Imagining a House
Written and presented by Lou Wilson
John has invited me to talk about a theatre production called HOUSE. I created this work in 1999 with Wils Wilson with whom I was joint-artistic director of the company wilson+wilson. The company specialized in what is called site-specific performance. Site-specific performance emerges from a direct response to particular places. It draws attention to the peculiarities and the history of the place in which it is created and performed. It is very different from traditional theatre in which a director heads up a team to stage a play written by a playwright that the audience experiences whilst seated in a comfy auditorium with the lights out. Our work, by contrast, was devised through an integrated process in which actors, visual artists, poets, composers all had an equal say in the creation of the production. At every stage in the creative and working methodology we aimed to transcend conventional boundaries (between artistic disciplines, between performers and audience, between individual artists and members of the public, between memory and imagination…). Audience numbers were always kept small, making each piece an intimate and often highly personal experience.
HOUSE was our first production and was made in collaboration with the poet Simon Armitage and the sonic artist Scanner. The piece took just over a year to make and was created for and performed in two derelict nineteenth-century workers' cottages in Huddersfield. As London based theatre practitioners we wanted to return to our native Yorkshire to make a piece in and about a place of dwelling and belonging. Both Simon and Wils are from Huddersfield so it was there we began our search for a suitable house. Nine months later and after many adventures we found ourselves witness to a surreal telephone conversation whereby the head of the council gently yet skilfully coaxed the chief executive of property developers Kirklees-Henry Boot to lend us two co-joined properties located in Goldthorp’s Yard. The dwellings had been standing empty for years and were due to be transformed into an upmarket pub as part of the locally contentious Kingsgate Shopping Centre Scheme, which was set to transform the centre of the town by the year 2000.
Soon after this meeting and armed with a screw driver Simon, Wils and I found ourselves ‘breaking into’ the boarded up houses. The following is a section of the poem Simon wrote in response to this first expedition.
We started in over the Great Artex Shield,
ridge-walls taking the shine from the blades of the sleds,
the half-track finding it tough going indeed.
Permanence, ages thick, caked on to some depth.
All the tinned supplies found to be second rate
and the packet stuff got at by morning dew.
We pushed on through.
….
We sank a borehole through the plaster board,
hacked away at what was underneath,
then wormed into potholes of wattle and daub,
shouted vast echoing prayers into the cavity wall.
Here one of us performed the transillumination of a bird's egg
with a torch. More lonely than could possibly be true.
We pushed on through.
Objects found in the properties and in the Yard during these initial excavations were incorporated into the installations and one room was filled exclusively with found objects. Extensive and wide-ranging research into the houses was undertaken, revealing the names and occupations of all the inhabitants of 2 and 3 Goldthorp's Yard since they were built in the early 1800s. The discovery that 3 Goldthorp's Yard had been the Meetings Room of the Huddersfield Naturalists' Society from 1866 to 1882 widened the thematic interest of HOUSE to include the evolution of the species and a journey through deep time. This source material was a jumping-off point for the artistic team, who would go onto imaginatively transform it. It fed our growing preoccupation with time, change, the evolution of buildings and private space and in how we read the past. Many local individuals and organisations became involved in the making of the piece including the neighbouring shop-keepers, workers and residents around Goldthorp's Yard, and in a wider sense, the people of Huddersfield.
In HOUSE an audience of 15 journeyed from room to room in a piece which combined visual art, installation, poetry, live performance, live and recorded sound and music. It was performed over five weeks by a company of four actors. The piece began with a walk from the nearby Lawrence Batley Theatre (which when built was the largest Methodist Mission in the UK) to Goldthorp's Yard. Once inside the houses, the audience progressed from room to room, sometimes split into groups of five, sometimes as one audience, whilst live images and events unfolded around them. Fragments of narrative interwove to create a rich texture of human stories past, present and future.
I am now going to give you a description of what you would have experienced had you been one of those 15 audience members.
You open the front door. An old man sleeps in front of the fire, surrounded by the shored up fragments of his life. You can hear his breathing. On the mantelpiece a clock is ticking loudly. Books maps and paintings- Genesis and Darwin provide clues to how far we will travel. There is a model of the Beagle, fish in a tank and two finches in a cage. We hear a poem ‘To the Occupier’, written in response to the un-opened letters, dating back over many years we found on the door mat when we first entered:
In the tiny kitchen a young woman stands at a sink of icy water peeling potatoes - her hands are red and chapped. She speaks as she dreams of escape and gazes out of the window, but rather than looking across the hills to Castle Top, as was once possible, she cannot see beyond the solid stone wall of the Lawrence Batley Theatre.
You descend stone steps into an even smaller cellar. Lace, thread, tapestry and needlepoint catch the dim light from the sewing machine. A dolls face found in this room peers out from the wall. A dodo egg nestles in the folds of a christening dress; and a spidery voice caught in the thick stone walls whispers a magical web of dreams and of escape.
Upstairs the wall of the bathroom has been cut open and we peer through glass to see a pyjama wearing man suddenly swing down from the ceiling and past our noses like a live specimen in a case. He evolves from ape to human through a few minutes of precisely choreographed and executed movement.
In the bedroom an old woman sits at her dressing table in warm candlelight. The air is heavy with the evocative perfumes of face powder, rouge and cologne. A young man bursts in. He is dressed in black and as the poem is spoken you realise that he is dressed for her funeral.
We follow a sound that takes us up to the attic- someone has just left…but not by the door. The old man’s pipe and slippers hang in the air, the floor is covered with a young boy’s toy aeroplanes (cut in half), the music is airy and meditative, the old man’s voice speaks a poem about evolution, of finger tips becoming feathers, of a desire to fly.
You crawl through a hole in the wall into a different space. It is a laboratory, full of found objects which have now become specimens: an archaeology of Goldthorp’s Yard. Each one is meticulously labelled, numbered and classified. You realise that an experiment is in process here: an experiment into the nature of time. A young woman scientist sings a song like a nursery-rhyme to herself as she works endlessly on her lonely obsession. She is dissecting objects, cutting them in half and placing scrapings of them under the microscope in search of their essence and the memories they hold. There is a pre Damien Hirst half a sheep and a half a hedgehog and in the corner Seth Moseley is studious painting specimens of local flora.
In a small room, beyond a heavy curtain, you put on a headset. The poet’s voice speaks in your ear a poem about breaking down the door and entering the house for the first time. The incident turns into a polar expedition, a desert trek, an odyssey. Slides flash up on the walls: pictures of the derelict, rubbish-filled house, interspersed with Antarctic vistas, icebergs, hazy desert horizons and lonely lunar landscapes.
Dark, pulsating music draws you downwards and you descend two steep flights of stairs into the cellar. A man greets you from behind a broken window - a preacher? a mad scientist? He starts to speak - a sermon about time in which you are ‘both witness and proof, audience and evidence, observer and specimen in the same breath’. Time unfurls before you and behind you as he speaks. You look down to find that you stand on the edge of a black abyss. It suddenly fills with light and you see that it is a swamp filled with brightly coloured fish, swimming at your feet.
You climb upstairs, into the light, where an ancient couple - the old man and woman that you have met before - are sitting drinking tea and playing snakes and ladders in the Garden of Eden. Real grass grows under their feet, there are primroses and you can hear birdsong. The young couple are there as well, putting the finishing touches to the walls of this, their new home. The walls are painted with the Huddersfield skyline in beautifully rich blues, greens and pinks- it is the once visible view. All four actors speak directly to the audience, a poem about their lives and all our lives. The past, the present and the future.
Our audiences came from far afield and from just around the corner. We often found the people who came did so because they had a personal connection to the place or were just intrigued. Some were former residents and brought with them memories of growing up there; one day three sister in their seventies and eighties came to re-visit the house in which they had live in the 1920s. There were also a few accidental ‘guests’, on one occasion an elderly lady out doing her shopping was ‘scooped up’ with the audience and only towards the end of the piece did she call out “can I get out now I have bus to catch?”
As HOUSE continued to be performed we found, there was a growing reluctance to the houses being boarded up again (post HOUSE) before their absorption into a faceless shopping centre and a debate began, that was picked up by a local newspaper which expressed a desire for the houses to remain open, and accessible perhaps as a permanent arts venue.
A few weeks ago I asked one of our former trustees if she would photograph the houses as they are now: Goldthorp’s Yard and houses are a Yates’ Wine Lodge and neighbouring Hammond’s Yard is home to a dental practice that in 2008 won an award for the most attractive practice in the UK.
In her Guardian review of HOUSE Lyn Gardner wrote: “This is not theatre as we know it, but more of an archaeological dig or geographical survey whose time-span is from Adam and Eve to the present day.” […] the House company made these collapsing walls breathe and speak, tell stories, weep tears, pulsate with anger, yield up their secrets.”
The process of making HOUSE led us to the realisation that the extraordinary can be found in the ordinary. HOUSE also demonstrated that site-specific performance of a particularly poetic and innovative kind, which has the ability to juxtapose a range of different personal and cultural references, can bring to the surface and powerfully evoke deep layers of personal and cultural memory and meaning held within a single place, perhaps more effectively than standard re-constructions of history that you can get in the heritage industry. Furthermore, the overwhelmingly positive responses of audiences to this work indicate that people’s identities are inextricably linked to their sense of place, and that place itself holds the memory of the people who have dwelt there.
Following HOUSE Wils and I discussed how we wished we had met ‘visitors’, such as the three sisters, prior to the piece being made so that their voices, memories and lives could have been woven into the tapestry of the piece. This led us to the decision that our next project Mapping The Edge, which was staged in and across Sheffield, would be inspired by the city and the people of the city.