FRAMING STATEMENT:
What is Site-Specific Performance?
According to Mike Pearson, site-specific performance is a “slippery” (2010, 7) art form that is personal to each artist that creates such work. It often involves creating work in spaces with some form of historical or political significance to a community or artist/s, with the work endeavouring to “engender ideas of place and community” (Wilkie, 2002, 144). The idea of creating work in a space that has strong community links, particularly a community whose presence transcends the space’s current state, was very important to our process of making a performance in the library.
Our Performance:
Our site-specific performance consisted of audience members participating in a scavenger hunt around the library before sitting with us underneath the east staircase. Under the stairs, we encouraged our participants to help us create a timeline of the building’s history (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 below). The event lasted eight hours and, within that time-frame, twelve invited audience members experienced a twenty-minute one-to-one performance.
My primary research involved looking at Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance, with a particular focus on Fiona Wilkie, Sue Palmer and Kathleen Irwin. Irwin states that a site-specific performance can be “extrapolated from the specificities of the site itself, and […] the communities that claim ownership of it” (Pearson, 2010, 10). Since our early investigations of the library space, I felt that the people who currently inhabit the space and the way they use it were imperative to the performance I wanted to create. However, as we moved forward with the process and found out more about Great Central Warehouse’s (GCW) history, I also wanted our piece to reflect what the library has meant, not only to the student body, but to the larger community of Lincoln over the years.
Our creative process was influenced practically by Marina Abramović’s live art shows, Night’s in This City by Forced Entertainment and the performance practices of Punchdrunk.
AN ANALYSIS OF PROCESS:
Scavenger Hunt:
In the first few weeks, I was interested in the current occupants of the library, students like us, and how they experience the space around them. Sue Palmer’s concept of site-specific performance involves “the people who normally inhabit and use [a place] for it wouldn’t exist without them” (Pearson, 2010, 8) and this really resonated with me in terms of how I related to our site because I saw the library as a busy, thriving environment for students. As a group, we felt the best way to explore this would be to “engage with the site as symbol” (Wilkie, 2002, 158) as we knew we wanted our audience to view the library in a different way; not merely as a facility for work but as a representation of knowledge and community.
Our initial idea involved a scavenger hunt around the library, where verbal instructions would be given to two separate groups of participants. Their task would be to find a collection of words taken from a pre-selected poem, hidden in books we felt had social or historical significance. The words they found would contribute to a poem on the glass panels on the ground floor to create a final installation.
The main issue we found with this was that, by focussing on site as symbol, as opposed to concentrating on how the site was “imbued with history” (Pavis, 1998, 337), we had made the performance too convoluted. It was not fully engaging with our site, as we could have realistically done this performance in any library and yielded similar results.
Another flaw was we were too focussed on creating something based on influences that were external to the space, particularly fiction. We felt that ultimately fiction is not what this library symbolises, or what the building has historically been a part of. We felt our site’s history reflected the realities of Lincoln as a city so we did not want to create an installation that primarily existed independently of the site; we did not wish to tell stories or create fiction because it did not feel true to the space.
Student Protest:
We made the decision to strip back our ideas and focus on simplicity. By finding something we were passionate about, we hoped to respond to our site as a hub for student community, and the notion that knowledge and books contain their own sort of power. Whereas the scavenger hunt was very audience-led, we felt our performance would benefit considerably from us as performers having a greater presence in the piece; we wanted to create something with our bodies in the space as opposed to a visual installation that did not involve us.
From this, Rebecca highlighted the prevalence of student protests across the country and internationally in recent years. We felt that the spirit of these protests would be something intriguing and provoking to bring into the library space itself.
After looking at Marina Abramović’s performance Seven Easy Pieces, in which she recreated famous artwork using her body, our plan was to recreate iconic images of student protests (see Fig.2 and Fig.3 below) using our bodies. We still wanted the audience to be important to the piece and offer elements of choice in regards to how they engaged with both us as performers and with the space. To explore ways in which we could do this, we also looked at Abramović/Ulay’s Imponderabilia in which they stood in the entrance to a gallery naked, and visitors had to choose to pass between them or turn away.
In our tableaux, we hoped to emulate Abramović/Ulay’s “intense and intimate situations that involved the body of the performer and space” (Nigianni, undated). Our performance would be situated in a transient space such as the foot of the stairs, as this is a place where the students would have to make a conscious choice between moving in-between our bodies to go forward or turning away.
The issue that arose here was a lack of site-specificity. Whilst student protests connect the occupants of the library, the protests we were recreating had only a very tenuous link to the library itself, and the piece was too site-generic which was not part of the work we wanted to create. The passion for this concept, however, was something we were eager to maintain throughout the rest of our process.
Domesticating the Space:
Following this, Rebecca and I sat on the east staircase in the library but our lack of ideas about this space encouraged us to move under the stairs, as I felt that there was greater potential for a performance in this confined space with very little meaning or significance than in the generalised thoroughfare of the library. Rebecca, Sophie and I spent many hours in the space trying out different ways of personally engaging with it and exploring how we could encourage the audience to as well.
Our initial trials under the stairs involved causal interactions with passers-by, both inside the library and outside. I was intrigued by the ephemerality of these small performances, but as we spent a prolonged amount of time in the space, the desire for ephemerality changed into a search for permanence in a space that had not always existed in relation to the rest of the library.
We considered domesticating this space (bringing a mattress or blankets into the space, wearing our pyjamas in the space, offering people who joined us food) in order to infuse it with meaning and intimacy. By covering the windows with books found in the library (see Fig.5 below), we hoped to encase the space in order to make a micro-world that would be immersive for our audience members.
Credit: Molly Richards Siddall, 2016.
However, we struggled to pin down how we could make this more site-specific so we decided to hone in our research and performance to the history of the library and the stages it has been in previously to what it is now.
Final Idea – The Bricks Have Stayed The Same:
Instead of creating an entirely new piece, we decided to create an amalgamation of the work we had done leading up to this point. Going back to Irwin’s definition of site-specific performance, we ended up coming to the realisation that ‘communities that claim ownership’ over a place meant not only the current community of students, but the communities of the past who used and benefited from the library when it was a warehouse from 1907-1998 (Heritage Gateway, undated).
We adapted Sophie’s idea of a scavenger hunt so that participants would be searching for clues and hopefully noticing aspects of the library’s architecture that have significance to the history of the building. This scavenger hunt was inspired by Forced Entertainment’s Nights in This City and Punchdrunk’s Against Captain’s Orders, both site-specific performances involving tours of places that were familiar to audience members and helping them see these spaces in new or interesting ways, with the help of clues, props and historical facts.
We encountered a few issues with the clues such as wording and placement, but eventually resolved to create our own clues that involved historical facts about the library, whilst also helping the participants drift through the building as we did whilst writing them. This made the process and the final performance more personal for both us as performers and for our audience members, thus helping them to connect with us and the space.
We kept under the staircase (see Fig. 6 below) as our performance space as we felt it held strong potential for ephemerality, and injecting meaning into a place with no meaning or history in a strongly historical building.
Credit: Molly Richards Siddall, 2016.
Instead of domesticating the space, Rebecca suggested we put paper across the back wall and create a timeline based on our research of the library. The timeline consisted of photographs of the library in its various stages of use or disrepair, and I felt it would be valuable to both us as performers and for our audiences to encourage them to creatively engage with the wall using materials that were used in the building or represented what occupied the building throughout its life (grains, charcoal and book pages).
Our hope was that this process of creating would help facilitate the discussion we planned to have with each audience member when they entered the space. We would begin a dialogue with them once they were comfortable in their surroundings, about the areas they had just explored, and the general history of the library in terms of its development, both as a building and as a reflection of the communities of the city of Lincoln.
The performance ended with us giving each audience member a gift. Inspired by Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, where audience members kept the masks they wore during the performance, we gave our audience members a personalised clock card and a handmade box filled with the materials they had used in the space, to remind them of the history of their library. This was done to epitomise the intimate nature of our performance and personally acknowledge the contribution of each participant.
A PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
I feel that our chosen space was the strongest aspect of the final performance, and the ways in which we attempted to suffuse the space with GCW’s history. The staircase is one of the newest aspects of the library, and by juxtaposing this with our dialogue about the life of the building before the space existed, we gave it a greater sense of purpose for ourselves as performers and to our participants, and any secondary audience members who saw the performance in action.
However, if I were to perform there again, I would spend more time trying to engage with the physicality of the space itself: such as the confined nature of it, or the way footfall on the stairs sounds from underneath them.
We gave audience members the choice of what they could contribute to the timeline. Upon reflection, it may have been more conducive to our aims for the timeline if we had instructed our audience on what we wished for them to contribute, so our timeline would have had a real sense of cohesion by the end of the event
Saying this, the one-to-one nature of our interaction with each audience member was a success (see video below). It provided us with a level of intimacy that is rarely afforded in the library space as a whole. Also, in our chosen space under the stairs, having a singular audience member helped us create a more relaxed dialogue with them; it would have felt cramped and uncomfortable to have more than one participant in the space at a time.
Credit to: Filming by Kieran Spiers, Rob Anthony and Holly Marshall, 2016
Edited by Sophie Tahssein, 2016.
The information we gave our participants was not fully scripted, meaning that each audience member had a different experience. This helped us achieve a more ephemeral nature in our interactions as no two performances were the same. However, the use of the timeline allowed participants to contribute to the sense of permanence we strived for, through acknowledging the building’s changing but essentially enduring nature.
Informing our audience about the history of a familiar building gained a positive reaction from many of our participants, who seem to have felt very engaged with our piece. One of our audience members said we “opened [his] eyes and lifted [his] appreciation of the University Library” (Rowan, 2016), with another saying “I felt like you took me through a journey of [GCW’s] life and found out things I would never have known without participating” (Brunt, 2016).
The performance triggered new ideas for us as a group and as individuals about how we could have used the space. Whilst retaining the one-on-one nature of our interaction, I thought we could create a type of production line with our participant. We could pass the same materials we used in the performance from person to person and place them individually into the miniature sculpture of GCW Rebecca created for the performance (see Fig.7 below). This could be performed to an audio track of warehouse production sounds or simply listening to the sounds of the library in the present day.
Credit: Rebecca Fallon, 2016.
Throughout the module, I had a personal discrepancy between the theory of site-specific performance and the practical elements of the performance. Whilst I grasp the theoretical concepts of site-specificity and understand its value within the live art sector, I struggled to apply this theory to our site, and my ideas for performances were usually at odds with the demands of the module because of this.
I struggled to see past my own perception of the library as a work space and fully embrace the potential of the library as a performance space. I believe my other group members had this issue as well, and this impacted on our conduct, enthusiasm and attention to detail during our final performance. In retrospect, a more open-minded and relaxed approach to the module would have benefited my learning.
Word Count: 2, 450
WORKS CITED:
Abramović, M. (1977) Imponderabilia. [Performance Art] Bologna, Italy: Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna.
Abramović, M. (2005) Seven Easy Pieces. [Performance Art] New York, USA: Guggenheim Museum, 9 November.
Brunt, E. (2016) Questions on our Site-Specific Performance. [interview] Interviewed by Rebecca Fallon and Molly Richards Siddall, 11 May.
Forced Entertainment (1995) Nights in this City. [Performance Art] Sheffield, UK: Moving bus.
Hall, M. (2016) South Africa’s student protests have lessons for all universities. Cape Town: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2016/mar/03/south-africas-student-protests-have-lessons-for-all-universities [accessed 12 March 2016]
Heritage Gateway (Undated) Lincolnshire HER. Lincoln: Heritage Gateway. Available from http://www.heritagegateway.org.uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=MLI70121&resourceID=1006 [accessed 28 April 2016]
Nigianni, B. (Undated) Marina Abramovic Presents: Architectural Experience as Critical, Self-reflective Practice. New York: Art & Education. Available from http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/marina-abramovic-presents-architectural-experience-as-critical-self-reflective-practice/ [accessed 9 May 2016]
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Pavis, P. (1998) Dictionary of Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Pearson, M. (2010) Site-specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Punchdrunk. (2015) Against Captain’s Orders. [Performance] Peter Higgin (dir.) London: National Maritime Museum.
Punchdrunk. (2013) The Drowned Man. [Performance] Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle (dir.) London: Temple Studios 31 London Street.
Rowan, B. (2016) Questions on our Site-Specific Performance. [interview] Interviewed by Rebecca Fallon and Molly Richards Siddall, 11 May.
Wilkie, F. (2002) Mapping the Terrain: A Survey of Site-Specific Performance in Britain. New Theatre Quarterly. 18 (2) 140 – 161.