This is not a manifesto by Beatrice Jarvis

The Duet of the Body in the City. ( are we dancing yet) Collaborative and unbuilt studies towards unknown utopian geographies of Milton Keynes. ( this is not a manifesto)

Groundwork Residency Tracing the Pathway at Milton Keynes Arts Center. May 2015 Beatrice Jarvis. In collaboration with Dr Bob Jarvis

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Practice Overview The city can exist beyond limitation as a stimulus and resource; such reflections can be sociological, poetic, and political, the city exists to be studied, analyzed and intervened. Methodologies developed in my current research practice allow me to disengage from ontological methods of representation; rather they seek to objectify creatively the way in which social interactions and patterns of spatial use occur in the city. The city as a facet of sociological research data remains an anomaly. The city perhaps cannot be summarized. The mythology of the multiple narrative forms which form the labyrinthine quality of the urban scale allow a brief understanding as to what the city may be defined as. The everyday life of the city; the routine; as so often we see projected in cyclical realms of film and in images of the dawns and dusks; but whose city do we so eagerly consume with tired eyes in the early hours. Watching yesterday films of the unique everyday lives of subjects unknown; reading accounts of the trials of the city and trying to allow an identity to form. To remove the self; the walk to work, the supermarket, the potential eviction; the bailiff, the broken boiler, the decisions, made and unmade, the lily pollen which stained my clothes, the boy who bought me a cup of tea and gave me a book, the lady who asked me if I would sit with her a minute as she was lonely, the bus stop as site for social interaction, then what does the city become. Such softness in the kindness of strangers. I walk the streets on a daily basis with a camera, framing, curating and navigating the string of discordant events

which seamlessly pass; yet to what avail? To begin an understanding? To formulate a hypothesise? To construct and reconstruct? I collect their stories. The stories of the city folk. The boy on the bus sat there for over an hour and narrated his version of the map of London. The lady on the train let me walk with her all the way to her office and told me her tale of a city, the man in the newsagent tells me what happens to him everyday, the duke in the kiosk tells me all about his long nights as he stands behind the shuttered gate. All of these stories are different; they are all in a medley of event, sorrow, mistrust and hope. The city remains a playground to dreams. Yet what does freedom mean in Milton Keynes? The paths are neat. The lawns are moved. The paths are all ever so tidy. This document will explore the residency period I spent in May at Milton Keynes Art Centre exploring MK as studio, canvas and archive. Exploring my father’s perspective of the city when he was a part of Milton Keynes Development Corporation in 1969 as a town planner and exploring his memories and experiences of the city as it was forming. In this residency period I have researched the city in relation to creative qualitative investigative methods, striving to create inventive schemas to both represent and investigate aspects of the social orrery of the networks within specific sixties and locations. ‘The city is a stage, a theatre stage even, on watching an uninterrupted succession and ever changing forms, characters appear and disappear, events develop and come to pass, which taken together form something like an orrery for the social world.’1 This is a summary of a much more extensive research period within my work locating my artistic practice in an academic framework beyond dance and choreography. I have drawn on published material, exhibitions and first hand investigations into human movement, activity and interaction in urban space and through this to the wider fields of town planning, social, political and historical theory. I am currently developing a framework for my practice based on concepts of the impact of the urban environment on creativity. This Research begann at Hochschule fűr Schauspielkunst “Ernst Busch” Berlin. I began to wander with an ‘aimless gaze’2 writing small excerpts about the world around me, recording images of particular interest with the notion ‘the real city stroller is like a reader who reads a book simply to pass time and for pleasure’3. I saw my emerging practice as directly related to that of a flaneur that ‘walks to uncover traces of the past and to read these reflections as symptomatic of their respective time.’4 Flaneurie fast became my stimulus, taking small incidents from daily life and weaving them into my own movement vocabulary. On the one hand I was constructing many different interventions5 in the city, intuitively using the city as my studio before I had formulated such a concept. On the other I was creating a naturalistic choreography where performers do not know they are performing and perhaps I am the only member of the audience.6

Reymond. Von M. (1894) p.1. Berliner Pflaster. Preface to Berliner Pflaster. Illustrierte Schilderungen aus dem Berliner Leben. Berlin. Cited by Schlör. J. (1998) p241. Gleber, A. 1999 p66. Hessel F. Ermunturng zum Genuss. Kleine Prosa. Edited by Karin Grund Bernd Witte. Berlin. Brinkman 1981 p59. Cited in Gleber, A. 1999 p66. 4 Gleber, A. 1999 Page 67. 5 I define a choreographic intervention as an action (or series of actions) which have impact in some form upon every day experience of the city for passers by. 6 William H. Whyte describes this in ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’ as ‘Triangulation,’ the element in a public open space that brings extra stimulus to the environment, be it a physical object or a performance 2 3

I later made photographic studies from these experiments, collating and storing these interventions to document otherwise lost moments. These experiments can now either be considered as photographic works in their own right or documentation of my choreographic work. As a visual choreographic artist I utilize urban form and landscape both as my inspiration and resource. My working methods are primary observation and visual and written documentation of existing forms and scenarios in the wastelands of major European cities. I further instigate choreographic and visual intervention in the spaces I am exploring and recording and document these through film and photography. My aim is to utilize my creativity in such areas of disuse in order to form a regeneration of the landscape and encourage more productive and interesting use of urban fallow. My wanderings through the streets of various cities, collecting and storing images, moments, snatches of conversation, essences of place and interactions become the inspiration from which I create both art and documentation simultaneously questioning what either of these terms actually means. Walking by day, by night, in areas of disuse, commercialism, construction, mapped or unmapped, I can piece together the essence of the place through the materials and thoughts I collected. I approach my practice with the idea that art should not be restricted to a studio, and I make the majority of my work in open and public spaces. I am keen to develop means of raising key social questions related to public space use and research how space in urban contexts can be more creatively used. I explore through site performance, photography and multi disciplinary work different areas of cities in Europe. My practice draws on anthropological field research techniques and town planning and urban surveying, then translated into a more creative artistic context. I have researched extensively to draw links and inspiration from existing observational practices. I draw strong links to early concepts associated with Louis Aragon (Paris Peasant), Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project) and stem key ideas from the Situationists and Happenings. My artistic practice is strongly supported by detailed research methods to ensure through contextualization. I constantly collect recent urban material, documenting current creative responses to cities, frequently on the fringes of legality operating as urban guerrillas. Central to my practice is the importance poet and observer Charles Baudelaire places on the role of an observer within everyday scenes; By locating art in a wide social context the boundaries of art and life can be overcome; as Buck-‐Morss highlights, ‘the flaneur must work hard posing as reporter of the true conditions of urban life, he in fact diverts his audience from its tedium.’7 In my work I have attempted to draw the attention of passers-‐by to areas of destruction and decay, with the intention of regenerating spaces of outside any cultural life through means of photography and choreographed scenes, utilizing moving image to document and represent the scenes. My research stumbled into forgotten and undeveloped parts of cities, which are hidden or ignored in the shadow of hyper-‐ urbanity. I make my investigations into the spaces that are left as the ‘underside of the metropolis’, 8 the gritty spaces left out of the guide books, where weeds rule and cracks in the pavement are not glossed over, pirate ships

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Buck-‐Morss. (1999) p347 Mangler. C (2006) p7.

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for the disaffected, with the ruins as treasure. My inspiration for this work can be traced to T.S Eliot. My film, photographic and choreographic practices explore themes from ‘The Wasteland’ (1922) which documents the effects on the mind of the breakdown of civilization, the loss of innocence and the realization of the effects of modern progress on social circumstance. One aspect I documented photographically and textually was the ‘stony rubbish’9 left by the preparations for the Olympic Games 2012 in London reflecting; ‘A heap of broken images where the sun beats. The dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief.’10 By nurturing and expanding my vision of urban life (‘each day in the city is a kind of odyssey, each day a new adventure, each encounter a surprise, ’ 11) I have been able to find ways and means that my daily activity can have creative output, utilizing Psychogeography as resource for my film, choreography and photographic work, developing a relationship between historical artistic theory and own practice. From my research I have realized a crucial historical connection between documentation of daily-‐lived experience and works of art. I see my practice now border line between the two, similar to Atget and Henderson. By locating my activity in the ‘shatter-‐zone’ of cities I am positively influencing the ‘urbiculture’ with creative interventions. As flaneurie is an individual practice of in-‐habiting and appropriating urban space so my practice is an interpretation of flaneurie; I see my choice of location for my interventions as critical, as potentially the area chosen to work in will be the area highlighted to a certain number of fellow urban dwellers. I look upon this as a form of social duty to highlight areas of dereliction, misuse and disuse, with intention for positive creative change. I look now to investigate whether specific urban areas can be created to encourage creative use of the city in public space development projects, or does creative space use occur as personal reaction to the individual’s environs, suggesting that over tailoring and pre-‐empting particular space use may in reality decrease inventive use of the space. This dilemma mirrors my practice as I chose to work in areas of cities that have no redevelopment and are often wastelands, and I know if these were developed into ‘creative spaces’ I would, indeed, take my practice elsewhere. These projects are often in the style of urban interventions, performances and temporary exhibitions and installations within found locations of the city, often derelict and decaying. My research methodologies function as both artistic practice and spatial research practice for sociological theory. I am keen to involve multidisciplinary practices with key relevance to live art, performance, photography, film and installation, drawing direct inspiration from situations, which occur in situ, and formulating qualitative sociological research methods. I am keen to explore how creative approaches to the city can facillate sociological frameworks of investigation towards the urban infrastructure. Within my practice I instigate key collaborations with architects, town planners, cultural policy makers, artists, found-‐space collectives and sociologists to extend the legacy of small-‐scale interventions to a wider social dynamic.

Eliot. T.S (1954) (The Wasteland) Eliot. T.S (1954). (The Wasteland); Gooding. M. Sourced in Introduction to Redstone City Diary 2008

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This is not really a history of Milton Keynes (Fragment from conversations in MK and borrowed facts, which attempt a cultural history) Anthropology: what does it mean to learn a place? A lady on the tube asks my two heavy suitcases, and me where I am going. I tell her MK. She looks confused, “oh that’s a new town isnt it” In my first visit to MK Sainsbsuires (passing through to find the only Independent coffee shop in Central MK, Ash tells me some people know MK as Cliff Richard made a music video here. Midsummer Boulevard, so that you can see the sun and the moon in the sky, the streets are pristine and the fountains have put on a lavish display for our encounter. Nothing in Central MK was supposed to be higher than the Church. Jury’s Inn was higher than the church and during construction, it collapsed and killed people. Of course there was speculation in MK as to whether this was an indication that any progress should cease. The hospital is over crowded. Its easy to live here. There is so much green space. You don’t have to shop. Water. Yellow and Green. The roundabouts. This page should contain a neat time of MK history. I have read this and could it all out on this page. But this is not the point of this document. This document is a diary of sorts of the 8 days I have spent in MK beginning to learn the city from as many different perspectives as I could. Trying to learn the city from the perspective of the people who live in it, trying to dance the city. This is an unfinished document in the sense I am still exploring and still making. There are 4 films to support this document and a sharing of found work/ images / performance and th conversation at MK Arts Center on May 9 2015, (an open studio with conversations) I would like to write at this point thank you to Ashleigh Griffith, Cara Davies and Aaron James and Groundwork: Tracing the Pathway Project. Thanks also to Deirdre and Mike at Fulwell Court, and all at MK Arts Centre for all the support.

Manual of performance ideas: 8 days in Milton Keynes: Day one: • The Nando chicken walk dressed as a chicken, linking the 5 nandos in the city center. • The live art square: a small square in CBD labeled LIVE ART in which passers by are invited to display / discuss what live art is / means to them • A circle-‐walking candle lit vigil around the dead tree in MK. • Circle of memory in MK shopping center all telling memories of MK in chorus. • Marching band to create walking tour of MK • Car Sellers of MK gestural portrait series Day Two • Milton Keynes the Musical: each song represents a sector of the community ( fortnightly rehearsals, 8 weeks, show in arts center, elders, teens and children, songs about daily life in MK) • Field freedom: series of movement works in the vast open spaces of MK that represent individual’s notions of freedom • Lawn mower symphony: city council lawn mower drivers to make a dance piece about the actions they make whilst mowing lawns Day Three • elderly tai chi classes • collecting ruins . making a city archive • the may pole every day life dance Day Four • Today I have felt a deep sense of static. Close observation of habitual gestural leads sometimes to a sense of weight, how to stay light and buoyant in such a slow place? Reading the weight of Sunday in MK, silence and heart monitors • Type writers for automatic writing ( city center and forest ) to generate a series of texts of actions observed for performance scores. Day Five: • a car based dance improvisation • a nervous collapse in a shopping center • filling a shopping mall with typewriters for people to interact with ( live broadcast of text on line stream) • Public readings of personal diaries in the shopping center back allies Day Six: • The local Morris Men Dance • Writing the City in Light, Ritual Procession in the back alleys • Notating performance of daily walk to work Day Seven: • Sound Booth of MK archive • Developing performances in shops • Home improvement performances • The Bell ringers dance in The Range • Writing in the Range Day Eight: • Drive thru performance • The performance of taking down a building • Making way ( the choreography of roundabouts in Milton Keynes) • A manual for drivers in MK • Open House ( anthropology tour of homes in MK lead by an estate agent)

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How can a city be revealed through movement and how far can choreography determine this movement. From the mass; heaving through the crowded under passages at 9 am; the dance of the workers; to the quiet duet of the man and the sidewalk at 3am, the empty parks as empty stages, the city and I are dancing. The city can be seen as choreography in its right; yet perhaps this is too vague, to dance, how to define dance; ten days immersed in a public personal methodology. Each walk taken becomes a solo performance; noting the textures; the sounds and the spaces; How can mapping of a city reveal patterns of spatial use and explore modes of spatial encounter? If this is method one: The city as natural choreography: then method two becomes: Encounter: the tentative formation of workgroup. The duet of the city and the self is solitary affair; one can learn and return to the studio where I was hoarding thousands of images, notation and documentations of my encounters, yet this is ‘ me in the city’ which I am not to draw for too long a period on. To explore

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choreography as a social apparatus, one has to become social. The choreography of sociality and sociality of choreography. Is this about defining the cultural heritage of Milton Keynes or defining the capacity of choreographic methodology to create embodied and tactic knowledge of place. 12 As recent explorations of Pina Bausch’s World Cities Program has highlighted the experience and practice of a choreographer is personal. And the experience of having to do one’s laundry in several different locations so as to learn how each city has its own rhythm and pace; its own tempo, codes, social conduct, body language and how the understanding of these codes can and does feed into a choreographers understanding of the city. To experiment and explore the city choreographically with the desire for the choreographic outcome to in some way reflect and embody the experience of the city; one has to know the city. Yet what is to ‘know’ a city? This is dealing with the subjective, the ephemeral, and the experiential realm of perception. How does one know the city after a brief meeting; a life in the same city, a month, a week, an hour; how can the experience of this urban encounter fuel choreographic (and social) enquiry. I have learnt the most from walking. Walking as learning, walking as understanding and walking as a means to begin. Keeping a journal of all my walks; sketching on maps the routes I have taken, and notating in labanotation the caliber of movement encountered, This is surface analysis; the initial probe to scope existing patterns, to form a way in. Route finding; to local shop; to local yoga studio, to library; to the market, to the pencil shop; to the bike repair shop; to the lake; to the village; to the school; to the place I only know from someone else’s memory; this is how I began to learn Milton Keynes. ‘Walks for their own sake, furiously enacted but lacking agenda. Strategic walks (around the M25 and walls of the city) as a method of finding interrogating fellow pilgrims. Walks as portraits. Walks as prophecy. Walks as rage. Walks as seduction. Walks for the purpose of working out the plot: Walks that release delirious chemicals in the brain as they link random sites. ( Savagely mute walks that provoke language.’ Sinclair. I.(1999). p15.) “ The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (1962: 146)

This refers to a recent conference: Pina Bausch’s World Cities and the Embodiment of Place and Space. Birkbeck College, University of London.. I presented a paper here about my recent work in Bucharest: The Duet of the Body and the City; Towards Urban Embodiment.

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day one: A train journey a home ( temporary ) Mike and Deirdre Coffee a studio ( temporary ) coffee meeting all at MK arts center / exhibition bees flowers books postcards the library The shopping center the dead tree some driving ( the grid roads of MK) a dinner coffee coffee/star/ trees. cars. 4 homeless people/ a manifesto/ what is live art anyway issues: graffiti’s, car selling, manifestos, urban public space freedom, neatness, order. personal freedom/ what does the city feel like? the impossible walks; the car as restraint Performance ideas: • The Nando chicken walk dressed as a chicken, linking the 5 nandos in the city center. • The live art square: a small square in CBD labeled LIVE ART in which passers by are invited to display / discuss what live art is / means to them • A circle-‐walking candle lit vigil around the dead tree in MK. • Circle of memory in MK shopping center all telling memories of MK in chorus. • Marching band to create walking tour of MK • Car Sellers of MK gestural portrait series

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How far can creative practices serve as a method of socio-‐political communication? Can teaching and various processes of knowledge transfer develop tangible works of art in themselves? How far can socially engaged practices allow subsequent audiences to develop modes of cultural understanding? How can multidisciplinary arts practices and site projects formulate a sociological knowledge base which can be used as source material for subsequent application beyond the boundaries of arts practices? How can social and ecological engagement within creative practices stabilise the position of the arts as tool for cultural understanding which also function in an economically viable fashion? With the notion Sacks suggests; ‘practice-‐based strategies for coming closer to our own lives and the world around us: listening and hearing strategies; strategies for uncovering agendas, for shifting attention; strategies for encountering our values, our attitudes and our presuppositions; strategies for entering what is difficult and for discovering what each person feels needs addressing’ what are the potential practice based research methodologies the socially engaged practioner should explore? How can the socially engaged schema of intentionality by which an artist has created their objet (material/embodied/ephemeral) be fully determined by the receiver? How do concepts of social sculpture become fully embodied with both ideology and practice? What are the potential ‘gaps’ which may appear in this dialog between process and product? Can creative action stimulate social reconciliation? Can an image function as a mode of activism? Can creative activities facillate a voice for the politically ‘unheard’?

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The task of sociology is to provide a diagnosis of the social world and how it is organised; but also; it involves listening to what goes on behind the public façade, attending to ways that people achieve a ‘bit of humanness in a world become inhuman.’13 I would like to utilise this residency in MK to raise the issue; can such creative material become social resource? If sociology is the understanding of daily life, and forms of creative practice can articulate a wider social dialogue and comprehension; then does this allow such practices to become a ‘sociological resource’? Neither sociology nor art practices can be divorced from the realities of daily life -‐ the issue rests in how such structures and interactions are re-‐presented and explored. The whole heartedly engaged researcher and artist finds in their discipline and the fruits of their research a means to navigate a route through the world. The complex relationship between sociology, and the sociological function of the arts as a mechanism to cultivate particular stands of social value and hence become socially useful product and development mechanism. Yet such social ‘usefulness’ can mean that the actual art work itself becomes a secondary concern which may contradictory to the intentions of the maker; as Zolberg problematizes ‘Because of sociologists concern with the social, the art works themselves become lost in the search for understanding society and end up as virtual by-‐products.’14 As Becker alerts; ‘All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number of people.’15 The complex matrix network of societal interaction which allows an art work to form; be received and reviewed is expansive; notions of the individual become redundant; as seminal to a project’ success is the network by which it is supported. However as Becker suggests such a complex network should not detract from the significance of the initial conception of an artwork; ‘The artist thus works in the center of a network of cooperating people, all of whose work is essential to the final outcome.’ 16 Such a perspective of collective authorship facilitates a vision of artistic production with minimal preoccupation with authenticity and ownership; due to the collaborative structure of production such a concept is particularly useful when exploring the potential for social and physical change as a direct and indirect result of artistic documentation and intervention. The social chain by which an object/ artwork will be manifested and reviewed cannot be divorced from the process by which it is initially conceived. Landry’s ideas of ‘creative action’ to enable a sense of the ‘creative city’17to form are relevant here -‐ ‘Culture can also strengthen social cohesion, increase personal confidence and improve life skills, improve people’s mental and physical well being and strengthen peoples’ capability to act as democratic citizens and develop new training and routines.’18 If such ideas can be successfully applied to review of action-‐led research and art practices as social research; the potential for their cultural value index19 is dramatically increased. The reader, viewer or audience is actively involved in the construction of art work and without the act of reception / consumption, the cultural product is incomplete.’20

Inclusive of quote from Ardent. Men in Dark Times. P 23. Sourced in Back. L. ( 2007) The Art of Listening. Berg. New York P 167 Zolberg. V. ( 1990 ) Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. P 54 Becker. H. ( 1984) Art Worlds. University of California Press. California. P1 16 Becker. H. ( 1984) Art Worlds. University of California Press. California. P25 17 Term coined from title; Landry. C. ( 2000) The Creative City. A toolkit for Urban Innovation. Comedia Publishing. London. 18 Landry. C. ( 2000) The Creative City. A toolkit for Urban Innovation. Comedia Publishing. London. P 9 19 Reflective of review from: DCMS ( 2009) Working paper 8: Understanding and measuring the value of engaging in sport and culture The Culture and Sport Evidence program ( CASE) Research aided by Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre. The EPPI-‐Centre is part of the Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. This list the; ‘outcomes of engagement in culture and sport. The result of a stakeholder engagement exercise as the following: International reputation, Option to use, Existence value, Bequest value, Self-‐identity, Shared experience, National pride, Community-‐identity, Social capital, Community cohesion, Citizenship, Continuity with the past, Knowledge of culture, Understanding others’ cultures, Reduced crime, Enjoyment, Diversion and release, Escape, Solace / consolation, Inspiration, Expression, Creativity, Innovation, Health, Skills / competence Productivity, Income, Employment, Achievement, Self esteem, Excellence.’ These are listed in Box 2 of page 8 of this paper. This paper is now available 14 15

Wolfe. J. ( 1984) The Social Production of Art. New York University Press. New York. P93

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day two. a walk with a camera to a motorway no breakfast no coffee studio clear out 4 trees in the studio yoga construction of a reading table bench Deidre visits a run ( 9 k ) meeting a fisherman meeting a duck meeting a horse meeting a dog walker meeting a stranger A trip to B&q to buy a light bulb Dad arrives Studio Interview A walk to Great Linford Studio Visit A dinner Coffee Images / trees/ the value of culture / how to cover ground/ why fill space/ too many humans/ the law mowers / neat / I want chaos / feeling lost/ urgency / to create / dancing at 0059 issue: why do we need culture? inner city crime rates, how do you create culture? what does a culture emerge from? the presence of so many DIY places. what to do in MK? a Friday night karaoke drop in clinic, Obesity; food, fried food and fast cars. Health and vitality in the city. Performance ideas: • Milton Keynes the Musical: each song represents a sector of the community ( fortnightly rehearsals, 8 weeks, show in arts center, elders, teens and children, songs about daily life in MK) • Field freedom: series of movement works in the vast open spaces of MK that represent individual’s notions of freedom • Lawn mower symphony: city council lawn mower drivers to make a dance piece about the actions they make whilst mowing lawns

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In his text Field Berger indicates how the process of looking closely at a field, framing a field as specific event space can enable the observer to learn a great deal as to their own position and relationship to the world. If the term field is replaced for the process of this research and replaced with public urban space, this text outlines the perspective desired of the researcher and participant to the spaces, which they will encounter. Berger outlines: ‘you are before the field and although it seldom happens that your attention is drawn to the field before you notice the event-‐taking place within it. Usually the event, which draws your attention to the field and almost instantaneously, your own awareness to the field, then gives a special significance to the event. The first event-‐ since every event is part of the process invariably leads to another or, more precisely invariably 22

leads you to observe others in the field. The first event may be almost anything, provided it is not over dramatic.’ In the case of this research, the first event in each movement workshop was, aside from the embodiment and somatic warm up exercises, the simultaneously subtle and complex task of simply observing gestural movement with the specified realm of public space. This then became a mechanism to learn the movement vocabulary of the area gradually generating a means for researcher and participant to create their own reactions to the vocabulary of place. As Berger continues; ‘ you relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing in the field. It is not only the field that frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the pre-‐condition for them occurring in the way that they have done and for the way others are still occurring. All events exist as definable events by the virtue of their relation to other events. You have defined the events primarily (but not necessarily exclusively by relating them to the event of the field, which at the same time is literally and symbolically the ground of the events, which are taking, place within it. You may complain that I have now changed my use of the ‘event’. At first I refereed to the field as the space awaiting events, now I refer to it as an event itself. But this inconsistency parallels the apparently illogical nature of experience. Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to happiness, which is instantly recognizable as your 23

own. The field that you are standing in appears to have the proportions of your own life.’

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Berger. J (1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London ( P199-‐205) Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P202-‐3 Berger. J ( 1980 ) About Looking. Bloomsbury. London P204-‐5

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Dance can be seen as physical behaviour; the human body releases energy through muscular responses to stimuli received by the brain. Movement, organized energy, is the essence o f dance. The body or its parts contract and release, flex and extend, gesture and move from one place to the other. The action or existential flow o f dancing is inseparable from the dancer; the creator a nd the instrument are one. Dance is cultural behaviour; a p eople’s values, attitudes and beliefs partly determine the conceptualization of d ance as well a s its p hysical production, style, content and performance. Dance comments reflexively o n systems of thought, sustaining them, or undermining them though critic of institutions, policies or personages. Thus action a nd a wareness merge. Dance is social behaviour. Social life is necessary for human mastery of the environment; dance reflects influence patterns of social organization (relationships between individuals, groups and among groups) The d ancer may for example, play a specific role with special status, both of which are determined by society’s standards for proper dance b ehaviour. Dance is psychological, involving cognitive and emotional experiences affected by and affecting individuals p ersonal a nd group life. Thus dance serves as a means of knowledge and coping with socially induced tensions and aggressive feelings. As economic behavior, dancers may perform for a fee to supplement or to earn their lively hood, or perhaps to enhance occupational skills or values. Some people spend their resources to take dance instruction or to watch others perform. Societies require a system of decision-‐making and enforcement. A political behavior, dance is forum for articulating political attitudes and values, it is an arena for training which carries over to important positions in other spheres of life, and a vehicle for control, adjudication and change. Dance is a communicative; a text in motion, or b ody language. This critical behaviour underlies most other dance motivations or actions. Dance is a physical symbol for feeling and/or thought and is sometimes a more effective medium than verbal language in revealing desires or masking true intent. B ecause humans a re multisensory, they act a nd watch or feel often more than they verbalize and listen. The dance medium often comes into play when there is a lack of verbal expression. Movement and dance has become standardized or patterned symbols, and members of a society may u nderstand that these symbols a re intended to (Hanna. L . J (1979) T o D ance is Human. University o f Chicago P ress. Chicago. p4)

represent experiences in the external or physic world.’

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“ Have you ever considered, how invisible we are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only the voice inside oneself. The words of others are mistakes of our hearing shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss/ we read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound. The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator, the voice of trees, whose rustling means what we say it means. Ah, my unknown love, this is all just our fantasies and we. All ash, trickling down the bars of our cell.’ (Pessoa)

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What are your first memories of Milton Keynes? When you think of Milton Keynes what is the image that comes to your mind? Describe a route you walked through Milton Keynes Tell me about one place that is vivid when you think about Milton Keynes? Can you remember the smell of Milton Keynes? What about specific colors? Tell me one place that you would never want to go back to in Milton Keynes? Are the any odd facts that make you laugh when you think about Milton Keynes? What is your last memory of Milton Keynes? This interview can be heard on line:

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day three yoga an awful breakfast finding dads old house meeting the man who was going to knock down the old house collecting and searching fragments taking the wall having lunch in the new pub “ Prince George” Meeting Effie ( dance in public space) Bletchley community Centre visit driving through estates ( voyeur) Woughton on the green ( cows in the city) Campbell park improvisation Dad leaves Studio organize ( what is ‘ to share?’ ) Yoga Photo editing Reading Images / trees/ bricks / blue / yellow / the smell of fire / apple trees/ audio/ guided tours / history issue: archive/ collection/ what do we leave behind/ the personal and the forensic/ public an private practice / what does an artist show / what needs to be documented / what to exhibit / sculpture and found object / the lack of movement / no more cars / too much driving / loneliness / how to perform in a city that does not warm to performance / the car as personal performance space / gratitude / pleasure / pressure Performance ideas: • elderly tai chi classes • collecting ruins . making a city archive • the may pole every day life dance

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Choreography. Choreography. Choreography? Choreography. Hewitt expands; ‘What I am calling ‘choreography’ is not just a way of thinking about social order, it has also been a way of thinking about the relationships of aesthetics to politics.’ (Social Choreography. Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Life) This raises the further issue as to how far can choreography exist as vehicle for socio cultural commentary which extends a dialog in which the body as a punctum for the social and cultural framework in which it exists. The body becomes ultimate tool within this framework of exploration; not as trained or non-‐trained dancer; simply existing within its locality as it exists and utilising its existing capacity in either an active or passive means to explore its social position. Within my own research I am raising the issue as to how far the act of choreography creates a process, which enables the body to become an active constituent to the cultural context in which they exist; or whether the act of choreography becomes a form of distancing the body from the social schema in which it exists. The body in the practices I have committed myself to has been framed as site for the enactment of social order in which it exist, an act of conscious reflection and integration with social order that facilities a form of autobiographical framing of the scenario in which the body exists. Hewitt further problematizes this position; ‘Whereas writing on dance’s function (as image) within modernism has tended to stress the movement of transcendence as the dancer disappears into the dance; here I envisage instead a more ‘lateral’ transcendence whereby the dancer is integrated into a social organization.’ Hewitt applies a strong focus to the deconstruction of semiotics, which surrounds and to a certain extent confuses the realities of choreography. His dynamic approach to the deconstruction of choreographic text and physical syntax creates space for the reinterpretation of subsequent applications of choreography; he explores; ‘Choreography is not just another of the things we “do” to bodies but also a reflection on, an enactment of how bodies “do” things and on the work an artwork performs. Social choreography exists not as parallel to the operation of social norms and strictures, nor is it entirely subject to those strictures; it serves ‘catacritically’ we might say to bring them into being.’ This raises the broader issue as to how far choreographic practice can viewed (as a social apparatus) can be transferred cross culturally; and how adaptable choreographic apparatus have to adapt to the culture in which they are positioned; or if indeed; this highlighting of ‘difference’ can become a further social tool of cross cultural meditation. Hewitt outlines this potential as an advantage to the construction of social choreography; which he points serves a role of social education; producing what he defines as; ‘ A mimetic aesthetic ideology would be one in which the artistic representation of a better life serves to blind the audience to the social realities in which they live.’ If choreographic practice can serve a tool of social meditation; an inclusive and productive realm which can be qualitative assessed as successful in its conscious or subconscious task of increasing awareness of self or other life worlds; then this raises the further call to assess the construction and formation of dance within potential parameters of increased cross cultural embodied literacy. Hewitt suggests; ‘Every social order has sought to represent itself aesthetically-‐ one only needs to think of the origins of ballet in the baroque court-‐ but in all such representations power was constructed along the axis of inclusion and exclusion.’ This suggests the necessity for caution within the argument that choreography serves as means to embody social context; namely due to the levels of subjectivity inherent in the craft of choreography; and the realities of the context from which the choreographer and choreography emerged; which as suggested in the introduction should not be assumed as totalising; yet this facet should not demote the worth of the act; rather the critique should be aware of the boundaries and limitations faced in construction. Hewitt expands this argument away from reflection and critique to a more radical, progressive and active affect; framing that if choreography is capable of reflecting social order and construct; to what extent does it have the potential to create a social form; he asks; ‘ How does choreography enact rather than perform a social order? What social work does it perform? In this sense choreography need be regarded as an active social function capable through its initiation of presence and certification of formation of life world; that enables onlookers, spectators, audiences, choreographers and performers to actively seek to reflect upon their own social realities through the act of examining their own movement context; Hewitt furthers his question; ‘In a nutshell dance asks two questions: Can I still experience something? Can I produce an artefact? In other words, are we to think of a work or art as a noun or verb, as artefact or activity? If the work of art is thought in the everyday terms of artefact we risk losing sight from the Schillerian perspective of the integrative function of the aesthetic.’ In this sense choreography becomes a performance of the existing social structure and its experienced affects to generate a practice capable of re-‐defining approach to cultural quotidian experience.

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‘ To be in conversation is surely to live in the open. To be in conversation is to think and feel on your feet and not to speak of prepared positions. To be in conversation is to be who you are as who you are. It is to live in what is not yet in the other And what they are leading you to. It is when centers meet that the world is changed. To live in serious conversation is to live with the converse To live in and with the contradiction With opposites With the other than we are To be a place of meeting Not a place of judgment. To be in conversation is to enter into what flows In and amongst and between you. To be present in conversation is to speak of and speak to the world 24

now.’

Mair. M. Between Thee and Me. Between Psychology and Psychoanalysis. A poetics of experience. Sourced in Crickmay. C, Tuffnell, M ( 2004) A Widening Field. Journeys in Body and Imagination. Dance Books. Hampshire. P40.

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when you tell me about your city I hear word as story I want to see through your eyes and understand your city in the car I am tired tired to see no ones city we are all in capsules my legs ache from sitting down I want to see the fields as they used to be with no houses only your cat who collected mice which the council would collect now the city is yours I watch you looking I see through your glasses our feet are side by side the map is from 1960 when the city did not exist I wonder what you wore then and how used to walk

Gift You tell me that silence Is nearer to peace than poems But if for my gift I brought you silence ( For I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me. ( Leonard Cohen: The Spice Box of the Earth)

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“ The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary for the conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a figurative meaning, it manifests through them a core of new significance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, finally, the meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the body's natural means; it must then build itself an instrument, and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world. (1962: 146) When the body and mind are in active and committed dialog to the projection of the cultural world which the body projects then a more active dialog is possible with one’ s life world. Seamon outlines: “ Understanding is coming to see more deeply and respectfully the nature of human experience and the world in which it unfolds. The subject of understanding is the everyday met afresh, that world takes on a new and richer facet of meaning, which speaks to the individual’s life. Unlike explanation, understanding does not seek the causes of events, it helps the person see more intimately and lucidly the pattern of his own existence and thereby live better in the future.” Grange furthers this notion, outlining the significance of understanding to become a sensitive active embodiment: ‘ Understanding is directly related to the way in which we actually live. Layers of meaning constitute our human existence and these layers, in effect create the world in which we live. As we perceive meaning, so we act. Understanding is therefor, a process of ‘standing under’ our ‘ world’ so that we can support it, sustain it, dwell it, articulate it. Perhaps most relevant to the core ethos underlying all my thought towards the body in landscape at present remain the practices of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. I wish to lay in mud. I wish to hide in a tree. Fusing techniques of creative writing, ecology, activism, and the social politics of landscape, both authors and their ambulatory practices serves as indicators as to the acute power sustained and detailed observation of the self and the other in landscape can offer a platform of sustained investigation of the relationship between body and place. Yet on seeing your image of the three figures I was prompted to revisit Walser, like seeing an old friend, the pages do h eared and covered in pencil marks which seemed pivotal at the time and now appear as abstract expressionism. “Walk,” was my answer, “I definitely must, to invigorate myself and to maintain contact with the living world, without perceiving which I could neither write the half of one more single word, nor produce a poem in verse or prose. Without walking, I would be dead, and would have long since been forced to abandon my profession, which I love passionately. Also, without walking and gathering reports, I would not be able to render the tiniest report, nor to produce an essay, let alone a story. Without walking, I would be able to collect neither observations nor studies.”

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‘Our theoretical notions of reality are formative for our experiences; thus what we consider important for experience of architecture is intricately related to our conceptual frames. Our conceptual frames, the manner in which we approach questions pertaining the body, are of course, not formative, but 25

necessarily transformative.’ ‘ The body and its environment produce each other as forms of the hypereal, as modes of simulation which have over taken and transformed whatever reality each have had into the image of each other; the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body and the body in its turn is 26

transformed; citified, urbanised as a distinctively metropolitan body.’ ‘ All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as 27

soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.’ Dancing as a method of inquiry is based on the researcher’s observations and bodily experiences. This is especially true when the research participants do not have the verbal ability or reflective consciousness to express them. However, dancing as a method is also ethnographically promising while trying to comprehend holistically and experientially something that is foreign to the 28

researcher.'

Hauptmann. D. (eds) (2006) The Body in Architecture. 010 Publishers. Rotterdam.

Grosz. E. Bodies-Cities Sourced in Colomina. B ( 1992.)Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press. New York. P242 Arendt. H ( 1970 ) On Violence Harcourt and Brace. Florida. P41

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Maarit E. Ylönen. Bodily Flashes of Dancing Women: Dance as a Method of Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry 2003 9: 554. Sage. Accessed August 1. 2003. P565.

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‘For a moment, think of yourself walking and observing the world. Imagine that is not your lower body that walks, but that your head has legs and could walk. Then your observation of the world and your will would be completely interwined, resulting in you being able to walk when asleep. However because your head sits upon your shoulders and upon the remainer of your body, it rests upon the body. It rests, and you carry your head with the remainder of your body. However, the head must be able to rest upon the body otherwise it could not be an organ of cognition…. The head allows the body to accomplish actual willing and lives in this body as carriage, allowing itself to be moved about in this manner. It is possible for human beings to be willfully active only because the head allows itself to be moved about by the body as if in a carriage and during this movement, the resting head is at the same time active. You can only fully grasp the human form of the body only if you can comprehend things this way.’ (Steiner. R ( 1961) The Foundations of Human Experience) The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. Everything outside me faded to obscurity, and all I had understood till now was unintelligible. I fell away from the surface, down into the depths, which I recognized then to be all that was good. What we understand and love understands and loves us also. I was no longer myself, I was another, yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. (Emphasis mine.) The soul of the world had opened, and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing. Earlier walks came before my eyes. But the wonderful image of the present swiftly became a feeling which overpowered all others. ( Walser) ‘ Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding, dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought that we and our world create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another, that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of the land; that as we and our land are part of one another so all who are living are neighbors here; human, plant and animal, are all apart of one another and so cannot possibly flourish alone, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.’ (Berry)

( Dancing about MK) Grosz alludes; ‘Humans make cities. Moreover in such formulations the body is usually subordinated and seen merely as a tool of subjectivity, of self given consciousness itself, but the conceptual and reflective possibilities of consciousness itself, the capacity to design, to plan ahead, to function as an 29 intentionality and thereby can be transformed by the process.’ Such critique allows the visualisation of the urban form as a means of critical reflection of the built environment facillate the conception of a framework, which situates architecture as a critical interface for the study of human behavioural modalities. To consider Virilio’s critique on the relationship of landscape as reflexive to human interaction one can further demonstrates the ability of the city or zone of conflict as a reflection of human interaction; he alludes; ‘Landscape has no fixed meaning, no privileged vantage point. It is orientated 30 only by the itinerary of the passer by’ To consider each city, each town as fluid malleable entity which is configured by the interactions, psychologies, emotions and physicality’s of the human forms which inhabit it allows a sociological impression to manifest; the potential architectural iconography of the landscape can be systematically deconstructed and reconfigured in a human perspective; Virilio alludes; ‘It is no longer the big events that make up the fabric of the landscape of time but the myriad 31 incidents, minute fact either over looked or deliberately ignored.’ The landscape from this perspective becomes a densely textured fabric woven with the very essence of the human condition. In this framework the human form becomes the predominant spatial node, 32 as Grosz explores; the; ‘body as socio-‐cultural artefact’ yet such a framework for spatial investigation is fraught with complexity as Burgin alludes; ‘There is no objectification without 33 identification.’ The human form, to return to Grosz, cannot be disembodied from its spatial context, and equally spatial context, in reflection of the built environment, is the very fruit of human endeavour, such mutual co-‐dependence cannot be simply eradicated from such a theoretical framework. To reflect upon Freud momentarily; ‘The object of an instinct is the thing in regards to which or through which 34 the instinct is able to achieve its aim.’ One can further allude that any movement, any transitions or trauma to either the human form or space can seen as a counter insurgence of the other entity; to add a further dimension of complexity in this situation however; the relations and struggles between human forms can exist without spatial intervention; and equally the human form can manipulate spatial configuration to influence subsequent actions and occurrences to other human forms; but spatial configuration alone cannot be shifted and reconfigured, manipulated and redefined by spatial entity itself; it relies on human intervention and is led, steered and operated by human action, except of course in situations of natural disaster. This argument places prominence upon the nature of the human form to consciously or sub-‐ consciously impact upon its spatial container; the study of such impact then, cannot be removed from the primary instigator, the human form. The potential here for conflict is vast; due to the sheer volume of potential inflicting and contradictory impact schemas, which are invariably impressed upon the spatial container; hence as Grosz further alludes; ‘the city not as body politic but as political 35 machine no longer a machine modelled on the engine.’ To seek a further definition of the various spatial containers and architectures for the human form; I 36 shall briefly define the city as an assemblage of the accident, within review of Virilio ; an emblematic container for an accidental history configured as collision of conflicting political and social agendas of the populous which inflict their manifestations of corruption upon the built environment.

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Grosz. E. Bodies-Cities Sourced in Colomina. B ( 1992.)Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press. New York. P245 Virilio. P (2000) The Landscape of Events. Translated by Julie Rose. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. P xi Virilio. P (2000) The Landscape of Events. Translated by Julie Rose. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. Pxi Grosz. E. Bodies-Cities Sourced in Colomina. B ( 1992.)Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press. New York. P241 Burgin. V. Perverse Space. Sourced in Columbian. B ( 1992.)Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press. New York. P231 Freud. S. ( 1915) The Standard Issue of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.Hogath. London. P122 Grosz. E. Bodies-Cities Sourced in Colomina. B ( 1992.)Sexuality and Space. Princeton Architectural Press. New York. P251 More specifically this is in reflection of my understanding of: Virillo. P ( 2007) The Accident. Polity Press. New York.

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Within such a framework; I shall conceptualise the body as spatial apparatus; functioning as a political tool for reflection of the manifestations of human inter-‐relations in the built environment; exploring the potential the human form has to manipulate said spatial practices. To further Agamben’s critique of the apparatus in relation to the context of the body as socio-‐spatial tool, one can explore the potential dynamics of power the body can uphold as strategic political entity; ‘ The nature of the apparatus is essentially strategic, which means we are speaking about certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in relation of forces either as to them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilise them and to utilise them. The apparatus is thus 37 always inscribed into a play of power.’ To withhold this positioning of the body as power conductor and social instrument, Agamben continues; ‘Apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say they must 38 always produce their subject.’ In this light we can further situate the visualisation of the built environment as the subject of human intent and intervention. The subjectivity, action, power and determinism by which the human form can shape the built environment allows a further accordance to Agamben who defines the apparatus as ‘anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions or discourses 39 of living beings.’ Such vision towards totalising capacity of the apparatus, in this case the projection of the socio-‐political human form, one can review the potential such force can play in the negation of spatial environment and conflict. I will seek now to explore the limitations of framing the body as socio-‐political apparatus, as although as Agamben suggests, an apparatus may function as a ‘machine of governance; it remains doubtful that each human entity holds such power; hence the mechanisms of social power which elevate certain individual and collective human forms to a position of dominance; inherently means there must be a submissive party for the facilitation of such domination. To continue my exploration of Agamben’s argument; ‘Apparatuses are not mere accident in which humans are caught by chance, bur 40 rather are rooted in the very process of humanisation.’ I shall explore how then such positions of dominance and submission of human interrelations may emerge if the argument that the body as apparatus is to be supported in a logical framework; thus broadening the argument to reveal the complexities of the potential vision of multiple colliding human apparatus’ existent with the same spatial container. The sociology of human behavioural interrelation has been accurately explored by means of the cultural dissemination of the context of a community of human forms, which may in which the individual may reside. However the very term community is fraught with discrepancies. Daily manifestations of culture in the built environment of the human apparatus lend symbolic representations of the syncretism of the cultural geography of a community reflecting on the extended point of potential for spatial enactment of identity through environment. The diasporas of social process and notions of cultural fragmentation further reflect how notions of imagined homogenous zones of community are riddled with a plethora of segregation and further need for classification, the definition of community is used with care free abandonment, yet in reality it should be used with a degree of in trepidation to move the respective dialogue from a hypothetical construct, shifting the definition of understanding to a more sensitized nature. Let us consider briefly Sennett’s exploration of community; ‘A community is not simply a social group or an unrelated collection of individuals living in the same place. It is a group in which people belong to each other; share something in common. What is distinctive about this mystic sharing in communities is people feel that they belong to each other, and share together; because they are the same. The narrowness of 41 this feeling can seen by contrasting it to the sharing and sense of belonging to a true love’

Agamben. G. (2009) What is an Apparatus. And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishnik and Stephan Pedatella. Stanford University Press. Stanford. California. P2 38 Agamben. G. (2009) What is an Apparatus. And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishnik and Stephan Pedatella. Stanford University Press. Stanford. California. P11 39 Agamben. G. (2009) What is an Apparatus. And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishnik and Stephan Pedatella. Stanford University Press. Stanford. California. P14 40 Agamben. G. (2009) What is an Apparatus. And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishnik and Stephan Pedatella. Stanford University Press. Stanford. California. P16 41 Sennett.R. (1970) The uses of disorder: personal identity and city life: London. Penguin p40

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The utopian implication of this text can be seen in a overwhelming idealism that allows the individual to comprehend the city as place where they can belong; the city that allows the individual to achieve a sense of belonging that can manifest in such ways that allow the individual to feel a sense of ‘ sameness’. The need for this feeling of the euphoric mass all working and living to the same goal can be seen as the need to conform to social ideals to avoid failure. Such definition of a city is reliant on mass and density of individuals formed in complex networks; interlinked and inter connected in a multitude of forms which allows the individuals to form a mass that allows an individual to form a notion beyond that of the banality of the solitary existence. This notion of the ‘community’ fragments and intensifies within zones of conflict; where by support infrastructures have far greater implications towards personal and collective security and right to basic necessity, in this context one could disseminate that the ‘community’ are apparatus to the complex power networks it holds to infiltrate basic human need. Yet such idealisms should only be briefly entertained as to create a totalising perspective of human relations within the built environment, the realms of difference and anomalies are crucial to theoretical deconstruction and it cannot be assumed that all human interactions are so abundantly utopic. Sennett’s allusions to community can be poignantly contrasted to Rancière’s exploration; ‘ the mob of anonymous speaking beings who call themselves the people does wrong to any organised distribution of bodies in community. But conversely “the people” is the name, the form of subjectification, of this immemorial and perennial wrong through which the social order is symbolised by dooming the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence or to the animal noises 42 of expressing pleasure and pain.’ Such definition further alludes to the complexities of attempting to group together human forms under the guise of a universal semiotic in order to manipulate and control their actions. To allude then to the potential management of the complex interaction schema which may exist between co-‐existent or competing human apparatuses; I shall frame the ideology of Benjamin; ‘The city is a stage, a theatre stage even, on watching an uninterrupted succession and ever changing forms, characters appear and disappear, events develop and come to pass, which taken together form 43 something like an orrery for the social world.’ His vision of the city as container for such an ‘orrery’ of social discords further frames the complexities of the potential for competition for competing apparatuses, and equally supports a frame for their co-‐existence. To briefly expand upon this metaphorical stage for the enactment of the routines of the social apparatus one can layer a tautology of performance on to the actions of social interaction either as personal tool for cultural dissemination of urban social interactions or wider projected realms of social exchange and potential manipulation. The city functions as a container for the vivid intersections of human apparatus; fraught with simplicities and complexities; beyond the basic need for survival; nutrition; reproduction; there can exist degrees of similarity; of common experience within the same cultural referencing system and beyond this exists the spectrum of difference. Goffman’s interpretation of ‘impression management’ enable notions as to how far spatial interactions and manifestations can be considered with a vocabulary of performance; ; ‘A back region or backstage may be divided as a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. There are of course many characteristic functions of such places. It is here that the capacity of performance to express something beyond itself may be painstakingly fabricated; it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed. Here stage props and items of personal fronts 44 can be stored in a kind of compact collapsing of whole repertoires of actions and characters.’ Such illusion creates further discourse as to the necessity of the human apparatus to function by pre-‐ 45 determined social codes as they pass through space. Such perceptions of the performance of the body as social apparatus allows the problematic assumption of preordained social roles within an estimated social hierarchy, such assumptions when questioned and reverted may then created imbalances of nodes of behaviour when apparatuses are shift from culture to culture; highlighting

Rancière. J (1999) Dis-aggreement. Translated by Julie Rose. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. P22 Reymond. Von M. (1894) p.1. Berliner Pflaster. Preface to Berliner Pflaster. Illustrierte Schilderungen aus dem Berliner Leben. Berlin. Cited by Schlör. J. (1998) p241. 44 Goffman. E ( 1990 ) The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Penguin. Harmondsworth. P112 45 Goffman expands in his own example about the social enactments of hotel workers; ‘Shetland Hotel provides another example of the problems workers face when they have insufficient control of their backstage.’ (Goffman. E ( 1990 ) The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Penguin. Harmondsworth. P113) Goffman allows the routines of catering service men and women to be defined as a schema of performance whereby they enter and exit the realm of stage which he defines as the locations of their everyday. The notion as to the right to performance and the right to non performance in the everyday can become problematic when the definition of the performance is differs between performer and spectator. 43

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how social action cannot retain a cultural or physical universality on either a macro or micro scale. Such theatrical framework has been useful briefly to allude to the potential situations and implications which may occur in situations of competing apparatuses as human forms on an individuals level; to consider then with relation to a further study of power; this raises the further critique of Deleuze; ‘Each apparatus is thus defined in terms of its newness and its creativity content, this marking at the same time its ability to transform itself, or indeed to break down in a favour of a further apparatus, unless it concentrates its strength along its harder, more rigid or more solid 46 lines.’ Perhaps we reveal from the application of this statement that interaction and collision of social apparatuses in the form of social conflict will ultimately reveal the stronger apparatus; which will then need to readjust accordingly to manage the situation, which it faces. This research has explored the human form as political apparatus to reflect upon spatial negotiations in conflict zones. Seminal to this exploration is the ability to conceptualize the human form as both dominant and submissive to the negotiations of other human forms and the spatial container, which becomes seminal tangible entity for these vivid intersections. The built environment can be reviewed as a systematic construction of the human form; the mutual co-‐existence of the body in space, the visual and aesthetic experience of architecture and the political context, allow an understanding of the limitations to control and power of totality; and conflict manifested between human apparatuses and the built environment symbolize dynamic shifts in the cycles of power and its negotiations The spatial embodiment of conflict engenders a method of social change; in varying degrees of positive and negative affect, and with accompanying resistance, trauma and celebration from the dominant human apparatuses, which engineer such shifts and the reactions of the submissive human forms that experience such intervention and manipulation, both spatially and psychologically. The dynamics of power manifest thus as spatial embodiment; within the spatial container that holds the human form as functioning apparatus The physical manifestation of power can never be removed from the social contextual framework in which it appears. The city cannot contain more than we allow it to. Projecting tired metaphors, the apparatus of history, and the postcolonial accident that we admit no blame for. The city, which we fill with accidents of the post modern, endlessly repeating the same tired charade. The accidents, which we name, progress to effortlessly allow us to move slowly to visions of certain futures lamented. The city watched, but not observed, catered for our every need but not understood. Named but the identity undisclosed. The body in the construct allows us a means to wager the city battles and torments; to reflect itself as the power it holds or desires. The body becomes emblem, endlessly attempting to symbolize its endeavors. It’s dwelling becomes an extension of such will; the abode in which the body surrenders to society’s surmount.

Deleuze. G. What is a Dispositif? Sourced in Armstrong. T. ( ed ) ( 1992) Michael Foucault. Philosopher. Essays translated from the French and German. Routledge. New York. P163-4

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day four 4am to Linford Wood Lake Sanctuary (National Dawn Chorus Day) Walk (12 or so people on a lead walk around the lake learning bird song Some sleep Hannah Ardent John Berger Film Editing Yoga WIllen Lake Dinner Yoga Letters Images / the rhetoric of birds / the action of bird watching / the community of bird watchers/ navigating a landscape through careful attention to bird song and action. Recalibrating and gathering Issue: The personal vs. the public / how to directly apply theory to practice Performance ideas: • Today I have felt a deep sense of static. Close observation of habitual gestural leads sometimes to a sense of weight, how to stay light and buoyant in such a slow place? Reading the weight of Sunday in MK, silence and heart monitors • Type writers for automatic writing ( city center and forest ) to generate a series of texts of actions observed for performance scores.

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how do bird watchers inhabit space? A method of navigation which allows a shift in their relationship to space. The lakes of Milton Keynes: ‘you will find no where like this’ the guide assures us. A company, as group, still in the dark hours we pass slowly along path, meadow, walk, hide and stream, near silence and a slow steady pace. Perhaps for those hours in our steady meandering line we were a company. On my return to the studio I am taken again by notions of collectivity, of group dynamic and the potential spaces of sociality and shared experience the urban encounter can generate. The day feels then confused, time back to front. Walking a way to encounter the city, but I feel somehow lost in my body, tired of the two-‐step and the car. Walking. The motorway at night. The canal in sunshine. The lake in grey, the motorway in blue, the park in grey, the side walk in lampl light, rarely seeing another soul. On a Sunday evening in may in Milton Keynes, if I write it enough times some sense of the real may return, I have been out seeking the lakes and taking time to make a quiet dance of a circle on the performance platform to the black swan. M birds K birds The rhetoric of a city, the language of birds, do birds has a regional dialect? Cara asks the guide Do the magpies of Milton Keynes sound different from those of Southwark? The dance of the bird walkers. We walk from 441 to 0746 in a continuous line across the lakes of the city. I am learning the city of MK, quickly, faster than the sound of birds. ( Pounds Hill, Prospect Land, Beethoven Place, Bellini Close, Bliss Court, Briar Hill, Brahms Close, Brill Place, Birdlip lane yet they leave no real trace.. I do no t feel however that I know anything other than my own variations of a two-‐step. The history of the city is becoming apparent, slowly as my fathers old books are lined with neat pencil lines and yellow sticky notes. How to make a city? how to make a city feel? What does a city need? Who decides how a city becomes. I have not fallen in love with MK and my fathers voice is always in my head, ‘ the problem is, nothing is extraordinary” but perhaps we need ordinary places where the tranquil steady slow pace is habitual. I pound the asphalt confused by the term ‘ applied culture’ Walking the motor way and the grey look almost beautiful in the gloaming A man has his arms out by the lake and his friend takes his image with the swans behind him. The birds have a designated feeding area and the park has a trim trail. All the lawns are mowed symmetrically and no blade appears aloof to such centralized order.

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Todd describes walking as an effective socio-‐cultural strategy for the dissemination of live world geographies, through sustained and kinesthetic analysis; I wonder this as we are walking along. We speak of families, of life, of projects, of hopes, of memories; perhaps through this one is able to 47 decode what Ardent refers to as ‘Power and the Space of Appearance.’ We are in place and in another place. How does the walking body appear? Todd indicates that there is lack of genuine understand as to the power of the body;’ Our bodies are brought to our attention usually under disagreeable circumstances-‐ when we are sick or injure, and the clothes have to come off to reveal a wound, burn or fracture. We seem messy inside, for when our skin is punctured or torn out runs a scarlet fluid which makes a horrible stain and is offensive… Unlike dogs, human beings form habits of managing their bodies badly, through false notion of holding individual parts. It may never occur to them that mechanically, action and reaction are as persistent in 48 the living mechanism as in that of any inanimate structure.’ This research draws from key ideas of Falke-‐Heller: ‘ the body awareness in the sitting, standing walking, lying down in all human functioning. What is expressive movement? Where does it start to be really interesting? And where is it empty? Then I also the space-‐the dynamic in the room. That's what 49 I was always interested in from the beginning (Falke-‐Heller 1980) Using the actions of walking, standing, lying sitting, we are able to begin a deconstruction of the most fundamental principles of movement, this is all we can do perhaps to begin to understand humanity: “I rushed from sitting to lying and back to sitting and soon, whatever the task happened to be. Eventually I discovered that this sensing oneself is not a technique and it is nothing dramatic. It is very simple and there lies its

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Ardent. H (1958) The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago. P199 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P5

Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95

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difficulty. I had to learn to reduce my efforts to absolute simplicity-‐ the most difficult thing in the 50 world.’ (Falke-‐HellerI983, 4) Both Flake-‐Hetter and Gindler have expanded an approach to the phenomenology of embodied spatial practice which Loukes aptly describes as: “the non judgmental observation of "simple" 51 movement, leading to greater awareness of habitual actions” This practice, as both practioners 52 narrate through their practice does not rely on the creation of: ‘a fixed methodology of any kind’ in the sense that participants are so immersed in the active state this kind of research creates there is no need for formal method, rather a constant undulating sense of enquiry which is cultivated through a heightened sense of awareness. As a workshop participant indicates: “we had to just improvises; saying something or moving ... so it was really a little drama exercise. But I think that again she was working for being relaxed, and totally in you and in the situation, and sensitive. Sensitive to the others. ... And yet feeling the moment when you had something that was appropriate . . . She wanted it to be 53 spontaneous” (.Hutchinson Guest 200I) In Louke’s detailed research as to the impact of such movement methodology, she highlights key terms as discovery and the cultivation of sensitive, tacit embodied knowledge of the movement behaviour of the self as key foundation becoming more attuned to ones life world. “Her work was an exploration, a way of following up what we discovered in the process of sensing. It was not what we did, but how we did it. There was nothing to 'teach' she maintained the reason, only discovery" (Selver quoted .in Roche I978, 32). "Approach" and "technique” are of course both transmissions of belief of how the body operates and communicates and are always culturally, historically and temporally specific. Clearly, these transmissions of knowledge are always complex and subjective. After all, as Bourdieu writes, “what is 'learned by body 'is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished about, but something that one is" and so" the body is thus 54 constantly mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces ("I990, 73).” As Todd indicates; ‘Attention means tension, a readiness to move with no movement taking place, which spells fatigue. Emotion constantly finds expression in bodily position, if not in the furrowed brow or set mouth, then in limited breathing, in tight necked muscles, or in the slumped body of 55 discouragement and listlessness.’ When the body is in its natural resting state, a true image of the life world begins to emerge, this research methodology has sculpted a means to develop this image more actively and with a more conscious state of awareness on very simple and open level, continually referring back to the movements of daily life which are most common to us. These are 56 referred to as The Four Dignities; Sitting, Standing, Lying Being.

Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95 P 81 51

Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95 P 82 52 Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95 P 87 53 Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95 P 83 54 Loukes. R ( 2004) Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-‐Hetter(1891-‐1984) in Dance Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer, 2007), pp. 75-‐95 P 88 55 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P44 56 Carroll. C ( 2014) The Four Dignities: The Spiritual Practice of Walking, Standing, Sitting and Lying Down. Singing Dragon Press. USA

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Elsa Gindler first drew attention to the need to sustained and active presence of these active 57 meditative states in the 1930’s with her seminal work around the principles of soma-‐humanism. Gindler foregrounded the need for embodied awareness; ‘ Now it becomes more and more apparent to us that we do not quite keep up with our lives, that the balance of physical, spiritual and intellectual forces is disturbed… We no longer lead our lives thoughtfully and sensitively. We become rushed and allow confusions around us to accumulate in such a way that they get the upper hand at very 58 inappropriate moments.’ Gindler’s seminal movement research places emphasis on the awareness of habitual movement patterns in social situation which emit a visual emotional language which the mover in question may allow problems for their social action which more acute body awareness could control: she highlights: ‘In difficult situations, for example in martial quarrels or with the unexpected appearance of one’s employer, we see that this grasping for breath, cramp in the diaphragm and stomach assumes frightened sensations. Breathing stops or breath is hastily drawn and the situation – which probably demands our greatest responsiveness, is hopelessly lost. We all know this condition well, embarrassment, anxiety, ill humor, confusion in the mental and spiritual realms, trembling or an embarrassing fidgeting in the arms or legs in the physical realm. If one is conscious of how cramping – or constriction can be eliminated by becoming aware of it, one is suddenly equal to the situation. The 59 breath flows more freely, the mental confusion abates, one can make use of one’s capacities.’ ‘ It is clear that we cannot begin by working with large movements if even the smallest cause inference with natural flow of breathing. One must first come to know – through observing oneself – just what one does when breathing, whilst brushing ones teeth, while putting on ones socks, or while eating. So we begin by attempting to awaken in our students an understanding of what happens in these daily performances. Then we have to try to make any movement without interfering with breathing. This requires much work that one could possibly stay with it forever. The main playground for this practice however, is not the class session; there the quick release of constricted breathing is attained relatively easily and quickly. It is outside the classroom where we begin to notice how breathing becomes constricted in response to the most trivial cases; it is there where the tendency to constrict must be 60 overcome. As Glinder’s research indicates, the cultivation of heightened sense of awareness of the body as kinesthetic awareness cultivates a platform of a more sensitive relationship towards daily encounter and social practice;’ we must recognize and the connection between breathing and bodily movement, and bring about their correlation. In doing so we begin to understand that demands made upon us by life are not so overwhelmingly difficult, that they can be carried out with greater sense of economy 61 without our maximum effort and turmoil’ She highlights the need for the body to be porous vessel capable and calm to responsive to the demand of our environment: ‘for us relaxation is that condition in which we have the greatest capacity of reacting. It is stillness within us, a readiness to respond appropriately to any stimulus. As for standing, real standing, we must feel how we give our weight, pound for pound onto the earth, and how in doing so, the feet become steadily lighter, Here is a paradox, the more weighty we become the lighter we become, the quieter we become. In sitting, we must be upright, as long as slouch we 62 disturb the internal functions.’ Glinder outlines the benefits of increased mental well being with the application of such diligent and mindful embodied movement practice; ‘we gladly give ourselves a workout but we do not wish to wear ourselves out and that is where the difference lies. In reality whoever is able to relax is capable to healthy tension. This we perceive as the beautiful changeability of energies that react to every

Gindler. E. ( Gymastik for People whose Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H ( ed) ( 1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California 58 Gindler. E. ( Gymastik for People whose Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H ( ed) ( 1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P5 59 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P9 60 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P11 61 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P12 62 Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P12

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stimulus, increasing and decreasing as required. Above all it includes a strong feeling of inner strength, of effortlessness in accomplishment, in short, a heightened joie de vivre. …’ She furthers; ‘The most essential things we have to keep in mind are; that any correction made from without is of little value, and that each of us must try to gain understanding for the special nature of our own constitution in 63 order to learn how to take care of ourselves. Such relative simplicity of evaluation of movement methodology was also highlighted by Todd who 64 explores through Wendell’s key text of the 1880’s ; ‘The two accomplishments common to man kind are walking and talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practice them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend, yet it has been clearly explained and successfully initiated 65 by artificial contrivances.’ Todd explores walking as a task seminal to the understanding man, a task however that is potentially filled with danger and complexity and not to be debased as an innate human function: ‘walking then is a perpetual falling and a perpetual self recovery. It is the most complex, violent and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early stage of life. We find how complex walking is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never fully understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or to overlook the last step on a flight 66 of stairs, and discover with head long violence we have being hurtling ourselves forward.’ Todd sensitive research aids a through understanding of the minute details the ‘The Four Dignities 67 of man actually entail. With such an awareness of acute natural kinesthetic process man commits to on a daily basis and the minute shifts in balance and understanding as to what changes can be made to improve this daily performance. Todd details; ‘ Walking is a lot less fatiguing than standing, since the process of losing our balance and recovering it causes less strain than to keep our flexible delicately poised mechanism in one 68 position’ It is at this point my research methodology diverges from such a detailed body of kinesthetic focus and aligns more to the value of the observation of the cognitive perceptions developed and shifted by the individual whilst walking in the city, walking with an embodied awareness of the impact of developing a socio-‐ kinesthetic archive of the movements of daily life.

Gindler. E. (Gymastik for People who’s Lives are Full of Activity. in Johnson. D. H (ed) (1995) Bone, Breath & Gesture. Practices of Embodiment. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley. North California P14 64 Wendell. O ( 1883) The Physiology of Walking. Notes in Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P194 65 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P194 66 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P195 67 Carroll. C ( 2014) The Four Dignities: The Spiritual Practice of Walking, Standing, Sitting and Lying Down. Singing Dragon Press. USA 68 Todd. M. E ( 1937) The Thinking Body. A Study of the Balancing Forces in the Dynamic Man. The Gesalt Journal Press. Gouldsboro. USA. P37

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This research methodology is largely inspired by a sense of art as social action and social process, not driven to create social change, but to function in a way that creates a social platform using discursive and open techniques actively seeking for a deeper connection between body and landscape, place and person. Drawing from Rothko’s writings, this research has created an embodied reaction to participants notions and experiences of daily reality: “It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity 69 in the means used to achieve them.” Rothko deconstructed the relationship between art and action and the role of artist or practioner as purveyor of social change. He explores; ‘Art has often been described as form of escape from action. It has been pointed out to the artist, finding the practical affairs of the world too unpleasant withdraws from the world of true activity and ensconces him in a world of the imagination, in order to exempt him from this unpleasantness. The world of true activity is usually considered that one which occupies man – either communally or individually, with the satisfaction that his body needs. The staving of physical starvation or discomfort is considered the 70 proper world of realistic action’ Rothko highlights the need for artist and practitioner to have a deeply embodied sense of connected realism with thin their practice which ensures any notion of idealism within practice does not uproot the artist from the social reality they are a part of. He furthers; ‘Art is such an action. It is a kindred form of action to idealism. They are both expressions of the same drive, and the man who fails to fulfill this urge in one form or another is as guilty of escapism as the one who fails to occupy him with the satisfaction of bodily needs. In fact, the man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry so that he has neither time nor energy to occupy himself with any other needs of his human organism is by far a greater escapist than the one who developed his art. For the man who develops his art does make adjustments to his physical needs. He understands that man must have bread to live, while the other cannot understand that you cannot live 71 by bread alone.” As he highlights the tangential dualism that exists between desired practice outcomes and desire for ones practice to be still integrated within the socio-‐cultural framework it emerges from is the key success of the artist’s duet between practice idealism and society. Rothko highlights: ‘ Art is not only a form of action; it is a form social action. For art is a type of communication and when it enters the environment, it produces its effects just as any other form of 72 action does.’ . “ There is no doubt that the artist being human is both changed and influenced by his environment. The environmental factors that impress themselves upon him and his action are infinite, and as time goes on and our investigations lead into more and more fields, we shall find many 73 influences that we cannot trace as yet today.’ Rothko highlights the need for the continued reevaluation of the role of the artist in society, the need to continually realign to ones social context through the process of review, affirmation and any necessary realignments; he alerts; “We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-‐expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But 74 it must move.”

Rothko. M ( 2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P 10 Rothko. M (2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P 10 Rothko. M ( 2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P2 72 Rothko. M ( 2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P10 73 Rothko. M ( 2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P15 74 Rothko. M ( 2004) The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. Yale University Press. Newhaven and London. P5 70 71

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The stone circles may be a plant Someone has left flowers We cross a road Without traffic lights the free pedestrian and what of hitching in MK The man who made the Buddhist Pagoda died in a tragic accident with a lawn mower There are two black swans on the lake the restaurant advises all can be made larger go large get big more more and more The trim trail and the fisherman in his tent The day is ending the roads are long and offer clear straight paths with no certainty and no sense of home where is the heartland? the dialect of MK the call centers Hope in commuting The under paths do not sense danger the city is somehow soft but wait for no impression moulded, kept, held permanent impermanence we are not at stone henge

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Day five Bikram yoga in City center Hannah Ardent on Labor / action / work Solo improvisation journey (arts center, canals to Willen) 4pm Choreographic Variations of Flash Mob (public space in urban space MK) Dinner Jazz night ( Mike from Furwell Court) Yoga Film editing Rehearsing collectivity text Images / collective action / frames of awareness/ the body in large urban spaces / how to make dance / filling urban space / interaction / form / awareness / dancing alone in the city / dancing alone in rural landscape Issue: What to wear when dancing the city/ working alone in desolate urban spaces / how to talk to strangers / making dances / what to do with public attention / the vast nature of gestural vocabulary which exists in public space / bonding / what is research material and what is daily life Performance ideas: • A car based dance improvisation • A nervous collapse in a shopping center • filling a shopping mall with typewriters for people to interact with ( live broadcast of text on line stream) • Public readings of personal diaries in the shopping center back allies

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Dancing the city alone. Playing the wind, seeking tone. How to react and respond? The body awaits some sensory awareness. In the shopping center. We are a collective? The teenagers in the park and I share the common ground of yoga moves as break dance. We play in the grass, a temporary union. They ask what I do. Lost again. To the shopping center, to make a mob, what makes people dance? I am almost nervous. Participation though synchronization does not involve me as a whole, as an entity that can be a part of a larger entity, Why rehearse collectivity? What is freedom? The collective reality You can create all by yourself but you cannot act alone. In action the creative part is the one that puts the agent in the position of the only one and I am inclined to add, in a lonely place, no matter how good the individual is at his or her socializing. Reality viewed through the visor of creative invention is peopled with potential leaders who prove, each of them, that they are good, very good or even excellent. But who shall they expect to practice, thereby realize, what they invented, Weak powers can be responsible for some of the strongest collective effects. ( Notes from Archein to Prattein: Suggestions for an Uncreative Collectivity by Kai Van Eikels)

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To document in secret. How are interventions seen in a public sense? Shifting our social realities. the lady sits and talks to us she asks us how to meditate she tells Cara about her life Perhaps people need a platform simply to talk The covered market in the rain We are almost dancing what will remain? to repeat. How to define our action How to allow the space not to act as limitation? Do I feel free? Can I dance?

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Towards a study of Flash Mob: Variations of Collectivity. How far is non dance dance? what happens when the quotidian extends a millimeter to become performance? A man chases his child across our stage. A lady stares at me. I wonder her thoughts. I stand on a chair. I raise my arm. I kick. I run. I skip. Think of the children? They are always skipping. Why have you stopped? The actions and gestures of an adult. Anger and Rage. Social convention, and conformity. Perhaps this is an exercise to un-‐nerve.

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When we sit in the middle of the shopping plaza and write down our actions I am startled. Using words to show movement. How to tell you of what happened? How to document ( there is a film of this intervention ) How to make sure this action has a resonance or no resonance. What do these things do? Can we start dancing? The careful and continuous narration of the duet of the body in the city. What do the lists of our actions mean? how might they be now used? How many singing bowls have been played in MK shopping center?

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.” ― J.G. Ballard

I try to imagine the sound and taste of the sea. It starts then to rain, heavily. I haven’t heard the news I don’t know where the sea is My compass is spinning incessantly of its own accord I hand wash my socks I drink another cup of coffee and think about the smell of venice.

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Pedestrians do not have priority There is a mini bus that offers free counseling to anyone who wishes to join The market in the rain All closed Muchiees and Daâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s All closed with the lingering smell of instant coffee and Indian take away Pedestrians do not have priority We drive in circles to the old tape under the grid roads over new terrain The grey beauty the rain The rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the rain drops Pedestrians do not have priority there is still mud on my now covered toes My toes still contain the fields there is dirt under my fingernails. the smell of a city ill at ease content in banality beauty and Ballard

I am in search of Concrete Island . Perhaps I am lost in Utopia. Pedestrians do not have priority Pedestrians do not have priority

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Not everything is fieldwork. It was attending the Jazz night in Newport Pagnall which was organized by Mike of Furwell Court retirement center that I had the sudden over bearing sensation to pause. That not everything is fieldwork. That sometimes a jazz night is just a jazz night and does not need to a way to make more performances. It does not need to be a way to meet musicians who might want to improvise in a shopping center in the rain. That this might be a jazz night, where everyone attending might be there just to see the jazz and enjoy the music. I become confused. Am I at work? Is this a social cultural engagement study? Is this a mechanism of socio-‐cultural understanding? When I am at work? Now Its 0318 and I am sat writing about MK, when to pause? What is to pause?

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Day six writing yoga dance walk ( Furwell Court to Willen via City Center) Bikram yoga Dinner with Jess ( Community Action groups, OU, Parks Trust) Bike Film editing/ writing Images / the body against brick / distance on foot/ how to make dance in public space/ how to document oneself/ the journey of being alone in the city / wind Issue: dancing as way of learning the city/ what is field work/ degrees of separation / how to learn a place / mechanisms of social understanding/ how does a place shape you/ do you say MK or Milton Keynes ? People returning from MK after uni / why come back / Local neighborhood politics/ bikes in MK/ back garden etiquette in MK / where do the young people go in MK / what is the alternative culture of MK Performance ideas: • a car based dance improvisation • a nervous collapse in a shopping center • filling a shopping mall with typewriters for people to interact with ( live broadcast of text on line stream) • Public readings of personal diaries in the shopping center back allies

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Milton Keynes, for any enclaves of un extraordinary beauty, lacks a certain luster, perhaps at times feels like an empty room. I am tired of the roads, of the endless retirement homes; even the canals offer no relief. I am weighted here by a sense of imminence, of the sense of perpetuation watching people wait. There are so many DIY stores, endless shops for self-‐improvement, endless places for activities where one can go to try and forget the nature of their existence, but it will persist. The roads are long and straight. Every lawn and grass area is mowed to an image of ‘perfection’ each shopping mall glimmers, there is piped ‘ happy’ music everywhere, and yet it is so empty. I feel heavy and I feel almost ‘bad’ to write to you of such atmosphere for fear even the tone of the words may be infectious of a deep-‐set gloom that radiates here. I think of sheep and lambs (again) of rugged hills and open spaces, and look out to gated fields and designated pens where humans are allowed to feed the birds. I am slipping into a daily rhythm of walking, walking and the search for good coffee. The hope that something ‘ wild’ will be just that little further, it never is and I am in another gated community cul-‐ de-‐sac and surrounded by the another sea of endless low rise housing in fake red brick. My thoughts are with Happy architecture; how to make spaces with the potential to make people happy. I have been skeptically half reading The Good Life. New Public Spaces of Recreation. Ryan. Z. 75 (2006) Ryan categorizes the need for a city to be analyzed into five categories; the cultured city, the 24hr city, the fun city, the connected city and the healthy city, locating examples of regeneration projects defined under these categories. We live in an age in which the quality of the public realm is driven by the ability of our streets, open spaces, parks and plazas commercial and cultural centres to tell us stories and give us meaning to life. There is a strong need for cities to encourage, nurture and facilitate the creative activity of its dwellers as the city is; ‘increasingly be valued for the level of creativity they inspire and encourage’. I cringe reading this and wonder if such idealism can actually be really in a book, I wonder has she ever walked around central Milton Keynes in the rain alone. Underutilized public spaces are being reinvented with bold new designs that will activate the contemporary urban landscape through day and night, she narrates on, almost skipping in glee, I envy her tone and wonder where she lives and If she wears yellow dresses. “These bold new designs take advantage of existing infrastructure and harness local interests in order to engage a diversity of people and activities.” I think to the underpasses and the piped music, this is the perfect city.’ Of course she makes some relevant points. • Architecture and design are not just isolated to buildings and eminent architects but also about urban space and agents of all kinds being intimately connected to the fabric and 76 machinations of city life. • ‘Urban space is not just about the great monuments of the city but the places where we go 77 about our daily lives’ ‘ • ‘The good life of the city should incorporate all manner of spaces where people gyrate, glide, and rotate, mine, perform, and declaim, traverse and act out options. street poets, graffiti artists and skateboarders already know this and their actions should be encouraged and 78 celebrated for it is here that cultural acts can be performed, witnessed and heard.’

Ryan. Z. (2006) The Good Life. New Public Spaces of Recreation. New York. Van Alen Institute. Boden. I. Thirteen tactics for the Good Life. soured in Ryan. Z.(2006) p97 Boden. I. Thirteen tactics for the Good Life. soured in Ryan. Z.(2006) p97 78 Boden. I. Thirteen tactics for the Good Life. soured in Ryan. Z.(2006) p98 76 77

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‘We need architecture of an impermanent and temporary nature, which appear for a few weeks, days or even hours which do whatever they need to do and then disappear without 79 leaving a trace, except that it is in the minds of all those who have witnessed It.’

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‘Using the city for as a space for interrogation and provocation, these interventions open up 80 the city and create a flow of people, commodities, and ideas.’

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‘The connected city is a place of encounters, unexpected discoveries and social exchange 81 where citizens are taken on a new journey time after time.’

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‘We need a city that we do not know, that we do not understand, which we have not yet encountered, which is simultaneously strange, familiar and unknown to us. This is public space which is always a surprise, a unique place of stimulation. This is the acceptable and 82 indeed desirable risk of not always knowing what lies around the corner’.

This is all so horrifically obvious surely? My toes are tense here as I continue through the skipping pages, I raise the question how far these spaces actually encourage creativity, or are the fact that they have been tailored for such specific use a hindrance to user’s freedom in such areas. Can creativity simply happen in a designated area? This has been attempted on numerous occasions through liaison with the public space users, in attempt to truly integrate users into the design process. The most successful contemporary examples of public space have been designated with the extensive observation of and with potential users. Simply put, when asked about their cities, what do people want? The reality is that they rarely know and how are they asked is my main issue. If I was asked about what would make MK ‘better’ I would say take most of it down and teach people to farm and how to make cobb houses. Public spaces have to fit the demand of a ‘charged creative society’ which is what the policy documents say; high-‐rise blocks with a desolate play area do not call for dynamic activity and interaction of inhabitants. As Landry highlights the; ‘creative city identifies, nurtures, attracts and sustains its talents, it mobilizes talent’ (The Creative City. Its origins and its futures. ) I find this term the ‘ creative’ city bordering now on the absurd and the image of the counseling bus in the rain comes to mind. How to make creative space? Crayons? Chalk? Mud? Creativity in urban design, collaboration between artist, observer, inhabitant and planner is essential if the space that is being created is to fulfill its creative social role, there has to be an; ‘avoidance of mass development and erection of generic and chain outlets, which do not encourage individuals to 83 have a particularly enlightened existence. ’ ( This is all MK seems to be) The development of ‘new areas’ in cities has to be extremely well considered of the desire is to increase creative activity and heighten the social interaction network of the area through space design, which in reality dictates the choreography of everyday life. There must be weight on the importance of developing a creative infrastructure into which urban dwellers can decide to place themselves in, giving them the opportunity to partake in artistic, intellectual and emerging activities with a social frame work, thud enabling the birth of a ‘creative city’ (or in reality, a DIY city which inevitably seems to fail to have any core or sense of heart) An architect who has made the integration of the primary space user’s need seminal to design principles has been Colin Ward, someone I hold in great personal esteem for his grounded urban approach to life in cities. In a series of lectures he has established a series of theories, which enable the space user, the inhabitant to be of primary concern in the design process, thus integrating their

Boden. I. Thirteen tactics for the Good Life. soured in Ryan. Z.(2006) p101 Ryan. Z.(2006) p 65 Ryan. Z.(2006) p 65 82 Boden. I. Thirteen tactics for the Good Life. soured in Ryan. Z.(2006) p101 83 Landry. C. (2008) p14. The Creative City. Its origins and its futures. In Urban design Spring 2008. Issue 106 ISSN 1750 712X 80 81

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needs and creativity into the final product in urban space. He maintainds these fundamental approaches within his practice; • ‘The ordinary citizen should have a vision and a comprehension for the possibilities of his own 84 city. • ‘The aspiring architect must unfortunately develop patience and a technique for working in 85 harmony with officialdom’ • ‘At the cultural heart of modern industrial societies lie the values of freedom and personal choice which currently find practical expression through consumerist life styles. Their present urban expression is ecologically destructive but in tackling this problem we cannot ignore the values themselves, as designers we must seek a balance between human desires and their 86 ecological effects.’ • Town planning is not mere place-‐planning or even work-‐planning; if it is to be successful it must be folk planning. This means that its task is to find the right places for each sort of 87 people; places they will really flourish.’ • ‘When dwellers control the major design and are free to make their own contributions to the design, construction and management of their housing, both the process and the 88 environment produced, stimulate individual and social well being.’ • ‘Today we live to isolated. Private property has led to an egotistic individualism in all our 89 mutual relations. We know each other only slightly, our points of contact are too rare.’ • ‘In an environment both a degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of 90 discovery are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.’ • ‘Creativity is for the gifted few; the rest of us are compelled to live in environments constructed by the gifted few……the result is that the vast majority of people are not allowed to experiment with the components of building and construction. whether in environmental studies, the abstract arts, literature or science, the creativity, the playing around with the components and variables of the world to make experiments and discover new things has been explicitly stated as the domain of the creative few, and the rest of the community has 91 been deprived of a crucial part of their lives and live style.’ Such collations of social and planning theories in Urban Development allow the individual to take precedence within the design process, thus potentially enabling a more personally considered, socially conscious outcome, but who gets involved? who comes to the meetings? who speaks? what is this public voice? and what about the whispers behind it which are left out of all policy documents. Creative public space comes with risk. In the theory if creating creative space, the risk factor of the public’s relation to this space cannot be over looked. There is a need for clarity in within the designated use of creative space in cities. Do space users fully appreciate the risks to their personal space? The paradox of risk and creativity in public space has undoubted effects on the creativity possible in urban planning as the; ‘opportunity side of risk taking culture begins to disappear.’ 92 leaving often dry shells of projects, over burdened with safety legislation, so the pedestrian is

Tyrwhitt. J. Cited in Ward. C. (1996) p45 Fathy. H. cited In Ward. C. (1996) p29 Bentley. I. cited in Ward. C. (1996) p50 87 Geddes. P cited in Ward. C. (1996) p68 88 Turner. J. Cited in Ward. C. (1996) p101 89 Kropotkin.P. Cited in Ward. C. (1996) p106 90 Nicholson. S. Cited in Ward. C. (1996) p23 91 Nicholson. S. Cited in Ward. C. (1996) p23 92 92 Landry. C. Risk and the Creation of Liveable Cities. in CABE Space (Eds) (no date) p4 85 86

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suddenly only considered not as an individual but rather they become a walking safety hazard in themselves, as; ‘consciousness of risk comes in myriad forms’ speaks the official language. ‘The simultaneous rise of the risk and creativity agendas is one of the greatest paradoxes today, given 93 that risk avoidance strategies often cancel out inventiveness ‘The creative city cannot be founded like a cathedral in a dessert, it needs to be linked to and part of an existing cultural environment, we need to appreciate the complex interdependencies and not 94 simply use one to exploit the other if we want a real creative city’ (Landry Creative Cities?) Sat with all this creative city rhetoric on the table, I look past it and out of the window. I am deeply troubled I suppose by notions of modern progress, I feel at a loss to understand what this analogy in urban design of the creative city really means, and being in such a melancholic state in MK I can only fear that all this language and bravado around the modern image of the creative city is a reinvention of the use of myth as tool of socio-‐cultural deception. I read Ward, Landry and Collins and then walk the back of the central grid in MK and look to all the alleys of concrete near wasteland. I am struck with such an acute and overwhelming saddens for the notions of modern man, I sit down and close my eyes and try to take myself somewhere, anywhere else. I try to imagine the sound and taste of the sea.

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Pratt. A. (2008) Creative Cities? in Urban design Spring 2008. Issue 106 ISSN 1750 712X Landry. C. Risk and the Creation of Liveable Cities. in CABE Space (Eds) (no date) p9

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Wandering by Hermann Hesse 1918 For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-‐wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and

reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-‐breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

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I wonder of the trees in MK. If trees could speak. the older ones who have seen the city before it was a city and now watch as they talk about taking the point down. The population has doubled and the hospital is not expanding. The Xscape and the fake snow. What do the trees think? I walk slowly at night, they whisper in the wind stories of construction. The city of trees? the trees however make no comment, waiting only for time to continue.

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Day seven Church Visit / bell Ringers Lunch and Workshop chats The MK Archive Visit The Range Visit Studio Time Writing How to review the city: Urban Education and the City Experience. What did Jane Jacobs think of MK? / Shopping for improvement / mass availability of consumer goods / Issue: Local groups and local knowledge / what is invasive / how to switch off / what is performance and what is daily life / perception of performance / mechanism of social interaction Performance ideas: • Sound Booth of MK archive • Developing performances in shops • Home improvement performances • The Bell ringers dance in The Range • Writing in the Range

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( a note from the archive room ) I am becoming overwhelmed with a sense of pride in MK. Every resident has their history, their story, their road, their feelings. The archive is a full of ways in which to understand the birth of the new MK. Sick cities and well cities, how to make a city healthy. In the archive I linger in the section of environment and pollution. How to manage a new city and pollution, the new city is filling with cars. I think of the notion of all the architects sat in a room planning out the spaces in which everyone wil live out their daily lives. How to reflect upon a city ( sections of the archive) Planning New Towns Community A city looked at square by square as to the grid reference: a study of flora Tourism Women Ecology Arts I linger in the section which explores the role of women shaping a new city in the 1960’s. The geography of allotments, the green spaces of the city. I think about the geography of dog walkers in MK, how I have witnessed odd sightings of people beginning performances only as they are with their dogs. The Tallest Tree ( Derek Walker) The sadness of the tress diseases. Key local topics: The cows Roundabouts Commuters London ( proximity and alienation ) Sports ( football) Xscape building The trees Gardens LoveMK what animals to bring to the new city of MK ( Noah’s arc ) What plants to bring to the city What to introduce ( MK as a science experiment) Ecology Arts Business Investment Mapping the city through social or pedestrian use or butterfly sightings How to map where the trees are planted ( to meet every person who has planted a tree in MK ) What insects and birds are new to MK? How to track environmental changes in MK. Mechanisms of urban control and urban freedom.

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Performing the field | Strategies exploring performance based research within qualitative research methods.

‘Every day life does not exist in generality.’ The everyday is a laden and potentially hazardous infinite term within the field of visual sociology. Existing in a plethora of form, the diasporas of elements which constitute the definition of the everyday mean that concepts of universality are limited to the various differences which manifest globally within human routinal occupation of co-‐existing bodies in space. The everyday can shelter any pattern of events from global disaster, famine and war, to eating, drinking and the complexities of human inter-‐relations. Essentially the everyday is a malleable form; constructed by its respective subject. The everyday is said to demand an interdisciplinary openness, a willingness to blur creatively the traditional research methods and protocols of disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology and 96 sociology.’ •

How far can photography generate creative and sociologically informative production which alleviates the everyday from individual perceptive life world strata to a wider social frame?

•

How often is the particularity of everyday life lost as it is transformed by the process of description and interpretation? Can qualities research methods imbue daily activity with the force of the spectacular?

•

How far can the practice and social investigation of quotidian observation and simulation enable the revisioning of contemporary performance practices and sociological research?

‘How can everyday life be defined? It surrounds us; it besieges us, on all sides and from all directions. We are inside and outside of it. No so called ‘elevated’ activity can be reduced to it, nor can it be separated from it. Its activities are born, they grow and emerge, once they have left the nourishing earth of their native land not one of them can be formed and fulfilled on its own account. In this earth they are born. If they emerge, it is because they have grown and prospered. It is at the heart of the 97 everyday that projects become works of creativity.’ Approaching the everyday street as endless performance | towards envisioning the city as symphony. ‘The everyday is human. The earth, the sea, forest, light, night, do not represent everydayness, which belongs first of all to the presence of dense urban centres. We need these admirable deserts that are

Lefebvre. H. ( 1961) Clearing the Ground. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P26 96 2 Johnstone. S. Recent Art and the Everyday. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P15 97 Lefebvre. H. ( 1961) Clearing the Ground. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P29

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the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to over take us. The everyday is not at home in our dwelling places, it is not in the offices and churches, anymore than in libraries or 98

museums. It is in the street – if it is anywhere.’ The city street offers a myriad of inspiration: an essential communication network for city dwellers, a place of activity or calm, where we are free to wander, rush, sit, use and create. ‘Force yourself to 99

write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, what is colourless.’ Perec echoes the 100

passion and enthusiasm of the first ‘school’ of flaneurs

;

‘To walk out your front door as if you’ve just arrived in a foreign country and discover the world in 101

which you already live.’

Drama and potential exist in the street and the onlooker lies predator to a

potential spectacle which consumes and engulfs. Perec’s occupation with the detail of the street affords insight into the spectacular level of detail within the rubric of residential planning: ‘The street: try to describe the street what it’s made of, what it’s used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The buildings: note that they’re in the comfortable, well heeled side. Distinguish residential from official buildings. The shops. What do they sell in the shops? There are no food shops, oh yes, there’s a baker’s. Ask yourself where the locals do their shopping?’

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Interaction with the city can lead to a fruitful and engaged response to the aesthetics and dimensions of urban space. Using the street as seminal force for creative inspiration may inspire additions to every life as simple as Yoko Ono suggests ; ‘Step in all the puddles in the city.’

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How far can creative and interactive relationships with the city benefit a grander schema than the life world of the individual experiencing it; to form a vehicle of comment on society as a whole? There is a social hierarchy as to how influential and how far within the quotidian experiences of the public domain can be perceived as to the potential spectacular and valid sociological research. The dualism of how far observation highlights the street or the image maker can become a reflection as to how far the act of transformation and elevation of the quotidian serves as highlighter for the flaneur himself; making the act of observation an objectification of the spectacular. Key points of contextual reference: •

Using street photography as a means to creatively frame the everyday; how can such principle be applied to other disciplines?

Blanchot. M. ( 1962) Everyday Speech. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P3 99 Perec. G ( 1974) The Street. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P105 100 This can be not be finitely pointed in history and can be traced from the work of William Blake; to Louis Aragon and Walter Benjamin. 101 Benjamin. W (1927-‐1940 collections) (ed. Tiedemann. R. Translated by Eiland. H. McLaughlin. K. 1999) Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. USA. Harvard/Belknap.(M10a A4)p437 102 Perec. G ( 1974) The Street. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P105 103 Ono. Y. ( 1963 ) City Piece. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and MIT Press. P113

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The intricate relationship between citizen and the street is closely reflected through the street photographer and the striving to gather images capturing the passages of the everyday continuum of the street and the potential towards the spectacular. The street photographer; like the flaneur, walks the street like a stalker, taking in sights the unconscious eye may call the banal, the mundane: he/she eagerly consumes them, plate by plate, to create an archive of the spectacles of the everyday. Such archives remain open, presented to the viewer to create their own reference to their own system of categorization of the everyday. How the photographer chooses to represent the everyday allows not only a presentation and documentation of the everyday, it reveals their own cultural schema of seeing and relationship to their everyday. By successful framing of such encounters, the photographer can enable the banality of post modernist working patterns in the city to become artefact and metaphor for the striving of the human condition. Daily routine has long been subject to philosophical and sociological scrutiny, perhaps the copious literature and images of everyday city street life allow its status as cultural impression to become celebrated beyond its expected capacity Through endless documentation by artists, sociologists, philosophers and researchers, the city becomes a relentless metaphor for the human condition. Selecting the field | where disciplines merge | towards ‘open’ space The boundaries between artist, anthropologist and sociologist become blurred in the quest for the spectacular quotidian; a lapse in the traditional social etiquette facilitates a calibre of image making which will enable an image to form by means irrelevant to social protocol. Kosuth highlights; ‘The artist as anthropologist is operating within the same socio-‐cultural context from which he is evolved.’ 104

Such a paradigm in representation facilitates how far the researcher’s life world will influence the

communication of their own preoccupations with their culture in any given modality of research; ‘The artist perpetuates his culture by maintaining certain features of it by using them. The artist is a model of the anthropologist engaged.’

105

Such levels of engagement within the chosen sphere of research

enable the researcher a degree of intellect which cannot be ascertained without a degree of immersion with his subjects; a respect of care toward the research legacy which the researcher could not seek to emulate without active engagement to the subject material. Embodiment/ endurance/ ritual performance / notions of home within nature / life as art / live installation of embodied landscape / the performance of walking / gathering landscape as movement and material / developing experiments throughout terrain / removing comfort / deconstructing ideals / collaboration with landscape / the human form as archive / the body as site / notions of need and comfort / how to allow the body to become ingrained in landscape

104

Kosuth. J ( 1975) The Artist as Anthropologist. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and

MIT Press. P183 105

Kosuth. J ( 1975) The Artist as Anthropologist. Sourced in Johnstone.S ( ed) ( 2008) The Everyday. Documents of Contemporary Art. London. Whitechapel Press and

MIT Press. P182

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Day eight Poundland Starbucks Visit to the old house Woughton on the Green Netherfeild Visit Waitrose ( coffee) Jessops Newport Pagnell charity shops Shopping Center Campbell Park Studio Writing Bikram Yoga Film Edit What to collect / car tours of the city / making a map / making a show / what to show / an exhibition / how to share all this / how to make something of 8 days in MK / what to leave / the wall of dads house Issue: leaving a city / trace / social interaction / remains / maps / rushing Performance ideas: • Drive thru performance • The performance of taking down a building • Making way ( the choreography of roundabouts in Milton Keynes) • A manual for drivers in MK • Open House ( anthropology tour of homes in MK lead by an estate agent)

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returning to the house to collect fragment A performance a fear a singing bowl collecting relics leaving pages and taking bricks the cows chase me I am in Hollywood I am in line I am here I am not here I am wondering how to show I am taking photographs To consume place I am being greedy I make a film Hungry to share what? the city is collapsing and reforming I still do not know how to say its name MK MK MK MK MK Milton Keynes cars, paths and lawns I must be more tidy? Dawn comes The day in circles I danced.

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Perhaps they still shop endlessly in a form of searching; perhaps to conceal the sense of empty loss. The generations who do not produce anything other than new computers and canned air, the empty shops which have become home now to euthanasia centres for the morbid. There is a heavy sense on the street, a weight that heaves through nylon clothes and weighs in the pockets of unpaid bills, a weight that hinders the lightness of step through the endless shops. The streets are lined with… The old man laughs, “I have never seen gold”. There are scenes I am trying to remember, trying to write, trying to photograph quickly as soon they will disappear, they are already trying to, as though these places are waiting for some new generation which will come along in polished shoes and buy up all the new glass buildings and move in and make plans to make more glass buildings. For fear that I have no notion as to what such best laid plans will amount to and how far the lay out of the future will correlate to the expressions which have been left to pasture. There are small moments, when the city seems soft, so young and impressionable; as though the wrinkles of its past have been filled with botox, and what appears can be seen as perfect face of youth, shimmering glass facades adorned with new public art pieces. The city now seems as though it lays waiting for some new tribe to emerge and storm these empty glass palaces. There might be a loneliness; there might be a sadness, there might be a loss; there might be a wound, but we can not see past the mirror walls and the streets have been coated in the thick musk of post modernity which temporarily cloaks any crevasses of despair. I feel myself trying to find explanation; trying to seek understanding as to what this city was and what this city will become, and the vast planes between which seem in their solace to defy logic in the simplest sense. I feel a nostalgia for a world which I did not exist in, only have glimpsed and scraped an understanding of through fragments of buildings now vacant and murmurs in the soon to be closed market of ‘days lost’. A nostalgia for what? fields? Long hours of exhausting work for little pay and cramped houses and just getting by? A nostalgia for a Workers Clubs which may have never have been here, where one could go and dance away the long days with a sense of earnest care? I have never worked in a Nando’s, I feel I should to understand MK and its trail of Nandos. nor have I danced in a working mans club, nor has the lady who just got the new job in KFC, yet there seems, perhaps through my own sense of self constructed reality of a past which I have not lived something these new paving stones and endless glass facades do not offer, perhaps a sense of unity and solidarity, a collective identity, perhaps forced or even contrived which warranted a unity in the city which seems to be ever more concealed with no need to talk to your neighbour, no need to go to the market to do the weekly shop when one can drive to the out of town super store, rush in and check out with the robot who has replaced the cashier, to return in silence to the one bedroom apartment complex, shut nd the high security door, get the lift to the 2 floor and shut your door and turn on the sky box to watch the news of yet another world disaster. The distrust in the eye of a camera as I walk in awe Loitering. Do not sit here, orderly, yet with ease. The lady choosing cushions very deliberately There are lists of images which when I write I am comforted by in a softness which nurtures again this sense of nostalgia.

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The following pages are works from Dr Bob Jarvis and his visit to MK

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Crescent City: Bob Jarvis II'm goin' back to the Crescent City/where everything is still the same/this town has said what it has 106 to say/now I'm after that back highway/..... A clapped out old Connex four car unit round the outlands of west London past the car crushing plants beyond North Pole Junction isn't quite the same as the same as Lucinda Williams' open top car heading back over Ponchatrain to hear zydeco and find the best bars of Mandeville, but for a while Milton Keynes was a crescent city before the grid roads and drains were connected across Bradwell Common, and while I lived there at least I had an open top car, even if it was a Fiat 500. But just as her songs are rich in ordinary places so Milton Keynes, where I'm heading for the How Sacred are the Cows conference, is filling up with personal histories, becoming another thirty something city trying to shake free of its conflicting parental voices -‐the non-‐plan of Llewellyn-‐Davies 1969 Plan (about which we heard very little at the conference) and the modernist architectural visions of the Derek Walker era. From the pre-‐conference pack Building Design re-‐prints of Stuart Mosscrop's demand "it's time for the development agencies of Milton Keynes to get tough on bad design", through Derek Walker's own story of how he had given structure to a plan that left things open and Elizabeth Williamson's careful classifications of the city's architectural history, to Robert de Grey's charting of the four ages of Milton Keynes -‐ arrogant architects, bureaucratic control, market forces, and now, expansionism -‐ the emphasis, here of all places in a city that was founded on the goals of flexibility and change, was still on the fixed and the architectural with little room for the anecdotal and emotive. Angry questions about leaking roofs and freezing cold churches remind us that there's more to life than architectural history, and my diversions from the prescribed architectural walk through the central area at lunchtime into the windswept huddles of the market stalls' cut price Christmas tinsel and the checkout queues in Iceland, in a cut price version of the Walker/Mosscrop mall seem closer to the kind of life you could write songs about. Brian Goodey asked us each for five places in Milton Keynes we'd list -‐ among mine were the first expansions of west Bletchley, Whaddon Way shopping centre and Mellish Court, bits of nowhere already forgotten, and the gravel road that used to lead away from the cottage at Tattenhoe, ("stories 107 nobody knows......little bit of dirt mixed with tears......car wheels on a gravel road" . Car Wheels on a Gravel Road ends with another travel song, Jackson, a deliberate song of leaving an old love, of letting go-‐ " Once I get to Lafayette / I won't mind one bit..... Once I get to Baton Rouge / I won't cry a tear for you.... Once I get to Vicksburg / I won't even feel an urge...... 108 All the way to Jackson /I don't think I'll miss you much " . That's the track I play on the dark journey back southwards.

106 107 108

Lucinda Williams,Crescent City, Lucy Jones Music,1988 Lucinda Williams,Crescent City, Lucy Jones Music,1988 Lucinda Williams,Crescent City, Lucy Jones Music,1988

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WE COULD HAVE BUILT YOU (in memory of Philip K Dick) Bobby Jay had been working late at Planitco (Inc), these past few weeks and it hadn’t been good for him. It was just that things mattered to him, things that others could skim over. These days it was easy enough for the guys who knew all the big words, who had all the figures and the data just to plot in a few city parameters and feed a few projections they’d cooked up and press the ‘something like’ key on the CitySimulacron and it looked good enough. But Bobby knew those guys really hadn’t got a clue what those condo towers and highspeed buzzways they were dialling up for the next outerworlds Titangames would really feel like. To them it was just another option, just another vizscreen to keep the future open and get the next policy OK’d by the precogs. Outside, who cared? Outside? Whoever went outside? That was for freaks and `droids. But Bobby cared. He’d been trained up in the old days when, even though it was getting to be a bit dangerous he liked to walk around and check the pigmentex against the way the light really did fall on those dusty old pediments they’d built over for the first Greater Gateway Zone. So he was good. They used to say you could tell if he’d done the final reality checks on the cityscapes. But now he couldn’t keep up, they could generate alternative futurescopes so fast his kind of detail never got seen anyway. One skim of the viewer and who could tell if it would stand up or if you could actually turn a corner without the whole thing dissolving back into the grid. Just so long as it looked real enough to get coverage. He was unwrapping another amphigum to get him through when his holoplate buzzed and glowed with an incoming. Only low rate sales papes and long lost lovers got through at this time of night and she couldn’t have traced him here. Forty red white and blue shoe strings, a thousand telephones that don’t ring flipped up in his memory. Old age is measured in useless quotations. He needed a big break here, something to show them -‐ Planitco promises Utopia -‐ I deliver it. Instead of the usual personalised ‘Hi, Bobby’ roll trying to sell him the latest in Simulacity visualiserware, complete with reverse rampjet rides, there was a flickery shot of a rather overweight guy with greasy greying hair wearing a Cal State sweatshirt and stroking a black cat. What kind of jape was this? But he had twinkling blue eyes and there was something that stopped Bobby going for the scram key. -‐I wrote that, the holosim chuckled. Almost. The suspension of disbelief, perhaps that’s the clue. Rather like a communion. Maybe I could help you here. All futures are fictions, they say. We’re in the same business, really. If ‘reality’ can be trusted. Bobby wasn’t too sure what was going on here. Maybe it was a bad wrap of amphigum? This old style guy who talked like a priest on acid. What’s this got to do with city imaging? How did he get into the frame here? The hologram from the past didn’t stop: -‐Your problem is that you need your audience to really enter into the feeling of, da sein, the Heideggerian ultimate moment of ‘being there’, of sharing that special experience of time and space that is yet to be, that only your simulacrum can offer. Back then, toys taking over the universe gave me that idea, Barbie and Ken. I added the truth drug and the shared experience it gave to block out the hovels of Luna. And it became my first big hardback deal. CanD, you should try it. The holosim broke up. Bobby was sweating. He checked the transmission date. 3.2.1982. Past century. Pre-‐net time. Sender: Horselover Fat. Must be a code. But maybe, if he could get the techies to impregnate Planitco’s simulacra with something that would, even just for one second, take the viewer into another world. And if you could add UniversalMosaic consumer group perceptions via the chemistry of the drug, who would need cities at all? Bob Jarvis FOOTNOTE Phillip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was first published by Doubleday in 1964. Emmanuel Carrère’s I am alive and you are dead: a journey into the mind of Phillip K Dick was published by Bloomsbury earlier this year.

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Notes for ‘Tracing the Pathway’ (May 2015) The lost archaeology of the arts in MK There is something strange (or is it inevitable?) that my daughter should be in Milton Keynes as artist in residence. Its over 40 years since I worked for Milton Keynes Development Corporation in my first job after graduating, and though I have been back a few times for meetings and conferences relating to the growth and development of the city, this was the first time I had been back with memories to explore in the new reality of the city. Which when I worked there was words and drawings and ideas with only the slightest evidence on the ground. So any artistic ‘pathway’ that I traced back then was in the landscape before the new city. It’s those traces these notes are about. As an undergraduate student I had always tried to link ideas beyond ‘planning’ to the professional syllabus – adding poems and drawings to my projects but arriving in Bletchley in the summer of 1969 I found an empty world with few connections to sustain creative ideas. I was starting over in another place, trying to make sense of the empty landscape and the future I was (a miniscule) part of. These notes are about some of the paintings and poems and films that we made outside the working days at MKDC. On the scale of later achievements in Milton Keynes they are ephemeral and most are now forgotten, but they are perhaps the deepest level of the archaeology of the arts in the city. Ephemeral fragments that I am struggling to recall and put into context, mostly lost or forgotten, some of them collaborations, working with Pam, with colleagues from the development corporation, with friends from Bletchley Youth Centre. The first thing about the city of Milton Keynes that one notices today is the seemingly endless grid (though really with all the bends and rises and falls it’s more of a web) of roads. Even in those first days driving was the norm and I tried to

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capture those sequences of skylines and hedges in the Ouzel valley mists in sketches, the same landscapes that the late Andrew Mahaddie later captured in his fine line collapsed axonometrics of the linear parks – one of the important influences that I took away from my time at MKDC. I remember two paintings I made that tried to capture the experience of driving in this lowland landscape. One was inspired by the many motorway trips to and from London (a new experience in the late 60’s) and in a shaped image I tried to capture the blurred rush of the passing trees and bushes against the sharp focus of the tail lights ahead (I think I collaged a plastic model Ford Escort for that); the other was much more pastoral – into a blurred green backdrop and a stencilled sign ‘Private Road’ (we lived on one by then, having moved out of Mellish Court) a bold perspective line runs across the canvas moving with the shape of the land – the shape of things to come? But the most memorable piece was a performance poem ‘All Night Drive’ in that phrase was repeated, drone like (the influence of Pink Floyd’s ‘Set the controls for the heart of the sun’ (1968, on the LP ‘Saucer full of secrets’)) and interspersed with (or overlaid by depending if I was reading along or with others) various crisp phrases (‘alone on the backseat’ I recall was one). By that time we were working with young people from Bletchley Youth Club and had set a very loose collaborative : Bletchley Arts Workshop and though we never had a base we produced several pieces – a ‘pop-‐up’ exhibition of American Trash (with David Pearson who had started on the ‘monitoring and evaluation’ of the new city) in an empty shop on Queensway; a ‘Poembag’ (loose leaf mimeo sheets in a printed brown paper bag) which was sold at the readings we did and where ‘All Night Drive’ appeared, along with contributions from other members; geometric quasi-‐futurist road signs for ‘Bletchley Week’, and our longest and most complex project, ‘The Bletchley Film’ – silent, standard 8 format, approx. 20 minutes – scripted and improvised around ideas from members of Youth Club to express their dissatisfactions with life in the suburban environment. I have no precise notes to look back to but it included one of them being turned down for jobs (probably because of his long hair), scenes of an idyllic country cottage, wild running and ‘idiot dancing’ ending with the disaffected hero hitching a ride out of town……..It probably sounds more coherent in that summary (40+ years on) than the grainy film would

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have done but it was an opportunity to develop self-‐expression in an empty landscape. In 1973 when there was still very little of ‘Milton Keynes’ Pam and I returned to Newcastle and I recall driving back across the autumn landscape across the burning fields of stubble from another poetry reading. By then the place was changing – there was an ‘Arts Development Officer’ in the Social Development Department and the official history of the arts in Milton Keynes had begun. We worked with what now seem incredibly primitive tools – silent standard 8 film, no computers or internet, or mobile phones, even a hand cut silkscreen poster we made for a concert – and we were very much on the fringes of cultural life but it had a warmth and spontaneity (necessity being the mother of invention perhaps?) that survives in my memory even if the art is lost and the details (and names) are fuzzy with time. (Others involved in these projects were Pam Jarvis, Jos Pearson, Barry Field, John Dell, Badger, Hot Cottage, …..and many others whose names now escape me) BOB JARVIS May 2015.

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( This forms an exploration of MK in the personal geography of my father, Dr Jarvis. ) A full interview with Dr Jarvis can be heard here soundcloud.com/beatrice-‐jarvis/bob-‐jarvis-‐talks-‐to-‐beatrice-‐jarvis-‐about-‐mk Dr. Bob Jarvis was educated as one of the last of the gentlemen planners at Newcastle University, but later took classes in poetry and contemporary dance. He is perhaps the only qualified planner to have an MA in Creative Writing. He undertook a two year research programme of zen-‐like isolation and intensity in urban design before urban design was re-‐invented. His research and writing has focussed on town planning as an art and urban design as choreography, developing the argument that urban design is the core of town planning and that its ‘real subject’ is everyday life, no different from some modern choreographies. Teaching programmes at London South Bank University In a series of imaginative and creative course ‘units’ he has developed and applied the idea that town planning is an art and that planners need to develop their creative and imaginative skills and look beyond their conventional professional langue and parole. The Arts of Town Planning is a first year urban design unit that has variously included choreographic workshops, reflective journeys to familiar places as well as the more conventional Townscape work; Contemporary Urbanism introduced studies in the urban imagery of film, popular music and poetry to planning, Culture Place and Creativity and more recently Place Performance and Social Usage are final year units where the conventional academic essay is forbidden and students are expected to engage with the flow and rhythms of the life of a place – students have produced a three minute punk single, a performance of Trafalgar Square and a vision of the LSBU campus at midnight (its near the Ministry of Sound) Papers and publications : These teaching projects are paralleled with papers and publications offering a theoretical perspective on this work 1983 Readers, Travellers, Visitors, Inhabitants and Storytellers-‐ Notes for an Existential Urban Design, GLOSCAT Papers in Local and Rural Planning, 18 1985 Truth is only Known to Guttersnipes, in Gold and Burgess, Geography the Media and Popular Culture. 1987 The Next Best Thing to Being There ,in: Landscape Research 1994 Transitory Topographies, in Gold and Ward, Place Promotion Wiley, Chichester 1995 The Arts of Town Planning in Planning Practice and Research Vol 10. No 2 pp 111-‐ 119 1996, Mind/body, Space/Time, Things/Events in Urban Design Studies, 2,University of Greenwich 1997 Being There, Creative Environments Symposium, University of West England, Bristol, From users to Consumers, The Future of Urban Design Education Conference, 2001 Education in place and performance (with Struan Leslie), Urban Design Quarterly, Just passin’ thru , European City in Transition Conference, Bauhaus University, Weimar 2002 What’s normal then? (The work of David L Thomas) (with Jim Stewart) UDQ April

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Appendix City as studio EXERCISES

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Exercise i |The body accepts | The body resists |Performance score

Arrive to location; What does the space necessitate you to do? Consider pace, stance, emotion, proximity to others, placement of body in space. Allow your body to mirror, imitate and follow movement sets which you notice around you. Allow your body to blend with such patterns. | Allow such motion to happen | Let it pass. Return to the emotion of arrival; remember your preconceptions; trace the stances which they have left on your body. Trace the acceptance you fabricated to the space | Simplify Allow your body to repeat the motions you chose to represent. Notice if anything feels uncomfortable Closing your eyes allow yourself to dismiss the response to the patterns which you performed Dismiss. In softness, find comfort and stability in newness; in your own innovation to dismiss the constructs you first constructed. Take such movement and reapply allowing yourself allowing yourself to emerge to a new point of arrival. Take a sense of the liberation you experienced in this momentary freedom. Return to a sense of place; how are people around you walking? How can you feel and sense the pace of the space? The emotion by which the space is allowing people to move through it; how do you fit into this scale? How does your body fit to the construction around you? Return to forms to space to generate an understanding of the body; see how shadows of buildings may affect or generate shapes and forms in location. How are you accepting the behaviours of place and how can such observations manifest as contract in your body Take a moment to allow yourself to formally agree to the expectations of the space you occupy. Pause; filling the space through breath; envisaging flux both internal and external. Allow yourself to actively become a spatial anomaly to the space you occupy. Play with alternating these positions, pacing acceptance and dismissal as you wish. Return to the space as neutral; become void Return to your breath; acknowledge streams of thoughts to come and to pass, direct attention to breath, the rise and fall of the exchange of the breath which you consume and direct back into the space you are in dialog with. Finish such experience as you wish, setting out however the terms by which you are acknowledging and dismissing your reality as to what the space demands and reflect to you.

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Exercise ii | Emerge, Merge, Collect Depart. 1. Arrive to location …take a long slow look around, the way people are moving, the way they come and go, the things they do, their pace and their patterns, maybe take some photos, make a few notes… 2. Then merge with the patterns of movement you see there… See the people and their actions; remove them from their space; see them and their bodies. .....join in, mimic, simulate, copy, imitate what you see there, try to be unobtrusive but also be aware of what you are doing. Do this for long enough to blend with the patterns, possibly 5 minutes or so, trying different movements and sequences if you like. Then as soon as you can make some notes and records of this experience, thinking about the place and space….its form and shadows, its steps and seats and trees …… 3. Then from that ‘ordinary’ sequence choose one or two – a step, a stance, a gesture ….and repeat that in the place you are working in. Note your feelings and if anything feels strange – are you uncomfortable?, are you being looked at? THEN do the same with your eyes closed a few times! (then open your eyes, and make some more notes) 4. Next teach yourself these movements and add to them… ….turn them into a little performance, half natural half new movements of your own, something freer and more complex perhaps than the original you have already ‘taught’ yourself ….and then ‘perform’ that in the space, with ordinary users and their movements around you. Change and modify this as you repeat them, adding improvised cadenzas and unexpected changes. Try another. After you have done this a few times, and maybe noticed reactions to your actions, pause and again make some notes. …..

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5. Then start over again in your other chosen place and repeat the exercises in response to that place and movements. 6.. Collect together your notes and records and add any further observations and pause ( There will be a reflection period here for all involved) Part two •

What’s missing from the space?

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How can your body become an architectural intervention?

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How can the body become a means to unveil the potential ( used in the subjective realm) of the space?

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Respecting existing patterns and codes of use; how can the body be applied to the site/ location as a means of executing a subtle nuance of change.

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This exercise may allow schemas of interaction and participation to arise as reactions from the general public.

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The intention of this exercise is not to subvert spatial use patterns; rather to explore what the space may lack and develop a means of amplifying spatial use.

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How can the body be used in a non intrusive way to develop a means of allowing a mode of spatial evaluation to occur?

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Take an action/series of actions and consolidate and finalise it to generate one sequence/action which you feel can add to your perceived potential of the space you have been researching.

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Exercise iii| The city as studio I. Take a walk with a partner; one person will have their eyes closed; the other will lead them through the site for a walk. ( This should be a 5minute exposure) By depriving the body of sight, this will allow you to become more attuned to the processes of your body in the street and to note the sounds and smells, the site becomes a sensorial experience. ( swap round) II. Take a walk alone now through the site; this time take a notebook and write a list of all the physical actions you observe. ( your body here becomes more dormant, the text will later become movement score) III. Take a walk and actively seek to follow the score you have just written of physical actions, ( this can be added to and repeated) The essence here is to develop a short movement phrase. IV. Meet with your partner, without speaking, and attempt to teach them the movement pattern you just repeated and learnt. V. Repeat together; try to be aware of each other and how these patterns may have potential to inter act. This improvisation will last for 15 minutes. ( in a site removed from original location) We will then all meet in a site and collectively perform both our phrase and the phrase which you attempted to learn from another. Rather than sticking to your original partner and try this phrase with another person and continue; so the whole group is cohesive. •

We will then all go back to the original site and perform this again.

Ask you self the following: -‐How far does your body become spectacle within this exercise? -‐How far can this exercise be pedestrian or performance? Can you play with the boundaries between these two? -‐ does your body express your emotions; if so; how is this communication occurring; if not; can you explain the ‘blockages’ you may be experiencing. We will then take this exercise to another site and attempt to consolidate a 15 minute piece.

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I have made several films of my explorations of MK, these can be found here: http://vimeo.com/beatricejarvis “ One of the things that you learn about working with real life issues is that it can be transformative. You work with an issue because it is unresolved and through the dance we hope to discover new possibilities. It is not about the dances, it is not about the interpretation of a theme, and it is real. And by doing it you are getting to a different place with the issue and with your life. The dance changes the dancer. The purpose of the dance is to create change. That’s is why we started to use the word ritual. To distinguish from dance or entertainment, dance as spectacle. Not that it is not spectacle or that is not entertaining, but that is not its purpose, and that is very 109 important for me.’ (Halprin )

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Halprin. A ( 1965) Moving Towards Life. Five Decades of Transformational Dance. Wesleyan University Press. New England USA. P 14

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BIO | Beatrice Jarvis Choreographer, visual artist and urban space researcher/creative facilitator. University of Kingston / University of Ulster Beatrice is an urban space creative facilitator, choreographer and researcher. She utilizes key concepts of choreography and visual arts methodologies with the intention to develop, original doctoral research on the connections between choreography and urban cultures developing heightened socio-‐cultural responses to the urban realm. Her practice merges essential techniques in a sociological framework of critical perspectives, cultivating a unique stance point to practice based research. Beatrice is currently a visiting lecturer at various town planning and architecture departments in London and wider afield in Europe (LSBU & AAIS, The Bucharest National University of Arts) developing a platform for the conceptual and physical integration of urban planning, sociology and choreography leading to practical social creative implementation and curation. Beatrice is keen to create platforms social interaction using urban wastelands, conflict zones and areas of social and cultural transformation and reflections on urban habitation as a creative resource. Beatrice received distinction for her MA in Photography and Urban Cultures affiliated by Arts and Humanities Research Council within the Department of Visual Sociology at, Goldsmiths and now continues with her PhD at University of Ulster and Kingston University within the Architecture department; fusing a strong mixture of practice, research, experimentation and exploration to create a unique approach to urban socio-‐choreographic research. Her PhD is titled: The socio-‐choreographic apparatus| Developing a practice of social choreography through practice of individual and collective embodiment. The Sociological Dimension of Choreography as framework for progression of social reconciliation. Beatrice initiated an urban forum: Urban Research Forum for artists, architects, urban designers, cultural researchers, sociologists, anthropologists and all with an urban interest. This is conducted through seminars, workshops, performances and exhibitions. Collaboration, discourse and intellectual inquiry are seminal to her constant sense of enquiry. Her practice has been profiled within dOCUMENTA (13), (Kassel) Pina Bausch Symposium, (London), The School of Art in Bucharest and various spaces in Berlin; including VITal, C|O, and Zentrum. She has presented her research: ‘Das Duet des Leibes und der Stadt. Berlin. Verschieben Stadt’ at Annual Association of Geographers Annual Meeting: LA; exploring the position of the body as social and political archive. Her research has been profiled at Urban Encounters Tate Britain 2014, Critical Costume (Helsinki 2015) The Playhouse; Derry, Bauhaus-‐Universität; Weimar, Birkbeck College; University of London, DRFI 4th International Conference 2012; Urban Photo Fest; Irish Association of Geographers: Annual Conference 2013: National University of Ireland, Galway, Aarhus School of Architecture 2014, Bucharest School of Art, Terror and the Tour and Galway Dance Festival. Her commissions include Jerwood Space, Steven Lawrence Center and EGFK. For further examples of current work please see the following links: Creative City life: http://beatricejarvis.net/ Urban Research, Workshop templates; Selected Writing: http://issuu.com/urbanresearchforum Documentation: http://www.blurb.com/user/bj87 City as Studio: http://urbanorganics.cultura3.net/Resources/media/promo.mov

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