As a group we took a trip to Speaker’s Corner to identify what physical elements of it could be used in performance, what new things we could notice, and whether anything gave us inspiration. Our initial response when moving into the space was to comment on just how large the space actually is; we said that it almost resembled a theatre in the round, with buildings looking down on the centre from all sides.
(Bickerdike, 2016).
The second thing we noticed was how many banks were in the square and how many big companies such as McDonalds, LUSH, WHSmith, Thorntons, Pandora, etc. Contrasting to these big chains, there seemed to be very little in terms of more local/smaller businesses, the only places we predicted they could have been in the past were now empty units:
(Bickerdike, 2016).
As an image, this is interesting. In an area so saturated by banks and big businesses (MONEY), having derelict units creates an interesting contrast. This caused us to question who the managers of these failed businesses were, and who the managers of the big corporate chains and banks are; the likelihood is that most of the successful managers are men as there is a great imbalance between men and women in managerial roles. How could we show this link between Capitalism and gender to our piece? Well, the answer we came up with was mapping – specifically, mapping where the women are, and mapping where the money is, to see the relationship.
I made a rough start planning out an aesthetic for a performance based around political activism and performance art after researching Speaker’s Corner. I found out that there was once a Suffragette rally in that area which influenced the decision to name the square Speaker’s Corner, a place specially designed for people to go and exercise their freedom of speech. I researched the work of Debord and came across his piece Society of Spectacle, where my idea for the centre focus of my performance piece originates from.
Banner in French (red paint) – “Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n’as pas besoin de lui” = “The boss needs you, you do not need him”. Now has two meanings – Capitalism and Feminism. Inspired by Debord’s Society of Spectacle.
Girl #1 – Young girl dressed in modern dress, carrying modern teddy (recognisable character) and clear balloons with money in = dress covered in newspaper articles about female inequality, particularly unequal pay (e.g. day in November when technically don’t get paid). Dragging money balloons around the square – weighed down by money and Capitalism when should be free = childish innocence being destroyed, affects all women young and old, evokes Suffrage movement (rallies that happened then – if Capitalism and money weren’t there, that particular inequality wouldn’t exist. Even today she is still being oppressed – how far have we really come since these rallies? Only difference between then and now is that people are no longer in this spot protesting about it… but we are.
Girl #2 – Adult Suffragette wearing period clothing (as accurate to the time as possible), tied to numerous authentic Suffragette placards with green and purple ribbon (Suffragette colours) = heritage of protest, being tied to something not moving/tied to the fight and tied together (comradeship)/tied as in restrained – so many ribbons that woman is tangled in them – restrained as in exercising restraint as a woman “should”.
Girl #3 – Woman in own clothes stood with megaphone/microphone reading the same articles related to women and money that are on the girl’s dress. WE are protesting NOW – use the space for what it’s made for, continue the fight.
Additional ideas: Durational? Placards appear like a forest spanning a great deal of the square – resonates = ghosts of the women that once stood there. Young girl weaving inbetween the placards – lost, confused, everything against her.
End: young girl becomes exhausted from struggle and pops balloons, counts out money in desperation (needs food/water). Suffragette escapes from ribbons. Megaphone girl finishes articles.
Particularly prevalent in Speaker’s Corner – filled with BANKS and SHOPS = Capitalism/consumerism/money. Place of protest that lacks use – make use of it, it was made to make people remember their freedom of speech. A place where women campaigned for their rights, and still women are not equal, therefore we will do what they did.
During the course of our second seminar I observed how the general public responded to our interpretation of Carl Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities. He designed these “instructions” in the hopes of getting students to devise, using his instructions as; “a stimulus, not a strait-jacket” (Lavery, 2005, 230). In extension of their purpose, I found the instructions to be an activity open to analysis of audience/performer relationships.
The parameters of our site (the High Street), has become a familiar location that I traverse routinely with several singular purposes; to shop, to get somewhere, and to meet people. Under Lavery’s instructions, however, I was suddenly walking backwards, following animals, and watching as my classmates asked people for directions to a fake location. The absurdity of these actions didn’t strike me because I was engaged in my role as a drama student. But upon witnessing the responses of the general public, I observed myself and my classmates as they did. They had no idea we were drama students, which made for a different perception as to what was going on.
Upon reflection of my observations, I noticed that there is a tacit agreement that comes with the High Street, where people don’t notice the people around them because they are performing the same actions as everyone else: shopping, travelling, or meeting people. Throw a performance into that mix, and we get a spectator/performer relationship that Pearson and Shanks in Theatre Archaeology describe as;
“the performance event exists as a locus of experiences – spatial, physical, and emotional – preserved in the bodies and memories of the varying orders of participants” (2001, 54)
This is further elaborated as a separate experience for both parties. So going back to the notion of a tacit agreement taking place on the High Street, we find that there are several things we did that blended with the typical experience of the High Street (asking for directions to a fake location), and some that did not. Shouting at buildings, asking to buy furniture from café’s, chasing pigeons: actions that don’t occur naturally, which the public became witnesses to. We broke the tacit agreement, and suddenly people were aware of us, and analysing us.
The question I now have is what did they think was going on? What were they seeing in comparison to what I was seeing?
Work Citations:
Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25 (3) 229-238.
Pearson, M., Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre Archaeology. London: Routledge.
As part of our second seminar we looked at Carl Lavery’s 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Within this, we were given examples of “exercises or improvisations” (Lavery, 2005) to conduct within a city location to evoke material for creating work. These included:
“Deliberately get lost in the city.
Ask a friend to guide you through the city via instructions given on a mobile phone.
Negotiate the city by bus, car, bike, and on foot and document your impressions.
Collect lost or abandoned objects in the city streets and try to imagine narratives about them.”
(Lavery, 2005)
From this stimuli we were asked to adapt these or create our own to form set of instructions that we then swapped among the groups and were challenged to follow out on the high street. We created our own instructions such as “follow an animal for 5 minutes, note where it goes and how it moves”, and were given instructions like “go into a shop and ask for something they clearly don’t sell, gauge their reactions”. Primarily, this was the instruction we followed, but we also altered it slightly by going into a shop and asking for directions to a place that doesn’t exist – we found that most people tried to help us by guessing what this place was; a pub, a restaurant, a clothes shop? We created an imaginary place and through misdirection, made people question what they knew to be a fact, that this place didn’t exist.
Works Cited
Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 25 (3) 229-236.
“Cornhill in Lincoln’s city centre, the scene of huge Suffragette rallies a hundred years ago. The Speakers’ Corner Committee subsequently decided to create its Speakers’ Corner on the High Street part of Cornhill.”
(Speakers’ Corner Trust, undated)
Speaker’s Corner is a corner of the high street which has been developed into an area that people can go to demonstrate, protest, and exercise freedom of speech. The Speaker’s Corner is “a joint project between the University of Lincoln’s Take Part programme and the Speaker’s Corner Trust” (BBC, 2010), sited “close to where a suffragette demonstration took place nearly a century ago” (BBC, 2010). Speaker’s Corner was opened by former Labour politician Tony Benn, followed by students from the university “who were among the first people to debate at the site” (BBC, 2010).
“This will remind people that we have the right to speak.”
(This is Lincolnshire, 2010)
This has sparked ideas such as recreating a Suffragette rally, but perhaps rather than using signs such as ‘votes for women’, focusing on more contemporary issues that still oppress women today. Setting this contemporary demonstration in a place with such rich history of similar themes will echo the ghosts of those women there before us.
On a similar note, rather than holding a physical protest in the style of Suffragette rallies, a more peaceful, if not slightly haunting method of demonstrating would be to use silence – the exact opposite of the loud, sometimes violent protests of times gone by. Not only would this be safer in terms of our safety and also the publics, but it would also serve as a comment that women are still very much silenced in many aspects of society; a Suffragette rally without the chaos would be unnerving. A more metaphorical approach through different aspects of performance (i.e. the body, visual work such as video, etc) would serve us well.
Artists/work that have inspired me:
“Pioneer of multimedia environments Aldo Tambellini put on collaborative performances such as 1965’s BLACK ZERO,which incorporated live performance, poetry and projection and had strong revolutionary and social change messages, commenting on the racial situation in America. BLACK ZERO is the cry from the oppressed creative man. There is an injustice done to man which is not forgivable.”
(Beaven, 2012)
“Other artists associated with Fluxus (as Ono was) often took their actions into the street, aiming to break down the barriers between art and life, and bring the revolution to the everyday. In Prague, Milan Knížák and others in the AKTUAL group were often stopped by the police as they built environments or performed personal and participative acts in the streets of Prague, such as his Demonstration for One 1964. “
(Beaven, 2012)
“French students were exposed to and took on anti-establishment Situationist ideas such as Guy Debord’s 1967 Society of the Spectacle, which argued (the Marxist idea) that consumer society had reduced everything from direct experiences to mere appearances, and that the avant-garde and mainstream life should be brought together. Students in Paris went on strike, leading to confrontations with the French police and street battles in the Latin Quarter, and then a general strike across universities and industry. Painted graffiti appeared around Paris, with slogans such as‘Le patron a besoin de toi, tu n’as pas besoin de lui’ (The boss needs you, you don’t need him) ‘Je suis marxiste tendance Groucho’ (I am a Marxist, of the Groucho tendency) and famously, ‘Sous les paves, la plage!’ (Under the pavement, the beach!) came from Situationist ideas of play and freedom.”
(Beaven, 2012)
THIS GAVE ME AN IDEA FOR AN AESTHETIC OF A PERFORMANCE:
Bickerdike, 2016
I created this rough sketch to demonstrate my aesthetic ideas inspired by Debord’s Society of Spectacle. The text on the banner would be painted on in red (connotations: blood, danger, lust, Communist red) and the balloons would be coated in newspaper clippings (adverts/tabloid headlines to symbolise consumption and the public desires under Capitalism) – the balloons themselves, the dress and the stuffed teddy bear present the main figure in the picture to be childlike, young and innocent (a description of humanity under the Capitalist structure/the harmful effects of consumerism on the youth – children evoke emotions amongst the public – ‘what if it happened to my child?’ – presents Capitalism to be HARMFUL.
Could possibly work in the Cornhill –
“Female artists also focused on their lived experience, making public those parts of a woman’s life that had been seen as taking place behind closed doors. Judy Chicago taught on the germinal feminist programme at the California Institute of the Arts, along with painter Miriam Schapiro. Rejecting both her maiden name and that she had taken on her marriage, she changed her name to Judy Chicago in 1971, signalling her move into a feminist art practice, and a rejection of male domination. The influential installation Womanhouse1972 took place throughout a house in Los Angeles, and showed the work of 26 students as well as Chicago and Shapiro, including Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom(a bathroom with a bin overflowing with bloody tampons) and a series of performances exploring the lives, activities and roles of women. Chicago’s most well-known work, The Dinner Party 1974–9 came from previous works such as herGreat Ladies series and her realisation of the erasure of female achievements throughout history. The Dinner Partyis a triangular open table set with thirty-nine places, each commemorating an important female historical figure or goddess, resting on a tiled floor inscribed with the names of 999 other important women. The Dinner Party was exhibited in 16 venues in 6 countries on 3 continents to a viewing audience of over one million people, amking it an important touchpoint in the history of feminist art.”
(Beavan, 2012)
Works Cited
Beaven, K (2010) Performance Art 101: The Angry Space, politics and activism. [online] Available from http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/performance-art-101-angry-space-politics-and-activism [Accessed 5 February 2016].
BBC (2010) Tony Benn has officially opened Speakers’ Corner [online] Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/lincolnshire/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8872000/8872171.stm [Accessed 5 February 2016].
Speaker’s Corner Trust (undated) Roadtesting the Speaker’s Corner Site at Lincoln’s Cornhill [online] Available from http://www.speakerscornertrust.org/library/videos/roadtesting-the-speakers-corner-site-at-lincolns-cornhill/[Accessed 4 February 2016].
This is Lincolnshire (2010) Speakers Corner given official new home in Lincoln’s High Street [online] Available from http://www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk/Freedom-speech-new-home-Lincoln-High-Street/story-11200935-detail/story.html [Accessed 5 February 2016].
