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Monday 1^st February

After spending the week contemplating the idea of architecture and its history, the idea has developed to incorporate a specific site and the personal history people share with it. I am intrigued with the idea of how a particular place can mean different things to different people dependent on their personal history with that place.

The theory of situationism/psycho geography fits in with this idea quite well in that a person’s behaviour is dependent on their surroundings rather than personal behaviour traits. Psycho geography involves the idea that a person’s emotional state including their blood pressure and heart rate can be altered depending on their surrounding environment. Christian Nold is an example of a practitioner who used this idea, with his work involving measuring his heart rate whilst walking round an urban area.

This idea of peeling back layers, whether architectural or emotional, is something which I am definitely interested in exploring in the final Site Specific performance. The medium of a collage consisting of pictures, objects, audio etc. could map out people’s personal history of a place and making the spectator view said space in a way in which they haven’t before.

Joe Turner

Pictures of Jack Wills and Fatface which were of particular interest when walking through the city

Joe Turner

In today’s session we discussed different ideas for the performance, relating to research we’d undertaken of Lincoln . Some people mentioned the history of Lincoln city, dating back to the Roman ages.  Some drew an interest too ghost story’s, and others researched murder cases in Lincoln city. We discussed how this research could be transformed into a performance. One particular idea I remember is a tour of Lincoln, taking people on a journey across the city discussing the history and interesting facts of what had gone on in certain areas of the city.

Next we we’re placed into separate groups of three, given the task to write clear instructions for another group to follow and explore the city. These instructions we based on Carl Livery’s 25 instructions, aiming to make the reader get out and explore. Once we we’re given our tasks, we headed out into the city. The first instruction was to walk all the way to the top of the high street, then place our hand on the left side of the street, following the wall for 10 minutes. Once we stopped, we had to draw the first thing in front of us. This happened to be a large pile of junk, consisting of a broken table, metal poles, rotten wood, metal containers and a large empty tin of vegetable oil. The final task was to walk back to the University completely avoiding the high street. We found this literally impossible, as we had to pass through the high street at some point to access a different route.

Once we arrived back at University, everybody discussed there experiences out in the City. Luckily, we came up with the idea to create a snap chat of our adventure, recording it on our phones. Everyone added us as a friend on Snapchat, watching our experience out in the city.

The best way to discover the possibilities of performance is by actively exploring all that a site has to offer. Taking a walk up and down the high street enlightened me to many to things that would most likely go unnoticed to passersby – the beautiful architecture of buildings, the signpost ‘Speakers Corner’, and mini barons displayed in several shops windows. Because I was making these discoveries through actively looking, it came to my attention how absent minded people can be when walking.

The next session sent us out into the city once more, this time with instructions written by other students. This notion of using instructions to navigate a city was inspired by Carl Lavery’s article Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Our instructions told us to go to a place that held an emotional connection to us. Discussing this we discovered that due to only living in Lincoln for a short time, there was no significant building of such value. Thinking of other possibilities we decided that the train station held an emotional connection to us all. We discussed the mixed emotions we had felt here due to events that had happened; including excitement of travelling home and sadness of leaving and saying goodbye. As we sat on the station and watched the area, we took in various sounds and sights and documented them. A notable thing we saw was two analog clocks which had both stopped and both said the wrong time. This prompted us to discuss the irony of how a place which is so centered on time has broken clocks. We also thought about how this site acts as what Marc Auge calls a ‘nonplace’ in his book Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. This is a place of transit and not seen to be social. But as we watched others catching and waiting for their trains, we discovered that there can be an element of social interaction tied to the train station as we witnessed a woman meet a man and leave together. We watched the couple closer and created a story for them: the man was walking slightly behind the woman, meaning she was mad at him, and as they walked we decided they were on the wrong station and had only just realised. I believe my personal experiences of being on wrong platforms and not knowing which train I should get had influenced this story.

Back in the studio, we discussed our experiences and I got the feeling that others found it exciting and freeing not to know their destination when following instructions. It could also be interesting if the journeys that people took were tracked on a map and visually seen. We also discussed different possible ways of performing on the High Street, and I found the idea of cultural changes when going down the street really interesting. I am going to think more about this idea and analyse what differences there are.

Monday 25th January

During my first session with the tutor, questions were raised about what site specific performance could entail. It was at this point that Steve showed us some of his past work from his undergraduate days as well as more recent projects. One of his pieces that I found particularly intriguing was his degree project which focused on an abandoned building which had previously housed bells. The piece focused on restoring the nostalgia of the bells to the town decades after they had been moved elsewhere. This then got me thinking about using Lincoln and its history to create a piece that plays homage to the history but in a contemporary setting. When exploring our site (Lincoln high street) something that was of particular interest was the ornate architecture of the buildings which are now corporate shops such as Fat face and Jack Wills. Delving into the history of what these buildings were before they were high street shops is something that I intend to explore further with my group later on in the devising process.

Joe Turner