Framing Statement
This performance “Stories Break the Bounds of Time”, demonstrates a side of the progression of time and how everything goes through cycles of change. In our everyday lives time passes on through stories, “How was your day?”, “What did you do at school?”, “Who are your new friends?”. In our performance we convey these stories through reading books taken at random from the second floor of the library, since books are all stories of a sort. Throughout the 12-hour progression of the performance not only do the books vary and change but so do the surroundings of the performance, as the time progresses in the performance it reflects time progression of real life for instance at the beginning of the performance we were full of energy and mistakes not as common, as opposed to the last hour of the performance were not only were we exhausted and our energy at all-time low but we started making mistakes in the reading of the books as well.
The piece was inspired by artists such as Marina Abramovic who gave us the inspiration to do the piece for an entire 12 hours. We performed the piece in one of the smallest areas we could find which was the refuge area on the second floor, the smallness of the space allows us to create an entire different world which the audience can immerse themselves in if they choose to. Although audience participation was not integral in the piece the audience reactions we got were good and not negative as we had a few people taking time out of their obviously busy day to stop and listen to us. One person in particular complimented our work out loud “That’s actually quite good…” although I didn’t actually see her since I was reading a book at the time.
The performance happened on Friday 6th May bang in the middle of essay and exam deadlines so that the library is at one of the peak times of library attendance. The performance has a transactional element in that me and my partner provide a relaxation zone for if anyone passing wants to take a couple of minutes just relaxing and listening to the stories that we are providing for them. I wanted a transactional element in the performance as I feel that it was important to give people an opportunity to take a relaxing moment out of their stressful days, while staying close to their productive opportunities the library offers.
Analysis of Process
Site specific performance to me, means bringing the magic you get from a theatre and then taking a person or an audience member and throwing them into a completely different world. Using this magic in other, more public places such as out on a high street, in a public library, in an art gallery or even in a café outside of/or attached to a theatre. Mike Pearson tells us: “Current perceptions of site have moved ‘from a physical location – grounded, fixed, actual – to a discursive vector – ungrounded, fluid, virtual’” (Pearson, M. 2010, 12) I believe that this is telling us that site specific performance currently isn’t considered a fixed position or a single place, but more of a perception of place and the ideas that are produced in these spaces take a completely different meaning to conventional theatre.
Our site specific performance area was the university library. The fact that this was a university library, full of a collection of students was what sparked my first idea for my performance, I initially wanted to keep it focused on audience immersion, however this changed as my process went on. I had my first idea based on the stage outside the library where I would place different stations. This would show people the stereotypically true life of a student. Where this idea started to fall apart was when I was asked to explain why I was doing the performance and I realised that not only could I not answer the question but that the piece would be more suited to showing the general public which would not be my audience as since the library is based in a university campus.
The next idea came after learning about Marina Abramovic who tests the limits of human endurance and her own body in the name of art. What really inspired me was her performance “The Artist is Present” and how she was there for the full 736 hours and 30-minute piece where she sat immobile for the entire piece and audience members were invited to sit individually across from her whilst she maintains eye contact with them. I was particularly inspired by this piece because of the atmosphere she created in this area and how it affected each audience member completely differently to the point where one person was sick, another cried and a different person stripped off all of his clothes and had to be escorted out by security. This atmosphere that she created to me was one of the most intimate things I have ever seen and compelled me to try and find a way of creating an atmosphere of my own.
This, along with some research into the history of the site, sparked an idea which at the time was an extremely basic idea. The building was originally built as a train warehouse in 1907 by the Great Central Railway (GCR) and by 1998 it had fallen into disrepair and was converted into a library in 2004 for the University itself. At one point the building had become a goods and grains warehouse storing mainly grain and potatoes. This created an idea in my head of creating a kind of human clock. Me and my partner would take turns staring at potatoes which were set up in a clock formation, taking five minutes per potato, adding up to one hour after the full twelve potatoes were stared at. This would link to the history of the building but was not very aesthetically pleasing as a performance. So instead of using potatoes, we decided to use books that we had taken at random from the second floor of the library. We decided to use books because not only were using potatoes not really interesting for an audience it made finding a place for us to perform a bit harder as we would be making quite a bit of mess. So we decided to use books as not only did it make it easier for us to find a performance space but it also based us more in the site itself as we used books from the site itself. This could be seen as an invitation to a passing audience member to stop and listen for a while if they want, maybe sit down in the space and just listen to us reading these completely random books about Chinese artefacts, British architecture or even how to manage a football team. This is also a transaction, so our audience would be taking away some of the story with them. We also came up with the idea of having a metronome playing in the background which might not just catch people’s attention but also helped me and my partner when we read the books. At the end of the five minutes an industrial whistle went off signalling us to change to the next book, the industrial whistle calling back to the history of the site as a warehouse. Mike Pearson tells us that: “If site-specific performance involves an activity, an audience and a place, then creative opportunities reside in the multiple creative articulations of us, them and there.” (Pearson, M. 2010, 19) the ideas for a site-specific performance come from the performer being in the space and feeling whatever gets from the space as opposed to conventional theatre space where the ideas come from writers and scripts.
To get a truly random selection of books me and my partner noted down the library book reference numbers down from the end of each aisle from the second floor, printed them off and put them in a container. Then each time we needed to refresh the books that we were reading we asked two separate audience members or passers-by to pick six different numbers each. We refreshed the books once every 90 minutes, as this was when we ran out of books.
Me and my partner then realised that what we had was a one-person performance with a two-person group so we brainstormed some ideas so that when one of us was reading the other person wasn’t just sitting there doing nothing. This meant that whether we were doing one or the other we’d still be contributing to the piece. Out of this session we came up with some themes for the piece such as time, change and progression. This sparked another idea for the background. As the performance gradually progressed the background can slowly change along with the changing of the books and the changing of the stories. We did this by collecting images off the internet, wrote phrases and drew pictures all based on the themes we had decided on. We also decided that the time we spent reading was cut down from five minutes to three minutes per book so that the audience didn’t get too bored at a particular story. This also brought the total read time down from one hour to 36 minutes per twelve books. At this point it was decided that we should do the performance for the full twelve hours so that we would experience the full exhaustion of pushing our bodies to a breaking point in the name of art, similar to Abramovic. Mike Pearson tells us: “Whilst site-specific art might constitute a form of institutional critique and more intense engagement with the everyday world, it has the capacity to articulate and cultivate local particularities, accentuating difference in the face of globalizing tendencies” (Pearson, M. 2010, 12) so since site-specific might be more based in the real world, set in real locations with real people as opposed to a theatre which sets performance up more like windows into different worlds other than our own. In this quote Pearson is also telling us that site-specific performances have the ‘capacity’ to show more of the real world that even we don’t see and showing us the differences in the world as time passes on.
One of the central things we tried to achieve was to create an entirely different atmosphere in this little corner of the library that is completely contrasted by everything around it. Inviting audience members in to listen to the reader’s stories, whether it be Sherlock Holmes or a children’s book and watching the decorator throw images all around them showing the main themes brought forward in the piece.
(Stephenson, 2016)
Performance Evaluation
Since the performance was not based around audience interaction and instead the audience were offered a choice, the strengths and weaknesses of the piece lay more in the reactions we got from people. Many of whom didn’t know we were there and were pleasantly surprised, some even sat with us for however long just to experience a small piece of the full atmosphere of what we had created. Since our piece was in such a small area and the way we went about performing our piece meant that we did virtually no advertising for the piece and instead relied on the curiosity of passers-by. We knew that this was taking a big risk, but site specific performance is all about taking risks. This in turn resulted in a low number of audience members but a higher number of audience reactions as the only reason an audience member would stay was if they were truly interested in the piece. The final performance triggered a few ideas about how we could have improved it, as during the performance we came up with the idea of ending the piece with a fog horn-like end of work whistle. We could have improved the performance by collecting photos for the background of one of the themes shown clearly, we could have managed to advertise a little so that instead of entirely relying on passers-by to be curious we would have people turning up and then returning to see how we were getting on. This performance actually triggered another idea for the space where I could use not only the refuge area for the second floor but the refuge areas on the first and third floors as well as the area underneath the stairs on the ground floor. I would line these areas with different books to create completely different atmospheres on each floor and anyone could stop and just lose themselves in different worlds for however long they want. For example, on the ground floor could be Alice in Wonderland, then you travel up to the first floor and listen to a biography on Freud and many others. I really admire Marina Abramovic and how she suffered for her art, doing my piece for twelve hours straight allowed me and my partner see a small window into what her performances are like for her as a performer to do them. Also doing my piece in such a small space allowed me to see some of the difficulties of how these performances can go. This performance also gave me an idea about something else I could do in the space. I had an idea when we started piling the books on top of each other like the building of a wall between the reader and the audience, this gave me the idea of building said wall for however long it would take to get up to at least halfway up the reader’s height and inviting people to just look through a hole in the middle of the wall of books and just watch and listen to the reader read.
Bibliography:
Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan.