Yesterdays Site Specific lesson comprised of very philosophical ideas about performance and art.
What is a performance?
Is life a performance?
Do you need an audience for performance?
Is a repeated task a performance?
Can animals perform?
Is a ritual a performance?
In Performance Studies Schechner suggests,
“Performances occur in eight sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping situations:
1. in everyday life
2. in the arts
3. in sports and popular entertainments
4.in business
5. in tecnology
6. in sex
7. in ritual-sacred and secular
8. in play (2002, p.25)
We also watched some inspiring video clips from Conan Lawrence’s Prezi on blackboard. I particularly liked the video set in a Spanish shopping mall where members of the public were given headphones and told to do unusual actions for the expected behaviour when in a shopping mall, I really liked this idea of contrasting expected behaviour in given circumstances and viewing that as a performance in itself and bringing some joy to the locals.
Following the lesson our group had a meeting and finally fixed ourselves on our performance.
We began with this idea of film and physical theatre and tried to think of what in Lincoln was important to us and what Lincoln meant to us and then we realised the best way to gather such information would be to gather the ideas of a variety of people living in Lincoln: locals of different age groups, students etc.
The basis of our idea is to give individuals a postcard on which to write what Lincoln means to them and photograph them holding up their postcard beginning with people we know and ourselves so the public feel more at ease seeing others have already completed the task, we would video some of this process. We also thought of getting these words down on to a big canvas we would take with us as well again with some starter words to make the task less threatening. And we even talked about holding up two different popular words to see which the public agreed on more as another possibility.
The plan is to incorporate all this in to a video and we would use some of the ideas from the post cards and canvas to govern our performance using physical theatre to act out these ideas in locations that would suit e.g. if some suggested something like “quiet and peaceful” we could video ourselves in the library doing a physical theatre performance of reading a book, shhing people etc..
We would screen the video live to be our performance possibly on one of the large screens in tower bar. The idea was that it would bring fresh eyes to many sites of Lincoln using the ideas of a variety of people obtain this different view points and opinions of Lincoln.
Our idea obviously needs some key planning and we feel it would be beneficial to do a trial run to iron out any creases while we have time.
Katherine
Today for Site Specific we took a journey around Lincoln documenting as we went.
I remembered today just how beautiful Lincoln is and how it is a hybrid of old and new, these industrial type buildings transcend in to cobbled roads and historical buildings as you head up steep hill. A beautiful contrast that really shows our urban development.
We noted Jews Court and Jews House a building with so much horrific history has now been transformed in to a restaurant and bookshop. In 1255 Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln dissapeared. In The Jews House Lincoln: Building History the website suggests “When Hughs body was found word quickly spread that he had been murdered by the Jews. It appears that Coppin a member of the Jewish community, was coerced in to confessing. Unfortunately this led not only to his gruesome death (dragged up Steep Hill tied to the tail of a horse) but the execution in The Tower of London of 18 of his alleged co-conspirators.” (2012, p. 1) However there is more to this story still In Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln Wikipedia suggests “Some six months earlier, King Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. Having lost this source of income, he decided that he was eligible for the Jews’ money if they were convicted of crimes. As a result, some ninety Jews were arrested and held in the Tower of London, while they were charged with involvement in the ritual murder.” (p. 1, 2012)
(For further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saint_Hugh_of_Lincoln and http://www.jewshouserestaurant.co.uk/about-us/jews-house-building-history)
Continuing our Journey up steep hill we arrived at The Cathedral an awe inspiring building. We noticed the mood of our journey had completely changed, we became quiet and respectful. Although I myself have no particular religion I still found myself very moved by the cathedral and found it to be a very peaceful place. A few of us lit a candle in the Cathedral and I briefly videoed the flames flickering gently through the draft, discussing this candles later and how they are a symbol of passing on in many religions I considered them to be a guiding light which brought us on to the idea of the olympic torch as a guide and we even discussed taking our own olympic torch round Lincoln!
We also visited Greestone Gallery and Danesgate and again notice this unusual mixture of buildings and rural vs urban. We were struck by a bottle of weedkiller just sat on the wall nowhere near any weeds it felt very out of place to us and this made me think about what our lecturer said about seeing the space in a different way and the impact this has on your opinion of the place I think now I’ll always remember the random bottle of weed killer when I walk past that wall!
This journey definitely gave us some food for thought for our projects and helped us to see Lincoln differently, thinking of it’s history that we normally ignore when partaking in our usual routine.
Well my group had a bit of a brainstorming session on Friday to get some ideas rolling around.
We watched some youtube clips. I particularly liked one that Frankie found called Cross Channel by Lea Anderson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFG0hZYH3E
Within this clip there were very illustrative gestures and movement telling a narrative of two different holidays to the beach.
From our brainstorming, we decided we are definitely interested in:
. Incorporating film and maybe photography in to our piece
. Using movement within our piece perhaps in the form of physical theatre
We have progressed to some small ideas of what kind of projects we could do. However finding a location is key in helping us to define our project and begin creating the performance.
Hopefully this walk around Lincoln on Monday will shine light on some great location opportunities for us.
(Also for some bizzare reason my name is now my student ID number on here and I can’t seem to change it back! So this is Katherine Clarke’s blog!)
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