Side by Side Show, Petticoat Lane Market

Further details at: Side By Side Show website


Borrowing elements from Victorian fairground entertainment, Side by Side Show tells a story peopled by playing cards and animated by the artist's hands. A live yet mediated performance which questions relationships including that of audience to performer.


Previously shown by Whitechapel Gallery's Street Project in November 2008.

Locomotion

Locomotion, Crewe Railway Station, England
performed as part of Station/Stationary

"Highlighting dance, live music and film, the station will be pulsing with over 150 performers including professional dancers, first time performers and local groups of young and older people from Crewe and the wider region."

Locomotion was a collaboration between performers Ania Bas, Rachel Jane Dean, Patricia Derrick, Hannah Pantin and Natasha Vicars, inspired by the classic film Brief Encounter (1945), the group gave a subtle performance on parting in the railway station's halls, corridors and lift.

Portraits by Ania Bas & Natasha Vicars

Curios and Wonders of the Barge

A version of a peep show where the performer's hands animate found objects from Battersea Barge, the location for the show.

Format:
A show for one person to view at a time; the performer greets visitors to the stall inviting them to contribute a small object of theirs which would appear in the show, before entering the stall - a kind of make-shift booth. The brief performance in the booth sets the objects as characters within a simple narrative animated by the performers hands.

The photos above are of the nooks and crannies in the barge, referring to places the 'found objects' came from.

Each viewer was presented with a card showing a detail from these photos.



My Site | In Space 3, Battersea Barge

Curios and Wonders of the Barge was presented at a site-specific performance workshop and showing event curated by Switch Performance, held on Battersea Barge in Vauxhall.

Switch Performance website

Whitstable Biennale, Telling Cards

In Telling Cards, individual visitors are invited to sit at a roadside stall and select a sequence of specially made cards. Each card is read as a visual mnemonic, based on stories harvested by Vicars from different sources. Moving between sites around Whitstable, she uses the format of a card teller to entice passersby and release these surprisingly specific tales, each belonging to an absent other. Chance plays a part in deciding whether a story holds personal significance for its target – whether they find or reject the potential connections that lie in every tale.

New work commissioned as part of the Performance Programme at the 2008 Whitstable Biennale.

Whitstable Biennale

My interest:
In turning the stories/memories/anecdotes I had collected from other people into a pack of cards, I was generating a way that audience could pick them out by chance as part of a kind of game. I was interested in what connections the audience might find or elaborate from the stories as I told them.
Playing cards have a history of use for gambling, fortune telling and as means of organising knowledge, and all these aspects engage my interest.



Image: Four cards from the series (Photo: Natasha Vicars)

Dressing-Up Box

A participatory performance piece where the artist's collection of dressing up clothes and accessories were displayed and offered to visitors to Cannizaro Park in Wimbledon. Vicars worked with an assistant to staff the stall and introduce passersby to the collection, while inviting them to try something on.

This image shows the setting of the small hut from which the piece operated, when presented within the exhibition PARK06.







A video clip from Hyde Park, where the Dressing-Up Box was set up guerrilla style. This also shows the artist & assistant interacting with participants.

Kept Objects

Raffle of artist's kept objects, Arnolfini Live Art Weekender







Enquiry:
I was aware that I had many possessions that I was keeping and found it hard to let go of, despite the fact that they were sometimes kept out of sight in an attic or took up space in my room without being an active part of my life. In this project I picked 50 objects and offered them in exchange for participants reflections about holding on to things.

The objects included:
my running spikes from when I was 15
a cambridge university calculator from my first degree
my long-term collection of shells and pebbles
a set of miniature turtles in marble that was a 17th birthday present
a length of special printed fabric from a Brazilian carnival group

Some responses from participants are quoted below


"In my room at home - the room which I had as a kid - I still have a small pair of blue clogs painted in an attractive design, that I bought on a school trip to Valkonberg in Holland when I was 11 years old. It was the first ever school trip that I went on, and I felt incredibly grown-up as I had spending money and I made sure that I bought presents for all of my family. And I bought myself a baseball hat and pair of blue decorative clogs. And I still have the clogs…they're sat on a small shelf in the corner of my room.
For me, they are a souvenir in the genuine meaning of word -they can kind of remind me of that point when you feel far more grown-up than you actually are, but without any of the adult anxieties. I think I probably keep a lot of things from that period."

"I have about 145 old minidisks that I bought before the whole CD thing really picked up because I thought that minidisks were going to be the next big thing. And it turns out that they weren't. Although they are very useful for recording things. I have about 145 that I'll probably never ever listen to ever again, but they're all there. Like tapes - a lot of them have been made for me by other people, and they're quite special. They're covered in dust and I don't have a reader to play them in any more. But they're all there in alphabetical order in boxes. Under my bed."


Description of work:

A raffle table is set out, offering a range of the artist's possessions. In order to enter the raffle, each participant is asked to think of something he/she is holding onto - and to record an audio interview about this. The participant then picks a ticket and wins the corresponding object as a prize. This often led to further conversation about why the artist had been keeping that object.

Cubicle, 10x10 projects, Camberwell

Cubicle was a context-specific audio installation, using recorded interviews with cafe visitors.

Enquiry:
A response to boundaries set by curator Ashleigh Pearson, to produce a work that fits within a cube of 10cm side. The work would be displayed on a mini gallery area within a working cafe.

I asked cafe visitors to talk to me about 'being in a small space', recorded these interviews and presented sections of the audio track as an installation.

My interest was seeking a response to my experience through eliciting others' stories and memories. I was also interested in relating to the location as a social space.

http://ashleighpearson.com/projects.html