[Vertical Kate]

Angie Hiesl and Roland Kaider – x times people chair
https://angiehiesl-rolandkaiser.com/projects/x-times-people-chair/

I haven’t seen this work live, but I almost feel like I have.
Discipline: choreography, installation art, live art, architecture, design, conceptual art
Theme: highlight the unseen elderly population by bringing out of doors and raising them up literally on chairs above the public’s heads. Promoting the beauty of everyday actions.
Location: the walls of any buildings in any cities – this project has taken place internationally.
The audience: passersby. The film really shows how some people stop and others don’t even look up. I think this is a truly fantastic aspect of art that interposes itself in the everyday to challenge our perceptions.

Boxed by Seven Sister Group (2006)
https://www.sevensistersgroup.com/boxed

I saw this work live in 2006 in Oxford street and it has stayed with me vibrantly ever since.
Discipline: Dance, Fashion, Commerce
Theme: the female body in the fashion industry. The dancer occupies a box like an upright coffin in the shop window of John Lewis department store on Oxford Street. We are implicated as voyeurs as our bodies are reflected back to us overlaid over the solo dancers body in the window – performing a dance in which she slowly crumples before our eyes.
Location: shop windows – it was also performed in New Zealand.
Audience: passersby. Some people came specifically to watch – it was advertised.

[Vertical Kate]

Host by Vertical Dance Kate Lawrence

I want to share this work I made with students of Circomedia in Bristol as it had a very big effect on me as a choreographer and I’m really grateful to the students for their fortitude and determination in completing this incredibly challenging project. MOOC have showed video of the second performance of this work in Worthing, so I wanted to show the first performance on the historic cranes of Bristol docks. The reason is because the two sites are so different. The first performance was is the pouring rain, with hardly any audience. The performers were given the choice to cancel but they really wanted to do it. I was somewhere else, working on another project but the students got their friends to film it so I could see it and I created this little film to document it. The work is inspired by the angels in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. The idea that there are spirits watching over us and that at a specific moment they come down to earth to be among us – we might notice them or not. Once they land on earth they disappear into the crowd, slipping into the ‘infra-ordinary’ (Pascal Le Brun-Cordier). I really felt that the work was discreet at Bristol Docks because no one looked up because of the rain. In Worthing, in contrast, the sun was shining and the audience gathered some distance away to watch. Very, very different performances of the same idea. If you look at both you can see how different the spaces are.

[Vertical Kate]

I agree with much of the previous comments that generally public space is somewhere that is not private. This means that in public space we share space with others and are expected to abide by the social rules within that space, for example, don’t walk on the grass, don’t drink, don’t smoke etc. These rules differ according to the particular public space. However, in recent times, public space is increasingly encroaching on private space, whether we desire this or not. The use of surveillance equipment regulates public spaces to monitor our behaviour and our own use of social media allows us to make our private lives public online – sometimes against our wishes. The separation of public and private space is a fairly recent phenomenon in western society; before the 16th century most homes were communal. Different societies and cultures have different conceptions of what public space is so it’s definition is complex and place specific. I suppose I would say it is a space regulated by human social and cultural structures. Some questions: is a space never visited by humans a public space? Do animals regulate their spaces and can we consider these spaces public spaces? Can we only understand public space in relation to its apparent opposite; private space?

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