Inside Out Dorset Festival: The Alternative Tour

Yesterday I was putting the finishing touches on The Alternative Tour for Inside Out Festival. The day began with some last minute editing to get the timings precise for the audio tour element. This is modestly ambitious in that I have tried to avoid some of the things that I have often been annoyed by when taking audio tours. 

The principal one of these annoyances is the structure of most audio tours whereby you look at the map, walk to number 1, press play and listen. When that's finished you look at the map, go to number 2, press play and so on. I instead made this tour continuous so that you it walks with the listener throughout, both giving the guiding directions and the commentary. This way makes for a shorter, more intensive sort of audio tour. It does however take quite some work to get there.

This is the slightly glazed look I had when done with the recording and editing. The village  was empty then and has since been transformed by the festival infrastructure; there is some serious event management going on. One part of me would prefer to see the place in a quieter way but I know that if you have 2000 people coming, you need to be able to deal with them, and their cars, which now swell fields designated as temporary parking spaces.

I am on a three performance a day schedule, which is pretty heavy, particularly as the tour is a little longer than anticipated, even though it only uses nine locations. It covers Nelson, 1983, The Tour de Manche, lost Danish students, an alcoholic cricket team, an electric bike tour, stones circles, the Parish book, genealogy and magic mushrooms! Not bad for 40 minutes.

I did manage to see some of the other work in the festival such this giant hare. It is very nice to see it transform as you approach it from the side. At first it is an abstract shape but as the position shifts it comes into focus and reveals itself fully. Nice. There's plenty more going on too, so if you are in Dorset do pop down this weekend.

The Tour of All Tours at the Bookwork Literary Festival, Beijing 2014

Here are some pictures from the performance of The Tour of All Tours in Beijing, presented as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival 2014.

The tour started in the bookworm itself with a review of an audio tour around the station area.  

The tours that were covered were very different with a good number of them from other cities. The details were smoothed over so as to make it ambiguous whether this was a tour of Beijing or a projection of the tourist gaze. The one exception that would not allow itself to be smoothed over was the 'Occupy Beijing Tour'. This was so unlikely that it was interesting in its own right in so far as it described a tour that would not be permitted. Standing in front of the Bank of China, we started to look a little like the tour we were describing. 

Rather than describing this performance, something best left to someone watching it, it is more interesting to describe how it seemed to function. The format of the tour, even with the caveat of it being an art tour, brings with it a way of watching and participating. That and the great weather meant for a laid back audience.

The group was made up more of Westerners than of Chinese spectators, so we attracted a bit of attention in our own right as a minor spectacle. The hat no doubt helped.

It was great to be able to talk about The Olympics and East London and make comparisons between Hackney Wick and Sanlitun, an area that was developed significantly ahead of the games. Certain structural similarities connect the areas such as the displacement of poor people and their not very profitable businesses.

I enjoy those moments in the tours between stops when you talk in a more informal way with the spectators. I have to retain a performance sensitivity yet engage with people in an unforced manner. It is in these moments that you realise there is no escape from performing. The mask of sincerity is usually the best option. 

Something I was not counting on happened. Taking the group through Yashow Market, I lost 2 or 3 people as they were spirited away into shopping mode upon seeing a dress they liked the look of. That is when I realised that it is not just me who engages in the event in more ways than one but so to do the spectators: as tourist, as art viewer, as shopper and as self, to name but four. As for the baby, he was probably the most centred of us all and hadn't leant the different roles he could play in this game of being the tourist.

The Sanlitun Tour: a conceptual tour of Beijing's tours

This blocking of the blog from within China is why there have been fewer postings of late and that is a pity as there has been plenty to write about. The tour to The Great Wall was very silly and they managed to make something that could have been quite beautiful and impressive a great deal less than what it is. On the other hand, the way the day unfolded and the differences between Chinese coach tours and those I am more familiar with was so vast that it was worthy of a study unto itself. 

Last weekend I gave the first Tour of Tours here in China for the Bookworm's Literary Festival and it went really well. The smog did not interfere, the weather was finally warm and it was a pleasure to be outside, something that has not been the case for a while. That helped enormously. The tour was a particularly conceptual one as there are no real tours that I took of the area and which I could report on. Everything was referring to something else or was a projection of another location onto Sanlitun. As such it made for an unusual sort of tour with the weight falling on talking about tours. We passed through Yashow Market a place bristling with fake branded products and lost a few people there, such is the danger of passing through a shopping place. In all however, it was a good start to Beijing tours and one that will be built upon in the coming months.

Advance notice now about workshops that will be given on performing in public space using guiding principles. There will be workshops in Beijing in May and in London in July, others to be announced.    

Beijing Tours: research for The Bookworm Literary Festival

I have been getting my bearings in Beijing which for one thing means North, South, East and West all mean a great deal more here than they did in London which is a meandering city that has little interest in lines. Another thing that this means is that it is time to start both taking and giving tours once again. Tomorrow I'll be taking the tour bus to the Ming Tombs and Great Wall at Badaling, the most popular spot for visitors. Apparently there is a guide and lunch is included too. My one experience on a Chinese tour bus back in 2011 was memorable (it was pretty insane to tell the truth) so I'm hoping this tour will also be something worth writing about.

I am also making a tour at the moment and will give it in the Sanlitun neighbourhood next Sunday as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival. While tickets for it are now sold out I heard there may be a second tour added so don't be put off. This is the festival's website which includes information on the performance and booking details. This will be the first time I've shown this piece in China so I'm very curious how people will understand it. 

Finally, I've been taking a lot of pictures of daily life here in Beijing as a way to both help document my tour creation (there are many of Sanlitun in the recent posts) and as way to document how the eye shifts its focus with time and familiarity. The photo blog is HERE.

The Littlebredy Tour

Little Bredy or Littlebredy, the village gets spelt both ways, is indeed little. It's a village in South Dorset that I was shown around in preparation for the arts festival Inside Out that will be held there next September. I shall be constructing a tour for the festival which takes the South Dorset Ridgeway as its frame and Littlebredy as its focus. 

The day began in the village hall with talks about the area and an opportunity to meet the other artists. We assembled outside later in the afternoon to take a walking tour.

This tour led us past a number of points that the artists had selected to site their work in. Here for example is one of the artists with a plan of the landscape artwork she will create showing it to us and describing how it will sit upon the side of the hill. 

There was no precise tour guide leading this walk so there was no group commentary but instead a straggle of artists following a route that had been more or less decided in advance. The leader at the front of the group changed from time to time but was always one of the festival team who knew the route. As there was no ongoing commentary it was far more a chance to walk around the village and ridgeway and talk with the other artists. The going underfoot became increasingly muddy as it had been raining recently. There was much sidestepping of puddles.

We encountered our first real obstacle with a series of gates, this being one of them. We had to clamber over them but when it came to the dog in our group this variously meant coaxing it to squat under the gate or lifting it up and passing it over the gate. Undignified.

We then met the livestock. They took us for intruders and a showdown ensued. After a few nervous advances they scattered and let us pass. This was one of those moments that divided the group into those of us familiar with animals and farms and those of us more familiar with the Coffee Republic and city life.

We then came to an impasse by a farm at the bottom of a hill. There ensued much consultation of maps and smart phones, which started failing as we drove deeper into the folds of the South Dorset Ridgeway. Finally we had to ask the farmer.

Our path was an unlikely overgrown one that passed beside the cow shed. They eyed us keenly, they don't get many walkers coming this way.

And where you have cows you have cow slurry. Our path passed directly through several ankle deep, hold-your-nose stretches of manure and mud. There was no alternative but stoically soldiering on and hopping that it did not get any deeper.  

We reached an abandoned chapel in the woods some distance from Littlebedy as the light was failing. Later than expected with the night closing in we took it in and made an exit for the road which seemed to be some distance still.

By the time we reached the road it was a dark and not long after a taxi arrived to whisk us through the winding roads back to the village. This ended the first day and first part of the village tour but there was more to follow the next day.

As I had expressed an interest in tours I was offered a tour around the village's visitor attraction, The Walled Garden. I was joined by some of the artists and our guide was both responsible for maintaining the garden and showing people around so she knew the place very well.

She told us that various people visited the garden such as ramblers and horticultural societies from as far away as Somerset. I asked her if she could offer her standard visitor tour so I could get a sense of it and she agreed however as we started looking around I realised that what I was experiencing was something quite different. The artists were asking about the buildings and looking inside in order to see if they might be useful locations to site artworks and events in. Our guide was obliging and shared what she knew about the places and I realised that I was not on a normal visitor's tour but was instead getting a different sort of tour: the artist's site visit tour. Once I realised this was what was happening I relaxed more into it and took it for what it was rather than wishing it to be a different sort of tour.

With a storm forecast for the next day there were preparations afoot to limit possible damage to the garden by taking down temporary structures such as this gazebo. The approaching storm was a bit of a conversation topic in general over the weekend as it was being talked up as if it was going to be a devastating hurricane when in fact it turned out to be far less.  

Perhaps as a nod to our curiosity and the nature of the group we were treated to the ghost story. While our guide acknowledged she was not a believer in the ghost she did not disappoint us by omitting the fact that a ghost was said to haunt the garden. Coming on the back of the Haunted Holborn Tour I'm starting to see a strange connection between ghosts and tourism. This will have to be investigated a whole lot more. 

Overall then, this was a very relaxed and informative introduction to the village for what will be a new commission for The Tour of All Tours. I'll be returning here next year to develop the project and have many ideas of tours to reference. As it is not a saturated site I will have to be creative and this may in fact mean the work refers out into the society more than it might do in a place where there is an overwhelming amount of tours already in place. The festival will take place in September next year, details and updates will stream in before then. 

Still Walking Festival Tours

Over the weekend I had a heavy fix of alternative guided tours in Birmingham: I was at the Still Walking Festival. The programme mixes walking tours of the more conventional form of showing you a series of locations and talking about them with walking tours that experiment with the form of what a tour can be. 

The first tour I took was called 'Lost and Found' and our guide was artist Iris Bertz. It started in the foyer of Ikon Gallery in a rather peculiar manner: festival director Ben Waddington introduced the tour and lead us to the first location, a room in the gallery where a member of the Ikon's team gave us a short introduction to contemporary art and to the Shimabuku exhibition before showing us one of the artist's film. We then got a further introduction from the artist Iris Bertz and I began to wonder if we were going to be passed from guide to guide throughout the tour. But no, we settled with her and began the main part of the tour. These multiple beginnings were given directly and clearly so to set the frame and make non-art audiences not feel intimidated but rather, welcomed. At first I feared this was going to be over-explicative but as the tour moved on from this point I came to see it as building upon a solid foundation.

We were then led around and Bertz shared what she saw when she looked at the different areas, buildings, walls and plants that we stopped in front of. Here she made a connection between this abandoned and boarded up ghost building and Rachel Whiteread's 'House' sculpture. 

This sign, showing a shrinking list of places to go to in case of emergencies, she likened to an artistic intervention that made an ironic commentary upon regeneration hubris, the sort of work that could form part of an institutional critique programme. I was glad that she moved into this social and political dimension as this layer of reading the city gave the tour added resonance.  

At one point we had come across an incongruous crocodile sculpture on a houseboat and later we saw the animal's form repeated on the wall. This was a nice touch as it began to give the tour more of a history: one observation fed upon another and this made something that would have been a minor sight into something more significant within our narrative.

The tour finished in front of a 'found painting' and my abiding impression was that it was a tour of her artistic imagination first and of the neighbourhood second. It was her way to show how art had helped her to better see forms in daily life. This it did in a modest and unassuming way, but was no less effective for that. 

The next tour 'Pedestrian vs Car' was led by Roxanna Collins and the geographic palette was car parks and subways. Our first stop was Pershore Street Car Park where, chance would have it, an Ikon Gallery project had taken place some time ago, its trace, this crumpled poster, still visible. There were however not so many explicit art references on this tour, it really was themed around the spaces.

Because the spaces we passed through and stopped at ranged from mundane to depressing and even potentially dangerous whilst the commentary remained minimal, I found my attention moving onto the guide herself, and more specifically, asking the question, why is she attracted to these places? She had said that she did not drive a car and yet was attracted to these city locations that are the result of the motor vehicle and its dominance in the city's planning. This was quirky and I suspect there is a further story yet to be told lurking within this tour. This was however the very first time the tour had been given and this was indeed her first ever tour so I suspect it will mature and expand with repetition. 

This was a nice detail highlighted in the walk: two large stones used as improvised steps to scale the wall and make a short-cut over the road. This brought my attention to just how car friendly Birmingham City Centre appeared to be and how pedestrians often had to either run the gauntlet across lively A roads or else make lengthy detours through subways. It also drew my attention more generally to the improvised solutions to pass through the city, the desire paths, the holes in fences and barriers ripped aside. 

Something that was a feature of these tours was that the group ended up talking between itself. There was an interesting mix of people taking the tour and most had something to say about the spaces too. From the top of this multi-story car park, for example, we had an architect talk us through a nearby stalled tower that he had been working on. Conversation moved onto city planning and the economy and then to photography before finally continuing in a local pub. The social dimension is a feature of these walks as at the end of all of them there was an opportunity to talk with the guide and to one another. 

The final tour I took on a damp Sunday afternoon was 'WALK * LOOK * DRAW * KNOW' led by Tom Jones. The basic theme was perception and the approach to heightening it was the use of simple sketches. The point was not to produce beautiful drawings, it was to draw in a way that helped focus the eye upon a detail so that it could be better understood. 

We did this through a series of perceptual tasks that Jones guided us through. In this square for example, we were to focus upon parallel lines as we made our way through it. This active reading of the space was not only to be done with the eye, we were also encouraged to be open to metaphorical readings the space. In this square's case it was to consider it as a drawing room, as an inwardly focussed space that encouraged intimacy rather than an outward focussed space that, for example, inspired awe. 

To do this we undertook some funny looking tasks like this one where we stood in a line looking at the shift in the pattern of the paving stones as we slowly lifted our gaze from under our feet to a point in the distance where perspective made the stones appear to converge as parallel lines. We must have made a nice sight ourselves. I had the feeling that this very conscious approach to seeing did make me read the space in a new way and I could tell that Jones had led generations of drawing students through these exercises as he was confident and in control in his guidance. It is a question what the purpose of this approach is and I suspect it is multiple, not single. It seemed that while it could aid ones drawing skills it was primarily there to improve ones perceptual abilities and here it could be seen as something that simply makes life more interesting. This tour was related to the first tour of Iris Bertz, also an artist tour focussed upon perception. The difference, as I saw it, was that this one was based more upon how we use the eye and that of Bertz upon how art has influenced how she perceives the world. The two of them made good counterparts.  

We finished in the park observing plants and the exterior of the rather beautiful new Birmingham Library, a building which features a fantastic view over the city. A defining feature of the festival is that it helps people who would not normally give tours develop them through its mentoring programme. This struck me as a very good idea as it meant a whole array of different sorts of tours came into being as a result, tours that were far from the blue badge guide style heritage tour. The festival is still quite young but growing, and it has the potential to create a new public for guided tours in Birmingham by offering a range of tours that are less about showing the city of the great and good and more about sharing its citizens' perspectives on the their hometown. I did not catch the tours that were more actively playing with the form of the tour itself but they are part of the programme too and with more coming this weekend, it is a must if you want to see something new of Birmingham.

The Bridges of London Tour

This was a boat tour, a first for this blog but hopefully far from the last, and it was led by broadcaster and architectural historian Dan Cruickshank. Upon embarking at the Tower of London pier I was offered a glass a wine and then made my way to the top of the boat where a growing crowd of us waited for the boat to depart and our tour to begin.

I was not aware of Dan Cruickshank's programmes but quickly guessed he must be something of a celebrity as, during the pre-tour wait, a number of people introduced themselves to him and asked to have their pictures taken beside him. Obligingly and with good humour he did so. Looking now at the substantial list of programmes he has researched and presented for the BBC I see the 2012 broadcast that was the template for this evening's tour: The Bridges That Built London 

Dan Cruickshank explores the mysteries and secrets of the bridges that have made London what it is. He uncovers stories of bronze-age relics emerging from the Vauxhall shore, of why London Bridge was falling down, of midnight corpses splashing beneath Waterloo Bridge, and above all, of the sublime ambition of London's bridge builders themselves.

This was basically our tour too, except we were not watching it on the box but were taking it in a boat in the company of the presenter himself and could enjoy a glass of wine along the way. This was, in effect, a television made real tour.

It just remained for the captain to make some brief health and safety announcements, a somewhat familiar protocol (e.g. Victoria Park Memoryscape Tour), and we set off into the dusk.

That's when the light food was offered. It made a welcome return later in the cruise too and this made me wonder if this was in some way a 'bribe' to endear us to the event. Upon reflection however, that is the thinking of someone who has taken a few too many walking tours and was unaccustomed to river cruises. This most certainly was part of the package and it is wrong to try and separate it from the rest of the tour, just as it is a mistake to not include the pub at the end of the walking tour that often plays its role in the event. That said, we were in effect taking our tour on a floating bar with the staff bringing a steady flow of wine and tea up to us. This gave the whole affair a much more relaxed atmosphere than a walking tour where you have to make continuous effort. 

The commentary began with Tower Bridge and we were told about its construction: dates, architect, technology, rationale, style, cost, reception and consequences. This included a nice story about Queen Victoria being secretly opposed to it as she thought it might jeopardise the security of the Tower of London, still considered in the late 19th Century a refuge of last resort in the case of a republican uprising. We headed upstream and heard a similar type of description at each bridge and in the stretches between them also heard more general observations on things that could be seen from the boat such as how The Embankment narrowed the river and changed its character.  

Some of the bridges were architecturally interesting and we heard a good deal about the evolution of materials and methods used to construct them. The new London Bridge however is no charmer, as the forced labourers used as guards for last year's Jubilee Pageant would probably agree.

By the time we reached Blackfriars Railway Bridge dusk had truly given way to night and as there were no lights above deck Mr Cruickshank had to use a pocket lamp to read his notes. I have the impression he is somebody who communicates a lot with his hands and this created a choreography of light, a pool of illumination skipping between the bridges, his notes, circling in the air when he was thinking and stopping upon me, it seemed, when he was making a full stop in his sentences. The woman in the foreground acted as his assistant holding the pages when the wind whipped them up or fixing his lamp when it switched to red for no good reason. Mr Cruickshank, to his credit, took these things in his stride, acknowledging any mishaps, making light of them and moving on.

The night only got blacker still and finally there was not so much to see except the lights from buildings on the riverbank and bridges caught in moments of flash photography. Here is Westminster Bridge looming out of the night. This left me feeling that the tour would have worked far better if it were arranged as a weekend afternoon cruise when we could have clearly seen all the things that were being talked about. What's more, the boat's progress along the river and the spoken descriptions could have been better coordinated. The text that acted as his source material had been been written to be narrated for a documentary and not developed as a river tour. This meant that there was sometimes too much to say in some sections which were interrupted by the next bridge while in the fallow zone after Westminster Bridge there was not so much to say. A tour that is developed for a specific route and honed over time has the opportunity to deepen its relationship to the route, for the guide's timing to become precise and detailed observations particular to the route to be made. This cruise was however a one-off event and as such was more freewheeling and, it must be said, was largely taken in that spirit.  

After passing Vauxhall Bridge the boat turned around and made its way downstream back towards The Tower. We descended below to the warmth and light and Dan Cruickshank interspersed the homeward journey with some short literary readings such as Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge. The final impression of the tour was rather mixed for me as it was on the one hand rough in its surface and on the other I was aware that this was an influential version of the capital's history that I was listening to being given live. This mismatch between the simplicity of the event with all its attendant niggles and the impact of the tour, a TV tour made real, was curious to observe and I wondered whether people were watching the actual event of whether they were using it as a springboard for a televisual imagination. This is a way to say I wonder if the same tour was given by someone the public knew nothing of whether they would perceive it in a similar way or not. I suspect that they would view it quite differently but then again, if it were given by someone unknown it would be a very different sort of event as the expectations would not be the same. In any case, Dan Cruickshank held together both the real and the TV tour, with charm and a depth of knowledge so I can see how this makes him most suitable for broadcasting.

Thames Festival who presented this cruise have a number of other tours and art events coming up this week and next including a series of walks along London's lost rivers by Tom Bolten who is interviewed about these on Talking Walking and several other tours around and about the river and indeed some walks along the river bank itself. It looks like a good program.

Father Courage: a intimate large-scale theatrical tour of Dubrovnik

The performances of Father Courage (Otac Hrabrost) directed by Boris Bakal and staged on the streets of Dubrovnik are now completed and it is now possible to say one or two words about it. 

Here is Jelena Lopatić, one of the five guides who led the audience from location to location. Each of the guides had an audience that followed them around throughout the entire show and so there were five audience groups of upto 40 in number. The guides led their groups through the streets and offered narration that was often personal or unreliable and not to be taken at face value. At five of the locations, an historic building, a courtyard, a space beside the city wall, a schoolroom and an outdoor basketball court, there were performances that involved other actors. The guides interacted in these five scenes with the other actors in different ways so there were, in a sense, five different performances within the the one larger one.

This is a sketch of the timetable as it was imagined at a middle point in the process. There are the five locations on the left and the initials of the performers who will be at them at any point in time. This was only ever going to be approximate and it was only after trying out the show with real audience groups that it was possible to make it all come together and avoid scenes clashing with one another. It required timekeepers who travelled with each guide to keep the whole system together and with this it functioned pretty smoothly. The sixth location on the diagram 'Klarissa' was the meeting point for everybody at the end of the night where people who had seen the performance with one of the guides could hear how it was with another guide. In this way the sense of the performance could grow in the imagination.

For a tour that included 494 stone stairs up and down it was really quite demanding on the audience. As they were mostly people from Dubrovnik however they were well used to it and that was not going to stop some of the ladies doing what they customarily do for social occasions like this: wearing heels! This woman was far from alone in sporting footwear like this and, trooper that she was, she made it through to the end of the show balancing on these orange heels. The price of fashion.  

The premiere party was certainly a glamorous affair with cameras, interviews, celebrities and so on. Not being part of the Croatian TV industry I was more a witness than a participant to the media circus that followed. I did have to note however that such attention existed for a show that was far from mainstream and this is something that would be most unlikely to happen in the UK. There have followed reviews which have been very positive, though they are in Croatian, so if you can't read the language and are curious, it is Google translate for you.

Finally, I caught the end of a meeting on porous dramaturgy that talked about the performance, tourism, the city, the training of the performers, the history of this work and much more besides. There will be some publications forthcoming on this topic, I'll be sure to flag them up here as a central part of the idea of porous dramaturgy is performance structures that are open to interaction with the environment they take place within.