Abstract
Mike Pearson’s Marking Time considers performative acts committed in Cardiff over 45 years. This book is presented as an ‘urban companion’ to Pearson’s In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape, a 2006 study set in north Lincolnshire. Both books carry an introductory theoretical and locational framing, followed by sections of site studies. Where In Comes I took concentric scales of village, neighbourhood and region, Marking Time takes five sections of Cardiff: North, East, South, West and Central. Pearson imposes a geographical discipline on his text, with 10 site essays in each section, each between two and three pages, with a one-page opening photograph. The effect is of equal attention to disparate sites, whether grand or vernacular, spectacular or humble, Pearson’s art practising a democratic urban geography. Prose moves between detailed description and abstract reflection: ‘the signature style is theory-inflected storytelling’ (p. 17). Pearson’s account is of Cardiff and could only be of Cardiff, given that the purpose of the work is to respect locale and evoke place in a ‘chorographic account’. The method, however, is deemed mobile: ‘Marking Time develops and recommends a transferable methodology that might be pursued with other practices and other histories, elsewhere’ (p. 14).
Where In Comes I was grounded in upbringing, in Pearson’s unchosen place of birth and youth, Marking Time reflects a professional life and selective residency. Cardiff holds a biographic archaeology of work, with performance techniques and professional craft and reputation formed through the city. Pearson’s accounts of performance pieces across Cardiff from the late 1960s onwards convey commitment and self-discipline. Whatever the setting or audience, whether scheduled theatre or impromptu street, performance is an act committed, demanding nerve, even courage. Performance entails techniques which become, over the time period covered in this book, a discipline in the academic sense, but it also demands a discipline of self. Creativity, whatever its connotations of freedom and the throwing of shackles, is here a matter of rigour and structure; sometimes, even a submission to ordeal and pain, judging from some of the book’s photographs. Pearson takes performance cues from other social acts, describing a rugby international in terms stressing flow and improvisation underpinned and enabled by rules giving ‘direction and purpose to the release of energy’ (p. 222). Games likewise provide a model for 1970s community theatrical work with children: ‘the onus was on the need for self and peer group discipline’ (p. 92). There is an echo here of Colin Ward’s 1978 The Child in the City, with its anarchistic celebration of improvisatory play, but also its attention to alternative sets of rules and rituals; likewise to Iona and Peter Opie’s 1969 folkloric cataloguing of Children’s Games in Street and Playground. Performance here becomes a form of activism channelling energy for inventive release.
Pearson proffers a style of performancerespectful of established modes of theatricality and public display. Sometimes, this involves revival in an altered state, as with the staging of a seasonal folk ritual wren hunt in Cardiff’s main shopping area at Christmas 1978. Sometimes, there is learning from establishment forms, as with Pearson’s evocation of the 1909 National Pageant of Wales in the grounds of Cardiff Castle as an ‘originary moment’ for site-specific performance (p. 231). Pearson’s description of ceremonial statues in Cathays Park might also be projected onto Marking Time’s own photographs, fixing the time and gesture of performance works 40 years on: ‘silent actors suspended in preternaturally long durational performances, marked only by processes of erosion and decay, and ghostly shifts’ (p. 51).