“Home is where the heart is…”

IMG-20130129-00496
Taken By Faye McDool

Home is “the place of one’s dwelling and nurturing, with its association” ((Little, W (1969) “The Oxford Universal Dictionary”, London: Oxford University Press.)). Entering the house, I got the complete opposite feeling to this definition of home.  My first impressions were that the house was cold, damp, dirty and therefore a perfect performance space for a site specific performance.

From the reading, Pearson lists the differences between a performance on a stage and site specific. “At site, it is always as if for the first time” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p17 )). Gaining the unique opportunity and experience to devise a piece from the house made everyone begin to have ideas for the final piece.  Using the CCTV equipment installed in the house, the idea was said to prerecord some material and play it during the live performance causing juxtaposition. This could be used to a great extent as we could play with the audience and their reaction to the performance by filming it.

Learning how to use the CCTV system  was very interesting to see the rooms from a different prospective . I found Govans Revisioning Place “ inhabiting space” interesting reflecting on the CCTV. “Making performance which deals with travel, context and orientation” ((Govan, Emma, et al (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices Oxon and USA, Routledge p121)) From watching the groups in different rooms and how they adjusted to them to make a performance made me think of this as they all explored the rooms and what was in them. They also played a lot with props and explored the cupboards so they became more familiar with the space after their orientation.

When watching the groups, I was reflecting on how I could see everything in the rooms and what performance rehearsals were occurring. “From a different disciplinary standpoint” ((Pearson, Mike 2010, Site Specific Performance, Palgrave p23)) I had an inspirational idea from Eve Dent. Her work involves adjusting her body to where ever she decides to hides and only being able see her if you’re looking for her but to most people, she is invisible. This gave me the idea of the audience to explore and challenge them to find places to hide around the house. Some should be obvious that other but in some rooms like master bed room, there is a cupboard where you can fit at least two people and it would be interesting to see if they open the cupboard to find the performers. “Organic connection between art and the environment.” ((Govan, Emma, et al (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices Oxon and USA, Routledge p133))

dent
Event Dent ((Eve Dent, Tel Aviv,, Google Images Accessed 1/2/2012))
060405ab
Eve Dent ((Eve Dent, Bird in the House,, Google Images Accessed 1/2/2012))

While I was watching the other groups on the CCTV, I had become familiar with listening in to their conversations. Making this productive we recorded it on the CCTV then writing down creating a script which we then went to that particular room and repeated it to them. This is the use of Verbatim. “The term verbatim refers to the origins of the text spoken in the play. The words of real people are recorded or transcribed be a dramatist during interview or research process…actors take on the characters of the real individuals whose words are being used.” ((Hammond, Will & Steward, Dan , 2008. Verbatim p9)) We tested and their  reaction was just what we was looking for. This also links back to the reading and the Last Supper. “gives voice to the voiceless.” ((Govan, Emma. Nicholson, Helen & Normingtion, Katie 2007 Making a performance. Routledge p115)) As an audience member, one usually may think they are not allowed the speak during a performance and giving the the realisation that they have been watched. However, we had the idea of listening in to their conversation when none of the performers are in the room and repeating it to them when they least expect it.

“This sense of evoking the invisible is increased through a number of devices, including the director’s encouragement of ‘non-performing’, … Indeed, the whole status of the performers is ambiguous. Are the actors themselves? (they are named as such in the script.) Are they personas? Are they momentarily representations of the people whose words the speak?” ((Govan, Emma. Nicholson, Helen & Normingtion, Katie 2007 Making a performance. Routledge p115))

 

 

Play.

I had a lot of fun today in the house – I much prefer to work practically when I’m there and then reflect later, though the writing tasks we receive often unearth things I wouldn’t have thought of. However, today was a day of practical work and, to that end, I played.

Firstly, I was displaced from the Fisherman’s Shed by necessity of being caught on the camera, so I had to find an unpopulated space to unlock my writing from Friday. Partly out of practicality (as no one seemed to have chosen it) I chose one of the liminal spaces in the house – the stairs. Now, the memory which I was attempting to activate was that of playing on the stairs at my mum’s workplace so, I began experimenting, trying to find different ways to ascend and descend the staircase (bearing in mind the ideas of making strange the everyday that we had discussed earlier). First, I bumped down the stairs on my bum, which was slightly painful – Louise, who was working on the landing at the time, joined in on that one. Then I started to get a little more dangerous. As children, we are all told (I assume) not to play on the stairs, as it is a tad risky. I’m sure in the minds of most parents, if they see children playing on the stairs they immediately picture horrifying images of broken bones, concussions and trips to the hospital after a tumble down them. However, today, there were no parents – of course, there were doubters, wondering at the danger of what I was attempting but I (foolishly perhaps) refused to listen and went about my experimentation. I slid down the stairs on my front and back, jumped up the stairs, increasing the amount of steps I jumped up them every time, crawled up them (a rather pedestrian attempt), walked down them backwards and walked up and down them with my eyes closed (this after discussing with Louise and Angela the horrible feeling of thinking there’s another step and there not being one there, and lurching forward into the dark). Sliding down on my front is my new way of traversing the stairs, so none of you be alarmed if I do it again.

In the end though, the stairs couldn’t yield up any more interesting ways to use them so I went in search of something else. I found a feather duster.

Initially, I took the duster because it entertained me – it was large and inherently quite a ridiculous thing. But then, when I took it upstairs I had a bizarre urge to dust at all the cameras. In the beginning, it was just because the idea of a big feather duster slowly creeping up onto the camera amused me greatly. But, slowly, as I went round all the cameras grinning, I started to think through and rationalise my actions – there was a method to my madness. When we’re in the house, the CCTV tends to fade away into the background (as a few people have mentioned already). What I wanted to do, with my rituals of cleaning (first the duster, then spray and cloth, and finally the hoover) was to make obvious the cameras. With my escalating cleaning rituals, I separated the CCTV from the rest of the house, isolating it and inverting the focus in each room.

Eventually, however, I ran out of cleaning implements and had to find another way to amuse myself. This is when I truly settled on play. Before now I’d been playful in my exploration, but I’d not truly played as a child would. So I became a pirate.

The idea of setting sail on the seven seas and becoming a scurvy sea-dog came to me in the bathroom, when I was changing the toilet roll as I noticed the current one had been finished. Through the eyes of a grown-up, t’was but a simple cardboard tube. However, through the eyes of a child, it was a telescope! Next, I turned my child’s eye towards the bins just outside the toilet. Bins? No, they aren’t bins, they’re my pirate ship! (Though, size-wise, it was more like a little pirate dinghy) And what’s this? One of the flappy bin lids came of? Well, that looks rather like a pirate hat to me! Unfortunately, sailing the seven seas may be a bit hard without a sail… But, luckily, I found a handy oar in the form of a fire extinguisher!

You may be wondering what exactly the point was in all of this seemingly pointless play. Earlier, we talked a great deal about the idea of ‘making strange’ a place – mainly how Gob Squad’s Work ‘sought to ‘make strange’ the activity’  (Govan, n.d.). When you’re looking through the eyes of a child, mundane household objects can become magical, fun and strange. In that way, I played my pirate game to fully experience the making strange of the house and to observe the reactions of everyone else. First of all, I simply played on the landing in my bin-boat, but I wasn’t really engaging anyone that way. So I began a hunt for treasure. Understandably, considering where we are, treasure was hard to come by, even through the eyes of youth. I systematically went through each room (with my bin lid hat and cardboard telescope to make it quite clear I was a pirate) searching for the elusive treasure. Then, in the reception/waiting room, I found some shiny gold tacks! I even found a treasure-chest facsimile to put them all in (I haven’t a clue what it was, it was a strange folding silver thing). Now that I had succeeded in my pirate’s quest to find a buried treasure, I decided on philanthropy so that I could involve everyone in the house – I went room to room offering everyone some of my treasure. I was genuinely surprised by the result though – pretty much everyone accepted my offer of treasure, even though the treasure was clearly just drawing pins and a few other brass bits and bobs. The only people in the house who didn’t accept my offer were those in the CCTV room – except Lizzy, but she was outside the room at the time. This got me wondering, is there something about the CCTV room that separates you from the rest of the house? Because within the room you observe everyone else’s actions, do you feel apart from them – it’s an interesting idea that whenever you watch people through the CCTV you feel detached from the house.

That or they just didn’t want any of my treasure.

References:

Govan, n.d. Revisioning Space, The Place of the Artist, [e-journal] P. 123, Available through: Lincoln University Blackboard: http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk.

The Language of Sheds

The Garden Shed is “an attempt to create a separate world within a world, over which we have control and the means not only to imagine but to shape” (( Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p. 114 )) .

cropped-8440243687_8002709752_h.jpg
Taken Jozey Wade, 23 January 2013.

 

Man has always sought refuge, originally from the elements, building huts over which he had complete control, more recently as huts developed into homes these became the domain of the woman, be it the matriarch or the housewife. The man required refuge from the home itself, an inner sanctum, for some this is the office or the study, but for the everyday man a slapdash construction of corrugated iron and broken down fence panels could become a shrine to all things masculine, a place “for retreating into and thinking” (( Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p.115)).

cropped-8440258903_702a2e4b23_b.jpg
Taken Jozey Wade, 23 January 2013.

Our sheds stand opposite each other almost mirror images. Their measurements are almost identical a square of concrete 6ft X 6ft for a floor, a single window facing out onto the shared courtyard, a large porcelain basin against the wall that stands on two pillars bare brick like the walls.

Everywhere the sure signs of decay, chipped and peeling paint, years of dust and cobweb are mingled with long dead insects and their living relatives. These sheds do also have their own individual characteristics which distinguish them and their former inhabitants, show the inescapable signs of practical minds in these confined spaces.

Shed A (named solely because it is almost always the first seen) is a bright space, full of the marks of human habitation, the slightly shoddy handmade shelves show a man more interested in function than design, further evidenced by the range of colours that can be seen on the walls. Most interestingly there are pencil marks recording long forgotten measurements for some project or other. These reveal the workings of a practical man, one of precision and detail, the man who builds.

Which brings us to an interesting stand point, the perceptions of man, there has for some time been a dichotomy in the perception of the masculine and inherent contradiction whereby the male creature is equally expected to be builder, protector and all round knight in shining armour and at the same time being suspected a pervert, peeping tom and general sexual deviant.

It occurs to me that this contradiction, and these extremes are incompatible and a solution must be found to reconcile them. It does equally occur to me that a reasonable person is capable of comprehending that to a certain degree these traits exist in all men and equally in all people, but performers are by and large not reasonable people, so I think it’s about time we took these two extremes the peeping tom and handy man and the various materials of their trades/hobbies/perversions locked them all in a room for 16 hours and see what we can be built, what can be corrupted, and where is the balance? If sheds are “Spaces we construct in which to dream” ((Heathcote, Edwin (2012) The Meaning of Home, London: Frances Lincoln, p.114)) what shape will this dream take? These are some big questions and will probably require some further thought, so I’ll be in the shed if you need me.

Home is where the heart is.. but the heart has to roam

 

Photo Taken by Tiffany Thompson
Photo Taken by Tiffany Thompson

Working in a house is very different to what any of our group as ever done before, but in another way it’s very familiar to all of us because it is a home. Home is something everyone has had once in their life. It defines you, I feel by walking around a person’s house you can really get a sense of the person they are. Walking around the house on west parade you instantly got a sense of familiarity from the old fashioned carpets and curtains to the patterned wall paper.
The room I felt most comfortable in was the living room; this is because to me the front room is the main body of a house. Its full of people and it is the room where I personally feel the most relaxed being able to relax and feel safe in your home is the most important thing to me.

I feel the people you live with make your home what it is. When you’re surrounded by people or even just one person you can relax in your front room even with the curtains open, but as soon as you’re on your own in your house everything seems to change you feel on edge and take a lot more care in making sure all the doors are locked and the curtains are shut so that nobody can see that you are alone. You suddenly start thinking about being on your own in such a big space and think of all the dangers that could happen to you. Being able to relax and feel safe is to me the most important aspect, one subject that came up in our last seminar is that of people moving away from home to university and how much of a drastic change it is. Living somewhere else that isn’t always of great comfort to you is a hard situation to get used to also living with people that you may not necessarily put yourself with in everyday life. This links to the title of my blog, explaining that everybody knows where they are from and where there home is but sometimes to succeed and get where you want to go in life you have to ‘roam’ and leave the comfort of your home and explore and find new places to call home. Choosing who you want to live with in second year at university is very different to the situation in first year when there is not a choice, you are putting your faith in the fact you will be comfortable to live with them, and together you find somewhere that can be ‘homelike’ defined in the oxford universal dictionary as “like home; suggestive of home; homelyLittle, ((W (1969) “The Oxford Universal Dictionary”, London: Oxford University Press p. 914))

A very interesting thing in the front room to me was the window and how big it was, if you stood on the back garden you could see everything happening in the house. This subject has always interested me that looking through someone’s window you are looking into their life. It is very interesting how people live very different lives. Alfred Hitchcocks ‘rear window’ a story of a man watching his neighbours and seeing their various different characters that live on his street. Just shows how your home can be a window to your life someone could be watching it like they would a performance at a theatre. In Mike Pearson’s chapter ‘provisional spaces’ ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance)), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.he talks about the distinct differences between a site specific performance and normal performance in a theatre. He talks about how the auditorium creates ‘control’ and you know when the performance is going to start and end. The end of the show is always known by the shutting of the curtains. One idea that came to me while reading the chapter was how we can incorporate this into the new space we are working with. As the garden on west parade is a reasonable size, the audience could stand there and watch the performance through the window and as the action that is happening stops somebody gets up and shuts the curtains showing the end. This is an idea that I would like to expand and work on in different rooms in the house.

What’s mine is mine

Coming to uni never seemed like that big a deal to me just another step in life. To be halved moved out with the option to go home whenever I want for however long I want. I was lucky enough to find a kindred spirit here at university and she had the room next to me, it meant I instantly had someone who had the exact personality of my friends back in Wakefield (although with a weird accent), and to top it off one of my friends from Wakefield ended up coming here which meant it never felt like id actually left. Even now I’m happy to call Lincoln my home, but its different from my house in Wakefield as when I lived there (before university) it was my home but when I think of it now home is my bedroom in Wakefield rather than the whole house it’s just that one room, in comparison to my house in Lincoln as the whole place is home. It even goes back to the house I lived in for the first 3 years of my life obviously I don’t have a mountain of memories I have videos and pictures but my only true memory of that house is sitting in front of the fire on a snowy day with my friend. That to me has left the impression of only that room being home I could tell you the colour of the sofas the wall paper , the rug and carpet on that day but any other details of any other room and I draw a blank. I guess it falls down to possession for me not the material things (although nowhere is home without my teddy) but my ability to feel possession for the place, be that simply with memories as with my first home, things and memories as with my second home or literally being the one that pays for the place as with my current home here in Lincoln (but I’m quickly getting more memories and things than I thought possible). So I guess what I’m saying is home is where you make it not where your memories are as you can have them from anywhere such as park benches, or people as my family will always be my family but I think I’ve outgrown my home being the same as theirs.