Category: Uncategorized

These are some pictures of my performance space. I wanted to peform my piece here as it is on the Broadgate side of the Drill Hall and that is where the H. Newsum & Sons Ltd. Steam SawMill used to exist. As you can see the space at the moment is being use as a storage cupboard, however, my plan is to transform it into a woodwork room that plays on 4 of 5 senses: Sight, Sound, Smell and Touch. There will be many elements to my piece, all of them linking into the idea of the once existing SawMill. For the sight, a projection of a steam sawmill and its process, the actual installation itself of sawdust on the floor, wooden panels and furniture filling the room and me completing my task of completly demolishing a wooden table by sawing it up. Sound will be a soundscape of 3 different accounts, one of behalf of the tree being made into wooden floor panels – giving a voice to the voiceless, one from Henry Newsum who was the owner of the SawMill and one of the employees at the SawMill. The Smell will be given from all the sawdust and wooden panels, giving the room that freshly sawn wood feeling. Lastly touch will be apparent as I cut of bits of the table I will hand them over to the audience who will be able feel it.

With all of this taken into account, I am hoping to give the audience a feel of the history of the site but more importantly the actual foundations of the site, before the Drill Hall was even thought of. I want them to leave my piece feeling in the know about something that they probably didn’t know about before. I also want them to feel involved in the actual performance, when I hand them the fragments of wood, I want them to take it away with them – they don’t have to of course – and feel that they had a sense of being a part of it.

These were my presentation notes for Talking Birds. I tried focusing more into how they use the techniques I would like to use for my own creation.

Talking Birds

About

Composer and Co-Artistic Director Derek Nisbet, Designer and Co-Artistic Director Janet Vaughan, General Manager Philippa Cross.

Since 1992 Talking Birds has been producing thoughtful, playful, resonant, mischievous and transformative meditations on people and place. They call their work ‘Theatre of Place’ and is characterised by a distinctive blend of humour, music and visual flair in venues both conventional and unconventional across the UK and internationally.

Their work is made collaboratively, connecting people and place. They’re particularly interested in making work in places which the public don’t often get into, the sorts of places that they might stumble across by accident. Places which have interesting features, histories and former uses, perhaps layered with recollections and associations which are on the brink of slipping from living memory. Or places that are at the end of one use and not quite ready for the next.

“Our projects invite people to explore a particular place of interest in a mediated way; weaving together its stories – real and imagined – to make accessible this neglected or forgotten space and encourage people to examine it in a new light.” (Talking Birds)

Three doctors

Three Doctors was a performance as part of One Last Look to mark the closing of Coventry & Warwickshire Hospital (which was being relocated to the new University Hospital in Walsgrave). Talking Birds marked this significant moment for the city by guiding an audience of 12 at a time through the corridors and operating theatres that have held the stories of thousands of local people, accompanied by voices, music and the ghosts of doctors Arrowsmith, Bourne and Mellor, the hospital’s founders

Solid Blue

SOLID BLUE was courtroom drama done Talking Birds style, and made especially for Whitefriars, the atmospheric medieval monastery set amidst the flyovers of the Coventry ring road. It was inspired both by the ghosts of the building and by conversations with local crime historian John Russell, who revealed to us the grisly discovery in Coventry of criminals’ remains buried vertically, headfirst…

Wanderlust

Made in, for and about the South Bay Underground Car Park in Scarborough in the depths of winter, Wanderlust told the story of a man who had been parked there indefinitely.

It explored the way that a site’s many incarnations and histories continue to build and sit on top of each other, in a sometimes less than peaceable co-existence. When they first visited the car park, someone mentioned Galaland, an arcade that the car park replaced in the 1960s. Digging in the local history archives revealed astonishing pictures of Moroccan-style arches, which seemed incongruously elaborate architecture for an amusement arcade until further investigation revealed the original life of the building – as Scarborough Aquarium, designed by maverick architect Eugenius Birch, best known for his seaside piers. Wanderlust allowed all three of these incarnations to take turns to surface.

“If you’ve use the underground car park in the last few years and wondered why there are small pulleys in the ceiling at one point, now you know – but don’t tell anyone we told you…” (Talking Birds)

This short 20 minute performance/live art installation intrigued and beguiled the audiences.

How they have influenced me

Use of history

I’m focusing on the history of the drill hall but before it was the drill hall and exposing that while exploring it further.

Use of tech

They use a lot of projections and sound and I’m going to be incorporating that into my piece, my piece I going to be based around the 4 of the 5 senses.

Speeches

They also use people from the history of the place and make accounts for them and pre-record them or actually speak them live. This is a big part of my performance that will be incorporated also.

These are the notes that I found and used for my presentation on Blast Theory and their use of technical aspects and technology as a whole.

Blast Theory

Est. 1991 and they are based in Brighton, UK

Founded by Matt Adams, Niki Jewett, Will Kittow and Ju Row Farr. The group is currently led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj.

51 notable works between 1991 and 2015 and have won many awards including an interactive arts BAFTA award.

Genres of performances

The genres of their performances are listed as so Audio, Gallery-Museum, Games, Live, Mobile, Online, Video & Our Research

A lot of their performances also cross over genres

Soft Message

Comes under the genres of audio and mobile

The calls catch people drunk at parties, in art galleries and out on the street. We hear them arguing, shouting at their cats or as their friends grab the handset. They open their lives to the listener, they reveal secrets and declarations of love. From the first call to a Mancunian goth pretending to be Romanian we follow these four people through a week in their lives as they open up to us.

The conversations use the intermittent, slow motion nature of the interview to explore the things that are rarely said and rarely heard. Most importantly, we hear the voices of people alone, confessing, contemplating, and opening up to the absent interviewer.

The programme explores the ways in which radio and telephones lend themselves to a certain kind of intimacy. The programme asks how is the rise of the mobile phone affecting how we talk to each one another and what does it mean to talk to strangers?

The programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 10pm on Thursday 7th December 2006.

Fixing point

Genres are audio live and mobile

Fixing Point is an audio walk about Seamus Ruddy made in collaboration with electronic musician Clark. This work was first shown at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. The Maltings focus on a programme of classical music in an idyllic rural setting. However the area has a strong military history with experimental installations at Orford Ness and an American nuclear base at Bentwaters.

Building on these contexts Ju Row Farr conducted an interview with Anne Morgan about her brother Seamus Ruddy. He was killed in 1985 by members of the Irish National Liberation Army in Paris. His body has never been found but is believed to be in a forest in France. He is one of a number of victims who disappeared and relatives are still anxiously hoping to find news of their loved ones. Anne speaks movingly about Seamus and what it is like to wait 26 years for news that never arrives.

To take part in Fixing Point you walk to a wood wearing headphones connected to a smartphone. The screen shows a map of the area and audio recordings are hidden in the wood. You explore the wood to reveal the recordings and learn more about Seamus. Each recording is also marked by a metal fixing point which is screwed into the ground leaving a galvanised steel ring visible above the surface. Blast Theory Associate Artist Jon Sutton created the Android application.

This work was premiered on 28th May 2011.

Too much information

Genres are audio live and mobile

Use a smartphone to find audio recordings of secrets and intimate moments hidden around the streets of Manchester, set to a score by Martyn Ware of The Human League and Heaven 17 fame.

Too Much Information is an audio walk around the streets of Manchester, based on a series of frank and funny conversations between two groups of people at very different stages of their lives – a group of young adults and a group of over 60s.

Posing some seemingly awkward questions, Blast Theory Artist Ju Row Farr and Associate Artist Niki Woods worked over a series of 3 intensive workshops with two groups at the Royal Exchange Theatre. The two groups had never met and under normal situations, would be highly unlikely to have such personal conversations with each other.

Too Much Information explores our expectations of young and old people, it looks at different life experiences and what we can enjoy and learn from each other from different points in our lives.  As you walk around the centre of Manchester these shared revelations are set to specially commissioned soundscore by Martyn Ware.

This is the second piece of work Blast Theory has created in partnership with the Royal Exchange Theatre, following on from 2013’s My Neck Of The Woods.

‘ An eloquence emanates from these abandoned spaces, and Pilgrim cleverly allows them to speak for themselves, to reveal more than she imposes’ (The Guardian, Deep End).

Geraldine Pilgrim creates Site Specific installations and performances in extroadinary buildings and in different locations. Her main work is creating memories and atmospheres and interpreting them into Site Specific art.

Pilgrim created a Site Specific piece called Not Forgotten which ran from September 2010 until September 2011. The installation is based on the fourteen children of John and Mary Towneley, who had a family portrait back in 1601. The family tree, the lavender and the cots were each a memorial to each child.

‘I want to create a memorial to the Towneley family, part of which installation that changes and develops over time and draw on the family history, the hall and landscape to create an artwork the belongs to the people of Burnley.’ (Pilgrim, 2010).

I feel that it was her aim to create a type of artwork that makes the public think and imagine a home that experienced the life, loss and love of the family.

http://www.midpenninearts.org.uk/contemporary-heritage-notforgotten