Tag: Lacey Cole

The Pleasure of Treasure

Lacey Cole / / Cultural Terrorists, Development, Inspiration

With our sculpture continuing to be built, I thought I’d take some time to consider other parts of the performance. I was interested to read an article recently on the Pleasure of Treasure, a site specific piece based in London which gave people the opportunity to follow clues on a city-wide scavenger hunt. Since the piece was based in London, it was thought-provoking to read and in fact has some similar elements to the performance piece we are now creating. The Artangel group, initiated by Kathy Battista, recreated maps from 1868 merged with contemporary maps for those taking part. Our initial idea bore some relevance to this, as we discussed the idea that previously where the Usher Gallery stood it was just woodland, and the bringing together of what used to stand and what now does stand in the space was considered. We also had a chance to look at some older maps of Lincoln in the Lincolnshire Archives, which may have added an interesting element, as we discussed covering Big Ben with maps of London or Lincoln. This idea has evolved and we are now looking at incorporating both the history of the site and modern elements.

Another part we found struck a chord with us was the final effect the Artangel group wanted to produce with the walk. As we want the audience to consider their personal attachments to a city, the group wanted people to question ‘what they thought they already knew about… inner-city London’ (Battista et al. 2005, p.431). This idea of wanting people to query where they live and what they know about their roots and the city they feel comfortable in is prevalent in both site specific pieces. Along with this we also wanted to consider the ‘overlapping histories that make up urban space’ (Battista et al. 2005, p.439), in accordance with both London and Lincoln, with the idea that we’d be able to overlap both cities to create our own version. I feel this is somewhat close to what we are working towards, two intersections of historical places overlapped in order to become our own personal culture.

Although not much is documented about this particular site specific performance, other pieces by the Artangel group can be found on their website at www.artangel.org.uk.

References: Battista, Kathy et al (2005) ‘Exploring ‘an area of unnatural beauty’: a treasure hunt around King’s Cross, London’, Cultural Geographies, 12: 429-462.

Author: Lacey Cole

 

Problem’s occurring with our performance.

Fotini Efstathiou / / Cultural Terrorists, Development

A vital part of our performance is the drinking of afternoon tea after our hectic construction of The Big Ben in the gallery, as previously stated this is showing us inhabiting the space and also entwining the galleries history within our performance and cultural smuggling of London. Unfortunately when asking for permission to eat or drink in the gallery this was denied, so now we are stuck as to what to do during this part of the performance as we feel it is important to keep it in as it adds such a contrast to the first part of our performance, thus adding another dimension. We don’t feel pretending or miming will have the same impact, we feel if we are going to do it we should do it properly.

I have thought of other ideas such as sitting down and reading a piece of literature from the twenties, simply just listening to the music and lounge or perhaps do a bit of embroidery..what are your opinions?  Any comments or ideas would be really helpful. We really feel that having this contrast within the performance will make it more interesting and dynamic to the audience.

 

Author: Fotini Efstathiou

Part of our inspiration…

Jade Nicholls / / Cultural Terrorists, Development, Inspiration

After the gallery had a re-hanging the painting we were basing our performance around had been taken down. We at first thought this maybe a problem, however the new paintings in the gallery are very useful to our piece. The paintings of the cathedral in the corner of the room is where we are going to put up our model as it highlights the significance of the cathedral in Lincoln and how it is an iconic building in this city. This will mirror how the Big Ben is iconic for London. Another inspiration for us was the dress which is downstairs in the Usher gallery, it is covered in an atlas. We at first thought of covering our model in an atlas or map of London and Lincoln to show the differences between the two cities. However it looked extremely messy and was not as eye-pleasing as the newspapers are.

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The construction stage…

Jade Nicholls / / Cultural Terrorists, Development, Experimentation

Over the last week as a group we have been constructing our model. This has been very hard and taken a lot of patience and time but it has been worth it giving our end result. We have decided to cover the model in newspaper, using The Telegraph, as this is a London based newspaper and is more relevant. By the end of this week our aim is to have drawn the clock face on the tower and also have it fully covered in newspaper. Also our practice rehearsal in front of the whole class has improved our confidence on the overall piece as the tower made a huge impact in the gallery and even members of the public seemed interested to question what we were doing. The whole group gave us helpful feed back and we have taken the comments on board to make our piece the best it can be.

Here are some more photos of the building process:

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Rehearsal Schedule

Fotini Efstathiou / / Cultural Terrorists, Development

This is our rehearsal schedule for the forthcoming weeks:

11th March 2013- We have visited B&Q to buy more of the Selitac material which is a wood flooring underlay. We have decided on this material as it is strong enough to create the sclupture as well as being easy to shape and build with. We then began to make the rest of the sculpture. Last week (4th/5th March), we made the base of the ‘Big Ben’ and we have realised we need more of the material to create the top. This week we have started to build the top of the sculpture and put it all together.

12th March 2013- We are going to visit the archive library with the rest of the class to research more into the gallery. After the visit we are going to continue building the top of the sculpture to make sure it is finished in time for next weeks lesson to show the rest of the class.

18th March 2013- We are going to show our sculpture piece which will not be finished as we need to cover it with newspaper, however we can show the actual sculpture and practise how we are going to put it altogether on the actual performance. It is important to see how much of an impact the slupture will make in the gallery as well as we want to make a big statement so it has to be big enough to catch peoples attention and interest. After showing this to the class we are then going to begin to find appropriate newspaper articles about London to either buy or print which we can use to attach to our sculpture.

19th March- We are going to start attaching the appropriate newspaper articles to our sculpture, we decided that glue would be to messy and would not hold the newspaper to the material. After speaking with Dan we came up with the idea of using a stapler, which will minimise the mess that glue would cause and we are certain it will keep the newspaper attached to the material.

Easter Holidays- as a group we have decided to visit London during the Easter holidays, although this may not be possible for us all to be there at the same time. Whilst in London we are hoping to make a soundscape of the noises happening in the busiest areas surrounding the Big Ben and maybe even ask tourists what they think of the Big Ben and what it means to them. This will help with our research into the background of the Big Ben and we maybe able to interpret some of the public’s viewpoints of the Big Ben.

8th April 2013- We are going to sort costumes out to make sure we have enough time to make adjustments if needed. The costumes we have decided on are 1920’s style dresses, such as the authentic flapper dress and the reasoning behind this is due to the building of the Usher Gallery being built in the 20’s, so therefore we want to capture the atmosphere of that era. As we are smuggling in the sclupture of the Big Ben we thought us wearing a balaclava whlist building the sclupture would be very affective and emphasise the idea of ‘cultural terrorism’.

9th april 2013- We are going to run through the whole performance, we will email the Gallery to ensure they are fine with us using the Gallery for this purpose beforehand. Also we have decided to ask members of the public who are in the Gallery at this time what they think of our idea and whether they would be interested if this was happening whilst they were in the Gallery.

The rest of the weeks leading up to the performance we will keep running through the performance and making any changes which need to be made. We want the performance to be slick and explosive to make an impact in the gallery and capture the audiences attention.

Authors: Fotini Efstathiou and Jade Nicholls.