Originally we thought doing site specific in the rain was a miserable affair. However, the weather forces people to do things differently and we found inspiration from today that we probably would not have found had we been outside. We decided to go into the cathedral to see what we could hear from people and their take on the cathedral. There was a family including two small children that we encountered more than once in our trip and we noticed something very interesting. Children’s perspectives on things are not only very different to an adults but their insight seems to provide much more excitement to a place. When we were in the Chapter House one of the children came running in loudly to the space unaware of the noise he was making and it opened our eyes to the world from a child’s perspective. This we thought could be a good idea for our performance; looking at a place from a child’s perspective. In order to gather information we aim to ask Children or young adults to tell us a story about the Cathedral, based on anything and we aim to take inspiration from this. We would like to do this as we believe the world can be seen as a playground through the eyes of a child and we would like people to consider this when visiting a new place, but also revisiting an old place with child-like eyes. The benefit of this would be that by viewing a site as a playground, people can step away from conventions such as walking on pavements where they could be missing small areas and sights that would be seen, say if they walked on the grass. Our aim is to encourage people to look past the norm the way that children do so naturally.

Reading The Performativity of performance documentation by Philip Auslander has opened my eyes to the broad spectrum that is ‘performance’ and what is classed as such. Auslander defines the two types of performance: Documentary and theatrical which leads us to the question – what is the performance? The process or the finished product?. Originally I assumed it to be the latter, however after a comment I read I have slightly changed my mind “to argue that Klein’s leap was not a performance because it took place only within photographic space would be equivalent to arguing that the Beatles did not perform the music on their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album” (Auslander, 2006, 7) and of course when you consider a piece of music the original performance in your mind is the art and you are recreating this by listening to the recording. However when you think carefully the recording you hear did not happen at one time it is an accumulation of talent and arts recorded at different times, just like Klein’s leap it is not the true representation of what actually happened. Which leads to the question I stated earlier what is the performance, the process or the finished product? Musically I would argue it is the process, yet in terms of a traditional play you would rarely consider the rehearsals as a performance the whole lead up is to that finished product. This has truly opened my eyes to the possibilities site can offer as it is a form of non traditional theatre which we have the freedom to do whatever we desire with.

After forming our groups yesterday we considered doing a piece of Verbatim theatre, perhaps in the form of a tour or misguide. The text would be taken from snippets of conversation we would record from tourists/locals in and around the cathedral to see if we can create a mythogeographical walk based on rumours and old folk tales. The walk would probably be around the cathedral in our order to make our audience/participants take a different stance on the cathedral after our performance had finished instead of just looking at the front and seeing it as a building of breath taking beauty, we want to dig deeper.

This is a map me and my partner made my walking around the cathedral. We chose to do this because just by chance when walking around the cathedral we found very interesting things unnoticed at the first glance, such as headless figures and skull gargoyles. We are interested in bring this feeling to our audience by making them look at the cathedral differently during and hopefully after our performance.

Auslander, P. (2006) The Performativity of performance documentation. PAJ 28:3 

Watching the videos in our seminar about performance walks has changed my opinion about the possibilities of different locations. Watching videos about the Morcambe bay and how people reported that they felt like the were looking down on the earth as the stretches just went on forever has made me think that an ideal location for performance may be a rooftop. I think when people realise how small we are they are more likely to enjoy an experience e.g. our performance and take much more away from it. There are two types of locations from our walk on monday that I would consider, either a regular everyday destination with views of Lincoln, or a high up place off the beaten track, with views of buildings and countryside. I think this could be an important location to consider as taken from Adrian Howells Foot washing for the sole, people are much more likely to take in more when they are removed from everyday circumstances, and I think making people feel small in relation to the earth is a good way to do this.

BritishCouncilArtsSg’s channel (2010) Adrian Howells. [Online Video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7btf8Tdg_s [Accessed 5th February 2015].

Janan Yakula (2012) Sand Pilot. [Online Video] Available from http://vimeo.com/58462237 [Accessed 5th February 2015]