Day: February 11, 2016

Over the course of the week, myself, Holly, Emma and Lucy began discussing ideas for the final performance and found that we all shared an interest in the history of both the buildings of Lincoln and people’s personal histories. The four of us also love the idea of one place meaning different things to different people and the idea that participants/observers of our work would view our site differently after experiencing it.  We have therefore decided to work together for the final project because we feel as though mutual interests are an important element for site specific performance to be successful.

Once the seminar was underway we looked into the introduction of Mike Pearson’s Site Specific Performance and all of the practitioners/theorists that are relevant including Michael Fried, Dee Headon and Cathy Turner. Out of these three practitioners Cathy Turner was the one that caught my interest, particularly the idea of Palimpsest (the layering of information to change people’s perspective). When we broke off into groups to discuss the performance further, the four of us quickly collaborated to create an idea that relates to most of the things discussed in previous posts including layering (palimpsest), emotional memory, collages, actively appealing to more than one sense and engaging with ‘history’.

I will be posting a blog entry shortly proposing an initial idea for the final Site performance.

Today’s session began with us having a recap on what we did last week, for the benefit of the people that wasn’t there. We discussed our experiences with the instructions challenge, explaining our journeys to the class. Next, we moved on to watching a video of an experiment by John Smith. In the video, he’s recording the general public walking past in the street (E.G Women, Men and children), whilst telling the what to do. For instance, if a women walked from the left side with an umbrella in her hand, he would say “Now, I want the women with the umbrella in her hand to walk on from the left”. He persisted to do this with everyone that walk past in the sight of the camera.

Next, we watched a video on Marcia Farquhar giving a tour of the history, Phyco-Geogrpahy, biography and autobiography in London.  She discussed her performance and how she is very much in the movement. She says that a performance she creates is never the same and she’s very much in the moment. We also looked into Mike Pearson article, as he discusses how Richard Sera thinks “to remove the work is to destroy the work”. Dr D. Headon followed Pearson’s work and she used scriptotherapy, where you write about experiences that have taken place in your own life (Mainly negative things). We also spoke about Mi Wong Quon, who wrote a book called One Place After Another, bringing things from visual art to performance.

Finally, we ended the session discussing everyone ideas for the performance and forming groups based on similar ideas. I joined a group, with the idea of creating a performance based on peoples emotional experiences in Lincoln. We sat in a group, brainstorming different ideas on how we could create a performance with our ideas. Hopefully by next week, we will have a solid idea on what we would like to do.