The main inspiration my group have taken for our site specific performance is from Wrights and Sites as they are the pioneers for Mis-guides. To help us to understand what a mis-guide is and to be able to construct our own we read their book A Sardine Street Box of Tricks which provides details into how to create your own guided tour. The influence for these type of performances stems from mythography “a series of approaches to space and place that attempts to reveal the multiple meanings in any site and to set the ideas, feelings, symbols and discourses of these places and their people in motion about each other” (2011, p.20). The aim of our performance is to allow our audience to experience new modes of interpreting our site and challenge the concepts of what art is. Crab Man and Signpost recommend spending time at the site exploring to begin to create the beginning ideas for performance “We allowed ourselves to be pulled by its atmospheres. We explored it with an exaggerated intensity. We examined the cracks in its concrete and the mould in its walls” (2011, p.13). This type of initial research allows the elements of performance to come directly from feelings and experiences within the site itself. They say that by re-visiting the site on different occasions will help to build up the performance through exploration “Each time changing a little more from exploration to a hybrid of searching and rehearsing together” (2011, p.17). However, they also add emphasis for the need to research externally about the sites history “Find out all you can about the history, the geology and the architecture of the street. Much of that finding out may be fairly conventional: online, in libraries. But don’t scorn the naff sources: check out the local book of ghosts and legends. Then there’s just being on the street and chatting” (2011, p.30). After spending time at our site my group researched more about the history of the Usher and James Usher by visiting local libraries and archives. We used information from the internet and also old newspapers to gather more information about the building and the artwork within it. The research we found helped us to develop ideas of informing the audience of the truths within the Usher but also to create our own stories about the space and the collections.
Our initial ideas were to create a tasked based performance, so we constructed a series of tasks and experimented with these at our site to discover which were most effective. By using the advice given in A Sardine Street Box of Tricks we were able to turn these tasks into a way of constructing our Mis-guide and engaging our audience through participation “Our audiences were challenged to respond to and enjoy the street: through offers and instructions, maps and burdens, gifts and libations” (2011, p.26). One of the recommendations from Crab Man and Signpost linked directly to one of our tasks, the idea of collecting lost and abandoned objects “We recommend that you collect some ‘relics’ of your street as hooks or snags upon your accelerating process” (2011, p.60). In their Mis-guide tour they carried a box of ‘relics’ around “The objects in our box were ordinary, everyday items. […] But we found that the way to present these was not as a collection of mundane things, but as the quotidian equivalents if the hundreds of ‘holy relics’ collected at Exeter Cathedral” (2011, p.63), this echoed our idea of creating our own collection that reflected the collections in the Usher.
Our time spent at the Usher exploring and experimenting in the space has allowed us to create an outlining ‘script’ of how we will present our performance “Over many walks as a duo and then, later, with our invited guests, we built up a proto-script of the street based upon factual, journalistic and associative events” (2011, p.20). We have decided that by including sensory experiences for the audience such as touching, tasting, smelling, will create a clearer engagement and lean away from a typical guided tour which we are not trying to recreate “All the senses: challenge the dominance of looking and listening on your tour” (2011, p.53). A problem we encountered when considering creating a Mis-guide we how we would be represented as people. Crab Man and Signpost offer useful advice for this enquiry “Don’t try to create characters that operate as if they are in a naturalistic drama. If you use characters then they should be walking symbols or stereotypes. Use costume in ways that don’t simply ‘dress’ a character – if you in a busy road then dress as a car, dress in paper and be litter” (2011, p.36). Using this information we have decided that we will manipulate our bodies into unique pieces of art created by ourselves, so that we will not be representing a ‘typical’ tour guide through appearance. Another challenge we faced was how to end our guide “Can you find an ending that is somewhere between the finality of a bow to applause and the conclusion of a conversation?” (2011, p.66). We have decided to inform the audience that the tour is over and then leave them to their own devices wherever they may be in the gallery.
Works Cited
Crab man and Signpost (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks. Blurb: Exeter.
Kimberley Gibson (2014) Yazmins Statue [Taken] 13th March.
Kimberley Gibson (2014) Interacting objects [Taken] 13th March.
Kimberley Gibson (2014) Mis-guided feet [Taken] 9th April.
Yazmin Chamberlain (2014) Abandoned Objects [Taken] 13th March.
Yazmin Chamberlain (2014) Kimberleys Statue [Taken] 13th March.