Oyster Group 20

Greenwich Market

“An ancient village on the banks of the Thames, steeped in Royal history, Greenwich has long been home to a Royal Charter Market which was originally assigned to the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital on the 19th December 1700 for 1,000 years.”

- Quote from http://www.greenwichmarketlondon.com/about/page/market-history

  London and Greenwich in particular, is well known for several reasons. It’s the home of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, The Greenwich Maritime Museum, The O2 Arena (formerly the Millennium Dome), The Royal Naval College and of course, Greenwich Market.

  As a group we have been assigned Greenwich Market as our site for the Oyster Project. We have visited the site several times, with the building in various states of use. When we visited the second and third times I personally was shocked at a piece of information collected which suggested that the Market had existed in some form or another since 1831 – It did not even occur  to us that the market would be that old and still viable to this day.

  The Market itself has been housed in two locations throughout its lifetime – It began near the west gate of the RoyalNavalCollege, though it was moved to its current location in order to improve cleanliness on the riverfront and to bring the building standards up that of the RoyalHospital, which was a fairly new building at the time. Another reason for the move was the sheer dangerousness of the area it was situated in, as is clear from the below image, which suggests a very dark and shady area of London, which probably would have been rife with crime, though this was fairly common of many areas of London at the time.

The stall owners themselves have been a key part of the market since its inception, trading goods such as live and dead meat, fish, eggs, butter, poultry, fruit and vegetables initially, before becoming more commercial and allowing a plethora of different products to be traded such as the comic books, antiques, jewelry and fast food.

  As time has progressed, so too have the influences and cultures present within the Market. Nowadays one can see people from all nationalities making a trade selling food, items and speciality goods from their homes.

We want to immerse the audience, we want to bring the stories and characters to life, we want to convey the story without speech – Engage through movement. We want to allow people to create their own interpretation of the Market and it’s people. 

From an admin perspective we aim to either breakeven or make a small profit, we aim to ensure that all members of staff are paid above minimum wage, we aim to use fully recyclable materials where available and we are running the performance with the aim for it to be taken on tour in the future if it is successful within the initial venue, altering the show to suit the different places we are performing it in. 

Fundamentally we want the performance to be;

We want our performance to;

•Be Engaging

•Be Safe

•Be Innovative

•Be Interpretive

•Be Enjoyable

This track by Sam Jackson has influenced the way I would envision transition of time through a space.

  Our piece is a performance focusing on Greenwich Market whereby we explore the day to day preparation of the market / market stalls along with what may derive throughout the day, up until the end of the day. There will be six scenes with three different plots within it. All scenes will be repeated exactly like the first, but throughout the performance there will be a disruption to the equilibrium.  The rest of the performance will be an exploration of resolving the problems that occur.

This is a dance based performance, where we will primarily use interpretive dance; incorporating both the styles of Complicite and DV8. Within the dance, we will be using the elements of earth, water, fire and air to strongly depict the narrative of our performance which lays in the genre of drama. The piece will follow the journey of a young man who moves to Greenwich to start his own business, which immediately doesn’t go to plan due to the lack of help and funds; elements of fire and earth, a man and a woman who find unexpected love from one another; elements of air, and finally, a young child who gets kidnapped in the hustle and bustle of the market; elements of water, fire, and earth.

We thought it would be interesting to use dance to deliver our performance because it will bring the stories to life, and at the same time will allow the audience to immerse themselves in the world that lies behind Greenwich Market. The absence of speech will enhance the storytelling, allowing the audience to really engage with the performance, and have their own interpretation of the Market and its community. The use of fabric and artificial fruits (including bread, meat, flowers etc.) as props were important to us because of its relation to our site. For example market holders were selling products from food to clothing, and it is exactly what we need in order to enhance the realism of the scenery. Also, we wanted some of the dancers to dance using fabrics (resembling those sold in the market) to give a more vibrant effect to the performance, as well as helping to configure the elements of air/water.

Whilst visiting the site we decided to have a chat with some of the residence and workers of Greenwich Market, and found that it was a tight nit community – everyone knew each other, people often came to start businesses on the stalls because it has a welcoming atmosphere, and it very affordable etc. There were also some unexpected responses that allowed us to have a political; as well as a social and cultural context. Whilst exploring a small jewellery shop, there was a fairly large mirror with post-it notes covering the edges of it; surrounded by jewellery. On the notes were written e.g. “Paedophiles are vile!” “Rapists should get more years” “Politicians make me sick”. After talking to the owner of this jewellery shop, we found that his passion stemmed from injustice that a friend of a friend experienced. This allowed us to form an idea around it where we could convey some of the implications that could occur within such a favourable community – which will be shown in the scene where the child gets kidnapped.

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Income

Arts Council Grant- We will be applying for a grant of £15000 which will be the main funding for the production. As they are supporters of the venue we will be performing in I am hoping that this will help us get approval for our grant. We are also being careful to be in agreement with their ethical views- specifically by trying to be as ecologically friendly as possible and paying our artists for their work.

Greenwich Market Sponsor- We will be offering Greenwich market to have their food vendors sell their food at our venue after the show which is going to cost us £6240 to get a room for them to do that in. We are hoping the Greenwich Market Council will give us £4000 of sponsorship money to alleviate our costs.

Box office expected income- this figure is calculated based on the assumption that 60% of the seats will be filled. The formula to calculate this expected income is:

Where  is the number of chairs,  is the ticket price, and  is the number of shows.

Ticket price was largely based off what would allow us enough money to break even as well as looking into how much other dance shows charged.

Bar expected income- this figure was calculated by estimating that 60% of our audience would buy a drink and that each drink would cost us 50p to buy. We decided to charge £4 per drink to make a profit which would pay for the bar.

  Expenses

Green street advertising- We chose this advertising company because of their environmentally friendly values and original advertising techniques. Green Street have embraced new creative ideas which help them advertise a show in a successful way whilst causing less damage to the environment. We also think their urban techniques might attract out target audience.

Greenwich Dance Agency hire- The venue will cost £17550 for the run (4 weeks) and 7 days for the get-in and get-out. Additionally we will be hiring a rehearsal room for a 6 week rehearsal with the same company. We also paid cost for all the set-up, clean-up, and bar space.

  Artistic spending¨- This is the breakdown of the costs spent on props and set:

3 sets of parallel bars- £ 7,556.40 (£2518.80 each)

6mx6m of mats (2x2m x9) - £ 5,907.60 (£656.40 each)

Paint- £300 (£20 per Rosco paint)

40m Steel- £280 (£7 per metre)

MDF- £129

As the props consists of buying lots of objects to decorate the stage as well as large pieces of fabric we decided to set a maximum budget for props (£600) instead of listing the hundreds of objects to buy and their prices.

Costumes are simple so £33 per dancer is accounted for in the budget to get simple black clothing for them.

London, and Greenwich in particular, is well known for several reasons. It's the home of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, The Greenwich Maritime Museum, The O2 Arena (formerly the Millennium Dome), The Royal Naval College and of course, Greenwich Market.

As a group we have been assigned Greenwich Market as our site for the Oyster Project. We have visited the site several times, with the building in various states of use. We have seen the space completely bare aside from the frames used to host the stalls, we have seen the space with quiet business during the afternoon or early morning of a weekday and we have seen it in full swing during a lunchtime of any given day. This idea of the passing of time within a single space gave shape to the performance concept we have decided to put forward.

We as a group consider dance to be one of the most creative and expressive ways of conveying any concept or belief in performance. We are therefore proposing that our performance be a piece of contemporary dance using influences from various cultures to show how the market comes to be constructed, traded and then removed on a day-by-day basis. We aim to give the audience a true understanding of how a day in Greenwich Market might occur through the medium of dance and music. We hope to make the performance completely multisensory - meaning aside from the obvious visual and aural qualities of a dance performance, we hope to have market traders operating their trade before and after the performance itself, we aim to have chefs from the various stalls which can be found throughout Greenwich Market cooking their specialties to create a cacophony of smells and tastes, which can be enjoyed as part of the ticket price.

We aim to have the Greenwich Dance Agency host the event due to the intimate nature of the venue, meaning that we can have a relatively small audience get a close-up view of a true(ish) representation of life in Greenwich's busiest market. This also means that in-house equipment would be available to marginalise the cost of equipment hire. It also means that less additional thought needs to be given to altering a space for performance, alongside the health and safety work that comes with that, as it already purpose built for performance.

We aim to update this blog as and when we have more information available regarding the performance as a whole.

After discussing the elements of our production as a group we decided that the Greenwich Dance Academy was the venue we preferred so I looked into their set-up. I emailed them to ask about their technical specifications and if they had any discounts for long-running shows. I also asked if we needed any extra documentation to perform in their venue.

This is what they have online:

Auditorium- 64ft x 64ft

Stage- 36ft x 24ft

Seating capacity- 200-450

They have catering facilities and a bar if we pay an extra fee. They also have their own basic sound equipment. Unfortunately they have no available information about their lighting rig.

Their prices are: £100 per hour, £50 per hour of set-up, and £1050 per 12 hour slot.

We can also hire rehearsal space for £12 per hour.

They have not mentioned any specific documents we need but I assume we need insurance which I looked into. There are lots of insurance companies for performing arts and one of them, Hencilla Canworth seems to have great specialist insurance. This would cover our production for any risks.