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Category Archives: Nothing happens here apart from us
Test Run And Dress Rehearsal!
On Monday of this week, we believed our group were in a strong enough position with our site specific performance idea, to try out a test run of our idea. After our first initial meeting last Wednesday after the Easter break, we feel that we’ve got a strong and united idea now to test out. Our idea has evolved from before the Easter break, as we were going to have 2 people with the iPads and the Go Pros, with one person mirroring the CCTV camera doing a CCTV Ballet and the final person documenting the performance be taking photographs and notes, so it was like a 3 performances in 1 piece.
However we decided to develop and change this idea even more by scrapping the CCTV ballet and the final person documenting. We developed our idea by now having 2 people mirror the CCTV with technology and 3 people mapping the members of the public. During our test run and dress rehearsal, this idea worked quite well and I got good practise in mapping and walking at the same time at a lot of different paces, its quite a skill to perfect. But I did on on the final rehearsal we were confident we would emulate our success on the day, as we were well rehearsed, well communicated and organised to deliver a good investigation.
Easter break/15th April
Easter Break/ 15th April
Looked into Freedom of Information Act, we have emailed Lincoln City Council asking about how we would acquire the CCTV footage but are awaiting response. We are unsure if we will be able to get the footage for the performance if it does we will be presenting it on another iPad along with the iPad we will be using to stream the live feed from the GoPro. If it doesn’t arrive we will just us it as another layer of documentation but we hope that the council will accept our request as we are all interested to see what our performance looked like.
We have recapped on what we want our piece to be and have created a contingency plan for the next few weeks, including rehearsals, our dress run and our actual performance. In our next rehearsal (tomorrow) we will be testing out the go pro and iPad live feed for our dress run Wednesday.
Dress run will be on Wednesday 22nd April at 2.30pm
Assessment performance will be on the Wednesday 6th May at:
- 9am 30 minutes
- 12.30pm 30 minutes
- 5.30pm 30 minutes
CCTV ‘Ballet’
Week starting 23rd March
We have decided after our meeting/ presentation with Conan that we would try to get some CCTV footage of the Castle Square, from the camera situated on the corner of the Magna Carter so we could have it on one of the iPads we will be using.
Our group created a piece of theatre and performed it to a CCTV camera for 30 minutes. Rachel gave us the idea to do this and called it a ‘CCTV Ballet’, we also took some inspiration from a group Surveillance Players who have done a lot of CCTV performances, their performances/ protests focus on political issues and say that “The surveillance camera Players are not watching you. They are watching the cameras, because we have forgotten to.” (Surveillance Camera Players, 2006) We are using their ideas of performing to the camera to create awareness of CCTV cameras and how they are constantly watching us.
We then thought that it would be interesting to walk in any direction across, through Castle Square, Tania still being the constant and following wherever the CCTV camera pointed next. Instead of walking away we decided that we would all stand in a line facing the camera, count down from 10 then disband in different directions and repeat this where ever the camera moved to again.
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I personally found it really interesting and actually quite enjoyable, we were all quite apprehensive and nervous at first but then after the first 5 minutes we were all enjoying ourselves. It was really interesting to see people’s reactions to what we were doing, passers-by were confused, and some were interested in what we were doing which was good because they stayed to watch, also workers were giving us odd looks as we moved around the square.
To get the CCTV footage we’ve had to do some research around how to retrieve it and who to contact. We have may have to make a Freedom of Information Act request or we may be able to get the footage through Lincoln City Council.
GOV (2015) Make a Freedom of Information Request. [online] United Kingdom: GOV. Available from https://www.gov.uk/make-a-freedom-of-information-request/the-freedom-of-information-act [Accessed on 28 March 2015]
Surveillance Camera Players (2006) 1984 [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILTl8mxEnE [Accessed 10 April 2015]
Here’s a link to my flickr for more pictures
Meeting with Conan
Week starting 16th March
This week we focused on putting together our presentation/ pitch for Conan, going over feedback questions that Rachel gave us to consider.
We also went back to our previous weeks plans and we have decided to scrap the idea of the live feed to a laptop element of the performance that we would have had situated in the Magna Catra. We want an accidental audience not a forced one, so we thought that the idea of pushing our audience to take part in a viewing would not be appropriate, if we had kept this idea we would also be heavily relying on an audience which we don’t want to do.
Ready for Conan we tried our technology (iPads) in the site as they are a big part of our piece, they were working well until we actually had to show Conan. This has shown us that we cannot rely on technology because they can be very temperamental and unreliable so we would need a backup plan for the real day. Conan seemed to like the ideas that we presented him with, he especially liked the CCTV ideas and the concept of the time lapse videos although he did say that they could easily become tenuis and an audience would be bored if they had to watch it for a long period of time. Although he explained that we were never going to be able to ‘be’ the CCTV cameras but to still use the concept of CCTV and how it constantly watches the square, he also wanted us to take our ideas to the next level.
Ideas/revaluations we have made after our meeting with Conan:
- Look into retrieving the CCTV camera footage of the meeting
- Look into the Freedom of Information Act
- Definitely use Go Pros – incorporate a live feed this way instead
- Think about time lapses – we may just use them as documentation rather than in our performance piece
- Look into the Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) theatre group