Category Archives: Cathedral group

‘The circle of life’

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There is so much difference and variety in the way we live our lives, but life takes us all on the same pathway which leads us all through the same stages of life. Regardless of our individuality, we all finish the journey at the same place.

During Rachael’s visit we ran through the script with her whilst she pretended to be an audience member. This was very helpful as she listened from a fresh outsiders point of view, and pointed out aspects of the script which didn’t make sense or needed tweaking in order for clear understanding. We spoke to her about our idea of having the famous Shakespearian monologue ‘all the world’s a stage’ playing as the audience make their way round the final leg of their journey back to the beginning. We wanted there to be an underlying message of the journey of life, and we thought that the words in that monologue reflect exactly what we wanted to portray. ‘First childness’ as a baby, and ‘second childness’ as an elderly person, in parallel with our tour starting at the picnic green and finishing there too. One interesting comment that Rachael mentioned was that the green where we are intending to have our starting picnic is actually a mass burial pit where bodies were dumped during the plague. This gave us the idea to remove the picnic blankets and anything lighthearted whilst the audience are on their journey. Therefore when they arrive back at the place they started, it is bare, empty and a reflection of the death that’s been underlying their journey from the start – much like the journey of life itself.

To ensure that this theme of the life cycle is evident and justified we needed to place audios or objects around the site that would represent adulthood and retirement between the Tennyson statue (childhood stage) and the final picnic green (death). We walked along the route and decided that adulthood could be represented by marriage, and we would use subtle coincidences to represent it. We are looking to scatter confetti on the ground on the corner of Minsters Yard where there will be another audio track, which is very different to the previous ones. This audio represents when we reach midlife, the crossroads where you question life and start on your inevitable decline. The audio will ask them to reflect upon their journey and ask a series of rhetorical questions with the sound of wedding bells in the background. Phrases such as ‘as your journey draws to a close’ and ‘you have reached the peak of your journey, please continue on towards the finish’ it echo’s the peak of adulthood. As well as adulthood we also focused on the elderly stage of life, the final stage, which will have audio that will be listened to when they reach the west face of the cathedral whilst they make their way back around to the green. We thought that this would be a good place to have the ‘all the worlds a stage’ speech and we are going to have an old man (my granddad) reading it. The last section in the speech talks about ‘second childness’ that we thought could be read by the girl who read the Cradle song. Representing the life cycle.

A day of coincidence

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This week we have focused on developing the specifics of our performance idea. For example we created a rough script of the audio that our designated speaker (Fleur) would record once finalised. This took us a lot longer than expected as we found it hard to create instructions that were not too patronising, structured or contained not enough information. After four painful hours in the library we finally completed the script, however in hindsight it would have been a lot easier to have written it in the site, saving us trying to imagine where the audience would stand. Despite the extra work we made for ourselves, we managed to complete the scrip ready for Rachael’s meeting.

Today we went to the site and conducted a trial run through of the script and pretended to hear it from the audience’s perspective. There were several little things that cropped up, such as ‘look to your left and you’ll see the statue’ is actually suppose to be ‘look to your right…’ etc. However whilst running through the performance a middle aged man, roughly in his 40’s, stood next to us whilst we were examining the judgment gates and suddenly said ‘I wonder who the women are on the archways, and why they’re headless’. This then sparked a very unexpected conversation between himself and our group about the headless statues around the entrance. Which is exactly what we were looking for in our piece. The complete irony of it all and the sheer perfect topic of conversation allowed us to see the site from even more of a different angle. Whilst talking to the guy he mentioned that a lot of the smaller statues around the archway are also missing a head. Despite staring at the gates twice a week for a month or so, we had never noticed this! All (except two) angels surrounding the statue to Jesus had no heads, and several of the smaller female ‘saint-like’ statues were also missing a head. The fact that only some of them had their heads removed made us really think? We know that the heads of the non-biblical saints were removed in the Reformation, but these were identical angels? Why are some headless and some not? This made the man suggest ideas/ stories why there were like this (again exactly what we’re basing our performance on). He suggested that one night in the Reformation a man crept up to the cathedral and was chopping the heads off the statues when he was caught half way through the job. This opinion from a complete stranger will be included into our piece and played to the audience as a valid perception of that’s site.

12. The Man in the Yellow Coat

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Standing in our first site today, a man approached us and asked “Why are they (the headless angels around the archway) headless?” We told what is thought to have happened in the Reformation, which he then used to create a story of a man who during the Reformation secretly cut the heads off but was caught before he could finish. Although we weren’t able to record this great encounter, we plan to use some verbatim from the moment. After speaking with Rachel, we want to add more perspectives to the site, allowing the audience to think more creatively and see differently perspectives to the architecture. Like Fiona Wilkie, we also feel that “it’s not just about a place, but the people who normally inhabit and use that place. For it wouldn’t exist without them” (Wilkie, 2002, 145), and thus we need to keep them prominent into our site-specific tour. Rachel also informed us that the grass area we begin our piece on is in fact a graveyard, which adds a strange layer to the playful picnic we have at the beginning. Using this new information, we plan to change how the audience sees the space by telling them at the end of what they previously stood on, hopefully tieing in to the theme of life and journey. We also discovered that we need to link our tour more to the themes within the speech of “All the worlds a stage…”. We think the first site connects to the idea of creation, the second site to childhood, and the ending graveyard to death. To add more links, we plan to sprinkle some confetti on the corner nearby the front of the Cathedral, subtly showing the idea of adulthood with marriage as prominent moment in an adults life, often with a wedding performed in a religious place. After we found this link, we saw a family walking past dressed in wedding appropriate clothing, a coincidence we were all excited about. Lastly, by having an elderly person read out the speech, and the ending lines read by a younger child, we hope to reflect upon the circular journey of the walk around the Cathedral and life in all, leaving our audience with several ideas and perspectives to think of.

Wilkie, F. (2002) Mapping the Terrain: a Survey or Site-Specific Performance in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11. The Audio

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All of us knew the gravity and importance of what our audio said, especially now as it is the main focus of our performance. Thus, we spent hours today talking and writing up notes about what Fleur (our designated audio speaker) would say. Conan and Rachel had both stressed to us how descriptive and directional our audio needs to be, whilst also balanced with an informal and conversational tone that we want. We talked over the right way to say what we needed to convey to our audience, sometimes even trying to find a correct single word that we needed. Whilst this was sometimes challenging, I think it was the level of detail and attention that we had to have. We also worked out the kind of coincidences and moments that Conan suggested we had to make our piece playful, which now possibly include Barbie heads, a yellow arrow, cats cradle, bird noses and hot chocolate. Another development in the piece is the walk back to the beginning grass area, which we were concerned would be too long with just silence. We are thinking of using Shakespeare’s “All the worlds a stage…” speech from As You Like It, which we feel subtly represents the themes of journey and life in the rest of our performance. Similarly to Miwon Kwon beliefs, our performance has moved “from a physical location – grounded, fixed, actual – to a discursive vector – ungrounded, fluid, virtual” (Kwon, 2004, 3), hopefully allowing our audience to think more about the journey that have just gone on. We now need to test out this draft version of our audio in our site, hopefully using Rachel as a mock audience member. Once this is done, and we know any changes and alterations we need to make, we can record the audio properly and begin to market the piece to any potential audience members.

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another. Cambridge: MIT Press.

From children’s voices to a pilgrimage

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Over the last week our overall concept has slightly altered. Due to the lack of response from the school we emailed, it not only forced us to changed either the school or the idea all together. After a long discussion we decided that it was too much to find the time to gain access and record the audio, plus we we didn’t know of any children in this area that we could test run it on, which left us taking a huge risk. Therefore we scrapped the consept of children’s perceptions and focused on all ages. By focusing on all ages we realised it linked back to our original idea of the many layers of perceptions that surround the cathedral. The route we had picked out for our tour also influenced our process as its an almost circular route with the starting and finishing point at the same place. This then made us think of a pilgrimage and the journeys of discovery the partisipants embarked upon. Within Phil Couineau’s book The Art of Pilgrimage, Hudson Smith stated that ‘The object of a pilgrimage is not to rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life’ (Smith, 1998). This made me really think about what is is we were going to ask the participants to do. After Conan’s feedback we scrapped the activities and so we have just an audio to make such an impact. However, with a strong audio tour we would be able to challenge them to open their minds. To develop an appreciation for the growth of the imagination. To understand that one object/ site can have many facts and truths through individual understanding. One particular quote that caught my eye was one of Balloc’s absolutisms, ‘The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience’ (Belloc, 1904). Hopefully at the end of their walk, when they arrive back at the place they began, they may feel more aware of the site, themselves, the world, and possibly a change of thoughts may have occurred along the way. To achieve this we researched into the history of lincolnshire pilgrimages and discovered that Lincoln Cathedral was one of the most popular pilgrimage points in England. The 1536 pilgrimage from St Jame’s church in Louth to the Lincoln Cathedral had over 40,000 participants by the time it arrived in lincolnshire. Pilgrims therefore have a significant history with the cathedral (as a statue of a pilgrim is calved on the west side of the cathedral), and we are really interested in incorporating it into our piece somehow. The scallop shell is significant regarding pilgrims and we were planning on giving each participant one on a piece of sting to hang around their necks, like they did in the original religious pilgrims.

Finally here are a few quotes that made me think:

‘While on pilgrimage people think with landscape, rather than only about it’ (MacFarlane, 2012)

‘It is the material culture of the city, rather than the psyche, that provides the shared collective spaces where consciousness and the unconscious, past and present, meet.’ (Buse, 2005,52)

‘It is along paths too, that people grow into a knowledge of the world around them, and describe this world in the stories that they tell.’ (Ignold, 2007, 2)

‘Economic, political and cultural social relations, each full of power and with internal structures of domination and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every different level, from the household to the local area to the international. It is from that perspective that it is possible to envisage an alternative interpretation of place. In this interpretation, what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a conscious- ness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.’ (Massey, 1994, 154-156)

 

Buse, P., Hirschkop, K., McCraken, S., Taithe, B. (2005) Benjamin’s Arcades. An UnGuided Tour. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A brief History. Oxon: Routledge.

MacFarlane, R. (2012) Rites of way: Behind the pilgrimage revival. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/rites-of-way-pilgrimage-walks [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, H. (1998) Forward in The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. California: Conari Press.