Framing Statement:
Our performance was based on the history of train stations in Lincoln, specifically the disused St Marks station and the current Lincoln Central. The historical element was initially so that we would have something else to bulk out our performance time, but it turned out that this addition was the real making of our piece. The performance was a variation of a guided tour, similar to Marcia Farquhar. But it wasn’t a ‘good’ guided tour – we kept it rough at the edges and fairly informal. This was to try and keep whatever audience we had at ease, and give them a laugh when we stumbled over our facts. Although, in turn this could have made the audience more awkward about the tour, making them question why they were doing this. Either one is a reaction and the reaction is what we wanted. The piece took around 15-20 minutes in total. Our audience was the select few we had invited to see the tour, plus any public that wanted to join or listened to the song as we played it, the public were a vital piece in our performance as they were the ones who would tell us whether or not we had succeeded in making them smile as they waited at the most miserable place in Lincoln.
Our performance depended on the train barriers being down, because otherwise the whole meaning of the piece would have been changed, so our timing had to coincide with the barriers. We were limited as either side of our allotted time was a huge gap of time where no trains passed through. 1.30 was our ideal time. Our performance consisted of starting at St Marks square next to PureGym. This is significant because the building next to PureGym is a replica of the old signal box that was there, and the original sign from St Marks station is placed on this building. (See Fig. 1) Then as we walked down past the building that now holds shops such as Mothercare, Sports Direct, Lakeland and more, I talked about the history of the building and how it is still the original station building, how it has won the Ian Allan preservation award and how the building was designed by I.A. Davies for Midland Railway Company in 1846, plus some other facts here and there. We took a minor detour into Lakeland through the old entrance to the station to view the scaled down tribute of the station. (See Fig. 2) This consists of an old timetable pole with copies of the real timetables on, plus a brief explanation of St Marks station. I noted that you can see on the floor where the platform may have ended and the tracks may have run. We then walked into Argos to view the photos that are on display in the entrance. (See Fig 3.) We tried to get in touch with the photographer Michael Hollist, however we had no success. After Argos, we looked out across the road and took note of the old signal house accommodation, which is now ‘Mr Chippy’ – Chris then suggested we go across to see the commemorative plaque that is placed on the wall. (See Fig 4.) After this we walked down the high street to the current train barriers, commenting on the building of St Marks shopping centre and other odd facts about the disused train station. Once we got to the barriers, luckily they were down, Kai and our guest Jordan were able to start playing the song they’d written for the piece. This got a brilliantly emotive response from the audience, with someone even throwing us money and applauding us! This was an amazing achievement for us, as all we’ve wanted to do the entire time was make people happy, and this proves we did.
Analysis of Process:
Site specific performance as an art is a complex one to define, with everyone’s interpretation being different depending on how they were introduced to the subject and how they feel about it. I think the person who came closest to successfully defining it in a short, simple way was Nick Kaye: “…articulate exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings were defined…” (Kaye, 2000, 1). I partially agree with this, because our performance was a work of art, and it was in a place where some NEW and additional meanings were defined, however the real meaning of our performance was established before we even had a performance: to make people happy, or to care for people.
Our site was a very open space, being the high street. There were many options we could have taken during our initial exploration of potential ideas, however we decided that the most miserable place on the high street was the train lines, as you get stuck for up to 10 minutes sometimes, waiting for multiple 20 plus carriage freight trains to pass by. This is extremely infuriating especially when you have a class to get to, or a bus to catch. It’s also infuriating anyway because you feel like you could be doing something more productive than just standing waiting for a stupidly long period of time for a single carriage train to pass by. In reality the average wait was only 2 minutes and 30 seconds, but it feels like much longer. As our aim of the piece was to make people happy and care for others we wanted to make the most miserable place a little bit less miserable. We wanted to use the audience to help build our performance, like Marcia Farqhuar and John Smith, so we decided to go and find out what would make people happy.
The first thing we did for our performance was go out and get some research from the general public. We went to the train lines, waited for them to go down and then asked the people standing there the question “If there were anything we could do now to make you happy, what would it be?”, we got a lot of mixed responses, ranging from “£100,000 please” to “Sort her Dad out because he’s a pr*ck”. Some were very predictable and others were very personal. This range of responses was amazing to me, because some of these people were telling us very personal things. This interested me as it made me think of Adrian Howells’ interview with Dominic Johnson. Howells said: “As it turned out, people were champing at the bit to tell me dark and dirty secrets, and it was very clear that I was perceived as some sort of agony aunt figure.” (Johnson, 2012, 178). We were becoming a fleeting agony aunt to some of these people, and this made me feel that our performance aim was already a success before we had even formulated a piece.
Our initial performance idea was completely different from the final outcome. The first idea we had was inspired by Forced Entertainment, in that we’d stand and read out responses from our research we had collected earlier, and though this was simple, we agreed it would be effective. However, we later decided we wanted to do something more, something a little more engaging. Also we then found out that St Marks had previously been a train station, and this sparked my interest, and Chris and Kai liked the idea of doing a guided tour, like Marcia Farqhuar. We had been shown her Onwards Tour while we were in seminar, and the informality was something I hadn’t seen before. This was interesting to me because it was something new, something that would make me feel like I wasn’t acting, and we didn’t want to act in this piece. We were already being taken out of our comfort zones so why not go the whole way and stop acting? Just be our normal selves? This was easy for me, as my interest in trains helped me with the research and delivery as I was commenting on the facts with my personal opinions, which made me feel I engaged more within the piece.
It took us a long time to decide on how we were doing the tour, and what would happen during it. There were many variables including used Forced Entertainment’s idea of relaying fact over fiction, so I would talk about the facts and then Chris would comment with the occasional piece of fiction, and the closer we got to the end of the tour the more ridiculous the fiction would become. This idea came about because on the side of the old station building there is a huge hole, that has been filled in with a red brick, instead of the yellow brick the rest of the building is made from. (See Fig. 5) We were unable to find the real cause of this, so my interpretation would be an educated guess based on the condition of the surrounding brick, and Chris was wondering whether someone could have crashed through the wall in a car. This seemed very silly, but it added another element to our performance that would make people smile because it was obvious he was talking rubbish. We later decided that this was taking the humour a little bit too far, however it is definitely a technique that we liked, it just didn’t fit in with our performance.
Another idea we had was that since our tour is based on the history of the train stations and we are taking a journey from the old station to the new, we toyed with the idea of treating the tour as if it were a train journey, so having the introductory piece, then conducting the walk between the stations in silence with only the odd comment here and there, as if it were a train journey. However, through practical experiment decided we didn’t like the silence. It felt too awkward as we are supposed to be doing a piece that makes people happy. However, to keep the train element in we decided on having a few announcements, for example a “Hello and welcome to the tour, thank you very much for choosing us” or if there was a delay then use announcements to indicate this. We decided that this was significant enough for us to show our meaning.
The idea of having the song involved in the piece was a very last minute idea. Our original plan was to have a gift stall where people could pick one thing that would make their day better, this also added a transaction element to our performance. However, this turned out to be far too much worry and far too complicated for our fairly simple piece. We decided to use the research I previously mentioned as the song lyrics, so that we could still use original ideas. Firstly, we put them to the tune of Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis, however, we wanted this song to be completely brand new and so the people who heard it would not have any confusing memories of Oasis mixed together with our song. To solve this problem, we asked around for a guitarist who could help us rewrite the song and found someone called Jordan. He and Kai rewrote the song, but kept very similar lyrics in, and this song went down amazingly with the general public, many people bobbed their heads along, a lovely lady came and gave Kai and Jordan a sweet each and someone even threw us money. We handed out the lyrics on a piece of paper to people who wanted them as something they could take away, so there was still a physical transaction we could do. The song was the real transaction but we wanted to give our audience something physical to take away and remember how the most miserable place in Lincoln was made a little bit less miserable that time.
Here is a link to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwP0SJsTfeg&feature=youtu.be [accessed 12th May 2016]
Performance Evaluation:
Our final, assessed performance was definitely the best one we done, which obviously really comforted us. However, a definite weakness for us was invited audience numbers, all through the rehearsals too. The most we had was two people. However, once we got to the train lines and started singing then the public gave us a lot more of a reaction, all positive. Some applauded, as I said earlier we had money thrown at us and some even stayed to hear the end of the song after the train lines had gone up again. So although we started with a small audience, we ended with a bigger one than we could have hoped.
During rehearsals, we had been performing on only one side of the train lines, next to the church. However, on performance day, when we arrived at the train lines we were the other side and couldn’t get past, so Kai and Jordan decided to perform it then and there. This worked extremely well because the cavity we stood in made the song echo out further across to the other side of the lines. I wish we had thought of this earlier but at the same time I am pleased as our reactions were all genuine rather than acted.
We could have improved the final performance by having a bigger audience to start off with, but as I said earlier, I think the final one was the best one we had done to date. So there was not a lot to improve. We wanted it to feel natural and we were told by our tutor to keep it a bit rubbish, so we didn’t rehearse much of what we were going to say, just roughly what we would talk about at which point. I feel this was successfully reflected in how much I stumbled over my words.
Learning site specific performance has been challenging for me, as I very much like structure and certainty in what I do, however site specific performance has very few barriers, thanks to the fact that it is not in a restricted space. This I believe is one of the strongest things that site specific has in its favour, because of the freedom of the project. But on the other hand this can also be a huge weakness for site specific. The complete freedom of location made it so much harder to come to a certain decision regarding our performance ideas, as we had so many different options. However, I feel that it has helped my confidence and made me feel like it is ok to take risks and leave your comfort zone every so often. One artist I feel I engaged with hugely is the late Adrian Howells, because of his interview with Dominic Johnson. I felt like I was reading about my own feelings, as Howells had managed to put into words how I felt before and after a performance: “The work was self-lacerating, and I was ripping myself apart in the spoken parts, and in the visceral nature of Nigel’s choreography, and I would have to go back to a hotel room and carefully stitch myself back up for the next day and the next performance.” (Johnson, 2012, 177). Aside from the fact I don’t go back to a hotel, but the whole ‘ripping myself apart’ section is exactly how I felt doing this performance as it pushed every boundary and instinct I have when it comes to drama.
I enjoyed doing this performance, but site specific is not something I will be revisiting any time soon, it’s too much freedom for my liking!
Francesca Bolingbroke
2573 words
Bibliography:
Johnson, D. (2012) ‘The kindness of strangers: An interview with Adrian Howells’, Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance, 3(2), 173–190.
Kaye, N. (2000) Site-specific art: Performance, place and documentation. New York: Routledge.
Photographs courtesy of Francesca Bolingbroke, taken between April-May 2016.