By A*musing Co Lab

Photos taken by Briana Quintanilla at the Bloomsbury Festival 2023

On Sunday 22nd October, at the Bloomsbury Festival 2023, the A*musing Co Lab, performance collective made up by Performance Making MA graduates from Goldsmiths University, Jamil Nicolle (Lima, Peru), Gao Shuyi (Wu Wei, China) and Rukmini Sircar (Kolkata, India), presented their site-specific piece “London: A Bloom of Consciousness”. An immersive experience in which spectators follow the performers, who evoke different personalities of Virginia Woolf, through the streets of Bloomsbury, while listening to a pre-recorded audio. The piece explores the relationship between the female body, the city’s body and each of the performers’ cities and cultures. Below is a text written by the A*musing Co Lab in which they cite their inspirations and reflect on their piece.

An immersive, moving site-specific piece. Part “derive”, part haunting story, part stream-of-consciousness and part peripatetic manifestation. The piece transports individual listeners on foot through the squares, streets and corners of Bloomsbury, as well as through the intimate confessions, desires, and fears of three women from different cities: Kolkata, Wu Wei, and Lima, as they reflect on the condition of being citizens/residents in their own cities and in London.

The piece draws from the Derive of the French Situationists and the Greek term “peripatetic”. Following the Situationist concept of disruption/protest, we played with the idea of protesting against the disappearance of a female body in the urban space. However, this protest is in the form of an active quest, which is informed by the Greek concept of walking and learning.

We were interested in experiencing London via the works of Virginia Woolf, a prolific streetwalker. We read her seminal work “A Room of One’s Own” as well as her essay titled “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”, and that helped formulate our driving research question: Is it possible to adapt the literary technique of the stream of consciousness into a scenic, theatrical performance style on the streets? Can our investigation into the nature of citizenship in London be expressed as an evolving/blooming consciousness through the act of perpetual movement? In the end, we realized that the “city”, which is usually associated with something concrete and solid as land, may very well coincide with that fluid consciousness that is developing while we constitute ourselves as citizens.

We were inspired by the soundwalk of Janet Cardiff’s “The Missing Voice (Case Study B)” and developed the primary system of the piece to be an immersive audio which is simultaneously a dramatic/theatrical guide through Bloomsbury, as well through the cerebrations of the three persona-guides. The text of the audio began to emerge from our process of mapping what Kris Darby in Framing the Drift and Drifting the Frame, calls the “psychogeography” of urban space (Darby, 2013). In our explorations of Bloomsbury we discovered spaces that were charged with potent personalities and atmospheres. We recorded our response to them, and began to weave together a text that captured our layered and complex relationship with urban spaces.

Part of our exploration of Bloomsbury was an audio tour that described the lives of the members of the Bloomsbury group, specially the Stephen sisters. This gave us further impetus to compare our relationships with our cities, and that of Virginia Woolf with London. The three persona-guides in our piece are a culmination of these explorations. They not only embody their cities (Kolkata, Lima and Wu Wei) but also the fragile, inquisitive and boldly provocative versions of Virginias. As they begin to puzzle together their identities they discover a mature, critical and creative self.

The discovery of a female mannequin body in the props room, helped us physicalize this quest and manifestation. By using the mannequins in different places in Bloomsbury we tried to explore how city spaces either objectify or make invisible the female body. As we continued our research into the poetry and strangeness of the mannequin fragments through actions and movements, they became a core dramaturgical element. The search for self in London, became also, a piecing together of a lost and broken body.

Bibliography:

Ackroyd, Peter, London: the biography London: Vintage, 2001.
London written & presented by Peter Ackroyd; BBC, 2004.Videocassette: (150 mins): VHS
Back, Les, The Art of Listening, Berg, 2007
Bachelard, Gaston The Poetics of Space Beacon 1994
Calvino, Italo: Invisible Cities translated from the Italian by William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1997.
Darby, K. (2013) ‘Framing the Drift and Drifting the Frame: Walking with Wrights & Sites’, NTQ - New Theatre Quarterly, 29(1), pp. 48–60.
Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle Eastbourne: Soul Bay Press, 2012
Jackson, Shannon, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
Kaye, Nick, Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, Routledge, 2000
Knabb, Ken (ed.) Situationist International Anthology USA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007.
Pearson, Mike, Site Specific Performance, Palgrave, 2010
Smith, P. (2019) Making site-specific theatre and performance: a handbook. London: Macmillan international.
The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (no date). Available at: https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/the-missing-voice-case-study-b/ (Accessed: 23 March 2022).
Woolf, V. and Bradshaw, D. (2008) Selected essays. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford world’s classics).
Woolf, V., Shiach, M. and Woolf, V. (2008) A room of one’s own: and, Three guineas. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford world’s classics).

Gao Shuyi is a London-based Chinese interdisciplinary performance artist. She has an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths. She is interested in exploring the human body and sensations with the echoes of objects and space. She uses the process of performing to investigate the temporal nature of her existence. During her performances, she is most interested in exploring the fluidity between her conscious, subconscious, and unconscious and the flow of actual time, performance time, memories, and dreamscapes. She also helped establish the Chinese Last Minute Live Art Organization.

Rukmini Sircar is an Indian Actress and Performance Maker based in London. Her recent credits include Gazebo Theatre’s critically acclaimed play Wanted (2023) where she played Phoolan Devi (she is also due to appear in the March 2024 rerun of the show). Her credits also include The Dancing Elephant (2023), an interactive, children’s theatre piece that toured the North of UK. She completed a Masters in Performance Making from Goldsmiths in 2022, and is also an alumna of National School of Drama, India. She is the recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship and the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award (India).

Jamil Nicolle is a Peruvian performance artist and philosopher. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of performing ideas and profound thoughts from the Western Tradition in dialogue with Latin American idiosyncrasy. Known for her innovative work, she has staged productions such as Platonics Live at Applecart Arts (2023) and London: A Bloom of Consciousness at Bloomsbury Festival (2023). With a career spanning since 2014, her interest lies in developing a hybrid between theatre and philosophy, creating a thoughtful praxis that challenges traditional boundaries. She completed a Masters in Performance Making at Goldsmiths, University of London.