Publications -
Three Rooms - an archaeology of three performance - in Traumwerk
Performing a visit: archaeologies of the contemporary past with Mike Pearson Performance Research 2: 42-60 (1996)
Theatre/Archaeology with Mike Pearson Routledge, 2001
see also conferences organized by the Centre for Performance Research, University of Wales Aberystwyth Performance, Tourism, Identity: September 1996 Performance Places and Pasts: September 1998
The architecture of Three Rooms developed as part of my collaboration with the performance company Brith Gof and its art directors, Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas.
With Mike, I ended up writing Theatre/Archaeology. He sent a performed lecture over to Stanford when I first came here in 1999 for a class on narrative I was running with Paulla Ebron. "The first five miles/Rhyfel y sais Bach: The war of the little Englishman" was a Brith Gof site specific event across Mynadd Bach, an upland Moor in West Wales, with Mike as Brackenbury. Mike Brookes was co-designer. The piece for Stanford was a recorded three part narrative comprising social history, commentary and primary sources (Brackenbury's diaries, oral history, local records). I think Mike had done it at a conference too. Anyway its structure is a model for Three Rooms.
Since then Mike has created several works that deal with the fragmented experience of urban life in what may be called dislocated performance. Audience and performers set out in groups into the city to encounter each other in prefigured/designed settings and to (collaboratively) document the results.
We see this as Mike dealing with similar issues as those of Traumwerk, but through performance.
See his fabulous new book - "In comes I" Performance, Memory and Landscape - [link]
Cliff McLucas came to Stanford in 2000 as part of The Three Landscapes Project.
We had started talking in 1993, or thereabouts, about archaeology and site specifics, and a whole lot more. In 1995 the company produced one of its large scale site specific pieces at a ruined farm, Esgair Fraith near Lampeter (where I became Chair of the Archaeology Department in its campus of the University of Wales). It was called Tri Bywyd.
For Cliff it was a new kind of work in a cultural ecology that connected history, material remains, performance and dramaturgy, scenography, and community location.
For me, it was a work of theatre/archaeology.
It was an extraordinary experience of three fragmentary narratives of three deaths and their remains, brought together in an architecture of a ruined farm, Esgair Fraith, and two 'Tschumi cubes' of scaffolding run through the ruin.
Nick Kaye later commissioned Cliff to create a visual documentation of the work for his book Site Specific Art (Routledge, 2000) - a superb and intelligent treatment of site specifics [link]
The tripartite architecture of Tri Bywyd, a feature of what Mike and I came to call a katachrestic tactic, inspired the organisation of Three Rooms.
