H20. Final Submission: Kieran Spiers

Framing Statement

Site Specific Art

Site specific art and the performances within this discipline explore the boundaries of how the relationship between performance, object, place and performer might be understood. Nick Kaye in Site Specific Art describes this style of performance as being very articulate. It “define[‘s] itself through properties, qualities or meaning produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position it occupies” (Kaye, 2000, 1). Site specific art in Kaye’s terms is about relation, and how a relationship to an object or an event combined with the history of said object or event might help to establish meaning which transcends itself into performance. Miwon Kwon provides the view that site specific art takes the site as an actual location, “a tangible reality, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements: length, depth, height, texture” (Kwon, 2002, 2). Whilst these readings of this discipline are broad, it gives us an insight into how site specificity might be understood. Both Kaye and Kwon refer to how the physical properties of the site, determines how the performance is to be constructed. These viewpoints informed our process and our overall theoretical understanding in creating our work.

Our performance was a durational site specific performance situated on the High Bridge, which engaged with the historical significance of the site and audience interaction. Furthermore, we practically explored the materiality of water, through repetition, physical action and meaning.

Our methodology is the value of experimentation through audience engagement inspired by initial research into Forced Entertainment and Carl Lavery to a practical homage based on the works of Kirsten Pieroth and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. We have also engaged with theorists such as Mike Pearson, Nicholas Bourriard and Marc Auge.

Process

Square one

At the start of our process we explored the High Street, examining areas that we have never seen before such as alleyways and places of interest which could be used for performance. Kaye suggests that the city as an urban landscape “offers a profusion and complexity of signs and spaces where the condition of reception… might be countered by an excess of information” (Kaye, 2000, 33). From here we can understand that the city as a space exhibits a traffic of information which overwhelms our reception, therefore the “profusion” of signs, spaces and information blurs into site specific performance and would certainly do so for a performance on the High Street. This led us to look at Marcia Farquhar’s Live Art Tour (2012). In this performance, she explores the use of psycho-geography and layering of history. Farquhar talks about her interest in boredom and how leading an audience through intentional and unintentional objects and events can enhance the performance. From our explorations we found that the most interesting place was the High Bridge. The location attracts buskers, stalls and connects the city therefore providing the most human traffic.

Relations, Signs and Audience

When we were researching into site-specificity we came across Bourriard’s Relational Aesthetics. He argues that the function of artworks being developed in city spaces “attest to a growing urbanisation” (Bourriard, 1998, 15). Although Bourriard is examining city spaces from a socio-economic perspective, it was interesting to engage with this when thinking about performance. He explained that “it will not be possible to maintain relationships between people outside these trading areas” (Bourriard, 1998, 9), such as consumerist brands and shops. By applying this to our space we realised that our performance needed to fit around the fact that the city is a hustling environment, which could hamper lasting encounters. Therefore, we would need to devise something visually compelling, to be able to draw attention from passers-by.

Our initial experiments were inspired by Carl Lavery’s 25 Instructions for performance in cities and Forced Entertainment’s Nights in the city. Carl Lavery created a list of exercises to use when creating performance within a city such as to “Sit in a park, café or bar and listen to the stories spoken around you.” or “Create a forest” (Lavery, 2005, 236). This inspired us to devise our own instruction which was to ‘create a sign, write whatever you want and see how people respond.’ The signs we designed had phrases such as “free hugs” and “hi fives” then we stood on the street to see what happened. People responded well, they hi-fived and hugged us whilst engaging with a sign saying “talk to me”. This led us to Forced Entertainment’s Nights in the city, which was a tour of various locations in Sheffield which weaved fact and fiction within their text, for example, “all the streets round here got named after famous football hooligans from history” (Forced Entertainment, 1995). They began to write over the city through palimpsest, treating the space as layers and the performance “define[d] itself in the very sites it is caught in the process of erasing” (Kaye, 2000, 11), which I thought was interesting as a concept of performance.

This gave us the inspiration to combine the bizarre with our signs. Beforehand we were provoking a reactional response from people and to rectify this I decided to write on a sign, “If Aliens attacked Lincoln, where would they land?”

Figure 1: Myself holding up the sign; “If Aliens attacked Lincoln, where would they land?” — Figure 1: Myself holding a sign. (Jason Lodge, 2016)

Although not primarily engaged with site-specificity, people became involved by offering answers such as “the cathedral” or “Tesco’s big car park.” One woman even thought I was part of a cult, which was an interesting response. These experiments, albeit random, contributed to our methodology which was to immerse the audience through their own personal contributions. Tim Etchells suggests that the city as a space “is both a map of space and a map of states of mind” (Etchells, 1999, 77). We were not just committed to exploring the space but the opinions and thoughts of its inhabitants. Consequently, we wanted to examine the reactions in order to explore the space and analyse what High Bridge means through the community.

High Bridge History

Moving on from these experiments we conducted in-depth research into The High Bridge to see if there was any historical significance. We discovered that there was a chapel dedicated to St Thomas Beckett but was destroyed during the reformation in 1762/3. Incidentally an obelisk was built in homage to the chapel which also acted as a fountain.

Figure 2: Photograph of an image showing the original placement of the obelisk. Credit: Kieran Spiers — Figure 2: Photograph of an image showing the original placement of the obelisk. (Kieran Spiers, 2016)

This was subsequently removed in 1939 due to fears that it was straining the bridge’s architecture because of the weight. It was reconstructed in 1996 in St Marks Square and 2016 is the 20^th anniversary of its reconstruction. By examining the history of our site, it enabled us to start thinking about how we could use it as stimulus for performance.

Figure 3: Photograph of the Obelisk taken in February 2016 in St Marks Square. Credit: Jason Lodge — Figure 3: Photograph of the Obelisk taken in February 2016 in St Marks Square. (Jason Lodge, 2016)

Bottles and Water

To start with, we explored the High Street, engaged with the public through practical exercises and researched into the history of our site. By March we were set in creating performance. We began to theorise that the High Street could be a non-place. Marc Auge argues non-place designates “spaces formed in relation to certain ends such as transport and commerce, and the relations that individuals have with these spaces” (Auge, 1995, 78). The High Street is primarily a place of travel and so “the traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place” (Auge, 1995, 86). From this, we examined the tacit agreements of the High Street, in which people travelled up and down and entered the stores that they wished to purchase from. From here, we knew we wanted our performance to disrupt the fluid human traffic of the High Street.

We were inspired by the obelisk because of its relation to water and the significance of its history on the High Street. Pearson and Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology suggested “Do not begin with the question ‘What is it?’ Instead ask ‘What does it do?’” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 53). Using this as a framework, the obelisk was a fountain and therefore contained water, whereas now it is simply just a commemorative statue. This started our explorations into the connotations of water and of the obelisk.

We narrowed our exploration to three themes: Life, Reconstruction and Memorial. Initially we wanted to create a visual representation of the obelisk out of water bottles but figured that it wasn’t feasible and wouldn’t be an interesting performance. Narrowing our text and explorations further we devised a question to say to the audience. This question was ‘In one word, what do you value most in life?’ However, we still needed to establish an effective way of engaging with our audience. Bim Mason on audience explains that there are two main approaches to attracting an audience “one is to be loud, large and colourful, the other is to be subtle.” (Mason, 1992, 93). We did not intend to create a loud spectacle but rather a subtle interaction with our audience, similar to what we had been accomplishing with our prior experiments.

We wrote the question on a white board and interacted with the public audibly by asking the question. The way this idea entailed was that upon receiving a response we would write it on a label that was stuck to a water bottle, or if the audience member wanted to they would write down the response and place it down. As you can see from figures 4 and 5 the bottles began in a grid formation, jutting out from the raised area to the centre of the High Bridge.

Figure 5. Credit: Jason Lodge — Figure 5. (Jason Lodge, 2016)

Figure 4: Water Bottles place in formation on the High Bridge. Credit: Jason Lodge — Figure 4: Water Bottles place in formation on the High Bridge. (Jason Lodge, 2016)

The use of this allowed people to move in-between the bottles, to view the responses provided by participants. Typically the responses were ‘family, money, education, health’ others were unconventional such as: ‘fifa, eyesight, sex, home.’ This was interesting to view as a lot of the responses juxtaposed those that they were positioned next too, and the formation of the bottles somewhat became an installation. We moved away from this idea due to too many complications. The bottles provided an obstruction on the street and we relied too much on the audience activating our piece. Furthermore, from feedback it was not visually interesting enough, and so we wanted to create something even more visually engaging. Despite this, this idea still impacted on our final idea because of the initial engagement with the materiality of water.

H20 – A final reconstruction

Following our previous concept, we struggled to move on due extensive enthusiasm and passion. I provided the idea that we should hang bottles off the High Bridge with pure water inside mixed with red, green and yellow food colouring – the prime colours. I wanted to explore the idea of purity, however on reflection we would only be un-purifying the water. This led us to the action which formed the basis of our final performance. Bucketing water out of the Brayford. We decided that rather engage with bottled water, we would examine how we could interact with the water under the High Bridge and use that as the basis for performance.

We bought buckets, rope, containers and DIY suits and started work on our final idea. The DIY suits was a choice made by Jace and Tom, as they figured it would be visually compelling if we were to be costumed whilst transporting water to the containers. Our experiments included bucketing water out of the canal, transporting it to a large container on the High Bridge and filtering/purifying it through jugs and smaller containers. The motion of walking with a full bucket was interesting as initially we did not feel that this would be visually interesting however, through bucketing, travelling and pouring the water back and forth, we gathered significant attention. This idea was not just inspired by our previous idea, but was informed by Kirsten Pieroth’s Berlin Puddle (2001) and Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Maintainence Art.’ Maintainance Art is:

“Avant-garde art, which claims utter development, is infected by strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials. Conceptual & Process art, especially, claim pure development and change, yet employ almost purely maintenance processes.”

(Ukeles, 1969, 2).

Her work highlighted overlooked aspects of social production and questions the hierarchies of different forms of work, especially housework and low-wage labour. In Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside (1973) Ukeles cleaned the stairs and plaza of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. This was one of four works in the series Maintenance Art Performances staged by Ukeles which drew attention to the comparative status and value of artistic and manual labour. We were inspired by this because we used the purified water in sprays to clean the area where the obelisk used to be. This enabled our performance to be not just a piece of art but more of a metaphorical community service. Pieroth’s Berlin Puddle (2001) explored the materiality of water by physically moving a puddle from one location to another through transferable containers. I was particularly interested in the piece, due to the simplicity. She simply took a puddle from somewhere in Berlin and transferred it to Isartorplatz park via plastic jugs. The use of labour, movement and simplicity heavily informed our final performance, because the act of continuously repeating an action/movement was something that transpired to be at the heart of the final stages of our process.

Reflections

We performed our piece on the 5^th May 2016 from 2pm till 6pm, and on reflection I feel that overall the performance went considerably well.

Figure 6: Myself (Left) Jack (Centre) Will (Right) stood filtering and purifying the water and using it to clean the raised platform. Credit: Ashley Walls — Figure 6: Myself (Left) Jack (Centre) Will (Right) stood filtering and purifying the water and using it to clean the raised platform. (Ashley Walls, 2016)

Figure 7: H2O – Complete process of Performance – with added sound. (Ben Peck, 2016)

Mike Pearson says that Site-Specific performance needs to “invoke a collective identity for its audience” (Pearson, 2010, 177). The audience we gathered from our performance was a constant stream of the general public, and the attention we received came in two forms: visual engagement and practical engagement. Visual engagement: passers-by often looked at what we were doing and even stopping to form a group. Practical engagement, some audience members involved themselves in our piece by asking us what we were doing. When approached, we told them exactly what we were doing in that we were bucketing water from the canal, transporting it to be filtered and spraying it back into the canal. We then proceeded to enquire as to whether this engaged audience had any interesting memories or experiences with water which generated interesting responses. One response we received had an affiliation to water through living on a canal boat for three years. Another response was that an old couple gave their son a sea burial, a sad but interesting response, in how we have often referred to water being a source of life not really associated with death. Additionally, I felt that the weather aided our performance somewhat, as when we were engaging in practical experiments in the space, it was often too cold or miserable; so by performing on a day with excellent weather certainly helped us gather and engage with a larger audience.

Figure 7: Will and Jack stood by the full container waiting for it to be filtered. Credit: Rebecca Fallon — Figure 8: Will and Jack stood by the full container waiting for it to be filtered. (Rebecca Fallon, 2016)

Finally, we could have orchestrated some better ground rules for our final performance, such as breaks for a rest as due to the nature of the 18 degree heat combined with constant physical exertion it had certainly taken its toll on us half way through the performance. Furthermore, by having break slots in the performance it might have enabled us to perform for a longer duration which could have been effective visually, as audiences viewing the performances in the morning might view the performance and our physical tiredness and therefore respond differently if they were to return. We could have engaged with more scripted material because we were not prepared for some of the conversations we had and I felt that the dialogue between our audiences was too casual. Which isn’t to say that I wished it to be robotic but I felt that we could have developed this further.

This process has challenged me intellectually and practically as a performer, however I feel that I have learned a considerable amount know that I have been able to grow as an artist. Site Specific is an ever-changing discourse which I would love to explore in more depth.

Word Count: 2644

Works Cited:

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

Bourriaurd, N. (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presse Du Reel

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. London: Routledge.

Forced Entertainment. (1995) Nights in the city. [performance] Tim Etchells (dir.) Sheffield: Sheffield, 9 April.

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

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another Site-Specific art and Locational Identity. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pearson, M. (2000) ‘Bubbling Tom’ in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Small Acts: Performance, the Millennium and the Making of Time, London: Black Dog, pp. 174- 85.

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

Mason, B. (1992) Street Theatre and other outdoor performance. London: Routledge.

Pearson, M., Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre Archaeology. London: Routledge.

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

Peck, B. (2016) H2O. [online] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ejgHF15Mpl8. [Accessed 11 May 2016]

Pieroth, K. (2001) Berlin Puddle. [performance art] Berlin: Isartorplatz park.

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

Ukeles, M. (1973) Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside. [performance art] Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum.

Ukeles, M. (1969) Manifesto For Maintainance Art. Arnolfi: New York.

March 15, 2016Kieran Spiers

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.

February 21, 2016Kieran Spiers

History and ‘Writing over the city’

From our prior experiments over the last few weeks, myself and my group decided that the place in which we would create and perform our piece of site specific work would be the High Bridge section of the high street. We studied the context and the history of our site by researching the history of it. From sheer observation it can be argued that the High Street itself can be described as being a non-place. It is transitory, and it’s use is for easier access to specific destinations i.e: Home or shops for either work or shopping.

From researching the history of the High Bridge it became clear to us that the site is more signifcant then we thought before. There was once a chapel situated on the bridge, built and dedicated to St Thomas Beckett. It was taken down during the period of the reformation. What was also interesting is that a stature or ‘obelisk’ as it is generally referred to was built in place of the chapel when it was taken down in 1762/3. The obelisk was present on the bridge and later moved due to fears of it’s weight on the bridge.

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Here is a picture of the obelisk now in St Marks Shopping Centre. It was removed from the High Bridge in 1939 and rebuilt here in 1996. This is significant to us as the High Bridge represents re-construction and travel. The bridge itself was refurbished with stone instead of wood for extra stability, and as stated there is a pattern of refurbishment: A chapel was built in dedication and taken down. An obelisk was built in place of that chapel and subsequently taken down and moved and now on the high bridge there is nothing there apart from an old Tudor coffee shop and a transitory place for people to walk up and down almost ‘zombie-like’ as described by a man that we interviewed on the High Street as part of one of our experiments. We will be using the obelisk and the history behind it for our work. Nick Kaye describes site-specific work as articulative and it “define[‘s] itself through properties, qualities or meaning produced in specific relationships between an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and a position ir occupies” (Kaye, 2000, 1). From this it can be said that our “object” is the obelisk itself and we are exploring what it means. The obelisk was used as a well to supply water to the population of lincoln and this year it is the 20th anniversary of when it was rebuilt, and naturally this renders the object and the site with a level of historical significance.

We moved ahead from our prior experiments to exploring the high street’s mode of response through signs to specfically being based on the High Bridge. We wanted to portray this idea of community. Community has a broad context but the meaning which underpins our understanding of the word, in context to our performance is this from the Oxford English Dictionary:

“The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common.”

The people along the high street do not represent a community. There is hardly any communication, no interaction just movement. It follows it’s own tacit agreements in the sense that you keep on moving. For instance, if you’re talking you move and walk and you never really stop and take notice of anything for too long. This provided the basis for our experiments in asking direct questions through the use of signs. We took inspiration from Forced Entertainment’s Nights In This City whom of which we have already decided to use as one of our influences for our work. In Nights In This City they gave guided tours with fictionalised questions and statements along Sheffield and Rotterdam respectively. that posed “questions which implied generic narratives or events linked to dramatic themes: ‘If you had killed someone and had to dump the body where would you take it?'” (Kaye, 2000, 9). They began to write over the city, to give it a more interesting context. Tim Etchells in Certain Fragmennts Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment suggests that the city “is both a map of space and a map of states of mind” (Etchells, 1999, 77). We wanted to see the reactions to these states of mind, and to a degree begin to map out the space of the high street and what the high street means through the community.

Firstly, I held up a sign saying “What would the high street be like in the future?” We got responses such as tired, knackered and the idea that the history and the ‘vibe’ of lincoln has began to dissipate and arguably has already dissipated. One man suggested that that the historical is merging with the corporate. That the buildings are becoming chain businesses and independence in business within Lincoln is faltering. This of course coincides with reconstruction as once something is out of use it is moved or made into something new. From reflection we did not get much attention from a simple and arguably mundane question. So we decided to ask something out of the ordinary:

“If Aliens came to Lincoln where would they land?”

This question met with a lot of varied response, whilst I was stood central to the oncoming traffic of people, Jack had began to make observations of what people’s reactions to me were and what they were saying.

( Photo credit: Jason Lodge)

In the image, my ‘costume’ arguably gives off a certain vibe, this was intentional. The responses to the question were varied. More often than not people saw me as being weird, one woman thought I was part of a cult. Someone took a selfie, when I held the sign high above my head just to experiment with the proxemics of where the sign was I got more response and more people stared. What was interesting was that as soon as the sign went down for when I spoke to people, the crowd just walked on by oblivious to the event. From this experiment alone we were able to draft up the most interesting responses from people along the street.

Possible locations for aliens to land:
– “High Street”
– “tell them to fuck off”
– “that house”
– “Dover”
– “top of the hill”
– “brayford”
– “castle” x2
– “cathedral” x3
– “big tesco car park”
– “Pavs”
– “horse field”
– “somewhere around here”
– “avoid Lincoln”

Although this was an experiment it can be said that a basis of community was being created here, people were stopping contributing to the event that we had created. This was not just a verbal communication between people but a contribution of people actually taking time out of their transitory state of mind to notice the sign and the event.

Reference List:

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragmennts Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. Abingdon: Routledge.

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

February 17, 2016Kieran Spiers

Experimentation and Ideas

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.

February 17, 2016Kieran Spiers

Instructions for Performance

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].