TaPRA Annual Conference, Kingston

The TaPRA (theatre and performance research association) annual conference in Kingston was packed in between arriving home from a month-long stay in France (a working holiday!) and the chaos of moving back into the Arts Tower, launching the new SSoA website, and writing up my first year research.

The conference was a first chance to have the work done over the first year of RECITE properly critiqued by an audience who really knew the subject area. TaPRA is structured around the 'working groups', which form the bulk of the conference programme and provide a platform for smaller-scale, specialised discussion within the conference sessions as well as helping to foster a close-knit network one the conference has finished. Coming from outside the field I was initially unsure in which working group my project would be most appropriate, but given my interest in the effects and legacy after performances (and the lack of specific group for site-located theatre), the 'Documenting Performance' group seemed to offer the best fit.

The documentation working group was making its reappearance at TaPRA after disappearing for a few years, and referring to this absence Toni Sant (co-convenor) suggested that a mentality had set in in performance research whereby ‘if everyone is documenting now so why do we need a specific group?’. However he felt that it was the interdisciplinary nature the group (with presentations covering web media / mapping / information design / archival studies) that made the new direction distinct. Though from a personal perspective it was very useful to be part of a cross-disciplinary dialogue, it will be interesting to see if the working group has a long-term future, given this fragmentary nature of documentation research.

Perhaps a product of this new mentality across the discipline, there was surprisingly little questioning in the working group about the fundamental philosophy of why we to document live performance and the ‘secondary’ nature of documentation. The majority of the presentations assumed that you would document ‘as much as possible’ - with the debate then about how you create access to archive (digital, social media documentation, wiki etc) and how to ‘activate’ archive material (re-embodying, inspiration). Perhaps therefore the debate has moved on - there is an assumption that ‘documentation’ will happen whatever on youtube & flickr (with performance being subsumed into the mass media) so the aim should be to discover methods of doing this in a way that will be useful for future performers & academic study. The panel session, where delegates were more free to move between working groups, saw Heike Roms (Senior Lecturer in performance studies at Aberystwyth) present her long-term research project into Welsh site-specific work from the 1960s and 70s, which employs an admirable array of methodologies and techniques to uncover how these performances became embedded in the cultural memory of a place.

Beyond the working group, we heard interesting keynotes from Ian Brown on Scots playwrights and Louise Jeffreys, director of programmes at the Barbican. However these sessions (and much of the other discussion around the conference) only really served to highlight the marginal of performance research that interests me and that I am able to engage with to any kind of informed degree!

Overall I came away from TaPRA with mixed feelings; one the one hand very pleased that the presentation went down well and the the first year pilot produced results that appear valuable to theatre research community. That said, I couldn't help but come away considering the disadvantages of crossing disciplines - that its easy to miss out on significant attitude changes in performance research and end up covering ground that is well-established (albeit with an architectural spin), or worse - that the audience don't know enough about architecture, urbanism or the research questions to feel able to criticise.

National Youth Theatre - 'Slick' at Park Hill

I very rarely buy local newspapers, but feel very fortunate that last week I picked up a copy of the Sheffield Telegraph, which devoted its centre page spread to the National Youth Theatre (in orange boiler suits) preparing for their takeover of the behemoth that is the Park Hill flats in Sheffield. Before this, I had somehow missed all publicity for the 'outdoor spectacular' that has come north to Sheffield following the success of 'Swarm' in London last year.

And, particularly in the sunset, Park Hill makes a beguiling setting - with its commanding views of the city, complicated and contested history, and current half-finished transformation into trendy Urban Splash apartments. The narrative of 'Slick' reimagines Park Hill as a ship that will transport those gathered for the performance - both audience and 200 or so actors mingling as fellow passengers- to a Utopian island made entirely of recycled plastic where they will volunteer to make the world a better place. There are clues here of what might have inspired the story - the huge geometric form of Park Hill cut into the hillside has a resemblance of an ocean liner, and the original intentions of much of this large-scale deck access housing was to replace the horrors of back-to-back terracing with an idealised form of new social utopia.

Perhaps to most impressive thing about the performance (apart from the sheer scale) was the dramaturgical ambition - the tone for which was set by the initial excitement and anticipation generated by the actors mingling and preparing to board. The audience of 100 or so (also 'playing' fellow volunteers) were then split up into manageable groups (built into the narrative), to enable the plot to unfold with the closer spaces inside the building.

On climbing the amazing new spiral staircase almost to the top of the structure, the concrete decks and unfinished apartment spaces were perfectly suited to the intimate scenes aboard the boat, where the early excitement quickly gave way to scenes of fear and distress as the ship's security forces searched for stowaways and a disturbing group of malnourished 'islanders' warned of the true atrocities that were taking place at this 'utopia'. In some of these chaotic scenes the distinction between actors and audience became blurred - a relationship which dramatically changed once we left the 'ship' for the breathtaking final scenes of mass-coordinated dance and action. The outdoor courtyard spaces of Park Hill lent themselves perfectly to the dramaturgy - this time as an auditorium / stage and the building's facade as a huge backdrop to the action. With the story coming to a head (basically a simplified battle between environmentalism brought down by capitalism in turn brought down by popular revolution), hundreds of orange boiler-suited actors came together amidst sound, smoke and lighting display to create a stunning visual finale.

Park Hill tends to polarise those within Sheffield, and its reputation lies somewhere between iconic and detested. It has been written about and talked about to death - and then unexpected rebirth through its Grade II listing and massive Council investment. And given its current state of flux there is still so much more to come. In this context there is probably already too great an excess of meaning written over it for the ideas of 'Slick' to stick - but given the enormity of the project the NYT handled the scale brilliantly, and created unexpected moments of exhilaration in a city that is often lacking in such bold and brave outdoor theatre.

http://www.nyt.org.uk/news/news-slick-sheffield.html