Category: CCTV

Over and out!

Hayley Misseldine / / CCTV, Home, Rooms, Technical, West Parade

After four days and about 16 hours of performing…the safehouse is closed!
There were setbacks, complications and few expressionless audience members, but overall a huge success.
To lay out the scene – firstly a couple would ring the doorbell, where I would answer and ask them the password/phrase, in all cases they did know it, so luckily I didn’t have to shut the door in their faces, then I would take them through to the waiting room, which was minimalistic and fairly dark as the curtains to the window were closed to stop light filtering in, but also to avoid people from the outside as “it is nearly impossible to prevent your gaze from wandering into the private lives of others made suddenly visible” ((Heathcoate, Edwin, (2012), the Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln Ltd, P.99)) and it would ruin the whole performance if the audience could see into the house before they themselves had even entered, as well as destroying the illusion of the ‘safehouse’ because if you can see into it so clearly – how is it safe?

The most challenging parts of my performance were firstly – being professional yet approachable as I found when I performed in a manner that was all corporate with practically no humanity that the audience were more withdrawn, and not as inclined to divulge any information I asked of them. After I had seen this error, I changed my demeanour and added a little more friendliness to my performance, and I saw instantly that almost all of the audience members seemed more relaxed and therefore were able to answer my questions with more ease. Another challenge I faced were difficult audience members, some were absolutely expressionless! It seemed that no matter what I did or said, nothing affected them. Even when I shine an incredibly bright light in their faces, they didn’t even blink. So to counter these types of audiences members, I cut off any of my friendliness, I treated the situation as if were incredibly serious, and for most of those difficult audience members – it seemed to work.

I also encountered several technical difficulties, I made a 3 minute video for the audience, which explains issues such as safety and audience decorum whilst they were in the house, it features Lizzy, portraying Agent L, she simply talks to the camera explaining said issues –

videoscreenshot

 

The problems I encountered with this were only small, on two occasions the video would not play, and I had to improvise – asking the audience more questions such as ‘what do you know about the art of spying?’ whilst working on the computer, and trying to get the video to play, which luckily succeeded before too much time had passed. Additionally I learnt after the video had been made, that there was only one fire exit, but had stated there were two on the video, which after it had been played, I reiterated back to the audience, but informed them of the new information, and showed them said fire exit on a map so the audience would have no doubts about what to do in the event of a fire. With the video, I was trying to create a sense of anonymity, letting the audience know that this is infact an operation, it is not just me in a room pretending to be a spy, Agent L is a part of the operation, her eyes are covered, her identity hidden. For those who saw performances where Lizzy was not there, her appearance on the video remains a mystery by building “electronic identities: out there, we are disembodied, depersonalised.” ((Pearson, Mike, (2010), Site-Specific Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, P.125.)) Which I believe adds a more realistic element to the performance.

The most problematic technical problem however were the phones – the CCTV room and I had worked into our performances phone calls back and forth, with at one point whomever was performing in the CCTV room speaking directly to the audience via speakerphone. The problem that ensued were connectivity related – occurring more often than I would’ve like, the person upstairs would miss their queue to ring, and I would have to call them instead, but for some reason the calls would not connect, leaving an awkward silence the first time it happened. Of course after the first encounter with this problem, despite not being able to fix the technical side, I prepared more dialogue and more opportunities for the audience to speak whilst the problem was occurring. With enough foresight I managed to overcome any future possibilities of silent moments, which made for a better performance.

The only other problem I encountered were timekeeping related – making sure I let people into the house at the right time, only having two couples in the house at one time. This was difficult if we overran, or were under the time schedule. Making sure I knew where everyone was at any given time was the biggest responsibility I undertook, and making sure everything ran smoothly was probably the hardest part of the whole performance.

Altogether, I feel like the performance as a whole went incredibly well, and I am proud of my participation in it. I have learnt new things about myself, and found a new sense of self-believe in my abilities which I will carry with me in the future.

Our time in the Safe House has come to an end.

Lauren Hughes / / CCTV, Performance process

Well it’s all over! I can comfortably say not one have us has ever experienced anything quite like the past few months. Site Specific has not only given us and hopefully the audience members an experience to remember, it’s opened up Drama as a subject even further for us as students.
For the CCTV group it’s been harder than we first predicted, we’ve gone from holding placards to the cameras, leaving messages around the house, treasure hunts, to finally finding something worthy of a performance. Instead of focusing on relaying messages to the audiences we decided to show the house in a different context, at night.

Going back to my first blog post, I reeled off the ideas and emotions that came to mind when I first entered the house on West Parade. When looking back now a few of my ideas were trialed and tested and eventually used in the final performances. Our group always wanted to use the CCTV to our advantage, for example whether we informed the audience they were being watched or to leave them to figure it out for themselves.

When the rehearsal process progressed so did our ideas, with the final piece being called Safe House, it developed our ideas for the CCTV room even further. Joining the CCTV group and Hayliegh in the Reception, we were the Agents within the Safe House ensuring their visit goes smoothly. With Hayliegh welcoming the two audience members to the house for their induction in the reception, she listed some rules and regulations within the house. There was then a phone call between me and the downstairs phone on speaker, asking the audience members questions about their choice of clothing, interrogating them as to whether they considered their clothing as a disguise when making way to the Safe House and so on and so forth.

On my performance evenings of the 1st and 2nd of May, improvisation was done during the performances mainly through the phone calls identifying individual visual aspects of each audience member. Identifying personal aspects ensured they knew they were being watched which clearly changed their body language straight away. Being in the Safe House for two performance evenings meant I had the opportunity to see several audience members explore the house and how each individual reacted differently to our weeks of work. When the audience members came across our room towards the end of their time in the house, several entered bewildered discussing their individual experiences, some came in quiet, calm and collected, others even tried interacting with me trying to provoke a reaction. The performance evenings were very exciting and nerve wrecking giving the improvisational aspects, it was fantastic seeing the reactions some audience members had when being asked personal questions about their appearance, watching their eyes race around the room before seeing the camera. One particular audience member entered the CCTV room at the end and were astonished they had been watching throughout the whole piece immediately saying in shock “Oh my goodness they’ve been watching us the whole time!?”

Choosing to leave the CCTV on for the audience members worked out really well, flipping the whole evening in their eyes on it’s head it was fantastic seeing their reaction, after watching this performance for the past sixty minutes and realising they were a part of it and that contradiction of all the performers now being unaware they were being watched. Although ours was an installation piece I was pleased we had the chance to see for ourselves the reaction the audiences had to our work. I can’t quite put my finger on it but there was something magical about watching the audience’s reaction to seeing the house as a whole on the CCTV screen.

Going back to the audience being a part of the performance the Living Room was probably the only room in which the audience had chance to be a performer knowingly. Some audience members literally sat with the performers for the full ten minutes, which was frustrating in that they didn’t explore the room they had put so much effort into. However the realisation set in that they may be trying to be a part of that performance as one audience member in particular sat still with them for the full ten minutes which could have been for that reason or maybe just the anxious, vulnerability they were feeling. The only sad aspect to the performance evenings was not being able to have a feedback session with the audience members afterwards to understand what was going through their minds and also what they took from each individual performance and if it was what we set out to accomplish or something totally different.

 

 

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.

 

Worn out one’s welcome of the Safe House

Faye Rose Mcdool / / CCTV

During the performance, I feel my photos of my Liminal, Compact and Ignored Spaces project worked successfully. As they were scattered around the house in different rooms, it allowed empty places in the house like window ledges being filled and like the concept of my project, draws audiences eyes to these disregarded places creating a larger relationship with the Liminal, Compact and Ignored Spaces in the house. “leads us beyond the spatial area of the dwelling into general human relationships.” ((O.F. Bollnow’s 2011 Human Space, London: Hyphen press p143)). These abstract photos also fitted in most of the other rooms due to the other concepts of the performances. For instance, rooms like the bedroom and also the shed and were also used during that performance but did not steal focus. I sincerely think my images reflected my inspirations, Eve Dent, Willie Dorner and Emma Hack and succeed the surrealism of the images in the frames around the house.

Click the image to link to all my Liminal, Compact and Ignored Spaces images

For the CCTV performance, all of the pre-recorded were set up around the room with the audio playing on speakers and headphones. However, during this, to help out another performance and to set the theme for the house, we interrogated the audience members while they were sat in the waiting room with ‘Agent H’. As we could see them from the CCTV room, but they didn’t know they were being watch, we asked the audience a series of questions via telephone loud speaker:

“Are your glasses prescribed or a disguise? What’s in your bag? Is your electrical chipped or can be used as a weapon? What’s the first thing you see when this key is in use? Is your fringe long to disguise your face?”

After this we recall, and stated the “Access has been confirmed” and wrote the answers on the white board.  When the audience arrived into the CCTV room, we were situated on a chair at the back of the room wearing a shirt, smart black bottoms and shades which are dark or mirrored so the audience is unable to see our faces. From this position, we stared at the live CCTV 9 screens and unable to react or speak to the audience.

When some audience members entered the room, some took a different approach than others. As the audience had just become comfortable with the house, they had forgotten about the interrogation at the begining and have to return to this environment. “Thus comfort represents an essential component of the domestic sphere in the contrat with the tension of life outside the house…” ((O.F. Bollnow’s 2011 Human Space, London: Hyphen press p143-3)) Some tried to speak to us while we were sat on the chair but was unable to answer. Others came straight in and listened to the night filming and its narratives. Being in the dark room with all the pre-recorded footage being played created a taunting atmosphere in the dark with the whisper of voices and only light from the various screens. One audience member found it difficult to be in the room and listen to the audio, especially through the headphones. When the audience members realised that they had been watched and that the CCTV 9 screens were live, we had a variety of reactions as some already realised but others felt guilty as they felt they were spying on the rest of the house. One audience member said:

“Maybe this is the message! It is rude to watch others even though we have just been watching them perform and now we are watching them on here?”

Following this, asking if he could exit the room if he got it correct as the room creeped him out. To Complete, I feel our pre-performance and the audience interrogation set the tone for the overall process from out time in the Safe House.  It was a successful final room for the audience to experience as they were able to see the journey they had just taken. Also, to experience footage with audio of being invisible allowed them to have a range of overall views on their experience in the Safe House and being able to witness it empty and at night.

Link to all the videos:

Bedroom

Cot Room Half and Half Face

Waiting Room

Living Room

Cot Room Window

Kitchen

Landing

Living Room Spotlight

Front Door

 

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.