A Reflection on the Performance of Treading Water
Directed by VOID:Performance

Liz Swift

There was a scrap of crumpled paper blowing round the boatyard. It said: 'Instructions for survival - If you capsize or get into deep water stay calm, breathe steadily and tread water as you wait for help to arrive. It is advisable to recite verses that you know by heart, or count backwards or name out loud the things you see around you.'

VOID:Performance has been working with live art and technology for the past ten years. Digital media, robots, live internet links, video and multi-track sound have featured with performers in events in UK and abroad. The company has made site-specific work for locations ranging from a warehouse in Chicago to an architects' office in Cumbria. Founded by directors Liz Swift and Peter Ireland, VOID has collaborated extensively with performers, musicians, videomakers, engineers, architects and others. VOID's use of technology informs its approach to structuring live work. Techniques such as multi-tracking, jump cuts and crash video editing, tend to influence the way in which work is planned and organised more than traditional dramatic structures.

In recent work we have often used non-linear narrative structures that utilise a number of performance texts and convey a density of information through the media of performance and technology. In Treading Water various strands of performance texts co-existed without any one having dominance. These were presented to the audience through the words and actions of the performers, the soundtrack and through the video and slide projections which showed mostly text. Five sources of projected reading material were used in the piece, the projections being located all around the site. It was therefore physically impossible for any one viewer to perceive the whole of the show and likewise it was impossible to cognitively absorb the complex diversity of simultaneous information. Viewers had to continuously make choices - i.e. to read one strand of scrolling text or another, to watch one section of performance or another or to concentrate on one aspect of the soundtrack or perhaps on an element of the Quay's real life - river traffic or pedestrians - beyond the scope of the show's content.

VOID uses multiple performance texts in order to question and subvert conventions of linear narrative. We are concerned with opening up textual and narrative possibilities within our work and thus similarly opening up creative possibilities in the relationship between audience and artistic product. This also raises possibilities for cognitive and sometimes physical interactivity.

The notion of non-linear text has become increasingly familiar with the onset of digital technology. Computer hypertext, the process through which the World Wide Web is navigated, is today perhaps the most well known means of utilising non-linear structures.

Conceived by the US computer pioneer Theodor Nelson in 1964, hypertext exists as a flexible collection of blocks of text which the reader has access to via an interactive interface - usually a computer screen.¹ The reader is presented with options which allow her to select a personal route through the hypertext. Creatively involved in the reading task before her, she can control where the text begins and ends and ultimately what the text means. There may be chances for her to add her own words to the hypertext, or to change existing words. The structure sanctions a continually fluctuating content.

Non-linear text systems have wider cultural implications than the use of the Internet. Many Post-Structuralist theorists have speculated about the potential for such systems to challenge the authority of the writer over the meaning of the text. This assumed authority has dominated Western cultural experience - particularly in theatre and literature - since the dawn of logocentric culture in Ancient Greece.

Roland Barthes, for instance, discourses on non-linearity in his concept of the 'ideal or writerly' text:

In this ideal text the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.²

As a vehicle for an investigation into non-linearity, performance has many advantages over other art forms. It is unstable and infinitely in process and these qualities resonate with the characteristics of non-linear systems.

Performance, being live, is not an artistic product which can be rigidly stabilised by its creator - as a painting, book or film can. It will change from night to night, due to the changing conditions of the players, audience and environment. These conditions will bring about an increased possibility for various readings or interpretations. In site-specific work, where the environment may be beyond the control of the artists, the work becomes still more unstable, more capable of many interpretations.

In the cinema the audience experience is rigidly defined by the director who can use the film medium to steer the audience gaze throughout the piece - one cannot stare into the middle distance if the director wants to show you a close up. In a performance the director's control is less. There may be multiple focus points in the space and different audience members may well focus their attention on different elements and thus have different experiences.

Much of Western theatre practice works against the inherently unstable and plural tendencies of live performance and uses mechanisms (from classical scripts to stage lighting) to govern the audience experience with a cinematic exactitude.

However, increasingly artists who wish to experiment with notions of non-linear structures, and who are informed by the impact of digital culture on contemporary thinking, are embracing and exploiting performance.

Site-specific performance is a particularly fertile territory for such work, because away from the trappings of theatres and arts buildings, with their rigid traditions, there are more possibilities for a rigorous questioning of structure. Any site is a complex mixture of many layers of history, with different associations for many people who have different points of view as to its significance. This is very apparent in a place like Exeter's Quay, with the conflicting needs and views of tourists and the heritage industry, affluent flat owners and a working boatyard with its itinerant occupants. The use of a non-linear structure which can contain a multiplicity of performance texts is suited to conveying this complexity with all its contradictions.

There was a scrap of crumpled paper blowing round the boatyard. It said: Instructions for survival -
1. Treading Water:
If you capsize or get into deep water stay calm, breathe steadily and tread water as you wait for help to arrive. It is advisable to recite verses that you know by heart, or count backwards or name out loud the things you see around you. This activity will help pass the time and keep the mind alert while you wait.³

If you walk down the towpath at Exeter's Quay you soon run out of shops, bars and cafés and come to what remains of the working docks. There's a string of small boatyards - people with their weekend yachts, a few canal barges, scruffy dinghies, half-built boats left high and dry like forgotten toys.

The yards won't last long in their current state. Already on short leases, the boat owners mostly plan to leave soon. Everyone expects that the heritage industry that has turned the Quay into the town's top visitor attraction will steamroller downstream until the remaining scruffy working sites are subsumed in a wave of themed leisure facilities and posh flats.

It was one of these condemned boatyards at the end of Exeter's Quay that became the site for VOID:Performance's Treading Water - a performance commissioned by Wrights & Sites for The Quay Thing. We spent a month working in the boatyard followed by a week of performances at 9pm each night.

As strangers to the place and directors of the piece, Peter Ireland and myself were initially interested in educating ourselves. Feeling like outsiders we hung around a good deal, finding out what we could about the boatyard's background through listening, watching, asking questions and taking photos. In short we were investigating its meaning as a site in order to find an anchor for an artistic response. But the longer we spent in this shattered and muddled place the more our interest dwindled in the reality of its past, present and future and the more we became fascinated with the fabric of contrary information that we gathered by chance.⁴

The information about the site that we found for ourselves was full of contradictions and anomalies; no one told us the same facts twice. The many versions we heard of the plans for the future of the boatyard ... its current problems ... what the tourists did ... what the vandals did ... became more fascinating than any factual objective account. We constructed a view of the place from the stories and rumours we heard and half-heard during our short time in the place. We secretly recorded the conversations of passers-by, listened to gossip, conjectured and put together for ourselves a subjective and partial history of the boatyard from the layers of tall tales spun from the site.

Our performers contributed to our research process in the time they had available.⁵ They told us stories about things that had happened to them in the past that the boatyard reminded them of - there was one anecdote about someone's dad who nearly drowned in a canal and only survived after mouth to mouth. Other of their stories were inspired by the place - like Ross's tale of the cat he saw one day swimming calmly down the river.

We constructed elements of the Treading Water performance text from our collection of scores of anecdotes and statements. This disparate body of text was to feature in the performance as words projected from slide and video projectors onto the site itself. It would serve as a series of inscriptions telling a truth about the boatyard as experienced by us, rather than any recorded official history.

The boatyard was a working site that could not be closed off to the public either for rehearsals or performances. We needed to reflect and respond to this reality of our situation and therefore it became important to us that the final piece could absorb and encompass real incidents as they occurred in the place during the show.

Thus a barking dog - being taken for an evening walk through the site - was easily incorporated in a piece which included mediated dogs on its soundtrack. The activity of a boat owner mending his deck was made an appropriate background to the performed actions, and became further involved through the boat being illuminated with a projection of text - serving to mark it and subsume it into the meaning of the piece.

It had been difficult to get permission to use this site for the show. Despite the prestigious nature of the Wrights & Sites festival and the skill of its administrators, negotiations for the use of places on the Quay for the project had been problematic and frequently unsuccessful. Difficult political agendas and an unhelpful city council had made many of the officials responsible for the potential sites jaded and unwilling to assist the organisers of The Quay Thing at all.

Eventually we got the go-ahead to work in the boatyard, though with many provisos. We got access to the site for our vehicles and equipment and bribed the people who lived on the boats there with beer to put up with our rehearsing at all hours of the day and night. And they did with the fragile compliance of itinerants with no secure tenure. We were all just using the site for the time being, knowing that big changes to the place were imminent, which we weren't part of; knowing that one false move and we'd all be thrown out.

This sense of being involved in an activity officially allowed but disapproved of, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, inevitably seeped into the process and informed the piece. We soon stopped feeling like visiting artists, but more like users, hackers even, trespassing on a prohibited site for just as long as it took to get what we wanted. As we worked with the company on devising the performed sections we drew material as much from our situation on the Quay (and by extension our situation within Exeter as a place and a political entity and within the Wrights & Sites festival) as from the physical patch of gravel, concrete, water and detritus which was our site.

A week before we arrived, a boat moored at the yard had been set alight by vandals. We heard other stories of frequent arson attacks in the area, including a memorable historic one about an audience burned alive in their seats when the town's theatre caught alight. Tales of toxic waste and hidden pollution poisoning the waters of the Quay were also very common. These stories directly informed the performers' devising process and lay behind several themes within the piece.

One of the strands of narrative which emerged from a series of long improvisations and discussions with the company was a fantasy about players in a fictional future dystopia, secretly rehearsing a banned performance. This fictional company lived rough on the Quay next to a warehouse full of discarded and forgotten books. They played a private game created from years of shared experience and were obsessed with starting fires and with recreating theatre from the past. They rehearsed in a boat yard and had ambitions to stage parts of Henrik Ibsen's The Enemy of the People.

Another of the narrative strands within Treading Water was provided by their interpretation of scenes from the play.

VOID has frequently used classic theatre texts as elements within performances. The texts have often facilitated an engagement with the subject of theatrical representation - a theme which has been an ongoing interest. Furthermore, theatre texts have been used to respond to and comment upon contemporary themes whilst retaining a critical distance from present politics.

The Enemy of the People is about small-town bureaucracy and corruption. It tells the story of Dr. Stockman, the 'Enemy' of the title, who discovers that the waters of his home town, an up and coming spa, are infected. His findings are suppressed by the local council and community who discredit and ostracise him.

The performers in Treading Water were responsible for three strands of narrative: their fragmented version of The Enemy of the People, their fictional lives as players rehearsing for an illegal show in a dangerous place; and their real lives as performers working in Exeter. This layered narrative was held together by the game. Though most apparent at the start, this ran through the whole piece, and though the rules were probably incomprehensible to the audience, it was seen as of immense importance to the players. Thus the sequence of scenes from the play, the improvised movements, the various songs or dances and reminiscences throughout the piece, were all a played-out system of moves and forfeits. It was a game for desperate people, committed to living by the throw of the dice but keen to finish, and was therefore played out with an air of growing tension and urgency, signified partly by the obsessive counting of its participants in repeated sequences of 1,2,3,4.

The video and slides added into the piece continual stories about the site and its users presented as sequences of statements. The projections also included footage of fragments of the performers' lives in Exeter, images from the site shot in daytime and CCTV footage of the performance. The sound score used amplified live sounds (spoken and sung) to which were added sounds taken from the Quay and mixed with music from elsewhere, fragments of pop-songs, and occasional, very contrived, scene-setting music.

The operation of the sound was done largely by the performers themselves. Similarly the operation of the camera, and the very visible handling of lights, torches, cables and microphones throughout, were all considered an important part of the performance in their ability to support, contextualise or contradict other elements.

VOID's performance work is usually planned using a grid or matrix structure, allowing us to plot all performance texts (and by this we include narratives plus sound, visual and physical sequences) alongside each other. This process is designed to give similar initial weighting to all the elements which make up the piece, preventing any one from having an automatic dominance. A conventional script structure inevitably lends weight to the text as dominant element.

The foregrounding of technology in VOID's work, likewise, gives it a presence on a par with that of the players. The performers become accustomed to not necessarily being the centre of attention in VOID's work as the audience's focus shifts between the diverse elements - live and technical - used to convey information.

This was VOID:Performance's first outdoor performance and we had limited control over our site (even our exact location was unfinalised at the start of rehearsals). Being a public, working boatyard by day, and having to de-rig equipment after each performance, meant that everything had either to be portable, or nailed down, out of the way and valueless. This determined our approach to setting and technology, persuading us to use a boat and also a flat-bed Land Rover to carry carefully protected video and slide projectors, a very portable video camera, and other either tough and waterproof or very cheap equipment.

Each performer had a battery powered karaoke machine - incorporating cassette player and microphone - which they used throughout the piece as a personal PA. We also used a central sound system, connected to the video and a cassette deck. This was housed within the Land Rover cab with most of the equipment. The Land Rover was wired to the site power supply and one remote projector, ready to be simply unplugged when we left. (It was used as a means of quick getaway for the performers at the end of the show.) Also it served at times as a platform for the action - as a tightly constrained stage. We attached five six-foot-long fluorescent lighting tubes to the back of the cab providing a starkly powerful lighting source.

Lighting elsewhere was various - torches, two outdoor floods, and several flares and other domestic fluorescent striplights - illuminated the site and action in different ways. Handheld, the slide projectors also came in as powerful and very directional spotlights.

The organisation of The Quay Thing introduced us to a new way of working with performers. We were allocated a group of four people none of whom we previously knew - or knew us. Our 'found company' was of traditionally trained naturalistic actors with little experience or knowledge of our approach to making work or of technologically-based, non-narrative performance. But the company brought with it a rich assortment of talent and skills. We had an expert on commedia dell'arte, a dancer, a classically trained musician and German speaker. We found skills in writing, rowing and microphone technique. We chose to give a platform to these individual skills, treating them as found material and presenting them as evidence of the real lives of our performers and therefore valid information within the piece. The mechanism of the game allowed each performer to present a brief part of a previous production they had been in. Thus we used the company's personal performing histories within the piece, in much the same way as we incorporated partial evidence of the location and its past. Just as our piece was designed to absorb naturally occurring events of the site beyond our control so it could deal with the interesting incongruities we discovered within our midst.

The piece reflected the performers' real situation. Like us, they were working in an unfamiliar place and an unfamiliar way, away from home. We incorporated their imagined or real letters home, read quietly to camera. We used anecdotes they remembered from the pub last night.

In the final work the live performances became a balance of the intensively rehearsed, the stock anecdote, and the improvised and personal; the performed scenes functioning always as elements within the whole, equal to the sound or video track, slides or environment. Treading Water was about the play between its different constituent elements. Its concern was with contradictory pasts and possible futures, with unlikely juxtapositions of the live and the mediated, with chance, storytelling, with beautiful moments and harsh discord.