Abstract
This article documents some of the imaginative and physical journeys taken by a group of performance makers during a two-week course at Northbrook College, West Sussex in July 2011. Text, photographs and artworks are used to re-present some of the journeys we have taken together as a group and the modes of marking, map making and documentation used. MB: is an inclusive arts practitioner who works with artists with learning disabilities. Mary was coordinating the course and HM: was participating as an interested Cultural Geographer. The article is written as a dialogue and is likely to be of interest to readers interested in the geographies of performance, disability, non-representational research, innovative non-verbal methods or inclusive arts practice.
HM: I met Mary at her MA in Inclusive Arts Practice end-of-year presentation. At this event Mary managed to communicate something of her artistic research engagement with ‘hard to reach’ participants that words alone could not have achieved. 1 I decided it would be worthwhile to join her performance company summer school to learn more about her methods, re-present them here and reflect on what it was like to be part of an inclusive performance company made up of people with and without learning disabilities.
MB: When Hannah said she was interested in joining our inclusive performance company I was curious and excited. Curious, because I had no real idea of what a Cultural Geographer does beyond some hazy school memories of counting businesses in Bowness, and excited because I wanted to explore how we access space and experience space. I had an idea that we might share some common ground. Working as an inclusive arts practitioner, with artists with learning disabilities, I am always looking for ways in which we can collaborate, devise, and document without words, in order to make the process of creating accessible to everybody.
HM: As a Geographer interested in non-representational methods I was interested in Mary’s practice which reduced the importance of words and in her desire to explore new spaces. I found the use of the term ‘inclusive’ a bit off-putting at first because of the way in which it appears to denote a core and then a periphery that should be ‘included’. However, in practice I discovered Mary and the performance company ‘Us’ worked in a much more collaborative manner than this term implies.
MB: This debate about how and if we should label our work is very interesting. I used the label ‘inclusive’ to refer to working with groups who are often excluded for one reason or another from the ‘core’ of the arts scene in this country. My working practice is all about collaboration, creating shared ownership, and breaking down the hierarchies, which traditionally exist in performance and society.
Journeying together and evolving as a group
MB: We were working in the Performing Arts department at Northbrook College. The facilities on this site are not normally accessible to people with learning disabilities as the spaces are reserved for more ‘able’ students. I had been asked by the college to run a summer school in anything I liked – a rare opportunity. I decided to gather together a small company of people with diverse interests and backgrounds, with and without learning disabilities, interested in making a performance together. Together, we decided to call our company ‘Us’. We had our own studio for two whole weeks in a vast and sprawling building packed with unexplored spaces.
HM: First we explored the space of the studio – a black room with a rubber floor, a large window and a large mirror framed by curtains. This was to be our home for the fortnight. Mary asked us to explore the space using each of our senses in turn. We explored the edges, and textures of the room and the sounds we could make by rubbing the walls and the floor – everyone seemed to love the mirror and going behind the curtains (an element of our fortnight which we re-produced for our end of year show – see Figure 1). I liked the sound of my feet on the rubber floor. Then Mary started rolling around on the floor, some of us followed her – clearly this was acceptable behavior in this room, with these people. I was enjoying myself already, brought into the moment, the here and now.
MB: I introduced a game invented by my dad that I played as a child called ‘Urban Potholing’. The rules are simple – if there is an open door you can go through it. I remember the excitement of walking into spaces where you’re not expected, the adrenaline of possibly being in the wrong space, uninvited, but best of all I remember the adventures and discoveries we made. For the first time we had access to all this space and I decided we should explore it and claim it.
HM: Putting aside any academic reservations I had about the potential to ‘claim space’ I helped prepare tags for this shared ‘Urban Potholing’ journey that we would be taking around the college building. Each of us took a pen and put a design on each tag. We had five minutes each to lead the group around the Northbrook college building and outside areas – the idea was to tag a spot you liked (see Figures 2 and 3). Over the following days our ‘Urban Potholing’ took us to a woodwork area, a costume department and a fabric studio with Radio 6 playing to some Mannequins in an empty room. Temporarily at least these spaces were ours to play with and claim – a form of contained liberation.
We tagged the radio and returned the next day to find the tag still there and the radio still playing to nobody in particular. I became accustomed to moving through the building at the pace of M’s electric wheel chair and of only being able to take our group through wide doorways. We all seemed to enjoy our shared adventure through the college building and shared reference points. We laughed together. We got frustrated at doors together. We went into bits of the building that we never would have dared to go into alone. There was a lot of ‘togetherness’ during these journeys (the name we would subsequently call our end-of-fortnight performance). It seemed to me that our collective movements through the building and shared discoveries enabled a temporary flattening of some of the differences in verbal ability to communicate that existed between us – we journeyed and felt our way together. As Mary put it we ‘evolved as a group’.
MB: When we tag something we are declaring its value, identifying it by name, and claiming it as our own. We open all those closed doors in our own way, at our own pace. Our own way of moving, evolving as a group. Our own pace decided by the speed of a chair, punctuated by the rhythms and of the many electric doors in our path. A slow journey. A careful journey. A cheeky journey. No way is the wrong way. Our way is just fine. I reassure. We have the right to get lost.
The right to explore and get lost is a right often denied to those with learning disabilities. Access to new places is often denied due to physical, financial or communication barriers and academic discrimination. There is a natural fear of getting lost, but exploring is important and can be a lot of fun in the right places. Perhaps we all deny ourselves the right to get lost. We stepped beyond the boundaries of the known without any expectations of the outcomes. I think this is one of the most important aspects of inclusive working; our high expectations of people and no expectations of outcomes. 3
HM: Exploring the spaces of Northbrook college together was certainly a lot of fun and my fellow performers would return each day for more – something they were not obliged to do. The tags and how tagging spaces we liked made us feel was recorded by Mary in a journal of the week. She sat and consulted with everyone there and wrote on bits of masking tape with the quotes from the participants. These have statements on them such as ‘working as a team’ and ‘it means that I am there’. I remembered the day more clearly when I look at this page of the diary and the diary of the week constructed by participants (Figures 4 and 5). While some of the detail of the events is lost compared to a more linear written account, these visual recordings of events have more depth and texture than my handwritten diary of the week and are more appealing to look at. The lines of the masking tape are like the tape we used to map the space of the college on the floor of the studio (another activity which there is no space to give further detail of here). The statements from each participant that are carefully written in pencil echo the care that Mary took over listening to each participant. The journal had two or three pages for each day and everyone was given a copy of it to keep.
The studio space – hiding behind the curtain. 2
Tagging spaces we like.
Tag Mannequins.
Day 2 diary page.
Wall diary.
How we experience, react and interact in space
MB: Each of the members of ‘Us’ communicate differently, using our own set of complex expression. It was difficult at times for us to understand each other through talking or signing. At times even our body language and facial expressions are different languages, which don’t translate and can easily be misinterpreted. With this in mind I asked myself the question: how can we experience space from each other’s perspective? I decided that a good starting place was to explore space through movement and materials, in order for the group to begin to communicate and collaborate equally. I brought some materials – paper, ink, charcoal and masking tape – into the space. I chose materials that we could control, and that would control us by changing the way that we move and respond to space together. The materials and our responses to them documented our group’s collective complex communication, our relationship to the spaces as well as with each other. Figure 6 illustrates one of these activities – we attached charcoal and pens to our feet.
HM: We made ink maps together in the afternoon of the first day. Mary placed a pool of ink in the centre of a piece of paper and then we moved it around in pairs imagining we were mapping the journeys we had taken through the college building during our ‘Urban Potholing’ adventures. We moved, the paper moved, the ink moved, our minds moved. This was a new sort of mapping – the ink had considerable agency – ‘Aesthetic agency’. 4 The results made us laugh. We tried it again with two dots of ink on one piece of paper. Then Mary asked us to perform some of these ink journeys – I wondered what we were supposed to do – she suggested using the shapes of the ink as inspiration for movements. We held hands, we jumped up and down – these ink maps made us move in unexpected ways (Figure 8). They provided more starting points and some of our ink-based movement returned to be part of our final performance (Figure 9). The next day we made some of them into more tags and we went on more journeys to tag places.
The following week we did more ink journeys to make into performance invites, the ‘ink journeys’ then became a game in itself just moving ink around the page. For example, in Figure 9 E was tipping the paper and saying ‘I am coming to get you’ I had to react in time to stop the ink from dropping off the page onto me. 5
MB: I wanted to ensure that the documentation of our performance was an integral part of our process over the fortnight. The very act of doing left traces of our presence. Some of the traces we gathered, some we left and some we destroyed. The traces we gathered, we curated in different ways. There was a diary on the wall where we left our traces, to remind ‘Us’ of what we had done, and how long we still had left before the performance, this was a rough diary, which we all added to on different days (Figures 5 and 11). The studio floor and mirror also became a record and reminder of our movements, we taped notes and traces of our work to these. Some of the traces we kept together in a book. I also found it useful to record the reflections from the group each day. I recorded the words along the traces, eliminating any hierarchical structure to our views or linear reading of the work.
Charcoal and pen on feet.
Ink maps.
Ink map dance.
Moving ink together.
Group movements.
Documenting our activities on the studio wall.
Conclusions
MB: By allowing the space and materials to lead our action and by placing equal value on each of our responses we found a way of collaborating, devising and documenting together with fewer words. In creating a joint complex language using our own bodies, the space and materials, we effectively reduced the importance of words, making the process of creating accessible to everybody in ‘Us’.
Using the traces of our day as starting points for the documentation gives me a memory of the physical act of creating. Looking back at the documentation I hear the sounds of the charcoal crunching beneath my feet, feel the pull of the masking tape, and the momentum needed to make the marks, and the words that we use in the documentation are equally evocative.
We literally opened doors that have always been closed to people with learning disabilities. It was a satisfying metaphor, and whilst it was empowering to explore the space, its impact as an action on its own is ultimately limited. The college was empty, closed to almost everybody, except a handful of staff in offices. The doors we opened are now well and truly closed again till next summer, when we can once again roam the empty corridors and rediscover the spaces that we can’t go and find Radio 6 still playing to the mannequins. In documenting our work and sharing it, perhaps ‘Us’ can open more doors for ourselves and others.
HM: The two weeks offered up numerous starting points for further work, only some of which we have chosen to focus on here. First, I think as a form of participatory research engagement our ink journeys and our urban potholing adventures open up new relationships between participants, between participants and the artistic materials we used and between participants and the spaces of the college. The ink maps, the tags and the diary pages illustrated here were all active participants in the performance art company ‘Us’ – enabling (at least fleetingly) feelings of ownership and togetherness that would not otherwise have been experienced.
Furthermore, for researchers who are frustrated with the deadening and linear affects of language as a mode of research documentation the artistic methods presented here offer a different picture of our practice than a standard academic article about the spaces of such a performance company. For example, the diary enables modes of affective response or recall that are accessible to a wide audience – making aspects of the research process ‘present’ in ways that would be hidden in a purely written format. Obviously this has limitations. I have not written here about the wider social or policy context of such work; however, this is offered elsewhere in the academic literature. 6
Finally, I think that the process of being involved has been at least as important as some of the final products displayed here. During the course of the two weeks we worked together in all sorts of ways, moving together, creating together and exploring together. These collective movements and how they open up particular forms of corporeal-ethical spaces are important and require further exploration. 7 I hope these processes of performance will also provide the starting point for establishing longer term and more closely attuned research relationships with ‘Us’ in the future.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
Biographical notes
Mary Bleasdale trained in devised performance at Dartington College of Arts, and Central School of Speech and Drama. She works part time as a lecturer at Northbrook College teaching arts to adults with learning disabilities. Mary graduated from the University of Brighton MA Inclusive Arts Practice in 2011 and has gone on to co-ordinate, choreograph, curate and collaborate inclusive performances.
