Output details

The Talking Road: evidence box including photographs, drafts/maps/video of site-specific poem

Purpose

Mike Pearson (Site-Specific Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 19-21) has established a position for the traveller in site-specific performance and Fiona Wilkie (‘The Production of ‘‘Site’’: Site-Specific Theatre’, in Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (eds), Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Theatre (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 87–106 [p. 90]) has identified a shift ‘from performance that inhabits a place to performance that moves through spaces’. The aim is to nuance this by creating an installation inhabiting a series of places, indicated by briefly-worded signs, part-indexical, part alogical in the manner of Futurist surprise; places which form through accretion a composite that draws in a wider space (with mythical, historical, geographical and political referents), one that is understood by the inadvertent act of embarking on and completing a narrative journey.

The work should be in keeping with the tensions of stasis/mobility, belonging/passing-through, settlement/non-settlement. It should seek to be embedded in and at odds with the environment in which it is sited, disappearing as suddenly as it has arrived, displaying the ephemerality common to journey and theatre and to the wider space that is itself subject to development and change.

Methodology

The work was realised through an iterative process of:

field-trip research (virtual, driven, walked)

background research (historical, geographical, community, building plans, precedent)

writing/editing/photographic documentation

other preparation (health and safety, sign and typeface design, site-preparation/site-editing)

Outcomes

The work was displayed on the roadside for five days, from November 30th to December 4th 2012, between Branston and Tatenill, Staffordshire, it was advertised on the SCUDD website and in Writing West Midlands’ newsletter and received an estimated 14,400 viewings.