Adrian Howells – City and Site

May 13, 2016Christopher Clarkson No Comments

Christopher Clarkson Final Blog submission

City and Site

Framing Statement

Place is space in which important words have been spoken which have established identity, defined vocation and envisioned destiny. Place is space in which vows have been exchanged, promises have been made and demands have been issued. (Brueggmann, 1989)

Our final piece looks into the historical background of the train lines that used to be at St Marks and gives the audience some background to it, before we begin our tour. An element which we took as inspiration from Marcia Farquhar’s Onwards Tour. Except with ours being more fact than fact mixed with fiction which was often the case on her tours. As we made our journey through the town centre doing our informal tour, we were purposefully arguing about some of the facts in order to create the misery in the mind of the audience. This is what we wanted them to feel at the time we got to the existing train lines, thus taking the audience to a non-place and turning it into a place. So that we could cheer them up with a song composed from the responses we got when we asked people what would make them happy whilst they were miserable at the train lines, a process taken from Adrian Howells’ Salon Adrienne (2007), where he prised information from them while having them in a comprising position, where they could do nothing but open up to him. So from the responses we got given we turned them into a song as our aim was to cheer people up while at the train line, having originally decided to also have a transaction element of it where gave people gifts.

However, the impracticalities of this meant that we decided not to go with this idea and to have the song as the ‘transaction’. As well as give out lyrics to the audience stuck at the train line so that they can remember the moment every time they are at the train line and feeling miserable. We felt that the performance would be more powerful having this as the transaction rather physically handing them a gift. After deciding what our final piece would be and entail, we decided that it wouldn’t work as a durational piece however we could do three performances of it with a small intimate audience for the tour.

Our original piece was going to be performed at 10.30 am on a Friday but it was vital for the train lines to be down in order for the musical element of the piece to really work and resonate, so we requested that it would be moved to 1.30 as from our research we knew this would be the best time for us to do it. The performance would begin at St Mark’s square by the old signal box, we would then take the audience on a journey up to the train line, we thought the piece would work best as a short 15 minute piece, that would end at the current train line it was important that whilst the song was being performed at the end we got a reaction from the audience, not just the people who came on the tour but also those waiting for the train barriers to go up so they could continue with their day. The reaction and response from the audience that what want is for them to be cheered up, this was the part that they played in the performance as well as using them to create the lyrics for the song in the first place.

Analysis of Process

From the beginning of our site specific performance, were we learnt about tacit agreements and what some of those may be on our site, the high street, I gained an interest into what site specific performance meant and what it was all about, Nick Kaye’s definition of sire specific certainly helped this“…articulate exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings were defined…” (Kaye, 2000, 1) this certainly helped us to quickly realise that in order for something to be a site specific piece there has to not only to be a link in some way to the site where a meaning is defined but the performance is to be performed in that space.

As the weeks of seminars went on and we learnt more about things such as hosts and ghosts, place and non-place.(Kaye, 2014) my interest and ideas, as well as an enjoyment for our site piece began to develop. This was more so particular when we looked at instructional pieces, particularly Carl Lavery’s essay on instruction for performance in cities (Lavery, 2005 ) . This was something that really took my interest and resonated with me, the idea that I wanted our group’s piece to form around. As our site was the local high street we looked at and tried out some of the instructions he gave in the piece and from this created our own and swapped with another group we then went onto site and had to follow these instructions. After trying to put this in practice we realised we needed more to work with so we went and sat in a local coffee shop and watched passers-by. Upon doing this we found that people were generally quite miserable at the local train lines that pass through the city. After noticing this we our aim was to make people happier whilst at the train line. We decided to take a route similar to that of Adrian Howells in ‘Salon Adrienne’.

(Adrian Howells,2007)

From this we tried something similar where we gained information from people while they were trapped waiting to cross to the other side of the train tracks, we approached them and told them we believed that the train lines were the most miserable part of Lincoln high street, we then asked if they felt the same and how we could make them happier.

We were thus breaking the tacit agreement not to talk to people at the train line, and it was quite strange to realise how open people were to giving answers, particularly responses such as 100,000 pounds and make the weather better, however we did get some outlandish ones, one of which was a guy who said ‘stop my girlfriend’s dad being such a prick’, this was one that resonated with us in particular. After gathering lots of responses over a couple of weeks we then had to decide how we would use them.

From this we got to our initial more likely performance idea which was inspired by Forced Entertainment’s, Speak Biterness.I felt that the link between ‘Salon Adrienne’ and Speak Biterness were key as Forced entertainment had to go through Howells’ process, albeit in a slightly different way and with a different outcome, after watching these pieces we feel that although we follow the same process our piece and what we did with our responses was very different, particularly from what we felt would be our final outcome.

(Forced Entertainment, 2014)

We tried to add some inspiration from this video into our piece by standing by the train lines and read out the responses, however after trying this realised it wasn’t of much impact and didn’t create the response from the audience we had hoped for. After thinking back to earlier sessions we thought why don’t we look into the history of our non-place, the train lines. After doing several hours of research and looking into the archives we realised that St Marks Square used to have a train line there too that lead to the same station. Kai and I thought why we don’t try a guided tour from the old train lines at St Marks to the ones that still remain. We wanted to use historical information as well as overlaying fictions onto a place, inspiration we took from Marcia Farquhar and her live art tour. When linking Speak Bitterness with Faqrquhar’s live art tour you see that Speak Bitterness takes you on an auditory tour, of the response they were given during their research stage, yet the live art tour offers the visual as well as the auditory, this we felt would work better for our piece.

(REcreativeUK, 2012)

As we got closer to the performance day we decided that the performance couldn’t stick strictly to one set of train lines and that a moving auditory history from one site to another would be best , particularly after reading Fiona Wilkie’s article on the ‘Mobility Turn’ where she states that‘…. site-based performance has developed a multi-layered relationship to mobility that has included transporting its audience to/from the site of performance (for example, The Persians, National Theatre Wales, 2010), undertaking a journey as the mode of performance/inviting us to think about what it means to be in transit / and conceiving of ‘site’ as inherently ‘restless and mobile’37 (Wrights & Sites, A Mis-Guide to Anywhere, 2006) (Wilkie,2012). In this she mentions several links that we endeavoured to look further into as inspiration for our travelling piece, these were Wright and Sites, A Mis-guide to Anywhere. This is of course accurate to Marcia Farquhars live art tour, whose piece does exactly this, hence our inspiration to use something similar within our own piece.

Performance Evaluation

Come performance day we practised with a few run through’s on the site before we were assessed these two weren’t the best as we slightly under timed the travelling element of the piece, which meant we got to the train lines earlier than we needed to which lead to the composition element not having the same effect on that audience as it did in the final piece, which we timed perfectly and managed to perform the song made of audience responses several times. This meant that due to the train lines being down we attracted more audience numbers as they were essentially trapped in what would usually be referred to as a non-place. Therefore giving them no choice but to listen to the song while they waited. We gave out lyrics to the people on the tour as well as those waiting at the train line that were not part of tour.

This was so that they had a memory of the time they were made happy at the train line by the song which was written from responses as to what would make people happy, some of which were fairly comical. Even though we didn’t attract a large number of people to the informal tour element of the performance, this was good as we wanted this to be quite intimate, and for the majority of the audience to come from the train lines and to be feeling the misery there before cheering them up with a song at the train line, which we were hoping they would join in with, however this didn’t really happen.

We did get some reactions people throw money at us thinking we were busking, I heard people comment on some of the lyrics saying ‘yes I do wish that’, as well as people smiling and giving us thumbs up. There is a point in the song where we use the word prick, which I was worried may have got a bad reaction from the people at the train line as swearing in the street isn’t very politically correct, and people may have been offended particularly if they had young children with them.

During the final performance we realised that it didn’t matter what side of the train line we were on, we would usually perform on the side of the train line were the church was, but on the day we performed both sides and it worked either way. We also realised that even if the train lines weren’t down we could keep the people on the tour waiting in silent until it did go down before starting the song in order to make them feel the misery there, and use the song to show them that it can be a happy place, so these were new ideas that we thought about during and post-performance.

I think the informality of the tour worked really well, as if it was a proper tour, with proper tour guides who knew their information, it could perhaps have come across as acting and not being ourselves, however the fact that we were informal second guessing dates and buying chips mid piece, seemed to really work and for that reason will resonate with the audience. Had it have been done as a formal tour, audience will not have taken as much information in, and the fact it was informal and ‘Naff in the all right ways’ as mentioned in feedback to us by our lecturer, this helped the audience to build in that misery making them feel much happier once they heard the song. We could have improved the final performance by trying to attract more of an audience in and finding a way to really get the audience at the train line to sing along to the song.

If I was to do the performance again I would maybe alter the route taken in order to show the audience a less familiar route and take them around to things that they may not have noticed before. So instead of going straight through town and to the train lines maybe take them down a side road which lead to the train station and round that way. This would have allowed to have made the performance a bit more observational pointing things that we hadn’t spotted on that route before and seeing if the audience had spotted anything they hadn’t noticed before.

Figure 5: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop. — Figure 5: Chris explaining the historical original signal box that now homes a chip shop Important Plaque on the chip shop (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

Pointing out the plaque at the chip shop (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

(These bloody train lines- Site Specific Performance, 2016)

Research for Historical infoormation (Chris Clarkson, 2016)

Word Count – 2300

Pictures courtesy of Chris Clarkson, Kai Valentine and Fran Bolingbroke

Works cited

Wilkie,F. (2012) Site Specific performance and the mobility turn. Contemporary Theatre review, 22(2) 203-213.

Kaye,N. (2000) Site Specific Art: performance, place, and documentation. London New York: Routledge.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25(3) 229-238. Available from https://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-1155877-dt-content-rid-2084523_2/courses/DRA2035M-1516/DRA2035M-1516_ImportedContent_20150807123831/Carl%20Lavery%20article%20%281%29.pdf [accessed 13 May 2016]

Homotopia Festival (2007) Salon Adrienne .Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmUn2ZTzeY0 [accessed 9^th June 2016].

Forced Entertainment (2014) Forced Entertainment on Speak Bitterness . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjCjHvuCb_8 [accessed 10^th June 2016]

REcreativeUK (2012) Marcia Farquhar- A live art tour . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 10^th June 2016]

April 15, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

Going back to the roots

We decided to meet up and discuss the logistics and meaning of our piece, writing everything down in an attempt to be fully clear, as individuals, on our roles and the meanings behind them. We realised when doing this that we were over-complicating our piece; we needed to strip it back to our original idea. Whilst we were simplifying our overall piece, we found it hard to plot out what each person would be doing at what point, so we decided to focus exclusively on the idea of growth – growth of ideas, growth of confidence, growth of voice.

Whilst remaining with the idea of watering each placard to nurture the ideas and make them bloom, we decided it would be a good idea to show this growth in some way throughout the duration of the piece. One person at a time would be given this task and then would rotate when everyone’s task changed over. The person responsible would walk to a filled plant pot and begin to draw chalk roots on the floor. These roots would eventually fill the space around one plant pot, at which point whoever drawing them would move on to another plant pot. Each time the artists rotate, the roots would be drawn longer and around more plant pots as they were filled, creating and interweaving map of thought and growth. The lack of permanence around this idea echoes the entire piece; the roots will be washed away with the rain (if this is the case in the performance, the artist starts over), much like how the cardboard would wilt and the writing would run. This element of temporality emulates the life cycle of plants: they grow, they are nurtured, they wither, they die. However, the ideas on the placards remain. Once they are revealed to the world, they cannot be removed.

Continuing with this idea of growth and nurturing, we decided to incorporate the ‘destroyed’ answers into this natural cycle. Using a hand-powered shredder, we will shred the ‘destroy’ answers into strips of paper, and it will be one artists’ job to turn that paper into compost. They will travel around each filled plant pot and mix the paper in with the soil using their hands. This raw, ritualistic-style action adds another layer of nature to our piece, and shows that all ideas can fuel the desire for protest and change.

As a group, we also made a big decision regarding the audience of our piece. We decided to bring our work closer to that of our main influence, Adrian Howells, and make the piece a one-to-one experience. One at a time, an audience-participant would come up to the table, sit, and make eye contact. At which point, the artist sat at the table would produce a piece of paper with the first set of instructions on it; the audience-participant reads it; they make eye contact; they are handed the question and paper/pen; they write; they are given the last set of instructions; they are given a card; they put their answer into one of the two boxes; they leave; the next person sits down. And so on. This one-to-one experience gives the piece a much more personal feel, and delivers the idea we strived to achieve of making the audience feel connected to the piece in a deeper way, which allows them to give much more honest answers. By giving a one-t0-one experience, the audience-participant feels valued and are given time away from their lives for a couple of minutes to engage in collective catharsis, just as Adrian Howells does in many of his pieces. The idea of non-verbal conversations that Howells and Dee Heddon talk about is also present in our piece through the use of eye contact – not only does our lack of speech and purely aural communication tell the audience we are taking a step back (this is not about us, but about them), but allows them to search deeper into themselves via an intimate experience.

We went out into Speaker’s Corner to experiment with the placards and work out the logistics of them. We also wanted to find out, by using just one placard, whether people stopped to read it. We placed the placard in the centre of the square, and covertly sat on a bench on the other side.

We realised that the placards were rather unstable in the wind as it often fell over. We believe to counteract this, we need larger (deeper) buckets with a brick in the bottom of each to keep them weighted.

In terms of a reaction, most people who walked by reacted to the placard in some way. Most simply glanced at it, but some did stop to read it. When people walked by us in groups, we realised we’d created a talking point; people were answering the question, whether they knew it or not. They were talking about it to each other and giving answers without even realising. Most of the conversations we over heard suggested people were confused by the placard, and mainly believed that they had very little power at all.

March 18, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

“Free Power”

I conducted some further research on the work of Adrian Howells as I wanted to know more about his performances and how he uses different types of transaction. Currently, the transaction in our piece takes place in the form of cake being given to the audience-participants for helping us with our performance. However, I felt this type of transaction to be too impersonal and too forced rather than artistic and meaningful, yet the use of the cake as an incentive problematises this notion of meaningfulness, as it’s meaningful to us to get people to take part.

As a result of this, I read the article From Talking to Silence: A Confessional Journey by Dee Heddon and Adrian Howells, in the hope of finding out more about transaction. Heddon discusses how “the boundary between performer and spectator dissolves in the process of exchange, an exchange that asks for a very committed and at times vulnerable sort of spectatorship” (Heddon, 2011). Not only that, I found that in most of Howell’s work, exchange is “consistently dialogic […] performed within a wider cultural context of the mass-mediatization of the personal and private made public” (Howell, 2011). The use of dialogical exchange in Howell’s work is primarily used to help the audience-participants feel comfortable with sharing.

On Wednesday we wet out into Speaker’s Corner with signs advertising “FREE CAKE”. To our surprise (and contrary to similar experiments we have done in the past) a lot of people came over to talk to us. We generated more interest than ever before, simply by advertising something for free. I was delighted that we finally had participants, but somewhat disheartened with the lack of sustenance in our part of the transaction. Us giving out free cake lacks meaning and generosity, whilst somewhat telling people we’re only doing this for us, not them – the opposite of our purpose. So, we decided to ask our classmates.

Back in the seminar room we talked our classmates through our performance and our ideas, and asked them specifically about our use of transaction – what do you think to it? What does it say to you? What could we do instead? Some suggested that the transaction from our side is giving them the means to protest, giving them “free power”. Could we give them something physical to symbolise this? Perhaps a slip of paper with something written on it. Another person suggested giving them “free advice” on what they’d written down, like an advice slip you get from a cash machine, which are so present in Speaker’s Corner (this too plays on the idea of ‘transaction’ as that is what a cash machine is built for). Other more general ideas around our performance were born through this discussion, such as the placing of the placards into plant pots and allowing the audience-participant to do that themselves if they so wished – they are letting their idea grow and are nourishing/nurturing it. This triggered the idea of someone – perhaps one of us – going round at certain intervals and watering the soil each placard is planted in. Furthermore, the idea arose about having smaller signs branching off the larger placards once we run out to create a physical representation of a tree.

Works Cited

Heddon, D. and Howells, A. (2011) From talking to silence: a confessional journey. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 33 (1) 1-12.

February 18, 2016Emily Claire Bickerdike No Comments

A Revelation

This week we had an epiphany. We already knew we were interested in creating art that was political as well as historical, and we knew that we wanted to combine the topics of Feminism and Capitalism, but we were unsure of theorists and practitioners to inspire us and to ground the research we’d already done; this was until we were introduced to the Situationists.

Situationists were interested in creating every day situations in order to make daily life a creative, individual, spontaneous experience. They do this in an attempt to counteract the alienation in society caused by mass media and consumerism (essentially, Capitalism). Hopefully, through these situations people will see the city in a new way, ignoring the consumer culture being fed to them. An interesting quote we found from Situationist Raoul Vaneigem reads:

“People who talk about revolutions and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth”. (Vaneigem, 1967)

Essentially, what Vaneigem is saying is that people who protest against Capitalism and oppression in a way that ignores the every day (real people and real situations) have nothing of meaning to say – their ideas are dead. For revolution to work it needs to be alive, it needs to be REAL.

We linked this form of protest with our historical research on the Suffragette Rally in the area Speaker’s Corner now stands. These were also real women campaigning for political and social change, trying to establish a revolution and overthrow the laws of society that held them back. Many Suffragettes, after being arrested and imprisoned, went on hunger strikes as it was one of the only forms of protest available to them in a restricted environment. Hunger-striking Suffragettes were force-fed though tubes (either down the nose or throat); a horrific, traumatising experience for those who experienced it. This idea of force-feeding and using force/restraint to make people conform reminded us of the idea Situationists discussed about consumer culture and how it is everywhere in modern day society – it is force fed to us, whether we like it or not. This link with the Suffragettes creates a powerful metaphor for people being overpowered and silenced by authority; “the man” (like the political posters in the Parisian riots), in both senses of the word.

One way that we as a group observed this force-feeding of consumer culture in Speaker’s Corner is the use of neon lighting. We found neon lights on the signs for banks, on the euro exchange and on the cash machines, all of which are used as a form of advertising – you can’t look away as you can see them out of the corner of your eyes. We also discussed how neon lights are typically used on the outside of places like takeaways and even brothels/strip clubs; all of these things, both in Speaker’s Corner and elsewhere, relate to the idea of immediate gratification. A simple transaction can give you what you want instantly, an idea that is promoted through Capitalism.

All of these places of immediate gratification, the corporate chains, and the dancing neon patterns that make up the buildings around Speaker’s Corner violently contrast with the sparse, un-kept square in the middle. This stage-like space in the centre is a recognised area for people to practice freedom of speech and political expression (a title inspired by the Suffragette rally of the past) and when coupled with almost the embodiment of Capitalism surrounding it, an interesting picture is created.

We collated all these ideas together and came up with an idea for a performance:

A durational piece spanning an afternoon (the time when most people will be out).
Rent out the small empty unit opposite Halifax – red neon lights in window and sign advertising “Girls”. This has connotations of a brothel-type building – what is the difference between this kind of immediate gratification and the immediate gratification from the bank/cash machine opposite?
Use the idea of exchange and transaction (prevalent theme in Speaker’s Corner with big businesses and banks) – offer women FREE services such as nail painting, hand massages, etc. and the only thing they give you in exchange is story: what it is t0 be a woman/experiences of women/personal anecdotes/modern femininity.(reminiscent of Salon Adrienne).
Use quotes (anonymous, but with permission) from women from throughout the day – write on Suffragette-esque placards.
End of day create a forest-like installation in the square of these placards – free-standing as though being held but nobody there: emulates ghosts of who was there before = palimpsest.

Works Cited:

Vaneigem, R. (1967) The Revolution of Everyday. Paris: Editions Gallimard.

Howells, A. (2005) Salon Adrienne. [performance] London: Battersea Arts Centre and Glasgow: Glasgay! Festival.