There’s Non-Place Like Home – Rowanna Soyza
Performed with Holly Lomas, Franki Elmer, Hannah D’Arcy, and Olivia Calvert.
Fiona Wilkie defines Site Specific performance in Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation to be ‘performance specifically generated from/for one selected site’ (Wilkie, 2002, p. 150, cited in Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, 2000, p. 8). This definition establishes the necessity for the performance to be solely influenced by the location.
We could choose our site anywhere on the high street of Lincoln City. Our group came to the conclusion that the aesthetically enticing Stonebow Arches in the centre of the high street was where our performance would take place. Through this we researched its historical transformations and decided Marc Augé’s theories on places and non-places could interestingly explore this site. We drew upon the practitioner Adrien Howells to develop our performance, as well as John Newling and Sophie Calle. Although Augé, Howell and Newling were our predominant stimuluses, there were also other practitioners that influenced our piece through the development process which I will discuss later in the ‘Analysis of Process’.
On the 5th of May 2016 our group performed There’s Non-Place Like Home in Lincoln City’s Stonebow Arches to the public. The start of our performance was 10:00am at which time we proceeded to set up the Arches with our props and furniture that created a living room whilst engaging in conversation with the public. We provided cups of tea and biscuits and exchanged conversation with members of the public who wanted to participate in our performance. We continued to do so until 4:00pm at which time we decided our aims had been fulfilled. Following I will discuss the justification for this final product and furthermore demonstrate the advancements we made to get us there.
Analysis of Process
Through the study of Marc Augé our group was introduced to his theory of place and non-place. We discussed the binary meanings of these two words and established that a ‘place’ can be defined as ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (Augé, 2009, p. 77). Moreover, we can generalise this to mean that a ‘place’ is somewhere that interactions can and have taken place and a space that does not meet this criteria is subsequently categorised as a ‘non-place’. This proposes that a ‘non-place’ is a space that cannot offer opportunities for interactions within a community or area. Joanne Whalley and Lee Miller have exercised these boundaries within their own piece called Partly Cloudy Chance of Rain (2002) in which they renewed their vows at a place of transit: Roadchef Sandbach Services. This demonstration of love is an interaction that Whalley and Miller have imparted on this ‘non-place’ which consequently transforms this space into a ‘place’.
This exploration of palimpsest within the theory of place and non-place sparked my interest. I began to examine places of non-place within our given site and eliminated the street that granted access to the shops as non-places due to the benches that provide opportunities for conversation. There are many areas of the city that I classed as having possibilities for relations which left me questioning if there were any. Upon further discussion within our group we identified an area that we all agreed could be adequately described as an area of transit: the Stonebow Arches. I began to recall my personal experiences there and concluded that I had never stopped and interacted with anyone within this space, nor had I seen anyone else do so. Upon this epiphany our group travelled to this site and discussed the aesthetically appealing nature of the arches. We observed the public and how they interacted with the space.
Fig. 1 – Observing the public at the Stonebow Arches.
Our hypothesis that this site is definitively an area of transit was substantiated with this video evidence. When revisiting this video observation we documented that there were no examples of interaction or even stopping at the Stonebow Arches. Furthermore, we observed that despite the fact that we were filming, the public had no interest in us which demonstrated further that no interactions were to happen in this space. It was at this point that we decided to use the Stonebow Arches as our site.
I proceeded by researching into the history of the Stonebow Arches and learned that the building above the arches is called the Guildhall. The Guildhall was built in 1237 in which council meetings took place and has remained so through to present day. The Guildhall offers a tour and we decided that knowledge of this building would help inform us of the history of the Stonebow Arches. During this tour we discovered that the council use a bell five minutes prior to their conferences in order to summon council members to the meeting. Upon this discovery our group discussed incorporating the bell into our piece. This stimulated us to delve even further into the history of this building and the arches in an attempt to find inspiration for our piece. Our search provided us with the evidence that the ‘eastern wing of the Stonebow was used as the city prison until 1586’ (Lincolnshire Echo, 2013). This initiated conversations in what the prison would have been like which developed into a conversation about envisioning that room becoming your temporary home. This challenged our ideals of place and non-place because we were able to argue that it was both. On the one hand, a prisoner stayed there for period of time which resulted in relations and developing an identity. However, inmates would be in a state of flux as it is a temporary place of living.
I decided to attempt to identify other instances where a place of living became temporary. I considered the lives of those that are homeless and recognised that this was a reflection of those in prison but with added aspects of discussion. For example, those in prison make their homes out of where they go to sleep which is every night in lives of those that are homeless. I concluded that this potentially means that any location is transformable into a place. Through discussion we acknowledged that we had seen homeless people sleep by the Stonebow arches at night and our group decided to advance this into the foundations of our piece. We determined that we would aim to create a home in the Stonebow arches and communicate with our audience as if we were in this ‘home’.
Influential Practitioners
In the beginning weeks of our study of site specific we were introduced to Adrian Howells who is a practitioner within this genre of performance art. Howells created a piece called Salon Adrienne in which he transformed into his female persona ‘Adrienne’ and provided the participants with haircuts and Indian head massages in exchange for conversation. The piece takes place in an actual salon and he interacts with pre-existing customers of the salon. Howell says that ‘the piece, Salon Adrienne, is an excuse for me to have a meaningful interaction and dialogue exchange with another person’ (homotopiafestivel and Howell, 2007). We were inspired by this concept he terms ‘confessional exchange’ (homtopiafestival and Howell, 2007) and felt we could incorporate this into our piece. We concluded that we would employ Adrian’s method of using haircuts as a sort of currency in exchange for conversation.
We discussed that this ‘currency’ should be something relatable to our concept of creating a living room within the arches but we were unsure as to what that ‘currency’ could be. We recognised that certain social conventions necessitate that the host provides beverages for guests so we decided to create a survey and ask members of the public to identify what drink they think of when they think of home and the predominant answer was tea. I processed this answer and begun to explore the pre-existing social conventions that accompany a cup of tea and I began to accumulate the conclusion that sharing a cup of tea with another person is a socially interactive event. Our group recognised that in many situations tea is utilised as an accompaniment to casual conversation and we were inspired to use this ‘exchange’ technique within our piece by offering cups of tea as a prompt to converse with our audience.
In addition, Howell recognises the necessity of ‘authentic experience’ (Heddon and Howell, 2011) within his site specific performances. He states that the salon ‘intended to reassure the audience-participant, engendering a sense of safety’ (Heddon and Howell, 2011) which we recognised as a vital aspect of his piece. Furthermore, if we were to achieve our aim of confessional exchange with our audience we needed to recreate a home that promoted a comfortable and safe environment. It was this that inspired us to extend our idea and create a fully operational living room within the Stonebow arches.
Through these developments of our piece we were struggling with the true aims of our piece and what we wanted to achieve through it. We ascertained that our piece was attempting to create a connection between the public and our site which mirrored Sophie Calle’s inspiration in Suite Venitienne (2015). After spending an extended amount of time travelling away from her home in Paris, Calle felt disconnected from the city. She proceeded to follow a man (known as Henri B.) to Venice when he moved and observed his life in an attempt to connect with the new city. Calle’s challenging endeavour to connect with a city made me consider the enterprises I have had to face in order to create a connection between myself and Lincoln. All of the members of our group have only lived in Lincoln for two years and we discussed whether we would consider Lincoln our ‘home’ and it was in this discussion that I realised that Lincoln is my home. But why? It was these factors that inspired us to construct our conversation with the audience around notions of ‘home’. Through these conversations we would be able to employ Calle’s method of understanding someone else’s connection to a city in order to develop our own. Furthermore, our piece became an opportunity to discuss the definitions and aspects of ‘home’ with a variation of people that are influenced by an array of circumstances. We further specified that this discussion directly relates and furthers our inspiration from the Stonebow Arches’ history of being a prison. Additionally, our earlier considerations of the concepts of a ‘temporary home’ within a prison and defining place and non-place are directly relatable to the topic that is ‘home’.
Lastly, John Newling’s piece called Saturday Night Sunday Morning (1991) in which he placed lights in a market square to create a safe, communal area. This installation piece was activated by the audience which we established as a vital aspect of our piece. We incorporated this theory into our piece by providing lights and candles to create a safe environment for our audience participants. Furthermore, we dictated that the audience activates our living room by entering and interacting with us and the space.
Performance Evaluation
The final performance started with us bringing together all of our props into the site and transforming the Stonebow Arches into a ‘home’. This action transposed the real life situation of ‘moving in’ into a performative aspect of our piece. We began to set up the space as seen in fig. 2
Fig 2. Creating our home.
Furthermore, this aspect of our piece was our exploration of generating a ‘place’ out of a ‘non-place’. We recognised that the small details would create the big picture and bared this in mind when buying props: excessive was more beneficial than not enough. Whilst setting up I noticed that we would arrange and then rearrange in order to make the space our perfect representation of our home. I concluded that it was in these actions that we were implanting part of ourselves into the space which further enhanced the authenticity of the experience. Through analysis of our piece I have concluded that we successfully recreated Adrian’s theory of authentic experience to the best of our abilities. Fig. 3 demonstrates the final outcome of our piece in comparison to the other arches surrounding us.
Fig. 3 – Comparison of the arch that was next to us and ‘home’.
What’s more the reaction that we obtained from our audience members substantiates this claim. Audience members felt comfortable enough to share tea and biscuits with us whilst lounging on the sofa and rug as seen in fig. 4
.
Fig. 4 – Discussing ‘home’ with the public over a cup of tea.
However, we anticipated that those actually within the site would not be the only participants to our piece. Prior to our performance we predicted that passers-by would contribute to our piece and we were right. During the creation of our living room we had many different public members that were prompted by the site’s transformation to ask us questions. This meant that many different conservations ensued which generated organic material that I had not previously considered. For example, a gentleman who later told us he was ‘houseless’, expressed his opinion on the word ‘homeless’. He explained that you can make anywhere your home, even going so far as to say ‘home is where the heart is’ and that the only thing he was lacking was a house. This caused me to re-evaluate my preconceived notions of home and found this became a very interesting topic with other audience participants. Therefore, due to our ongoing performance we had consequential participants which meant attempting to pinpoint the audience numbers is unachievable.
In reflection I would state that our creation of a living room was extremely effective. Furthermore, this success meant that the confessional exchanges were also efficacious. We received a substantially positive amount of contribution from audience members which developed our piece more than we could have hoped for. Due to the array of new participants there were varying levels of subject depth which meant every conversation was original and concepts or topics of conversation were not exhausted by the end of our piece.
However, the material we used to block off some of our living room was torn away by the wind. Upon evaluation it would be this aspect that I would change for our piece. During some interactions the material was blown away by the wind which meant that the area lost its enclosed atmosphere. It would have destroyed elements of authenticity within the performances because members of our group were required to disengage with participants to go and fix it.
In summary, this piece was effective in creating a place out of a non-place and we achieved what we aspired to do with the audience through conversations. Site Specific performance has required me to transform my pre-existing knowledge of performance. Through this experience I have learnt that any location is performable which has inspired me to reconstruct my perception of space. Furthermore, I have recognised as a deviser that theory presents us with opportunities for development within ourselves and within our art.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augé, M. (2009) Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of Supermodernity. 2nd edn. London: Verso Books.
Calle, S. (2015) Suite Venitienne. Los Angeles: Siglio Press.
Calvert, O., D’Arcy, H., Elmer, F., Lomas, H. and Soyza, R. (2016) There’s Non-Place Like Home. [performance art] Lincoln: High Street, 5 May
Heddon, D. and Howell, A. (2011) ‘From Talking to Silence: A Confessoinal Journey’, PAJ – A Journal of Performance and Art, 33(1), pp. 1–12.
homotopiafestival and Howell, A. (2007) Salon Adrienne. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmUn2ZTzeY0 (Accessed: 7 May 2016).
Kaye, N. (2000) Site-specific art: Performance, place and documentation. New York: Routledge.
Lincolnshire Echo (2013) How Lincoln’s Stonebow played its part in both local and national history. Available at: http://www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk/Lincoln-s-Stonebow-played-local-national-history/story-17946800-detail/story.html (Accessed: 7 May 2016).
Howells, A. (2005) Salon Adrienne. [performance art] London: Battersea Arts Centre, 3 October.
Lomas, H. (2016) There’s Non-Place Like Home [photos and videos] Lincoln: Stonebow Arches, 5 May
Newling, J. (1991) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. [performance] Nottingham: Market Square,
Pearson, M. (2010) Site- Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke