Today we have discovered that not only is there a Lucy Tower at the top of Lincoln’s steep hill near the Cathedral, but also that there is a Lucy Tower named multistory car park in the down hill section of Lincoln. This is very interesting as we are leaning towards the idea of including the towers in our performance. But we’re not exactly show how yet. We’ll have to wait and see…

Patrice Pavis says ‘A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere’ (1998)

I really believe in this quote, as before a place becomes personal to you, you have to know its own personal history. You have to indulge yourself within it’s many paths which has led it to where it is now. What has happened here? Who have been here? What stories lay hidden within these streets? I think these are some of the questions which as a group we need to look into to help get our imaginative juices flowing, as once we have found an interesting aspect of Lincoln we can start towards bringing this to life through out project.

Having decided that we will defiantly be basing our performance on the history on Lincoln, we found an interesting background about Lincoln cathedral and the castle. That in the 1800’s ‘Lincoln was divided into two parts, known by the application of Above-hill and Below-hill, the former part is the general residnece of the gentry and clergy; while the latter is mostly inhabitad by merchants and tradespeople.’ (The History of Lincoln 1810)

This is the kind of imformation we have been looking for from the get go. This shows just how the divide has effected the type of people who live in each of these areas of Lincoln, and even their jobs.

But what exactly could we do performnce wise to show this?

Our idea so far is that we could create a tea party in both sections of Lincoln. Uphill we would have a middle-class tea party, with alcoholic drinks, maybe dancing to modern music. Whereas Downhill we would have a very demure, sensible tea party with little tea cups. We have decided to swap the social classes on their heads, as this will be more shocking to the public, seeing what they believe to be ‘proper’ for that particular area been acted out at the opposite end.

Research time! Today I researched past site-specific performances and came across the book; Good Luck Everybody by Lone Twin. A performance based book based on public projects. Reading further on, I found this book to be one of the most insightful detail enriched pieces of work, which furthers anyone’s knowledge if they want to pursue acting in public.

‘Participation is an activity that is inherant to any relationship, that any viewer/reader can join in with to help the end product.’

This is a quote from the book Good Luck Everybody. I believe that this quote is of high importance to our performace, as we are going to be out in the public, and even if we chose not to interact with the public as we perform, there is no getting away from the fact that just by walking by us, or glancing at us.. that is infact them participating in our private performance space.

Researching online I found a site specific video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsIMfHxCBFU   This shows just how we can make the space our own. How we can move to reflect a performance.

More research is needed…

First presented with the module of ‘Site-Specific’, as a group we initially had no clue where to start so we decided to take a more practical approach. Rather than researching using book from the get-go, we set off from the LPAC, and took off for a walk around Lincoln taking paths, roads and bridges which we would never usually travel down. Along our journey we discovered many different visual perspectives of Lincoln, which we’d never encountered before, be it just a different angel view of a street or a building. Our main aim today was to get a feel of the space around us, to see if this conjured up any ideas of what we could do for out performance and where we could perform it.

To go along with the theme of ‘You have not been here before’ we descied to discreetly follow random members of the public, some of which led us to even more spots in Lincoln where we had not ventured before. Nevertheless, which ever person we followed and which ever random path they took we always ended up back in the city centre. This started me thinking of the city’s allure, and the pull it seems to have on people. Maybe this will aid us towards coming up with a performance… the attraction of the city centre.

So for now we are basing our research around Lincoln’s centre.

Below are some of the pictures which we took during our roam around Lincoln

I am a drama student in my second year at the University Of Lincoln. As part of our ‘Site Specific Performance’ module our group has to undertake research around a certain place within the Lincoln area, which we are keen to use in our performance, and based on these ideas, come up with a 20 minute performance around this site. I will be blogging through-out our time on this module. Documenting our meetings, research, development of our final performance, and the over all process.

– Paige

My BlogContinue reading →