Week 2 - more in depth in to site specific

This week we looked at what “site specific” means and read an article about the main features of site specific artistry: it could be any theatre-based piece that is performed outside a normal theatre. We were told to find a space in the building, which we did look at yesterday, and told to create a 1 minute piece using that particular space as a stimulus. In site specific theatre, the space has direct effect on the performance, and has to have special connotations in order to pass the message onto the audience. A very restricted space would mean restrictions, boundaries, lack of freedom or loss of liberty..

In the second activity we did, we worked in groups and I was with my group from the past week. Each of us came with some good ideas, but we couldn't agree on one, so we kept walking around without developing any ideas. In the end we worked on a piece which used the idea of the old days school strict rules, which lead as to the idea of having a fire drill. We came up with some choreography on the staircase we were using to show the uniform of the School system back in the old days. 

Site Specific Week 1 - Ideas for Selhurst School

This blog will be about my progress in Site Specific Performance, which will be looking into how the lessons and rehearsals went, what my ideas are, and my responses to the lesson. This first week I will present what ideas I had, and some history about the building our CAP rooms are based in.

We started with getting in the mind-set of working in a Site Specific project and how we can develop ideas for just single places. Here is a picture of thoughts tasks.  Following on from that task we look into the background story of the building that hosts our CAP room, the information we found was really interesting as the history was about the different schools which were in the building; the building went through different stages, from being a boys, girls and mixed school, to the period of 1914 to 1922, when it became a war hospital. Based on this information, our task is to go round the school and come up with ideas for a Site Specific piece.

My group which was made up with Joe, Eleanor, Mel, and Pakize ran out of time to talk about the ideas we all came up with, but I had a few of my own. One of my ideas was based on the corners of the building and I am planning to use each corner in order to represent the different turning points in the building’s history.

The second idea I came up with was to include the staircase outside our classroom into a freeze frame timeline of all the different schools and people that were in that building through time; for example the top of the stairs would be the beginning of the building and the bottom of the stairs would be the current use of the building.