set’ and our ‘costume’ but we are not generating a theatrical performance and nor is our intention. We are simply bridging the gap between the audience and the art.

An Audience member > (Contributes a suggestion) > The suggestion is taken by the performer and is written on the bottle > (On the bottle is a white label, and in black permanent marker the suggestion is easy to read) > The performer places the bottle down in formation and the engagement with that particular member ends.

That is until they ask us (which is typical of people who are intrigued of lots of waterbottles being placed down on the street) in which case we pull our a piece of paper which contains a eulogy. The obelisk is representative of a memorial, of memory. So in this regard we are treating our particular site with the memory of the obelisk that once stood. There is the argument made by Michael Fried that if you move a work of art, that work is destroyed. Although the obelisk served a social purpose it did serve as a, archaelogical piece of artwork. Now because it has been moved, it’s purpose has moved with it. It no longer serves a communal nor social function. It is just something to be admired, something to look at, and something to be interpreted. Which is what our piece of work is incorporating throughout the duration of the performance.

March 8, 2016Jason Lodge No Comments

Last weeks site experiment

Last week our group content with our idea though it was crucial for to experiment with our latest plan. instead of returning to the concept of gathering thoughts of the public. But instead use water bottles to make our structure which is our major plan, to show the history or more clearly a anniversary of the obelisk and its life and use on the Lincoln high street. through this we wish to present this structure through water bottles, however this task appeared harder then our group originally though building this structure seemed impossible do to the surrounding conditions of the high street for example the uneven surface of the high bridge as well as peoples interaction with our work (mostly negative) as people took bottles without asking jeopardising our testing. also the whole principle is challenged due to the actually ability to stack the bottles. the shape of the bottles makes it difficult to stack the bottles in our desired shape as well as the sheer amount of bottles that would be required unpractical , thus questioning our ability to make our reinterpretation of the obelisk. however after our mid session meeting with Steve, helped us find a way around these problems, instead of making a statue of the obelisk which seems to be unpractical what if we made a grave out of the water bottles presenting a memorial instead of a statue however until further research we can not see how this can be approached this will be next weeks mission.