Site and the City

Steve sent us away early in our groups to discuss where we were in the devising process and what we thought was the next logical step. I was concerned with our piece and its attempts to engage with history because our location (the raised seated area outside the waterside shopping centre) doesn’t have a particular history. During Steve’s introduction to the seminar I began thinking about what that area was particularly used for. The answer to this I thought of was conversation/communication.

After discussing the theme of communication we created an idea which involved playing a recorded conversation and miming over the top of it. This brings up the question of authenticity and ownership and whether someone else’s words become mine if I speak them and do the words lose their meaning. We are going to attempt to introduce palimpsest using the following means:

1. Document people’s conversations (We began doing this in this week’s seminar). This methodology is similar to that used by George Pereck in his work ‘an attempt at exhausting a day in Paris’. We found that we only caught snippets of conversations which gave a brief glimpse into people’s lives ranging from the random and chatty to deep and meaningful conversations. We are going to select a few of these and stitch them together to create a manuscript in the same way the Pereck did.

 

2. Record someone on site reading the manuscript. It is this recording that would be used in the final piece. Doing it this way creates a palimpsest both in the text (asking different people to speak) and in the location (many different people have spoken the same text in the same space).

 

 

As well as Pereck our piece relates with a number of practitioners. The idea of taking people’s personal stories and performing them links with Dee Headon’s autobiographical scriptography whereas Erving Goffman’s theory of ‘every day life being a spectacle correlates with the social and public aspect of our piece. The physicality aspect of the piece also relates back to a few weeks ago when we went out into the city with instructions (I am going to look at how we talk through our bodies in more detail later on).

 

Whilst we all agreed on the initial concept and location there are many elements which create a number of discussions. Different people had different ideas about  ways in which to perform the piece which we will experiment with over the next few weeks including costume or no costume, miming or speaking with the track and learning the text or having it in front of us.

 

Basically our piece is trying to recreate a moment in life on site. Our main theme is authenticity and exploring questions of whether someone elses words become mine if I speak them etc. Ultimately a moment in life cannot be recreated accurately no matter how hard you try.

 

Over the course of this week I am going to research Pierre Bourdieu and his piece delegate as well as Miwon Kwon and her ideas surrounding the community and performance.

Joe Turner

The first week of Site Specific performance was a focus on ensuring all students had the background knowledge to begin forming groups and ideas for their performance. This included going through the module handbook to explain the format of this semester as well as how we will be examined. The next part of the session was aimed at explaining what Site Specific Performance is. A good summary of what was explained to us comes from Mike Pearson’s book Site Specific Performance, an essential text for this module:

“[Site specific performace] refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world…A large part of the work has to do with researching a place.” (Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.)

We were then introduced to a variety of Site Specific works, including some of Steven’s own work. These works sparked a variety of debates. Particular ones of note were caused by Sophie Calle’s work in which to re-establish a connection with France after being away she followed a person around without their knowledge, to the point of buying a plane ticket and following them out of the country. This raised the question, when does observation cross the line into stalking? We decided it depends on factors such as anonymity, proximity and that there is a difference between online and real life, with online observation being deemed more acceptable. After further research into Sophie Calle’s work I discovered her observation goes far into the region of invading people’s privacy. In her work, The Hotel, Room 47 she “was hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks in a Venetian hotel. [She] was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor. In the course of [her] cleaning duties, [she] examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me”. (Calle, S. (1981) The Hotel, Room 47 [2 works on paper, photographs and ink] Paris: Tate Modern.) Her observing included reading letters and diaries of the guests, listening through the hotel doors at their conversations, even spraying herself with their perfumes and eating their left over food. The result of this debate and further research has resulted in my desire to avoid any possible violation of people’s privacy, so any information I obtain from audience members (if this is the direction in which my performance goes) will be completely with their consent.

After our introduction to Site-Specific Performance we went into the city of Lincoln, our site for this module and observed the city. We decided upon our boundaries, from the top of the high street near Kind bar, down to the Ritz bar and then began to look around us for inspiration and things that interested us. Attached is a photograph of a building, this painted wall is something myself and others have never noticed on our day to day commute through the city. This inspired me to consider showing parts of the city to my audience that are normally unseen by them. Whether this is literal like the photo attached, or more factual by telling the audience things about the city, past and present that they did not know is undecided.

 

Week Four – (15/2/16)

Before meeting with our performance groups, we were shown some videos from different theorists. One video we saw was called Salon Adrienne by Adrian Howells. An artist Dee Heddon often writes about referring to scriptotherapy works. It featured Adrian himself in an actual salon, washing and blow drying members of the public’s hair and giving them an Indian head massage. Whilst he was doing this, he was talking very openly with the person participating, confessing certain things in his life and inviting them to confess something to him too. He was using these techniques of relaxation and intimacy to have a deep conversation with him. We talked about how it is cathartic to talk about our problems and have a rant and Adrian was using it as a performance.

After we watched some videos, we got into our performance groups. Firstly, we filled in Hannah and Franki on our ideas and they were really into it. They also helped build on a few ideas we had discussed from the previous week. As our ‘end product’ we thought that we could get random members of the public into our ‘home’ we would set up in one of the archways and take a photo of them (with their consent). We would then make all the photos into a collage representing home, bringing strangers on the high street together all linked by the idea of the city of Lincoln as their home.

We were told to go out and explore the spaces on the high street we were interesting in performing in. Therefore, we went straight to the archway to look at our space now we had some ideas on how to use it.

Week 3 (8/2/16)

This week began with looking into different theorists and their works. We looked briefly at Mike Pearson’s introduction to Site Specific Performance and picked out some important theorists mentioned by Nick Kaye in the book. Such as:

• Miwon Kwon- contemporary, land and site specific artist. Ideas of community performances. Phenomenological.
• Dee Heddon- Autobiographical works, walking through inspirational landscapes
• Michael Fried- Art and Objecthood. Minimalistic sculpture
• Richard Serra- “To move the work is to destroy the work.”
• Cathy Turner- Palimpsest/overlaying
• Marc Auge- Place/non-place

We also watched a video of  Marcia Farquhar’s A Live Art Tour. She creates guided tours for the public and depends on audience participation and interaction for her work to be successful. It involves psychogeography, the idea of ‘drifting’ through and around urban environments. She also included interaction with the public’s senses, by serving them lemonade.

The video sparked a discussion to whether some of the events on her tour were planned ahead of time, or just there by chance. I liked this idea not knowing what aspects of the tour were, so people were more engaged with their surroundings.

We also watched John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum. I really enjoyed this video because it was so simple and took me a while to figure out what he had done to the video. The recording was of a corner of an ordinary street with public walking in and out of shot whilst John Smith voiced over what he wanted the people to do. Such as “I want the man to walk in from the right” … and then indeed a man would walk into shot from the right. It was a really effective piece of work and quite comical once you realised it had been pre-recorded.

Once we had swatted up on various theorists and their relevant works, we split off into our performance groups to discuss any possible ideas. Rolo, Holly and I each swapped ideas of what we wanted to include in the performance and tried to accommodate everyone’s interests. For example, I liked the idea of having an end product from the work we produced. Our first idea was about the social change from the top to the bottom of the high street, which we all found interesting from a previous class discussion on it. I felt we could incorporate the litter problem in Lincoln too, by picking up a piece of litter from the street, which we would replace with a symbol which we would make out of the litter found on the high street. Also by possibly comparing the type and amount of litter from the bottom to the top of the high street. However, this first idea was us just bouncing ideas off one another. Once we had exhausted this idea, we moved onto another completely new idea.

Our second idea which we all preferred was based on Marc Auge’s work on Places and Non-Places. Another discussion we all found interesting in class prior to this group meeting was the question of whether the high street is a place or a non-place. We thought exploring this idea could work. We immediately thought of the archway on the high street as a starting point, as it is the part of the high street everyone remembers. It also has a lot of history linked with it and is a place of transit to get to the top of the high street. However, we thought about how homeless people might not see it as a place of transit, they would see it as their home. So we wanted to explore this idea further and ask our other group members (Franki and Hannah) about this idea and to see if they could push it further.

Monday 15^th February

During the seminar discussions were made on the topics of different practitioners. One of these practitioners who was of particular interest was Dee Headon whose autobiographical work links well with what we are attempting to use in our piece. By people documenting their personal stories on a common domain, a sense of community is created. The idea of cathartic release was introduced to me by a practitioner called Adrian Howells and his piece called Salon Adrienne. In the piece Adrian takes on the role of a hairdresser who asks the clients personal questions about their life. The clients left the experience saying that they felt clean and that they had been able to get rid of emotional baggage, a concept that really intrigues me.

For a few days now I have been concerned about the falseness of our concept, how it feels like we are marketing Lincoln rather than creating a piece of performance (something which Steve confirmed when discussing the idea with him). A huge part of this I feel is the way in which we approach people, asking them to write their feelings, making them feel uncomfortable. The idea of an installation could therefore be the solution to this problem.

I discussed with the group about the idea of potentially leaving the board in a location with people’s stories playing through speakers. We could potentially layer a sheet of acetate each hour to show the different interactions and emotional feelings in a place throughout the course of the day. A potential problem with this is that we have no way of controlling how many people contribute to the work. We could reach the end of the day with three words on the board. One way of combating this is placing the board in a ‘place’ along the high street where people sit and socialise rather than walk past without noticing their surroundings.

Joe Turner