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.
Implied or inferred without direct expression; understood.
(Collins Dictionary, 2016)
If a lecture were to take place in a lecture theatre, there would be a context that all participants would know to adhere to. For example, the students would sit on the chairs and take notes or listen, and the lecturer would stand at the front and deliver knowledge in a presentation-type-form. These are the tacit agreements of the site or location. If this lecture was moved into the street, the context would be altered.
It is when people upset the tacit agreements of a site that things become more interesting.
In order to punctuate the flow of a performance in a particular site, the tacit agreements of that site need to be disrupted.
This is the main point I took away from the first half of the first seminar; that when performing in a particular site, you must ensure that you are aware of the context behind it, and make an informed decision as to follow this context, or to reject it. Context is – broadly speaking – the building blocks of a piece of site specific performance, whether that be social context, historical context, or perhaps the geographical context: what are the parameters of the site? What determines this site to be public or private, and how can this be changed?
In the second half of the seminar, we looked deeper into performance art works involving a site such as ours, a city itself or building within a city centre. This is when I was first introduced to the idea of mapping as an art form. We’re all aware of how technology today allows us to track our movements, location, and even heart rate, all from a small device in each and every one of our pockets. I never before considered the possibility that the data this collates could possibly be turned into art. Initially we looked at an artist called Daniel Belasco Rogers, a ‘walking artist’. Rogers reveals how technology represents your presence… or your absence using GPS mapping – by virtue of you being absent, you are also present, an idea that particularly pulled on my creative strings.
(Rogers, 2003-2011, cited in Plan B Performance.net, undated)
This piece is aesthetically interesting to me; like a painting, the GPS map acts as a canvas, whereas the route the artist takes acts as brush strokes. This image is what grabbed the idea of ‘mapping’ as a possible concept for my performance – it is a person telling a story by not being there. An audience can interpret this piece in many different ways and create a narrative about each movement on the map as we can see which areas the artist frequently (bold) and rarely (thin) visited over an 8 year period.
Another artist that took the idea of ‘mapping’ and turned it into art is Christian Nold. Nold shows changes in the emotions and body as he negotiated a city, revealing his emotional response. This inspired me to use a similar method in tracing my emotional response to a route which I take regularly through the city, using a (very) long roll paper to line the walls along buildings I travel past, and document my heart rate pattern along it up to my destination. If I were to use this idea in performance, I could experiment with the idea of presence versus absence: being physically absent whilst being emotionally/artistically present through my heart beat. On the other hand, if I were to be physically present, the audience would be able to watch me trace my heart beat around the city, whereas without me present and the route already complete, the audience is free to create their own narrative behind it – which end is the start and which end is the end? Something to think about.
(Nold, 2005, cited in Nold, 2009, 13)
Another idea this emotional mapping – or as Nold calls it “emotional cartography” (Nold, 2009) – gave me was a much more personal one. Synaesthesia is a is a neurological phenomenon where stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second cognitive pathway. Synaesthesia is something that I experience personally, in the way that I associate certain letters and numbers with specific colours. For example: A = red, 8 = yellow, F = orange, 7 = brown. My idea was that I could map a certain route through the city I often take (for example, to my favourite coffee shop) using colour – each building would ‘be’ a colour that I associated with it, and to find that I would delve into the history of the buildings along my route. For example, the date of the building may determine its colour or perhaps its number aligning with its address.
Ideas to think about for next time:
Mapping through colour – numbers determining a sensory pathway for an audience = personal. Artist absent or present?
Idea of presence versus absence/absence = presence.
Works Cited
Collins Dictionary (2016) Definition of “tacit”. [online] Available from http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/tacit [Accessed 31 January 2016].
Rogers, B. D. (2003-2011) Nine Year Drawing Berlin 2003-2011. [online] Berlin, Germany: Daniel Belasco Rogers. Available from http://www.planbperformance.net/index.php?id=danmapping [Accessed 31 January 2016]
