Monthly Archives: April 2015

Just to confirm!

Posted on by
Reply

On Thursday 16th April 2015 myself and my group met with a member of the secret gardens staff just to confirm that we were still ok to use the garden on our date and time we would like to do. We have been booked in and we are defiantly going ahead with our 9 until 5 working day.

We also asked if our idea was ok to be working with clay within the garden. We are allowed but we need to put down some protective plastic on the grass and we are responsible for asking people to keep the place tidy.

Our most up to date to-do list is:

  • Buy clothes for dress rehearsal.
  • Make salt dough.
  • Run the piece – dress rehearsal. (full day)
  • Keep running the piece for a couple of hours, within scheduled rehearsal time.
  • Set in stone our little introductions to each place.
  • Buy some protective plastic.
  • Keep promoting our piece.

I want to be a clay walker

Posted on by
Reply

Hi All

I’ve been busy over the last few weeks creating and promoting our site specific performance on social media as well as creating an event for “Clay Walkers” on Facebook. (Links are here https://www.facebook.com/events/851927624878965/ & https://www.facebook.com/pages/Clay-Walkers-A-Site-Specific-Performance/452974651526779)

Well since my last post a few things have changed within the group’s performance. Firstly a brand new name for our performance piece. It sounds better I think “Clay Walkers”, it connects and relates better to our performance piece than “The Potters” or “Pottersgate group”. However I must remember that without these names I don’t think we would of got the idea of “Clay Walkers”.

The idea of Clay Walkers came from the works of Antony Gormley’s installation piece “Field for the British Isles “. The idea of small clay figures being created by our audiences was a wonderful idea to get a more hands on experience with our piece, sadly we only have 8 hours to try and create 200 small figures to be displayed in the “secret garden”. Unlike Gormley’s  40,000 figures that are displayed in various locations across the United Kingdom.

http://www.antonygormley.com/projects/item-view/id/245#p6 – a image of Gormley’s figures standing together in there thousands.

As a group we all agreed on a main target audience to get involved creating our own version of Gormley’s figures are students / semi residents of Lincoln aged between 18 to 24 years old. With the facebook like page I invited friends and students at the University of Lincoln as well. By inviting 3rd year drama students I hope to change some of the views and opinions they have with Site specific. I’ve also opened the invite up to 1st year drama students so they can see some work they are likely to be creating this time next year. We hope that on the day of the performance we will get the general public and tourists wanting to get involved as well.

Well for now I’m going to look up recipes for making our version of clay on Monday. There will be a video documentary made and will be uploaded to youtube & facebook for you see the process we are about to undergo creating our clay. And lastly our dress and technical rehearsal is nearly upon us!

Till then everyone.

 

Bibliography:

Gormley, A. (1993) Field of the british Isles. [online] United Kingdom. Available from  http://www.antonygormley.com/projects/item-view/id/245#p6 [Accessed 15 April 2015].

A Potter’s Development

Posted on by
Reply

We refined our idea of using Pottergate because of its connection as the place where the potters of Lincoln would have plied their trade around the archway set into the city walls. https://flic.kr/p/rxsM4R. Although we decided not to include the ritual of the Queen Anne’s well, we wanted to keep the theme of rituals as the basis for our new journey for our performance. Our permanent sites are now Pottersgate and the cathedral gardens. The gardens are now situated in an area where most of the trading and markets would have been held. Conveniently for our purposes, there is a fire furnace in the garden (https://flic.kr/p/r7Dn9P ) built into the wall and this is where our work will finally take place. We thought about having the audience or participants take the clay from Pottergate to the garden where they will mould it and then place their clay model into the furnace. We discussed our thoughts and ideas with our tutor and explained the route we would be taking for our performance; we also mentioned our idea about letting the people work on their piece of clay in the garden. After some consideration, she suggested some different ways of going about it which would make it flow better. Her main recommendation was that we should use Pottergate more than the garden as our main objective was to highlight the work of the potters of Lincoln. As a result of this discussion, we are now going to base the making of the clay models around Pottergate Arch itself as this will emphasise the feeling of being right in the heart of a historic location. The participants will take on the role of a potter and create a clay figure in exactly the same surroundings as the potters in medieval times; from here they will imagine the market place and then walk to the Cathedral gardens to feign firing their model in the furnace. We are all agreed that after experiencing the actual making of clay figures in a historic location, everyone concerned will have a sense of fulfilment as they take them to the furnace ready to be fired and then sold to the public.

Some artists and ideas that triggered our performance which I will explain further in the other blogs to come:

 

Antony Gormley

http://whitecube.com/channel/in_the_museum/antony_gormley_on_amazonian_field/

http://www.scunthorpetelegraph.co.uk/World-renowned-artist-coming-Scunthorpe-20-21/story-25027646-detail/story.html

Nele Azevedo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-28621777

http://neleazevedo.com.br/

Do Ho Suh

http://www.upperplayground.com/blogs/news-upperplayground/tagged/south-korea

http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/2014-09-20_the-contemporary-austin-texas/press_release/0/exhibition_work#8

Endurance “Rehearsal” & Challenges

Posted on by
Reply

Earlier this month, I attempted a “rehearsal” of our performance. I use the term “rehearsal” loosely, as we are still finalising parts of our performance, so this might not be a completely accurate representation of what this part of our performance will look like. As a group we are looking to complete a ‘routine’ of actions so to speak, for us to follow as we perform these day to day water based activities. Our next step is getting these ‘routines’ polished and completed, which we are working on daily.

I have uploaded a sped up version of this “rehearsal” that I attempted to YouTube, despite the fact that I was unable to complete the one hour duration that I had planned on doing it for. Unfortunately, I only managed to complete about 20-25 minutes of it. I wasn’t able to finish it because I had an allergic reaction to the soap that I was using, causing my face to turn red and swell slightly. The reason for uploading this video is that I believe it doesn’t hurt to document both the positives and negatives of creating a piece of performance. All performance can be a struggle at times, and there will be challenges you have to face along the way. The video can be found here (Jamie Dunn, 2015).

The next step from here as a group for us is to find a way around this obstacle. We already have an idea of how to do this, and will be visiting our site in the next couple of days for another attempt at this “rehearsal”. As a group of two, we are hoping that we can both actually manage to do this without any allergic reactions this time. With any luck we should be able to film it, or at least have a friend of ours take pictures so we can document the process and hopefully put it online.

We are also working on the marketing of our performance piece, and are hoping to have a Facebook event up by no later than the 20th of April. As Tehching Hsieh has been our main influence for this piece, we’re hoping to recreate his poster for his Time Clock Performance, as seen here (Hsieh, 1980, cited in colaboratorioartandspace.wordpress.com, undated) in our own style. We plan on finishing these posters up after our next rehearsal on the 17th of April.

Although this “rehearsal” of mine didn’t go smoothly, I would encourage anybody interested in performing to give endurance pieces a try. It’s an interesting thing, attempting to do something that we do every day for longer than normal. Since I started working on my performance, I’ve been thinking about everything that we do in our day to day lives that we consider mundane, and how the meaning of doing it changes when we pinpoint that specific action or activity, and I wonder how our opinion of it would change if we focused on doing nothing but that one routine for an elongated piece of time. Thanks to the this module, I have found myself becoming more and more interested in performing endurance pieces, and would consider trying out variations of this style of performance in the future.

References:

Jamie Dunn (2015) Endurance Performance “Rehearsal” [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErlJtAjc4s [Accessed 16th April 2015].

Hsieh, T. (1980) One Year Performance. [online] New York, USA: Tehching Hsieh. Available from https://colaboratorioartandspace.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/tehching-hsieh-art-live-in-action/ [Accessed 15th April 2015].

Getting to the Route of things

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve found it difficult to think of a route off the top of my head when thinking about our audio. I believe that with our audio a simple route was needed so that the audience could appreciate what they were listening to and not have to concentrate on holding maps or working out where they are. I also thought that with a simple route it would mean that the audience would be able to appreciate their surroundings more as they could look in each direction and see how the audio fits with what they were walking past, this is why I decided to look at Newport Arch, I felt that it was quite a distance from the Cathedral that it would be a nice walk for people to take but also had interesting buildings and places to look at on the way back along towards the Cathedral. I also felt that the different shops and pubs along the way would fit in well with the sounds that we have within our audio.

I began to look into the history of the area specifically looking at Newport Arch, I was interested to find that it is the most famous Roman remain in Lincoln as well as the best preserved. The gateway straddles Bailgate at the northern extremity of the old Roman city; this is where the old Roman Ermine Street struck north towards York.

Dates are found to the stat of the 2nd Century AD, the arch was mainly made to act as a main gateway for transportation and to create the main road to pass through north to York, however it is still used today and from what is known, it is the only Roman arch still in use for daily transportation. However the arch that we in fact see today is merely the upper section of the inner arch as the outer section was destroyed in the 17th century. In 1964 the Arch also found itself victim to an accident as a tall lorry passed through it without realising the restriction and as the lorry became stuck under the central arch bits of the archway began to become dislodged where they had stood for over 1800 years. Over the years this got built back up and therefore was able to still be used however the restriction is made apparent to make sure such an incident does not occur again.

I then began to look at Exchequer Gate and the history behind it as I thought it would be quite interesting starting at a gateway then ending by passing through another gateway to get to the final destination. Exchequer Gate was where tenants who had rented properties from the Church would meet to pay their rent. Built in the 14th century it acted as the main ceremonial access to the Cathedral.

The path from Newport Arch to Exchequer Gate is a simple walk where audience members can take in each site around them and their will be a confidence that they will not get lost as even if they are unaware of the exact places in which I am saying, I can easily explain where to go through a means of places on the way as well as following the path down or walking towards the Cathedral so automatically the worry about finding the end point goes and therefore the audience can fully interact with the audio.

Britain Express (1996) Newport Arch, Lincoln. [online] Available from http://www.britainexpress.com/about_Britain_Express.htm [Accessed 12 April 2015]

Collins, R. (2012) Exchequer Gate in Lincoln – an Illustrated History. [online] Available from: http://www.rodcollins.com/wordpress/exchequer-gate-in-lincoln-an-illustrated-history/ [Accessed 12 May 2015]

Britain Express (1996) Exchequer Gate, Lincoln. [online] Available from http://www.britainexpress.com/counties/lincs/properties/Exchequer-Gate.htm [Accessed 12 May 2015]