Transit Station

9 Apr 2006 in Dance & Drama, Visual Arts & Crafts

Transit Station is a concept

IAN STEPHEN reflects on his experience with Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith and Charles Ryder’s Transit Station
 

THE STRUCTURE of the event that contains it is simple. Get a building – not a gallery but a space. Set up temporary stations – scaffolding is ideal – to establish positions for performance-art. Make links with partners in the host city – so far Berlin, London and Edinburgh – and provide technical support in lighting and projection.

Established artists aren’t banned, but Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith and Charles Ryder are not really interested in the star-ratings of their colleagues. The event organisers are looking for artists in many mediums, but all with a feel for tuning-in to the opportunities offered by two days of non-stop live art.
 
Scotland’s Transit Station was held in Leith’s Ocean Terminal in February, an ideal space within a space. Rose Strang and Aaron McCloskey acted as Scottish team-leaders. They negotiated an ideal venue – a bare concrete attic, like an extra floor in the parking area, but without cars and with windows to the sea-pools of the docks below. You go through the buzz of heavy-duty selling and are in a space which has its own busy-ness.

Let’s go back to how it started for me. Rose enthused about her experience in taking part in Berlin. Her story suggested that this was an opportunity to meet other folk from different parts of Europe who didn’t mind chancing their arm. It seemed that a piece of work, still forming or with an element of risk, was a better proposal than a tried and tested piece, rehearsed and remade.


The event was the opportunity to test something with a strong localised basis in a trans-European forum


So I thought of a work filmed in an extant salt-cellar in the Sail Loft building in Stornoway. The former Customs House was being renovated to provide housing. I was leading an Arts Project to document history and memories linked to the building and make works, some sited close to the structure and some existing only in digital media.

I wrote a short play on the inner lives and ambitions of three herring girls, The Sked Crew. (“Sked” is the Stornoway slang for herring.) I had the idea of filming the actors in the tiny cellar which used to be the salt store for the curing. So we could now take the film and show it further along the old route, in Leith.

But there had to be some transmutation to make the export worthwhile. In An Lanntair arts centre in Stornoway I’d worked with Norman Chalmers, a musician who often works in theatre, to see how the tensions within the 15 minute play could translate into the silent movie form.

And Leith was good for me because it’s along the historical trading route from my home town of Stornoway. The centres of commerce shifted as the herring boats, curers and fisher-girls moved around the British Isles, following the migration of herring.

The original work had been directed by Alison Pebbles, also a film-maker, as a Theatre Hebrides production. Later we’d played with the projection of extracts from the 15 minute drama on the high wall at An Lanntair, as a trailer to the play the audience would shortly see. Norman was stationed below the screen and improvised to it on concertina, rather than the traditional piano. We thought this was worth trying for the full length.

Then there was the imagery of netting needles – “dark dark nets on their knees…” – they were fast, skilled, skilled at their job, no skulking then…”. The phrases come from the memories of people who had lived in the Sail Loft/Net Loft building, or visited the loft to see the needle-bones flash or catch the gossip.

I found that Alex Patience, actor and theatre-director by trade, and grown up in Fraserburgh on Scotland’s East Coast, had helped to mend her father’s nets. So we talked about her view of the sea, as one of the rare girls who had shared a bunk with her skipper-father.

It contrasted with my own sea-career which was mainly onshore, organising marine rescue from the Stornoway Co-ordination Centre. I do have a knowledge of water, including the North Sea crossing and the Pentland Firth, but mainly as a leisure-sailor – vastly different from the day-in/day-out business of being responsible for six or so livelihoods on a working boat.

We devised a proposal – Alex would find the family netting needles and I would make a poem with the rhythms of the sea in a quest for the details of memories. We reckoned that the text should be projected and I would be able to see the pace of it and speak it or just mouth it silently, like memory coming and going. So Alex would hear the rhythms ebb and flow. But planning beyond that would run the risk of losing the freedom to explore – the risk and trust that makes Transit Station special.

We arrived in Leith with our basic equipment and props. The chaos that met you in a babble of electronics as you came out of the top floor of the mall was soon found to be cleverly scheduled. We were allocated our slots for each day and negotiated working stations.

A little discussion on where the audience would stand, what we needed. And then there was the team meeting – why we were here, what the mission was, and really an exhortation to take interest in each other’s work. Rehearsal time is over. It starts, and it doesn’t stop. Every event must flow into every other.

And it did. Our team came in early to check the DVDs and then there was music. And dance. And projection. And improvised piano, electronic music relating to the laws of physics. A woman wearing a velvet head-dress/blindfold writing on one of her legs from the toes up.

A re-enaction of a fable – if a woman eats an apple, whilst combing her hair, she can see the face of her next lover in the mirror. Only the courtesy was extended to men for this Saturday morning break from the shopping.

There wasn’t a huge number of visitors – an admission fee had to charged due to the lack of funding from official sources. But there was a trickle, and you began to get some names and accents to the host of visiting artists.

Over the week-end the visitors did accumulate and the relationships built-up. Our team engaged with Rita Rodriguez from Galicia. She’d shown us records of her work which is often about joining one area to another. A cup at the end of tense string left dangling to find a curious listener, passing by a monastery. A chalk-line leaving a temporary connection. She joined with Alex in another improvisation, one woman at each end of a piece of cordage, knot-dancing to a soundtrack driven by strong Uist wind. The waiting women on both ends of another trading route.

So how did it work? I’d say there was a comparison with the Triangle Trust approach to International workshops. I was lucky enough to experience Comhhla, Triangle’s partnership with Taigh Chearsabhagh, the North Uist arts centre.

In these workshops you are encouraged to come without too fixed a plan. For me in both Comhla and Transit Station, the most interesting work had a freestyle element, adapting to the space and the ambience.

There were many good soundpieces in the Leith event and many good videos. Then there was Nanna Lysholt-Hansen, the dancer with both feet in one leg of a pair of tights, moving all the way, with pain and humour, responding to all the different musics met along the way and outside to the upper floor. Dancing her way to the women’s toilet and gaining the curiosity of the shoppers who had maybe not even noticed till then that an international live-art event was taking place in the mall. Yes, something unique happened.

And over the two days there were plenty such moments. An expert pianist playing from a projected score. It was mustard-seed, scattered random and sprouting notes from sheet-music. Cyclists in hoods turning this way, that way, responding to simple signals sent to them: right, left or centre. Pedalling amongst us and reminding us that our own brains and movements are geared the same way.

So if you or your team were there for most of the duration you gained a real sense of being in a trans-Europe trading event. And how did our pieces fit in? Not qualified to say. But from the resulting film made by Lewisman Neil MacConnell, something strange in the exploration of memory did in fact happen. We all thought the silent-movie was worth installing in a library of lost stuff. Lost dialogue in this case, or simply translated to gesture and music.

The event was the opportunity to test something with a strong localised basis in a trans-European forum. The next Transit Station will probably be in Poland. If I’m invited again, I wanna be in that number, and I think everyone in our team felt the same.

(Theatre Hebrides are currently developing a full-length play of The Sked Girls)

© Ian Stephen, 2006