14. Preparing for the Day

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Today we started marketing our performance for our potential audience, creating a Facebook event that we all host. We have titled our peice from the Tennyson poem, The Daydream, “all precious things, discovered here”. We felt the idea of discoverey within the quote really captured the ideas of our piece, of discovering not just more about the site around the Cathedral but also of an inner discovery for the audience member. We have decided to start our performance at 11:00 on the 6th of May, as we felt this enabled our audience and ourselves to arrive and prepare for the performance. We are going to release the audio files on the 2nd of May, allowing for any technical problems to be resolved if need be, and also for the audience to not forget about the preperations they must do.

I also spent time answering some of the questions we were asked by Rachel and Conan to look at, which I feel helps to focus on what we need to work on in these last few meetings.

Where is your site, above and beyond its geographical location?
Our location is a tour around the Cathedral of Lincoln, incorporating the architecture, statues and the Castel Square area.
Why have you chosen to work there?
We feel the back of the Cathedral is relatively unknown to the average tourist, and is an area that deserves more attention.
Which performances and practitioners have influences and inspired you?
Practitioners such as Robert Wilson and Prototype.
What is your idea or framing device?
An audio tour of the outside of the Cathedral which explores the themes of journey and pilgrimage.
How are you documenting your process?
We have all been documenting our process on the blog and in notes of our meetings.
Who are your audience?
Our audience is predominantly fellow drama students, but anyone able to download the audio can perform the piece at any time.
What is your audiences’ role?
Their role is to listen to and experience the audio as they tour, seeing the site from hopefully a new perspective.
What will their experience of your piece be?
Hopefully an enjoyable one in which they are treated generously by us with gifts and thoughts.
What is the relationship between the site, the performance and the audience?
The site and the audience both work together using the audio to create the performance, without the other it would not be.

13. Generosity

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Now that our piece is in its final making stages before the performance, we have been working on the final touches to help our audience experience our piece to the fullest. Once again we met with Rachel, who spoke to us about “giving generously” to our audience, a phrase which I feel really summaries what we want to do with our performance. This also contrasts with what we had previously thought we wanted to do, with the small activities in each site, which was a much more forceful treatrment of our audience. Taking the theme of generosity, we want to expand upon our coincediental moments or “orchestrated serendipity” (as Rachel said) throughout the tour, allowing our audience extra symbols and images for them to connect the audio too if they see them. So far our ideas for this have included a lost glove, teas and coffees, a lost book, a newspaper, confetti and a fundraising bucket. Taking inspiration from Fortnight, I also feel our tour is based upon “the ever-mutating process of taking on new perspectives and interacting in the city – any city – that is central to Fortnight’s intervention”. (Hui, 2011, 8) Moreover, we have also spent time on intervening the “All the world’s a stage…” speech into the audio tour, allowing for it to have more gravity within the tour and not feel like an added extra. We have found ways for each “seven age of man” to be represented symbolically and visually in the tour, hoping that our audience will come to a slow realisationthat the journey of the tour does not just mean a physical walk, but also as a metaphor for life.

  • The judgement doors shall represent birth.
  • “At first the infant” – Tennyson’s Cradle Song.
  • “the whining school-boy” – The sound of school bells and relfective questions on childhood.
  • “then the lover” – The sound of wedding bells with confetti scattered on the floor.
  • “a soldier” – Castle Square, with a fundraising bucket for a war charity.
  • “the justice” – Exchquer gate and the library above, Tennyson’s quote of “knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers” along with questions reflecting life up until this point as they pass through the gate.
  • “the lean and slippered pantaloon” – Futher rheotrical questions about life but in the past tense.
  • “second childishness and mere oblivion” – The speech itself read aloud by an elderly gentleman.

Hui, Allison. (2011) Art as an everyday intervention: shifting times, places and mobilities in the pervasive media performance project “Fortnight”. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Baptist University.

Just to confirm!

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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

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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

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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