Environments for Encounter
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Leeds
Department Name: Sch of Performance & Cultural Industries
Abstract
Our proposal explores the phenomenon of relational performance within contemporary music festivals as an emergent genre of creative communication.
Whilst bands booked for festivals such as Glastonbury, Big Chill and Bestival often grab the headlines and attract large audiences, the presence of unscripted, un-programmed and unpredictable performances circulating around these sites provide opportunities for interaction that are rarely recorded, notated or analysed. These performances are highly visual, overtly playful and prioritise conversation between performer and participant. Being inherently dialogic, the 'text' of these encounters is improvised, co-authored and malleable. These types of performances can be understood as operating in the responsive mode. To be effective they must respond intimately to their audience, to physical location and to cultural context. Our proposal aims to explore the impact of contextual changes on performance practice and brings into focus how performance 'texts' might be created, shared and transmitted across festival communities.
Our project uses practice as its core methodology. The practices under investigation can be articulated as:
1. Devising and making interactive performance for a festival site
2. Performing interactive work within a festival site
3. Audience-performer interaction within a festival site
How these practices develop, change and adapt according to environment will be the main focus of our research. To this end, we will be asking a series of questions that address both process and performance. These questions correlate to three key terms - making, performing, responding:
- What are the implications for making relational or interactive performance for a festival environment where site, audience and context are inherently unstable and unpredictable?
- In what way do changes in the festival environment impact upon the manner in which work is performed and how are the interactions that ensue negotiated differently according to changes in context?
- In what ways do festival-goers respond to performative encounters within the festival site and how does this differ across a range of environments?
Academic researchers will be working in partnership with Urban Angels Circus who will be commissioned to make a piece of interactive performance that will be toured to three different contemporary music festivals. Each festival will be chosen to provide a different 'environment for encounter' so that a comparative analysis can be made and our research questions addressed. We intend to situate the work in two UK festivals that have distinctly different cultural contexts - namely Glade Festival (a dance music festival which is over 18s only) and Latitude Festival (an interdisciplinary festival which attracts families). The third context will be a European festival - namely Boom, Portugal (an electronic music event that supports the confluence of politics, art and culture). In addition we will be engaging with festival promoters in order to assess the impact this type of performance practice may have in terms of developing festival culture.
This project builds on the success of the existing Beyond Text Research Network: 'Festival Performance as a State of Encounter'.
Whilst bands booked for festivals such as Glastonbury, Big Chill and Bestival often grab the headlines and attract large audiences, the presence of unscripted, un-programmed and unpredictable performances circulating around these sites provide opportunities for interaction that are rarely recorded, notated or analysed. These performances are highly visual, overtly playful and prioritise conversation between performer and participant. Being inherently dialogic, the 'text' of these encounters is improvised, co-authored and malleable. These types of performances can be understood as operating in the responsive mode. To be effective they must respond intimately to their audience, to physical location and to cultural context. Our proposal aims to explore the impact of contextual changes on performance practice and brings into focus how performance 'texts' might be created, shared and transmitted across festival communities.
Our project uses practice as its core methodology. The practices under investigation can be articulated as:
1. Devising and making interactive performance for a festival site
2. Performing interactive work within a festival site
3. Audience-performer interaction within a festival site
How these practices develop, change and adapt according to environment will be the main focus of our research. To this end, we will be asking a series of questions that address both process and performance. These questions correlate to three key terms - making, performing, responding:
- What are the implications for making relational or interactive performance for a festival environment where site, audience and context are inherently unstable and unpredictable?
- In what way do changes in the festival environment impact upon the manner in which work is performed and how are the interactions that ensue negotiated differently according to changes in context?
- In what ways do festival-goers respond to performative encounters within the festival site and how does this differ across a range of environments?
Academic researchers will be working in partnership with Urban Angels Circus who will be commissioned to make a piece of interactive performance that will be toured to three different contemporary music festivals. Each festival will be chosen to provide a different 'environment for encounter' so that a comparative analysis can be made and our research questions addressed. We intend to situate the work in two UK festivals that have distinctly different cultural contexts - namely Glade Festival (a dance music festival which is over 18s only) and Latitude Festival (an interdisciplinary festival which attracts families). The third context will be a European festival - namely Boom, Portugal (an electronic music event that supports the confluence of politics, art and culture). In addition we will be engaging with festival promoters in order to assess the impact this type of performance practice may have in terms of developing festival culture.
This project builds on the success of the existing Beyond Text Research Network: 'Festival Performance as a State of Encounter'.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Alice O'Grady (Principal Investigator) | |
| Rebekka Kill (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
O'Grady A
(2013)
Exploring radical openness: A porous model for relational festival performance
in Studies in Theatre & Performance
| Title | Beyond Text: Environments for Encounter Film |
| Description | Documentary that records the process, production and reseach centered around relational performance and "The Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste". |
| Type Of Art | Film/Video/Animation |
| Year Produced | 2011 |
| Impact | The creation of the documentary film has been extremely important in terms of disseminating the research. While we were unsuccessful in getting it broadcast on national television, having a visual record that represents the research has been useful to the team. |
| URL | http://vimeo.com/54096171 |
| Title | The Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste |
| Description | Relational performance devised for audience engagement and interaction at festivals. |
| Type Of Art | Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) |
| Year Produced | 2010 |
| Impact | The relational performance "The Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste" is now a commercial product and is toured nationally by Urban Angels Circus who were the original collaborators on the grant. The piece has also been used in a variety of non-commercial settings, including a project with adults experiencing mental health issues. |
| Description | The project involved devising a new piece of interactive performance work that was toured to three different popular music festivals across the UK and into Europe. The purpose of this was to examine the extent to which the varying environments in which the piece was performed would alter how the work was shaped by the performers and received by the audience. Each festival chosen presented a different cultural context in which to work. They differed in size and demographic. They were located differently in terms of their geography and also had different histories in terms of their function within the festival community and leisure industry. The performance piece created was called 'The Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste' and was conceived as a piece of relational peformance, namely that which involves the audience in a participatory experience where audience input is integral to the final outcome. Whilst some parts are rehearsed and loosely scripted, the piece is co-created with participants in situ and is responsive to audience input and physical involvement. It borrows from the tradition of much street theatre and walkabout performance but differed inasmuch as it offered an opulent, playful environment within the festival space where festival goers could interact with characters and shape their own narratives in the search for Madame Fantaisiste. The main findings of the project were varied and involved issues relating to three key areas: making, performing and responding to relational performance. In the making phase, the research team explored methods of creating performance work for unpredictable and unstable spaces and sites such as festivals where audiences are mobile, transitory and bombarded with other stimuli. A balance had to be found between fixing rehearsed elements and allowing adequate space for participation and audience input. A number of strategies for open engagement were developed and applied in situ at the three different festivals (Kendal Calling 2010, Bestival 2010, Cactus Festival Belgium 2011). These strategies and their results have been discussed at length in subsequent publications. They concern structural methods of composition; choreographic practices for sustaining durational work with participatory elements; the use of visual artefacts as triggers for improvisation; degrees of invitation to play that are both implied and explicit; signalling, coding and negotiating from within a role. In terms of performing relational work of this kind, the cultural framing of each festival did have a significant impact on each instance of performance. Implicit codes of behaviour were inscribed in each event and this determined how audiences participated and interacted with performers. Performing at a day festival in Belgium offered the starkest contratst to British festival culture with its reputation for latent hedonism and excess. Issues relating to managing crowds began to emerge in the British context with a growing awareness of the tension between openness and control in regards to audience participation as a core ethic of the work. The project discovered that whilst the cultural context may have a significant impact on the work, what was more influential was the physical positioning of the performance within the festival site itself. Where the performance was physically located in relation to the main stages, cafes, other performances, the camp site and so on had great influence on how audiences approached and interpreted the performance as it developed. Where the work was located determined how crowds gathered and this, in turn, determined an audience's expectation of what they were about to witness. The main findings of the project related to discovering how audience behaviour alters according to spatial, temporal, geographical and cultural changes in environment. Findings from follow up interviews suggested that festival goers, having already entered the playing space of the festival, find themselves in a nuanced psychological state that makes them more ready to receive and willing to play along with performance. The opportunties for co-creation in this context are heightened and the impact of the bespoke experience potentially transformatory. |
| Exploitation Route | The research has many potential uses in non-academic contexts. The work has already been carried out within the professional festival industry and findings from the initial project could be used in planning, programming and scheduling performance work of this kind that contributes an important element to the festival experience. Urban Angels Circus, the performance company commissioned to devise 'The Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste' have already begun to tour the show as a commercial product and have found other applications for it, including one to one performance work with mental health patients. Beyond the festival context, the findings from the project could be usefully applied to any setting where crowds gather in open spaces. How groups and individuals behave according to their physical environment, changes in weather, time of day and so on, can all be predicted using some of the findings from this project. How to negotiate effectively with individuals in heightened states of arousal using non-confrontational, playful strategies might find many uses beyond the academic context. |
| Sectors | Creative Economy,Other |
| URL | http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/sg-alice-bayliss/index.php |
| Description | Findings from the network grant were built into and developed in the Small Grant that followed. The second award started as soon as the first award ended so the findings are very much linked and the impact narrative the same. Findings from the first award were built into the second and used to create the relational performance 'Heavenly Court of Madame Fantaisiste'. Findings from the second award are now being used specifically by the aerial performance company, Urban Angels Circus, who use the research as part of their own practice in terms of developing relational performance. Their work has now been seen by a large number of people at festivals in the UK and internationally who have been able to experience and participate in relational performance of this kind. In addition, Urban Angels Circus have just received a substantial award from Arts Council England which is, in part, due to their involvement with the research. The impact to the company itself is very significant but has far reaching impact as the ACE project involves the training of other aerialists in the North of England to address a skills deficit in practical training. Findings from this initial award have continued to grow and develop within the academy. What began as a specific project on festival performance has now developed into a broader consideration of participatory performance and risky aesthetics which is being headed by the PI. A call went out to the international community for participation in an edited collection (due for publication 2016) and this attracted unprecedented interest. Further impact activities are being planned in order to respond to this surge in interest in this field. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2010 |
| Sector | Creative Economy,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Description | Environments for Encounter dissemination event |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | This dissemination event was held at the University of Leeds for members of the public, invited guests and participants who were interested in or who had taken part in the research project Environments for Encounter. Approximately 20-25 people attended. A presentation about the project was given by the PI and clips of the documentary film that was made were shown. There was time for discussion and questions. Further networks across institutions were established (namely between University of Leeds and Huddersfield University) |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2011 |