Liberation Rituals – Final Blog

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Elizabeth Christie Hellend

Liberation Rituals – Framing Statement

Heavily influenced by performance art practitioners Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Twydell my piece, Eight Liberation Rituals, inhabits the idea of offering myself as an object of psychological experimentation to audiences. Incorporating themes found in Abramovic’s The Artist is Present (Abramovic, 2012) I have created an exploration into liberating from a state of acute anguish, loss and bereavement. Using theoretical insights into the relationship of site and performance developed by Mike Pearson, I have transformed a space with great personal resonance into an expressive piece of performance art.

My piece is centred on the loss of my dad, who passed away suddenly in late 2014. I was in Lincoln, travelling from my home to the high street when I received the news of his death. I was located under a passage way that connects the waterfront to the high-street. Ever since, I have avoided that same passage when travelling to the high-street – I divert, taking a longer route in fear of the emotions that may overwhelm me. This is the space my piece targets.

After exploring other Site-Specific work, such as Sit with me for a moment and remember (Pinchbeck, 2012) inspired me with an initial idea that I can transport an audience from two contrasting places, that I could transform this space from a place of pain and grief to a place of beauty, freedom and acceptance. With this in mind, I began to link this transformation with our brief of liberty and freedom. Developing my first idea, I started to research into site-specific performance related to transformation, this is when Rebecca Twydell’s piece, Re–generation Spells, (Twydell, 2010) became a big influence to my work. Like her, I could physically transform the tunnel to a much brighter, cleaner place by using a number of rituals.

I have devised eight rituals in order to cleanse the space from its sadness. They have been recorded for the purpose of my performance instillation. On the 8^th of May 2015 eight spectators, whom have been invited prior to the event, are encouraged to visit a screening located in a studio, sitting silently across from the performer for duration of their choosing, becoming participants in the performance.

By researching into this particular space, I gained a clearer understanding of what Site-Specific performance is. In addition to exploring a space because of what I find interesting about it, it is also important to research into the historical background of a place. To fully appreciate the place in an existing life, I needed to figure out its past. Marvin Carlson suggests that “places of public performance … are marked by the traces of their other purposes and haunted by the ghosts of those who have used them in the past” (Govan, 2007, 139). By discovering the original ‘roots’ of a place, we are able to imagine the place as it once stood and in doing so, we have the advantage of re-creating or re-experiencing the past and merging it with the present.

Knowing that this site was used by the Romans as a central trading market for boats and that it’s the oldest standing bridge that still has buildings on top of it dating back to 1160 A.D made me engage in the variety of what a location means to diverse people, the many contexts the space can be portrayed – the journeys, not just physically but emotionally and mentally too, ‘Layers of the site are revealed through reference to historical documentation, site usage (past/present), sound, personal associations, half-truths and lies.’ (Wilkie, 2002a, 150, as cited in Pearson, 2010, 8) Taking this into consideration I now understand that everyone has diverse opinions when observing this space, most just see it as a walkway, some will have a more personal connection but more specifically the way I perceive the place in a unique way and how my experience of the tunnel is now a part of its life-long history.

(The Glory Hole, Lincoln, 2001)

Exploration:

In the early stages of exploration, I followed a number of Pearson’s strategies in hope to find a space which I felt connected to. One practice that lead me to the subject of piece was Field Working (Pearson, 2010). Pearson created his own methods for making theatre in a variety of contexts and locations, including Field working; Field walking. This was a key exploration exercise for innovating ideas for my own piece. This exercise involves revisiting the same location but on diverse days, times and weather conditions; noting down all the changes in nature in hope to create a personal response.

Similar to this, Tim Etchell, a practitioner who focuses on performance and site devising a piece which focuses on the change in site. In ‘Exploration’ the notion of attentiveness and observation is highlighted. The term, “dead of night” (Etchell, 1999, 76) suggests that darkness prevents investigation of a space because it shrouds the places around us and restricts our sight. In the morning, however, the light enables us to explore because it gives us a sense of security. Harbisson describes this “veiled arrival” (Etchell, 1999, 76) as “acting out an allegory of knowledge” (Etchell, 1999, 76). I decided to take upon his theory and visit my site once in the morning and once a night to see if the physical appearance of the space was actually camouflaged by light and also to see how my emotions would change about the tunnel in the diverse conditions. Interestingly, I felt less fearful of the space at night – it’s true that I couldn’t see the full extent of the walkway whereas in the morning I felt more discomfort as I could see all of its scars, the graffiti, cobwebs and just the general abandoned ness of the place. Alongside this, I also felt more negative emotions to the space during the morning as I visited the tunnel at approximately 8.30am the same time I had the phone call to say my father had passed away. From gathering this information I felt that if I was going to produce work that was authentic and therefor the most painful I should avoid working with the space at nigh time so it couldn’t hide away my emotions.

(March 23rd 2015, The Tunnel in the day)

Another piece of Etchell’s that greatly inspired me for my own work was ‘Maintenance’ – a piece which demonstrates one performer’s continuous “ritual” (Etchell, 1999, 77). The performer walks the same journey at the same time every day for a period of a. Part of the piece includes bizarre rituals, behaviour that is not normally accepted in an urban environment. The performers unique actions opposes to the everyday normalities of life but the man’s repetitive nature can reflect a human’s tendency to repeat their everyday routine as if it is ritualistic, for example getting up, going to work and going to bed. This influenced me when devising my own rituals, the majority only use the tunnel when travelling to and from the high street, therefore I thought, alike ‘Maintenance’ that it would be an effective introduction to my rituals if I was to simply walk through the tunnel – mirroring its everyday use but with an underlying meaning of confronting the tunnel before creating more personal rituals.

Besides Etchells, another practitioner who inspired me in the creating process of my piece was Larvey and his instruction of ‘Making the public, private’. This specific instruction influenced me to show the full extent of my personal discomfort by confront the tunnel and therefore produce a piece that shows this. ‘The urge to show everything come what may…turns the theatre into mere illustration of the author’s words’ (Pitches, 2003, 49) Adhering to the general rules of Site-Specific performance I decided that It would be effective to bring the public to the location of the performance, however after a lot of consideration the tunnel is a main link to the high-street and with it being so narrow I would be making an obstruction to the public who do not wish to participate in the performance. Due to this I had to make a solution that would avoid blocking off the busy traffic but still performing in the space – this lead me onto the idea of recording a piece at the space and then screening it later to an audience which would relate to another key theme of our brief, pervasive media.

I started to research into performances that involved recording, one particular site-specific performance was Super Night Shot, produced by touring performing group Gob Squad. The group take the streets of Leicester in a split screen video experience filmed an hour before audiences arrive, Super Night Shot contains no cuts or edits and is produced with four synchronised video cameras by four performers. ‘Performers declare a “War on Anonymity” before taking to the city streets on a set of magical adventures that celebrate unplanned meetings with strangers’ in a military style format. This inspired me to use little edits in my own video in order to represent an authentic performance.

(Super Night Shot, Gob Squad, 2014)

Devising process:

However I still had no content to my work? What will I be doing on this recording? Will it have literal meaning or more of a metaphorical meaning? After discussing with my teacher about these questions he guided me towards a previous student, Rebecca Twydell, piece ‘Re–generation spells’ where audience members were invited to act upon rituals she had formulated. With already knowing that audience participation wouldn’t be possible and despite the context of Twydell’s piece being unlike my own, the general idea that she uses rituals to transmute a space seemed stimulating. Could I create my own rituals, could they cleanse the space of the negative connotations I portray it with?

I started to create themes of cleanse to create my set of rituals with. I decided that due to the nature of the piece each of the rituals should be compelling for me – liberating me from the fear and bereavement felt when entering the space. As already stated, after the loss I found it difficult to revisit the site therefore I felt my first ritual should be aimed to conquer this anxiety would be to simply travel through the tunnel, ‘walk the tunnel, feel the coldness on your feet’. My second ritual challenged the first, in order to see a different light in the tunnel I needed to see it differently – therefore my second ritual ‘walk the tunnel again, but this time use a blindfold,’ was to walk through the tunnel blindfolded to see how this changed my perception of the tunnel, if I could map the space differently. Following this, taking on board the cleansing idea I literally wanted to clean the tunnel from its graffiti and other traces of recklessness. My third ritual, ‘wash the wall and then wash it again’ I decided that due to time constraints it would not be possible for me to clean the whole of the tunnel and instead I would just pick a small part to clean thoroughly and with the care that it deserves. I decided that an hour would be an appropriate time for this. The next ritual I devised was again following the cleansing idea. Ritual four ‘Sweep the tunnel and then sweep again’ consisted of sweeping the same spot of the tunnel for an hour. I decided – knowing I would now have to perform in the studio I could collate the traces of dirt and grime and bottle it up to showcase it in the screening. My next ritual I wanted to just be present in the space to see if again I felt differently about it after the cleanse, my fifth ritual was to ‘lie down and just be present in the tunnel’ was a moment I could then reflect on my feelings towards the space and my dad. The next ritual ‘Decorate the tunnel, make it something of beauty’, after not receiving permission to physically dress the tunnel I decided to use a projection of my dad to make it something of beauty. I projected a picture on the spot I cleaned, I chose a picture of him on the last holiday we went on in order to bring memories of happiness to the tunnel. The seventh ritual ‘Write a letter to the tunnel, and let it burn’ I wanted to write all the negative things about my loss and destroy them – liberating me from them. My final ritual ‘Leave the space’ was to simply walk away from the tunnel and leave behind the memories of transformation in hope that when I revisit the space, I will fell a lot differently.

Although I had already started to feel the psychological effects of actively thinking about the loss of my dad I was not prepared for the emotions felt when actually doing the rituals. I spread the doing of rituals over two days – again early morning, similar to the time I heard about the news. I invited somebody I trusted dearly, who recorded the whole journey.

(27^th of March/3^rd of April 2015 – pictures from the day I did the rituals)

Previous to the doing of rituals, I came across an article about Marina Abramovic, and how she prepared for her most recent performance The Artist is Present. She described the process by ‘Sitting straight and allowing my breath to crinkle out memories, thoughts, and emotional treasures were enjoyable in a way, and although I could have physically continued on, in an instant, I felt my heart curl inwards and I knew that the growing and opening had come to a close for the day. My emotional self was exhausted’ (Abramovic, 2012) Similar to Abramovic, I am too pushing myself mentally, to limits I find uncomfortable by actively thinking about my loss for the purpose of my piece. Abramovic designed her own exercises and regimes in order to prepare herself and her performers for their shows, one performer from The Artist is Present, described the rehearsal process as ‘a challenge, but a blessing in disguise’ as she had to change so many factors about her body, ‘Because of the show, everything in my life changed; my diet, my body, the depth of my sleep, my energy levels, the depth of my breath and most importantly my respect for my own limits and an eagerness to overthrow those limits each day’ (Bailey, 2010) This training instilled impeccable mental and physical strength in her students, something I could merely admire rather than practise due to time constraints. Abramovic was a major influence in helping me on the day of my rituals, although I felt exhausted and emotional the outcome drove me to finish them.

(The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic, 2012)

After finding the rehearsal process of the Artist is Present so inspirational, I decided to look into more of Abramovic’s work. I came across Seven Easy Pieces, which was a montage of performances focussing on the theme of liberty and Oppression. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, and more specifically the sixth piece of the seven, Lips of Thomas (Abramovic, 1975) was a piece devised from rituals. Despite Abramovic’s intensely preparing for her other works, she only planned these performances rather than rehearsed them, this way she had no control of how she would react to the actions themselves creating a totally authentic piece. Part of the performance consisted of repeatedly whipping herself for a long period of time, although marina persisted to quiver and that spectators were saying, “Please, please stop,” or “You do not have to do it more” (Brockes, 2014) again and again, Marina continued. However, Abramovic did not quit the performance. This inspired me, as although I had pre-recorded the video, and I have somewhat scripted an experimental piece I still, due to the sensitivity of the subject matter, will have no control over my emotions on the day.

(Lips of Thomas, Marina Abramovic, 1975)

Now having recorded all of the rituals, I decided, like Abramovic I should too perform live at the screening, creating a more authentic piece. I had already decided that I wanted to showcase the tools I had use to cleanse the space, including the dress I wore on the day as they were key pieces valuable to the storytelling of the piece. I decided that I should be present at the screening to aid the clarity of the piece. I thought it would be effective if I repeated the process of cleansing but using the dirty water and filth found at the site when cleaning, onto the dress. I will then at the end of the performance be wearing the filthy dress. This symbolises that although I have cleansed the space and; in the performance done the act of cleaning the dress, in hope to feel liberated from the negative emotions at the site, I will never be completely free from the sadness and I will always wear the pain and hurt felt from my loss. Additionally, I feel that transforming the white dress to one that is dirty and therefore somewhat black in colour, would symbolise funeral attire – suggesting there is some acceptance of the site and my dad’s loss after doing the rituals. In addition, I devised a script explaining why and how I did the rituals which was spoken in between each ritual.

Final Performance:

During the performance, I wanted to create an intimate experience in which I allowed the audience to be very close to me. Some parts of the video were silent; this allowed the ambient sound of the dripping of the water and the scrapping of the brush when cleansing become very effective adding to the intense atmosphere of the piece.

In reflection, although I am very proud of the piece I produced, there are many improvements I would make if I was to recreate the performance again. Although I believe the studio experience was effective, I still debate whether the performance would have been more effective if I performed there at the site; however this would have took much organisation in order to get permission to possible close off or use this space, something time constraints didn’t allow me to do. In addition to this, I would have liked to incorporate more understanding of the rituals I did on the day into the live performance, I question now if audiences understood what I was doing with the objects as a live performer? I also would have liked to have further studied into Abramovic and followed some of her rehearsal methods in more depth in order to prepare me as a better performer. Finally, I only invited eight people, those of which were friends of mine and those who already knew my circumstances, If I could reproduce this piece, I would find it interesting to see reactions of those who do not know me and those who are strangers to the site. Despite this, I feel my performance was authentic, using the rituals and the whole process of Site-Specific performance; I had achieved my performance intention – to cleanse the space from its negative connotations and therefore be able to return to the space. I also feel I achieved an effective performance that showcased the tunnel of some part of its history, I used the site to symbolise my grieving process, tell my experience of the space and produce an expressive piece of art, adhering to Pearson’s theory, “Site as symbol, site as story-teller, site as structure” (Pearson, 2010, 8).

(Liberation Rituals, 2015, Final cut of video performance)

Words: 3,251

Bibliography:

Abramovic, M. (1975) Lips of Thomas [Performance] Marina Abramovic (dir)

Abramovic, M. (2012) The Artist is Present [Performance] Marina Abramociv (dir)

Brittany Bailey. (2010). PREPARING FOR PERFORMANCE ART WITH MARINA ABRAMOVIC. Available: http://gnomemag.com/preparing-for-performance-art-with-marina-abramovic/. Last accessed 4 May 2015.

Emma Brockes. (2014). Have you got what it takes to do the Abramovic method?. Available: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/12/marina-abramovic-ready-to-die-serpentine-gallery-512-hours. Last accessed 4 May 2015.

Etchell, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. Eight Fragments on Theatre and City. London: Routledge.

Gob Squad (2006) Super Night Shot. [performance] Gob Squad. Leicester: Comedy Festival, February.

Govan, (2007). Between Routes and Roots. Performance, Place and Diaspora. 136-143.

Laverly, C. (2005) 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Teaching Performance Studies, 25(3)229-238.

Pinckbeck, M. (2012) Sit With Me for a Moment and Remember. [Performance] Michael Pinckbeck (dir.) .

Twydell, R. (2010) Re-generation Spells [Performance] Rebecca Twydell (dir)

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

Questioning Retail – Final Blog Post

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Alys Victoria Brown

Framing Statement:

The site specific performance we were tasked with creating was to be developed and inspired by Lincoln High Street in connection with the Frequency festival 2015, with an exploration of pervasive media and the theme of liberation at the heart of our piece. Our final performance aimed to question the retail space and re-imagine the QR code, a marketing tool commonly used by retailers for advertising, but to offer consumers an altered view of the high street. Our durational piece took place on the 7^th May, the day of the general election, and took the form of QR codes, printed on handouts and t-shirts that the audience were invited to interact with by scanning with their smart phones to access the information within. By disrupting the high street in this way and starting a dialogue with the audience we aimed to liberate them from their assumptions of the retail environment and reject the site’s common purpose.

– Me during the performance, handing out QR codes to the audience

Pervasive media is new types of digital media linked to an awareness of place and location. It is delivered in to the fabric of everyday life. (Watershed, 2015)

Janne Tapper’s article Pervasive Games explored the aspects of a pervasive playing culture and the space of in-between-ness between players and non-players. “Pervasive playing consists of a wide variety of games and playing, which are played in the quotidian social environment amongst non-players who may or may not be aware of the playing. The non-players are unaware the game exists in the first place” (Tapper, 143)
The quotidian, meaning everyday space is the space where non-players make a sudden realisation of the odd behaviour of the players and it is this moment that Tapper calls a moment of in-between-ness. When considering site-specific performance alongside Tapper’s theory of the space of in-between-ness, it was interesting to consider how our groups’ site-specific performances may be perceived by non-players i.e the audience.

With this in mind we began to form the outline of what we aimed to achieve with our performance piece. A performance inspired by and developed from the high street, questioning our social interaction in a consumerist society, by disrupting the norm and using the vehicle of pervasive media to liberate the audience from their assumptions of retail.

Process:

After researching Michael Pinchbeck’s work “Sit with me for a moment and remember” (Pinchbeck, 2012) a number of questions came to me in regards to our chosen site. How often do we walk past people with our heads down? How many hours do we waste with our eyes locked to the screen of a phone? When do we ever just “sit for a moment and remember”?

– Michael Pinchbeck’s performance of “Sit with me for a moment and remember”

“The city is too complex an organism for us to ever fully know it, consisting as it does of endlessly intersecting narratives” (Pearson, 2010, 98)

A busy public space such as the high street includes busy shoppers on a mission to reach their destination, exchange their money for a product and then leave just as quickly as they arrived. This thought inspired me to create a piece that disrupted the flow of these shoppers, a pause in the audience’s lives, taking a moment to stop and look around them without removing them physically from their environment.

-Lincoln High street 4th May 2015 (photo taken by QR group)

Reflecting Lavery’s “25 instructions for performing in cities” I initially wanted to create a piece of work much like his seventeenth instruction “build a forest in a city” (Lavery, 2005, 236).
A turfed area with potted trees would disrupt the space and with two deck chairs the audience would be invited to sit with the actor and have a conversation with a stranger. The concrete, economic space of the high street would then be contrasted against the peaceful spectacle of a green forest rejecting the original purpose of the space and encouraging human interaction.

My idea of rejecting the current use of the space was inspired by Claire Blundell Jones’ project “Walking, the Western and the tumbleweed” and her desire to “become aware of suburban details and social space….exploring the notions of private and public space [and] create a new playful space between myself and the unsuspecting audience, who can potentially begin to imagine alternatives in their local environment, re-imagining it.” (Jones, 2010, 88)
Although the final piece did not result in this style of performance it was the beginning of our journey through devising and creating a piece of performance work that would disrupt the space.

QR’s:

Considering the aims of the performance and the licensing and funding needed to “build a forest in a city” (Lavery, 2005, 236), our groups focus returned to the use of pervasive media and our development of this within the performance. Building upon our idea of using QR coding as a performance tool we began discussing what QR codes are commonly used for.

The term QR code stands for a “Quick Response code: a code consisting of a pattern of black and white squares which can be read by a mobile device or computer. QR codes are used to provide further information about something” (Macmillan Dictionary, 2009)
Retailers and businesses commonly use them for commercial and on-line advertising to spread their product across a different dimensional platform, beyond printed copy. Therefore, we felt the high street would be the perfect space to somehow warp the expectations of our audience by using the codes for something other than advertising, in order to “Question Retail”. We concluded that this would become our working title.

- an example of QR codes used for advertising a business in Lincoln High street, taken 20th March 2015

– an example of QR codes used to advertise a business in Lincoln High street, taken 20th March 2015

During this stage it became apparent that this technology had not previously been used in a performative way and this gave us the opportunity to create a unique piece based around QR codes.

Urban life in an audio file:

After reading “Wandering and wondering” where Gorman describes her experience of being on an audio tour titled ‘Missing Voice’ in an area of London, I was inspired to find a way to disrupt the audience’s view of the space. Gorman writes “During my own experience of doing the ‘Missing Voice’ walk I felt that a certain sense of complacency about the nature of the urban street had been destabilized. My perceptions of the street activity, the sounds around me and my sense of belonging in that environment were heightened.”(Gorman, 2003, 168) Gorman experienced a change of perception toward the significance of the commercial space during the audio tour and the ‘sense of belonging’ that she found suggests she began to have a deeper experience of the site. We explored the idea of achieving something similar by putting audio content in to our piece that removed the listener from the space completely, reducing its importance. We eventually decided against an audio tour as we wanted the disruption to be simple and conversational rather than carry a specific message or a story in an audio file, but this source did help build our final piece.

Commodity as Spectacle:

“The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions.”

(Debord, 1967)

Reading Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” led us to make parallels between his theories, the work of the Situationists and our piece.

“The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.” (Debord, 1967)

Lines such as this caught our attention as it reflected our performance aims but also the process we were taking to explore the site in its commercialised form. Whilst observing the space frequently as passive bystanders, I felt more and more inspired by Debord’s theory of the “commodity as spectacle” (Debord, 1967).

I began recognising how the commodity and ownership of products in our commercialised culture is so central that, similar to Debord’s suggestion, it is beginning to blind us in to being all that we can use to achieve survival in this expanding economy.

“The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having.” (Debord, 1967)

With our primary focus to disrupt, it was important that our piece held these key theories about a consumerist culture at its heart.

As well as this, using the image of the QR code as the focus of our performance reflected this theory of ‘the spectacle mediated by images’.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”(Debord, 1967)

The retail site is a prime example of the spectacle in western culture, with its advertising material and body image dominating our social interaction and expectations in this consumerist environment.

A Situation is Happening:

The work of the Situationists, and their critique of advanced capitalism was an area that educated our process. Being the “first revolutionary group to analyse capitalism in its current consumerist form” (libcom.org, 2006) their tactics included “attempting to create “situations” where humans would interact together as people, not mediated by commodities” (ibid). Having confirmed our performance date would collide with the general election, this inspiration from Situationist theories became even more prominent. Our performance became a means of exploration in to social interaction on a day shrouded by political voting, campaigning and opinions. With this in mind I began to research Happenings.

Exploring the notion that a happening is when “the performer merely carries out a task” (Sandford et all, 1995, 7) we began to consider our piece as a performative installation rather than as a piece of theatre.

Reading further about Happenings we were able to form a clearer view of the type of piece we wanted to create, “a performer in the Happening merely carries out a task. The actor in the traditional play might add character details. If the actor in the Happening is not required to perform in an imaginary time or place, what is required of him?” (Sandford et all, 1995, 7-8)

Using this as inspiration, we stripped our creative ideas down to their simplest form in order to create the feeling of a performative act rather than a performance. We took our desire to disrupt the flow of the high street literally and started to find a way to distract the audience (the public) from their rhythm of movement through the high street. For example we considered physical obstruction such as forming a human barrier across the high street, as well as psychological ways such as starting a conversation and inviting a response from the audience

Our performance process echoed a post-modernist view of society, particularly our criticism of a technology fuelled consumerist culture. Our analysis of the actions taking place within the public street involving pervasive media reflects Jean-Francois Lyotard’s post-modern critique of “the status of knowledge”, believing knowledge “ is altered, as societies enter what is known as the post industrial age” (Lyotard, 1984, 3).

“It is common knowledge that the miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited”. (Lyotard, 1984, 4)

My personal exploration during this process has been to delve in to our use of smart-phones, electronic devices and social media in day to day life. Although the use of this technology to acquire information is often considered specific to a younger generation, I began to question pervasive media in its simplistic form; people’s excessive use of technology on a daily basis. Also, the performance I Wish I Was Lonely (Walker and Thorpe, 2015) explored society’s use of technology and its impact on our social relationship and inspired me to think differently about our reliance on smart phones and social media.

Therefore, Lyotard’s comments on the gradual changes in how learning is acquired and his suggestion that “knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold” (Lyotard, 1984, 4) was a view that we connected strongly with when observing people in the high street and the day to day happenings in the space.

– Lincoln High Street, 20th May 2015

One part of our process that really guided us to our end performance was during group rehearsals we would list words that we associated with the high street such as busy, repetitive, cattle, ignorance, money and dehumanised. This made us very aware of how we were viewing the high street but also what we wanted to develop further within our research. For example the idea of viewing the consumers as cattle being herded through the space by the retailers advertising material, made us ‘question retail’ ourselves.

We began considering a wider format to present our performance on whilst considering how the audience will access our piece. We took inspiration from Claire Blundell-Jones’ 2011 gallery installation described by her as, “Five weeks, 150 sheets of paper with the sentence ‘Crow didn’t know…’ 150 people finished these sentences which I then illustrated.” This use of a durational performance involving the audience and taking the stimulus of paper we began considering creating a performance installation.
We referred once again to Lavery’s 25 instructions for performance in cities, this time developing upon his twenty first instruction of wallpapering a car park. In order to reverse the negatives perceptions we have of a concrete, decrepit car park, the wallpaper covers that initial view of the building and gives it an alternative meaning, wrapped up like a gift for the visitors using it.

- our first location for our performance installation, Speakers Corner Lincoln High Street, 21st March 2015

– The first location for our performance installation, Speakers Corner Lincoln High Street, 21st March 2015

The result of our research process was to take an abandoned shop in the centre of the market square in Lincoln’s high street and cover it in QR codes. As we wanted to have a great impact on the high street for our performance it was at this stage that we decided it would be a durational performance (lasting longer than 3 hours).

It was important that the content of our QR codes would each take a number of different forms. Creating over a thousand codes between us we wanted to create a ‘spectacle’ of our performance. Taking care we were not bias towards or against a certain view of the high street we wanted to provide the audience member with an alternative view. Researching the history of the site, I aimed to explore the historical incarnations of retail and the deeper dimensions of the high street that we pass through and ignore every day. We also hoped to liberate the code itself, from its common purpose.

We originally wanted a live documentation on the day involving a table, a printer and a device to research content for the codes. However, after contacting Lincoln Council to confirm with them the event we were planning to execute in the high street, we discovered it would no longer be possible to use the desired location.

We then considered using the side of a major retailer to have a greater impact with our installation but being rejected by the retail owners (M&S), meant that we had to rethink our performance.

- the wall of retailer M&S that we requested to use for our perfromance

– the wall of retailer M&S that we requested to use for our performance

By this point, despite a number of stumbling blocks trying to attain permission, our process had been developing similar to the process dictated in “A sardine box of tricks”.

“We stopped seeing the street as a series of snapshots but as an endless movie”(Crab man and Signpost, 2011, 16)

In this text the performers/authors guide the reader through their performance process of researching and performing in a city landscape. Most importantly their process of exploring the site inspired us to follow in their footsteps and “become part of the street’s regular life”, (Crabman and signpost, 2011, 16)

A tactic they used was to “wear something that sets you apart and allows others to have permission to approach you” (Crabman and signpost, 2011, 16), encouraging people to share their stories of the street with you. We discussed the idea of wearing t-shirts to create a ‘uniformed’ impact on the street and this remained a key element of our performance throughout the process.

- Me in our QR t-shirts during our performance, Lincoln High Street 7th May

– Me in my QR t-shirt during our performance, Lincoln High Street 7th May

As well as this “a sardine street box of tricks” gave us the fundamental idea of ‘layers’. “Imagine you are archaeologists of the meanings of your street, then your walkings are excavations” (Crab man and signpost, 2011, 32). This inspired us to view our codes as vehicles on to a different level; uncovering the layers of the high street and revealing them to the audience by layering them in QR codes.

Whilst researching, I stumbled across a link to the website of Blind Ditch projects who “bring together varied voices from the communities we work with, to create unexpected arts and performance events in everyday spaces.” (Blind Ditch, 2013)

I was inspired by their work “This City’s Centre” because their focus on performing a different view of the city centre was similar to our aims. But more importantly I was inspired by their method of live streaming and method of encouraging the public to upload their own elements of performance directly on to their gallery. Taking photos of their view of the city from their windows offers anonymous and always different views of the same space, making me reflect back on the idea of revealing ‘layers’ of the high street.

“By hearing the voices of your neighbours, of people who have walked the same stretch of pavement over and again, just like you, and having their ideas, opinions and thoughts flow into your ears as you contemplate the exact same view that inspired those thoughts, you just might – as I did – feel increasingly connected to the people around you.” (Exeter Insider, 2013)

A number of videos were available on their website that enabled me to view their work further. Although the link would not allow me to import the video to this blog as it has been made private, I am able to produce the link to the webpage in which readers can view the video of Blind Ditch’s performance piece ‘Here and Now’ (Blind Ditch, 2013). http://www.thiscityscentre.net/performance/

From this, we felt it necessary that we create a performance blog in which everything that was coded was to be posted on in order to give the performance another layer. The audience would also be given the link to this blog on the day, thus inviting them to engage with our piece at a later time and in a different format.

http://questioningretail.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Evaluation:

The result of our process was a success. Although our original idea took the form of an installation, the importance of conversation as a method of disruption and the questioning of retail through pervasive media, led us to produce a 6 hour long performance in Lincoln high street. On reflection, it was unfortunate that the weather dampened the materials we had used for our performance. However, our method of inviting the audience to start a dialogue with us continued to have a great impact despite the weather.

If we were to develop the piece I would aim to review two possible ideas that arose during our process. The first development would be a heavier focus on the disruptive conversation, encouraging the audience to have full engagement and participation in the performance, by starting a dialogue with them. For example, sharing a blog post alongside the actors, after creating their own QR code, that revealed a piece of their personal history with the site. This would however need technology live on the day for audience members to use and would logistically have to be considered carefully. The second improvement would be to gain permission for a performance installation in the high street; a visual spectacle of disruption.

In my opinion, the aims of the performance were successfully met. We were able to physically disrupt the high street, questioning the consumerist culture through using social interaction where “humans would interact together as people not mediated by commodities” (libcom.org, 2006). As well as this we were not only able to liberate the audience from their pre-conceived assumptions around Lincoln’s retail environment, but we were also able to question their participation in contemporary consumerist culture through the use of pervasive media.

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Works Cited:

Best, S, Kellner, D (1999) Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle. [online] Available from: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell17.htm [Accessed on 1st May 2015]

Blind Ditch (2013) This City’s Centre: Here and Now. [performance] Exeter: Blind Ditch Projects. 17th-21st September

Blundell-Jones, C (2011) The Crow that didn’t know, installation. Claire Blundell Jones. [online] available from: http://www.claireblundelljones.co.uk/archipelago.html [Accessed on 10th March 2015]

Blundell Jones, C. (2010) Walking, the Western and the tumbleweed. Visual Studies. 25 (1) 87-88

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25 (3) 229-236

Crab man and Signpost. (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Exeter: Blurb. 30-32

Crow, P (2015) Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts: Site Specific 2015. Flickr. [Online] Available from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/61839232@N02/17238281760/in/album-72157652062387628/ [Accessed on 11^th May 2015]

Debord, G. (1967) Society of the Spectacle. Transcription/HTML by Greg Adargo. [online] Available from: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm [Accessed on 6th May 2015]

Exeter Insider (2013) This City’s Centre 2: Linger. Exeter Insider. [online] Available from: http://www.exeterinsider.co.uk/2013/08/this-citys-centre-2-linger.html. [Accessed on 15th March 2015]

Gorman, S. (2003) Wandering and Wondering. Performance Research. 8 (1) 167-178

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities. Studies in Theatre and Performance. 25 (3) 229-236

Lyotard, J.F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Translated from French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. UK: Manchester University Press.

libcom.org (2006) Situationists – an introduction [online] Available from: https://libcom.org/thought/situationists-an-introduction. [Accessed on 1st May 2015]

Macmillan Dictionary (2009) QR Codes. [online] Available from: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/qr-code [Accessed on 8th March 2015]

Pervasive Media Studio. (2015) What is Pervasive Media? [online] Bristol: Pervasive Media Studio. Available from http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/pmstudio/what-pervasive-media[Accessed 29th January 2015]

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pinckbeck, M. (2012) Sit With Me for a Moment and Remember. [Performance] Michael Pinckbeck (dir.)

Questioning Retail (2015) Lincoln, 4^th May 2015. Instagram. [Online] Available from: https://instagram.com/p/2QmSwXpD3n/?taken-by=questioning_retail [Accessed on 12^th May 2015]

Sandford, M R. (ed.) (1995) Happenings and Other Acts. London: Routledge.

Tapper, J. (2014) Pervasive Games: Representations of Existential In-Between-Ness. Themes in Theatre, 8, 143-161.

Watershed (2015) Pervasive Media Studio: What is Pervasive Media? [online] Bristol: Watershed. Available from http://www.watershed.co.uk/pmstudio/what-pervasive-media [Accessed on 26/01/2015]
Walker, H.J. and Thorpe, C. (2015) I Wish I Was Lonely [performance] Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 11 February.

Word Press Blog (2015) Questioning Retail. [online blog] Lincoln: Word Press. Available from: http://questioningretail.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ [Accessed on 13^th May 2015]

Against the Flow: Final Blog Post

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Naomi Victoria Jones

Site Specific Final Blog Post

Framing Statement

As part of our Site Specific module for University we were asked to create a Site Specific performance exploring the idea of pervasive media. For this task I was in a group with Rachel Mudd and Kerry McCarthy. We were given the choice of two locations, the Brayford Pool and Lincoln High Street and asked to explore the idea of liberty. We selected to look at the Brayford, mainly for its connections to water and the free-flowing connotations associated with it. The final performance piece was to be an audio experience which would include live elements. Due to these live elements, audience numbers were restricted. Each individual experience would last 20 minutes with the headphones and audio device provided.

A Paper Boat being placed on the Brayford Pool.

Fundamentally, site specific is a performance that was ‘conceived on the basis of a place in the real world’ (Pearson, 2010, 7). The space itself helps create the piece and is ‘not an empty container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it’ (McAuley, 2000, 40). As such it is crucial to understand the intricate details of the history of your location. For our piece we chose to combine the history of the Brayford with the elemental basics of water itself in order to contextualise our piece on a wider scale.

To further our understanding of our task we explored previous performances that had included an element of pervasive media. Some of our main influences included the mobile phone based performance I Wish I Was Lonely (Walker and Thorpe, 2015) and the reflective audio experience Sit With Me for a Moment and Remember (Pinckbeck, 2012). These helped us understand the role pervasive media can play within a performance context; additionally using The Pervasive Media Cookbook (2012) to reinforce how to ‘interleave media content with our real world awareness of our bodies in space and time’ (The Pervasive Media Cookbook, 2012). This combination of media and visual elements as well as physical components was something we were interested in exploring with our final performance.

Having gained a grasp on the task set out for us we researched the Brayford itself. In order to do this we looked through both the University and the local city library to delve into the history of the site. This allowed us access to an understanding of the vital composition of our site. It also encouraged us to go and look at the Brayford from another perspective and try to imagine what it might have looked like in the past. This visualisation of the history gave us a clearer picture of the aspects we wanted to portray in our final performance.

Throughout the process we knew that we wanted the audience to actively participate in the final piece. We felt that this would allow for a more personal voyage of discovery which would resonate with them for longer than a simply observational piece would. We also felt it was important for us to be present as a possible physical connection to the voice in their ear and also so that we could act as markers for their next location on tour.

Analysis of the Process

Technological Introductions

Before settling on the idea of an audio experience, my group investigated various ways of producing a performance through technology. We experimented with contrasting the cold-concrete of cities with the peaceful greenery of the countryside by creating ‘a forest in the city’ (Laverly, 2005, 286). We did this by simply holding an image of a forest up against the backdrop of the busy high-street to create an entirely new image.

A peaceful image of trees set against the hustle and bustle of Lincoln High Street.

Site-specific performances invite the audience to become ‘the creative pedestrian as the new architect of the city’ (Wrights and Sites, 2008); allowing them to reinvent the way they see locations. Though this experiment helped us understand the motivations behind site-based performances; it was not sufficient to create a final performance piece from so we looked elsewhere for more ideas.

We ended up seeing a video of Gob Squads Super Night Shot (2006). This inspired us to investigate the use of video to create a performance. Using the idea of timed intervals we visited the Brayford at various time points throughout the day, documenting each with a ten minute video. Superimposing a real-time video of our feet walking down the Brayford on top, we time-lapsed each of the videos in order to create a short three-minute performance. We ended the video with a simple black frame around the text ‘The events just witnessed will never be seen again'(Naomi Jones, 2015). Our idea behind this was to get the audience to consider the passing of time and make them think about the finer details of life that are missed through the focus on technology. However, feedback showed that the sped up variations of the videos caused events to become blurry, stopping people from noticing anything in finer detail. After this we looked for a way that would open the audience’s eyes to the world around them more, giving them time to consider what the Brayford represents for them.

Timelapse on the Brayford Wharf

Listening for an Answer

From this point we explored the idea of creating an audio experience using Our Broken Voice (Circumstance, 2010) as a main source of inspiration. Their idea of a subtlemob was fascinating; a ‘subtlemob is an invisible flashmob, it integrates with the beauty of the everyday world’ (Circumstance, 2010). The idea that there is only one audience member but numerous oblivious performers inspired us to explore in greater detail the relationship between a performer and their audience.

Technology provides us with greater flexibility for proximity, meaning that “sites today can therefore be virtual, and group events can take place remotely” (Ferdman, 2013, 7). The new forms of interaction mean that there is no longer a requirement for the performer to be present resulting in liberation from traditional performance practices.

Despite this, we were intrigued by the connection between performer and audience in Pinchbeck’s Sit With Me For a Moment and Remember (2012). The presence of a silent performer, we felt added a personal touch to the performance, giving the audience a more intimate connection to the voice they were listening to. Using this idea we decided to have three ‘moments’ throughout, one at each of the locations visited during the experience. The locations were at either end of the Brayford and in the middle. We chose these specifically to ensure that the audience were able to perceive the Brayford in a different way both physically and metaphorically.

Exploring the Depths of the Brayford

‘Site determines not only the location we find ourselves in but also its construction, its historical legacies’ (Ferdman, 2013, 13).

Using this idea that “The city is, rather than a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions” (Hahn ,2014, 31), we realised that in order to fully submerge ourselves in the atmosphere of the Brayford, we would have to understand its history. To do this we visited the Central library. This was useful in providing detailed information about buildings that had once been central to life in Lincoln. This allowed my group to gain a breadth of knowledge about the history of the Brayford that we could discuss as part of our audio tour. One aspect of information I found particularly interesting was the transcriptions of the Council’s previous plans for the Brayford as well as discussions on its state at the time the books were being written. One report noted that “Commercial use of the Pool has dwindled over the years and leisure boating has taken over”(Laidler, 1989). I found this particularly poignant considering the recent commercial renovation of the Brayford, its edges now lined with restaurants and hotels from which we hoped to distract the audience’s attention. However, this statement did act as a stark reminder of the speed in which things change and develop in as short a period of time as thirty years. We used much of our findings as script so that the audience felt as though they were ‘hearing the ‘voices’ of the history of a place’(Pervasive Media Cookbook, 2012), allowing them to feel a more personal connection to the past.

In order to create a performance that was grounded in the current day Brayford yet honoured the past, we visited Lincoln Museum. This helped us ‘in creating a present that is itself multitemporal’ (Pearson, 2010, 42). Being able to physically see remnants of the past gave us a clearer picture of how to transpose this into a descriptive, vivid picture for our audience.

A Log Boat recovered from the depths of the River Witham on display at Lincoln Museum.

With water being central to our performance, it meant the specifics of our site were in a constant state of movement, ever changing and flowing. This gave us a great level of freedom with our site, enabling us to contextualise it in a geographical sense through the interconnectivity of water, the constant flow of water reflecting the idea that ‘mobility is coded as freedom’ (Wilkie, 2012, 206). This interconnectivity ironically links with the technology from which we wanted to distract our audience. The show I Wish I Was Lonely (Walker and Thorpe, 2015) posed a similar dilemma, in that technology was used both as a liberation and justification for devotion to technology. It demonstrated ways that technology can turn a ‘city into a sonic space open to peripatetic exploration’ (Hahn, 2014, 29). The show was useful when considering ‘the isolation of individuals inherent in this social spectacle’ (Govan, 2007,140).

Due to this we had to ensure our performance was grounded, to the extent that ‘aspects of the location become integral to the overall form and content’ (Couillard, 2006, 32). This is where the historical research was most helpful, as every place has its own unique past.

The Fluidity of Language

We knew from the start that we wanted some form of interaction between the performer and the audience. Our initial thought was to use paper boats; we decided that at the end of the piece we wanted the audience to place their own paper boat into the water as their personal contribution to the history of the site. Originally we toyed with the idea of water-soluble paper; however the speed with which this dissolution occurred did not leave enough time for the audience member to dwell on the moment.

Originally we struggled with content, not wishing to make the piece a purely factual, historical tour like Ports of Call (University of East London, 2008). Though they were helpful when considering the language of water and using the voices of history to tell the story; this caused us to realise the problem of how to mix the detailed history and the liberation of water into a twenty-minute performance.

We initially struggled with this, but once we had spoken to Colonel Ron Dadswell OBE and interviewed him about his time in the North Sea (Mudd, 2015), directly connected to the Brayford, we found the content easier to structure.

Whilst developing the script we were inspired to delve deeper into the University itself and its relationship with the Brayford. Upon further investigation we found that the Brayford plays a prominent role in the University Coat of Arms. The two swans representing strength, self-confidence and loyalty and the “reversed pall is a representation of rivers and canals” (University of Lincoln, 2011). Though perhaps the most significant discovery was that of the meaning behind the University motto; ‘Libertas per Sapientiam´ which means ‘Through Wisdom, Liberty’ (University of Lincoln, 2011).

The Univerity Coat of Arms (Univeristy of Lincoln, 2011)

This concept of wisdom resulting in freedom is especially compelling when considering our own project’s theme of liberation. Our focus has primarily been on the freedom of water and the interconnectedness it causes, largely inspired by the Heraclitus quote “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man, and it’s not the same river” (Good Reads, 2015). The idea that water is constantly changing and has the ability to take us almost anywhere in the world is a truly liberating concept. This brought me to think about the freedom of the site specific performance itself, liberated from the constraints of a traditional theatre.

We went through many variations of scripts before settling on a condensed version which we were then able to record. We tried to incorporate phrases such as ‘dead ahead’ (Nautical Know How, 2015). We felt that this would help the audience position themselves more ‘on the boundary between private and public spheres’ (Tapper, 2014,150), society whirling on around them, whilst they take a private voyage of discovery down the Brayford.

Listening to Water

The recording process itself brought up its own range of challenges. Using Carrlands (The Carrlands Project, 2007) as an original guideline for appropriate tone of voice, we experimented with various ways of recording our script. One of the first problems we faced was an audible burst or air sounding when speaking plosive letters such as ‘p’ and ‘b’. We discovered that adjusting the angling of the microphone got rid of this problem.

Having experimented with different ways of recording our own voices we then explored different ways of incorporating water sound effects to create added layer onto the piece. We recorded water from various locations including the River Humber and a weir from a canal at my hometown:

Ultimately we found that none of these recordings were appropriate as the water was not distinct enough from white noise. This resulted in us using a recording from the North Sea found online from Soundcloud(2015):

Another problem we faced when recording our audio piece was white noise. White noise is inevitable when working in anything but a professional studio. White noise ‘is a special type of random noise where the energy content is the same at each frequency’(Yun, 2014, 49; this makes it incredibly difficult to edit out and we experimented with different ways of cancelling it out throughout the development process.

Going Against the Flow

Our first trial run on the Brayford was conducted with ourselves as the audience. Although this meant that we lacked the live elements of the performance it gave us the opportunity to test the practicality of the recording. We found that our initial timings for walking between locations had been overestimated, allowing three minutes more than necessary to walk to the final location. This was something of a relief as the initial recording had lasted well over twenty-five minutes.

We also discovered that our instructions for the audience member on travelling between locations were too rushed and did not give the participant enough of a chance to register the information before more was added on. To rectify this in our next version, we examined the script for A Hackney 4^th July (Hunter and Lawrence, 2009), specifically looking at the language that was used to directly address the audience. Although this was performed in person rather than through an audio device, a similar premise stands. Simple yet poetic instructions such as ‘turn right at the front door and Hoxton Street is our Atlantic, where we’ll carry ourselves to the water’ (Hunter and Lawrence, 2009), were useful in understanding how to be clear with our objectives whist maintaining the flow of the text. These also helped make the piece more relaxed, and less of a formal lecture so creating a friendlier voice that the audience could connect to.

Another problem we faced was volume as we realised that our own recorded pieces were far too quiet whereas the samples of the phone call with Ron were booming with volume, making listening uncomfortable for the listener:

The final glitch in our trial was watching our paper boat being placed in the water only for it to end up trapped in a pile of rubbish.

A beautiful moment swept up into a pile of rubbish.

Performance Evaluation – Going Against the Flow for a Final Time

With dark clouds dangerously looming above us we tentatively set out to complete our final performance. Thankfully the heavens remained closed until the final audience member departed. The weather did somewhat affect this version of our performance though being an outside location, the climate ‘will doubtless impact upon site-specific performance’ (Pearson, 2010, 102). We had been aware of this being a possibility so to ensure that we as performers remained dry we all wore matching rain macs.

A snapshot taken during our final performance.

Matching outfits also worked well as a uniform that distinguished performers from the members of the public. We were able to act as beacons, making it more obvious for the audience to know where to go next; this worked successfully.

Through previous runs we had calculated an appropriate amount of time to walk between locations. Although we would never be able to be 100% accurate with the time in which the audience would arrive at each location due to extraneous factors such as walking speed and crowding, I believe that we left enough time for both practicalities and contemplative periods.

Equalising the volume of multiple voices proved to be a problem as it had previously. Through various editing techniques, we eventually managed to even these out:

However, our decision to use high quality audio and listening devices was both a blessing and a curse. Though they provided a professional level of audio, any editing problems were immediately recognisable. For example there was some level of fuzziness in the voice recordings that we could not eliminate without a proper sound-proofed studio and more advanced editing equipment.

Overall I feel that the final performance went well. The placing of colourful paper boats along the start section of the Brayford added some colour into an otherwise dull day. It also allowed members of the public who were not participating in the audio part of the experience to be distracted from the everyday, even if just for a few seconds.

Paper boats on the Brayford.

Though we only had six audience members the response seemed to be positive. All followed the instructions correctly to end up at the right area of the Brayford at each point. However, if we were to do this again I would create a more distinct start location. Though it was obvious by the end of the day through the presence of the paper boats, it could have been more clear from the outset.

Overall this process has exposed/introduced me to performances that do not fit with what is usually perceived as theatre. Developing the piece, looking into the historical detail, examining our location in intricate detail, helped me engage more with Wilkie’s conception ‘“site as symbol, site as story-teller, site as structure”’ (Pearson, 2010, 8). It has opened my eyes to Ubersfeld’s idea that performances do not need to just take place in a conventional theatre as fundamentally; ‘Theatre is space’ (McAuley, 2000, 1).

Leaving our own mark on the Brayford.

Word Count: 3,187

Bibliography

The Carrlands Project (2007) Carrlands. [online] Cardiff Bay: Namesco. Available from http://www.carrlands.org.uk/ [Accessed 1 May 2015].

Circumstance (2010) Our Broken Voice. [performance] Circumstance. London.

Couillard, P. (2006) Site Responsive. Canadian Theatre Review, 126, 32-37.

Ferdman, B. (2013) A New Journey Through Other Spaces: Contemporary Performance Beyond “Site Specific”. Theatre, 43(2) 5-25.

Gob Squad (2006) Super Night Shot. [performance] Gob Squad. Leicester: Comedy Festival, February.

Good Reads (2015) Good Reads: Heraclitus: Quotes. [online] Available from http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/77989.Heraclitus [Accessed 28 March 2015].

Govan , (2007). ‘Between Routes and Roots’. In: Routledge (ed), Making a performance. 1st ed. England: Non.

Hahn, D. (2014) Performing Public Spaces, Staging Collective Memory. TDR: The Drama Review, 58 (3) 27-38.

Hunter, M. and Lawrence, C. (2009)A Hackney 4^th of July. London: Hoxton Hall.

Laidler, K.J. (1989) Brayford Wharf North: Opportunities for Development. Lincoln.

Laverly, C. (2005) 25 Instructions for Performance in Cities. Teaching Performance Studies, 25(3)229-238.

McAuley, G. (2000) Space in Performance. United States of America: University of Michigan Press.

Mudd, R. (2015) Against The Flow Interview [telephone call] Conversation with Ron Dadswell, 17 March.

Naomi Jones (2015) Timelapse on the Brayford Wharf. [online] Available fromhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQe_SdL5KfQ&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 13 May 2015].

Nautical Know How (2015) Boating Basics Glossary of Terms. [online] Available from http://www.boatsafe.com/nauticalknowhow/gloss.htm [Accessed 11 May 2015].

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pinckbeck, M. (2012) Sit With Me for a Moment and Remember. [Performance] Michael Pinckbeck (dir.) .

The Pervasive Media Cookbook (2012) The Pervasive Media Cookbook. [online] Bristol: Pervasive Media Studio. Available from http://pervasivemediacookbook.com/essentials/experience/ [Accessed 1 May 2015].

Soundcloud (2015) Soundcloud. [online] Available fromhttp://freesound.org/search/?q=north+sea [Accessed 13 May 2015].

Tupper, J. (2014) Pervasive Games: Representations of Existential In-Between-Ness. Themes in Theatre: Collective Approaches to Theatre & Performance, 8, 143-160.

University of East London (2008) Ports of Call: Walks of Art at the Royal Docks. [online] London: University of East London. Available From http://www.portsofcall.org.uk/legal.html [Accessed 1st March 2015].

University of Lincoln (2011) University of Lincoln Coat of Arms. [online] Lincoln: University of Lincoln. Available from http://www.lincoln.ac.uk/home/abouttheuniversity/press/identity/coatofarms/ [Accessed 23 March 2015].

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

Wilkie, F. (2012) Site-Specific Performance and the Mobility Turn. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(2) 203-212.

Wrights and Sites (2008) A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: ‘dealing with the city’. [online] Available From www.mis-guide.com/ws/documents/dealing.html [Accessed 09/04/2015].

Yun, Y. (2014) Noise Reduction & Gate Plug-ins in Audio Mixing Process. International Journal of Multimedia & Ubiquitous Engineering, 9(1)49-56.

A March Against Consumerism – Final Blog Post.

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Sabrina Bucknole

A March Against Consumerism.

Our rehearsal process began when we were asked to think about what the word “liberation” meant to us. I personally associated the word with freedom, release and rescue. We chose Lincoln high street as our site and decided to focus on consumerism and the public’s everyday routines. We wanted to liberate the public from the modality of consumerism through human interaction by disrupting the public’s everyday routines in order to give them a sense of release and freedom. Our performance began at 11am on the 7^th May on the Lincoln high street and ended at 1.30pm. We created four A2 signs that had the following written on them: “Can we hug?”, “Can we high-five?”, “Can I compliment you?”, and “What would you write?”. The signs were propelled upward onto large wooden poles so we could be seen from very far away. We placed ourselves with each sign from one end of the high street to the other, so we were in each other’s line of sight at all times. Every half an hour we would swap our signs with one another by marching to the centre of the high street which for us, was the archway. This was the formal aspect of the performance in order to emphasise the importance and underlying seriousness of what we were doing. We were inspired by the Queens Guard ritual procedure which we referred to in our performance as, the ‘March of the Guard’ and to ensure we were on time with one another, we wore synchronised watches. Our key ideas for our performance were influenced by the works of Guy Debord and the situationists and so this was our main source of research.

(Taken 7^th May 2015, Lincoln High Street).

The City

Firstly, site was an extremely important aspect of my research and for this, I decided to research the city, the people who inhabit the city and explore the differences between consumers and non-consumers in the city. According to Foust and Jones, the city “accommodates a diverse array of consumer performances, while the presence of non-consumer others […] is outlawed or more subtly policed” (Foust and Jones, 2008, 4). In the city, consumerism is considered a social normality and so non-consumers are perceived as the other who doesn’t belong. Walking through the city as a non-consumer is seen by the majority as interrupting the systematic flow of commercialism. This is precisely what we aimed to do through performance. Our aim was to disrupt the flow of consumerism, even if it was for a fleeting moment in order to give the public a sense of release and freedom. The non-consumer cannot help but feel alienated due to the fact that the people around them are all abiding to the social normalities of city life. In this case, the “consumer subjects are ‘in place,’ performing ‘properly,’ and (for the most part) complementing, rather than interrupting, each other’s performances” (Foust and Jones, 2008, 9) and when the non-consumer does not perform according to these ideals, they are seen as a threat to the system. They threaten to disrupt the regulated structure of consumerism by challenging the ideology behind it. Taking these ideas into consideration, I decided to walk through the city as a non-consumer. Walking through Lincoln high-street, I became aware that I was observing things that I had not noticed before, and I was especially aware of others around me. I also felt separated from others but strangely liberated because unlike the public around me, I was walking aimlessly, without purpose which felt very alien to me. Walking up steep hill, I found this loose brick that had come away from the path and I had the urge to put it back where it belonged which made me think about how some things are deemed ‘out of place’, much like the non-consumer in relation to the high street, where it is the normality to spend money.

(Taken 14^th March 2015, Lincoln High Street).

The city itself has the “potential to stage interruptions and challenges to consumerism” (Foust and Jones, 2008, 5) and by using separation as the distinction between consumer and non-consumer enables us as a society to take a closer look at the influence of commercialism. We wanted to give the public a chance to feel liberated from the constraints of consumerism by disrupting the ‘natural’ flow of modern city life, even if it was for a fleeting moment. Looking at our performance from a political point of view, we were ultimately challenging the ethics of consumerism. To add to this political slant on our performance, it was Election Day and so our signs may have been mistaken for being party political, however this was not the case. When the spectators realised that we were not promoting a political party they became more interested and may have even felt a sense of release from tension at our more innocent, simple gesture. Signs are commonly used for advertisements and our ‘misuse’ of the sign, challenges the politics of consumerism because we were using the means of advertisement to offer something which has no price. We were making a stand against money making schemes by using the very means that support it.

Consumerism

During our performance process, I focused mainly on the work of Guy Debord and the situationists because their work showed many parallels to the piece we wanted to create. In Debord’s Critique of Separation, he suggests that “we don’t know what to say. Words form themselves into sequences and gestures recognise each other” (Debord, 1992, 43). Debord emphasises that we have lost the means to communicate on an authentic, honest level and argues that the words we use to form sentences are produced by our sense of political correctness. We are afraid to push the boundaries of what is deemed as politically correct in case we are unaccepted and seen as other. Debord continues to question the fundamental aspects of communication when he asks “what communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What true project has been lost?” (Debord, 1992, 43). Debord suggests that we desire more intimate, authentic communication on a personal level that will actually satisfy our need for social interaction. The ethics of Debord’s theory is what inspired the ‘hug’ and ‘high-five. We replaced words with physical gestures in order to emphasise the importance of human interaction and to create a spectacle using intimate, personal gestures.

(Taken 7^th May 2015, Lincoln High Street)

Debord continues to analyse our need for authentic social interaction by suggesting that dreams are a product of our unfulfilled desires. In Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, he states that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious” (Freud, 1997, 64) and that at the centre of each dream is a repressed wish. Debord, being influenced by Freud’s dream-work theorises that dreams “strikingly publicise those of our needs that have not been answered” (Debord, 1992, 47). Debord emphasises that our repressed desire for authentic social communication is presented to us through our unconscious in the form of a dream. Freud also theorises that every dream once analysed thoroughly can be seen as a wish-fulfilment, however, these wishes may conflict with our responsibilities and conscious aims. In this case, our wish to connect with one another through different, bolder means of communication and interaction conflicts with society’s ‘normal’ way of communication. In our performance, we wanted to break boundaries and offer gestures that are not normally presented to strangers in order to create authentic social interaction. We did an experiment to see what kind of reaction we would receive from the public in which we stood in the middle of Lincoln High Street and held laminated pieces of A4 paper that had ‘Can we high-five?’ written on them. This is the video evidence from that experiment:

(Taken 16^th March 2015, Lincoln High Street)

The public genuinely looked eager and curious to find out what we were doing and why. For instance, in this video, I had a conversation with two men which went like this:

Man: “What is this for?”. I then gave a brief explanation of what we were doing, explaining how we were trying to create social interaction with strangers in order to interrupt the flow of consumerism. Man: “That’s awesome! Who has even said no yet? Let me find them and hunt them down for you” *Laughter*. “You’ve brightened my day”.

We were extremely happy for this type of reaction because rather than just high-fiving strangers, we were able to give them a reason why we were doing this without the need of forcing the information on them. They were genuinely interested and willing to hear what we had to say which made for us a successful experiment.

I researched more into the situationists and according to Sadie Plant, situationist theory is “the unified study of spectacular society” (Plant, 1992, 4). The situationists explore concepts of futurism, Marxism, Dadaism and Surrealism in order to invoke “a wider world of meanings which challenged conventional arrangements of reality” (Plant, 1992, 3). The ‘reality’ Plant refers to here, represents capitalist society, thus she suggests that the situationists challenge the structure of capitalist society in relation to the individuals who are forced to abide by these codes. This concept made me think about the politics of our performance and how we are challenging the boundaries of consumerist society by creating a spectacle that subverts social codes and regulations. Debord is especially interested in Marx’s theory of alienation which “refers to the subjective or objective state of the individual in capitalist society, a state categorised by desires which are either distorted or frustrated, and by a lack of understanding and control of the social environment” (Elster, 1986, 29). Debord focuses on the way individuals are alienated from themselves, their own emotions, experiences and desires due to the constraints of capitalist society. In our performance, we closed the gap on separation by introducing gestures that are not normally offered to strangers.

(Taken 7^th May 2015, Lincoln High Street).

Audience

Our performance relied on audience participation and so learning about how to engage and interact with the public was extremely important. In Govan’s article, Between Routes and Roots, Dudley Cocke describes how the Roadside Company engages their audience by “sharing and celebrating local music, and narratives of place often provided the starting point for devising a performance” (Govan, 2007, 137) and how this successfully engages “local audiences in performance-making” (Govan, 2007, 137). Therefore, by giving the audience something they can relate to and understand, ultimately allows them to feel comfortable and more willing to participate in the performance. This is why the content on the signs were colloquial and recognisable. We wanted the audience to feel comfortable which is why we used gestures that they would have been able to recognise and render familiar.

I was inspired by the way Hannah Walker and Chris Thorpe involved their audience members in their performance of, I Wish I was Lonely. Their techniques provided me with ideas about how to engage our audience and this was important because we were dealing with possibly thousands of audience members and we needed to find a way to connect and interact with them. In Thorpe and Walker’s I Wish I Was Lonely performance, the performers involved the audience to the extent that the audience themselves were the performers. We were asked to keep our phones on and to answer any call we received. Dialogue between the performers would be interrupted and we were encouraged to answer the calls and act normal in order to have an authentic conversation. The performers informed us of the difficulties of interacting and including the audience members. They emphasised the importance of creating “a way out” (Thorpe and Walker, 2015) for audience members who were unwilling or unconfident in participating. The performers also informed us that the key aspect of audience interaction is to avoid making the audience members feel uncomfortable by “respecting their decisions” (Thorpe and Walker, 2015). The advice Thorpe and Walker gave to us influenced the way we interacted with the public during our performance. We respected our audience members by not forcing our presence upon them, instead we awaited their reactions and responded to them as much as they were responding to us.

Another practitioner who inspired our work was Gillian Wearing who describes her work as “editing life” (Stonard, 2001). She documents the confessions of real people through photography and film. These people’s own personal thoughts are put on public display which creates a powerful visual spectacle.

Photo found here: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/gillian-wearing/

This photo of the policeman holding the ‘help’ sign really stood out to me because it can be interpreted in different ways. Wearing’s work inspired me to think about ways to create something as bold and engaging. By using signs, we created visual spectacles that captured the public’s eye and caught their attention. The work we created was designed to liberate the public from consumerism in the high street by engaging and interacting with them. We wanted reactions from the public in order to give them some type of liberating release, like the policeman in Wearing’s photograph. Wearing liberates the people she encounters by allowing them the freedom of speech in a safe, inviting environment. Of course, not everyone is willing to be a part of something like this, but when someone does engage and open themselves up to possibility, they are liberating themselves from the constraints of modern society. This example of creativity and bravery inspired us to create our own work which defies social boundaries and liberates us and the public from social normalities and consumerism. Our signs were designed to disrupt the public’s set journeys and to give them the opportunity of distraction by interacting with us. Wearing creates a visual spectacle that has personal meaning which is something we wanted to incorporate into our piece which is why we chose the “What would you write?” sign. Like Wearing, we were able to give our audience the freedom of expression.

(Taken 7th May 2015, Lincoln High Street).

I also researched into Happenings because, like our performance, Happenings always place the audience at the centre of their performances. A Happening is a type of performance which is concerned with the message being received by the audience. “Today we think in terms of ‘messages sent and received’ and understand that perception is a relationship between the sender, the message, and the receiver” (Schechner, 1995, 216). We think this way because we are used to being surrounded by technology which commonly use this kind of terminology (emails, sms texts, social network sites). Our own performance was highly based around audience involvement and reaction, not only this but we wanted to receive the audience’s own personal responses to the piece. “Happenings leave to the audience […] the job of ‘putting something together’ or ‘making something out of’” (Schechner, 1995, 218). The audience is presented as the most important aspect of the performance because they are given the opportunity to be actively involved in creating and/or deciphering the performance, and this type of intimate involvement ultimately gives them the freedom to determine the outcome of the performance. The participants of Happening’s have been offered a kind of freedom and “the receiver now confronts the freedom which is difficult to avoid once presented, and equally risky to accept” (Schechner, 1995, 218). This statement highlights the lack of freedom the average person experiences and as a result, they yearn to feel a sense of freedom, even if it is merely to do something silly or different even for a fleeting moment. The desire for freedom is strong, however, the public sees this extent of freedom as a challenge against social boundaries, and so they are fearful of the consequences. “Happenings challenge theatre people to re-examine the stage […] focus and relationship to the audience” (Schechner, 1995, 218) On the stage, audience interaction is always set in a safe, controlled environment in contrast with the city in which the unexpected can happen and a certain feeling of safety is diminished. Chance occurrences and spontaneous events have the ability to change an entire performance which is why Happenings are based around audience experience and involvement. Taking this into consideration, I thought about the importance of audience interaction and the spontaneous events that may happen. Researching Happenings prepared me to expect the unexpected and to embrace chance occurrences if and when they were to happen.

Another practitioner who inspired our work was Antony Gormley who created an artistic, creative piece called One and Other in which he would invite members of the public to occupy the Fourth Plinth for one hour each, within 24 hours a day, for 100 days. Gormley takes the contextual aspect of Trafalgar Square and juxtaposes it against contemporary society in order to “reflect on the diversity, vulnerability and particularity of the individual” (Gormley, 2009). Like our performance, Gormley gives the public an opportunity of freedom and a sense of release. Gormley comments that his work is “about people coming together to do something extraordinary and unpredictable. It could be tragic but it could also be funny” (Gormley, 2009). Gormley includes the public and gives them the full power to perform how they please and like Happenings, the unpredictable outcome of the performance is what makes it spontaneous and authentic. Here is a photo of one member of the public who participated in One and Other:

Photo found here: http://www.antonygormley.com/uploads/images/uk_oneandother_2009_005_web.jpg

Reflecting Back: A Performance Evaluation.

The ‘March of the Guard’ particularly worked well because it contrasted the informal casual moments with the more formal moments. The formality of the ‘March of the Guard’ ritual emphasised the seriousness of our performance and highlighted the importance of human interaction.

(Taken 7th May 2015, Lincoln High Street).

During the performance, we interacted with a large number of the public and I was surprised at how great the reaction was. A lot of people seemed more than happy to approach and interact with me and many of them asked what I was doing and seemed genuinely interested. One young man especially seemed very enthusiastic, expressing how he thought what we were doing was ‘amazing’ and how he really wanted to write on our ‘What would you write?’ sign. I asked him, if he were to hold a sign, what would he have written on it and he chose to write ‘Can we dance?’. This was really amazing because after the young man left, I held the sign and received a lot of positive responses and more than three people danced with me in the rain.

(Taken 7th May 2015, Lincoln High Street).

Site specific has taught me that a performance can be held anywhere, not only on a stage and how the site itself allows the performers to make the space perform as much as the space makes them perform. I have also learnt that the contextual and historical aspect of the site shapes the performance itself and for Fiona Wilkie, “site specific performance engages with site as symbol, site as story-teller, site as structure” (Pearson, 2010, 8). Our performance reflected the current, contemporary use of the high street and judging by the amount of positive responses we received from the public, our performance was an overall success.

Word Count: 3,226.

Bibliography:

Debord, G. (1992) Society of the Spectacle and Other Films. London: Rebel Press.

Elster, J. (eds.) (1986) Karl Marx: A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foust, C. and Jones, R. (2008) Staging and Enforcing Consumerism in the City: The Performance of Othering on the 16^th Street Mall. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 4 (1) 1-28.

Freud, S. (1997) The Interpretation of Dreams. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition Limited.

Gormley, A. One and Other, Fourth Plinth Commission, Trafalgar Square, London, 2009. [online] Available from: http://www.antonygormley.com/show/item-view/id/2277 [Accessed 24 April 2015].

Govan, (2007). Between Routes and Roots. Performance, Place and Diaspora. 136-143.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Plant, S. (1992) The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge.

Stonard, J. (2001) Gillian Wearing OBE. [online] New York: Tate. Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gillian-wearing-obe-2648 [Accessed 25 February 2015].

Schechner, R. (1995) Happenings. In Sandford, M. (ed.) Happenings and Other Acts. London: Routledge, 216-218.

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.

Collision- Final Blog Post

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Chloe Harrison

Initially understanding Site Specific proved to be difficult. As a result I derived that it was any kind of performance that was particular to the site it was performed at. However, this assumption has changed and developed over the process of creating Collision. The sounds gathered are from a specific place, however, ‘there is no place of origin: a place owes its character not only the experiences it affords as sights, sounds etc. but also to what is done there as looking, listening, moving. Both ‘being’ and environment are mutually emergent, continuously brought into existence together.” (Pearson, 2010, 16) If we went back to the place they were recorded and tried to re-create them, they wouldn’t be the same because the time, the place and the people are all different. Despite this, it can be interesting to see what happens when the sounds are captured and moved to a different location.

What is Collision?

Collision is an audio experience created using original sounds captured on the High Street of Lincoln City Centre. Every sound heard was recorded on an iPhone, using Audacity to manipulate and create a different version of Lincoln. It is a sound experience that will stretch an audiences pre-existing notions of Lincoln by changing the sounds they hear everyday. Despite the manipulation, majority of the sounds are slightly recognisable yet different from what they have heard before.

Collision was performed in a blacked-out studio in Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on Friday 8^th May. It is 16 minutes in duration per audience member with only one audience member at a time. In particular, the audience were asked the following questions in order to help to direct their thought process and liberate them from what they already view the city as:

What happens when you take sounds and put them in a new environment?

What happens when you collide the city with technology?

What happens when you sit in a room that is and isn’t there?

Pervasive Media

In order to use pervasive media we needed to understand exactly what Pervasive Media is. Pervasive Media Studio defines it as: “Digital Media delivered into the fabric of real life and based on the situational context at the moment of delivery.” (Pervasive Media Studio, 2015)

It can be also used for the public to play performance games. Pervasive games are a state of ‘in-between-ness’, “a space in-between real life, play, and discourse.” (Tapper, 2014, 145) this form of gaming creates “a double-identity, two aspects, which are both essential: first the existential in-between-ness, and secondly play as a contract” (Tapper, 2014, 156). To someone who is playing the pervasive game everybody who they encounter becomes another potential gamer. Tapper describes the encounter of a game player and someone who is not as ‘in-between-ness’. This space in-between play and reality is structurally embedded into pervasive games.” (Tapper, 2014, 150) The space in between ‘what is real’ and ‘what is not’ is an interesting place that can be explored further with Collision.

Performing in a City

Performing in a city can be a hard thing to start as “work can be made out of anything: there is no need for an audience or stage: and sometimes the performance will only exist through it’s documentation” (Lavery, 2005, 231). However, Lavery goes on to give 25 different ways of performing in the city. Maddie and myself decided to try number 25: “Interview people in the street about their dreams. Use this information to transform the city into a dream space” (Lavery, 2005, 236). After interviewing a few people we realised that this would be more difficult then we expected. Dreams have an aspect to them that feels real, yet things happen which would not happen in real life. However, we used this thought to create something out of the ordinary; by looking out of place yet doing ordinary things. In this way we managed to re-create a dream and see the results and reactions from the audience on the High Street.

Myself dressed as a dinosaur on Lincoln High Street- February 2015

By dressing up we saw a range of mixed reactions from the public of angry, confused and happy. Surprisingly, more people interacted then if I was dressed normally and people approached me rather than me approaching them. Buying coffee dressed as a dinosaur urged a little child to approach and ask my name in which case I found myself creating a character for the little child. What started off as recreating a dream, turned into creating a story from the story “postmodernists call this intertextuality: creating stories from stories, becoming a bricoleur of forms an organizer of materials” (Lavery, 2005, 230). This lead myself and Maddie to think of creating a dream landscape on the High Street whether we create for a specific audience member or as an installation. This also made us think as to how an audience might react and whether they would engage well with what we had created.

Etchell’s 8 Fragments mentions that “the city is a model… a space into which one astrally projects, a dream space” (Etchell, 1999, 78), a space which is neither here nor there. We create our own versions of the city by describing places with our own words and picking out the things that are important to us. My version or the city will be different to yours because I see different things to you. This helped to create an idea of an audio tour down the High Street using our descriptions and memories of places to guide the audience. However, what were to happen if we included someone the audience had to follow. We see people everyday on the street and “we pass each other like objects on a projection line” but using the “ strange fragments and endless possibilities of passing each other on the street” (Etchells, 1999, 79) we create a new thought of lives changing if you follow that one person.

Creating a three-minute piece gave us the opportunity to explore how we could fit pervasive media in to a dream landscape. We knew that sound was going to have a big part of creating a dream landscape. As a result, we started by recording the High Street as we walked down the hill. However, we had the audience close there eyes and listen to the High Street with Maddie’s voice posing questions into whether they knew the people they passed. The feedback we received was unexpected, with the audience liking the contrast between the busy High Street and Maddie’s voice, and the idea of closing the eyes. Closing their eyes helped create isolation and an ability to use their “descriptive names, literal names, names that refer to the use we made of their streets and not their official function” (Etchells, 1999, 78). Despite this, it also created liberation where they were not worried about what others think, they were able to see and do what they wanted because nobody could see them. It also created a deeper connection of trust that we were not going to harm them in any way and it liberated them from that fear.

Dreams

Researching into Freud’s dream theories, we discovered that this theme of liberation runs throughout. Freud found that dreaming “cures sorrow by joy, cares by hopes and pictures of happy distraction” (Freud, 1953, 83). We use dreams to overcome fears, however, Freud also believed that “a dream is a fulfilment of a wish” (Freud, 1900, 121) and maybe “if these wishes were verbalized, cure would follow” (D’Amato, 2010, 199-200). Freud’s findings lead us to want to lead people in a dream-like state down the High Street using audio like falling down a rabbit hole.

Audio Tours

Looking further into audio tours led us to A Sardine Street Box of Tricks and trying some of their tour techniques on our potential tour route. They recommend trying “a ‘static drift’- choose a spot to sit and let the street come to you” (Crab Man and Signpost, 2011, 30). After choosing a bench in the middle of the busiest part of the street we found that people are in their own world and don’t interact unless they know each other. Groups of people move past each other, only interacting if they know each. If they don’t know anyone, they walk silently and quickly. The majority of people ignore the buskers, Big Issue sellers and promoters with very few interacting to any serious degree. The next step was to “look out for and point out those things on your street that have left marks of there disappearance… the gap left can be a space for storytelling” (Crab Man and Signpost, 2011, 55). At the time of doing this, the street was under-going road works so big parts of the concrete were missing. However, as we carried on we started to pay attention to the smaller parts of the concrete. One slab was cracked, with a strange slice and gaps filled by another type of concrete. This led to us creating a new narrative around it and the possibility of fitting it around a myth of Lincoln.

Cracked concrete slab- March 2015

In order to start work on our piece we wanted to collect sounds from the High Street that we could use in the tour. This started with audio from travelling down the High Street to the train barriers, from inside McDonalds to an old style till in a sweet shop. Each sound we collected could never be created in the same way due to different people and different timings. They created something new and as a result we decided we to use the audio in a different way to create a different kind of piece.

Soundwalking

After our shift in ideas, we looked into soundwalking. In particular a company called Soundwalk who are “an international sound collective” (Soundwalk, 2015). They produce “cutting-edge audio guides, mixing fiction and reality to provide an exclusive and poetic discovery of a city” (Soundwalk, 2015). As well as audio tours they create sound installations in different cities using sound fragments. In Gibraltar, they created a piece called The Passenger, in which long-range antennae’s and scanners were fitted in a house They recorded frequencies from along the shores of the Straits of Gibraltar. This resulted in a collection of “an infinite variety of sound fragments”(Soundwalk, 2011). These sound fragments “were pressed onto a unique set of custom-made vinyl records which contain the separate elements of the final sound piece” (Soundwalk, 2011). The sounds were put into a track and a voice was recorded over the top. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly what is being said due to the language barrier but the tone and mixture of sounds make the recordings engaging despite not understanding what I am being told.

A sample of the performance can be heard at: http://www.soundwalk.com/#/INSTALLATIONS/passenger/

Looking further into soundwalking we discovered that it is “an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide… to explore sounds that are related to the environment, and, on the other hand, to become aware of one’s own sounds” (Drever, 2009, 32). This has an interesting effect on the participants. After the soundwalk is over Drever describes “a collective resistance to break the silence… out a desire to prolong the experience” (Drever, 2009, 35). Listening to what is happening can be empowering and creates a sense of awareness that the participants were not aware of before. This awareness and captivating effect is what we would like to create. Something that has never been heard before and never will be heard again, captured on an iPhone and liberated from the space it was in. It would also be interesting to see if you removed it from it’s environment whether it would have the same effect in a different setting.

Editing

When we had decided our concept, we knew that editing was going to be difficult due to our lack of knowledge. However, we started by using Garageband to edit and slow down our recordings. After researching further we found that there were better forms of software that we could use. We looked into using Logic Pro X (a more advance form of software), however due to expenses and availability that was not a viable option. This led us to Audacity. Audacity is an editing programme that is available as a free download. It has more effects available than Garageband, yet can still work with Garageband to create the desired effect. As a result, we decided to use both to create our track.

Screenshot of Garageband during the creation of the piece- April 2015

Screenshot of Audacity during the creation of the piece- April 2015

We found various YouTube tutorials, which taught us how to do basic editing on Audacity and Garageband, and we built our skills up from there, by trial and error.

(Song Surgeon, 2011)

New Sounds

In order to create the piece we started by listening to the sounds we had collected and using different manipulations in Audacity to find anything that sounded interesting. Manipulations such as slowing down our coffee shop recording and adding a Wah Wah effect was particularly interesting. It gives the impression of water or a science-fiction noise and when listened to can be hard to believe that it started as a recording of a coffee shop.

As Lincoln has a railway line running through it, we could not have an audio experience of Lincoln without the train barriers or a reference to the trains. By recording the train barriers and slowing the down, adding reverb we created a loud and persistent noise which is able to collide with the slow and calming effect of the Coffee Shop Wah Wah.

Drafting Process

The first draft of our piece was very busy. There was no structure to it and when listened to, it did not go anywhere. However, it helped us to use and experiment with the software. In order to make it interesting to an audience it needed to still tell a story or go somewhere otherwise the audience is just listening to sounds. It was then suggested that we look into structuring the audio similarly to the way a symphony is structured. In particular, we looked into a ternary form: a three-movement piece in which the first movement is repeated after the second movement. Most symphonies follow a fast, slow, fast pace of movement, however we wanted to try a slow, fast, slow pace to see what the effect would be. We also stripped the piece back allowing space for the audience to hear and take in the sounds that were produced.

Conversely, the second draft allowed too much space. Not enough happened and there were spaces of nothing that lost the momentum of the piece. In consideration of this we created ‘build points’ in the track where it is almost unbearable for the audience to add anymore sound. This effect creates moments of peace and relief in the audio as well.

Evaluation

For our final performance we had 6 audience members due to time constraints. The performance was 16 minutes long and could only cater for one audience member at a time. Overall the response from the audience was positive with general appreciation for the sounds. When asked about the effect of the piece they were amazed at the effect of the dark room and how quickly they adjusted. They also liked the ‘collision’ of sounds. However, part of the audio did lose momentum through the middle section, which lost audience engagement.

Including a door text also worked well. This helped to explain to the audience what the performance was about and what they were listening to. Without it, they wouldn’t know that the sounds were Lincoln and it could have been confusing. The isolation of sounds in the audio also worked well in order to allow them to really hear what was created and was even found to be ‘relaxing’ during some of the slower movements.

Certain things could have been improved for the final performance, as the room was not completely dark. We made it as dark as we could on the day, however I would have preferred a completely blacked-out room. We also could have used our original idea of using blindfolds in order to create the dark, this would have also added to the theme of liberation. There is an incredible amount of trust that an audience member places in you when they are blindfolded and that would have been interesting to see.

If we were to perform the piece again, we would look into using a more advanced audio editing software in order to create a better quality of sound. We would also change a few edits on the track in order to prevent the loss of momentum and make the audio more interesting for the audience to listen to. The use of blindfolds and headphones would also be interesting to see and possibly guiding the audience member around a space so they start of somewhere and take off their blindfold somewhere else giving the impression that they have travelled through Lincoln.

Over the course of this process I have discovered that no two performances can be the same as the time, place and people are different. Site Specific in particular is “an unlikely and fleeting moment on the history of a place, known only through the traveller’s tales of those present” (Pearson, 2010, 194), it can unfortunately not be created again, however this makes the performance even more important in the way it is captured.

Bibliography

Crab Man and Signpost (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Exeter: Blurb.

D’Amato, B. (2010) Aggression in dreams—intersection theories: Freud, modern psychoanalysis, threat simulation theory. Modern Psychoanalysis, 35(2) 182-204

Drever, J. L. (2009) Soundwalking: Aural Excursions into the Everyday. In: James Saunders (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 163-192

Freud, S. (1990) The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume IV The Interpretation of Dreams 1. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Hogarth Press.

Lavery, C. (2005) Teaching Performance Studies: 25 instructions for performance in cities.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pervasive Media Studio (2015) What is Pervasive Media? [Online] Bristol: Pervasive Media Studio. Available from http://www.pmstudio.co.uk/pmstudio/what-pervasive-media [Accessed 29th January 2015]

Song Surgeon (2011) ‪Slow Down Music (Tempo Change) With Audacity Audio Editor [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUxRdPn412E

Soundwalk (2011) The Passenger. [online] New York: Soundwalk. Available from: http://www.soundwalk.com/#/INSTALLATIONS/passenger/ [Accessed 12^th May 2015].

Soundwalk (2015) About Us. [online] New York: Soundwalk. Available from: http://www.soundwalk.com/#/ABOUT/ [Accessed 12^th May 2015].

Tapper, J. (2014) Pervasive Games: Representations of Existential In-Between-Ness. Themes in Theatre, 8, 143-161.

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