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A Tour of Sardine Street (a site-specific performance in Exeter, UK)

A Tour of Sardine Street, made with Simon Persighetti, was the performance culmination of a three year experimental project which researched a specific place as a multiplicity of meanings, objects, accretions and rhythms through the intense and repeated exploration of a single street in Exeter (Devon, UK). Smith discusses many of the project’s strategies for spatial exploration and site-specific presence in the peer-reviewed article 'Actors as signposts' (2009 as well as in ‘Researching the Body in/as Performance’ (Parker-Starbuck and Mock, 2011). The resulting 2-hour ‘mis-guided’ tour drew upon the extended immersive development period (for instance, in its identification and use of everyday objects as ‘relics’ of the street), in order to explore the virtues of and obstacles facing ambulatory and improvisatory performance through the multiple layering of character and personae. In an article for RiDE (2011), Smith discussed how the tour and its making process can be considered as both a ‘realised’ geography and an aesthetic provocation which aspires to represent multiple and diverse meanings resistant to the monocular politics of place. The tour also led to the production and publication of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks (Triarchy Press, 2012) which both documents the performance and acts as a handbook for the making of ‘mis-guided tours’. As a ‘how to’ guide, it seeks to describe basic principles and tactics to which different skill-sets can be applied, rather than targeting a specialist theatre or performance audience. Set within the narrative of the making of A Tour of Sardine Street (and reflecting the project’s overarching research methodology), it covers exploring and choosing a site, identifying and engaging in research tasks, immersive corporeal investigation, the use of the quotidian, and the application of performance elements as means to ethnographic research.