(Gibson, 2014)
Framing it. Site specific is a performance that relates to a place. ‘This term refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world.’ (Pavis, 1998, pp. 337-8) Once a place is chosen as the location for a site specific piece, a large amount of research is necessary to discover its history, events that took places there or the atmosphere that surrounds it. When the research is completed and an idea has developed, text can be used to create a performance. Pavis said ‘The insertion of a classical or modern text in this “found space” throws new light on it, gives it unsuspected power’ (1998, pp. 337-8) By doing this the audience will create a new idea of the place and create a different purpose for being there, ‘This new concept provides a new situation or enunciation … and gives the performance an unusual setting of great charm and power.’ (Pavis, 1998, pp. 337-8) ‘Site-specific performance can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remembering’ (Pearson, 2010, p.9) often people forget about a place and the history about it or even ignore the places they pass every day.
Our site specific performance took place at The Collection and Usher gallery. As this place is a museum and gallery we could use the history of the place and the art work to inspire us to create a Mis-guide. We decided to focus on the Usher gallery because it was an older building with more history and information behind it; it also used to be the home of James Usher. We believed we could use this information to pull in our audience as not many people think about it as an old residence, they just see it as an old art gallery. Another reason why we used the Usher is because we thought it would trigger memories in people’s lives which will help them become more engaged and interested. On our Mis-guide we start by having a picnic to get to know our participants, we then lead them on a guide telling them our truths and stories, engaging them in activities and giving them information to think about. The stories that we tell have been fully researched but leave our audience wondering whether they are true. The purpose of our Mis-guide is to help people engage with art galleries and try to change their perception on art. We believe the best way to do this is by doing a Mis-guide as it means we can research and create stories that help people see the Usher gallery in their own way. The performance takes place on the 8th and 10th of May between the times of 11am and 4pm. We did one performance that lasted about 20 minutes once on every hour. Limiting our audience to five at a time created a more personal feeling to the Mis-guide; it also helped us engage with everyone because we had a smaller group. During the time that we were not performing we used to gather audience members to sign up at the usher gallery reception and also advertised what we were doing.
Process.
The Place: Museums are often seen as quite boring places where they display art and paintings for people to visit and look at, but museum visitors are increasing and it is said that ‘people who go to the theatre, concerts, and movies are also museum visitors.’ (Bennett, 2012, p.5). Theatres and museums are becoming more similar as both are used for performance work and both have ‘increasingly become symbolic and actual neighbors, sharing the task of providing entertaining and educational experiences.’ (Bennett, 2012, p.3). Having performances in museums creates an exciting and entertaining element which draws people in and increases their number of visitors. ‘As components of the cultural landscape, theatres and museums alike play a role in creating and enacting place-based identity’ (Bennett, 2012, p.3) When a piece is performed it often teaches the audience about the place that it is being performed at but also opens their minds to a different interpretation to the place which helps them engage with a place that they didn’t necessarily think of or enjoy before.
‘Exhibitions are fundamentally theatrical; for they are how museums perform the knowledge they create.’ (Bennett, 2012, p.4) This is a way that museums perform. By the way pieces are exhibited they help create a linear narrative that tells a story to its visitors. Exhibitions will help trigger memories in people or expand their imagination, ‘today’s museum is a theatre, a memory palace, a stage for the enactment of other times and places, a space of transport, fantasy, dreams.’ (Bennett, 2012, p.4) Now that museums are using performances it helps to deliver education in an entertaining way, audience will be more willing and more enthusiastic about learning from a performance than from any other way of learning.
When creating a site specific performance in a museum, the place and artwork are used to influence the performance. Recreating or imagining the art in a different way helps to ‘demystify art, debunk the establishment that controlled museums, and make arts that could be performed by anyone.’ (Bennett, 2012, p. 6) A lot of people go to museums to see the art but are never interested in the story behind it, this is why performance is used to help people see the displayed art in a different way, the audience can encounter the past of the art through the performance which also brings it back to life.
Tasks: ‘What has happened? What survives after the event? How is it remembered and recalled?’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.57). Everyone was personally invited to participate in a variety of individual tasks that were emailed to us. The reasons for these tasks were to use different types of documentation to reflect on your feelings and experiences. Nigel Thrift said ‘[F]undamentally, much performance cannot be written down. It is unwritable and unsayable and has to be communicated in other registers.’ (Thrift 2003: 406-7, cited in Lavery, 2005, 231) Taking the task of capturing images of buildings that filled me with sadness, I took a camera and added a dull effect to capture my response to the task. As I was doing this task I noticed after the picture was taken there were graffiti damaging these buildings, not with colourful pictures but with words. Here are a couple of pictures that I took that stood out to me.
(Chamberlain, 2014)
(Chamberlain, 2014)
(Chamberlain, 2014)
This created the idea of ignorance, these buildings have had graffiti on them for a while but I had never noticed them, if I hadn’t noticed them then who else would have? Thinking about these buildings, the idea of ignorance and also creating a response I came up with some examples of tasks people could do themselves. Using tasks helps audiences think deeply about something that they may not necessarily think about unless they are faced with it. This brings out a creativity that can help create a starting point to a performance.
Influences: Moving on to creating an idea for my final piece I took inspiration from Blast Theory and SFMOMA Scavengers. I had really enjoyed doing tasks and thought that it would be a great way to engage the audience and make them feel as if they were participating instead of just spectating. SFMOMA Scavengers enticed their audience in with instructions that made them feel like they had a role to take on, ‘With only nine hours and the seven-by-seven-mile area of San Francisco at their disposal, teams are invited to register, pack their maps, and set out from SFMOMA in search of fame and glory.’ (2006). Doing a task based performance like this at the Usher gallery would help our audience engage and work with the given space. Blast Theory used a lot of technology in their pieces to connect with their audience, they said ‘with how games and new communication technologies are creating new hybrid social spaces in which the private and the public are intertwined’ (2007). Reading about this inspired me to use technology, for example Facebook, as a way of inviting our audience to our performance. When they arrive at the Usher gallery we could send them a text message containing their tasks and ask them to document as they liked. Using these two given methods, we can help our audience think about the hidden stories and histories of the usher gallery whilst keeping it contemporary and relatable. After deep thought about the idea of a task based performance, we decided that as a pair we wanted to be more involved with our audience, this is when the idea of a Mis-guide came to life.
(Gibson, 2014)
Start of a Mis-guide: After coming up with the idea of creating a Mis-guide we went back to the Usher gallery to get some inspiration. The idea of the Mis-guide is to lead people on a guide to open up their imagination giving them a different perspective on things and letting them create their own stories to the things they see along the way. By leading a Mis-guide we can ‘demystify traditional and established versions of history’ (Govan, 2007, p.137) meaning the audience will be engaging with the historical pieces but will be creating their own stories about them.
One idea that I had was to find pieces or places that could be relatable to audiences as I realised ‘that it was possible to have emotional attachments and a sense of belonging’ (Govan, 2007, p.138) to items that could possible bring back memories of the audience’s pasts. This helps ‘audiences to re-envision and re-imagine familiar places and recognise the multiplicity of meanings they carry’. (Govan, 2007, p.138) One thing that interested me was the idea of ‘the host and the ghost’ (Govan, 2007, p.139) which means negotiating contemporary ideas with historical ones, for example using historical facts, information or items but telling them in a contemporary way. The audience might have noticed the piece before but had never thought about it or was even interested in it. Giving them a contemporary narrative or re-imaging the historical information about the piece will help engage the audience. By creating a performance piece instead of an installation or exhibition it ‘encourages … participants and audiences to engage with particular locations, sites and settings’ (Govan, 2007, p.140).
The biggest influence of them all:‘From early on, we decided that our intervention should take the form of a “Mis-guide tour” that we would take people on our own version of a guided tour.’ (Crab Man and Signpost, 2007, p.16) The main influence we took for the Mis-guide was from Wrights and Sites, a company who create and lead their own misguides. To help us create a Mis-guide we were recommended a book called A Sardine Street Box of Tricks which was wrote by two members of Wrights and Sites who call themselves Crab Man and Signpost.
The first thing we looked into was the space and place we were dealing with. In A Sardine Street Box of Tricks, Crab Man and Sign post mention how they are approaching the space saying ‘you need to be hyper-sensitised to the flows, stories and textures of what is around you’ (2007, p.12). By going into the Usher and Collection and concentrating deeply on what was happening, the layout of the space and also the history of the place led us to start creating ideas for the beginning of our Mis-guide. They then led on to say ‘We allowed ourselves to be pulled by its atmospheres. We explored it with an exaggerated intensity. We examined the cracks in the concrete and the moulds on its walls. (2007, p.13) This helped us with gathering information and ideas because before we would just be doing the obvious and finding things which were noticeable. We then started a journey of finding not so obvious things like a hidden door for example and creating stories about it.
We started to think about mythogeography which ‘is a series of approaches to space and place that attempts to reveal the multiple meanings in any site.’ (Crab Man and Signpost, 2007, p.20) and ‘is all about finding and expressing the multiple meanings of any place’ (Crab man, 2007, p.21). The purpose of an art gallery like the Usher is to be used as a space to display art. Creating a Mis-guide would discover other meanings to the Usher gallery but still be linked to art as the purpose of the Mis-guide is to engage them or change their perception of art. I believe that the best way of doing this is with the Mis-guide because it ‘allows the thinker to ride the senses, and to use those senses as tentacles actively seeking out information.’ (Crab Man and Signpost, 2007, p.21). The audience will be able to process things whilst being actively engaged and have fun. If they were just left to their own I think that they wouldn’t be as engaged, having two Mis-guides leading will help them participate and activate their imaginations.
As our Mis-guide was very performance based we had to develop a script that we could follow. Crab Man and Signpost said ‘we built up a proto-script…based upon factual, journalistic and associative events’ (2007, p.20). We had gathered information from the archives, libraries and online, taking pieces from newspapers, books and articles as well as descriptions of paintings and art work. Adopting the different kind of research helped us with finding out more about the history and the architecture of the Usher gallery. We collected this information to create a script of truths that we could tell as our stories. One thing we wanted to do was collect information to create stories that would make our audience think about whether the stories were true. After running through the script several times, with and without audience members, it gave us a chance to improve our script, as Crab Man and Sign post said ‘once you glean a strong idea…experiment with ways of extending and developing it.’ (2007, p.53)
(Walsh, 2014)
Our audience is the main priority to lead a Mis-guide but they are also the most challenging part. We want our misguide to help engage people which means asking them things and getting them to do tasks along the way. We found that a lot of the time our audience felt quite nervous or were not quite sure about how to respond or felt quite embarrassed responding. Instead of taking this as a problem we took it as an opportunity not only to improvise but to also try a different method when repeating the Mis-guide with another audience. This is a technique we took from Crab Man and Signpost as they ‘attempted to respond to audience’s responses…both in the moment and by working these responses into later performances.’ (2007, p.27)
The last thing we thought about for our Mis-guide was the way we dressed. ‘Use costume in ways that don’t simply “dress” a character’ (Crab Man and Sign, 2007, p.36). We wanted something simple that stood out from everyone else but also made us approachable. Another thing we had to think about was thinking of a costume that would have a meaning. As we were located at an art gallery we came up with the idea of dressing as a painting, but I was drawn to a wall in one of the galleries. This wall was a simple floor to ceiling pattern of stripes. First a black and white stripe that merged into a yellow in white stripe that finally merged into a yellow and black stripe. We decided that we would become the stripes so we brought plain white t-shirts and painted on the stripes, myself being the yellow and white stripes whilst my partner was the black and white stripes.
(Chamberlain, 2014)
It all comes to an end.
So the performance is over, what an experience. During the two days we battled through some unexpected conditions. On the both days, we had very small audiences. We had limited our audience to Five members at a time but on both days we were lacking this, so during the time that we were not performing we found ourselves searching for our audience. When we had our audience we were quite surprised at how much people were willing to engage whether it was with us or whether it was the just following because they were intrigued. When this didn’t happen we had to think on our feet and we found that one of our strengths was the ability to improvise and make it flow, this helped the audience with thinking about their own ideas from our examples. At one point during our second day we couldn’t find an audience, we decided that the best thing to do would be to do parts of the Mis-guide in the rooms that were occupied by people. By doing this we found that people became interested and once we interacted with them they were willing to hear what we had to say. One problem we faced was that one audience member didn’t want to engaged in anything and just wanted to listen. At first this confused us a little bit but I soon realised that we could learn from this and that not everyone would want to participate physically. From this it made me think of alternatives that we could use for next time for example instead of making them do something physically we could talk to the person and get their reflections to our piece that way. One part of the Mis-guide that I thought was effective was when our audience left their tags tied to the staircase with their replies of what they wanted to tell someone if they were on their death bed. The reason this was effective was because they stayed there for the two days that we performed creating our own art of words unspoken but also because the people that passed them and read them only saw an answer and could create the question themselves.
The main problem we had was that on both days it rained a lot. Our Mis-guide started outside with a picnic but on one of our time slots the weather took a turn for the worst and started raining quite heavily. At this point I had to decide whether to stop what I was doing and get everyone inside to carry on or to just carry on outside and go with it. I realised that the rain did effect our performance but I decided to carry on outside until that part of the action was finished, this meant our audience also had to stay outside. Luckily the audience at that point decided to stay with us and carry on in the rain which ended up with everyone being drenched from head to toe. Looking back at that performance I think the rain was a brilliant effect to the performance, it made it playful as everyone ran inside and giggled at how drenched everyone was. In the end I took these problems not as negative barriers blocking the way but as opportunities to try something new and create something fun.
(Chamberlain, 2014)
Work Cited:
Bennett, S. (2012) Theatre and Museums (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan).
Blast Theory (2007) Rider Spoke. London: The Barbican Centre [Online] Available from: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/rider-spoke/#Accessed: 7th March 2014.
Chamberlain, Y. (2014) Cheer up [Taken] 13th February.
Chamberlain, Y. (2014) Hi [Taken] 13th February.
Chamberlain, Y. (2014) Peace [Taken] 13th February.
Chamberlain, Y. (2014) Stripes [Taken] 10th May.
Chamberlain, Y. (2014) Tags [Taken] 10th May.
Crab Man and Signpost (2011) A Sardine Street Box of Tricks (Exeter: Blurb)
Gibson. K. (2014) Interacting objects [Taken] 13th March.
Gibson, K. (2014) Mis-guided feet [Taken] 9th April.
Govan, E and Nicholson, H and Normington, K (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices (Oxon: Routledge)
Pavis, P. (1998) Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)
Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific performance (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan).
Pearson, M and Shanks M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology (London Routledge)
SFMOMA (2006) SFMOMA Scavengers. San Francisco:SFMOMA. [Online] Available from: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/270Accessed: 4th March 2014.
Walsh, A (2014) Misguide 2 [Taken] 10th May.