#batp

Commission: Sweet Bits headshot for @chromchill

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.