The Architecture of the Performance – Framing Statement
The Surviving Fragments of The Rumour Room took place at the Drill Hall, Lincoln, on the 8th May 2015. This performance was created and performed by one male (Cody) and one female performer (myself). The performance revolves around passages of text and stories telling the inner workings of the ‘Officer’s room’, which held great importance between 1909 and 1956. The reason it held great importance was because it was where all major decisions regarding the Drill Hall were made. This fascinated us as we felt that the officers’ room was like the brain of the Drill Hall. However, just like with human brains, some of the memories were distorted. For example, we still do not know which room the Officers Room had once been and whether the stories we were told were true. This concept of lost truth and found lies was something we explored further.
We decided to keep the performance to 10 minutes but to repeat the performance 9 times. The intention behind keeping the performance to 10 minutes was so that the audience members could be addressed individually and have their own unique experience. Thus the performance had to be repeated to allow more than one person to view the work. In order to achieve this, the audience members were required to book in an individual appointment when arriving on the site. We decided to have a performance every 20 minutes to allow 10 minutes in-between to reset the space.
We intended to create the feeling of voyeurism through creating the illusion of looking back through time into private meetings that now, in the present day, have become fascinating public records of the inner workings of the Drill Hall. To create the sense of voyeurism we limited the audience interaction with the space by taking away their hearing sense – by the use of headphones- to block noise, and moving them through small, confined areas, littered with the remains of past objects which used to occupy the room. This then led them to an opening in a curtain which allowed them to see but not enter the performance space. There was then a vast open space, void of direct light, creating a barrier between the audience and the performance. We hoped that this would have stopped them entering the performance space if combined with instructions from the headphones. The space between where the audience member viewed the action and where the action itself took place helped to heighten the sense of voyeurism as well as giving a visual representation of the events that happened in the past.
Our audience members where both a passive and active part of our performance. This is because the act of following the commands from the headphones is important for the entrance of the audience, however there are no commands during the main bulk of the performance. During this section the audience where encouraged to stand and watch what is happening in front of them.
The Brain of the Drill Hall – An Analysis of Process
25/01/2105 – Lincoln Drill Hall
‘The Room Upstairs’
Writing my first impression of the site, my thoughts always seemed to be drawn back to ‘The Room Upstairs’. Mainly the architecture of the building, how the new juxtaposed with the old and at the same time complemented each other. For example, how the old wooden beams used the same techniques as the new lighting rig to strengthen its structure, or how the old archway felt like a proscenium arch framing the new performance space.
Long before we found out the space may have been the ‘Officers Room’ and therefore had been used for past meetings, the concept of a meeting as a performance had crossed my mind. This is because the first time we walked into the space it was still set up as a meeting room, from a previous meeting. The room was half conference room, half stage and this made me consider what performances took place in the building long before it was a theatre.
On our first trip to the archive we asked for any information regarding the Officers Room. It was here we were first presented with a minute book that held records of past meetings that happened about, and was recorded in, the Drill Hall.
We all perform more than we realize. The habits, rituals, and routines of life are restored behaviours.
(Schechner, 2013, 34).
All of the people recorded in these meetings were actually preforming roles themselves. During the times where there was a changeover of power, the people taking on the new position would copy the people who had the roles before them. This was apparent in the layout of the minute books as there was over forty years of minutes, recorded in three separate books, yet the layout of the meeting stayed consistent.
Our first idea was to show this visually through means of an installation. One of our first initial ideas was to create a “web” of information out of string that would cover half of the performance space. This string would have tags on it, which led to a set of information about a meeting held, so that audience could find out for themselves about that meeting. This would also mean that they would see the minute book from which all of our primary research was driven.
When deciding what meetings to include in our installation, one of our inspirations was Quarantine’s site specific piece called ‘Walking Backwards’.
“Quarantine will make a series of pavement plaques in Manchester – flat monuments to ordinary people and everyday events. A collision of personal histories and city geographies” (Quarantine, 2015).
Quarantine seeks to remember the events that are a day to day part of people’s lives in this future performance. Not all of the specific memories have altered the shape and history of Manchester but are individuals’ stories about how they go about their day.
This made us consider the meetings that have gone on in our space which would be to ‘no consequence’ in the overall history of the building, yet that should still be remembered. For example, who should be the female attendant in the ladies toilets for a dance?
Our idea began to develop and after numerous discussions with our tutor and as a group, we decided to go down a more performance based route rather than an installation. As the space we performed in is now used as a theatre it seemed appropriate for the site.
Through researching Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes collaborations with The National Theatre Wales, we came across two performances that influenced our work; the first was The Persians (2010). The Persians was “not just a dramatic representation of a particular historical event, but rather a site-specific performance and a re-enactment of memories and experiences” (Primavesi, 2012, 50). The word re-enactment caught our interest and we thought about creating motifs re-enacting the meetings in the room upstairs. We were trying to “stage and frame those who inhabit… [the] space” (Pearson, 2010, 21).
It was not only their collaboration with The Persians which caught our interest, but also Coriolan/Us (2012). For this piece it was the immersive nature of the performance achieved via the audience “absorb[ing] the text through headsets” (The Guardian, 2012) and their chosen location of an aircraft hangar. We decided to try and record the meetings and have it played back to them during the performance via headphones. Using audio of the meeting would also give a nod to the present as this is how a lot of current meetings are recorded.
A reconstitution of the past from its surviving fragments…
(Pearson, 2010, 42).
In this quote Mike Pearson highlights how difficult it can be to work with a limited records of past events. We only have access to records of the minutes of meetings and people’s own memories about the Drill Hall in relation to ‘The Room Upstairs’. As a result of this, the performance that we created could have become very disjointed.
This is particularly the case with the rumours which were spread about the room when it was called ‘The Officers’ Room’. This room had become infamous as ‘a Gentleman’s club’ in the early part of the twentieth century. These rumours still exist today even to the extent that when given a tour around the building, the first thing we were told about was its apparent ‘seedy’ past. The fact that the room was used to hold all important meetings about the Drill Hall was not even mentioned! It has almost become irrelevant whether the story was true or created by people lower down in the Army ranks to spite their superiors. It has now become a part of the Drill Hall’s history true or not. As there are only stories about the ‘dual’ usage of the room, it forced us to create a fictional scene highlighting that side of the room’s history.
This room also held a personal memory for Cody, as he had performed a play in the room. We felt like this should be performed in the piece to add a personal touch about how the room has affected his life, as well as a gesture to the room’s current use.
We were now left with segments of information that had no real narrative link except that they were written in the same book, in the same room and/or was about the same building. One of our influences for the structure of the piece was Station House Opera’s piece ‘The Bastille Dances’ (1989). Maynard Smith, a member of the organisation, said that during the devising processes
“‘naming the structures was useful as a way of developing the narrative, but this is not a big story, there’s no coherent thread. Fragments are set up and abandoned or transformed…One situation metamorphoses into another’”
(Kent, 1998, 120).
This made us think that our piece did not need a narrative link. By simply highlighting that we were trying to show a vast range of research covering a large time span that the room has experienced, it would create enough of a link.
Since the main source of primary research was the minute book, we were interested to find the source of the word ‘minute’. There were multiple definitions of the word, from “period of time equal to 60 seconds; one sixtieth of an hour… [to] record in minutes… [e.g.] to minute a meeting” (Collins, 2015)
Our initial idea was to have each “scene” or meeting that we chose to replicate being a minute long but we soon found that to be impractical. This is because, unlike its name suggests, the minute books does not contain the specifics of every meeting held. They provide a brief summery instead. This made us look at other concepts of the word. What I found fascinating was that the word ‘minute’ and ‘minute’ are spelt the same way. Minute meaning “very small… [or] unimportant” (Collins, 2015). This complemented our reasoning behind what we found interesting about the minute books; the fact they so often looked at the “mundane” events of the Drill Hall. We, therefore, decided to make each of the scenes small and episodic to reflect the dual usage of the word and to try to imitate the pages of the meetings. We found 7 interesting passages that we wanted to include in our piece. Some ranging from 30 seconds to 90.
Throughout one of our feedback sessions, it was suggested that we use other noises in the recordings to help distinguish different minutes. This made me recall the works of Graeme Miller specifically a project he did with Mary Lemley called Listening Ground, Lost Acres. For this
“Miller developed a score for a path from Stonehenge north of Salisbury to Clearbury Ring to the south, giving participants individual earphones with which to listen to fragments of memories, sound and music as they walked.”
(Phillips, 1998, 111-112).
It was interesting how Miller and Lemley used more than just recorded words to tell his story. We decided to add in the sound of crumpling up paper for the end of each minute and sounds of glasses chinking for the beginning and end of each verbatim section. We also added in the sound of a coin spinning to the beginning and end of the piece, as one of our sections, taken from a personal memory of Cody’s, involved spinning of coins. We hoped that this would help to create a more immersive experience for our audience members.
Although we had created a performance piece both of us felt that we did not want to lose the initial concept of the installation. We began researching the concept of objects in or as performance, as a starting point. We both found different inspirations, however these different influences were compatible with each other. My main influence was Forced Entertainment and their relation with objects.
The reconstruction of a narrative from clues, the reconstruction of an event from its objects, the reconstruction of a text from its fragmentary scenes were framed as the object of our work
(Etchells, 1999, 73).
Although this quote is talking about objects as ideas and moments of events, it made me think about the physical items which would have been used in this room, and still are used in this room today. There was two entrances into the room, one of them involved going up an elevator and into a small room before entering. In the room we decided to place objects representing the motifs the audience was about to see, for example an A5 size picture of the Queen, with tags identify what each object was.
08/05/15- Lincoln Drill Hall.
Objects
This allowed the audience a clue about the performance before entering the space, as well as giving them an opportunity to link the motives back to the objects when leaving the performance. This became our pre and post-performance.
Another element of our pre-performance was a video, presenting us as researchers looking into the room’s history and presenting to the audience the main concept we had learned from this experience; that the truth can become lost or distorted and then taken as fact. We did this by filming the video in the Phil Cosker room as during our research we had discovered that the officer’s room may have in fact been in that room. Only sixty years have passed in the building’s history and yet we were unable to know the previous usage of all the rooms on the site.
You can view the opening video here.
As mentioned in the framing statement, we wanted the audience to have a sense of voyeurism and distance. This was to create the sense of reconstruction of the past, by making it feel like the audience were looking back in time. So at the end of the piece we began tiding up the space turning it back into how we found the room, bringing the past back to the present, to help with the feeling of reconstruction. While this was happening, audio of different dates in the rooms history were played. However, when showing this to our tutor, he commented that he thought we could have evolved this more. In one of the scenes previously I had been balling up pieces of paper. He suggested that while we tidy up the space we could be looking through the stacks of paper franticly, as if we were trying to find the fragments left to create the performance, mixing the end motif with overlapping audio of dates of other meetings. We decided to take this on board, however, we edited the audio to show an overlapping mix of all of the meetings, that we had replicated, rather than other dates to show that we have become researchers for this space.
Always Expect the Unexpected – A Performance Evaluation
Through researching and creating a site specific performance, the main lesson I have learned is to adapt. To always expect the unexpected, as an audience member and as a performer. The audience are not just influenced by you as a performer; they are influenced by the space just as much as the creator of site specific work.
The relationship between the architecture of the space, the positioning of the audience space and the stage or playing area dictates the very nature of the experience that the audience will have
(Pitches and Popat, 2011, 75).
The audience come into the space with a set of preconceived rules about their positioning based on the architecture of a theatre as well as the space they are now inhibiting. The challenge is bending these socially constructed rules. You can (and should) throw away the rules in the initial process, to connect with the site and to tell the story it has inspired you to tell. Use the space to create something different and enticing but you need to take into consideration that the unwritten rules may still be in the audience mind. This is something which I will now always consider.
For our performance we found that the audience were guided by the architecture of the building more than the faux architecture we created. Instead of stopping where the paper trail ended, in-between the small gap in the curtain, all but two of the audience members stepped over the line of paper and continued forward to the archway in the middle of the room. This archway then acted like a proscenium arch, which the audience never crossed.
This made the performance more intimate than expected. The distance we wanted to create was destroyed, the sense of voyeurism was gone, but what was left was a sense of community and ownership that was created almost singularly by the audience member. The audience became part of the performance rather than being spectators. It was not just the lack of distance that created an ensemble feeling but it was the similarities between us a performers and the audience, via the audio. We were all wearing headphones, and although we, the performers, knew what was coming next, we were still taking instruction and information from the audio the same as the audience members. So much so that some audience members felt they should join in with the end sequence of screwing up paper and helping us add more ‘stories’ to the pile. They became researches with us.
If I was to do this again, I would pay more attention to the architecture of the building itself and not just the room’s history. Throughout all of the research, I should not have forgotten about the first aspect of the room that caught my attention. The space itself. The layout of the building, the old mixed with the new. I have learned the atmosphere of a performance, for both performer and audience member, is influenced by the architecture and layout of the space and that this is something that should not be forgotten in any performance, let alone a piece of site specific art.
Word Count:3171
Bibliography
Collins (2015) minute. [online] London: Collins. Available from http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/minute [Accessed 14/May/2015].
Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. Oxon: Routledge
Kent, Sarah. (1998) An Act in Several Parts. The Work of Station House Opera. In: Nicky Childs and Jeni Walwin (eds.) A Spilt Second of Paradise: Live Art, Installations and Performances. London: Rivers Oram Press, 117-135.
Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Phillips, Andrea. (1998) Borderland Practice. The Work of Graeme Miller. In: Nicky Childs and Jeni Walwin (eds.) A Spilt Second of Paradise: Live Art, Installations and Performances. London: Rivers Oram Press, 102- 116.
Pitches, J. and Popat, S. (eds.) (2011) Performance Perspectives: A critical Introduction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan
Primavesi, P. (2012) Memories from a Theatre of War. Performance Research, 17 (3) 50-56.
Schechner, R. (2013) Performance Studies An Introduction. 3rd edition. Oxon: Routledge.
The Guardian (2012) Coriolan/us – review. [online] The Guardian. Available form http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/aug/10/coriolanus-review [Accessed 1 May 2015].
Quarantine (2015) WALKING BACKWARDS [online] Quarantine. Available from: http://qtine.com/work/walking-backwards-2/ [Accessed 23 February 2015].