#smallchoices

We recently discovered that our project #SmallChoices at Hoxton Hall has been shortlisted for the Museums & Heritage Awards. Massive excitement and a real thrill.

Category Shortlisted: Innovation Project Name: The Hoxton Hall Experience: A Collection of Small Choices Company/Organisation Name: Hannah Bruce Company on behalf of Hoxton Hall

For a few years now, I’ve been writing material for Hannah Bruce and Company. But this is the first time I’ve tried to set down any thoughts about the work. That’s partly because, however exciting and challenging our different projects are to be involved in, I still find it very hard to articulate what it is we actually do! When people ask me, I stumble over phrases like ‘site-responsive’, ‘app-powered’, ‘immersive theatre’, ‘theatre/dance’, guided tour’... But I never string them together quite right. And anyway, every time we launch into something new, it seems like I have to learn the rules all over again. I have to think from scratch what it is I want to achieve and how that’s going to fit with Jonathan’s music or Hannah’s overall concept. Then we all have to re-examine what tools we have at our disposal and negotiate how to approach a commission - someone else’s brief - without losing sight of our own artistic pre-occupations and beliefs.

When we start that process, our conversations are always bracing, inspiring, and difficult. But looking back, I think I’m becoming slightly better at spotting recurring themes, at least in my own contributions to the work. So the first piece I was involved in told the story of the passage of a day across the city. The second, created for a school building in Fulham, mixed images of bricks and mortar rising from their foundations with a sense of childhood memories falling back through time. ‘The Claim’ written for the West Yorkshire Playhouse (and performed in its astonishing subterranean ‘caves’ ) was also somehow about the idealism of building - about  the dreams for the future that it represents, even as it sweeps aside the past and present.

And maybe this is a better starting point for me when trying to describe the work. Rather than categorising, or trying to explain the mechanics, perhaps it makes more sense to come back to the physical spaces themselves. To the idea that all buildings are proof of the passage of time, proof of other lives lived, and a repository of stories and memories. In part, at least, these are the things our pieces hope to reveal, in as open and unforced a way as possible.

I’ve mentioned A Collection of Small Choices previously, a project at Hoxton Hall launched this autumn (2015).  An amazing team of artists and creative technologists have been creating this with me, and I love breathing the excitement of that sentence. Never in a million years did I think I’d be able to use the term “creative technologists” in the same sentence as “with me”. (Apart from, perhaps, if I’d been hacked and had to say that ‘creative technologists were messing with me’).

Its been a piece full of challenges – creative, technical and personal – but also full of satisfaction.

Fundamentally, the work is a creative challenge (an aspirational alternative), to one of those National Trust audio guides that you can borrow from a smiley young attendant. I think the audio guides replaced volunteers, who used to take groups on tours around historic buildings, or art exhibitions. People who loved the place with a passion and tried to inspire this love of history and heritage in others. But sadly, in my memory dragging visitors round room after room often just caused wilting eardrums and varicose veins. Or an urgent need for coffee and a NT scone. (Clever sales tactic).

In our work for Hoxton, you are “guided” round the building by a young woman who is uninformed and unreliable, but full of imagination and enthusiasm. She is a living, breathing volunteer - but she is entirely disembodied. You can hear her, but you can’t see her. We use binaural technology (which allows you to hear 3 dimensional sound through headphones, so that you can hear a person breathing behind you or opening drawers in the room you’re in). And we use BLE beacon technology (so that you can travel at your own pace, and the audio only triggers when you reach specific rooms, staircases, landings etc).

And then, alongside the eager young guide, are various old, stern women who understand the need for chronology and factual information. They see how history forms patterns if only you are allowed to see it through a wide angle lens. And they have been there long enough to witness that lens, albeit tinged with their specific world-views. (Plus many of them probably rather approve of Victorian schoolrooms and endless lists of dates).

So, in effect, you start to inhabit the ghost life of Hoxton Hall, although not in a spooky sense. You hear invisible inhabitants, you identify people who “aren’t there”, and best of all, you really have a chance to look around. A chance on your own, to work out the things that interest you personally, without a critical over-informed companion breathing down your neck and looking over your shoulder. Perhaps you start to notice that the bricks are really very old, that the wood is worn, that the staircase smells slightly of institutional cabbage. And bigger still – you have to take responsibility. You have to decide which way the voice has directed you (of course we have solutions if you go wrong, but there is an element of effort. You play a role in this experience.) And hopefully, you start to measure your imagination against the place. Your memory against fact. Your sense of self, against these fictional voices.

So, now “enter the archive”, which forms the backbone of the piece. Problematic for marketing because an archive isn’t a sexy word or idea. Hoxton Hall has the most incredible, democratic, random, chaotic and lived-in archive I’ve encountered. Originally when I started working with it, I spent time with wonderful Kirsty – who was the qualified archivist tasked with transforming vertiginous piles of dusty damp crap into “an archive”. Labelled, indexed, digitised, accessible. Sort of.

This process was both electric, and desperate for me. On the one hand, I was able to handle forgotten, seemingly unimportant historic items - a small wooden harmonica found beneath the floorboards. A fragment of paper bag with an advert for the flour milled on Hoxton Street in the 1800’s. It was a personal thing between me and that bag. I could touch it, be trusted with it – nobody had put it behind glass, nobody was watching over my shoulder (or were they). There was every likelihood that my fingertip touched a specific crease that was last touched in 1890 – that somehow my fingerprint aligned with someone else’s long dead. That is magic. That is the fire of an archive. Its when you personally find the thing, the whatever it is, that bonds you uniquely and personally. Its going to be different for everyone. It might be the building itself – at Hoxton its not just the moveable objects that form the archive, not just the documents and leaflets and letters and programmes and flyers. Its also the wooden floorboards, the stone steps, the tiles and beams and the particular creak of a particular hinge painted over and over since 1940. The air you breath.

Yet, on the other hand, we were painfully aware when creating the piece that by the time Hoxton Hall was renovated and re-launched, the archive materials would mainly have moved to Hackney Archives, and that the majority would be behind glass – reduced again to objects that you look at with a kind of distant eye. No personal thing between me and a flour bag. Instead a kind of sizing up process, an institutional respect, an evaluation. A skim-read of words through glass, not a tracing dust with your fingertip moment. Not alive and magically warming your gloved hand, but merely objects, to be admired and exclaimed over but somehow entirely impersonal.

So this is what we started to work with. How to create enough doorways for people to step one foot into the real magic. To find a tiny fragmentary moment of feeling “aliveness”. To make a personal connection (which will be different for every individual, in the same way that the hardware in every darned smartphone is a bit different when it comes to Bluetooth Low Energy Beaon technology…). To open imaginative possibility, and to leave space for a personal response. To invite you not just to look at a letter written during the Blitz, but prise open the chink to the point where that letter connects with a personal memory or sensation or emotion. That’s the alive moment 

So we were looking at this in the light of the two archetypal characters –the young imagination seeing, feeling, smelling and hearing history according to her own invention, determinedly making it live and powerful, and the woman obsessed with chronology, order, context, indexing. You need both – you need the actual, external force of the archive (the old programmes, the worn steps, or the old wallpaper fragments) alongside the imagination to directly connect those items with your own experience. This (I hope, but cannot prove!) fires your empathy, your relationship to the dead people you never met who were never officially recorded in the “book”. This creates the shiver when you see a handwritten letter that looks like your grandma’s writing.

In the piece we ended up making, we refer to a “book” which the young woman consistently fails to use. It represents an attempt to order history. It makes sense of a linear thread, it interprets and commentates on events. It presents an ordered, chronological, authoritative telling of history, and it is a guidebook that steers a path through ‘chaos’.

The archive represents multiple, chaotic individual voices and perspectives. It is an arbitrary collection which does not privilege any one voice over another. It is haphazard, simultaneous, contradictory, sensory and threatening. It is a vast labyrinth of voices, memories and materials.

We have represented Hoxton Hall via both these modes – the archive itself, and the books written about it. People’s lives are a complex combination of these two paths. We all combine a linear ‘birth to death’ narrative (our personal ‘book) with the chaos of our memories and imagination (our individual ‘archive’).

In our daily lives, we constantly navigate between the two, in the way we construct ourselves, imagine our identity, and project ourselves. We remember ourselves afresh everyday.

So effectively we’re encouraging people to bring themselves to the building, to add (in some intangible way) to the archive, as much as they take something away from the experience.

 A Collection of Small Choices is now open at Hoxton Hall. You can book here:

https://www.hoxtonhall.co.uk/hoxton-hall-experience/#tabs6

You can use your own smartphone or tablet to do the journey - search for “SmallChoices” on the Apple store or Google Play. Otherwise, there are optimised devices available to borrow from reception.