Today we clarified our idea and looked into specifics as to what we are going to do:
Intention – connect ourselves to the city. We previously discussed how we don’t consider Lincoln our home due to not living here for a long time and also still being very connected to our original homes (parents house, childhood town). We want to use the performance to secure a growing connection to the city so that we can start to see Lincoln as a home.
Devices and techniques – confessional exchange with members of the public. We want to have a conversation in which we discover their opinion of what a home is. We have drawn up some questions which we would like answering, but these need to be delved into further in order to succeed in our intention.
Spatial composition – creating a place within a space. Incorporating all the space. We are going to sketch a plan of how we will lay out the sofa and other homely items in the best possible way to attract an audience and efficiently use the space.
Practical theory – Place and non-place by Marc Auge, Salon Adrienne by Adrian Howells, Sophie Calle, Marcia Farquhar (use of lemonade in her tour, interaction).
Organisational skills – need to refine our historical reference. Organise furniture, tea urn and other items. Layout of performance.
Response to feedback – use of a bell and linking it to the site.
Research and development of material – need strong links to historical research and references.
Questions we have written for the audiences – these are brief ideas of what we want to find out, the conversations will be very informal and we will be talking about our experiences as well to keep up with the exchange.
- Have you lived here all your life?
- When did you consider Lincoln your home?
- Did you ever struggle to call Lincoln your home?
- Is there anywhere in the city that is significant to you?
- Have you ever been to the cathedral? Who did you go with? What was it like? (conversation starter)
- Is there anywhere in the ciry that you would recommend going?
- What is ‘home’ to you?
- What made you move/stay here?
Experiment we conducted today:
We tried out a test run of our performance and took beanbags to our site in a hope of drawing people into conversation. We found it difficult to get audiences willing to talk to us, and we decided that this was because the site looked unwelcoming and the beanbags were too low and unappealing. Because of this we decided to abandon the beanbags and approach members of the public directly. With this we found that some of the questions received the same type of answer, whereas we are hoping to receive a range of experiences. Because of this we have decided to delve deeper with the questions and specify with personal experiences, this way we will get more varied answers and the conversation won’t get boring. Also it was apparent that younger people were more willing to talk than older people, so we need to make sure our performance installation attracts a varied audience. As well as this, the idea of trust come up as we offered audiences biscuits but no one took one. We believe that once we have a more attractive and trusting set up, and audiences come to us instead of us approaching them, that they will be more willing to trust us in feeding them.
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