Rehearsal at the site

Last Wednesday was the first time that we worked down at the Arcade during our rehearsal time. I wanted to have some material to work with before rehearsing there for the first time, and so up until now we have been working in a studio, creating material that is related in various ways to the photos, the advertisements, the conversations, the memories. Now that we have some material, and now that the dancers have got to know one another more, I want to be working at the site more often. Our experiences of the spaces will shift and shape the material we already have, and inform the creation of new movement. In other words, I am interested in paying attention to the phenomenology of the site- the physical, embodied sensations that we experience at the Arcade.

I started rehearsal off by giving the dancers time to explore the site for themselves, asking them to pay attention to the impulses and sensations they experienced, whether that was a desire to walk around touching the columns, a need to walk down the street to understand how the approach to the Arcade works, or just a desire to sit and listen. It was an exercise in heightening awareness, and moving beyond the methods of "usual" interaction with the building where social understandings of space are dominant, and that usually privilege vision over other sensory engagements. Here are the notes that I jotted down as a result of that exercise:

Ash marks on the Westminster steps from cigarettes being stubbed out- like paint smears from fingers. The ash smears easily onto my shoe. A door handle that supports my weight- "Pull" is a command, a taunt, since it does not open no matter how hard I pull. Reflections define my experience of standing on the Westminster portico looking through the Arcade. So much dust on the Weybosset portico- it must be from tearing up and replacing the road that happened this week. Footprints stand out in the dust- ours and others'. 

It was a lot of fun to be down there and trying things out, realising how the space changed certain things, and finding new ways of applying the movement material we already had. It was fulfilling for me  to see the dancers responding to being there, and hearing their thoughts and excitement about the space. I don't think any of them had really explored the space before and walked up and into the porticos, although most knew the building, and had walked past it before. 


We spent most of our rehearsal on Wednesday at this location, 44 years after the photograph was taken:

I am excited to start to craft and shape the piece as a whole- working from the kernels of the vignettes that we have, expanding on those and delving deeper into them by reflecting on how it feels to dance at the site, and starting to connect them together to create some not-necessarily-logical relationships between the different moments of interaction that are occuring. 

Re-articulating some fundamentals

In reflecting on what I am doing in this project, I could describe it as working with fragments of the building's past (documents, memories, images) to make an interesting piece of dance at an interesting site. While this is what is happening on the surface, I do not want to lost sight of some of the deeper motivations for my interest in place-based dance work. Ultimately, what I am doing is an alternative archaeological engagement with place; this work is exploring what it means to (re)present, recycle, and constantly re-mediate a place, where material place is tied up with people. My research activities in the archives, on-site, and with others has not involved collecting for the sake of collecting and accumulating information, but instead has undertaken the collecting because it is a process in which the material is re-processed, re-mediated, re-searched: a conversation becomes a digital (non-material?) sound file on a (material) voice recorder, it becomes a blog post, it becomes performed, choreographed and improvised movements that are translated and mediated through the body of a dancer at the site (as well as not at the site, for example, when we are working in studio space). Mediation is an important word here. To cite the definition of mediation that gets at the heart of what I am interested in doing:

[mediation] refers to articulating aspects of the material world-- something of the locality, multiplicity and materiality-- that are often sieved away by paper-based modes of documentation...mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot accurately sum up. It is a way of manifesting something of the ineffable ¹

This work is about engaging and experimenting with the processes by which we interact with and experience places and things across time. Within this work, several mediations occur, but the ultimate focus is the body as a mediator of and communicator about material place; the body employs a visceral, kinetic knowledge that articulates the site beyond visual and linguistic ways of knowing.


^{1 Christopher L. Witmore, "Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto", World Archaeology 39.4 (2007): 554.} 

Trailing independence

I have posted previously about the recently unveiled Providence Independence Trail that goes by the Arcade on Weybosset Street, but yesterday made an exciting discovery. At points along the trail, walkers can dial a phone number and enter the number of their location to hear about the history of the site they are standing at. On Weybosset Street there is no stop on the trail specifically for the Arcade; however, on the Westminster side, there is a stop in front of the Bank of America building, which stands directly opposite the Arcade. I discovered (accidentally) yesterday that this stop also covers the Arcade. If you call 401 441 6401 and enter the location number 6, you can hear one of the histories told about the Arcade. Try it out! Among other things, the Arcade is described as being "clearly one of the most beautiful buildings in Rhode Island", we are told it was originally called Butler's folly, and the architects Butler and Warren are likened to children in a sand box.

At the RIHPHC (cont.)

As I mentioned in the last post, my visit to the Rhode Island Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission (RIHPHC) was both an engagement with some of the archived material about the Arcade, and a chance to have another conversation about the Arcade. My conversation with Sarah covered a variety of topics- both personal recollections and historic preservation perspectives on the Arcade- as Sarah grew up in Providence, and has worked for the RIHPHC for the past eleven years.

In addition to getting to hear some wonderful stories about Sarah's involvement with the Arcade as a teenager, Sarah and I had an interesting conversation about the imaginative potential of the Arcade, and its place in the preservation community in Providence.




 

To round this post off, here is one of my favourite photos that came from the RIHPHC file:

A woman looks over the second floor balcony at the north end of the Arcade (the Westminster street side). 1957. Photo credit: Providence Journal-Bulletin. Negative at the RIHPHC.

Also in the file is the photo used as the background of this blog:

Interior of the Arcade, looking north from the third floor balcony. 1957. Photo credit: Providence Journal-Bulletin. Negative at the RIHPHC.

Back to the archives

I wrote the title of this post offhand, but the phrase it recalls- the title of the film "Back to the Future" featuring the unforgettable Mart McFly- actually prompted some reflections on the nature of the archive. A play on the fim's name (and themes, since it deals with time travel) might frame delving into the archive as going "back to the past", but perhaps the classic title of "back to the future" suits the archive just as well as it suits Doc Brown and Marty McFly. After all, the archive concerns the future just as much as the past, perhaps even more so, since the project of the archive is to preserve and provide (and often control) a legacy for the future. The archive addresses select pasts (however distant or immediate), exists in the present, and projects a future; it deals in visions.

To return to the original thought that prompted this post, as the project progresses, I am aware that I have been more drawn to talking to people about the Arcade and recording those conversations than to archival research. The effect is that I have somewhat neglected the archival side of the research. While I am noticing this about myself and honouring it, I do want the archives to feature among the research materials in a meaningful way, and not just use a few images as a token gesture. 

That said, my visit yesterday to the Rhode Island Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission (RIHPHC) involved both engagements. As one of the archival repositories in Providence and the state agency for historical preservation and heritage programs, they were sure to have some material on the Arcade. Specifically, I had an appointment to meet Sarah Zurier who works at the RIHPHC, and who knows Laura and Rosanna (whom I interviewed last month) from growing up in Providence together, and who was willing to share some of her experiences with me. 

The RIHPHC has a file on the Arcade that contains two nominations for the National Register of Historic Places from 1968 and 1976. There are some interesting details among the information included in the form, and there are also some wonderful photographs. Since the RIHPHC is a state agency, the copyright regulations are less strict than those of the Rhode Island Historical Society Library, a private research library, and so I will be sharing those photographs on the blog. Here's one to get started:

Air view of the Arcade from the north showing the Westminster Street portico, 1944. 

Photo credit: Providence Journal-Bulletin. Negative at the RIHPHC. 

On the 1976 nomination for the National Register of Historic Places, one paragraph in particular caught my eye:

It recalled the paragraph in the 1919 article from the RIHS Library that mentioned "the recent fire in the Arcade [that] calls to mind that just 50 years ago the building also suffered from a slight fire." I have not found any other details on these fires, but it might merit some more looking into. It would be interesting to be able to establish how much damage was done, and to know to what extent renovations were required after the fires. 

The clarity of the photographs in the RIHPHC file provide a wonderful insight into the stores that were in the Arcade during the 1950s. In the photograph below, the shop signs are clearly visible, projecting out from the balconies of the Arcade. As Sarah pointed out, it is interesting the way that private, commercial, and civic entities were all present alongside one another in the Arcade at this time: the RI League of Women Voters, Don Turner, advertising artist, the Maintenence Dept, Ira Rakatansky, architect. 

Interior view of the Arcade, facing north from third-floor balcony cross-over, showing balcony setbacks and central bridge at second-floor level. 1957. Photo credit" Providence Journal-Bulletin. Negative at the RIHPHC.

Ira Rakatansky's sign for his shop on the second level features prominently in the photograph. Sarah provided some interesting information about Rakatansky, who I had not heard of before. He still lives in Providence and is known for his role in realising the ideas of the modernist movement in the New England area. Sarah said that at the time of his retirement his office was on Meeting Street, right by the Providence PReservation Society building, and that his wife now runs a gallery in that space. He trained under Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, two giants of the modernist movement in architecture, and is described on a RISD blog as "the only architectural practitioner consistently committed to Modernism in the Providence area during the 40s, 50s, 60s." I came across a ProJo article which provides a lot of similar details to those that Sarah gave me. It would be wonderful if I were able to talk to him about his experiences in the Arcade, so that will be a direction to follow up in the next week. 

Vignettes, emerging

As I continue to work with the dancers, material is developing and the first vignettes are starting to emerge. The piece will be constructed of a series of movement vignettes that do not exist in a strict serial relationship to one another. There is certainly a logistical advantage to this approach; it is easier to coordinate two or three people's schedules on a regular basis than it is to get everyone together for every rehearsal. However the primary motivation for the vignette structure is its potential for realising in performance some of the theoretical underpinnings of this project.

There are many narratives that can be created about this site, many stories that can be told. My intention in undertaking archival research and talking to people about their experiences at the Arcade was to share some of these. But as far as the dance goes, I am not interested in forming logical progressions from one section to another where the result is a sequence of independent events from which a narrative can be formed. Rather, I am interested in creating an ecclectic collection of vignettes that overlap, echo, repeat, contradict, digress from and relate to one another-- a reflection of the research materials that were the starting point for their creation. The relationships between the vignettes will, inherently, always be both spatial and temporal, creating places within the place, and existing in a temporal dialogue with one another. These spatial and temporal dialogues are intended to highlight and realise some of the ideas I have laid out previously concerning the ways in which we conceive of and experience places; where places are always in flux, our experience of time is not linear, and we experience the intersection of time and place in fragmentary and shifting ways.

30/9/11

This blog is one medium that I am using to record and process my thoughts. Another is the old-fashioned pen and paper journal that I have been keeping to record observations and thoughts I have whilst I am at the site, or in rehearsal. Below is the page from my journal documenting my time spent at the Arcade on 30th September.

My ostensible reason for going down was to measure out some of the spaces on the porticos that I am interested in using. Ideas for the different vignettes are beginning to take shape, and I have started to create and set them on the dancers, but in order to do so I needed more specific understandings of the space's dimensions. I used my body to measure out the space. The foot unit I was using was the length of my own foot, and the "body widths" was my shoulder span. Part of the reason for this was practical- I did not have a measuring tape or a metre ruler. But it was also an intentional choice to reflect the way that my understanding of the space is experiential. My body is the medium through which I understand the porticos; I have not spent any time pouring over blueprints or looking at plans, so a dimensioned, rational understanding of the space is not part of my experience researching this building.

The video below records the faded graffiti on the Weybosset portico which I had not noticed before. As I mention in my journal entry, my attention was also caught by the sign on the railings below. I have seen it many times before, but this time it called to mind Marianne's comment about there never being enough seating inside, which was part of the reason why there were always so many people on the steps.  

The following video was made when I walked the section of the new Providence Independence Trail that goes past the Arcade on Weybosset Street. It is a cell phone walking tour with a number to call at different points of interest, but it does not seem that the Arcade gets a stop of its own.