Year: 2016

Often having lots of ideas can be a good thing to have and can lead to vast amounts of work being created. However, on reflection there always seems to be a hidden idea or a hidden underlining theme which links all those initial ideas together. As a group we can came up with a multitude of ideas which on reflection could all be substantial as ideas for performance in the Site of the high street, however, in analysing the through-line of these ideas it was evident that words, the personal and interaction were the principals which anchored these ideas. What I found excting about this process was that by identifying these aspects it led us as a group to create a brand new idea that we were all ready to jump at and experiment with.

We knew that certain elements of this idea had been performed before in a prior year such as to ask for free hugs and hi fives in the high street, but we still wanted to use this method as an experiment in order to gauge how participatory our audience on the high street could be. We started off at the bridge area of the high street (where we believed to be the busiest part). However, in order to prove this, we moved the experiment after some time further up the high street, beyond the arch into the more rich district of Lincoln. The engagement of people on that part of the high street proved to be less so than people that were passing by the bridge. So in essence, through this experiment we found our site and to a degree saw that a participatory performance in that space on the high street could in fact work.

Our idea that we experimented with on the high street was to use paper signs that invited the audience to interact with his. Our starting points was when I stood in the middle of the high street holding a sign in front of me that I had no idea what was written on it. I personally thought this was particularly interesting as all I could really judge on the signs nature was the audience’s reactions as they passed by. Some were smiling and laughed, others looked fairly confused and it was hard to gauge what kind of statement or question was written on the piece of paper that I was holding.

In the second session of Site Specific Performance, we began to think about what could classify as performance.  We looked at the work of Marcia Farquhar, a site specific practitioner who in her Live Art Tour explores and engages with the history of the festival of Britain.  Her work attempts to represent history through a tour which features both planned instances of performance and what we can refer to as being accidents. For instance, it is unclear whether the busker playing Starman was a part of the performance but it is an element which arguably enhances the atmosphere. Nick Kaye for instance in site-specific art performance, place and documentation suggests that “the urban landscape offers a profusion and complexity of signs and spaces where the condition of recepton… might be countered by an excess of information” (Kaye, 2000, 33). Kaye argues that a city or a more urban space contains a lot more information and traffic compared to that of a gallery; which we might asscociate with emptiness. This information and “profusion” of signs and spaces blurs into site specific performance and would certainly do so  for when we perform on the Lincoln high street.

In further exploring how performance could be made in the city we as a class took influence from Carl Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities. Lavery in the article lists multiple ways in which performance can be created. Experiments such as to  “take a video camera into the city and follow a dog or a cat for as long as you can. Make a film out of this” (Lavery, 2005, 236), was something that led us as a group to develop an instruction which was to follow an animal wherever it went and upon seeing another animal, follow that. We found that the more simple the instruction was the more easier it was to perform. To walk into a shop for instance, and ask for something that they wouldn’t normally sell was interesting as arguably it subverted the norm. In today’s society we associate particular brands with selling specific styles of merchandise, and by going into paperchase and asking for a hot-cross bun rightfully caused a reaction of confusion from the woman at the till. Similarly, asking for directions to a place that wasn’t real was bother interesting and entertaining. We went into both Office and Game and asked where the places Lindon and the Shady Hut were and the cashiers although not knowing what we were talking about still went to ask their supervisor officials to see if they knew.

Citations:

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

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 35/3/229-238.

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

The first week of site involved a lot of new information, from Ivring Goffman a sociologist who turns everyday events in to performance, to Christian Nold who maps the emotions and changes in the body as we navigate our way through a space. 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 A Live Art 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 practised performance elements or not.

Towards the end of the session we walked the parameters of the city which we are able to perform in, we were told to walk around trying to notice places that could be interesting for a performance. I found myself struggling with this, as the City is something I see everyday, so it was difficult to then imagine it as a performance space. I found myself continuously asking would this idea be site specific, why is this site specific? At the end of the walk through the city, a skittle rolled down the hill and stopped in a hole in the concrete, as minute as it may seem, this was the moment I started to think as a site specific artist. Every small detail that happened in the City whether it be; falling leaves, people arguing, people sitting on a bench, I started to think what could I do with this. How could this be a performance?

During the Second week we continued to discuss and revise practitioners previously mentioned. We also discussed the idea of non places, 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,’ (P.D Smith, 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. Again this was another thing that I found myself interested in looking further into as a performance space. The fact that they are places for public to pass through means that will more than likely be busy places, therefore could create a good performance space as there would be more opportunities for audiences. Pearson states ‘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 it is important to chose a place where you are likely to receive an audience especially if you are using audience participation.

The second time something sparked my imagination as a site-specific artist was after looking at Carl Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities. These were a set of instructions devised to use as a stimulus 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 an other 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. 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. My task now is to begin to delve into practitioners that work with these themes for example, Robert Wilson and look for performances spaces that can enhance these ideas.

Works Cited

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.

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