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.
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.
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.
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.
(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].