Wrights & Sites & Other Regions

Simon Persighetti

The most refreshing aspect of such work is that its definition continually bleeds. It is work that embraces disciplines, highlighting and blurring skills. Site-specific arts imply accessibility by accident or design. Documentation in this format suggests closure and this forces me to invite the reader to open it up, viewing my opinions and observations simply as a record of some moments that have now been inaccessibly lost.

In my city of the damned, the story is over. It received none of the carnival-carnivore-carrion-carry-on of your tabloids. It is insignificant. It has seeped back into the red earth. Since the first telling of the story many other events have layered themselves upon it. A cow fell off the railway bridge crushing a car below. The fridge failed in the hospital morgue and unclaimed bodies fell apart. Two men were hacked to death at a funeral. A live baby emerged from a dead mother. A pair of rival witches collided in their flying baskets. All the stories are seeping into the mass landscape. Take on the form of an elephant, a leopard or a monitor lizard if you wish to tour this Other Region.¹

I worked in Zambia as an art and drama teacher for 4 years and it was there that I first became involved in what has been termed ‘site-specific’ performance work. On my first visit to this land-locked Southern African Nation in 1984, I met Dickson Mwansa who was teaching drama at Lusaka University. He told me about a theatre company called Chikwakwa, an outreach group formed in 1969 from the university campus experimenting with the uses of theatre in rural development issues. ‘Chikwakwa’ roughly translates as ‘grass cutter’ or ‘machete’, because the first task the performers completed on arrival at a particular location was to scythe a circle into the high savannah grass to create a performance arena. The cut grass was then used to create a thatched shelter to protect the actors from the heat of the sun and to be used as a base for meetings and devising a play which related directly to issues raised by local inhabitants.

...The European tradition of drama in the theatre clubs is one based on the use of expensive and complicated stage settings, lighting systems, furniture and costumes. The Travelling Theatre can neither afford nor has room to carry such equipment. We use simple stage settings, in school halls, or outside in village squares, with sunlight or tilly lamp for lighting...²

This image of creating a theatre out of the landscape and then of creating work which related directly to the landscape and its people was to provide influence and inspiration to my work from then on. The intrinsic drive of theatre work intertwined with task, need and the concerns of everyday life were certainly ideas shared by community artists in Britain. It was the act of grass cutting before any of the artifice, normally connected to the aesthetics of theatre making, which led me to further consider the impact of site.

The notions we might connect with site-specific work which emerged from community arts practice in the 70’s and 80’s are often related to place by memory or reminiscence. The work by Living Archive (Roy Nevitt, Milton Keynes), Colway Theatre Trust, Medium Fair and The Wren Trust (Devon) often consisted of peoples’ histories woven into pageant-like plays performed in and by members of specific communities. The work might have been performed in specific geographical locations which amplified the stories or histories but most of the work was more strongly resourced or rooted in ideas and narrative than in a tangible sense of place. Such work could be termed as ‘site-sensitive’ bearing similarities to the way Shakespeare texts, particularly A Midsummer Night’s Dream, have often been transposed upon idyllic garden locations. In such instances the open-air perhaps evokes the sky of the Globe Theatre and the fantasies and romantic illusions popularly connected with landscape. The on-location community play certainly addresses site with more integrity in that the local audience shares the experience and air of the play, but it often remains sensitive rather than specific to the unwritten text of site.

If site-specific work makes any departure from the usual premise of theatre it is made out of a desire to let PLACE speak louder than the human mediator or actor who enters place. This desire to let place speak louder than the humans stems from a statement I once overheard: ‘I went to the theatre but all I saw was acting’. It sums up the discomfort I feel about the ego-mania of Western Theatre so well defined by the Peter Brook definition of ‘Deadly Theatre’ in The Empty Space. In site-specific work the artifice of acting is exposed when the site reminds the audience of their own presence in a particular time and space. It suggests a different approach to performance. The exploration I became engaged in during my work in Zambia really arose from the luxury of wide open spaces in a predictable climate. It was possible, for example, to terminate a section of an outdoor performance by relying upon speedy and dramatic equatorial sundowns. The positioning of images in this particular light and the use of local resources such as river clay, bamboo, bark and elephant grass underline this experience of site-specificity. Development of site work included silent walks, gathering found objects, bird watching, cooking, processional performance and building totemic sculptures. The rainy season did preclude outdoor activity to a greater extent due to the unarguable force of the elements which in ‘thunder, lightning or in rain’ overshadowed the puny machinations of mere mortals. It is also worth noting that in a society where the gap between dream and reality is not as divided as in the western European culture(s), the power of place is often overwhelming. One also has to acknowledge that in Zambia most performance work, rituals and ceremonies continue to take place in open-air spaces despite the presence of urban theatre buildings, churches and temples. The work of Welfare State and the influence of Peter Kiddle (Theatre of Public Works) certainly underpinned my awareness of contextual practice during this period.

My return to Thatcher’s Britain in 1992 filled me with horror and a great sense of loss. I had left a place where visceral drama was part of everyday life and now found myself in culture shock. I began writing a play called Train which projected the idea that sections of the railways, then being privatised, could be used as a means of ‘disappearing’ the losers and lost of society. In such an imagined scenario, a government that claimed to be ‘closing down the something-for-nothing society’ would hive off a section of the rail network and, using old trains and rolling stock, create an invisible, mobile city of the new underclass.

Whilst I was developing this idea at Exeter & Devon Arts Centre (Exeter Phoenix), I overheard some people at the bar talking about holding a theatre festival of new writing. The central figure at this scene, who turned out to be Professor Peter Thomson of Exeter University Drama Department, had secured access to some enclosed railway arches where he intended producing a programme of ‘new writing’ performances. The local professional company, Theatre Alibi, had agreed to host the festival by supplying design, technical and marketing resources and skills. The festival was named Platform 4. As a newcomer to Exeter who had not really begun to effectively network with other local theatre practitioners, I was determined to announce my presence through some work. Some weeks later I heard that a planning meeting was to take place at a pub next to the railway arches in St Thomas, Exeter and here I presented a proposal to make a short site-specific event as an addition to the programme.

The tour of the arches, its spine supporting the Paddington-Penzance line, revealed a dark, dank, subterranean chamber. Its only inhabitants were pigeons. It had been used as car mechanics workshops and storage space but was now empty. Out of its Brunel designed stone bones came The Archangel of Industry, the only site-specific event on the programme devised, designed and executed in situ. It was to mark the beginning of a whole series of angelcast collaborations with an alliance of musicians (including Joel Segal), performers and the actor/designer John H. Bartlett.

The spirit of the first Platform 4 season spawned many local offshoot activities because it re-ignited a sense that despite funding problems and a general air of political despondency, it really was possible to create new and innovative work. During the period from 1992-97 angelcast continued making major and minor work including the production of two site films (The Drop, The Suit) directed by Stephen Clarke. The act of making this kind of work can indicate a direct political stance because it is work which inherently challenges the status quo of theatre buildings and galleries; it also can generate questions concerning land, ownership and human geography. Its political impact is heightened because the performance occurs in environments which remain in place after the event. Even the demolition of a building fails to immediately erase the geographical location on maps or in memory. A play inside a theatre is nearly always viewed within a temporary or ephemeral frame. The use of a non-theatre space suggests the empowering of the artist and the development of a wider audience. There was a certain freshness about the platforms because you were able to see new work without the obvious cultural trappings of auditorium or studio theatre. There was also a sense of experiencing theatre as an event generated by subverting or transforming the established use of a warehouse or abandoned shopping mall.

The seasons ran for three consecutive years in three non-theatre spaces and each time, the question arose about the meaning of the banner ‘New Writing’. Because the form and content of the plays largely adhered to a literary tradition, it seemed to me that most of the work produced was new only in the fact that the ink was still wet. The production directors did acknowledge the sites from a sensitive or scenographic point of view but the notion of creating work out of the sites was not on the agenda. The lack of response to place was amplified during the first season when trains thundered over the actors’ heads. The suspension of disbelief was irrefutably challenged.

What is behind the site-specific phenomenon? Why am I so fascinated by the act of making performance in non-theatre spaces? It may be because I want to get out of the church known as ‘the dedicated theatre building’. Is this move into the landscape or OTHER place another expression of the hedge church of a non-conformist sect? Or is it because we sometimes sense that the theatre was only built to contain or restrain us? Behind the walls and curtains we may be tolerated for a little longer. A little bit of heating and high society might quell the ‘storms of the heart’. The enclosure of an art form is certainly successful in commodifying the dreams. The conceit of hiding the secrets and only revealing the outcomes of our magic tricks provides good packaging and a sound contract between the performer and audience. The ticket sticks on the solid box office and those who wish to sell their wares in the streets will be treated not as harshly as mere beggars but as ‘the nicer sort’, beggars with a gimmick. If a stance against repertory and studio theatres is inferred by these statements, they are simply here to provoke questions about the aesthetic of the closed space as a place where illusion is constructed. In contrast, site-specific work has to deal with, embrace and cohabit with existing factors of scale, architecture, chance, accident, incident.

Out of these questions about place, came a group of Platform 4 associates and spectators who wanted to practically tackle this question of PLACE. We all recognised that we had very different approaches as writers and theatre makers. There were no real expectations about a particular style or consensus aesthetic. At the bottom line, we recognised that to form an alliance might assist us in the funding game and as a group we would be able to share resources and logistical support to make some ambitious work. This recognition of difference might also generate a picture of the potential variations present in the site continuum from sensitive to specific approaches and outcomes. The incentive of the Lottery/Arts Council initiative made it seem possible to raise the profile of this kind of work and I enthusiastically signed up with this new alliance under the banner of Wrights & Sites.

Our chosen site was Exeter Quayside and we called the project The Quay Thing. We chose this location because it seemed to us that it presented many possibilities because of its history; its crucial trade role in the development of the city; its contemporary use as a work and leisure space; its mix of ancient and modern architecture; its busy and abandoned buildings and spaces. Most importantly it presented itself as the artery of Exeter; the waterway of simultaneous past and present. During our development of the proposal we consulted with local inhabitants, local authorities and regional arts organisation, South West Arts. There was general support for the project including verbal offers of matching funding but we were to find out to our cost that words are not always enough. When the news came that we had won the award our good news was met with animosity from the city council rather than congratulations. Being aware that most of the property in the area belonged to a hostile council forced us to play our contingency card. At an emergency meeting we declared: ‘If they don’t want us on their land, we’ll take to the water’.

When we enter the public space or the field or the abandoned building new constraints quickly reveal themselves. We find that the ‘land of the free’ is not free; we discover that the horizon belongs to somebody. Every centimetre that surrounds you has been measured, allotted, bought, entered into the records upon written deeds. What this suggests is that artists who escape the gallery or the auditorium find themselves in other kinds of contract with land-lords and legislators. I speak of this not to deter the site-specific artist but to underline the need to see through the romantic image of the great outdoors or the rusty factory and to realise that it presents another kind of frame with its own peculiar sub-text and subsoil. The process of making site-specific performance is often archaeological. The signs we find on the upper layers of the site may mask incredible mysteries of ownership which challenge our sense of place and our sense of ourselves upon this planet. Each site has its own culture, architectural sign system, forensic evidence, written and oral history which makes each site unique and requires varied and fresh modes of investigation.

In attempting to document some aspects of this work I share misgivings, no doubt reflected by other members of the company. The experience of site-specific performance work is so varied and expansive that no clear definition or methodology of such practice seems possible. I prefer to view such work as being on a kind of creative continuum governed by actual and imagined factors. Indeed, the most refreshing aspect of such work is that its definition continually bleeds. It is work that embraces disciplines highlighting and blurring skills. Site-specific arts imply accessibility by accident or design.

My involvement in this Wrights & Sites season highlighted the issue of scale. The pilot season consisting of a journey down the River Exe and Exeter Canal on a pleasure boat meant that the primary site, the boat which carried audience and performers was a mobile, moving stage which travelled through an urban and then rural landscape and waterway. The physical scale and transitory nature of this performance meant that even if the audience completely ignored the interventions which occurred along the way, they still had an experience, a journey which was re-framed simply by it being billed as something different to the normal pleasure principle of a boat trip. My initial proposal had been to regard the boat itself as the main focus or site for investigation and preparatory notes were made to fuel active investigation with the performers.

Extract:

NAVIGATION: Working Notes (June 13th 1998)
Proposed performance units to be woven with other Wrights’ material (sinusoidal).

VOICE: The voice of the boat. (Berio style?) Vocal celebration developed from the sounds of the boat engine which provides the bass line/rhythms for vocal composition.
Encompass other found sounds of river, canal, water, birds etc.
Gradually text relating to the boat’s story/history emerges.

GIFT/TALISMAN: Passengers are presented with individual mementoes of the journey tied to a string or fishing line. The objects relate to the boat and aspects of the waterways. (e.g. Stones of the river-bed). These strung objects will also be hung from relevant nautical places along the route.

PEBBLE MUSIC: The engine of the boat is cut. As it settles or drifts the passengers are encouraged to listen. Music is played by dropping stones into the water at different rhythms, volumes, intensities.

TALISMAN TEXT: A character on board intones text/poem relating to each object tied on the string. The string is read in a cycle as if saying the rosary or using a prayer wheel.

THE LAUNCH: Some kind of speech frames the journey (Welcome and ‘we name this boat’).

APPARITION: A character who seems to be disconnected from the journey keeps appearing on route. Perhaps he/she is evicted from the boat at start of journey but then keeps appearing on canal bank. (Bicycle Express). At the Double Locks this character is seen by the rusty anchor playing music (sea songs, smuggler songs) for spare change.

LANDMARK: Drawing attention to at least one significant nautical landmark on route (to be identified).
At present I envisage characters having a fluid, drifting quality as if they are there but not there… memory traces of people who have travelled on the boat or embodiments of the boat’s character.
Following the belief that the central character of a site-specific performance is the site itself, then I wish to investigate the personality of the boat itself. The boat speaks to its passengers through the activities of the performers.

Later, during the planning stage I decided to ‘abandon ship’, choosing to focus my investigation at a crucial point in the proposed journey because the notion that I could use the boat as a site became untenable. I came to this decision on board the boat when all four Wrights travelled together. The actual journey revealed the compositional problems inherent in the creation of site-specific work. Imagined projections onto a site must be tested out on site. I became aware of the dramatic quality of the journey; the volume of the engine; the dynamic operation of the boat by the crew as they performed their daily tasks; the change in my perception of the space on board when it was inhabited by passengers. In my view, the journey was so loaded with atmospheres and images that I felt swamped by its actuality. I also realised that up to that point my site work had always been in places of comparative abandon, silence, stasis, places which I had perhaps colonised with my own perceptions. Added to this had been the mistaken notion that I could interweave a proposed score with the work of another Wright who I had never collaborated with before. My bravery about gambling images in a ‘sinusoidal’ weave seemed over ambitious. I was confronted by a situ-ation which suggested less content rather than two strands of collage or juxtaposed input. After this crisis of confidence I began to look at a very particular site, the place where passengers would disembark before taking the return journey towards the sunset. My focus had shifted to the Double Locks on the Exeter Canal.

The devising process began as the performers gathered to collect a small boat on a trailer which would serve as a focus point for the work. The company were assigned vocal tasks which they performed whilst hauling the boat along the paths and roads which ran parallel to the river and canal. I became conscious that the public exploration of ideas and actions could be problematic for the actors, particularly for those who were mainly used to rehearsal in the cocoon of studio or theatre. I hoped that the boat could act as a kind of physical/visual refuge during this process of journeying to the Double Locks. The itinerant hauling of the boat also externalised the sense of dispossession which I certainly felt following my frustrating encounters with city officials. This experience provided a clear example of how the circumstances or politics of place could impinge upon or inform the outcomes of the work. It led me to consider site work as a form of cultural trespass. The actors’ only home, the only place where they could rest their minds came through gazing into the bottom of the boat. In these circumstances the boat also became a foil, a disguise, a justification for their presence on the river bank.

Extracts:

IMPORT/EXPORT: Notes
Yes! The major character of this piece is the site/landscape/waterscape between the lock gates. Every time we go there it is different. There are many variables: different levels of water influenced by tide and the mechanics of the lock, trains passing, birds singing, the odd dog or accidental tourist. The water hides and reveals the structures of the lock. Dead fish and rubbish accumulate and swirl between the gates, but on another day the water is a sky mirror.

IMPORT/EXPORT: Details (Revised 30th June)
Owing to the variable states of the lock we may have to go with the flow, using whatever routes are available and adapting to different acoustic and spatial conditions governed by weather and the water levels.

During the second phase of the season, I occupied the former Exeter municipal power station, challenged by the forces of generality present in a vast space as well as the particularity of its former uses, wear and tear. If a building is perceived as the script or score for a performance, the outcomes of investigation will be influenced by the physical point at which material is discovered or generated. The large scale of site might suggest spectacular responses like those successfully made by such companies as Welfare State or Station House Opera. But the contemporary methods and effects of spectacle tend to be closely related to cultural activities which bear no significant relationship to site. The combination of live classical music with fireworks can have the resonance of a military attack upon an environment. Any space may be besieged or plundered in an exotic manner with special effects but if those effects are more commonly used in the rock concert, opera, political rally or military tattoo, then the chances are that the space itself will be masked, will become just an arena to be colonised by a particular package of imported aesthetics. Major bands like U2 or major religions (The Pope Live) can take over a sports stadium and obliterate the arena’s normal function. The sports arena can however evoke ritual behaviour in its spectators whether the event is secular or sacred. To that extent the arena generally lends itself to the broad brushstroke of transforming imagery, projections, mass participation and rhetorical performance.

The minute aspects of site can often be overlooked and to this end an archaeological or forensic approach to place may yield insights that the architecture and overt imagery of place may not. When I first entered the building I was drawn to a 4 metre square pit which had been filled with rubble. The upper layer of material consisted of rubbish which had been dumped or swept into the square. Some of the rubbish was recent whilst other objects were part of the building’s fabric and presented evidence of the electricity industry. These fragments constituted a kind of unrecognised archive, a collection of discarded traces but they also warned me against the nostalgic reliquary of the heritage industry.

Amongst the objects discovered during the development of WATT?, I keep on returning to one discovery. I climbed a metal ladder up on to a walkway high in the vast, glass-rooftop of the building. At the far end of the walkway was a cage where the controls for the mammoth lifting gear were housed. Lowering myself into this suspended cage I found a cast iron fuse box topped by 3 bare lightbulbs. Kneeling down, I looked under the box and found a rudimentary bird’s nest constructed with dry twigs and litter. Inside the nest were two eggs. One had hatched and lay open and empty and the other had a small black hole where the chick had made an initial attempt at breakthrough but had not emerged. In my imagination, this tiny ‘room’ with one round ‘window’ impacted with the huge shell of the abandoned power station. The impact was heightened when considering the way in which we describe how electrons orbit around the nucleus of an atom forming ‘shells’ of energy levels. Amidst the vastness of this generating building I had discovered a symbolic paradigm of the place. An abandoned shell and a dormant/dead shell.

Extracts (July 1998):

The main chamber which once housed four steam-driven turbines became a laboratory in which sound, text, movement and images were generated. The sonic qualities of the building led to the devising of vocal compositions based upon the resonance and dimensions of the architecture and the influence of Nineteenth Century Protestant (work-ethic) hymns. Scientific equations defining the properties of electricity also provided text. A durational sequence of actions was choreographed from notions of past work activity. Four bicycles moved in formation through the darkness illuminating the space from dynamo-powered light. A ‘worker’ delivered a eulogy to James Watt, an inventor of the steam engine, whilst people balanced weighty history books upon their heads. A blind actor (Kate Schofield) explored the machine room by touch; an ‘Electric Automaton Queen’ confined in a glass display case, ranted about power; a homeless man emerged from the inspection pit and fantasized about winning the lottery and spending his winnings on virtual reality equipment.

The performance culminated in a cacophony of electronic sounds, computer generated voice, old radio recordings and songs which accompanied the activity of filling the floor with live and dead domestic appliances. The combined interventions of professional performers and members of the local community led to six performances following a structured composition which was explored and adjusted for each showing. The audience were left with a sense of having been witness to the emergence of the memory traces of the building. For a short while power had returned to an abandoned cathedral of power.

In this composition I was concerned about the role of the audience; about their presence in the building. I wanted them to experience the feeling we had of being trespassers in another’s history. Attached to their chairs were objects found in the building such as rusty nuts and bolts, electrical components, scraps of paper, the detritus of another time. During the performance, one of the worker/performers senses that she is being watched by ‘intruders’. In that moment audience and performers are implicated in the act of trespass.

This production was devised on site through directing the performers to investigate the building, amplifying aspects of its structure, past functions and sonic qualities. The involvement of the performers cannot be underestimated in this process. Their physical engagement with the place and knowledge of relevant archive material as well as response to the tactile and invisible elements encountered, demanded stamina, sensitivity and presence solely relevant to the particular site. To this extent the presence of the human being and the individual’s connection to the work also makes the production people-specific. The performer’s body is framed by a harsh industrial environment, a reality which magnifies and usurps pretence. This revealing of the body and the fragility of the human being challenges accepted definitions of acting. In such a place the act of acting seems to be more about doing, about working, about performing a task. It leads me to consider and to further investigate the possibility that the ego of the actor might submit to the genius loci - the character of site. It was the act of grass cutting before any of the artifice, normally connected to the aesthetics of theatre making, which led to me to further consider the impact of site.