Monthly Archives: April 2014

I Watch.

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I watch, I’ve always watched. It used to be the case that I enjoyed watching, especially on race day. I think it was the atmosphere that I enjoyed more than anything, bounding and echoing between my walls. I witnessed the making of many fortunes, as well as the loss of many pay packets. The words of description which seem to encapsulate a race day are those such as excitement, anticipation and emotion, coupled with the likes of disappointment, inadequacy and regret. Now that’s all over and they’re all long gone, the punters and the races. I was lonely after they went, and lonely I still am, but never have I been as lonely as I was in the week of the 24th May 1969. The atmosphere that I had so longed to return to me had manifested itself not half a mile away over the West Common. I watched as a dome at least three times the size of my self was erected and I watched as revellers enjoyed days and night of fun and entertainment. The breeze carried distorted versions of swing numbers and echoes of compare’s telling jokes over to my terraces where the only echoes which previously resided were echoes of the past. I longed, then, for that past and for the attention and the importance and yet, they all passed me by without so much as a second glance. And now, (would you believe it?) all these years later, I am to host my own sample of EXPO69. So here is my plea to you, audience member; Imagine you are there, imagine the atmosphere, the excitement and the possibilities, smell the smells, hear the sounds and see the sights. Let me watch like I always have and see, for the first time in years, happiness, affection and appreciation.

Regards,

The Grandstand

 

When discussing ideas for the EXPO installation piece, it was suggested that we reverse a task that we did in a workshop session at the beginning of the course where we wrote a letter to the grandstand. Here is the result. Obviously I was writing with the EXPO in mind and, as a result of this task, have created a piece that could be used in a number of ways to enhance the installation, either by having it printed for the audience to read or as a voice over in amongst other written works belonging to other collaborators on the project.

This post was simply to share my process.

The Role and the Importance of an Audience: Spectator to Partaker

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‘Audience may find themselves having to participate in other, tangible ways, often acting as an actor ‘substitute’, or even an agent to propel the action forward’ (Tompkins, 2012, pg 10)

In terms of drama performance, the role of the audience has transformed through time as well as through genre. Traditionally, the audience are usually observers, merely watching the action in front of them. However in more contemporary theatre/experiences, the audience are regularly used as active participants on a variety of different levels. The function and result of active participants has been debated frequently. Some say that this type of involvement ‘dislocates’ (ibid, pg. 10) the audience from the site and therefore the experience; whereas it can also be said to add a dynamic component, providing ‘the opportunity to embody the site’, (ibid, pg. 10) making it an experience in multiple ways rather than it being strict and limited.

From the very beginning of developing ‘The Waiting Room’, the piece has been heavily involved with audience participation and interaction. I personally feel that this element works for our piece; we are in control of the situation by using instructions but the audience could essentially change the outcomes, creating a fresh dynamic. Small details have changed throughout the weeks, as to the level of audience participation, but this was a component that has stuck to us and the process. Our performance will use 2 different kinds of audience. The first is an audience that are a part of the piece but mainly observe with the rest of the audience participating through instruction.

This week has found this element being progressed even further through introduction of narratives and dialogues. After showing our progress to tutors and members of the group in the last week of term, we were given a lot of feedback to improve our piece and in particular the use of the audience. We had already created narratives that we read out during the performance but it was later suggested that these narratives (and a lot more) were read out by audience members. This would give them a task and purpose as well some sort of identity within the piece.

The narratives we have created all link to the several uses of the space we’re performing in as a ‘waiting room’. Including topics such as waiting to give blood, waiting to test planes and waiting to view a dead loved one, we also linked in some of the answers of the public research questionnaire we developed in the first few weeks of the module. To create more narratives, we are going to be directly using the answers from this questionnaire as inspiration for writing, with topics being used such as religion, justice and happiness. We have split up the work of developing these narratives as it allows for creative differences and varied types of writing. With this narrative idea, alongside the audience physically partaking and interacting with others in the performance as it happens, our piece is built and eventually showcased around the audience. Whether that is if they know it or not, written or being there on the day, our piece is (will hopefully be) as interactive as it gets.

‘Whether site-specific performance is interactive or downright confronting, audiences are rarely able to participate passively’ (ibid, pg 10)

References

Tompkins, Joanne (2012) The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site Specific Theatre and Performance. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillian. Available from http://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9780230364066.pdf [Accessed 5 April 2014]

‘The Waiting Room’

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“A basic aim in site-specific work is to encourage audience to see and experience more of their surroundings, and/or to see their surroundings differently; this volume rethinks not only what that might be but how they are experienced”. (Tompkins, 2012, p.11)

Our performance is something that we slowly pieced together to gain a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve. We have always liked the idea of waiting and how the grandstand has been waiting for many things over the years. As the quote above says, site-specific work is about making the audience see the space in a different way. We want the audience to feel like their experience of waiting has been changed. We want the audience to think about the performance 3 weeks later when they are sat in a doctors waiting room and think about the passing of time and the decomposition of the environment around them. We want them to have a changed view of the grandstand as a place that has only been used for horse racing to a place with a lot more history, but our main aim is to make strange the idea of waiting and have them constantly question the passing of time.

To do this we will set the room out like a waiting room, placing the seats close together and using the painting on the wall as a focal point. We will then place envelopes on the chairs of the audience members that contain instructions. These envelopes will be labelled with times and the audience will be instructed to open them when the time arrives. This means there will be a focus on the passing of the time. We want to do this firstly as the room has been used as a waiting room on many occasions. But also as the grandstand has been and still is waiting for something. This is symobolised within the work.

Tompkins, Joanne (2012) The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site Specific Theatre and Performance. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillian. Available fromhttp://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9780230364066.pdf [Accessed 5 April 2014]

Waiting Room Part 3

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John Newling performed a piece at the Nottingham Contemporary in January 2013, Where a Place Becomes a Site: Values.  This began with the installation of a riddler jacket in a shopping centre.

riddler jacket

 

Passers by would naturally stop to look at the jacket and would be offered a trade.  They would be given a piece of the jacket but in return they had to say something that was valuable to them.  Below is a link to the itunes podcasts from Nottingham Contemporary, there is a 3 minute video in which the piece is discussed.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/nottingham-contemporary/id349866879?mt=2
[accessed 3/4/14]

Later on those responses were turned into a script which was performed at the Nottingham Contemporary.  The Waiting Room is using this idea in regards to the survey we did about what people are waiting for.  So far the piece has enough relation to the site in terms of what we know people wait for and have waited for in that building and now our practical aim is to develop narratives using the research we have done.

We are also thinking about what others questions we might need to ask in order to develop these sections of text or whether we can develop them using our own ideas.

References

Newling, J., 2013, Where a Place Becomes a Site: Values [electronic print] Available at http://adrian4acn.com/2013/01/25/john-newling-nottingham-contemporary/ [Accessed 3.4.2014]

 

Waiting Room Part 2, featuring John Cage…

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There are many different circumstances in which you can be waiting for something and many of those circumstances involve carrying on with your life.  In our public survey two answers involved waiting for a wedding; you can imagine that there probably isn’t a great deal of sitting down and reading newspapers during that wait.  Our piece also focuses on all the pilots and soldiers that would have waited at the number 4 aeroplane acceptance park (The Grandstand) for their chance to test their planes or learn to dig trenches on the common.  These men would not just have been sat around, they would have written to loved ones, they would have played football, they would have talked with their friends.  The Waiting Room Piece is making strange all of these things by putting them into a traditional waiting room setting, as you would imagine them now.

John Cage’s “4’33′” is a piece that is very much an inspiration for the setting of our waiting room.  The sounds you hear are not deliberate as they encourage listeners, or in our case audience members, to listen for things they wouldn’t usually.  This performance of the piece features the sound of a child crying and people moving around etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAdR5N7eXog
[accessed March 28th]

The point in relation to our piece is that we want to include moments of silence and yet we want for the audience to realise that they aren’t moments of silence at all; in much the same way that this is not really how you wait.