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.
(These bloody train lines- Site Specific Performance, 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 9th June 2016].
Forced Entertainment (2014) Forced Entertainment on Speak Bitterness . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjCjHvuCb_8 [accessed 10th June 2016]
REcreativeUK (2012) Marcia Farquhar- A live art tour . Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Li90TEcsUw [Accessed 10th June 2016]