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.
Our site-specific performance was heavily inspired through artists such as Marina Ambramovic. It took place in the University Library and as such focused on the idea of books and, more specifically, stories. Since every book contains a story of some kind, even if the book in question is a purely academic one, we decided to emphasize that through our performance by picking books out at random from selected shelves on the second floor of the library – resulting in a mixture of classic literature, poems, plays, and educational textbooks – and reading selections out loud (chosen by simply opening the book and choosing a paragraph to start from) for a strictly timed period of three minutes before moving on to the next book. While one of us was reading, the other would be decorating the performance space (the refuge area on the second floor) with printed images, quotes, cut-outs and drawn images all relating to the ideas of stories and time, which we also wanted to explore since the library has such a long and varied history and in its current incarnation as a library used primarily for research for essays, exams and dissertations, time in itself has become an important aspect to the building – people go there to work towards meeting deadlines, the building’s open hours vary depending on how much time the majority of the student body have left for work to be completed. In order to drive home the concept of time as a relentless, unstoppable entity, we had the ticking sound of a metronome playing throughout the entire performance with the noise of a factory whistle every three minutes acting as an alert to change the book. The theme of the progression of time was also invoked in an unexpected way through our performance, as our performance itself changed as the day progressed: going from being full of energy and reading quickly while making few mistakes in the first half of the day, to gradually reading slower and slower and less energized as the day went on, and also making more mistakes in the reading, to the point where we were stumbling over relatively simple words in the last couple of hours of the day.
The performance took place on Friday 6th May – right at one of the library’s peak times since it’s during essay and deadline season – and it lasted twelve hours, from 9am to 9pm, with breaks lasting approximately fifteen minutes every three hours to allow us to stay hydrated and to collect new selections of books. In the weeks leading up to the performance, we had collected the codes for each row of books on the second floor of the library and placed them in a container. Throughout the performance, we approached people and asked them to choose a number of codes at random. When they had done so, we went and chose books from the rows they had chosen (again, completely at random) which we brought back to the performance area, stacking them on top of the books we had each already read.
An Analysis Of Progress
As a group, myself and my partner found it relatively difficult to adapt to the style of thinking required for producing work that is site specific – that because “current perceptions of site have moved ‘from a physical location – grounded, fixed, actual – to a discursive vector – ungrounded, fluid, virtual” (Pearson, 2010), one should not think of the space in terms of its literal use, but instead focus on the possibilities it presents – and as such, we were slow to come up with a piece that could truly be called “site specific”. The first idea was for a piece that would present the “typical” life of a student, which was to be presented on the wooden stage outside the library, with three sections – a “work” station where audience volunteers would be required to complete some kind of task; a sleeping area which had been envisioned as being either a mattress or a tent; and a food station with typical “library” food (energy bars, energy drinks, quick snacks, etc) – and the audience would spend a fixed amount of time at each station. However, in spite of initial positive feedback, we eventually realized that we couldn’t find a way to satisfactorily justify why the piece need exist in this form and, more importantly, exactly what made it specific and relevant to that particular site. Therefore, we eventually decided to completely abandon the idea and try to think of something else.
When we struggled to come up with any ideas that seemed better to us than our original one, we decided to think about the work and artists we had studied over the course of the module and which we had been most engaged with. One we both found we had in common was a Marina Abramovic piece – The Artist Is Present – in which she sat for 736.5 hours and invited members of the public to sit opposite her and for them to spend time staring into her eyes. When we researched this piece further, we found it had had intriguing and unusual effects on those who had taken part (people cried, were sick, and a one person stripped off all of his clothes and had to be escorted out by security), and we spent several hours in the library, exploring the space with fresh purpose and finding areas to stare at each other in complete silence in five minute sections. As we were doing this, people walking past would tend to stop and, particularly if they were in a group, comment on it. One notable instance of this occurred when a group of three friends stopped a few feet away from where I was standing and began debating what the possible “story” was, staying for most of the five minutes that we were there for. This exercise proved to us that sometimes, it is better to keep things simple and the people around you can do the work for you, creating a performance out of two people standing and staring at each other through a window. We discussed the possibility of turning the experiment into our assessment, but again we could not find a justifiable reason for calling it site specific.
However, the ideas of simplicity and the atmosphere we had created which in many ways matched that which had been created through Abramovic’s piece stuck with us and we tried to come up with ideas that would allow us to utilize these. Eventually, we came up with the idea of setting out objects in a circle so that they formed the shape of a clock. While the first idea was to maybe have these objects be potatoes in order to tie the performance in with the history of the site as a former grain and goods warehouse, we quickly decided to go for books instead since we thought it would be much more aesthetically pleasing. On our next session in the library, we randomly selected twelve books from the second floor and set them out in a clock formation on the floor in the refuge area. We then experimented with having one of us sitting in the middle of the circle, going round each book and reading for five minutes, trying it both in silence and reading out loud. We continued experimenting with this idea and together we decided that whoever was not reading at any particular time should be doing or creating something visually interesting (since otherwise the performance as it was would just consist of someone sitting in a circle of books reading out loud). The idea of creating images on the walls of the refuge area arose when we briefly considered a visual timeline of the life of the university, going back to its days as a railway warehouse.
However, this idea quickly developed into having whoever was not reading writing quotes and words and phrases that related to time, and so the background of our performance space would change throughout the performance as pictures and quotes were put up, taken down, covered up and moved from one area to another. One particular idea that came into play at this stage was the construction of a clock on one of the walls of the refuge area, by way of drawing numbers on A4 pieces of paper and sticking them up in the shape of a clock to mirror the one on the floor made by the books. This “wall clock” was present in all rehearsals from this initial experiment as well as in our final performance.
During the few weeks we had left, we continued to experiment with our piece, with most alterations taking place on a purely practical level – such as deciding to use a seat instead of sitting on the floor to read, since we’d be performing for twelve hours. We also began to think of a way to involve the audience in the piece and we decided that the best way to do so would be to have them be responsible to some degree over what books were chosen to be part of the performance. We wrote down the row numbers displayed on the bookshelves of the second floor of the library on small slips of paper and during rehearsals, we tested to see whether it would be practical to ask the audience to participate in this way by asking people who were walking by to pick out six of the papers for each of us, making twelve rows chosen in all – one book from each row. On the whole, nearly everyone we approached during this test was very willing to do so, and a few also expressed an interest in the piece itself, questioning us about it and appearing intrigued by the idea. We also decided, as a result of feedback, to cut down the time spent reading each book from five minutes to three minutes in order to stop the audience from becoming bored since we had no way of guaranteeing that the books we’d be reading from would be exciting to listen to due to the randomness of their choosing.
Performance Evaluation
With our final performance, I feel that me and my partner accomplished what we set out to accomplish. The performance itself triggered a few ideas in each of us, a couple of which were incorporated into the performance during the twelve hours, such as instead of returning the books we had already read, we ended up leaving them where they were to form a “wall” around the person reading. Since our performance didn’t have a great amount of scope for audience interaction, we instead had to rely on their reactions to the piece to measure its success. Overall, the reactions we got were very positive, with numerous people stopping to listen to the reader and several also choosing to explore the space and immerse themselves in it. Since our piece was not advertised – myself and my partner instead choosing to rely on people’s curiosity – the fact that so many people throughout the day stopped to take notice of us and what we were doing, even if only for a couple of minutes, proves its success since people were only taking notice of it if they truly wanted to. However, I feel there were still some significant improvements that we could have made to the performance, such as collecting photos of the space throughout the day and using them in the collection of images on the walls. This would have helped to emphasize our theme of the progression of time and change. I also think that while it was good keeping the performance within such a small and enclosed space, it would have been better to somehow spread the performance out a little more since when an audience member did come into the space, it became very hard to move around to place images on the walls. I also think it could have been improved by having the person who was in charge of decorating the space be limited to the same amount of time the person reading had – at the end of each three minutes, start drawing/writing something else, regardless of whether what you were working on is complete or not.
In the end, all these improvements could have been made if we’d had more time developing the idea we eventually settled on. Because we spent so much time of the development process thinking too literally about the site, we limited the amount of time and opportunities we could have had for ourselves to work on what became, in my opinion, a very strong idea for a piece. Working on the performance and especially doing it for the full twelve hours increased my appreciation for artists like Marina Abramavic and the challenges faced by doing a performance of this nature for an extended period of time and I think it’s a shame that this only happened for me in the last couple of weeks before the performance as I think it could have helped the final performance to be even stronger if I had been able to channel this appreciation into coming up with ideas and performing. However, with the ideas we had and the hurdles we faced attempting this performance, I think we ended up with a strong final product.
Works Cited
Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.