After being given the brief during Monday’s session, I immediately knew what I wanted to experiment and explore for the three minute piece. This was St Peter’s passage. During my previous investigations throughout the city, this particular passage remained significant in my mind. The initial discovery of this alley was astonishing because many a time I walked past its location without ever noticing its presence. That was quite odd. However, the most peculiar aspect of this location was the irony surrounding it. The fact that it is a passage, a place which leads to another, named after St Peter, the Saint who holds the keys to heaven, implies that this is a metaphorical gateway to heaven. On the contrary, the passage itself is dark and moody, it is scattered with beer cans, cigarette ends and a ragged sleeping bag. This enormous contrast to what the name of the alley infers is eccentric. Therefore, we wished to focus on this irony and portray a story of a homeless man who lives within the passage. To do this, we filmed the location at night and recorded a monologue written by us. By placing this on YouTube, we could create a QR code to place at the entrance of the passage. The audience members would then access this and the story would unveil before them, without them actually having to ascend down the alley (primarily for safety reasons). We believed that this would be atmospheric and create an experience in which the audience would associate the passage with the next time they walked past it. We also incorporated the notion of pervasive media within this video. Gaining influence from the play ‘I Wish I Was Lonely’ (Walker and Thorpe, 2015), we used the monologue to criticise society and how people are controlled by a phone instead of noticing their true surroundings, most notably that of ignoring homeless people and forming opinions of places which look dreary.

Bibliography

Walker, H. J. and Thorpe, C. (2015) I Wish I Was Lonely. [performance] Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe (dir.) Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 11 February.