Category: People

Time to develop ideas

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / / Development, Experimentation, People, Public Responses

After discussion we decided that we wanted to use another space in The Collection, the education room that looks out onto the Café. This was because we thought it would be good as it was an example of how the two buildings could be together yet they are apart. It was also another thing to do with our research and how children mimic what they see in society and in cafes. Children notice things that adults don’t. We decided it would be a good idea for some members of the group to have a tea party up in the education room, acting like children and using a child’s tea set. We experimented trying out lots of things whilst the rest of the group sat in the café and suggested to us afterwards what worked and didn’t work. Throughout this process we felt it was more natural for us to start as children but by the end become business women who were professional. Whilst we were doing this in the education room, the rest of the group aimed to create an exhibition down in the café and present all of the things that people might not notice but we had noticed over the past few weeks. After experimenting with this exhibition idea it was clear that it needed to be pushed even further as it just wasn’t working but again we had to take into account that it was still as business…
This was beginning to not seem a great place after all.

We showed our performance ideas so far to the rest of the groups and received great feedback for the tea party in the education room and got told things such as

“once you watch your intrigued that you need to keep watching to see what happens next”
“it’s a really good idea”
“it works well, maybe make more of it”

This was really positive for us as we wasn’t sure if it was going to make an impact or not. Most importantly we wasn’t sure if we could be seen clearly enough but it seemed to work ok, this wasn’t the same for the café however as the idea we hadn’t didn’t really work well and so needed to be rethought. As well as this exhibition we had the other three group members in the café talking to themselves using a verbatim script that had been creating through listening to peoples conversations. This seemed to get lost so we discussed our whole idea and decided to see what the effect would be if we took this outside. We weren’t sure if this would work as we were taking it out of its original setting, out of the café atmosphere and outside. So taking this outside and trying it out it felt like something was missing, it lacked energy and needed something to back it up. Still wanting to keep the education room idea we discussed whether there was a way that we could link outside and the education room. In the end it was suggested that maybe we could attempt to create our own exhibition outside and portraying our version of the important things in the café.
Our ideas included:

• Having the three people sat at their own individual table talking to themselves, one would portray ‘the reader’ another ‘the working man’ and the third would portray ‘the family man’ as these are the three characteristics that we picked up on most throughout our research.
• Taking pictures and creating a framed piece up on the wall of the café, and showing how it changes throughout the day.
• Having the sentences we had heard wrote in chalk down the stairs to create something different
• Using the placard idea from inside and seeing how that worked.

Working Progress

Jennie Chapman / / Development, People

The feedback we received from our working progress has been very helpful. Before the feedback our ideas about our performance had been unclear and confusing as to what we were trying to show. There were positives to the feedback such as the strong image in the upstairs windows and at first people did not realise what was going on. One of the main issues that came up was that there needed to be a stronger connection between the two happenings and a much stronger link to the café overall. Our idea of making the café an exhibition was positive however the feedback made us realise that there needed to be more to the whole idea as it was getting lost in and among the other ideas. We need to focus specifically on the objects and the people in the café, as to how we will do this is the question. Our discussion afterwards brought the idea of making everything in the café an exhibit by placing placards on the tables, plants, walls and windows, with quotes from the conversations we have overheard and the people we have seen.

Another question that has developed from this session was how we are marketing the performance and more importantly the question of our audience; where do we want them? What time do we want them? Our performance has no precise finish; we don’t want a standing, static audience that crowds the café. I think that if we think about our audience more carefully, then it will help us rethink our performance and perhaps make our idea clearer. We have discussed the idea of our performance being similar to an installation.

“Usually it is three- dimensional, temporary and can be entered and possibly interacted with by its audience/spectators.”

“Like environmental theatre and site specific performance, installation art compels its audiences to reflect on the meanings and histories of its site” (Allain and Harvie, 2006, p 162-163)

This way we can think more carefully about our performance, knowing the details about what our audience will be like.

Works Cited:

Allain, Paul and Jen, Harvie (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance, London: Routledge.

Feeling Lost…

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / / Development, Experimentation, People

At this current moment in time I feel as though we have a lot of great ideas but are not really making any progress. I understand that the whole process of creating a site specific performance is in my opinion not an easy thing to do or get your head around. ‘Site Specific work has to deal with, embrace and
cohabit with existing factors…’ ((Persighetti. 2000. p,12)) and it is at this moment of our process where we have these ideas but putting them into practice seems difficult and just isn’t seeming possible. I am not sure if it is our location with it also being a business so we can’t interrupt there working day or if we are just not pushing our ideas far enough. I am currently feeling lost about our development and where to go next because so far we haven’t made any definite decisions about our direction and maybe this is our next thing to do.

To make a firm choice as to which direction we are going to go and then experiment and push ideas further. Figuring out where our piece should head will be easier once we have looked at the feedback from the surveys we created as ‘a large part of the work has to do with researching a place’ ((Pavis, P (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and
Analysis. London: University of Toronto pp337—8)). We have been doing a lot of research over the time we have been at The Collection, listening to people conversations and figuring out why they are here, looking at how people interact with each other and where people tended to sit. For example if they were on their own then they would often sit in the alcoves.

Initial ideas, Bound

Holly Rudd / / People, Research, Uncategorized

To begin with we liked the idea of using the painting ‘Bound by Love’. I noticed that the painting itself had a similarity to the shape of The Collection gallery. This interested me as I thought about the idea of creating the painting on a larger scale on the outside walls of The Collection building.

Bound by Love

 

(Grigoriev, 1997)

I like this idea as we would be bringing the painting outside into the courtyard for people to see it as they walk by.

This led us to think about the connection of the two sides of the building at the gallery. We noticed how they are mirroring each other, the cafe and the gallery education rooms, they reminded me of the two lovers in the painting and I wanted to explore that idea further.

We then started thinking about how we could recreate the painting on the building we thought about stringing the two together like the threads in the painting to show the connection between the two buildings and we had the idea of putting up white sheets at the end of the building to show the people in the painting. These are ideas that we are hoping to try out in the next few weeks but we need to get health and safety checks first on the ladders.

Alexei Grigoriev (1997) Bound by love, painting, 52 x 43cm, Lincoln: Usher Gallery

Occupying the Collection Gallery cafe

Francesca Maria Izzo / / People, Public Responses, Video Research

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through Lincoln high street when I came across a sofa with a white square in front of it stating ‘Joe’s space’ and sat down on it were a couple of girls. I did what a lot of other people in the street did and looked at it as I walked past but didnt interact with it any further.

This was part of Joe’s photography project which was ‘a social experiment to explore the boundaries of the public spaces on the High Street, but also an investigation of public interactions with strangers.’ Along with this he states in the about section of YouTube with the video, ‘ most occupy movements have been engaging significant political value, mine was to instigate conversation and basic human interaction as so many of us just walk idly by one another.’

This made me think of our group piece which is based in the Collection Gallery cafe and an experiment which our group tried the other day. A few members of our group sat on their own around the cafe and started talking to themselves, no one caught anyones attention except from Gabriel. Gabriel sat having argument with an imaginary person in the seat opposite and caught the eye of a customer of the cafe who looked up, saw what was happening and quickly looked away again. This shows that we avoid any interaction or involvement with things which are not considered normal or which may include being a part of it. Like the passers by in the street, compared to the amount of people in the high street, only a small number of people actually stopped and got involved with the project.

From the observations my other group members and I have found from the customers in the cafe, a lot of people tend to sit on their own and appear to be in their own world, totally oblivious to everyone else. Which makes me think, are they so involved in their own bubble they don’t really notice anyone or do they pretend to be to ignore things which happen around them? For example, yesterday afternoon an elderly man caused some commotion in the cafe with the staff but the only people who seemed to notice were our group and a couple who were sat behind us. I looked around and everyone else just carried on as normal with their own conversations or still reading as if nothing had happened.

There are so many examples in today’s society where people avoid situations because they feel awkward or not safe. An extreme example of this is demonstrated in the video below:

Is this now the extreme people will go to to not get involved? Does this make anyone else think we live in a society where people are more enclosed and seem cut off from everyone else? 

 

Burt, Joe (2013) Occupying Lincoln high St. [online video] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgSP7Rb3cb4&feature=player_embedded [accessed 5th March 2013]

PayNoMind416 (2010) The Bystander Effect: No One Cares. [online video] available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGaJrgi_SpE&feature=player_embedded [accessed 5th March 2013]