Monthly Archives: March 2015

10. Advice from Conan

Posted on by
Reply

Showing Conan the ideas we had for our performance piece was such an influential and important moment for us in our devising process. He was the completely outside eye that we needed, and I feel that we can now really start finalising our tour. Whilst the journey of a pilgrimage is still at the heart of our tour, we now know we need to strip back all the “extras” that we felt we needed to put in, and instead keep it to a simple but detailed audio tour of the Cathedral. As David Wiles infers, “the play-as-event belongs to the spaces, and makes the space perform as much as it makes actors perform” (Wiles, 2003, 1), which I think surmises how we need to treat our tour by letting it “perform” on its own. Knowing that we now have an aim and intention for what we want to our audience to learn and experience, our tour feels more focused. Conan also gave us some great advice on what we as the tour guides can do throughout the performance, such as one of us introducing the “rules” of the tour whilst the others can be scattered across the site to create subtle moments of interaction and coincidences for the audience as they listen. I think these moments will give our piece the playfulness that we are all keen for it, whilst letting the audio take centre stage. We can now produce and perfect our script for the audio, practice with it in the site, and decide upon those audience moments.

Wiles, D. (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Conan Specific Performance

Posted on by
Reply

On Wednesday 18th March, our group had to give a presentation to Conan, who is the second marker for our site specific performance.  We had to give a presentation, clearly stating our idea to Conan, to make sure we are on the right tracks when it comes to our idea.  After the last rehearsal we had on Monday 16th March, we were confident that we had a well thought out and well organised plan and mini performance to show Conan.  As we decided who was holding the 4 iPads and what time lapse footage we were going to use, as we spent most of Monday recording more footage.  With a successful rehearsal behind us, we were confident at the start of our presentation, as we knew who was doing exactly what and also we were confident on explaining why we were going to do these ideas in our performance.

Lucy and Brittany started explaining our idea of using time lapsed footage on 4 iPads to the general public, to show them how they use Castle Square as a place throughout a certain time period of 4 months, to show the evolution of people’s daily journeys and habits in a communal place in the city such as Castle Square.  After that clear introduction, Me, Tania and Lily explained our parts in the process and performance, for example Lily and Tania explained how they were going stand and interact with the audience whilst holding the iPads which were showing the footage. Finally I explained my part in our idea, I would be documenting the piece by taking photographs of the audience interaction between them and the 4 participants holding the iPads, to show how the public would react by witnessing footage with them potentially be included as accidental audience.

When our presentation was over, it was time for Conan’s feedback.  There were certain bits of positive criticism, Conan liked the idea of using footage to mirror what the general public do in an unsuspecting and natural way.  However he did find problems and gave us constructive criticism, such as our movement, he said we should be moving more or it will just look like 4 people holding iPads for half an hour.  Also the main ideas he wanted us to include in our piece is using the CCTV camera in our piece, as we are interested in looking at how the general public act everyday, and CCTV cameras do that all the time, with the public being unsuspectingly filmed.

Conan wanted us to include more of the space of Castle Square, including the idea of directions, as Castle Square has 4 directions to go in and every member of the public is different and going a specific way for different uses.  To conclude Conan gave us a lot of constructive criticism to work on in the upcoming weeks, if we experiment with most of his ideas, I believe our piece can be a well rounded performance disguised as a social experiment showing exactly how the public use Castle Square.

Time for a Change

Posted on by
Reply

Through out the weeks we have been developing the idea of our split audio walk, experimenting with different routes, sound, ways for the listener to know where to walk to ect. we then presented this idea to Conan and Rachael. Although this was quite daunting we received good feedback which aloud use to alter our idea, a little drastically, for the better and simplify and define our idea. Conan was particularly interested in the idea of the Earthquake and said to look behind the science and history of earthquakes and concentrate on that. So me Elizabeth and George decided to take a trip to the Lincoln Central Library archives the following Monday.

Sites and Scallops

Posted on by
Reply

Simon Reeve’s documentary about Pilgrimage was informative and has cemented the idea that the purpose of our audio walk definitely needs to be with a focus on a ‘journey’. Pilgrimages are plagued with symbolism – which we didn’t even know about. A scallop is a symbol of a pilgrimage allover the world. As part of an initiation process for our walk we wanted people to take something as an acceptance into our journey, the scallop is a good idea both practically and symbolically as certain people will recognise the symbolism and others will learn this at the end of their ‘pilgrimage’. The sense of a journey will hopefully be felt by subtle changes along our tour – such as the shift in age of the voices in the audio and a knowledge about certain spots in the cathedral that they didn’t have before. Through reading an extract from Theatre/Archaeology there is a statement that says “Do not begin with the question ‘what is it?’ instead ask ‘what does it do?'” (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 53). This is the mentality we hope to instil in our Pilgrims throughout their journey. For example when looking at the scallop – what does it do? It is a recognised symbol of pilgrimage and it represents the sacrifice undertaken to travel to a site of religious importance. This is a far better outlook than simply stating what the scallop is.

I also decided to re-listen to some of the Guardian podcasts we listened to earlier in the semester. This has been useful as they have been created for a specific place just like our walk has. This has been useful as it has helped me think critically about background noises in the audio. Some of the background noises can be quite distracting for example the sipping in Adrian Howells and the ‘drip’ and ‘patter’ in Lemn Sissay’s. This has made me think we should have realistic sounds appropriate to the Cathedral grounds.

 

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

9. A Pilgrimage

Posted on by
1

Yet again, our performance has evolved. After discussing our ideas with Rachel, we have all become interested in the idea of a pilgrimage (a journey, especially a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion), and using this journey as a basis for our tour. Not only does this fit perfectly with the Cathedral as our site, but it also works for the theme of a “life cycle”, an idea we have also been moving towards. Moreover, unknown to us before, there is an image of a pilgrim on the Cathedral, which we think is placed quite close to the beginning place of our tour.

3409318_e45f04de

(Hannah-Briggs, 2013, citied in geograph.org.uk)

Whilst we do not want our tour to be overtly about or based upon any religious or historical material, as it is still primarily about the perspectives and the outside of the Cathedral itself, we want to subtly hint at such things. For example, for the beginning introduction of our tour, we are thinking of asking our audience to take a scallop as a physical representation of their acceptance to be a part of our tour. A scallop is an associated symbol to a pilgrimage, with the shape of its lines meaning to represent the joining of routes towards a religious place. There is an obvious connection between our site and the journey of a pilgrim, and as Jen Harvie believes, site-specific performance should be used “to explore spatial and material histories and to mediate the complex identities these histories remember and produce” (Harvie, 2005, 44). Additionally, “…location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to evoke specific past times related to the place and time of performance and facilitating a negotiation between the meanings of those times” (Harvie, 2005, 42). By referencing the past life of the Cathedral and using the voices of the present community, we hope to explore the different personal uses for such a site. We shall be testing out some of our ideas at our site this week, and continuing to develop these ideas into our final performance.

Harvie, J. (2005) Staging the UK. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hannah-Briggs, J. (2013) The Lincoln Pilgrim, Lincoln Cathedral. [online] Available from http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3409318 [Accessed 18 April 2015].