Site and the City

Week two, today we headed back out on to Lincolns high street, this time with set of instructions written by other members of the class. This task was set by Steve, and inspired by Carl Laverys article, teaching performance studies.

Our first instruction was to simply let go of the instructions and follow them for five minutes with it being an incredibly windy day in Lincoln my group and myself knew that this was a terrible idea from the get go. We did let go of the instructions however, and followed them. Looking back into last week’s conversation on tacit agreements it was interesting to see that passers-by would stand on the piece of paper, attempting to pick it up for us as we were following the instructions.  Asking them to let it go again led to some very confused people. Due to the wind, the instructions blew into a bush and stayed there for the further five minutes.

Other instructions given included:

In the latest session our site was dressed with our props and set, and seeing them in the site showed us how homely a non-place can become with household items. Although we have many props to create our scene, we still have many more items to add and buy. The completion of this will extensively help create the feeling of ‘place’, and specifically the feeling of ‘home’.

We rehearsed a performance around our last ideas (mentioned in previous post) and practised with teabags, biscuits, books, cleaning products and a pack of cards. With these we paid attention on deconstructing the household products. We also focused on the fluctuation of place and non-place (and other opposites) whilst creating the performance to see how we could incorporate the audience member into the piece.

Once we showed Steve and Conan what we had created, we received feedback to make the performance simpler, and making the audience member feel unsafe/trapped/etc made them feel irritated and bored and there was no contribution to creating a place from a non-place. It also became clear when seeing the props in the space that natural speech between us and an audience member could potentially come quiet easily as the feeling of the site was much more homely than we originally believed it would. Because of this, it was decided that our original idea of creating a non-place into a place through conversational exchange with audience members would work much better than we first believed.

Now that we have finalised our idea, we know exactly where our direction is headed and we know what needs to be achieved before our performance. From seeing what the dressed site looked like with the items we have, we have now made a final list of items we still need to obtain to make the setting even more like a home. We are also creating a list of questions that we will ask out audience member, these are simple questions, such as “what is your name?”, “can I take your coat?”, “would you like a seat?” and “do you feel comfortable?”. We will also rehearse exactly what each person will do in the performance, and how they can chip into the conversation naturally when they aren’t the main person conversing with the audience.

We are feeling much more confident with our idea now that we have had constructive feedback and seen the props and set in the space.

This week was a particularly challenging one in the process as we had to alter and adjust our piece after feedback from the module leader. The first 3 hours of our 6 hour period were spent in the space experimenting with the aesthetics of our piece.

After spending weeks theorising our piece we thought it was time to put the theory into practice. We began with the footsteps. Every step that I took I marked the front and back of my foot with chalk. We took a video and watched it back. The audience reaction to this element of the piece was exactly what we expected and hoped for. The audience had no choice but to pay attention to the piece because it was taking place in their space and they had to actively go out of their way to avoid it.

We met with Steve, showed him the video and discussed with him the rest of our piece. He felt it was difficult to pass judgment until he saw the piece in full in the space. Steve and module leader Conan watched roughly 13 minutes of the piece and then gave feedback.

Conan enjoyed the concept of recorded sound in the space, the footsteps, the feeding of breadcrumbs to the pigeons and the moments where we were sat silently in the space whilst the sound played. He was concerned about our own voices being part of the soundtrack and was also concerned about the ‘performed’ nature of the lines. He felt as though the lines sounded acted rather than natural probably due to the fact that we had drama students record much of the lines who inadvertently ‘performed’ the lines. We were told our piece could be reduced to as little as 10 minutes.

Our response to this feedback was initially negative and frustrating because of the workload we had taken on over the past 5/6 weeks. After a further discussion with Steve and meeting as a group we came to a solution. We are going to go through our soundtrack and pick out the least contrived voices and then re-record some other ones.

We are going to get another three speakers and have the track playing out of the four speakers at different times. This means the sound will constantly move around the space as we do rather than us being stuck to a laptop which was a concern of Conan’s. We are going to keep the movements in the piece that worked (footsteps, breadcrumbs and the moments of silence that were really poignant) and experiment over the next fortnight with the speakers and what other movement we could potentially add to the space.

Joe Turner

Today I met with both Steve and Conan to discuss my performance whilst in my space, bringing with me all my materials and my script. However after a discussion with both it became apparent that actually my performance was not specific enough to my site neither did it meet the requirements of the module. So it became apparent that I had a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.

I decided to go back to all my original notes and ideas, reading through my original notes I realised my performance is less about what the suffragettes would be fighting about now, but the idea of having a voice and fighting for your opinion. The suffragettes fought for suffrage, which means the right to vote. The Suffragettes used Speaker’s Corner/ the Cornhill to hold a rally in 1908, for support to pass the Suffrage Bill. They used this site to air their voice. Today, Speaker’s corner, is our designated location of political activism, for the public to air their voice. Yet looking back on my notes on my visits to my site it became obvious to me that the commercialisation of the space was more important than the political activism of the space. Each time I visited there has been a new ‘pop up’ internet shop or fairground in the centre. Neither, encourage the public to air their voice but want to entice us for our money. We’ve aloud for our space of political activism to be over consumed by the ever growing ideal of capitalism and commercialisation. Just recently, the traditional outdoor market (the other side of the cornhill) has been closed down as the CO-OP have brought it out to build a new shop, leaving many out of jobs and loosing a part of the cities heritage.

Personally, I see the suffragette’s fight for vote, a fight for equality which is still an issue in Lincoln. There is an ever obvious inequality between big companies and small traditional markets. We’ve allowed for commercialisation and capitalism to become more important than the use of our voice. I want to remind the public and the audience the importance of the space, from the famous suffragette rally to it being named our official stage for political activism. I’ve been very intrigued by the Situationist and their artistic, political activist approach. From research the Situationist, I came across a beautiful academic article which explained my approach and whole idea properly; “But theories are only made to die in the war of time” (Shukaitis, 2013). Relating this to Speaker’s Corner its become clear that the idea of having a place of political activism was just an ideal, that over at the time was exciting and new, just like the Suffragette rally was in 1908, but presently seems unimportant to our everyday uses of the site. From this I have decided to do more research it what makes a site a place or a non place and apply these theories to my site. I’m also keen in the idea of a silent protest, I’ve designed and built myself some ‘sandwich’ bored styled placards, which I will wear as I walk around the space that was once the stage for the suffragette movement. On one side I will have a quote/slogan which the suffragettes themselves used when protesting for their bill and on the other side I will have con-temporised this quote/slogan to protest the current issues of commercialisation/capitalism/inequality and the lack of potential activism.  I will then move to the other end of the site, in which the mayor named the Cornhill “Speaker’s corner” and make the same journey around his stage wearing the same placard. I plan on doing this circuit of both ‘stages’ two/three times with sandwich boards that have already been designed, but for my final journey invite my audience to write on both sides sandwich board, so when I make my final journey of this circuit I will physically be carrying/ silently but actively broadcasting the public’s political views and free speech, using the site as the purpose expects, linking both the past and present together, from the inspiration of the suffragette movement which lead to the naming of Speaker’s Corner to ignoring what ever ‘pop up shop’ may be present and focusing on our political activism as an equal city. 

My next step is to build and design these sandwich boards, trial it in my site and also research the following: Barbara Kruger, Gurrila Girls, Situationist international, Guy Debord, Mike Pearson’s guided tours, Nicolas Bourniud, as well as researching works on politically reworking the city.

Over the course of today we had individual tutorials with Steve. I found this helpful because it gave me an opportunity to reassure myself that I understood the theory. Steve asked the question of who inspired our piece and who inspired me personally and I was able to speak for a good 5/10 minutes which sent my confidence through the roof. It was also a good opportunity to speak to him about the final blog post and what it has to engage with to achieve a positive result (historical engagement, telling the story of our rehearsal process).

In terms of our group work we were limited to what we could do because we were unable to confide any changes in the piece with Steve. We managed to source and obtain all of our props including the remnants we are going to leave behind (CD’s, dummies etc.) and a box to but the speaker and laptop in should it start to rain on performance day. We also documented some more conversations and recorded the final section of the script. Over the next few weeks before performance we are going to focus on the choreography of the piece and how it looks aesthetically. We don’t want to over rehearse with the track as we want a sense of spontaneity to it.