Final Blog Post: Clay Walkers from start to finish

A Framing Statement:

Over a matter of 12 weeks myself with a group consisting of Georgia and Beth had to create a piece of site specific performance in a selected location within Lincoln. The location the group and I was given was uphill Lincoln which included the use of steep hill if we wished. We as a group were taken by the ‘secret’ garden located opposite the famous Lincoln Cathedral on our first walk (drift) around the possible site location choices to perform. The ideas I had first in versioned of this bizarre style of performance was linking to “religion” or a “Mad hatter’s tea party”. But the final idea we all agreed on was self-image on how a person sees themselves as well as the history of the Pot makers of Lincoln.

Our performance date was set and ready to be performed on Wednesday 6th May 2015. “Clay Walkers” was an installation as well as a durational piece which also consisted a miniature tour from Pottergate located south of the Cathedral grounds up to the exchange gate near the Lincoln hotel from there down to the garden. The reason why our performance piece was named “Clay Walkers” was because our piece was inspired by Antony Gormley who created the famous “Field of the British isles” https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS-JmVF8UnKU1BI3r8ytOEMC4HdJPuPMoA1vZhiwDkPnNNSXgkA1v2Uznw. (Gormley, 2012, cited in Zimbio.com)

The piece was made by ground clay figures (210,000) of them. We knew we couldn’t make that many figures on the day so our aim was 200 figures in 8 hours. This was to represent the working day.

As the weeks went by our audience would become more important to the installation piece more than ever. The audience would assist the creating or building up the figures with the clay we provided (that being only a handful of clay) well salt dough. Enabling the performance to have many different looking figures than just a normal same looking figures, which to me seems boring. As human being not one of us are the same in body shape or in mind.

On the day of the performance the weather wasn’t exactly on our side nor the weather we really wanted. It wasn’t fun being out in the pouring rain with salt dough clay turning all sticky and sticking to everything and staining everyone blue (as it had to have a colour change). Sadly the only audience members we had to assist with the creating of the figures were Conan (our second marker for this assessment) and Rachel (our tutor).

With the whole process of this piece this quote has always stood out to me ‘the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform asmuchas it makes actors perform’ (Wiles, 2003, p.1). When I first read it I couldn’t really explain why I liked it until the performance, as actors with site specific you don’t really need to over dramatize the performance. It’s not a play its well Site Specific, let the space (or site) do all the performing like we did as a group.

An Analysis of Process:

To get the final product of performance it didn’t happen overnight it took a lot of planning and ideas before us as a group agreed on a final idea performance. In the first few weeks the module was split up between theory classes and working on location creating some of the performance or at least getting a feel of the location. My first idea before I’d even got into a group to create our performance I wanted to work on the historical side of religion associated with the uphill Lincoln, however on reflection religion isn’t really a site specific performance idea plus it could offend people who believe/ support religion and the church (cathedral) if we had given out wrong information.

The Theory behind Clay Walkers:

As I’ve mentioned before Antony Gormley was the main influence for Clay Walkers, however it wasn’t just his work ethic that inspired the final creation. During the theory seminars with Rachel on Wednesdays we were taught different styles of site specific performances. There are many types of performance that we could have chosen. Some of them I didn’t think at the time were classed as a performance like an audio recording of instructions to be performed by the person listening to them. After this module I’ve accepted lots of other methods for site specific.

Adrian Howell was one the main people we focused on with the audio recordings. For example we listened to Howell’s Everyday Moments 11 http://http//www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2011/nov/21/everyday-moments-podcast-adrian-howells: (an audio drama for private performance in our own time). Some of the instructions that we were giving were based on how to drink a hot cuppa in bed. It was specially designed for people to participate from the comfort of your own home.  This task was one I wasn’t too keen on perusing for the final product. Reflecting back on the overall performance I don’t honestly think Clay Walkers would have worked with an audio recording.

Being one with the performance site location:

“To be a place, every somewhere must lie on one or several paths of movement to and from places elsewhere. Life is lived, I reasoned, along paths, not just in places, and paths are lines of a sort“. (Ingold, 2007, p.2). This quote sums up the main feel for the creation of Clay Walkers. We started with all sorts of ideas and walked many paths around uphill Lincoln to finally get the one that felt right. Also section of this quote stating “Life is lived”, I felt as a group we were reliving the history of the potters from the late 15th century some stories from Pottergate are even older.

Something I wrote from one of my first blog posts back in February “After walking around the cathedral and the secret garden it made me and a couple of friends decide that we felt connected with this site. The garden felt like a place you would enter after you’ve passed like God’s waiting room. I think it’s connected more by religion as the garden is right next to the cathedral’s door to heaven”. (Levesque-Payne, 2015). I have no idea still to this very day why I felt I had to work in the garden. It just felt right from day one like I was drawn to it. I had the same feeling with Pottergate that I had to work there as well. https://www.flickr.com/photos/130446517@N02/16076561893/in/datetaken/?cr a picture of Pottergate taken in February (Levesque-Payne, 2015 cited in Flickr).

Legends and Myths:

Lincoln being an historical city is bound to have local folk tales and legends, well it didn’t fail to disappoint. I was aware of the legend of the Lincoln imp in the cathedral. I was more interested to find out if there was any mythical legends connected with either the garden or Pottergate. Before our final group idea, we had included St Anne’s Well located at the back of the cathedral. Beth had done some in depth research based on the local history and discovered a legend about the devil being connected with the well. Needless to say I wanted to try this myth or theory out in a workshop session when rehearsing up by the cathedral.

“At the rear of Lincoln cathedral stands Queen Anne’s well. A small stone structure, with a pointed roof, the well has one wooden door, with six holes symmetrically placed across the front. Legend states, that if you walk around the well seven times, and then place your finger into one of the holes you will be judged by the devil. If you are a good person, you will feel the devil’s breath on your finger. If you’re bad, it will be bitten off!” (HauntedLincs Blog, 2012). I strongly felt this idea would have been amazing to add into our site piece however on reflection many people get freaked out when it comes to ghosts and witchcraft legends. Georgia and I felt most confident when it came around to testing this local legend out. I’m not going to lie I wanted something to happen but alas nothing happened at all. So I guess this story will forever remain a story.

Over the top performance or minimalistic?

So as a group our first idea of a mad hatter’s tea party was a bit over the top even for site specific. We were advised to look around the space to create a performance. Inside Pottergate on the bricks are engraved names some of which have been graffiti from teens, however upon on rehearsal Georgia and Beth had discovered a very faded out number of 1895 and a name of “P.Pinkering”. It resembled a grave stone marking, was it a date of an original potter’s death or birth? Naturally that got us all thinking ideas and creating a story behind this person (seeing as we were unsure whether this person was male or female).

In our own time each group member did their own research into the gates history, I’d discovered that Pottergate was an entrance to uphill Lincoln to trade your goods at the market which funnily enough is located where the secret garden now stands.

One idea that eventually was discarded was to give a misguided tour from the Pottergate to the garden via St Anne’s Well. While on the tour your guide would give you a set of tasks that you had to perform on the route. Some of the tasks were to see if you’d been good or bad at the well. We as a group had decide to turn down the ritual tasks at the well not to freak the audience members out, turning them out into more of a dance routine. With this misguided tour we were going to have P.Pinkering as our main character, Beth had created a background story saying P.Pinkering was a potter who sadly lost his life. So our misguided tour was to fulfil his/her wish to create an object out of clay and go to market to sell it.

Our reasoning for discontinuing the idea of a misguided tour with P.Pinkering as our main focus because it started turning into a characterised performance taking away the feel of a site specific performance.

 

“Site Specific performance exists within a plethora of phenomena, all competing for attention, all potentially meaningful: A concatenation of that at site and that brought of the site”. (Pearson, 2010. P.1). I wanted our performance piece to show through the location itself. The beauty of the garden didn’t really need a character to make it feel like a performance.

To use clay or Salt Dough:

Now we have an idea that we as a group want our audience to create a figure of themselves and to create it in the way they see themselves looking to the world. Once they have created a figure, they will walk with one of our trained Potters (Beth, Georgia and myself) to bake the figure in the kiln oven that still exists in the garden wall.

The price of clay varies depending on the amount of clay that is needed.  Seeing as we only have a budget of £30 (£10 per person in the group) we have to use our money wisely. Georgia, Beth and me consulted Rachel on what we could use that would have the same effect of clay that we could get that’s cheaper. She suggested salt dough (play dough). There are many ways to make salt dough by either cooking or just making it by hand. The recipe I found online to create our clay was from WikiHow, http://www.wikihow.com/Create-Salt-Dough.

The first time we made the salt dough was the day before our first dress run. It took four hours to create 200 pieces just for dress run. Considering that it’s taken four hours to create that amount, I remembered we would have to create either the same amount or more dough depending on how well the dress run went.

Dress Run:

So the day of the first proper test run of clay walkers had arrived and there was mixed emotions on the task we had put us through. We did have perfect weather which I was praying for. However upon reflection having very hot sunny weather made clay walkers a more difficult process than it should have been. The weather not only affected some of the cast with the onset of heat stroke it also affected the salt dough. Within an hour of running the durational piece the dough started to dry out. So the water we had brought for us to drink was being used on the dough to keep it moist. Due to the weather and health of the cast, I decided to inform Rachel that the dress run had to be cut short, so we only be able to complete four hours of our eight hour performance. This wasn’t clay walkers idea of this perform. However we were pleased that these issues had happened on the dress rehearsal than actually happen on the assessed performance.

Final performance of Clay Walkers:

The final performance took place on a very wet and windy day something we wasn’t hoping for. I know I said that the weather was a problem when it was warmer however I would of preferred it if it was warmer but not too warm. Sadly we couldn’t change or be in control of the weather.

Clay walkers performance lasted six hours as we ran out of clay (salt dough). A few problems we encountered throughout the day was no audience members expect for Conan and Rachel which for me was a really confident boost. Having no audience members attend made the performance a lot more stressful and time seemed to stand still. I think the many reason why we didn’t have any audiences was because of the strong rain. It wasn’t because it wasn’t advertised at all I had full control of the promotion of Clay Walkers on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Potters-A-Site-Specific-Performance/452974651526779

I would regularly update the fan page as well as the event to keep people informed of our processes to creating our group piece.

One thing we haven’t really taken into consideration was the reactions to the general public around us from tourists to locals. I know site specific is a bizarre style of performance, I don’t really think we helped matters when our clay was wrapped up into balls with cling film around it made it resemble pre-packed bags of drugs. We had this problem in the dress run so decided to change the colour of the mixture to make it look less suspicious to the general public.  Sadly on the day of the performance an unforeseen incident occurred between myself and a member of the general public wanting to take the bag we had as storage of the dough away. luckily enough the person didn’t stay long once hearing the sound of police sirens.

Something else that changed half way through the durational piece was the things we were creating down at the Pottergate. Conan wanted the group to use the things we had around us that inspired our emotions with the locations we’d picked.  Our final piece (once it was completed) was a memory or though mural dedicated to the history of uphill Lincoln.  An image link to the final product : https://www.flickr.com/photos/130446517@N02/16901390364/in/datetaken/ (Levesque-Payne, 2015. Flickr).

Performance Evaluation:

Upon reflection with the performance of clay walkers I felt it could have gone a lot better than it actual turned out. I think we as a group had done a bit more rehearsals on creating things around us than creating self image clay figures we could have created a lot more than we did in the six hours. But saying that the performance wasn’t all doom and gloom as I enjoyed being in a beautiful location even if it was raining the garden still smelt amazing with the wet grass. Still till this very day I have found putting the theory we was taught as a whole class into practise in the location was a struggle. Finding a reading that linked in a way to our piece was a nightmare. The only few times I could link in research to the rehearsals was when I referenced Antony Gormley into our inspirations.

If I was to re-create clay walkers again in the near future I would use wooden chopping boards in the garden only and create bricks with words cut into them with words relating to site specific performance or things I could see around me. I think I would use Pottergate once an hour to collect audience instead of walking in a cycle that way people could enjoy their time in the garden. I also think if we had audience as well involved in clay walkers the reactions would be better than we as a group reacted to each other. It wasn’t until we created and finished the mural that we actually appreciated our hard work in the pouring rain for six hours.

 

Works Cited:

Gormley, A. (2012) Antony Gormley’s Field For The British Isles Arrives At Barrington Court. [Online] Zimbio.com. Available from http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/U3xR0oAep5R/Antony+Gormley+Field+British+Isles+Arrives [Accessed on 11th May 2015].

Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essay on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skills (London, Routledge).

HauntedLincs Blog. (2012) Cathedral: The Ghosts of Lincoln Cathedral. [Blog entry] March 2012. Lincoln: University of Lincoln. Available from https://hauntedhistoryoflincolnshire.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/lincoln/lincoln-cathedral/ [Accessed 12th 2015].

Howell, A. (2011) Everyday Moments 11: audio drama for private performance. The Guardian. [Online] Available from http://www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2011/nov/21/everyday-moments-podcast-adrian-howells [Accessed 16th February 2015].

Levesque-Payne, S. (2015) it’s the uphill climb. [Blog entry] 8th February. WordPress: University of Lincoln. Available from https://sitespecific2015rba.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/wp-admin/post.php?post=215&action=edit [Accessed 8th February 2015].

Levesque-Payne, S. (2015) Final Assessment of “Clay Walkers”. [Online] Flickr.com. Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/130446517@N02/16901390364/in/datetaken/ [Accessed 14th May 2015].

Levesque-Payne, S. (2015) Sophie Levesque-Payne’s Flickr SAM_1338. [Online] Flickr.com. Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/130446517@N02/16076561893/in/datetaken/?cr [Accessed 12th May 2015].

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

WikiHow. How to make salt dough. [Online] USA. Available from http://www.wikihow.com/Create-Salt-Dough [Accessed 17th April 2015]

Wiles, D. (2003) A Short History of Western Performance Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This is Water: Final Blog Post

For our site specific performance we took initial inspiration from repetition and endurance artists and practitioners such as Sam Hsieh as well as Burrows and Fargion. The the way he uses his focus to make every day repetitive actions interesting to a watching audience. Of his performance pieces, there was one that stood out and that we have drawn influences from when considering how to base our performance, and this is his year long piece called “Time Clock Piece” (FACT, 2010). The main aspect that we liked when looking at this performance was the seemingly remedial task of repeating a repetitive action for a long period of time.

Tehching - One Year Performance

This idea of performing menial tasks over and over again appealed to myself and my colleague, however we felt like we needed a central theme in order to base these actions upon. This is when we came across the water tower in Lincoln, we decided that this theme of water was general enough to cover a range of actions that we could perform as well as being site specifically linked to the water tower in Wickham Gardens. When we were studying repetitive actions we could do in a performative way, we discovered two pieces from Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion which can be found here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyWwmHrmpxM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJ-kQwxfFI

Their simple yet somehow intriguing movements showed us that whatever movements we chose to do, as long as we them on point and with focus, it would become an interesting performance to watch which was one of our main worries.

Our performance would be devised into five stations that each would last for an hour. This would be followed by a transition to the next station in which we could pack up the things from the previous station and start on assembling the new one. This five stations, in chronological order, would be:

1. Brushing teeth and washing face – one of use doing each action a in pre-arranged set of movements e.g. washing left cheek then right, then forehead, then chin before ending the set with drying your face and repeating. We would switch every fifteen minutes to prevent our faces/gums becoming irritated.

2. Washing clothes – my colleague would wash the clothes and put them on the climbing frame that we would use as a washing line. I would then put the wet clothes on and dirty them by playing the nearby park and rolling down the hill. I would then pass the dirty clothes to my colleague, thus completing a set.

3. Eating and drinking – we would eat and drink water based products such as soup, squash and also tea and coffee. This would also be in a pre-arranged set of movements e.g. lift cup to face, drink, put down again.

4. Washing dishes – now we would wash and dry the dishes that we had previously used and wash and dry them very slowly, this would represent the passage of time that seems to happen when people do this mundane task.

5. Bathing – lastly, we would bath in a paddling pool that we had brought and spend 15 minutes washing each others backs before swapping over.

This performance would take place at Wickham gardens in Lincoln between 10:00 and 15:00 on the 6th May 2015. We did not expect any audience interaction as our performance was not based upon it, we only expected them to observe.

When first hearing about site specific performance, I have to say it was somewhat daunting. Not in the public performances, as embarrassment isn’t something that comes naturally to me but re-thinking what a site can mean, do or how it can influence a performance challenged my preconceptions. To me before this module, a site was just a relevant background to a pre-established text i.e. Macbeth in a gloomy castle. However, whilst reading Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance, I found many ideas and alternative ways of looking at things that opened my eyes to new ideas and the ambiguous characteristics that sites can have. “Not only does the use of non-theatre venues contribute to ‘an inquiry into what theatre is and might be’ it also incorporates ‘a set of productive spacial metaphors'” (Pearson, 2010. p.9). I then learnt about subtle mobs, an interesting idea but wasn’t really something that leaped out and grabbed my attention. I did however have a lot of fun in doing it and my colleague and I definitely took inspiration from the fun element of site specific and this is where we first had the idea of doing a performance in a public park, an idea which we would then later establish on. Here though, is a picture of my first day doing a site specific performance.

Signing on

Signing on

The next site specific lesson would cover the idea of a misguide, a guided tour that would offer an alternative look on places that seemed fairly ordinary. This again was an interesting idea and was the first time I’d looked into the idea of rich and poor sites as misguided tours would need rich sites to take the alternative ideas from, a poor site would either be uninteresting or of such little value that the people on this tour wouldn’t care about either viewpoint. I looked into this notion of rich and poor sites further and discovered a piece of text by Govan et al which uses the term ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ to describe the quality of a site and states that there are: “places which are rich in history and non-places which he see’s as soulless, alienating places with only functional value such as airports and motorways” (Govan et al, 2007, p.121). I therefore wanted to perform in a place which had historical significance and fortunately in Lincoln there are many to choose from such as the cathedral or the castle. However, we thought these places, whilst significant and beautiful, would be an altogether safe and predictable place to perform in so we wanted somewhere where it would be both fun to perform there for have some element of fun involved but was also historically significant.

We stumbled upon our eventual location for the performance quite by accident as during the misguided tours lesson, we ended up following a dog and it’s owner as we had an initial idea about incorporating animals or animal rights somehow into our performance (an idea what was later scrapped due to difficulties this would present with reliability). Whilst following this dog be came across an abandoned children’s park situated right next to the Lincoln water tower. We then had an epiphany and decided that this site covered all the areas so far that we wanted, it had the fun element of the former playground and the historical element of the water tower and set about learning the history of both of these places.

Water Tower

Water Tower Picture.

When I read about this history of the water tower I was shocked to discover just how important it has been in Lincoln’s history and yet many people, myself included, had no idea what it was for or why it was even built. It was built in the early 1900s to stop an outbreak of typhoid that had swept over the city and gave the local people clean water to drink and use in their day to day lives and the outbreak was eventually cleared. We then talked to out tutor who has lived in Lincoln and asked about her personal experiences with the park and we got plenty of local knowledge about how what the park used to be like and how much it’s changed over the years. For instance, the park used to have a sandpit opposite it, a route through the park known as the ‘Jungle Run’ as well as a hill that was specifically known as the ‘Rolling Hill’ by children using the park in the 1980’s. We wanted to incorporate at least one of these into our performance as it would give reference to the playground and the feeling of fun that used to be here that unfortunately is no longer. We also discovered that the site where we’ll be performing used to host a number of water related environments, including a public swimming pool and a public bath. We wanted to use one of these environments, as well as the playground in our performance as the history of our site was one of our developing themes of the performance.

After learning more about our site, we then focused on what sort of performance we wanted to do and what we wanted to achieve from it. When we were researching previous performances from which to take inspiration, my colleague found a piece by the artist and performer Sam Hsieh. It involved him performing a task or series of tasks for a whole year and this sparked an idea.

“Why don’t we do an endurance piece?”

This would be a problem for a few reasons as it turned out, first and chief among which was the problem of time, we only had one day to perform this as our performance day was set on the 6th May so an endurance challenge like Hsieh’s was quickly thought better of. Another problem we found was that health and safety had to be taken into account as the university was responsible for our well-being whilst in class or performing and doing tasks that are potentially dangerous for an extended period of time wasn’t going to be possible either.

We wanted our site specific piece to still be performative though so we eventually settled on doing a repetitive theatre piece. Our tutor then pointed us in the direction of Burrows and Fargion, a pair of performers who specialize in this particular field of theatre and we found videos of Hands and Both Sitting Duet on Youtube. We wanted to incorperate something like Hands in particular into one of our stations and after seeing these videos and drawing inspiration from our research as well as our site, we set about devising our performance.

When in the site we discovered five sections of ground that clearly used to have playground things in them such as a swingset, roundabout etc. and we wanted to use as our frames for each station.

Playground

We did have a brief idea about framing the water tower itself but this would of complicated the performance and we decided against it but did want to use the tower itself for something but we didn’t know what yet. As there were five sections it made sense to have five stations, each one representing something that we would do every day that involves water. Taking inspiration from Barrows and Fargion, we would use repetitive movements to perform at each station. Whilst in our site, we discovered that as we were planning what we’d do in each station the shadow of the water tower acted as a large sun dial and this gave us the idea of doing the mundane tasks we do every day in chronological order so as the time past in our performance, the real passage of time would also reflect how long we spend doing these tasks in our everyday lives and that we take for granted the clean water that this available to us. After much discussion between ourselves and our tutor we settled on these five stations:

1. Brushing teeth and washing face.

2. Washing clothes

3. Eating and drinking

4. Washing Dishes

5. Bathing

We settled on these because it’s what we use water for every day but also because we could incorporate some of the research we used and apply them to these particular stations. For instance, for our washing clothes station we thought that we could use the ‘Rolling Hill’ to dirty the clothes so that they could be washed again and complete a set. For the eating and drinking station we could take inspiration from Hands and do movements that just involve our hands and mouths completing a set before the next person would then complete theirs and so on. For the washing the dishes we really wanted to emphasize the water tower as a sun dial by slowing down time in our performance and show how boring this action is yet we take the water we do it in for granted.

After figuring out which station would go where and when, we thought that the best thing to do would be just the practice doing the movement for an hour and this was a lot harder than we thought it would be. My colleague tried to film himself performing brushing his teeth for an hour but could only do 25 minutes before encountering problems and this video of this can be found here:

(Dunn, 2015)

The main issue is that after brushing for so long his gums would start to hurt so to get around this issue we decided that we would switch roles so that none of us would be either brushing our teeth or rubbing our face for too long. Some of the stations proved easier to do for an hour than others, our eating and drinking station was by far our easiest station despite the concentration and focus we used on the movements.

Rehearsing Lunch Station

(Dunn, 2015)

After doing these rehearsals we found that no matter how hard we tried we could never do the same movement perfectly every time and this led me to do some research into this and ask the question?

“Is failure part of performance, is the audience as interested in failure as success and are these failures just a section of the humanity of performance?”

After researching this topic I discovered that “No repetition is exactly the same as the action as it copies – if only by the fact of it being a repetition rather than an initial act, or of being the third repetition rather than the second.” (Howell, 1999). This quote from Howell shows that in repetitive theatre, no repetition will be the same and that the failures in the performance will be just as important as the successful movements. Obviously, we would try our very best to ensure that the next set of movements is as perfectly copied as the last but we knew that this wouldn’t always be the case in a piece of repetitive theatre.

As our final rehearsal loomed large, we encountered some last minute problems that needed addressing. The main problem was that we would find it difficult collecting enough water for each of our stations and the transportation of some of out larger props, such as the tables and chairs for the eating/drinking station and the paddling pool for our last station. We got around this by asking our friends at university to keep all their bottles that they had used over the past weeks and give them to us instead of throwing them out so that we could fill them with enough water to ensure we wouldn’t run out on the performance day. We also made several trips to and from the site in one of our friends car to transport the props and found that on the day we’d have to be up and at our site starting from 08:30 to ensure that we were ready to start on the dot of 10:00. Aside from those problems the last rehearsal went very well with no further problems and we we’re looking forward to performance day. We decided to entitle our performance piece This is Water. The name is in reference to a speech given by the author David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005. The speech he gave references the mundane actions of every life, and the ‘day in and day out’ routines that we all experience.

site performance

(Crowe, Dunn, 2015)

Overall our performance day went very well but we unfortunately had to cut the performance short early due to health and safety concerns. This was because of the weather conditions taking it’s toll on our performance and meant that stations such as putting the wet clothes on and off again as well as sitting in a cold paddling pool for an hour was ill-advised and unfortunately we had to put an end to our performance at approximately 12:30. Fortunately the audience interaction we did get was positive with a couple of confused faces but that was to be expected. However we did put up notices around the park stating that there was a performance going on but that they should feel free to still use the park.

After the performance was over we discovered that we could of further improve the integrity of our performance by instead of using tap water which we had gathered, we could of used rain water and then then purified it, thus symbolizing the purification of water that the water tower does. We also could of put on our signs what specifically the performance was about and it’s significance to the water tower as well as the playground. This is because we realised that people from Lincoln that know about the water tower would make the link between what we were doing and the site but people that don’t know about Lincoln’s history wouldn’t understand the depth behind the performance and should we do this performance again, this is an area in which we can improve on.

Overall, the stations went well and exactly as we expected so we felt like the integrity of our performance was one of the best things about it as well as the focus that we gave to each movement at each station. The integrity of site specific performance and art is the main thing that attracts it to me and my understanding of performance in a non traditional theatre format has been both challenged and deepened considerably. Practitioners such as Pearson and performers such as Burrows and Fargion as well as Hsieh have inspired me to do this performance and has given be a new insight into what performance can be, it could be a West End musical but it could be something as simple as brushing your teeth.

 

Works referenced:

Burrows, J. Fargion, M. (2002) Both Sitting Duet [performance]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyWwmHrmpxM

Burrows, J. Fargion, M. (1995) Hands [performance]. BBC Arts council. London. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqJ-kQwxfFI

Crowe. S. (2015) Water tower picture [image]. Lincoln

Crowe, S. Dunn, J. (2015) Performance Day [image]. Lincoln

Crowe, S. Dunn, J. (2015) Mapping out the site [image]. Lincoln

Dunn, J. (2015) Site Specific Performance Rehearsals [image]. Lincoln

Dunn, J. (2015) Endurance Performance “Rehearsal” [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErlJtAjc4s [Accessed 16th April 2015].

FACT (2008) Tehching Hsieh – One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece) [online video] Available from https://vimeo.com/16280427 [Accessed 27 March 2015].

Govan, E. Nicholson, H. Normington, K. (2007) Making a performance: Devising Histories and contemporary practises. Oxon: Routledge.

Howell, A. 1999. The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice.Routledge. p.79

Hsieh, T. (1980) One Year Performance. [online] New York, USA: Tehching Hsieh. Available from https://colaboratorioartandspace.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/tehching-hsieh-art-live-in-action/ [Accessed 15th April 2015].

Pearson, M. (2010). Site-Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, p.9

Rachel Baynton Group  (2015) Subtle Mob [performance] Lincoln: Lincoln Campus, 28th January.