The empty space under the stairs in the library is small. However, it is big enough to fit five people under it. When we were exploring the space on Thursday we kept the signs from our previous experiment on the stairs and kept saying hello to people. We played music and asked if people were enjoying it. We also drew things and left notes for people to find. Then Teo came to sit with us so did someone else. The 5 of us fit in this small space and just spoke about our days, how we were feeling and our plans for the rest of the day. After they left and it was just the three of us again we started to think about story telling.
The discussion started with us questioning what was in this space before the library. From our research we found out that before the Goods and Grains warehouse had been built it was just land. From this we began to play a game, we would each say a line and the next person had to continue the story. We did this for half an hour coming up with different ideas and theories of what people did before there was a building here. Then we became more fact based and looked at the history of the library.
We soon realised we had been under the stairs for three hours, and began questioning why this space was not used? This turned into a discovery about how homely the space felt, and how welcoming it was. We also discussed how the walls felt like they would look after you and the stairs shielded you from the onslaught of people at various hours throughout the day. The space felt nice and cosy. We started to think about staying in the space and domesticating it, thereby making it somewhere we could stay for long periods of time. What stops this from being our performance? The idea is to give the space meaning, even if it is just for one performance. “The location [is] integral to the overall form and content of [the] performance, making it impossible to separate the “location” from the “work” (Couillard, 2006, 32). The idea was to create something we could stay in. Something that would have significance but then disappear. It would become empty space again, but is any space really empty?
Citation List:
Couillard, P. (2006) Site Responsive. Canadian Theatre Review. (126) 32 – 37.