Overtime

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Seeing as site specific can also be altered by time as well as the place, I decided to explore the site at nighttime to see if anything in the site changes.

As you would expect, many aspects of the site changes at this time such as the Cathedral is much brighter as it is lit up

Here are the pictures I took that night: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk4Z6mP6

Two pictures that stood out to me are: 1) The picture showing the Cathedral from the furthest point up the hill that you could see it from and 2) The “Secret Pathway” that our tutor showed us a few days before during lesson

These two stood out to me because they are both rather striking and both taken from the same standing point (just 180 degrees in different directions) show that things can be different depending which way you look at it

Ritual performance to Conan

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Today was a nerve racking day to the whole group, as today was the day we presented our ideas and site work/research to Conan (Module Leader). Being short on members within our group we felt a little under pressure. However upon reflection with informing our ideas I was pleased that Conan with Rachel included like the idea of a misguided tour with rituals connected to the history of the potters that worked on the uphill section of Lincoln dating back to 14th Century.

As a suggestion by Conan is to make the most of the open space that the ‘Secret’ Garden has to offer with the connection of rituals idea. One thing that has always stood out for me was the open fire place within the garden, back in the beginning  of this module I thought it would make a brilliant puppet theatre. However today Georgia & I agreed with Rachel & Conan that it makes a better connection to the original kilns that would of been used by the potters.

One thing that didn’t work out well with the connection to the misguided tour was the walk up to St Anne’s Well located behind the cathedral. If the well wasn’t locked up it would of made a perfect link as the water supply for the Potters clay to keep it moist and wet.  Also basing our performance around P.Pinkering would make the misguide more of a drama performance than site specific.

Think now we have a strong idea with site, more research and testing (playing around is needed) next week within the garden.

Till next time

 

Bye

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.

Conan Specific Performance

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On Wednesday 18th March, our group had to give a presentation to Conan, who is the second marker for our site specific performance.  We had to give a presentation, clearly stating our idea to Conan, to make sure we are on the right tracks when it comes to our idea.  After the last rehearsal we had on Monday 16th March, we were confident that we had a well thought out and well organised plan and mini performance to show Conan.  As we decided who was holding the 4 iPads and what time lapse footage we were going to use, as we spent most of Monday recording more footage.  With a successful rehearsal behind us, we were confident at the start of our presentation, as we knew who was doing exactly what and also we were confident on explaining why we were going to do these ideas in our performance.

Lucy and Brittany started explaining our idea of using time lapsed footage on 4 iPads to the general public, to show them how they use Castle Square as a place throughout a certain time period of 4 months, to show the evolution of people’s daily journeys and habits in a communal place in the city such as Castle Square.  After that clear introduction, Me, Tania and Lily explained our parts in the process and performance, for example Lily and Tania explained how they were going stand and interact with the audience whilst holding the iPads which were showing the footage. Finally I explained my part in our idea, I would be documenting the piece by taking photographs of the audience interaction between them and the 4 participants holding the iPads, to show how the public would react by witnessing footage with them potentially be included as accidental audience.

When our presentation was over, it was time for Conan’s feedback.  There were certain bits of positive criticism, Conan liked the idea of using footage to mirror what the general public do in an unsuspecting and natural way.  However he did find problems and gave us constructive criticism, such as our movement, he said we should be moving more or it will just look like 4 people holding iPads for half an hour.  Also the main ideas he wanted us to include in our piece is using the CCTV camera in our piece, as we are interested in looking at how the general public act everyday, and CCTV cameras do that all the time, with the public being unsuspectingly filmed.

Conan wanted us to include more of the space of Castle Square, including the idea of directions, as Castle Square has 4 directions to go in and every member of the public is different and going a specific way for different uses.  To conclude Conan gave us a lot of constructive criticism to work on in the upcoming weeks, if we experiment with most of his ideas, I believe our piece can be a well rounded performance disguised as a social experiment showing exactly how the public use Castle Square.

Time for a Change

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Through out the weeks we have been developing the idea of our split audio walk, experimenting with different routes, sound, ways for the listener to know where to walk to ect. we then presented this idea to Conan and Rachael. Although this was quite daunting we received good feedback which aloud use to alter our idea, a little drastically, for the better and simplify and define our idea. Conan was particularly interested in the idea of the Earthquake and said to look behind the science and history of earthquakes and concentrate on that. So me Elizabeth and George decided to take a trip to the Lincoln Central Library archives the following Monday.