Dance, Drama and Performance Studies

On Sunday 7th March 2010, I led a small guided walk around Exeter following its city walls.  Seventy percent of the city’s perimeter still remains and the purpose of this tour was to walk the remaining thirty percent back into existence.  Armed with John Hooker’s famous city map from 1587 and a small guide book we circumnavigated the city with the wall acting as an incomplete text. Pedestrian performer and academic Carl Lavery once stated that when drifting through the city his separation from place paradoxically produced an attachment to it (2007:46).  How did the presence of the wall affect our ‘separation’ and ‘attachment’ to the city? This paper will examine the performativity of this ‘wallking’ and is part of my ongoing research into the relationship between psychogeography and pedestrian performance.

On Sunday the 4th and Monday 5th of July 2010 a performance took place in Torquay spanning
200m along a stretch of white carpet connecting Torre Abbey to the seafront.

For the performers, the site-specific piece had three objectives:
1. Get people onto the carpet.
2. Change their perceptions of the site and the landscape.
3. Keep it playful. And fun.

The ‘Extended Cloister’ project encapsulated a moment in time where a community engaged in active dialogue with artists, local bureaucracy, and each other raising pertinent questions concerning identity and place. Amidst a climate of pressing economic concerns, setting aside money to fund arts projects becomes a luxury in the eyes of many. How does a community attempt to defend its right to art in the public space, to defend the role of artists, and to talk to itself through the medium of performance art? Perhaps more importantly, how does the local authority respond to the resulting conversations?

In this paper we will present two different perspectives of the same project, from the point of view of the project manager meeting the audiences at the beginning and end of their journey and a performer who walked with them, in a bid to observe the challenges faced in fulfilling these three objectives.

This paper presents an analysis of the performativity of an augmented reality application for mobile phones entitled Zombies Run! by Six to Start.

According to Max Brooks, author of World War Z, the fastest zombies “move at the rate of barely one step per 1.5 seconds” (2003), however as Daniel W. Drezner observes, there has been a recent proliferation of films and videogames that have sought to quicken the steps of the undead (2011:28). The slow, eerie dragging of feet along the ground in Night of the Living Dead and Resident Evil has been replaced by the relentless sprinting of 28 Days Later and Left 4 Dead. This aspect has also migrated into the everyday world with events such as Run For Your Lives, “the world’s first interactive zombie-infested obstacle race experience” (2012:n.p.), which provides runners with the opportunity to incorporate a narrative of escape within their exercise. It is within this intersection of the fictional framing of narrative with exercise that Zombies Run! is located.

Acting as a combination of a mobile phone fitness application and a radio play, Zombies Run! encourages the player to find a new reason to exercise, by aurally layering a zombie apocalypse over the real world with the aid of GPS.  As ‘Runner 5’ they must depart their home ‘base’ and collect supplies, whilst being fed aural updates as to locations of zombies in their vicinity. On their run, zombies may give chase, and it is up to the player to outrun them, spurred on by the sounds of the undead approaching.

As a researcher of pedestrian performance, I will analyse how the performativity of my running enhanced my receptiveness towards the narrative of the game and to what extent it bypassed sensations of engaging in routine exercise.

This document brings together a diverse series of solicited perspectives on 'staging play, playing stages'. Postgraduate and early-career researchers who might not otherwise consider play to be a central, or acknowledged aspect of their research, were invitedor challengedto offer a short piece that considers how the notion and/or practice of play might feed into, touch on, or inform their own scholarly research, activity, or practice.

"Walking as an aesthetic act is currently undergoing a surge of popularity amongst artists, performers and researchers. Artist collectives such as Wrights & Sites, Lone Twin and Walk Walk Walk have all given prominence to this simple action within their work. For Fiona Wilkie, walking is the most popular motif in site-specific performance since the beginning of the twenty-first century (2007: 99). Site-specific performance is a territory that actively encourages dialogues with other disciplines, drawing often from fields such as archaeology, geography and spatial theory to further understand this facet of performance. However, one prominent area mostly overlooked by pedestrian performance scholars is that of its neighbour: the theatre.

Pedestrian performance has a rich theatrical heritage that precedes its later prominence in site-specific performance. From Erwin Piscator’s use of a treadmill in Good Soldier Schweik (1927), through the repetitive pacing of May in Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls (1976), walking has a variety of uses within the theatre beyond that of conveying a performer across the stage.
There are various reasons why this territory has yet to be fully explored within pedestrian performance research. Nevertheless, the principle reason lies in a disliking of the theatre, as articulated by some exponents of site-specific performance. The traditional theatre is perceived by some as being spatially conservative, in that it largely expects its audience to remain seated throughout a performance. Yet in site-specific works an audience is often allowed to walk freely with the performers, crossing the line that traditionally divided them. Therefore, incorporating the theatre into pedestrian performance research could be seen as a step backwards.

In this paper I will demonstrate the challenges of ‘stepping backwards’ and how walking has proven to be an effective means in which to establish the history of a mode of performance that spans disciplines.

"

The audio performance walk has become a popular means in which to frame a walk, immediately altering our perception of place. In response to such works, Peter Salvatore Petralia has coined the term headspace, in which audio input facilitates the building of an internalised architecture that subverts physical space (2010: p. 97). Examples of performances that utilise headspace, include that of the binaural walks of Janet Cardiff and the subtle-mobs of Duncan Speakman. However within such works, there is a tendency for this headspace to become detached from the real world that the listener walks through. This may be led by a need to be in the right place at the right time or that such a space is too comfortable to leave.
In June I created an audio performance walk for Exeplorer entitled Murmurs, which was part of the Exeter Ignite Festival. The project’s brief was to devise stories made up about real places in the city, which provided me with an opportunity to experiment with the defining properties of Petralia’s model. I sought to upset the ‘layering [of] fictional space on top of a physically experienced “real” space’ and the ‘use of stereo headphones’ (ibid: p. 97) by asking audiences to remove one headphone. With their headspace breached, the soundscape of the city could be let in, creating a binaural experience part pre-recorded and part-live.
In this paper I will briefly present my observations as to the different walking behaviours of my audience and the manner in which they sought to merge headspace with urban space.

If you could give a pair of ears to a place, what would it hear?
The locating of ourselves in place through sound alone relies on our brain’s ability to sense the interaural time difference between our ears. Binaural microphones allow us to artificially replicate this, capturing an impression of the listener’s three-dimensional map of place. Artists such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have utilised this technology to draw attention to the slippages between past and present often by locating the listener in the same place as the original recording.
However, what would happen if these artificial ears were given to place itself? My project If Walls Could Hear used binaural sound recordings to provide objects with a set of ears to document how they ‘hear’ place. These objects have ranged from the very small (a lamp post, a statue) to the very large (a wind turbine, a building), the scale and material of the place affecting the outcome of the sound heard. The project sought to interrogate Brandon Labelle’s (2006) assertion that ‘place paradoxically comes to life by being somewhat alien, other, and separate, removed and dislocated’ (p. 211), questioning to what extent we can listen to a place caught in the act of listening to itself.
This paper will discuss the dislocating qualities of these recordings and the manner in which place’s mapping of itself interacts with the ‘headspace’ of the human listener (Petralia, 2010, p. 97).

Kris Darby is a lecturer in Drama and Performance Studies at Liverpool Hope who is interested in the relationship between walking, sound and performance. www.ifwallscouldhear.wordpress.com

Over the last decade, a genre of video gaming has quietly surfaced which has polarised players. These titles feature no time limits, no scoring and largely are devoid of any violence, instead focusing on the slow navigation of the player through a digital landscape. Derogatorily termed ‘walking simulators’, these games concentrate on fostering affinities between landscape and player, challenging some of the established conventions of video gaming. Although award-winning titles such as Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2016) have helped establish the genre, it is still largely an anomaly within the industry.

Artists have long experimented with gaming as a medium to draw attention to ‘the individual aesthetic pleasure’ of creating works within digital architectures (Stockburger, 2007, p. 27). Recent works such as Down and Out in Los Santos (Alan Butler, 2015-) and FF Gaiden: Delete (Achiampong & Blandy, 2016) subvert the gameplay of Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games, 2013), by utilising its cityscape for ‘photography expeditions’ and film- making. In these works, a violent, driving action game is transformed into a walking simulator and the rules of its cityscape are challenged. It is echoic of the spirit of resistance underpinning a lot of pedestrian performance, acting as a deliberate slowing down in the wake of super-modernity.

Beginning with a contextualisation of walking simulators, the paper will recount the author’s experiences of two digital walks. Video gaming is learning a new language of walking, and pedestrian performance scholarship can provide a useful framework for designers and scholars to articulate it.

In this paper I will argue that despite the numerous challenges it poses, anthro-pomorphism is a viable means by which to empathise with place without resorting to a wholly homocentric perception of it. Beginning with a discussion of the principal motivations for anthropomorphism and its aforementioned criticism, I will then make suggestions as to how binaural sound can enable a merging of self and place. Holly Owen and Kristina Pulejkova's film Fram (2015) is discussed as an example of an artwork that facilitates such a merging through its use of an anthropomorphised snow head to record the testaments of individuals living in areas most susceptible to climate change. The latter half of the paper discusses the practicalities of fostering placial empathy through binaural sound, making specific reference to my own project If Walls Could Hear (2014-) and the challenges it face by trying to give the city of Liverpool a pair of ears. It concludes by asserting that although the act of listening as place is difficult to facilitate, binaural sound possesses the capacity for us to listen with it.

'This is Dr Katherine Collins. I don’t know if anyone will ever hear this. It’s all over. I’m the only one left.'

In this paper, I argue that the often lack of interactivity and slower pace found within walking simulators is what accelerates the ‘doubly-haunted’ quality of the dead in video games (McCrea, 2014, p. 223). As the player attempts to give presence to past events, they invariably emphasise their own inescapable spectral role.

In Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), the player walks through the sleepy fictional village of Yaughton in Shropshire. As its title implies, everyone has vanished and it is up to the player to piece together the events that led to this mass disappearance of the village’s occupants. Rapture is one of many games, derogatorily dubbed ‘walking simulators’, which often utilises a vacant landscape for players to assemble the fragments of its narrative for themselves (Dear Esther, 2012; The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, 2014; Ether One, 2014; Gone Home, 2016; What Remains of Edith Finch, 2017). The often minimal interactivity required from a player and the absence of a clear win-state has meant that such titles sit quite awkwardly within video games, leading to alternative and additional forms of categorisation which borrow from other mediums (such as ‘story-led games’ and ‘art games’).

In his chapter ‘Gaming’s Hauntology’ (2014),  Christian McCrea argues that the dead in video games are ‘doubly-haunted’ due to being ‘resolutely about what they are not, or are no longer’ (p. 223). In Rapture, the pulsing, barely decipherable light projections of the occupants of Yaughton, are echoes of an ‘already absent present’ (Spivak in McCrea, 2014, p. 223). Pleasure lies not in the relative ease by which we happen upon these moments of narrative but in the ‘poetics of absence’ generated by what is left undiscovered, necessitating ‘an intimate way in following the connections’ between the remains (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p. 60). These ‘connections’ are afforded by the relative ease in which we access the homes and private spaces of the people in Rapture, allowing us to not only reconstruct what happened here but to haunt the old haunts of these characters and establish a sense of a presence before the absence.

Ironically, the more the characters in Rapture become more realised, the more the player’s spectral qualities manifest. Despite hearing the sounds of our footsteps, we lack corporeal form. Our physical interactions are limited to opening and shutting doors and turning on switches, reminiscent more of a poltergeist than anything resembling the living. Denied the ability to leave satisfying traces within the environment themselves, players must do so elsewhere, creating documentation of the performances they have assembled, taking screenshots, accomplishing specific tasks that give them trophies and sharing narrative theories on message boards. Through their emphasis on walking, games such as Rapture highlight hauntology’s function as a two-way path (Fisher, 2014, p. 21): presenting the remains of something that (never) existed in the past whilst offering the possibility for virtual representation of something that is yet to happen.

Analyses the dramaturgical use of forestage doors and wing entrances in early Restoration plays, demonstrating that models of Restoration theatre stages based on a widely-reproduced drawing attributed to Christopher Wren are potentially erroneous.

Despite regular international tours by his theatre company Seinendan, interest in Hirata Oriza’s plays in the Anglophone world is not as pronounced as it might be. One reason
for this might be negative comments on certain aspects of Hirata’s work by the critic Uchino Tadashi. In introducing this new translation of Kagaku suru Kokoro (The Scientifically
Minded, 1990), theatre director Tim Keenan argues that while criticism within Japanese cultural contexts may be merited, it tends to focus on Hirata’s theoretical writings rather than the plays themselves, thereby overlooking some often subtle cultural
commentary. Moreover, the import of Uchino’s arguments may be negated when the plays are considered outside Japanese contexts, especially in translation as in this case.

Examines the staging of topographical scenes in Restoration theatres. Uses a novel methodology to propose a practicable solution to staging the 'New Exchange' scenes in Etherege's 'She Would if She Could' and Wycherley's 'The Country Wife'. Discusses the staging of such scenes in later comedies.

Restoration Staging, 1660-74 cuts through prevalent ideas of Restoration theatre and drama to read early plays in their original theatrical contexts. Tim Keenan argues that Restoration play texts contain far more information about their own performance than previously imagined. Focusing on specific productions and physical staging at the three theatres operating in the first years of the Restoration - Vere Street, Bridges Street and Lincoln's Inn Fields - Keenan analyses stage directions, scene headings and other performance clues embedded in the play-texts themselves. These close readings shed new light on staging practices of the period, building a radical new model of early Restoration staging. Restoration Staging, 1660-74 takes account of all extant new plays written for or premiered at three of London's early theatres, presenting a much-needed reassessment of early Restoration drama.

This book is about staging at the first Restoration theatres, 1661-74. Its purpose is twofold: to propose a new conceptual model of Restoration staging and to demonstrate how this model can change our understanding of period dramaturgy. The dates above delimit a distinct 'early' Restoration period -as far as drama is concerned -marked by small theatres with relatively limited theatrical resources. Although not completely ignored by critics, this period has often been dismissed as a transitional phase before the development of 'characteristic' Restoration drama and theatrically accomplished production in the mid-1670s. Consequently, criticism has traditionally been inclined to skip over the first 15 years of Restoration theatre production to get to The Country Wife (1675) and The Man of Mode (1676). 1 Now it would be absurd to propose that many, or indeed any, early Restoration plays are 'great' by traditional measures (though I think several are better than the press they have received). I do contend, however, that it is short-sighted to continue to dismiss dramaturgical and theatrical development over this period as simply transitional. After all, this was an immensely exciting time in English theatre, when female actors and changeable scenery were introduced to the public stage. It was a period of innovation as playwrights and practitioners experimented with the resources of the new scenic stage and audiences learned how to read those experiments. But we look in vain for much indication, let alone celebration, of this in standard theatre histories that tend to view the early period through the lens of later perspectives and do not take into account its unique theatrical conditions, thus reinforcing the notion that it is inherently uninteresting. There is a wider problem here. For some time now, Restoration theatre studies has been perceived to be moribund, and as a consequence there has been little new work on early Restoration theatre and drama. 2 Earlier work has become, so to speak, set in stone, and is rarely challenged. Furthermore, there is a circular tendency fostered by these attitudes to think that it remains unchallenged because all the questions have been answered. This book would not have been possible without classic studies and influential articles by such historians as Richard Southern, Edward A. Langhans and Peter Holland, but as important as these remain, there can be no doubt that new methods of analysing the plays made possible and necessary by the introduction in the early to mid-2000s of such research tools as Literature Online (LION) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) means that we are now in a position, more so than ever before, to build on, refine and where necessary overturn the conclusions of earlier researchers. These comprehensive databases and their associated search engines have transformed the way we do theatre history. As well as enabling the analysis of far more textual data (so leading to greater statistical reliability) and almost instantaneous keyword searches, the more we use these powerful electronic resources the more that use refines our searches and suggests new research questions to ask. 3 This book is a product of such enquiry and methodological innovation. Its aim is to expand understanding of early Restoration dramaturgy and staging practices by offering empirically based conclusions drawn from analyses of all extant plays known to have debuted at the first two public scenic theatres in England: William Davenant's Lincoln's Inn Fields (hereafter LIF) (1661) and Thomas Killigrew's Bridges Street (1663). Uniquely, then, this book celebrates early Restoration staging, arguing that a lack of theatrical understanding has obscured the achievements of playwrights who were pioneering techniques and methods that would become the mainstay of theatre production in England for the next 200 years.