Since Monday we’ve spent the time exploring all parts of Lincoln’s high street, finding out new places. In the nature of I wish I was lonely we decided to put our phones down and just look. There has been a number of spots and locations that we have highlighted to be interesting, some that we had never seen or paid attention to before.

The Jews Court/House has stood out to us, particularly when considering our brief of Liberation. Because of this we have spoken to the owner of which now is a book store and they have been able to supply us with records and information on the buildings history and Jewish community in Lincoln. This is something we are thinking about when further developing our final piece.

We have also decided to further our research by modelling Pearson’s Fieldworking; fieldwalking research approach. We shall revisit the location on a number of diverse days and weather conditions to note down changes in the nature of the place and create personal experiences.

Regarding this week’s task, Michael Pinchbeck’s Sit with me for a moment and remember was a big influence when creating our three minute piece. Our piece invites an audience member to experience an individual’s homelessness. Our piece is located in St Peters passage, an alley way that leads to the high street. We used a QR code for audiences to access our piece and to introduce the idea of pervasive media ‘Pervasive media uses technology to understand something about the situation and respond based on that information.  Our piece asks the audience member to become the performer, to actively think about the words that are being spoken to them, to follow rules and to be the game player. ‘You go there, I and they do not’. (Pearson, 2010, pp. 23)

Mike, P. (2010) Site-specific performance. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tim Etchells 8 fragments of Theatre and the City explores different thoughts and ideas about performing in and about cities. I found the Observation/Coincidence fragment to be the most interesting “did you understand that the city was always about glimpsing other lives?” (Etchell, 1999, p.78)
I find it so baffling that we walk past several people in a day and share the same walking space as them yet know nothing about their lives. We make snap judgements when we look at people and decide what they do in their lives just by the way they look or walk, and when we could talk to them we don’t. Etchell describes the most extreme form of this as the escalator “where we pass each other as if objects on a production line”, “We watch each other, getting closer, and then just when we could speak, or even touch, our eyes drop and the moment passes.” (Etchell, 1999,p.78)
So many of these moment occur at various times throughout the day, cars in traffic, stopping at a level crossing waiting for a train to pass, waiting at a pedestrian crossing; we all keep to ourselves and don’t take the time to notice the others around us, we become aware of the people and choose to keep our eyes down to avoid awkward eye contact or conversation that you don’t want to take part in. Why do we do this? Why don’t we all speak to everyone we see, would the streets be happier places to be? This section in the 8 fragments raises all these types of questions and really made me think about just stopping and taking the time to notice the people around me.

Bibliography:
Etchell, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. London: Routledge.

Our group had so many ideas for our three minute piece, as we had so much inspiration from the reading and the previous workshops. It came to a point where we realised that we were over complicating the task, we wanted to include so much and it was getting out of hand. When we new that we needed to simplify the situation we came up with basic ideas about the sites. We decided we wanted to show what happens in a day in the high streets of Lincoln. This was a simple idea and allowed for adaption and improvements.

We wanted to experiment with the different forms of technology we could use so we came up with the idea of speeding the film up, this shows our technical skills and it became symbolic of the point we were making. The streets and the people are so busy and rushed that speeding up the filming emphasised how daily life on the high street is so chaotic. We wanted different angles and points of the high street so we shot many different sections and sped them up.

Our thoughts then turned to audio, how could we use sound to make the message come across even more. We decided that we wanted the background sounds to completely contrast to the visuals. So the music that would be playing is calm, relaxing and absolutely incongruous. After this we decided that it still needed something more, so we found a poem on the internet about Lincolnshire and made a recording of me reciting it and putting it as the background music for the ruching crowds of the high street.

The poem we chose fit our concept very well, it describes the land of Lincoln and its history it talk about a time before consumerism and technology. It is a way of showing the contrast of the city today and what it used to be like. Hopefully our piece shows that we have showed a certain amount of imagination and  technical prowess.

The show that we saw on Wednesday was not at all what I was expecting. Before even entering the performance space the established conventions of theatre were abruptly and forcefully broken down. The ushers asked us to write down our phone numbers and encouraged us to keep our mobile phones switched on throughout the performance. This caused both excitement and anxiety from the audience, they were excited at the prospect of a new form of interactive theatre and nervous because of the potential for humiliation: What if you received a call in the show?

The way that the performers handled the audience interaction was in my opinion truly inspired. They found the perfect balance of familiarity and distance; performance and conversation; seriousness and comedy. It put me at ease, I found myself letting my guard down and truly engaging and listening to the performance. The messages they left were profound but not in a bullying or patronising way. I didn’t feel like they were force all these opinions about technology upon the audience. They produced a piece of theatre that was more effective because they were giving both sides of an argument, in this case the pros and cons of technology.

Overall I feel that it was one of the original and evocative performance I have seen in a long time. They had the courage to break those theatre conventions and completely engage with the audience, enough to make the audience trust them. The inclusion of personal stories that made them vulnerable made it easier for the audience to allow their phones to be laid out on the floor, for their messages to be read and for their private phone calls to  be public. That is not something I have ever seen before and I am doubtful I will ever see its like again. That in my opinion is the highest compliment a performance can receive.

When I walked into Hannah Jane Walker & Chris Thorpe’s show I Wish I Was Lonely last night at the LPAC, my first thought was oh no. Please, not another avant garde piece of nonsense. The chairs were set out in a haphazard fashion across Studio 2; there was no set, only a couple of microphones at either side of the room. We had already been asked for our mobile phone numbers as we came into the room, and were told we were allowed – encouraged, even – to keep them with us and on during the performance.

Once in a blue moon does a show genuinely surprise me. This show, I am happy to say, is an addition to that very small list. Walker and Thorpe’s conduction of the some thirty to forty people in attendance was exquisite, leaving almost everyone comfortable enough to put their phones in the middle of the space and even take calls during the show. The way they handled the subject material – the use of technology, particularly of the mobile variety, and how it has changed and reshaped our society to the point where we are never really away from each other even when we’re physically apart – was with the utmost care and trepidation. I certainly didn’t walk away feeling as though technology had ruined my life, and that a time before it was better, but rather with a wider understanding of both the positives and negatives.

Walking out of the show, I felt a connection to the other audience members that I rarely feel when leaving the theatre. It’s ironic, how a show about how technology could potentially be driving us physically apart while keeping us forever together left me feeling physically connected to a group of strangers. We engaged together; we laughed together, we felt sadness, grief. In allowing us to keep our phones present in the performance, we no longer worried about what could be happening in our pocket while we watched. In including our phones, we were more engaged with the world around us – a feat, I feel, was extraordinary.