Site-Specific: Final Blog Submission

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Linford Leslie Butler

“Photofinished” was developed as a piece of site-specific performance work which was performed at the Grandstand Community Centre on Carholme Road in Lincoln, on Thursday, 8th May, 2014. The piece was a one-to-one experience lasting around 10 minutes, and performed repeatedly for multiple individuals throughout the three hours of performance.

The piece was staged within a long brick cellar space beneath the main seating of the Grandstand, accessible from a corridor in the main building. I created a photographic darkroom, using trappings of the aesthetic of the darkroom such as the red safe light, trays and bottles of chemicals and analogue cameras. Audience members entered the space through a small door and descended the steps into this space, and were instructed to close the door and put on a white lab coat, safety goggles and a mask. They completed this action by themselves, before entering the main space, entering past plastic curtains which masked the main space on entry. After entering the space the audience member was invited in, and engaged in a conversational narrative which asked how they thought a photograph could simultaneously be a beginning, a middle and an end. During this process, they were invited to develop a print of a photograph of the West Common racecourse.

The piece examined photography through the lens of the Grandstand, and the Grandstand through the lens of photography, studying how the Grandstand might be seen to be, like a photograph, a space frozen in time. It considered acts of creation, like capturing a photograph or the construction of a building like the Grandstand, to be simultaneously beginning, happening and ending. The idea was informed by the idea of the photo-finish moment within horseracing, a link to the racing heritage of the Grandstand and the West Common. The piece studied the singular moment, such as that frozen in a photo-finish shot, and how the act of taking that photograph is a creative act that begins a process of production; but is also a constant middle, frozen in stasis, and also the final destruction of a real moment by shoehorning it into a new form. The performance was a one-to-one experience, made up of an aesthetic installation of all the props and kit of the developer’s darkroom, which was interacted with through a performative narrative.

The space itself was a difficult one within which to work, and posed challenges that needed to be considered. The space was very dark, which was useful for its function in the performance as the darkroom, but this was controlled by providing light which fit the aesthetic but could still be used to see, and each individual was given a torch to use should they need it when they entered. The space was also very cold, a product of its lack of heating and various open vents; audience members were warned of this on the blurb affixed outside the space, and the lab coat they were asked to wear acted as another layer to mitigate the short-term effects of the lack of heat. The other challenge was that the door to the space was quite inconspicuous, and might have led to audience members not entering due to not knowing it was being used as a performance space. I avoided this by affixing a blurb to the door of the cellar space to encourage audiences to understand that they could enter and that it was being used.

The first development in my piece of site-specific performance took place very early into our first explorations of the Grandstand site. An early session at the site led to the capturing of photographs of the site for documentary purposes, and the creation of short texts, as a method of capturing and archiving our early initial interactions and impressions of the site. I documented these in a blog entry named: “Response, creation and site: discussing space through authorship.” The small texts led to a consideration of what purpose they had other than the purely documentary, even though the initial motivation behind writing them was as a documentary exercise. Through some further research into theoretical approaches to site-specific performance, I began to consider these mini-stories as narratives which responded to the narrative of the site itself, a cyclical process of representation and re-representation, in which my mini-narratives not only serve as recognition of the past existence and story of the Grandstand but also form a stimulus work for further consideration of the site and development of work. The theoretical research led to the idea that the conventional understanding of ‘site’ has shifted “from a physical location […] to a discursive vector” (Kwon, 2004, 29-30), and this idea of a site as discursive rather than purely physical led to my understanding of a site as a narrative. My creation of small texts, like the creation of photographs in my final piece, was “a distribution of stories and dramatic episodes” (Lorimer, 2006, 515) designed to create a narrative of site. Fiona Wilkie’s idea of “site as story-teller” (Wilkie, 2002, 158) cemented this idea of site as a narratological vector rather than simply a physical construction, a “space of encounter” (Wilkie, 2008, p. 101) which both told a story, and could be used to tell a new story. These short textual responses were the first instance in my process of using documentary recordings to freeze the narrative of the site in stasis, and it was these short texts – as well as my understanding of how a document can be a device through which to narratively represent the story of the site – which led inevitably to the use of physical photographic prints for the same purpose in the final performance.

Following my exploration of short texts and other similar items as narratological devices, and the idea of site as a discursive space, I was interested to consider the way in which, since our first visitations to the Grandstand, I – and, indeed, the rest of the group – had used photography and the taking of photographs as a method of documentation, and how our experience of the site to that date had been almost wholly mediated through the use of the photographic image, seen and documented through the camera viewfinder, on mobile phones or high-end DSLRs. I was encouraged, having studied my use of short texts as a form of documentary or archival process, to consider the same of the photographs that I had taken of the site when we were first exploring, and in our subsequent returns to the site. I did further research into the ways in which the photographic image and performance interact and collide, and the results were extremely influential to my final performance piece. The most influential piece of research at this point in the process was Karel Vanhaesebrouck’s essay ‘Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination’. His work signposted the way in which photography and performance are continually “contaminating each other in a permanent and systematic way” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97), for the reason that “theatre photography is an integral part of the signification process which is at the very heart of performance studies” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97); that the performance itself – or, in our case, the site itself – is not the sole signifier of meaning for an audience member, but that the peritextual documentation surrounding the site, such as my mini-texts or the photographs taken at the site, are equally important in signifying meaning, and therefore the surrounding documentation can “serve as dramaturgical matière brute, or it can be utterly performative in its own right” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97) The idea of photography not only being a creative act of bringing into being, but also of being a trace of a lost or dying moment, and therefore representative of ending, is also seen in the statement that “one cannot consider theatre photography […] to be a direct residue of an event that disappeared from the moment it was acted out” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 100), an idea backed up in further research, which also identified how “an image […] cannot necessarily fully capture or evoke […] rhythms or their qualities” (Simpson, 2012, 425). Overall, in considering those photographs I had taken at the site through the frame of photography, and the ways in which photography interacts with performance, I took away the central understanding of my piece, of “photography as an autonomous performative practice” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 105). My research also validated my idea of the photographs we take being a part of the overall narrative of the site, and therefore photography as being central and inseparable from the process of developing my performance.

My understanding led me to take a series of images on our next visit to the site, which were designed not only to document the site purely for the sake of creating a record of our interaction there, but are also designed to be a story within themselves and also to be a part of the overall story of the site. I made the creative decision to shoot most of these images in black-and-white, despite colour photography being an available option, as the act of shooting in black-and-white meant when taking each image, I was more likely to look closely at the subject of my shot for contrast and tonal range. While this is a technical requirement of good black-and-white photography, the act of looking for those technical ideals meant that I studied my subject more closely and therefore noticed more detail, which led my photographs to tell a richer and more detailed story as narrative devices in their own right. I attempted to identify details about the Grandstand that might go unnoticed, to create images that adhered to the idea of photography as an autonomous performative form, my central idea at that point. Some of those photographs are embedded below.

: Royal Flying Corps emblem

: The Lincoln emblem in glass

: The bar area

: Items in storage

: Fosters’ triangle

: The cleaning cupboard

: View through a keyhole

: Books in storage

: Children’s toys in storage

: Switches for heaters

: Pegs and clothing

Following some weeks of exploration of these ideas at the site, documentation through photography and theoretical research, I developed a pitch idea to be presented in a seminar for feedback. The idea at this point, based upon these ideas, focussed on the idea of performance as photography, and was intended to tell the story of the site through photographs which represented the narrative of the space. These would be developed using traditional photographic methods within the space as a durational piece, to create a visual timeline of sorts. Based on my earlier research about the photograph itself as a performance site as well as a signifier of narrative and basic factual information, this idea was developed. Within the pitch seminar, further ideas contributed by classmates and tutors, and through discussion about the ideas, led to a more solid overall concept that centred around the idea of the ‘photo-finish’, the photograph taken at the end of a horse race which decides the winning horse in a race, relevant considering the Grandstand’s previous use as seating for the West Common racecourse. I later found out the photo-finish image was used for the first and only time at the Lincolnshire Handicap at the Grandstand in 1964, and so this idea generally seemed a relevant and compelling lynch-pin for my performance, which drew clear links between the site and its heritage, and photography as a site and a narrative in itself.

Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s Blownup takes place under the red wash of the developer’s light, a familiar representation of the darkroom.
Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available at: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Given these decisions, I decided to conduct some research into contemporary artistic representations of the photographic darkroom within performance works, and how the darkroom is used as a symbol, a setting and a space. I considered the way in which the photographic darkroom in performance is seen as a performance setting, a literal ‘dark room’, a catalyst space of creative potential and experimentation, and a static space of archival. Following a seminar using ‘The Many Headed Monster’, a performance lecture pack which gave many examples of contemporary and site-based performance, I decided my best approach was to look at a wide range of contemporary performances and how they represent the contemporary darkroom. I considered Revelation in a Dark Room by Martha Jurksaitis, in which her piece is “situated in a photographic darkroom” (Jurksaitis, 2012), in which the “audience were invited in while the red darkroom safelight was on” (Jurksaitis, 2012). I also studied Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s Blownup, which encourages the audience to “enter the darkroom as [they] expose the very private world of photography” (Metro-Boulot-Dodo, n.d.). Both consider the darkroom as a performance setting. The idea of physical darkness is seen in the Crispin Spaeth Dance Group’s Dark Room, which is performed “in a lightless room for a small audience” (Novek, 2006) and The Dark Room by the Black Swan State Theatre Company sees the darkroom as a “dark and dangerous territory” (Black Swan State Theatre Company, 2009). Furthermore, within the theatre industry more widely, I found many examples of the idea of the dark room as a “‘creative place for imagination’ – much like a theatre” (Spontaneous, 2013), a space of creative potential, with many programmes for experimental, untested material and workshop development called ‘Dark Room’, hosted as widely as Battersea Arts Centre, the Cleveland Public Theatre, the New Life Theatre Project and the Roundhouse. Overall, this research provided examples of the dark room within the overall scheme of contemporary performance, as well as where photography and its surrounding aesthetic is used within performance. From this research, I decided to use many similar trappings of the photographic darkroom to those used in the pieces I researched, such as the red photographic safelight, chemical trays and photographs hanging to dry. I also decided to explore the idea of the photograph as a creative space within itself, and how it might simultaneously be the beginning, middle and end of a creative process as well as a documentary one, and decided to engage audience members in a collaborative idea-creation process by asking how they thought a photograph could be each of those three stages, and what they thought a photograph might be.

My final performance saw a traditional image of the photographic darkroom established, with a dark, quiet and isolated space set up as the photographer’s laboratory. The use of the red light established a familiar image, as well as trays and bottles of chemicals, and various safety equipment, including lab coats, which created a recognisable impression of the photographer’s darkroom. The series of photographs being developed contained a narrative within each individual photograph, and also told the story of the West Common racecourse, where all of the photographs combined created a series of images documenting the course. Each image was taken 201 paces precisely after the last, where the number 201 represents the number of metres in a furlong, a measurement of racecourses. The cameras used as props were from the 1950s and 60s, establishing an aesthetic true to that of the final years of the Grandstand’s racing activity. The audience member was encouraged to develop the photograph, to contribute themselves to the narrative of the Grandstand and the course and to engage them in the photographic process being questioned; and they were also asked to brainstorm ideas surrounding how a photograph could be a beginning, middle and photo-finish ending. The fact that the photo-finish was used for the first and last time at the Lincoln racecourse in its final year, 1964, was used as a final point to tie together the strands of the performance relating to photography and those relating to the Grandstand and its heritage, to create a single, rational overall point that the audience member could take away.

: General shot of the darkroom

: A photograph hanging to dry

: A general view

: Bottles of chemicals

: General equipment

: General equipment

: 1950s/60s cameras

Through my engagement with the theoretical concepts underpinning site-specific performance, I have been led to challenge some of my understandings of performance more generally. Site-specific performance has shown that to perform is not always to act, and that any site can constitute a performance space. It has led me to approach work as an artist rather than as an actor, considering details beyond simply the content or delivery of the performance, such as the challenges and constraints of site and details such as its historical and social background which the performer might not consider in more traditional forms of performance. The final performance was a five-to-ten minute one-to-one experience within the darkroom space, in which I represented the photographer and the audience member represented the photographic assistant. I feel that the overall aesthetic of the piece was impressive, with key trappings of the darkroom such as trays, the red safelight and photographs hanging to dry, establishing a convincing aesthetic of the darkroom. The use of the process of developing a photograph as an activity for each audience member was a strong method for establishing a comfortable environment within the one-to-one piece, which might otherwise be daunting, and led to the audience members being open and willing to engage with the activities and ideas within the piece. However, while the narrative was designed to be a natural conversation rather than a staged script, I feel the narrative could have mean further structured to lead to a more standard experience across all the individual interactions and with more time to develop the piece I would restructure the narrative, rehearse it further and ensure the semi-improvisational dialogue had a very solid groundwork to prevent the narrative from feeling under-rehearsed or awkward. Throughout the three hours of performance, the piece was undertaken a total of eight times with eight individuals. This was slightly disappointing as, even with a full ten minutes for each piece, I could have catered for a total of eighteen different audience interactions. This weakness I feel was due to a combination of the lack of forced interaction – audience members could choose whether or not, and indeed when, to enter the space – and also the fact that audience members entering the space would take a good amount of exploration time, taking in the various other pieces which were more instantly present than Photofinished before discovering my space. While the time they take for exploration is difficult to control, if I were to develop the piece I might take bookings for slots prior to the event to maximise the number of potential experiences of my piece. If I were to perform the piece again, I would maintain the visual aesthetic, including performing in the same space within the Grandstand site, but would restructure the narrative to make the overall ideas of the piece more apparent to audience members experiencing the piece for the first time.

Word count: 3,048.

Works cited

Black Swan State Theatre Company (2009) The Dark Room by Angela Betzien. [online] Perth, Australia: Black Swan State Theatre Company. Available from: https://www.bsstc.com.au/about/archive/2009/the-dark-room/ [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Jurksaitis, M. (2012) My live film performance ‘Revelation in a Dark Room’.[online] Available from: http://cherrykino.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/revelation-in-dark-room.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lorimer, H. (2006) Herding memories of humans and animals, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 497-518.

Metro-Boulot-Dodo (n.d.) Blownup. [online] Leicester: Metro-Boulot-Dodo. Available from: http://www.metro-boulot-dodo.com/blownup.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available at: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Novek, Y. (2006) Dark Room. [online] Available from: http://www.yannnovak.com/works/score/dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Simpson, P. (2012) Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance. Cultural Geographies, 19(4) 423-445.

Spontaneous, C. (2013) A Union of Disciplines and Minds: The Body Narratives Collective and Their Upcoming Production, Dark Room. [online] Vancouver, Canada: Vandocument. Available from: http://vandocument.com/2013/11/a-union-of-disciplines-and-minds-the-body-narratives-collective-and-their-upcoming-production-dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Vanhaesebrouck, K. (2009) Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination. Visual Studies, 24(2) 97-106.

Wilkie, F. (2002) Archaeologies of memory: Mike Pearson’s Bubbling Tom. Unpublished paper.

Wilkie, F. (2008) The production of “site”: Site-Specific Theatre. In: Holdsworth, N. and Luckhurt, M. (eds.) Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.

‘Under the red light’: Contemporary artistic impressions of the photographic darkroom

Posted on March 25, 2014 by Linford Leslie Butler

The popular image of the photographer’s darkroom, from William Bock’s installation of Dark Room.
Morgan, M. [Performance still from Dark Room by William Bock] 2013 [image online] Available at: http://williambock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Darkroomlr.jpg. [Accessed 25 March 2014].

In considering the role of photography in performance and in developing my own piece of site-specific work informed by the mediation of photography between subject and site, the photographic darkroom has become a space and an image of great interest. My site-specific performance brings the audience into the photographer’s darkroom, where they are asked to engage and interact with the processes and mechanics of the setting, and consider the way in which the development and subsequent forgetting of a photograph could be seen as an extended metaphor for the construction and gradual disuse of the Grandstand site. The photographic darkroom, for me, has become a space which is central to my performance. Therefore, I was interested to conduct research into other contemporary and (ideally) performance-based impressions of the photographic darkroom, which might prove useful in the continued development of my site-specific performance.

The image of the darkroom appears to be a readily-used one. My research into performances which engaged with the idea of the photographic darkroom led me to understand the varying understandings of the darkroom’s function and use within a wider theatrical context, and has led me to identify four different ways in which the darkroom is used within theatrical art:

The darkroom as a performance setting – the darkroom in its literal sense and form;
The ‘dark room’ – a place of little or no light, or a place of dark, gothic potential;
The darkroom as a catalyst space of creative potential and experimentation; and,
The darkroom as a static archival space.

Considering the research I have conducted in the course of writing this article, the performance artworks I have considered can roughly be filed into one of the four above categories.

Many performance works which concern themselves with photography and the photographic form use the darkroom as a ready-made image, setting narratives about photography within the darkroom to manage expectations and to play on the ever-present thematic link between the two. Martha Jurksaitis locates her performance Revelation in a Dark Room as “situated in a photographic darkroom” (Jurksaitis, 2012), with the image of the red light used as a shorthand for ‘photography’ as a theme but also as a lighting technique: “The audience were invited in while the red darkroom safelight was on, but once they were all in and the door closed, the light went off and the piece began in pitch blackness.” (Jurksaitis, 2012). Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s 2002-3 production, Blownup, focusses on the narrative between photographer and muse, inviting the audience to “enter the darkroom as [they] expose the very private world of photography” (Metro-Boulot-Dodo, n.d.). Similarly to Jurksaitis, the company present the darkroom as many would expect to see it, bathed in a red light or lit by camera flash (Metro-Boulot-Dodo, 2008). The performance also suggests the surrounding scientific narrative of the darkroom space, playing on the dualistic photographic and narratological meetings of the word ‘development’ in marketing material: “In the dark room developments occur” (BBC Lincolnshire, 2002); a “chemical soaked fusion” (Metro-Boulot-Dodo, n.d.).

The darkroom is often used in its literal sense: a ‘dark room’, a space with little or no natural or artificial light, and the distinction that this impression engages with, between light and darkness, often leads a darkly gothic surrounding narrative. The Crispin Spaeth Dance Group’s performance, Dark Room, is performed “in a lightless room for a small audience equipped with night vision apparatus” (Novek, 2006), and the night-vision goggles – an almost exclusively militaristic gadget – introduce an element of violence into the concept of the darkened space. The Dark Room, by the Black Swan State Theatre Company and written by Angela Betzien, aligns the title with the “dark and dangerous territory” (Black Swan State Theatre Company, 2009) of the play’s setting, and the space itself appears to disturbingly isolate and separate the characters and their stories, even when in close proximity to one another: “the three narratives end up in the same room, all in their own time and space” (Locke, 2009). The claustrophobia and lightlessness of the darkroom is emphasised to varying effect, and the image of the darkroom is used to infer gothic ideas of blackness, darkness or isolation.

Within the wider theatre industry, the darkroom space is often emphasised as one of creative potential and experimentation, and as a catalyst for creative development. Body Narrative’s Collective’s choreographer, Julia Carr, identifies how “a dark room to her was always a ‘creative place for imagination’ – much like a theatre” (Spontaneous, 2013). The wide number of open-space programmes named ‘Dark Room’, which provide a stage for new and untested material, are a testament to the understanding within the theatrical world of the darkroom as a space for breakthrough and development. Battersea Arts Centre’s The Darkroom is “a retreat/laboratory environment” (Jubb, n.d.) within “a unique development programme for devising theatre companies” (Jubb, n.d.). Similarly, The Dark Room at the Cleveland Public Theatre is marketed as “a venue to workshop plays, novels, poems, or any other written work in a supportive, yet critical environment” (Cleveland Public Theatre, 2014) and as “a place where writers take center [sic] stage and their work has a chance to grow” (Cleveland Public Theatre, 2014). The idea of a “safe space for artists from all different fields, all different genres, all different styles” (New Light Theatre Project, 2013) is common to many programmes presenting new work across the world, as is the idea of work “developed in the Darkroom” (New Light Theatre Project, 2013). Within Body Narratives Collective’s work Dark Room: The Realm of Symbols, Science and Memories, the theatre black box and the dark room are aligned as “blank canvasses and magic is created, light is added” (Sumar, 2013), in which the theatre is used as “photographic studio and dark room to reveal the process of creating photographic images as a performance medium” (Roundhouse, n.d.). Martha Jurksaitis’ work also touches on the idea of creative potential in noting that “the French word for film developer is ‘revelateur’, which means something that reveals” (Jurksaitis, 2012), suggesting the darkroom’s potentiality to reveal ideas or breakthroughs to the creator.

Body Narratives Collective’s art is informed by and creates photography, such as this image of the light traces of their dance.
Body Narratives Collective [Production still from Dark Room: The Realm of Symbols, Science and Memories] 2013 [image online] Available athttp://vanvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Light-Dance-2.jpg. [Accessed 24 March 2014].

Finally, the idea of the darkroom as a space almost frozen in time or held in stasis is another that some pieces of contemporary performance confront. Ellen Carr’s The Darkroom is the story of “an old man whose only way of remembering things is to write them down and order them in his shed, the darkroom” (Hutton, 2012 – quotation reformatted), in which the darkroom becomes an archival space of memory outside the realm of time. Similarly, Body Narratives Collective approaches the darkroom as a temporally static space, asking the audience: “what if there was no beginning and no end; no linear progression through time.” (Body Narratives Collective, 2013). It approaches performance like a photograph, foregoing ideas of linear narrative and focussing on the static and the captured, and going so far to create photographs as part of their performance: “These long exposure photographs reveal the traces that remain from light dance pathways. Is this how you remember the dance? Is this what you saw?” (Body Narratives Collective, 2012).

Within contemporary theatre, the image of the darkroom stands for many interlinked but distinct ideas. Ideas of darkness, gothic potential, creative potential, experimentation, catalyst, archival and staticness are all bound up within the familiar, red-tinted aesthetic of the photographer’s hideaway. The widespread use of the darkroom as an image and title within theatre betrays a strongly-rooted thematic link between the theatre space and the photography space, between the theatre and the darkroom. Performance and photography share a number of themes which cannot be dismissed as entirely disaffective of one another. Creative forms influence and inform one another, and the theatre-photography link is no different. The black box theatre is the actor’s darkroom, and the photographic lab is the photographer’s stage.

Performances cited

Black Swan State Theatre Company/Angela Betzien: The Dark Room (2009)

Body Narratives Collective: Dark Room (2012-13)

Crispin Spaeth Dance Group: Dark Room (2006)

Martha Jurksaitis: Revelation in a Dark Room (2012)

Metro-Boulot-Dodo: Blownup (2002-3)

William Bock: Dark Room (2013)

References

BBC Lincolnshire (2002) BBC – Lincolnshire Stage – On stage. [online] Lincoln: BBC. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/lincolnshire/stage/theatre_whats_on.shtml [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Body Narratives Collective (2013) Performance Projects. [online] Vancouver, Canada: Body Narratives Collective. Available from: http://bodynarrativescollective.wordpress.com/projects/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Body Narratives Collective (2012) Dark Room (Preview). [online video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enxD4TkBXHU [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Body Narratives Collective (2013) Dark Room Promo Sept 2013. [online video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvK3tMwsEDg [ Accessed 22 March 2014].

Body Narratives Collective [Production still from Dark Room: The Realm of Symbols, Science and Memories] 2013 [image online] Available from: http://vanvantage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Light-Dance-2.jpg. [Accessed 24 March 2014].

Cleveland Public Theatre (2014) The Dark Room. [online] Cleveland, U.S.A.: Cleveland Public Theatre. Available from: http://www.cptonline.org/theater-show.php?id=44 [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Hutton, D. (2012) Theatre Reviews: “The Darkroom” by Ellen Carr. [online] Available from: http://dan-hutton.co.uk/2012/08/18/the-darkroom-by-ellen-carr/ [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Jubb, D. (n.d.) What is the Darkroom? [online] London: Battersea Arts Centre. Available from: http://www.darkroomtheatre.com/What-is-Darkroom/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Jurksaitis, M. (2012) My live film performance ‘Revelation in a Dark Room’. [online] Available from: http://cherrykino.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/revelation-in-dark-room.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Locke, A. (2009) Review: The Dark Room | Black Swan State Theatre Company. [online] Perth, Australia: Australian Stage. Available from: http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/perth/the-dark-room–black-swan-state-theatre-company-2518.html [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo (n.d.) Blownup. [online] Leicester: Metro-Boulot-Dodo. Available from: http://www.metro-boulot-dodo.com/blownup.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available from: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo (2008) Blownup promo. [online video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epxTcZ25lF0 [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Morgan, M. [Performance still from Dark Room by William Bock] 2013 [image online] Available from: http://williambock.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Darkroomlr.jpg. [Accessed 25 March 2014].

New Light Theatre Project (2013) Darkroom Series. [online] Available from: http://newlighttheaterproject.com/darkroom-series [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Novek, Y. (2006) Dark Room. [online] Available from: http://www.yannnovak.com/works/score/dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Roundhouse (n.d.) Dark Room. [online] Vancouver, Canada: Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. Available from: http://roundhouse.ca/ai1ec_event/dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Sumar, F. (2013) E=MC2 IN THE DARK ROOM. [online] Vancouver, Canada: Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre. Available from: http://roundhouse.ca/emc2-dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

The Dying Breath of a Moment in Time

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Linford Leslie Butler

The following is a slightly edited transcript of a narrative I wrote at the Grandstand on 21/03/2014, for use within my performance. I include it here for documentary purposes.

There are still people who believe that, if you’re caught in a photograph, a small part of you is taken, captured within a frame. Photographs as moments, held in stasis, frozen. When you think of it that way, the photographer – or photographic assistant – wields a lot of power. Behind a lens, with the godlike choice of whether to destroy a moment, to crush it and push it and flatten it into a single, static negative. Maybe that’s not destruction. Maybe that’s creation. Either way, there’s a responsibility which comes with it that you have to take seriously.

Imagine the photograph doesn’t exist until an hour, or a day, or a week after you first press the shutter release. Imagine that moment is just trapped inside that light-sealed box – your camera – and the only way to set it free is to develop the film, and print the picture. But it isn’t the same thing as what you captured. In bringing the image into creation, you’ve destroyed what trace of the original moment remained, and the thing you have is a very different thing to the live moment you decided to encapture.

That’s responsibility.

You’ll see on the table in front of you that there are some pieces of photographic paper. Take one of them. The first tray you’ll see on the table in front of you is filled with developer, a type of chemical which will develop the image. You need to place the paper, face down, into the chemical.

Imagine someone, a photographer, at a race. The finish line, lining up the perfect shot. And it needs to be perfect, because that photograph will decide the race, will win or lose bets, will make or ruin a day, will bolster or destroy marriages. And then imagine, just a few years later and on the same spot, with the same photographer, but he’s photographing bodies now. The civilian war dead, brought to this site, earmarked as a mortuary.

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Time shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Frozen, static within photographs, we will remember them.”

Take the photograph out of the developer, but keep it face down. The second tray is filled with a chemical which will stop the developing process. Just do the same as last time. Pop it in.

Imagine the photograph as being this building. The idea, captured, is finally developed. The act of creation destroys the original idea – it’s no longer needed. The thing is constructed, the bricks and mortar assembled; an act of creation, like the printing of a photograph. And then it’s put somewhere, and is forgotten, and it slowly fades until just the blurs of faces and colours can be made out, if you look hard, as traces of its history. Frozen and forgotten in time, this place is a photograph of a building, still kept in the album but barely looked at. Just there.

Take the photograph out of that tray, then. Swap it into the third bath, which will fix the image, permanently capturing it within the paper. It won’t take long.

64, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, 54, 53, 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Done. Take it out, quickly, and pop it into the water. Just a quick dip. And then pass it here.

A photograph is an end. The final product of a process; the end of an exposure; the dying breath of a moment in time which won’t ever be experienced again. It’s a final moment, and it’s fixed. And you’ve done an excellent job with this ending. You’ve developed your photo finish.

I’ll peg it up to dry.

Notes on the transcript

The narrative itself came out of a process of exploration of the role of the photograph within traditional and experimental forms of theatre, and through continuing discussion with Michael Pinchbeck and also classmates about the ideas surrounding photography and how the idea of the creation and development of the photograph could become an extended metaphor for the development and subsequent decline of the Grandstand.

The idea of the ‘photo finish’ came out of an informal pitch made to the class and to Michael and Conan Lawrence (Pinchbeck and Lawrence, 2014) some time into the process. With the history of the Grandstand being so bound up in its original purpose, linked to the racecourse, the idea of the photograph’s purpose within horse racing – the photo finish, captured to establish a winner – seemed a logical conclusion.

The lines of poetry in the middle of the narrative are taken from the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ from Laurence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen (Binyon, n.d.). It is a re-imagining of a standard remembrance poem hashed out about the war dead every year which links the idea of freezing or holding part of a person in stasis within the photograph to the large-scale civilian casualties seen during the war, linking to the Grandstand’s planned purpose during the war as a mortuary.

Throughout I attempt to use photographic terminology. For instance: capture, negative, develop, print, exposure.

The countdown towards the end of the piece not only provides a temporal structure, a measure of time that suggests both an inevitable journey towards an ending point, and the sort of measurement of time that one would use within the process of developing a photograph. The countdown begins at 64, a reference to 1964 as the year in which racing at the Grandstand ceased and it became static and fixed.

References:

Binyon, L. (n.d.) The Ode. [online] Sydney: The Australian Army. Available from: http://www.army.gov.au/Our-history/Traditions/The-Ode [Accessed 21 March 2014].

Pinchbeck, M. and Lawrence, C. (2014) Site-specific performance pitches. [seminar] Site Specific Performance DRA2035M-1314, University of Lincoln, 6 March.

A Process of Discovery: photographs from our first exploration of the site

Gallery

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Linford Leslie Butler

This gallery contains 16 photos.

Click on the images above for full-resolution versions and Harvard-referenced citations. Further to my previous blog post, entitled “Considering Image: Performativity, Aesthetic and the Documentary Process“, which discussed in some detail some varying theories on the ways in which photography … Continue reading →

Considering Image: Performativity, Aesthetic and the Documentary Process

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Linford Leslie Butler

Vason, M. (2013) ‘Collaborative Actions #1’. [electronic print] Available at: http://lncn.eu/dkx4 [Accessed 28 February 2014].

“On top of these possible points of convergence, performing arts and photography share a conceptual apparatus in which terms such as theatricality, performativity, representation and visuality [sic] function as important points of reference.”(Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 98)

For the purposes of this article, ‘photography‘ should be understood as relating to performance photography solely, rather than photographic practise in general.

The capturing of a photographic image during the documentary research process involved in site-specific performance is an interesting process to study. Since our first outings to the Grandstand, our experience of the site has been largely mediated by the confines of the camera viewfinder or screen, our interaction with the site framed through the production of visual images. With the production of aesthetic documents being such a central part to the interactive process between student and site, it is interesting to consider the ways in which photography and performance intersect and interact with one another.

At what point does the photographic image irrevocably fuse with the performative act or site? Karel Vanhaesebrouck’s study into the use of photography in performance identifies how “photography has always held a tense relation with theatre practice, […] contaminating each other in a permanent and systematic way” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97) and how photography can “serve as dramaturgical matière brute, or it can be utterly performative in its own right” (Ibid., 98).

There is a strong academic argument behind the idea that performance photography and the performance act are interwoven, that “theatre photography is an integral part of the signification process which is at the very heart of performance studies” (Ibid., 97). The performance act relies on a system of signification, utilised by the performer to translate meaning to the audience, a term taken very loosely here not to mean just the live spectator of a performance, but also the viewer of a photograph or the inhabitant of a performance site. To this extent, the peritextual documentation surrounding this performance – the flyer, trailer, programme, newspaper interviews, reviews and, naturally, the production photography – can only be considered part of the signification process of that piece of performance art, due to the fact that each of them are involved in giving meaning to an audience about that performance. To this extent, performance and photography cannot be isolated as separate elements; instead, the two make up a dialogic activity, in which “performance – even if it is a performance in the strict sense of the word, namely that of performance art – is mediated by means of film or photography” (Ibid., 104). Joseph Beuys’ performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) was made up not only by the performance itself, but also the extra-performative elements – “the preparations, the flight to New York and back, transport in an ambulance from the airport to the gallery” (Ibid, 104) – which were all documented through photography, a clear example of the way in which performance and photography interact at a basic level to create one piece of work. The photographic documentation of a performance can be seen as an equally valid part as the set, costume or actor, in itself valuable to the signification process of that piece of work.

However, one can also see photography as being in itself a performance act. If we agree that “one cannot consider theatre photography […] to be a direct residue of an event that disappeared from the moment it was acted out” (Ibid., 100) then we accept the fact that performance photography can never truly capture the performance in all its detail; photography fails to capture the complex temporal and spacial rhythms of not only the performance, but also the interactions of audience and passers-by with the performance, technical elements and the site itself. Paul Simpson’s study of the space-times of street performance identifies this, stating that “an image or series of images cannot necessarily fully capture or evoke such rhythms and their qualities.” (Simpson, 2012, 425) Therefore, images of performance have to be to some extent considered to be their own sub-form, trapped between independence from and reliance upon the performance act. Melissa Heer calls this separate form the “photo-performance project” (Heer, 2012, 538). The performance photograph can be seen as interdependent upon the performance itself, but cannot present unadulteratedly the exact experience of that performance: the performance captured in the image becomes something distinct and different, through the act of capturing and processing the image. The photograph is in itself a performance site, a stage for the “continuous play between illusionistic realism and self-reflexive artifice” (Ibid., 538) of performance. Manuel Vason, whose photography seeks to “bridge photography and performance” (Vason, n.d.) is a notable artist within this area, his work “largely transcending the exclusively documentary” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 105), establishing a form which is “photography as an autonomous performative practice” (Ibid., 105). When viewed in such a manner, the performance or site captured within a photographic image can be seen as its own distinct space, and certainly as a separate artistic enterprise, rather than just an aesthetic representation of the original thing photographed.

Photography, therefore, can be seen in two lights with relation to photography:

As an unisolable part of the performance act, part of a continuous process of dialogue whereby the performance act informs the photographic image, and vice-versa; or,
As a separate ‘space’ or ‘site’ from the live performance, unable to fully recreate the true conditions of the live act, and as such a separate or distinct space.

To relate these two conclusions to site-specific performance practice, the images produced during the exploratory developmental process of the work can be seen as either an intrinsic part of that work, in which the two are so bound up that the whole piece can never be captured by an audience member without an intimate knowledge of both the final work and its photographic contextual documentation; or as separate spaces or sites altogether, the site and site-specific performance within the image fundamentally different to the live art experience.

Having had our experience of the Grandstand so far largely documented and mediated through the use of photography, I find it personally interesting and enlightening to consider the way in which, when taking those photographs, we are engaging in a process of creation and documentation which is involved directly in the cycle of signification along with the site itself and the work we create there. I have specifically avoided uploading images I have taken of the Grandstand within this article, as I feel their inclusion may in some ways divert attention from the complex argument being made here. However, in creating images of the site throughout the rest of the process, it is important that we each consider the artistic responsibility we have to the site and to our work when creating photographs which will ultimately inform and affect what we do.

References:

Heer, M. (2012) Restaging Time: Photography, Performance and Anachronism in Shadi Ghadirian’s Qajar Series. Iranian Studies, 45(4) 537-548.

Simpson, P. (2012) Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance. Cultural Geographies, 19(4) 423-445.

Vanhaesebrouck, K. (2009) Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination. Visual Studies, 24(2) 97-106.

Vason, M. (n.d.) Artist Statement – Manuel Vason. [online] London: Manuel Vason Studio. Available from: http://www.manuelvason.com/artist-statement/ [Accessed 28 February 2014].

The Grandstand Project

A site specific performance at the Grandstand in Lincoln

Author Archives: Linford Leslie Butler