“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]

The idea of waiting is one that seems so normal as we do it all the time. However, in our performance we are wanting to make strange of the idea. Make people really think about the idea of waiting and the passing of time and what this does to them and the environment around them. After doing audience research, we have discovered many normal and rational reasons for waiting. Its is a normal thing that people do on a daily basis. So how does this become a performance?

In Marc Auge’s ‘Prologue of non-places’ he describes the behaviour of a man and what he does as he arrives at an airport and leaves on the plane. These are normal behaviours that people do all of the time. However, he describes them in a way that becomes a performance in itself. Everyday life, no matter how mundane and boring can become a form of performance. These activities can easily become a performance and this is something we want to incorporate into ‘The Waiting Room’.

For example, when someone is comforting another person it would not necessarily be seen as a performance, but within our performance it will be. Also,in Auge’s chapter he talks about the man waiting, “he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events” (1995, p.2-3). In a sense, this is what our audience/participants are doing throughout the performance. They are waiting for the performance to unfold so they can stop waiting.

References-

Auge, Marc, 1995, Non Places- An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York, Verso.

Upon deciding on the waiting room formation for our performance, we have decided that we want to control the audience by using envelopes. We really like this idea but have decided to explore other ways of doing this. In Rotazaza’s work ‘Etiquette’ they used headphones and seated the participants in pairs in a coffee shop. Each participant would have different instructions in their headphones which would tell them when and how to interact with the other audience member.This results in the participants creating a meeting between them that they have no control over. Rotazaza describe the experience as “expos[ing] human communication at both its rawest and most delicate” (Rotazaza, 2007)

Another performance where they use headphones as a way of controlling participants is ‘Radio Ballet’ by LIGNA. This performance consisted of audience members turning up to a location wearing headphones that were tuned to a certain radio station. Instructions were then given over the radio and the audience members completed the movements. This once again takes audience participation to a new level. The audience become the performers rather than an audience in the most basic form.

We really like the idea of using headphones and this is something that we would be able to achieve at the grandstand, but this would mean having an audience of only 2 people or just 2 channels of instructions. The minimum audience we are looking at having is eight all with different instructions as this is how many people we currently need to make our piece effective. The concept of the instructions will work in the same way but for our piece the envelopes will be better suited.

References-

Rotazaza,2007. Rotatzaza’s Etiquette [online]  Avaliable at: <http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/ETQ_press_release.pdf> (Accessed 30 March 2014)

Radiodispertion, 2008. Radio Ballet Leipzig Main Station Part 1 [online], Avaliable at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3pfa5QNZI> (Accessed 30 March 2014)