Posted By David Shearing
An Ecological Approach to Performance Design
As an artist my work sits at an intersection between art, performance and design. I am interested in how scenographic materials (light, sound, space, object and less tangible materials such as the air, smell, temperature, rain and wind) inspire participants to connect with their environments and each other. My practice does not usually fit within the usual paradigms of traditional theatre design.
At the World Stage Design exhibition in Cardiff 2013 I exhibited my work within the ‘Installation’ category and at WSD 2017 in Taipei I exhibited under ‘Alternative’. Presenting my practice at exhibitions like WSD is a surreal and inspiring experience. WSD and the Prague Quadrennial celebrates the diverse nature of international design and helps place my own practice into a wider context. What is common amongst all the categories is how design-led performance is celebrated as a craft that speaks its own language directly to audiences and across continents without the need for translation. At WSD 2017 I presented The Weather Café, a project that placed performance design directly into the heart of the city of Leeds. In my practice, performance design does not stop at the theatre walls, I want it to have a deep and connected relation with the place in which it is staged. Below I reflection on how The Weather Café was situated within a wider ecological approach to performance design. The same way as exhibitions such as WSD and PQ allow designers to think globally and outwardly about how design can make an impact, not just in performance but as part of our day-to-day lives.
To approach performance design ecologically is to be attentive to the multiple ways in which events engage with people and place. Over the past ten years I have been creating environmental works where participants are guided through the experience via the manipulation of scenographic materials. I create spaces where audiences are invited to engage with the event through bodily participation and mindful engagementore recently my work, particularly through my 2016 Leeds-based project The Weather Café, has developed to remain sensitive to not just the physical spatial frames (the site, architectural qualities of a space and the design materials) but the wider social context of the city. In this work the performance event emerges through a set of complex relations that take into account both the immediate environment that the participant engages with and the wider social, political concerns of the city.
The Weather Café was an immersive experiential café based in Leeds, UK. Inside, the shifting environment evolved through digital technologies that responded to the changing climate outside. The wind blew, the rain fell and thick clouds unfolded around the audience. Working with creative technologist Daniel John Jones and composer James Bulley, the piece was inspired by the weather conditions of the moment. The sound responded to the shifting winds, the light changed with the visibility of the sky and the rain fell with the rising humidity – the space became its own digital microclimate. Real grass and moss covered the floors and walls to create a biologically living and dying space. The Weather Café presented the voices and intimate stories of over 100 people living in and connected to Leeds. Thus the café acted as a barometer reflecting the emotional climate of the city and provided a free space of contemplation. It attracted over 2500 visitors in three weeks.In immersive works audiences are often positioned as central to the environment, for example, participants are usually invited to move freely and at times offered agency in the dramaturgical shaping of the work. Often, immersive works present the experience in a closed-off space, separate from the wider world. An ecological approach differs from conventional immersive works; in that it considers the multiple spheres of experience in a relational context with the wider world. It accounts for the immediate tactile encounter of audience members with scenographic materials such as the ‘air’ of a space, its light, sound, smells and the objects that furnish it.
In my practice weather provides the perfect frame through which to consider the subtle, shifting and dynamic potentials of space. Weather is both immediate and global and offers a vehicle for making sense of our internal feelings with an external metaphor. In day-to-day life air, wind, smells, light and sound are not merely objects that we perceive, we are intimately entwined with them, a point made by anthropologist Tim Ingold who insists
[r]ather than thinking of ourselves only as observers, picking our way around the objects lying about on the ground of a ready-formed world, we must imagine ourselves in the first place as participants, each immersed with the whole of our being in the currents of a world-in-formation: in the sunlight we see in, the rain we hear in and the wind we feel in. Participation is not opposed to observation but is a condition for it, just as light is a condition for seeing things, sound for hearing them, and feeling for touching them. (Ingold 2011: 129)
Weather offers a scenographic framework and method for considering how individuals might connect to or become bound-up with design. In creating a space where participants can feel the wind, or smell the rain-soaked grass, I encourage them to inhabit the environment — not as distant observers, but entwined within the microclimate of the performance. The use of the ‘air’, as a medium that carries scenographic material, is often overlooked in experience design. Considering the ‘air’ as a multisensory agent allows us to think about how participants are psycho-physically bound-up with the experience in subtle and nuanced ways.
In The Weather Café the use of real time was an important dramatrugical device. The real grass was subject to the elements over the weeks: individual blades were slowly crushed into the dirt and untouched grass grew wildly along the edges. As you watched the wind blow on the outside, a soft breeze could be felt inside. The café design was based in real time (as opposed to a historical or ‘other world’ experience as is common in many immersive works), it connected with the city outside, which could be seen through large windows that looked out onto, and literally framed, the street. This framing of the outside, combined with the relfective space within, provided participants with permission to be still and reflect on the relationship between their own inside and outside spaces. Importantly, the café provided a space to consider others around you: headphones played short interview recordings of the city’s residents, documenting how they felt in their lives. I carefully curated the stories to represent the multple vocies of Leeds, with a strong prominance of the local Yorkshire accent inviting visitors to clearly locate the café within that particualar place. This was a space for and about the people of Leeds. Thus the performance space was bound-up with the larger spatial dynamics of the city, its people and its climate. The ecology was at once intimate and epic.
On three evenings the café was handed over to different community groups in the city. Emmaus, a local homeless charity hosted a ‘pay it forward’ event: they cooked a dinner, served to local volunteers, who ate whilst hearing the stories of the ex-homeless community members. This was an integral element of the artwork. I wanted to understand how the space could make a productive impact, how it might bring communities and culture together. I did this by sharing the venue, allowing it to become a space for others, who were given ownership of the environment. There are many spaces in our cities that could be used in this way. The Weather Café was temporary, but my hope was that it might show the possibilities for using space to make us feel connected.
Thinking ecologically proposes many questions for the role of design: how does the design shift or change with time? How is the work situated within large spheres of a place, its people and inhabitants? How can design shift and adapt to different audiences? How does it allow participants to connect with others? How might participants and dramaturgy emerge together? To think ecologically is to consider the inhabitants of an event as emergent with the dramaturgy in real time: to enable the participant to feel bound-up with the design materials, to invite personal feelings with a deep sense of wider connection to others within a local and globe frame. For me this offers a profound way to position scenographic design, not merely as a theatrical experience, but as an intervention into our everyday; a method to explore new ways of being and inhabiting space.
David has recently published his reflections on The Weather Machine in his book chapter Audience Immersion, Mindfulness and the Experience of Scenography in McKinney JE, Palmer SD (eds.), Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury Methuen (2017).
@davidshearing