FRAMING STATEMENT
Surviving Fragments of the Rumour Room was performed on Friday 8th May, a total of 9 ten minute, one to one performances, between the times of 2 to 5 pm. “A reconstitution of the past from its surviving fragments …” (Pearson, 2012, 42) This quote was one half of the inspiration towards our title, the other was the rumours we had heard about the Room Upstairs, a space that unlike the others in the Lincoln Drill Hall didn’t seem to have much of a reputation or impression on people when entering the building. Our piece focused on the idea that the room contained rumours and fact and throughout history these stories true or false have become apart of the space, the “surviving fragments” of its’ timeline. “Rumours get mixed up with the truth until it is embedded into the site, as the years go on it becomes unclear what is real or not and you only have the fragments left to pick up.” (Maltby, 2015)
Deciding where to work in the Drill Hall and who to work with was simple as me and Holly Reader both gravitated towards the Room Upstairs due to its mix of old and new. When stepping into the room for the first time you don’t only get a sense of longevity, it also feels modern and relevant. “The fixed ‘place’ of the performance building is transformed into a ‘space’, a continuous, moving entity capable of shifting to reflect those inhabiting it.” (Govan et al, 2007, 106) With the Site Specific module making the Drill Hall its new project Emma Govan’s quote connects directly with what has occurred through using the Drill Hall in this way, for us in the Room Upstairs it has gone from being a meeting room
, to a theatre space, and now we have taken it back to a meeting room using performance techniques, bringing the past and present together for a three hour performance.
As our teacher Michael Pinchbeck has said, a successful Site-Specific piece should be completely connected to one space, making it impossible to be performed anywhere else. With the intimacy of the room comes the intimacy of what has happened in it, if we were to attempt to replicate our piece, it wouldn’t make sense and the impact would be lacking.
Minutes by Cody Maltby, 2015
PROCESS ANALYSIS
The Room Upstairs, which was previously known as the Ruston Room (named after the Drill Hall’s creator Joseph Ruston) is a big and wide space. The most striking feature is its’ cross over between old and new, this one room was obviously once two with an arch through the middle of the space separating the two sides. One side complements the building’s new purpose of being a theatre, it hosts a professional lighting rig, curtain runs and the potential to be an intimate performance space, which was tested out when I performed Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in this very place. The other side of the room has a much higher ceiling complete with blue painted beams and an old chimney. When first entering the space there was a table set out, this gave the impression of a conference room. One side is free and creative whilst the other is formal and business like, I felt that the room from first glance had something more to offer to myself as a performer and to the building.
During a tour of the building, which I wasn’t able to attend, Simon Hollingworth, the Creative Director of the Drill Hall had said of the Room Upstairs that it was once rumoured to be a Gentlemen’s Club for the Army Officers. There was also an explanation about the strange yellowness of the chimney that still resides in the room that the colour is due to nicotine stains from Officers smoking a lot in the room. These two statements gave me more of an idea of what the room could have been before its’ conversion into a performance space. As a performer it was my original intent to use the history of the room, namely this rumour and to perform it in the fashion of a “rehearsal process” to highlight what the room has become. As I began to understand exactly what Site –Specific performance meant, “the term refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world (ergo, outside the established theatre).” (Pearson, 2012, 7) I realised that as Mike Pearson suggests, the performance should be taken out of the context of the theatre in order for it to be Site-Specific. It became obvious to me that in order to fully explore the history of the building I had to almost disregard the present.
In the final lesson before we were expected to begin rehearsing and researching our piece, I paired up with a fellow performer, who was also drawn to the Room Upstairs. After attempting to find different information about the Room Upstairs and its’ history we finally discovered a more factual source when visiting the Lincolnshire Archives. The staff had gathered a lot of information on the Drill Hall’s past, yet none of what was presented had any specific link to the Room Upstairs, once inquiring about this we were given a minute book, filled with documented meetings held in our space when it was known as the Ruston Room. Going through this one book and later two others it was apparent that everything in the Drill Hall from 1909 through to 1956, was because of the meetings held in the Room Upstairs.
After our initial visit to the Archives we both became fixated with the minute books, going from believing the Room Upstairs to be seedy and secretive to it becoming a formal and practical space, something that reflects my first impressions as previously discussed. When entering the space with fresh information we thought about the 40 some year span of fact and rumour that the room now represented to us, this led to the idea of creating a time line, using string to weave around the room as a “web”, we would then hang different quotes from the minute books and then have the audience take the quotes and go in search of their other half. The idea was used to create a connection between the space and the audience, so that they would feel responsible for bringing the factual and the fictional aspects of the room’s history together.
When thinking about the atmosphere we wanted to create, the agreed key word was “Immersive”, to bring the audience into the space and for the length of the performance pull them into the piece completely. In lessons we were asked to do individual presentations, unknowingly my partner and I chose two separate pieces from the same artists; my presentation was on Pearson/Brookes’ Coriolan/us an interpretation of William Shakespeare’s classic play of war, this production was performed in an aircraft Hanger in Wales, turning this RAF related site into a city in the mist of war. What truly engaged me about this adaption was their use of technology. “We absorb the text through headsets while following the action either as it erupts around us, or by watching it on two large video screens. What we are left with is the sensation of being caught up in a city in a state of chaotic, revolutionary turmoil.” (The Guardian, 2012) As theatre critic Michael Billington has stated here the technology used within the piece fully immerses the audience member in what they are watching and listening to. With the interest in incorporating headsets and video into our piece it became apparent that the string idea would become almost irrelevant to the piece, so we would have to find a different way to present the timeline.
After disagreements about how the piece should be approached, we decided that the piece should be both performance and instillation. As our main aim for the piece was to immerse the audience in the world that was created in the Room Upstairs through these meetings, we searched for ways to tackle this whilst involving both instillation and performance. The solution I found was when we were asked to do another presentation, this time on a theatre company as a whole. The theatre company I chose to research was Punchdrunk, who pride themselves on extending the idea of promenade theatre within sites unrelated to the pieces they display there. In 2003 they performed an adaption of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest at the Old Seagar Distillery in Deptford, south-east London. They transformed the 5 stories of the building into Prospero’s famed island and encouraged their audience to wander around the building, to either stay with the story being told or to explore the set as an instillation. Not only was this another immersive company, they too bring theatrical texts to non-theatrical locations, through this we gave ourselves permission to finally take advantage of the Room Upstairs’ present, by taking our chosen entries from the minute books and the Gentlemen’s Club rumour and turning them into motifs. To keep ourselves from simply turning the meetings into a “play” of sorts we agreed to only use dialogue through the use of silent disco headphones.
The instillation aspect of the piece came from our taking advantage of the Room Upstairs’ small storage room, which is the first space you enter through the elevator we decided to place objects relevant to the minutes around the space. Having the audience enter through the elevator meant that we also needed to involve it within the performance, so for the elevator we stuck quotes from the meeting books onto the walls; As our own note books developed into minute books themselves we also thought it suitable to include our own quotes and ideas into the elevator, to better connect us as people to the minutes so the audience can gain a better understanding of our purpose as researches of the Room Upstairs. “Objects are inherently unstable, serving representational, decorative, functional, fictive or cognitive purposes, moment by moment. Their identity and meaning may be only partly controllable.” (Pearson, 2012, 119) At first glance the audience member will not understand the relevance of the quotes in the elevator, or the objects in the storage room, but by asking them to leave the same way they should take the experience they had gained from our piece and implement this onto the items and quotes on their way out. By knowing what we wanted aesthetically for the instillation section of the piece we then focused on the performance content.
“Spatial relationships have always been integral to performance-making; the configuration of performance spaces and their effects on actor-audience exchanges have been richly and variously investigated by practitioners across history and cultures.” (Govan et al, 2007, 137) This explains why there as so many different types of staging techniques through out performance, whether it is theatre, site-specific or any other genre of performance practice. Punchdrunk’s use of promenade as freedom is something used in our pre-performance in the elevator and storage room, as for the performance it was important that the experience be a restricted and voyeuristic one. Although the meetings granted more members than two, this secrecy we wanted to create comes from the rumours of what may have also occurred. The audience needed to feel as if they were spying on the events of the meetings. In A Tender Subject by Company, Artangel they too use promenade, setting their piece in a secret location underneath Smithfields market in London, the piece involved a collection of prison based motifs behind large steel doors, which were only opened to the audience by prison officers and closed at the officer’s will. This was an interesting way of staging, and as we didn’t have doors it was decided that the audience members stand between a gap in the curtains at the back of the room. The distance takes away any believe of invitation, for the feeling separation it seemed apt to have the performance be one audience member at a time, this was so there was no feeling of community. The opposite of what the Drill Hall is and was, the reason we decided to contradict the buildings purpose in this way is because, the Room Upstairs has always felt separate from the rest of the building to me, even within its’ location in the building, the stairs of the room and the elevator both lead to the foyer, where as all of the other spaces in the building connect architecturally.
“G. Williams and the Secretary was appointed to provide a suitable stove.” (Minute books, 2015) This entry from the 2nd of June 1933 is a clear example of what we wanted our performance to essentially be about. The thought of a group of men sat around a table at half 7 at night, to discuss something so mundane and ordinary is on one hand funny and on the other; admirable that in this disconnected room these men would discuss the little things that would inevitably improve the conditions of the whole building. As we continued taking trips to the Archives and reading these books the entries showed a lot of character and related well to the particular time they were written. Entries regarding an autographed portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, which at first appeared as an odd reason to propose a meeting until we concluded that the meeting was written in November of 1953 only 8 months before Queen Elizabeth 2nd’s official coronation to the throne. Because of the sincerity of some of these meetings we thought it apt that we included our own personal experiences with this room, this was also a way of giving a small glimpse into the rooms present self. We both decided to write monologues of our accounts, mine being that I had recently performed in the Room Upstairs and that, that performance was my first impression and the deciding moment for my using the space for our Site-Specific piece. My partner’s however was the account of someone else who had learned all they now know about Technical Theatre in this room, although our teacher objected to the use of someone else’s experience, the fact that the Room Upstairs effected somebody’s professional career in such a way does give light to the importance the room really does have.
To go with the audio recordings of the meetings and our own monologues/opinions it seemed appropriate to introduce the piece through video, through expressing this idea we discovered something that almost changed most of our performance. Through confusion we found that the meetings “might” have been held in another room (The Abbey Room), as this room was already in full use, we knew it wouldn’t be possible to change location, however we were able to use the “might” in our favour by filming the video in the Abbey Room and using it as an example of our use of rumours.
After looking through the three books we could find it was interesting to find that through the 40 year span of the committees standing, that each meeting leader stuck to the same format and tradition of time and date. Every meeting was held at 7:30 at night, and there were approximately three meetings a year. One in November, one in January and then one in June, we had originally planned to begin our piece at 7:30 on May 8th but unfortunately due to another performance beginning at 7o’clock we were unable to take this time slot. Because of the strict structure and the simplicity of the minute book’s content we wanted the way we moved to reflect this, we started off performing very rigidly (this is evident in the video we decided to use for our introduction). When presenting the robotic like movements to our teacher, we were told that this was a slip into the theatrics we needed to avoid, so our performances became a lot more natural and neutral, so as to highlight us as guides of the piece instead of performers in the piece. The end product would result in two researchers taking the audience members through a time line of the real and the fabricated.
EVALUATION
A big part of our piece is that the Room Upstairs is still very much in use; this was something that caused a problem for us on the day of our performance as we were not permitted entrance into the room until one o’clock (an hour before our performance). Once we did enter the space, it was surprising to find that we didn’t have a lot to do in terms of set up. I blue tacked the quotes we had gathered from the minute books as well as quotes from our own note books, to the walls of the elevator. With the title of the piece, Surviving Fragments of the Rumour Room, stuck on both sides of the door that opens into the small storage room, the aim of doing this was for the title to be the last thing the audience see before beginning their experience in the “Rumour Room”. When I had finished in the Elevator I went into the storage space to see that Holly had finished decorating it. I was able to put myself in the shoes of the audience, seeing the small table full of tagged items, a white board of instructions and then a pile of boxes with the laptop, tablet and headphones sat on top.
All 9 of our performances went smoothly and the way we had hoped. The only problem being that, only two of our audience members stood between the curtains were we had planned and expected the audience to stand. As we had a line of paper piles under the arch which splits the two sides of the room, the audience would always stop just in front of this line. This placing felt as if it gave the opposite effect and experience to the audience than we wanted to achieve. Standing between the curtains would leave them feeling uncomfortable and unseen by us, whereas standing in front of us with room to move gave the piece a very open and intimate feel. I don’t believe that this diminished the performance in any way, in fact I feel the experience it did give to the audience was an effective one, and it also made me feel connected to the audience members as if they were supervising our interpretations of the minutes. With the members standing so close to us came confusion at the end of the piece, as they could still see us when we moved away from our space a certain expectation became clear, they expected more. For those who stood between the curtains they knew the piece had ended as we disappeared entirely from view.
The only thing I feel could have been improved towards the audience members experience was if we had added an end line to the audio, something that told them the piece had finished. With the placing of the audience the piece was improved as a whole, as judging from where they stood their experience of the piece was altered. The fact that the audience felt comfortable enough to get so close to us gave us something new to discover in the piece also. A certain warmth that there was within these meetings, a small intimate group of people discussing seemingly pointless yet effective decisions that ultimately changed the Lincoln Drill Hall.
lift of quotes by Holly Reader, 2015
Minute Items by Holly Reader, 2015
Our “Stage” by Holly Reader, 2015
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Govan, E., Nicholson, H., and Normington, K. (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. New York: Routledge.
Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Guardian (2012) Coriolan/us Review. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/10/coriolanus-review [Accessed 14 May 2015].
YouTube (2015) Surviving Fragments of the Rumour Room: Holly Reader. [online] Lincoln: YouTube. Available from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBIxlqe2vHYZb1kqOfxNp-Q [Accessed 14 May 2015].