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Final Blog Post – High Bridge Histories

Who, What, Where, When and How?

High Bridge, which was built around 1160, and is situated in Lincoln’s high street ‘is the oldest bridge in the United Kingdom which still has buildings on it’ (Visit Lincoln, 2015). Our focus is on the social history of the bridge as it now holds a seating area and Stokes High Bridge Café on top of it, with the high street running between the two. Both of these places allow people to socialise and interact with each other. It is these interactions that are our focus. Taking inspiration from the methodologies Georges Perec used in creating his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Perec and Lowenthal, 2010), we have created a piece that reflects the recent histories of High Bridge, bringing them into the present, whilst also commenting on the histories being created whilst our piece takes place. As well as Perec, there are other theories and practitioners that have influenced our piece throughout the process; Marc Augé and his ideas concerning ‘place’ and ‘non-place’, John Smith and his piece The Girl Chewing Gum (ewwtubes, 2011) and ideas surrounding palimpsest in performance.

Our piece took place on Thursday 5th May 2016 at 12pm at High Bridge. We are each holding a speaker that is connected to our mobile phones. Conversations and sound effects that we had heard in the space then recorded other people saying/doing play through the speakers. Each of us has started the 6 minute long track of recordings at different times, so each speaker is playing something different. Throughout the piece, whilst conversations can be heard playing from our speaker, we narrate the happenings of the present. For example, if a woman in a red coat walked past we would say ‘A woman in a red coat walks over high bridge’ or something similar. Whilst sound effects can be heard from our speaker, we carry out an assigned action for that particular sound effect. For example, during the footsteps sound effect, we mark the top and bottom of our foot on the ground in chalk as we walk around the space. This continues until we hear the line ‘Nice to meet you too’, at which point we leave the space with the track still playing. The piece lasts for just over 10 minutes. The invited audience stand in and around the space and see the piece as a whole, experiencing the histories being re-told in the space, understanding exactly what the piece is and what it is trying to achieve. The incidental audience, on the other hand, pass through the space getting a fleeting glimpse of the piece, making them question what it is and why we are doing it. If they happen across the piece during the phone ringing sound effect, they may be presented with a business card, which briefly explains the piece and directs them to this blog page, which will explain the piece to them in more detail.

Business Card
The Business Card (Lucy Workman, 2016)

The Process

Initial Ideas

  • A timeline running through the High Street, documenting significant historical moments of Lincoln’s history
  • Creating a time capsule by gathering everyday items from people in the High Street
  • A ‘Humans of New York’ inspired piece where we talk to people on the High Street and get them to tell us a story about themselves and perhaps use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to help gather these stories
  • To create Lincoln out of the people of Lincoln – a piece that would involve people writing their stories on individual ‘jigsaw pieces’ that would slowly come together to create an image of Lincoln Cathedral

All these ideas came together to create a performance that would involve us wheeling a board with a map of Lincoln on it up and down the High Street, introducing layers on top of the map including opinions of Lincoln from social media, opinions of Lincoln from people we talk to on the day and playing recordings of people talking about Lincoln through speakers attached to the board. This layering was inspired by the idea of palimpsest, described in Nick Kaye’s introduction of Site Specific Art: performance, place and documentation as ‘a paper ‘which has been written upon twice, the original having been rubbed out’[…] or ‘prepared for writing on and wiping out again’ (Kaye, 2000, 11). We were interested in how layers can be used in a performance to create meaning and how being able to see remanence of what has been there before perfectly captures the fact that moments in life are fleeting but that does not mean they should be forgotten.

As the weeks went on, we became concerned that the piece was advertising Lincoln rather than it being a piece of Site Specific work. We discussed the idea of leaving the board fixed in a particular space (the seating area on High Bridge) and leaving the inhabitants of the space to write their thoughts and feelings about Lincoln on the board. The recorded stories would still be playing from speakers but we would no longer be inviting people to contribute, it would be an instillation piece. This brought up a lot of issues, such as people not getting involved and inappropriate comments being left on the board.

Changing Ideas

After some individual reflection on the piece we started to discuss what our site is for people and as a space as we believed the piece as it was did not speak much to the site itself. We came up with the theme of communication. The seating area offers a perfect opportunity to sit and talk with people either in person or on the phone. We did some research into Marc Augé, who is a French anthropologist who has conducted research in Africa, Europe and more recently on a global scale, writing the book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity in which he states that ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.’ (Augé, 1995, 77-78). This made us think about whether High Bridge is a ‘place’ or a ‘non-place’, coming to the conclusion that the High Street is a ‘non-place’ as it is a place of transience, whereas Stokes Café and the seating area are ‘places’. As part of our piece we wanted to turn the High Street section of High Bridge into a ‘place’ by making our piece memorable, ensuring an identity is created for the site.

We talked about different ways we could incorporate communication into our piece and settled on the methodology adopted by Georges Perec, who was a French writer and filmmaker who worked with ‘experimental wordplay, lists and attempts at classification’ (Goodreads, 2016), in creating his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. This book is a documentation of Perec’s time around St Sulprice church in Paris between Friday 18th – Sunday 20th October 1974. He wrote down things that he noticed whilst being in the space. Although Perec did not record conversations in this book, we all liked the idea of sitting in the space and taking notes of what conversations we could hear.

After talking to one of my other tutors about our idea, she gave me a book called One Million Tiny Plays About Britain by Craig Taylor (Taylor, 2009). This book is made up of short plays that have been created from overheard conversations. This book showed us that it was possible to create a performance out of overheard conversations.

Whilst deciding how to use the material we gathered in the space we discovered that the majority of it turned out to be just snippets of conversations that we caught as people walked by the space rather than full conversations like the ones in Taylor’s book. We discussed ideas of how we could perhaps perform these snippets of conversation if we created a script and asked people if we could record them saying the lines and played that soundtrack into the space. We came up with a few ideas;

  • We could mime the lines as they are played
  • We could speak over the top of the lines
  • We could pretend that nothing is playing and just be in the space having our own conversations

We decided to create an example sound file with us recording what we had gathered and try out each idea to see which one worked best.

Here is the example sound file that we created.

We decided it would be a good idea to note down anything else other than conversations that we heard whilst in the space i.e. pigeons or footsteps, as we were aware that the piece needed to be a minimum of twenty minutes long and we were worried that people would lose interest in the piece if it was just snippets of conversations all the way through.

We approached people in the High Street, Zing Café and Alive Church and asked if they would take part in our piece by agreeing to be recorded saying lines from our script. Once we had the majority of the script recorded I started editing them into a sound file.

We decided that we would use the other sounds that we heard in the space in-between sections of speech. So as well as the recordings of people’s voices, I recorded sounds of footsteps, children playing, laughing, birds, mobile phones ringing, babies crying, dogs barking and a building site to incorporate into the sound file.

We showed our tutor the sound file and he gave us some feedback on how we could perform over the top of it. He suggested that we needed to be doing something that was more visually interesting than just sitting and speaking over the lines.

We discussed the idea of using different actions to go with each sound effect.

  • Footsteps – mark footsteps on the floor with chalk then erase them later to further emphasise the idea of palimsest
  • Child noises – draw children’s pictures on the floor in chalk
  • Laughing – put on a clown mask or red nose/just staring straight ahead completely expressionless
  • Phone ringing – hand out post-it notes with the word TEXT written on it
  • Babies crying – suck on a dummy or baby’s bottle
  • Birds – throw bread crumbs on the floor
  • Building site – shovel gravel over the site

We also discussed the possibility of us each having a speaker and having the track playing from each speaker. This would have made our piece aurally as well as visually interesting, ensuring the audience’s attention remains solidly on the piece. However, it soon came to our attention that without a budget, we would not be able to afford four speakers so we settled on having one speaker set up under one of the benches.

A Slight Set-Back

In week 13, our module leader was able to come and see our work in progress and gave us some feedback on how the piece could be improved.

  • The way we performed over the top of the sound file was too ‘acted’ rather than performed.
  • Although he liked the idea of the sound being played into the space, he did not like the recordings as again he believed them to be too ‘acted’ in how they were delivered. He suggested that we re-record all the script and ensure that people that we ask say the lines as if they were just reading a bit of text.
  • He liked the visual art aspects of the piece with us marking the footsteps on the floor but he was disappointed that it only happened at the start of the piece and never returned.
  • As an audience member he did not really understand what the piece was trying to achieve. He explained that the audience need to have a vague understanding of what the piece is.
  • He suggested that we use multiple speakers and we each carry one and have the sound file playing out of each speaker. He explained that there was a budget for this so we would not have to pay for them ourselves.
  • Shortening the piece to around 10 minutes as although he was interested at the start of the piece he started to lose interest as the piece went on.

We came to the decision that instead of re-recording the whole script, we would go through the recordings we already had and select the ones that sounded the least acted. We would then put these chosen recordings into a new script, under the dates that they were collected to add some meaning to the piece for the audience, and if we needed any more once I had put them into a new sound file, we would go and record some more.

Building on our original idea of having multiple speakers in the space, we thought that we could each enter the space at a different times and each start playing the track at different points throughout the piece.

We also revisited the video of The Girl Chewing Gum by John Smith, who is a filmmaker whose films ‘create a world from the ‘simple’ experiences of living, breathing and being a filmmaker or artist in a particular place and time.‘ (Johnsmithfilms, 2016) to try and come up with a new way of us performing over the top of the sound file. We liked the way he narrates the everyday movements of the people in the video, so we decided that instead of narrating the actions after they had taken place, we would narrate them live throughout the piece.

(ewwtubes, 2011)

Once we got the other three speakers we got into the space and tried out our new ideas. We loved the reactions we were getting from the people around us and it made us feel like these changes really worked.

Here is a short video of us trying out some of our new ideas.

How Did It Go?

About ten members of our invited audience attended the performance and as the performance went on, quite a few incidental audience members stopped and observed what we were doing. They all seemed genuinely interested and were happy to take the business cards we handed out throughout. After talking to some of the invited audience after the piece had finished it was clear that we had achieved our goal in re-creating what we had heard, as many people commented on the fact they could only hear snippets of the soundtrack as we walked by them, which is exactly what we could hear when we were collecting the material.

We found that the audience who stopped and watched the piece as opposed to continuing to walk through the space added a spectacle to the piece that we were not necessarily aiming for. We assumed the incidental audience would just pass through the space, getting a glimpse of what we were doing and perhaps receiving a business card.

Overall the piece worked quite well. Although we as performers felt as though the piece was quite clumsy in its execution, it clearly captured the happenings of everyday life that Georges Perec and Craig Taylor capture in their books. However, if we were to do the piece again we would need to rethink how we performed over the top of the soundtrack because we all slipped into acting rather than performing as ourselves. One way we could do this is by making it an installation piece, perhaps in a studio space with just the sound track playing and maybe include some video footage that can be projected onto a screen.

Learning about Site Specific Performance has broadened my knowledge of performance and how it can be created. I have found it quite challenging as a lot of Site Specific work is left to chance and can depend of so many different variables where as I prefer a more traditional approach to performance where I can learn a script and perform it. I think this may have been part of the reason we reverted back to acting as it is what we feel most comfortable doing. I found learning about the practitioners and their methodologies the most interesting part of the process.  I feel as though I can use these methods of performance making in future projects, particularly the methods used by Georges Perec as it was enjoyable to do and supplied us with a lot of material.

(Word Count: 2749)

Bibliography

  • Augé, M. (1995) Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.
  • ewwtubes (2011) John Smith – The girl chewing gum 1976. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57hJn-nkKSA [Accessed 30 April 2016].
  • Goodreads (2016) Georges Perec. [online] San Francisco: Goodreads. Available from http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15923.Georges_Perec
  • Johnsmithfilms (2016) John Smith: about. [online] John Smith Films. Available from http://johnsmithfilms.com/about/
  • Kaye, N. (2000) Site specific art: performance, place and documentation. London: Routledge.
  • Perec, G. and Lowenthal, M. (2010) An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. Cambridge, Mass: Wakefield Press.
  • Taylor, C. (2009) One million tiny plays about Britain. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
  • Visit Lincoln (2015) High Bridge. [online] Lincoln: Visit Lincoln. Available from http://www.visitlincoln.com/things-to-do/high-bridge [Accessed 27 April 2016].