A Grand Catch Up

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We met with the rest of the group to share the new information we had gathered and began to talk about plotting our routes and what our audio was going to sound like and what we may include. we have decided to make it about 20mins long and that based on the books we read our route will have a significance and not be and idle wonder.

Easter is almost upon us and we are all busy and also need rest but we all have a role and will try to fulfil what we need to by the end of Easter.

Roles:
Jade- Routes and Research
Elizabeth- Routes and Research
Jess – Marketing
George – Audio
Me – Audio

By the end of the Easter holidays we plan to have a solid route and our reasoning behind it and an audio piece that has been edited and altered over time and why.

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.

Working 9 til 5!

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Hi all,

After many weeks of piecing our little moments together on a trial and error bases im pleased to say we are finally decided on our end product (so far).

Our piece having many names ‘the secret garden group’, ‘the pottersgate group’, ‘the potters’ to our final title ‘the clay walkers’. Being titled ‘the clay walkers’ should give the participants a better understanding of what we are doing, which is:

We are going to be separated into three different areas. Someone will start at Pottersgate measuring out lumps of clay (or in our case salt dough) and this person will be greeting our participants explaining the tasks and handing them the clay. Another person within our group will also start the day at Pottersgate as this person is going to be taking the participants up to the secret garden with their clay. The third person in our group will be starting in the Secret Garden. This person will be inviting the participants to put their clay on display with the others and ask them if they would like to stay a while maybe to have a drink with us and enjoy the beautiful scenery. This person once doing all this will then make their way down to Pottersgate to swap roles with the person stationed there. The person stationed there becomes the person that takes the participants to the secret garden and the person who took them to the secret garden last stays in the secret garden until the ‘walker’ gets there. This should rotate all day.

So what are we actually doing with the clay?

We would like our participants to meet us at Pottersgate where we hand them a piece of clay. We would like them to make a figurine of how they see themselves. They have as much time to do this as they want. When the ‘Walker’ within our group gets to Pottersgate they also make a figurine. When the ‘Walker’ is finished they ask the participants if they would like to follow them to display their figurine within the Secret Garden. If they are not ready, they simply stay there, the ‘Walker’ heads off anyway, leaving the participants to wait for the next ‘walker’.

So where did this idea come from?

We have been playing around with our sites for many weeks looking in depth in their historys and stumbled across and tried many ideas but we have always gone back to what we knew from the second week was that Pottersgate was once a communications portal that potters from different places outside the city would come through to bring their goods to sell within the town. Knowing this and being in the area we finally felt that pottery is what we intended to do. The idea of asking the participants to sculpt themselves is inspired by Antony Gormley’s instalation piece “FIELD FOR THE BRITISH ISLES”. “Antony Gormley’s FIELD FOR THE BRITISH ISLES is a startling and arresting sight: thousands of unglazed, fired, small clay figures, standing closely together, all staring towards the viewer and filling a large enclosed space. There are more figures than can be counted, more still disappearing out of sight into a further space. Their number seems to be endless.” (Searle, 1996).

When is this happenining? What is the duration of the piece?

We are performing this on Wednesday 6th May 2015. The duration of the piece will be eight hours long, we are starting at 9am in the morning and finishing at 5pm at night. This is because we are essentially working potters and we would like to do this within the working hours of the day which is usually 9am until 5pm.

Bibliography:

Searle, A. (1996) Antony Gormley: Field for the British Isles. [Online] London: Hayward Gallery. Available from: http://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay-item/id/108 [Accessed 25 March 2015].

 

 

 

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.