This blog article is based on the seminar "Time, memory, place: an exploration through performance" by Lesley Mickel, Alessandra Campoli, Stephanie Smart & Alison Woodside, Drama, Art & Design, Inverness College UHI
The theme of ruination and decay has been suggestive in terms of theatre and art and has offered the opportunity to combine research with insights derived from curriculum development and a focus on pedagogy.
Two key principles have informed the evolution of the project so far: firstly, that learning and teaching should have research skills embedded in student activities at the earliest levels and that the best way to do this is to make students co-researchers on this project as well as performance creators. Secondly, that creative arts shouldn’t be delimited by conventional discipline boundaries and that the most productive research is generated when different academic approaches and practices collide. For this reason, UHI Drama is collaborating with Art and Design colleagues on the Ruination and Decay project. After all, dramatic performance, especially durational performance and performance art are siblings in the same family.
At an initial meeting, we explored the topic of mental health as well as ruins in the landscape, modern ruins, myth, story-telling, place, and ruins as performance. After reviewing possible locations for a site-specific performance the team identified the nineteenth century Ballerina Ballroom in Nairn as full of possibilities. Currently the site is closed for refurbishment and is apparently unsafe, so our initial plan to create a site-specific performance recuperating history through memories of the Ballroom has had to be revised. Nevertheless, we felt that it provided a grounding focus for research and theoretical concepts that can seem abstract from a student point of view, so we decided to pursue the project, albeit a site specific performance is not possible.
In thinking about the recuperation of history, place, memory and identity through performance, inevitably questions relating to mimesis, mimicry, representation and simulation arise, questions that have continued to resonate through cultural and aesthetic theories across the ages. Aristotle reminds us that mimesis does not function as simple reflection, but rather perfects and imitates nature, which is always prone to change and decay. The application of this idea to performance may suggest two important considerations: that in order to access the history of the Nairn ballerina ballroom, any contemporary performance will need to encompass this notion of flux, change and decay, that is, to resist being located or constricted to a monolithic text or script but to be devised in such a way that the performance may also evolve. This is much easier to do with a devised performance than with a text based performance, and is actually integral to the nature of performance as any actor will tell you. Even with consecutive iterations of scripted plays, with fixed cues and direction, the performance will be different every night, depending on location, audience, the actor’s state of mind and so on.
We have also been thinking about performance as archaeology. Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas of Brith Gof theatre company have developed the notion of ‘host’ and ‘ghost’: ‘The host site is haunted for a time by a ghost that the theatre-makers create’ (Turner, 2004, 373).
How does this relate to our experience of working with Nairn Ballroom as a stimulus, given that the students won’t actually perform there? The project has involved approaching people in Nairn to gather their memories and experiences of the place; in doing so, students are conjuring up recollections of past performances to inform what they create; and in asking a set of questions framed in a particular way, the surveys and interviews will inevitably construct the responses elicited, in a mutual haunting of memory and performance.
Returning to Aristotle, if nature inevitably involves change and decay, this kind of resonant site-specific performance should be part of the process, and as such generate a sense of being part of the world, and part of human experience at large: being in the present means being in flux. This approach adapts Aristotle’s view on mimesis to suggest that affective art does not fix or perfect nature, but engages with its state of flux, and is incorporated with it, it is both past and present.
In the case of the art students, responses were univocal, with a focus on human ruination, decay and transformation, in connection to the human body and mind, to physical and mental health issues and environmental issues.
Reflecting on previous and current research on modern ruins and the way in which students have responded to the topic connections between the two perspectives emerged.
Modern ruins transgress and subvert our everyday encounter with space and place. Places of neglect and loneliness, sites of disintegration and disorder, they testify, in fact, to an unnatural growth that is both uncontrollable expansion and inevitable decay, with the consequent impressive merging of blooming and fading, a visible alliance of life and death. Unlike the museum-like ruins of the past clearly representing something definitely gone by, these contemporary ruins of our urban modernity, remain in and of time, exactly as nature does.
“In a word, they decay, and they do so in an animated and vibrant way. The result of this active decay is that modern ruins viscerally engage with our senses.” (Trigg 2010).
Unlike familiar domestic space with its more or less fixed boundaries, in ruins malleability and porosity, in their broadest sense, prevail and, with this lack of fixed meaning, objects and the space they populate become more profoundly meaningful and take on a shadowy uncanny nature. They bring the outside inside, breaking a binary geometric opposition between spatial concepts that are traditionally in relation: that of “here” and “there”, of positive and negative, of “being” and “non-being”, of protecting and dangerous (Ginsberg 2004). Ruins substantially act as margins to the home, where home is “The centre of an astronomically determined spatial system… the focal point of a cosmic structure.” (Tuan 2001).
And where margins, in opposition, are the outside, the alien, the chaotic: places that, escaping the conventional rules of human rationality, obey different, often subverted, laws.
But margins can be inside us. The process of ruination with the consequent creation of marginal spaces that I have just described can be seen either in a physical or metaphorical way. And this is what my art students made me think about. What I have just said about modern ruins and their connection to the creation of marginal spaces and related feelings of unhomeliness, fear, loss and uncertainty can be actually interpreted in a more symbolic way and translated from the outer the inner landscape. This is what most of our students have done.
When we gave students the ruination and decay brief, we started sharing and brainstorming ideas. It is interesting to note that while the first ideas were all related to the outer world (to the physical process or ruination) the focus progressively shifted toward the more metaphorical aspects of decay and transformation and toward feelings, emotions, human ruination, memories and mental health.
Most of the keywords and concepts that I have used in my research to describe modern ruins and marginal spaces are actually the same words that students are using to describe their own creative work on human ruination:
loneliness
disintegration
disorder
life and death
melancholy
decomposition
loss
chaos
confusion
fear
transgression and subversion
REFERENCES
Ginsberg, R. (2004) The Aesthetics of Ruins. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, pp.157-158
Trigg, D. (2010) Architecture and Nostalgia in the Age of Ruin. [Online]. Academia.edu. Available: http://polytechnique.academia.edu/DylanTrigg/Papers [Accessed 8 March 2019].
Turner, C. ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance, New Theatre Quarterly, 20 (4), Nov 2004, pp. 373-390
Tuan, Y.F. (2001) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 150.