Framing the Site

Cathy Turner

A discussion of the relationships between performance, site and audience, with reference to the development of Landscape With Absent Artist (Pilot: Navigation - 4), Exeter Canal, and The Bell, Exeter Maritime Museum.

My meaning is in the piece itself. I'm not going to now make meaning separately from that piece for you. Again, it's not a thing where I'm withholding that – I don't have it.¹

There is an uneasy relationship between performance practice and its analysis. However astute the commentary, however cogent the ideas expressed, a performance can't be summarised or explained. Its meaning exists (if 'meaning' is the right word) in the moment of performance and vanishes with that performance. The legacy of post-production analysis and reflection radiates out from it - initially as an after-glow, but soon igniting new ideas and beginning to burn with its own flame. I'm thinking of the moments after a film ends, when people stumble out of the cinema still too immersed in the story to have anything to say: the beginning of conversation marks a transition, a departure. Such conversations, analysis and reflection can of course be misleading - imperfect representations of past experience. And in live performance, unlike more permanent art forms, we can never retrace our steps (perhaps we can never retrace our steps anyway). The danger is that the analysis will become identified with the performance, come to stand for it as an archive since other traces are lacking.

If this is true of the live performance event, it is also true of the process of devising and creating a performance. That sequence of trial and error, choice and chance, intention and recognition is unlikely to unfold in a linear, logical and coherent fashion. In a passage which has resonance for my own experience of quite different creative processes, Tim Etchells writes about the role of intellectual analysis within Forced Entertainment's devising process. He describes how the company have alternated between unstructured, free improvisation and intellectual interrogation of the work:

This routine of nice cop/nasty cop, the tactic so beloved of interrogators the world over, kind of suited them too. It seemed a good way of teasing stuff from the unconscious and working it. But even playing nasty cop there was a certain lightness to the way they operated. To bring down a conceptual grid or frame onto what they were doing, but then to take it off again and replace it with another one. In this they were, at best, speculative and pragmatic. They had no dogma (or they tried to have none) – they were only interested in 'what worked'...²

Given a process (perhaps all artistic process?) where conscious intellectual activity plays a secondary role, it is impossible, even in reflection, to define a reliable aesthetic or to be precise about methodology. There can be no reliable archive. Perhaps all theatre is born out of crossed purposes.

But, quite simply, there's a desire to create a record, however imperfect. To note that something happened, something like this.

What's more, there seems a need to make some attempt at exerting a conscious grasp of the intentions and the implications underlying the work created. This reflection on The Quay Thing represents a separate activity from the artistic practice which engendered it, but may prove to be a springboard for other flights of fancy, a bumpy launchpad for new exploration.

As indeed, previous conscious enquiries modified and directed the emerging performances on the Quay. Previous enquiries which manifested themselves as questions, niggles, hunches, images rather than theories, but arose from theoretical concerns with artistic form and the social, political and philosophical implications of form.

These questions were foregrounded by the decision to work in site-specific theatre.

But my Grand Tour must embrace the whole world!³

In approaching the Quay sites, I found myself particularly caught between two opposing impulses. On the one hand, there was the desire to put the focus firmly on the audience's relationship to the site 'in itself'. On the other hand, there was the impulse to interpret the site - to present a 'reading' of site as symbol. To some extent, these are artificial polarities (could some sites be fundamentally symbolic?), yet they imply very different attitudes towards the role of the performance work.

If the aim was to facilitate the audience's spontaneous contact with the site, this would lead away from the creation of any art object, which could stand between the audience and its receptivity to the place. We might hope to provide a context in which it were possible to 'rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there'.⁴

But several problems with this approach were immediately apparent. Crucially, the pursuit of an 'innocent', unmediated response was clearly a wild goose chase. Every audience member has a vast range of perceptual roles at their disposal: theatre spectator, tourist, game player, party-goer, voyeur, judge, connoisseur, witness, scientific observer, detective... the list is endless. Many performances invite people to play with and transgress these roles, but to evade them entirely is probably impossible. Assuming this impossibility, surely it would be more interesting to enter into the game, to join the audience in its role-playing and exploration, provoking it into new ways of playing?

Secondly, the impulse seemed self-defeating, since its logical conclusion was that the company should absent itself from the performance. Viewed from this perspective, the performance became an obstacle, an imposition on the site, whose role would be only to provide a collision between site and spectator. There seemed no more productive role than to deposit the audience into the river and disappear.

On the other hand, the impulse to impose a single reading, individual or shared, upon the site, seemed to point towards different pitfalls. While it might lead to the creation of an art work, a performance, which was complete in itself, it seemed to preclude real engagement with the landscape or building as physical, incidental and accidental presence. In the same way, it might preclude a genuine engagement with the diverse perspectives of the audience (and, indeed, the company).

At the extreme end of the spectrum, a performance might carry out so extensive a deconstruction and reconstruction of place, that the site, the 'thing in itself' would be lost to view. In so far as the piece successfully interpreted the site as metaphor, it would appropriate it, colonise it, and ignore all aspects of it that did not conform to its metaphorical 'reading'. In effect, this approach seemed to point towards an internalisation of site as symbol, rather than acknowledging its actual presence. Such work would surely be too introspective to be termed 'site-specific' - its real focus would be the 'Wright', company, or presumed community. This would raise the question of whether the physical presence of the site was actually relevant to the performance. If not, one might as well return to a black box auditorium.

As I began work on The Quay Thing I was caught between these extremes, usually with a tendency towards introspection. My notes are full of quotations which link interpretation to revelation, trying to bring together the two ends of the spectrum.

In order to understand this tension more clearly, it's necessary to skip ahead, to try to unravel these dilemmas in retrospect in a way that I could not grasp hold of (hardly had space to grasp hold of) at the time.

I believe that what I was looking for was an approach to site-specific theatre that would allow a live negotiation with both site and audience, yet which would include an attempt - perhaps diverse attempts - to create meaning. Those attempts would need to be provisional, incomplete - with gaps, as it were, for spontaneous response, and for the intervention of 'reality'.

I was interested by Mike Pearson's ideas:

Site may allow the construction of a new architecture, the 'ghost' within the 'host'. Host and ghost, of different origins, are coexistent, but crucially, are not congruent. The performance remains transparent...site-specific performances rely upon the complex superimposition and coexistence of a number of narratives and architectures, historical and contemporary. These fall into two groups: those that pre-exist the work – of the host – and those which are of the work – of the ghost.⁵

To these two groups I would now add a third: those which are of the audience and distinct from either the work or the site. The audience might be invited to experience and imagine beyond the confines of the performance, beyond the history of the site, slipping through the gaps in the performance to discover new narratives and experiences.

For years I've been fascinated by Marion Milner's book, On Not Being Able To Paint in which she explores the process of attempting to create an art work, from a psychoanalytical perspective. She suggests that art creates a bridge between what is 'me' and what is 'not-me', since it participates in aspects of both realms:

...the aesthetic experience has...moulded a bit of oneself into a new form by giving it a new object; and at the same time, it has given a previously indifferent bit of the outside world a new emotional significance.⁶

She goes on to suggest that the 'transcendence of separateness' achieved in attempts to create a work of art, 'might have its parallel in the union with other people that working for a common purpose achieves'.⁷

I have always identified with this, but find it difficult, personally, to relate her interpretation to the attempt to create with words: the physicality of words seems so insubstantial (so unrelated to their meaning), that their relationship to the objective world seems tenuous. Words always seem to lead inwards, to a subjective, symbolic world, never fully to participate in physical reality, even when yelled out loud, or placed on a hillside in letters metres high.

I think that's why I only write for theatre, where words meet objects, bodies, silences in space - and where working (and playing) relationships between people are paramount. Where, to quote Milner again:

...creativeness is not the result of an omnipotent fiat from above, but is something which comes from the free reciprocal interplay of differences that are confronting each other with equal rights to be different, equal rights to their own identity...⁸

Returning, as I often do, to this book and its ideas, it suddenly seems obvious that the tension between the impulse to share the site unmediated, and the impulse to take interpretative possession of it, is exactly the tension between self and object that Milner identifies at the root of artistic endeavour.

As a writer, I confront this tension by working in theatre, where the gaps between the lines are vital conduits for reciprocal activity. Perhaps I ought to have realised sooner that to confront this tension within theatre, one answer might be to discover new ways of being silent.

...I know Tomorrow's Muse is somewhere here too, writing and writing across the back of the painting.⁹

In approaching Pilot: Navigation, the first stage of our project, the questions outlined above were present, but never clearly articulated. Nor had I reached any definite conclusions.

Much of the early work on the project involved an endless and painstaking collection of information: trawling through old newspaper articles about the Quay; writing down snippets of conversation; wandering round and round the area; transcribing hours of taped conversations between an earnest arts centre archivist and perplexed senior citizens:

'If the river had a spirit, how would you describe it?'
'I ain't got any fancy thoughts like that.'

Diligently though I pursued this activity, sure that I was coming to learn about the Quay sites, I could not help being constantly frustrated - yes, bored - by the banality of much of the material: the endless petty squabbling about territory; the small-town greed of the little businesses. Few great dramas seemed to have been enacted here - at least within living memory.

It was so much of a piece with our struggles to negotiate with a mysteriously threatened and belligerent City Council. It became all too apparent that the Quay was the Council's showpiece, its front garden. A front garden they had never properly managed to fence in, intruded upon by gangs with lager, nights clubs with a long and chequered history. We felt ourselves cast as one more group of undesirables who had managed to crawl under the barbed wire.

Small wonder that the temptation was to become ever more insular. To transform the Quay imaginatively, rather than to meet it half way.

Yet for a while we could not even stake our claim - we did not even know where our pilot performances were to take place. We held out for the Power Station, to be let down at the last minute by Council bureaucracy. For a while, we were without a location.

Amid this uncertainty, I made plans for a piece that could be mobile: a way of momentarily ringing round a particular piece of the Quayside, taking temporary possession of it, framing it, literally.

The idea of a frame seemed a compromise between the desire to take artistic possession and the need to integrate with the place. It was also a compromise between the need to command a space and the reality of being commanded by it. It could even be seen as a compromise between the proscenium arch and the fluidity of promenade.

The idea owes much to Duchamp, but I felt more sympathetic to a sequence of James Turrell's works, in which he framed the sky, and to his statement that: 'I am interested in a place where the imaginative seeing and seeing of the external world meet.'¹⁰

However, my sense of the ambiguity of the process of artistic appropriation is expressed in some early notes:

Framing: selecting, labelling, singling out. Putting in a picture post-card, or as a pretty view on a wall.

Framing: setting someone up – creating a context that defines them in an incriminating way – is the Quay being framed in this sense – i.e. contextualised in order to make it appear fraudulently twee?

Framing: Putting in a context to better reveal a thing as what it is.

'Framing' might be a complex activity, involving more than a simple demonstration of reality: it might mean creating an imaginative context; it might mean providing definition. Yet there must also be a lightness surrounding this activity - a sense of provisionality, of play, of allowing things to be themselves.

At last, it became clear that we would be presenting our pilot as a mobile performance on a boat trip from the Quay, up the canal, between fields and parkland, past gas works, recycling works, factory and fishermen, to the Double Locks Pub and back again.

My pictures would be landscapes.

The piece began to evolve in three distinct and parallel strands.

The first strand was my own, private response. Finding the actors exhausted by the need to generate responses to the same material for all four 'Wrights', I swiftly moved away from an attempt to gather material as a group. This initially led me into an introspective approach and an appropriation of the site, as personal symbol. I selected a series of 'pictures'. I placed two performers as 'Muses' within these pictures, enacting responses to place that were largely personal to me, though developed with the performers. I wrote a commentary, supposedly prepared by 'The Artist', interpreting the journey from Double Locks to boatyard. This was recorded on tape, to be played to the audience at the appropriate locations:

They told me this was the wrong kind of landscape. But I'm painting it in a spirit of defiance. I'm painting the pylon. Is electricity so different from sunlight? Surely there's beauty somewhere here?

I've summoned Tomorrow's Muse, begging her to help me to see. She reaches up like the mast of a ship, she grasps the lightning in strings that sing across the countryside. A young girl, dressed for a concert in a grey dress of stiff lace, playing vibrato!¹¹

This almost immediately seemed unsatisfactory. The sites themselves seemed totally obscured by the fictional, symbolic sites. For example: the recycling plant was given a redemptive, regenerative role not fully in accord with either its physical attributes or its environmental efficacy. The boatyard, similarly, became a symbol of triumphant creativity, rather than a location for dilettante carpentry and squabbling over leases. The glue factory became quite unfairly linked to images of the Holocaust: I remembered, guiltily, the hyperbolic comparisons made in the early '90s between the transportation of calves for veal and the transportation of Jews.

On a more positive note, the 'journey' as described was an attempt to acknowledge all aspects of a landscape, both attractive and unattractive, moving from despair at industrialisation, to a renewed energy and creativity and a release of 'Today's Muse' and 'Tomorrow's Muse' into activity, rather than the poses of passive victims. As a symbolic journey, this did not seem a distortion of the questions raised by the key locations en route.

However, it seemed important to incorporate other factors which questioned and contextualised this personal vision. I invented a fictional 'guide', like Exeter's redcoats, who supplied biographical details about the fictional artist. Her commentary became increasingly bizarre, increasingly suggesting that she was inventing it as she went along. This threw the artist's authoritative appropriation of the place into question, while suggesting the pleasure of spontaneous fictionalisation:

...what I think is that the artist's watercolours got pulped, and recycled as newspaper. And then the newspaper was pulped and recycled and the artist wrote his memoirs on it. And then I think the newspaper got pulped and recycled and became a map of the Pacific. And then I think Yesterday's Muse folded it into a paper boat. And then I think Tomorrow's muse folded it into a paper bird. And then I think it was pulped and recycled as a big piece of blank paper...¹²

The final factor came about almost by accident. There was a need to find a physical solution to the problem of framing. I wanted to find a way of presenting the pictures on the canal bank, so that the spectators in the boat would all be able to see them clearly, through a frame. One of the performers suggested that each spectator might hold their own frame. It was a short step from this to the idea that audience members would be invited to create their own pictures. In fact, they needed no invitation: they did it, anyway.

This became the most crucial factor in the piece, as well as the most memorable. It allowed dialogue between site, performance and audience. It created a space for the audience, an openness to the piece, an acknowledgement of the audience's different perceptions and of the possibility for chance occurrence and physical changes within the site itself.

These empty frames were, in effect, the 'gaps' that were needed to allow space for reality and for spontaneous response. Through them, the site itself was able to perform, presenting the colours of sunset, the incidence of passers-by, the dimming of the light that gradually overtook the artificial creations on the shore. It also gave room for the co-existence of Stephen Hodge's piece at the beginning of the route: as Patrick (Morris) hammered signposts into the ground, flagging up fragments of response to the landscape, the frames were able to contain this activity, without imposing additional meanings. During this part of the journey, there were no interventions from the guide or the 'artist'.

The personal frames are what people remember from my pilot piece. The artist's tape, always somewhat baffling, became almost inaudible towards the end of the week as the stage manager became defeated by technology. Nobody minded but me. Probably it was not just the content of the material that failed to connect: because it was pre-recorded, it was too self-contained for an interactive environment.

The different strands of the piece each represented different approaches to creating site-specific work: discrete, private response (the tape); initially private, yet collectively developed response (the pictures); direct, live communication with the audience (the guide); audience creation (the frames); the action of the external world (the changing light, the landscape 'in itself'). Each of these strands evoked a different range of reactions from the audience and passers by. But looking back, it appears that it was the insular, introspective, contained voice of the 'absent artist' that was least successful in making a genuine connection with site and audience.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for travelling with the 'Southern Comfort'. This exhibition was shown courtesy of the canal bank fauna, flora and architecture. Please leave the frames behind, but take the pictures home with you...Good night.¹³

A space built to contain things – a warehouse or a museum – takes meaning from what it contains.¹⁴

In the second stage of the project, I was working in the empty maritime museum, which had formerly been a warehouse in the canal basin. Initially, it had stored imported goods; latterly it had been full of boats from around the world. Now, it stood empty.

The tensions that had been to some extent resolved in the previous piece would now resurface. Yet at first, I thought I might be able to let go of any attempt to make the physical 'reality' of the space central to the piece.

There were certain practical reasons for this. Firstly, our access to the building was severely limited, making it difficult to base the piece on the structure of the building. Secondly, the space was not architecturally all that outstanding, though very attractive, with a beamed ceiling, wooden floor and white painted walls. It was not so very far away from a conventional studio space, and indeed, the Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight is not unlike it.

But there was more to it than that. I wanted to avoid what had begun to seem a bogus over-involvement with objects. I had read Schechner's description of rehearsals where actors got to know a space by feeling it with their genitalia¹⁵ and found it alienating: what could be gained from such humourless sensuality?

Despite this, I set aside some time for the performers to explore the space. The result, at this stage, was only bemused frustration: 'It's thirty-eight steps long...is that interesting?' Not really.

I knew that I was more interested in the site as symbol, than in its physical presence. I knew that it was the emptiness, not the structure, that fascinated me: this was a place in waiting, its previous functions outgrown, its future uncertain. I found in the emptiness an allegory for late twentieth century England, a subject that deeply interested me. The imperial period (the busy warehouse) was over, the nostalgic period (the maritime museum) was coming to an end: what should replace it?

I told the actors that I wanted us all to have an opinion on Britain's entry into Europe by the end of the rehearsal period. They gulped.

For the tension between 'me' and 'not-me' had found its focus, perhaps characteristically, in the relationships between people involved in the production: between myself and the performers; between the performers and each other; between the performers and the audience.

Efforts had become focussed on creating a production that the performers could 'own' (at least in part) and which they could present with integrity. I wanted us to find a style of performance that was very intimate, and which seemed to invite the audience to be implicated in the piece. To do that, we had to implicate ourselves.

We spent much time in rehearsal asking ourselves questions, trying to get a grasp of history, trying to be clear about our own relationship to it. We made confessional lists, we made wish lists, we noted down everything we knew about English (and British) history. A range of notes made during the rehearsal period gives a sense of the central concern with personal investment:

I said... I did want that kind of sharing and intimacy with the audience... trying to keep a link with the audience but to be able to go from that intimacy into high energy movement. (Aug 17)

I asked them what they needed/wanted, or supposed the audience wanted, to know more about. (Aug 19)

Possibly the problem with amplifying the images is that the physicalization comes from nowhere – no theatre language, no reason for telling, no emotion...I want the sense that the actors are themselves and to hear their own voices...don't they need more than telling the stories out of a mild interest and because I tell them to? (Aug 20)

I can't impose an emotion for them to enact at the same time as responding spontaneously and honestly to the stories... (illustration through response, not vice versa). (Aug 21)

Feel confused and said that I thought I could find and feel what I wanted to do with the material, but I couldn't tell them what they wanted or believed. They were worried about being ill-informed, but we clarified it was really about personal wants, not being right. (Aug 25)

What was most interesting was when two things happened at once and you saw both response and illustration, separate, but united – i.e. when Patrick was struggling to tell the story and linked it to Banks struggling to climb a mountain... too hard to be in the moment and also to think of other moments. But how to keep the spontaneity if I write it? (Aug 26)

As rehearsals progressed, I found that the performers were increasingly taking on responsibility for the performance. I'm sure that an element of this was my unease in a directorial role, but it was also a measure of their investment, the 'ownership' that was necessary. I welcomed it.

In bringing material to rehearsals, I was determined, this time, not to merely plunder my own imagination. I wanted the allegory between space and stories to have a firm basis in historical research. It was not to be an incomprehensibly private reading, but one which drew on events and meanings which were publicly accessible. I therefore began to research the Quayside with a new sense of purpose, looking for its relationship to imperial history.

I brought a number of stories to the rehearsals. The performers offered others. We developed a way of working on them. I would write a range of short prose texts, telling stories or describing events surrounding a particular individual or ship's voyage. The performers would each take one and find a way to narrate it, incorporating moments of physical storytelling. A selection would then be made. As we continued to develop them, the whole ensemble would become involved in each story, finding physical or vocal ways to respond and enact images.

Eventually, four stories of four boats were selected: the story of Walter Prideaux, setting out on one of the few Exeter slave ships; the story of Joseph Banks, ship's naturalist on Cook's 'Endeavour'; the story of Mary Kingsley, a Victorian explorer, canoeing down an African river and finally, the story of Exeter's Sludge Ship, the last commercial vessel on the Canal, due to cease operations later that year. The intertwining of these stories suggested an intertwining of motives, building to a vision of Empire which was largely negative, while containing some positive impulses within it. Through the other strands of the performance, there was to be a very clear link between this historical perspective and our own, present-day, individual positions.

In order to achieve this, I created a structure in which the twining stories were broken through at intervals by more personal contributions from the performers. For instance, early in the piece, each approached a section of the audience to speak about personal images of England, centred around objects which they selected themselves. This was quite exposing, but this vulnerability, this sense of sharing, seemed important as a way of inviting the audience to respond in kind.

Another episode involved the audience more actively. Each person was offered a piece of exotic fruit (hopefully one new to them). Meanwhile, Patrick and Catherine read out notes they had made when tasting particular fruit for the first time. It was clear that an analogy was being made between the discovery of a new fruit and that of a new continent. The audience was implicated in the colonialists' wonder and excitement:

A dim warehouse, where the rain blows in through the slatted windows. Rats nibble at the hemp sacks. And then into the building comes a crate of oranges, seeming to bring the warmth with them, like small suns, or like new worlds to discover and plunder all over again!¹⁶

We struggled to find a way of suggesting a personal response to the climax of the four stories, as each met in narratives of colonial aggression. How could we suggest the legacy within ourselves without appearing pompous or self-flagellating? Nothing seemed to work till we discovered a strange object: a wind-up monkey, which danced and chanted football songs. Audience and performers came to share an image of the monkey dancing ('Olé, olé, olé, olé!'), tension released in rueful laughter.

In the final moments of the performance, I had intended that the performers would read out lists of personal wishes, written in response to the question: 'What do you want for yourself or for England?' Yet when we tried it, it seemed that the material was too private - it excluded (potentially embarrassed) the audience. Someone suggested that the audience should write their own wishes.

As with the suggestion to use frames in the pilot, this idea - again discovered almost by chance - proved absolutely vital to the performance. The audience members were invited to write their wishes on entering the space, then to post them into a ballot box on the floor. At the end of the performance the box was opened and the wishes read (anonymously). It marked a transition in the piece, from contemplating the past with ambivalence, to contemplating the future, with hope. It involved everyone in the room.

I had not anticipated the impact of these wishes, from all age groups, at that particular point in the performance:

'I want true socialism.'

'I want to be a tree.'

'I want to eat breakfast at Tiffany's.'

'I want CONFIDENCE!'

'I want to row well.'

'I want an end forever to world poverty.'

'I want to be not afraid of death.'

'I want everything to be like it was when I was small. No worries at all.'

'I want politicians to be accountable, honest, imaginative, caring.'

'I want a mini.'

'I want to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean.'

'What I want most for England is for its people to be known and respected for their large-heartedness and understanding.'

'Peace of mind for me.'

'For myself, the course that starts next week will be great. Let's see the wildlife bursting across England and Britain and Europe.'

'I want more work for money, for more drugs and alcohol, which should lead to peace for everyone.'

But before we reached the performance, we had to return to a concern that had seemed marginal: we found we had to return to a focus on the physical space itself.

The piece had become such a cacophony of voices, such an intricate entwining of stories, that we needed to be clear about the way in which they were all linked together by their association, imaginative or actual, with the site. I wrote brief linking passages, which clarified the connections being made. However, still more important than these passages, seemed to be space for the performers to pause, to 'take their bearings', to take a sense of the place into themselves, before beginning again. These were moments of locating the piece within the site, both imaginatively and physically.

There were other moments in the performance where tension was released. Moments when the set (two wooden structures echoing the roof beams) was repositioned, or moments when the performers sang or played music. But none of these quite rooted the piece within the space like the brief moments of silent looking.

If the ballot box offered the 'gap' through which the audience could slip its personal contributions, these were the 'gaps' which allowed the physical space to show through.

Was it enough? To what extent was the work 'site-specific'?

It was, to use the jargon, 'person-specific'. The piece could not be performed by different actors. It was specific to a group of people and was presented as being so. Each audience member made a personal contribution to the text, making each performance quantifiably specific to those present. The stories of the four ships may have led us away from these qualities too often, allowing us to cling to the security of a conventional narrative style. However, it is difficult to judge whether this security played a necessary part in the contract between performers and audience, laying the ground for moments of greater risk on both sides.

The work's relation to place is less clear. If we knew that a warehouse space was implied, did the actual, physical site need to be present? I think it did.

In particular, the warehouse had to be this particular warehouse. Its role as museum and its present emptiness were part of its potency as a symbol. Secondly, the question of what to do with its emptiness was implicitly answered, or given several possible answers, by the presence of the piece within it. The audience members were able literally to fill the space with their desires for the future of England and for themselves. The space had added another role to its history: warehouse; museum - now theatre, a place of constant possibility.

Hand on heart, is it over and done with?¹⁷

There are many aspects of these performances and their context which I have not begun to discuss. The role of Gary McCann, our Visual Artist, was a complex one: with me he worked as a theatre designer - while displaying a sensitivity to site, understanding that it would be inappropriate to transform it. The role of the choir of senior citizens who sang each night as the audience entered, might have been discussed in some detail. The role of Music Hall songs within the piece, the humour and lightness within it, have been given scant attention. The politics of running such a project were often fascinating and frustrating, while our interaction with the daily life of the Quay was by turns amusing, frightening, irritating and interesting - yet I have no space to explore these things here.

Instead, I have chosen to focus on the tension between private and public, individual and group, company and site, company and audience (within the particular performances for which I was responsible).

Looking back, it seems that our work's development was not led by the physical experience of site. The impulse to appropriate site as symbol was dominant. However, the openness to complementary or contrasting responses made it possible, I think, for both performances to be to some extent 'transparent', to allow both spontaneous reaction, and the experience of place within performance. The pilot piece was undoubtedly more open than The Bell, but this may also be a measure of the extent to which it was less integrated and less powerful in its use of the site as metaphor. There may be a necessary trade-off between the two.

My approach to a site-specific theatre was perhaps rather introspective: it could hardly be termed a confrontation with 'the unreadable real'.¹⁸ However, it was (or could be) a genuine meeting point for varying perceptions, an intertwining of creative journeys, with a common focus that was, by implication, not limited by any individual reading.

Site-specific performance is freer to renegotiate relationships with audiences than performance within traditional spaces: it becomes easier to attain a sense of equality between performers and audience, which is necessary, if audience members are to freely participate. Site-specific performance also allows a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction: between the expertise of the storyteller in creating a fiction and the actual experience and empirical judgement of the audience. I'm interested in a theatre where the fiction is the reality, which can be inhabited and altered by the audience. The real site is fictionalised, made metaphoric, but remains physically present and capable of other fictions, other metaphors, other occupations.

To attempt to define an approach, with a view to the future, I'll return to an earlier image: as a site-specific artist I want to present not a picture, but a frame. Rather than simply 'hold a mirror up to nature', I want to invite the audience to step, with the performers, through the looking glass into the reflected world and to explore beyond the edges of that reflection.

In writing this account, I find myself battling with the same tensions that engendered the performances. I am lured towards introspection, but fired by the impulse to connect with others, to invite others to look further. This account cannot reveal the performances 'in themselves', neither is it complete without the imaginative response of others. It is not an objective account. It is not a reliable record.

The performances framed the sites: perhaps this article frames the two performances.