The significance of place is vital when performing a Site Specific piece. The chapter Between Routes and Roots in Making a Performance highlights the importance of special relationships and their effects on actor-audience exchanges. Spending time in the location provides “starting point for devising a performance” (Cook, 2004) my group have spent a lot of time exploring the space and considering the ways in which we can use it to engage the audience with the artwork in it. To create emotional attachments we are seeking to find ways for the audiences to re-envision familiar places, by re-telling stories that relate to the space that they can make personal to themselves.
This can be linked to an aspect of performance described by Pearson and Shanks as ‘the host and the ghost’ (2001). This is the theory that performance spaces are “haunted by the ghosts of those who have used them in the past” (Govan et al, 2007, p.139) by considering this, it is possible to link the historical to the contemporary. Presenting a performance as a walk or journey can be used to “cast new light on how places are perceived and understood” (Govan et al, 2007, p.140). This activity of walking is suggested by Michel de Certeau to have the potential to “disrupt the regulatory system of ‘place’ and transform it into a more optimistic and counter-cultural ‘space’” (Govan et al, 2007, p.141) that by using the activity of walking in a performance can encourage the audience to find new meanings within the space.
Artists that have taken this activity of walking to create a performance are Walk and Squawk. Their reasons for using this concept are “By examining how changing patterns of movement can alter attitudes and perceptions; how people make their own paths; and the influences of culture, geography, language, economics and love, The Walking Project asks how and why people’s paths cross and how taking a different path might alter a life” (www.walksquawk.org). My groups aim is to encourage our audience to develop personal connections with artwork with a walking performance led by ourselves. This will be incorporated with story-telling and tasks which will make the audience question similar themes to those of Walk and Squawk.
Works Cited
Govan, E. Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. Routledge: Oxon.
Walk and Squawk (2014) Flavor [Taken] Unknown.