Category Archives: Cathedral group

Conan’s feedback

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Conan’s visit was extremely beneficial. He provided a fresh new set of eyes to our piece and gave some promising feedback. One of his main points was we need to make it simpler. Concentrate on having a good solid audio and less on activities at each site. One clear point he made was to scrap our map as he doesn’t want the audience to be looking at the map and not at their surrounding. Luckily we only made a rough template of the map so we hadn’t wasted too much time.

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He also suggested that we split our tour up into separate audio files so the audience can make their way round the site at their own pace without being rushed by the audio tour. Aside from the technical aspects of the audio, he gave us much needed direction in the way of what we were focusing on as a theme. Only recently had we scrapped the idea of a child’s perspective and thought about focusing on ‘a life journey’ and use all different perspectives from different age ranges. The route we had in mind for our tour was circular and it played very nicely into the idea of a pilgrimage, starting and finishing in the same place, ending at the beginning. Thus we looked into the pilgrim statue that is on the cathedral and the significance of the scallop shell. We realised that Lincoln, and more specifically the cathedral was and still is a significant pilgrimage point for the UK. Conan really like the idea of the pilgrim and the scallop shell and advised us to focus on that aspect more alongside the perspectives. Possibly a pilgrimage of developing an understanding of other people’s perspectives? Conan also mentioned that he liked the idea of coincidental objects/ happenings that appear subtly around the walk. This was something that we were unsure about, whether is was something worth pursuing, however Conan’s visit certified this and we can now work at developing the idea. Overall it was very beneficial and I fell much more on track!

Session with Conan

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We learnt a lot from our session with Conan. Firstly, our introduction to our performance is good, Conan liked the blanket and the acceptance to take part with the scallop shell. We also discovered we need to introduce our tour to everyone at the beginning to avoid repetition throughout the tour to each individual: instructions such as ‘should you need more time, feel free to pause the audio’ etc. Secondly, the practicalities of our tour – listening to an audio tour while holding a map is very distracting and most likely means our audience will not take in the site around them which is exactly what we did not want to happen. Instead we will get rid of the map and guide them only using the audio, meaning we will have to write a detailed enough description in order for them to follow our instructions accordingly. We also discovered we had over complicated our tour; activities at each site is not necessary and it would be much better to free up our audience more to allow them to soak up their surroundings. This means we have more time for perceptions to be heard at the site which I believe would be more beneficial to our audience in terms of a journey. We also discovered instead of activities we should have ‘coincidences’ such as one member playing cats cradle on the bench at the Tennyson site, while the audience listen to the ‘cradle song’ and perhaps another member handing out tea to keep up with the fun feel and to keep them warm on their ‘journey’. We should also stick to the circular side of our journey – even if our sites do not venture further than the Tennyson statue it would be more beneficial to have the audience walk all the way round to the meeting point again as hopefully, while the audience are drinking their tea, they will feel relaxed and therefore look around without feeling pressured making the journey back to the beginning and hopefully seeing the cathedral in a whole new light.

10. Advice from Conan

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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.

Sites and Scallops

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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

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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.

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(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].