Author: Lizzy Hayes

Final Performance

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Performance process

How did we play with the power that our room gave us? We exploited it. We use the visual information that we could see to our advantage and took on authoritarian figures to fit the context. Due to the nature of our safe house a spy like persona was taken on by the actor welcoming the audience members to the house before they explored the house one room at a time. To solidify her role in the eyes of the audience the CCTV team adopted similar roles as “agents”, engaging with the audience over the phone, questioning them about their appearance and safety having only seen them over CCTV. While this role had little to do with our installation piece it gave us the opportunity to perform live on the night as well as supervise our installation and actually the ‘agent’ role fitted the supervisory role that we would have needed to be anyway.

I think what was particularly effective about our room was what our installation was able to show the audience: the space as it would be when once everyone had left and all the lights were turned out. Marita Sturken writes that “installation that deploys such technologies as video and computer devices delineate time” ((Erika Suderburg (2000) Space, Site, Intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. P. 287 ))and I think that our piece can identify with that. The videos on the computer screens showed the space that they had just explored in a different time, in a different light, with different inhabitants and with a different purpose, and for me, that juxtaposition with the image of one screen showing live CCTV footage of the nine rooms in colour and fully inhabited was just what the piece needed.

2013-03-08 09.25.46
Image by Lizzy Hayes 2013

Before the performance when the nerves set in I found myself more focused on what the audience would think of the live performance, not the installation, because in the live performance it would have been easy for something to go wrong. The improvised phone conversations were nerve racking at first as there was no way to rehearse that part of the performance. However due to the nature of the phone call it became easier to know what to say and how to say it as each member of the audience came through, making the questions I asked not only original, but more effective.
Prior to the performance I was concerned about how I would react if an audience member tried to address me, as the role I was playing was intended to act as the eyes of the room and only interact with the audience when asking them to leave. In the event no one did try to interact with me which I now think was a shame as I would have loved to take the character further and inform the audience that “I am not permitted to divulge that information at this time.”. However the fact that I remained un-distracted enabled me to observe the reactions and interactions to the installations that were occurring around the room. If the audience spoke to each other at all they did it in a whisper, which I think reflected the mood of the room. It was interesting to see that they perhaps feared the consequences of talking out loud in a room full of whispering voices. Only one pair discussed their experiences in the other rooms and this pair was the only pair who did not really acknowledge me at all.

The performance itself was both exciting and tiring. It was empowering to take on an authoritative role for the evening, yet daunting to have to improvise a phone conversation with someone that I could see but that could not see me. It was fascinating to see how the audience reacted to the months of planning various rooms had put into their performances and it was unbelievably exciting seeing everyone pull off their performances to such a high standard. It was also gratifying seeing how the audiences reacted to our installation and of course how they reacted to the live CCTV stream of the rest of the house.

Overall I think everyone involved in the project should be extremely proud of the work that they have produced. As a group and as individuals we have created a piece of work like nothing seen before and like nothing that will ever be seen again and it is an experience that none of us will ever forget.

 

These are the ancestors

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Home, Music / Sound, Performance process, Research, Rooms

While the footage on its own had a great aesthetic effect  we decided that a relevant reading played over the top of each video clip would add to it. Each of us took on three rooms for which to find or write a text that we felt connected to the image, or added to or complimented the narrative of the clip. Considering the title of the whole performance was called ‘Safe House’ I looked in U.A. Fanthorpes “Safe As Houses”  (( U.A. Fanthorpe (1995) Safe As Houses: Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe. Cornwall: Peterloo Poets – a book of short poems )) . I found that the first stanza of the poem Haunting connected with mood and movement of the CCTV footage of the landing, discussing shadows and ancestors who just passed through. This coupled with the second stanza of the poem Last House  created a piece that spoke of shadows in three different senses-the darkness that requires light to be present, the ghost or image of a dead person, and the Shakespearean term for an actor.

“These are the ancestors. The shadow people,
who now and then lean softly from the dark
and stroke on chin or thumb the new generation.
This is their last performance. The delegate yaws doubtfully, as audiences do,
wanting the star to fall… but not until the last reel, at sunset, to the right music.” (( An adaptation of two poems by U.A. Fanthorpe (1995) Safe As Houses: Poems by U.A. Fanthorpe. Cornwall: Peterloo Poets ))

Another of my readings was a piece by David Rattray. His piece spoke of the fragility and ambiguity of existence in a way that complimented the brief existence of each of the life forms in every image.

“Life is a fragile hybrid pulsing, instant by instant, between being and nothingness. Even if every person on earth were to vanish suddenly from time and space, the mere fact of the absence would suffice to make humanity remain identical to what it already was. Absent.” (( Rattray, David (1992) How I Became One of The Invisible. USA: Semiotext p. 204 ))

For my final reading I took the lines of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and used them for the kitchen footage. In this stanza the Lady Macbeth discusses the place of women in the house and how strong the female kind are and this felt attuned to the place of the women in the modern day kitchen.

Installation piece-Kitchen. By Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughes, Faye Mcdool

(To view all the installation video clips with voice recordings please visit Lauren Hughes YouTube account on http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-d_h3abFFc4K36mLaNFaDw?feature=watch )

This was not the only feminist reading we acquired. For two of the other clips we used lines from H. G Wells’ book The Invisible Man but decided to alter the narrative to make them the voice of a woman. Not only was the text relevant to the clips in the text but also to us as CCTV operatives. We were the people who could see everything whilst remaining unseen.

Each video and sound clip was played off of a different screen, on a loop, in synchronisation and in a darkened room. For me the effect was haunting. To sit in the dark having nine different voices speak or whisper nine different pieces of text from varying points in the room felt like I was sat in the dark the centre of the  mind of a very thoughtful but confused person. Once again, I felt like I had power beyond my status: not only was I hearing the somewhat disjointed thoughts of various writers, poets and even fellow actors, but I still had the power to see the movements of every other person in the house. My way of overcoming the strange feeling? Play with the power.

 

 

Things that go bump in the dark.

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Performance process, Research, Rooms

For our final piece the CCTV group decided to create a piece of installation art using the fascinating piece of equipment at our disposal. Marita Sturken states that “An installation both defines and contains space, situating, if not controlling the viewer within it.” (( Erika Suderburg (2000) Space, Site, Intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. P. 287 ))  The idea for our piece was that while in the CCTV room the audience would be able to experience every other room in the house, placing them in a position where they could understand the format and use of the space in a way that they had not experienced it in the rest of the performance. Seeing as all of the rooms were occupied during the performance we decided to see what it would be like for the rooms to be captured with very few signs of life, and once we realised the potential that this emptiness created we decided to stick with it.

Full screen night filming by Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughes, Faye Mcdool
Seeing the rooms from a different perspective reminded me of Bollnows Human Spaces (2011) and how different each of our safe house rooms were from the definitions and purposes he proposed. Bollnow states that the furnishings and furniture play a part in the aura of a room and that “bare, empty rooms have a chilling effect” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 144)) and that “disorder and neglect have a quieting effect” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 144)) and due to the empty and neglected state the house was in it was easy to agree with him.
The emptiness and neglected state of the house became emphasised in the dark state that we filmed in.

IMG-20130122-00470

Image by Jozey Wade 2013

The cot room (above) had a chilling, spooky quality to it that does not represent home, even in the day light. As many of the ‘residents’ have mentioned, we doubt that the room would feel that bad if it wasn’t for the presence of the cot itself. But I think it was key for us to remember when filming was that the room was made to feel so unsettling on purpose. The true nurturing purpose of a child’s nursery is lost in a sort of dark translation in the house due its requirements for training and we were able to use that to our advantage when filming, making the images we captured as uncomfortable as the actor being filmed felt.

Installation piece- Cot Room By Lizzy Hayes, Lauren Hughs, Faye Mcdool

Other spaces that in the day time might not be pleasant, but had never been scary, transformed beyond what I imagined they would. The kitchen became colder and harsher and the introduction of a spot light to the living room gave the opposite effect to the warmth that we expected.
Instead of just filming the bare rooms we had one of us walk through or occupy the space in a minimalistic manner. Bollnow suggested that  “the dwelling becomes an impression of the individual who dwells in it” ((Bollnow, O.F (2011) “Human Space” London: Hyphen Press, p. 145)) and I think that in capturing snippets of life in each room we were in effect stating that the people who were seen are not permanent residents, but are instead shadows passing through. These hints of movement acted as suggestions of life in an otherwise still setting. Without realising it I think we created something very much like Gary Hills installation piece, The Viewer, which I talked about in a previous post, in that the person seen in each image was not there to be interacted with or to portray a character, but were there to prove their existence.
The final result of this nights filming was nine separate one minute clips of footage, each representing one room and containing a different movement at a different time.

Safe House

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Home, Rooms, Uncategorized

In getting a ticket for our performance our audience members fall subject to a false sense of security- they are welcome in the house because we have allowed them to be there but we do not actually live there. Is it really our home to invite them into? Are they really welcome? And are they really safe?

When I think of a ‘safe house’ I think of a discreet property that houses an occupant who needs to be kept safe from something or one. It is a temporary base for a hidden person. It is structurally a house, but very rarely a home, just as our property is, blending in nicely with the surrounding area.

Performance Process

Image by Jozey Wade 2013

In my experience of fictional ‘safe houses’ on television or in film the houses are very rarely safe and are often infiltrated by the enemy. While this is obviously for entertainment purposes the characters responsible for the victim are left shocked and confused as to how anyone could have seen past their high security system. But the answer is clear to me: a safe house is only as safe as or maybe even less safe than any other house on the street: it is just as easy to break into, just as likely to be burgled and because of its ‘secret’ resident, a much higher target of crime.

It is also easy to assume that those kept in safe houses are there under the protection of the law: someone in danger, someone on parole, someone whose identity is too precious to be introducing themselves to their neighbours without an alias. However, research has shown that ‘safe houses’ are often used against the legal system for other purposes. Human smuggling and trafficking for example require safe houses in which illegal migrants can be housed without being discovered.  Leman and Jansses state that in some countries “large smuggling networks in which the victims have a long way to travel need safe houses to conduct their business.” (( Leman, J, & Jansses, S “The Various ‘Safe’-House Profiles in East-European Human Smuggling and Trafficking.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 33, No. 8, November 2007, pp. 1380 )). It has been found that in these situations the safe houses may not only be used for temporary accommodation, but as a prison in which the migrants are held as hostage while their families are forced to pay more money for their safety or a brothel like establishment. Statistics suggest “that a minimum of 50 percent and upward of 80 percent of human trafficking victims worldwide are women (U.S. Department of State 2005; U.S. Department of State 2010). Seventy percent of female victims are trafficked into the sex trade…” (( Perdue, T, Williamson, C, Billings, M, Schart, J, & Boston-Gromer, R 2011, ‘In the Matter of Human Trafficking in Ohio: The Pursuit for Justice Continues’, Women’s Policy Journal Of Harvard, 8, pp. 4, viewed 17 April 2013. )).

While this statistic is disturbing, it appears that one room in our house has accidentally created a performance that could, when paired with the title of our piece, have a deeper meaning than was previously intended. The set up of the sexual element of the bedroom piece could easily represent not only a sex slave in terms of a BDSM arrangement but also a hostage situation in which a woman kept as a sex slave in a ‘safe house’.

While the bedroom is perhaps the most controversial room in our house, I’m not sure our audience will feel safe in the hostile living room environment or the peculiar child’s room environment either, especially considering that the technology normally used for a persons security is being used to scrutinise their every move.

Forkbeard Fantasy

Lizzy Hayes / / CCTV, Documentation, Performance process, Rooms

We have been toying with the potential performative use of the CCTV room, whether or not to have a performance occur in the room or only through the eyes of the camera’s in the rest of the house. It has been suggested to me that it could be an interesting idea to explore how we, the CCTV operatives, could interact with the technology to make an interesting performance.

This reminded me of a performance and workshop I took part in a few years ago. With my school we worked with a company called Forkbeard Fantasy- a company of two brothers who interacted with film and screens live on stage in a way that I had then never seen before.

All of their performances to date rely heavily on the projection of pre-recorded and live footage, as can be seen above. In The Colour of Nonsense (2010), among other pre-recordings and animations the company played pre-recorded footage of a woman entering an apartment in an elevator. The recording spoke to the actors and they responded to the screen as though the woman was actually on stage, though she was never physically present. The effect of the well rehearsed interaction was comical and fascinating. The actors explain, ““What we were doing was creating a living dynamic between stage & screen, where the filmed sequences become part of the world on stage into which and out of which the performers can move –from stage to screen and back again… and performers in film or on stage communicate and talk with one another across this Celluloid Divide”.” (( http://forkbeardfantasy.co.uk/new_ffs_use_of_film10.html  (Accessed 3rd March 2013) ))

Another example of artists using film and projection to create a performance is installation artist Gary Hill. Nick Kaye suggests when commenting on Gary Hills Standing Apart (1996) that video recordings add the ‘capacity of having and presence and a distance at the same time’ ((Kaye, Nick (2007) Multi-Media:Video Installation Performance. London: Routledge p. 135 )). I think that statement is true of any video recording in that the person on screen is in the room without being physically present, but it is particularly relevant to much of Forkbeard’s work.
While he uses recordings and projection Gary Hills work is very different from that of Forkbeards not only because the type of performance is different, but the ways in which they use the technology. Hills Installation piece The Viewer (1996) uses pre-recorded images but without sound.  For the piece seventeen men were captured on camera standing still (or barely moving) for ten minutes. These clips of footage were then projected onto a wall at the same time on a continuous loop. The use of video and projection was not to tell a story or to interact with or to represent a character, but was instead to suggest the presence of someone who is not there, to be “fully visible and absent” at the same time” (( Nick Kaye (2007) Multi Media: Video Installation Performance. London: Routledge. P. 131 )) . I think that is notion of omnipresence is one that the me and my fellow CCTV operatives can associate with. During exploration of the house we have communicated with other ‘residents’ about what they are doing or saying though we were never physically present with them.