Framing statement
The aim of our site piece was to create a performance that stepped outside our comfort zone and feel the space that we intended to work in. In our selected site, the library, we chose to perform within a space that was, from my point of view, overlooked and taken for granted by members of the library. The refuge area on the first floor just after the staircase. Our piece was to invite members of the public at the bottom of the staircase using a step by step instruction guide to follow the performance.
We first instructed them to draw around their hands with the given tools of pens and pencils provided onto a piece of card, whilst also providing them with a laptop for visual guidance of the required task. We then escorted the cards ourselves up to the performance space decorated in hessian fabric and pictures of the library, the relevance of the use of hessian is that this was the fabric that transported grains between warehouses. We then used liquid glue to stick individual pieces of grain onto the silhouetted hands, which when completed we left to dry on a library cart. Once they dried we used the wall around the corner from our performance space to mark our progress of the performance into a wall of hands representing the people who have entered the library during that day. The performance took place on the Thursday 5th May 2016 in which lasted 12 hours from 9am till 9pm with 5 minute breaks every hour and included two half an hour breaks for each performer. There was a range of practitioners and artists that helped us develop our overall piece in which we combined in the final assessment. We used the influences of practitioners such as Dreamthinkspeak whereby in a YouTube clip online they explain how the busy street that the individual is standing in is a vibrant and highly populated area of Gwangju (dreamthinkspeak). But what many people lacked understanding in, was that it is rich with a historical background. During May 1980 demonstrators were killed by paratroopers in the name of the government through their website they asked the questions “what if those people who died in 1980 could return as spirits from the dead and step into the shoes of people alive today?.” (Dreamthinkspeak, 2016). This is what inspired part of our piece to merge the two worlds of what the space used to be with how it is now. By dressing as ourselves, 21st century students, and challenging ourselves by working a 12 hour “shift” we created the juxtaposition piece to reflect on the hard labour hour’s grain and goods workers went through to provide the public a service. Using the question used by Dreamthinkspeak what would happen if the grains and goods workers of the Pattinson warehouse could return as spirits from the dead and step into the shoes of people alive today? By performing this piece we allowed ourselves to become these workers and experience the harsh conditions they worked in using a refuge area to create even more of a challenge as site specific performers.
Analysis of Process
When first introduced to the site specific I took it upon myself to do some general research about libraries and find something which inspired me to create within the Lincoln library. This is when I came across the human library in London, which I found rather interesting to read about. I therefore placed myself in an audience perspective and what would draw me into this piece. However once fully understanding the concept of site to make it specific to the location made me change my mind about the piece that I already had set in mind. Once we created a group we agreed that we initially wanted to develop an idea around the library that explored different areas of the building so we originally had the idea as a group to create piece we named “check out”. The fundamental aspects of the performance would begin with basing ourselves on the bottom floor of the library and have one or two audience members coming in at a time, tempting them in with free food and ask if they want to be part of our experiment. (A false sense of security). Once inside they would be blindfolded, they are then told that the experiment is a game and that they have been “kidnapped” from reality forcing them to look upon the library with a different perspective. After the briefing the participant is led by one of the group members to the top floor. During the briefing they are instructed to complete a task on each floor making it from the top floor to the bottom floor to “check out” of the library and return back to the reality and comfort of their daily routine. However it is not that simple, they as are constantly being watched by us and we chase the participant through each floor under time pressure from the tasks to make them feel paranoid in a calm environment. This performance would therefore create an immersive piece in which we was took inspiration from one of the readings “immersion” from Multimedia performance by Rosemary Klich whereby she states that “immersion involves a process of disembodiment, with the audience projecting themselves into an alternative world” (Klich, 2010, 128). Which was our aim to begin with as we would originally immerse them into a room providing them with information in which would allow them to view the library as an alternative world being taken away from reality and not seen as just as a library.
However, when first presenting this idea we were told by Dr Karen Savage that the piece needed more purpose with regards to the site and, once again, needs to be more specific to the site …and we were also encouraged not to traumatize any of our participants. Which made us question our ideas of how can we make this more site specific. We were also asked questions such as “what if the participant was to drop out of the performance halfway through? What happens after the audience member/ performer finished the performance as they have turned up to the library for a purpose other than becoming part of the performance?” All questions that I felt we didn’t take into account when creating the idea. I believe we were more focused on creating a lively performance piece than thinking about the specific site itself. Therefore we decided that we should come up with a completely different idea. We did some research of site specific performers that included the use of grain within their performance (due to the library’s history regarding grain) and we came across artist Marina Abramovic where in a video online she presents the “Abramovic method” (Abramovic, 2014). At the beginning of the video she explains these exercises help to improve our concentration within ourselves in everyday life, in one of the exercises she takes a pile of grain and counts the individual pieces for 16 hours to teach audience members about the sense of mindfulness in everyday life. When presenting the idea to Conan and Teo for the first time with some thought we decided that we should create some form of tea party whereby we would invite the public in and ask if they would like to join us for a while, but instead of providing them with tea we would fill the teapots with grain to make more a site specific performance as the library used to be an old goods and grains warehouse. However yet again we faced the problem that the performance was too general and we had to ask ourselves “why choose a tea party? What is the significance of this to site?” Generally speaking we found that we never took into account the library’s backstory we knew that it was a grains and goods warehouse but anything beyond that we was unsure about. We referred back to the “Abramovic method” with the exercise of counting grain for 16 hours and linked this inspiration with one of our previous site performers “Dreamthinkspeak” as we decided to make the performance “site specific” we should place ourselves in the perspective of the workers back in the nineteenth century of the site where there was long working hours and harsh conditions. We wanted to keep the idea of grain also to link it to the site specifically so we asked ourselves what could represent the repetitive tasks that the workers went through on a daily basis. We also asked ourselves how we were going to include the audience within our performance. We looked at lone twin’s project of totem, in which they used audience participation to help carry their site performance “with the artists carving into the pole the initials of those who helped complete the journey” (Lucas, 2016). Therefore we came up with the idea that we should get the audience to leave a mark within the library to show that they had been in the library on that day, so we thought that we would kindly ask them to draw around one of their hands, we would then fill their hands in with grain to make the performance more site specific as an old goods and grains warehouse, we thought then we would display them on the side of the library wall as a final installation piece to display the work we would produce during the performance. Once we composed this initial idea we took it upon ourselves to rehearse this idea in the library. We drew around our own hands and saw how long it took for us to fill in our own hands with the grain, we timed this for 1 hour and 7 minutes to fill in one of our hands, therefore to create a full display of handprints to create the marks of the residents of the library during the day we were going to have to create a durational piece. We all decided that by performing our piece for 12 hours would fit in nicely with regards to the harsh working hours the workers went through in factories during the nineteenth century, which made it very challenging for us… a challenge we were willing to accept in the name of art!
I personally felt that our group should use the form of social media given that it is a big part of the 21st century and we were trying to merge the library as it was into the library as it is into our performance. This idea came to me when I was conducting an experiment in the library by placing quotes around the staircase of the library from my knowledge from our space and place seminar was classed as a non-space. The aim of this experiment was to allow the audience to appreciate the space of the staircase more when labelled with inspirational quotes which would motivate students in the library. I was expecting that students would just take their time to appreciate the quote linked with the space but from observing some of the students from the staircase they were using social media to spread the quotes to friends and family members, which I thought would be a great factor to place within the performance. However after speaking with my group it was decided that we wouldn’t go with anything that involved with social media as we didn’t want to overload our performance with unnecessary elements and distract them from the basics of our performance with social media.
With regards to the rehearsal prior to the performance we used the time to clarify everything before our piece both physically and structurally. Individual members of the group met up and created a hand model of grain to direct the audience members to our site piece and placed it to the left hand side of the barriers in the library with a sign that gave instructions to the performance, which I personally felt was a great first impression of our performance. We decorated our space in the refuge area placed with Hessian material to create a more immersive area for audience members when witnessing the performance space. We created a sign out of hessian material also reading “lend a hand” as the title of our site piece, which in all honesty was rather a last minute decision as we had thought more about the performance itself than the title of the piece. We decorated our work table with pictures of the library in construction to relate back to the buildings foundations. One of the library trolleys was placed in the space and once everything was set up we were good to go for the performance the following day.
Performance Evaluation
Overall I felt that our performance was successful, we gained many of the publics support for our performance as many people came and “lent a hand”. At one point during the performance we had a member of the library join us involuntarily and ask to help us create the marks of other audience members and sat with us for at least an hour, which I found incredible that someone felt that inspired by our piece to come join the performance and commented on my earlier experiment in the library with the quotes. In a way it felt like we were actually bringing together the workforce of the nineteenth century to the students of the Lincoln library and this was a clear example. I found this performance interesting as many people would find this a very tedious exercise but we created it because it was not only relating to the module of site specific performance but it was inspiring. We took a simple idea and turned it into a challenge, and I was pleasantly surprised with how much we achieved over the course of our performance. If I was to improve this I would probably put a bit more thought into how the layout of our performance area was made such as the title of our piece that hung in the background of the space, we made the sign of our title piece a bit last minute but I felt we put a lot of thought into this idea… and maybe find a space that has a window to open when performing with so many solvents in an heated area for a durational piece which we felt the aftermath of. In all seriousness I am proud of what my group and myself have achieved over the course of the module and I have come to realise that site has been a topic that I can safely say was an eye-opening experience to view spaces as to not what they are but to be seen as something that not everyone can identify and appreciate it. It has been a truly different take as to how I interpret drama and I am thankful for the experience this module has taught me.
