Site 3 : Understanding the Performance
The sequences described here offer just a glimpse of the performance events that took place on the Pollard Trail, mostly in August 2006. Although the structure of the trail and key moments were fixed, much was improvised on a daily basis. The audience were free to come and go as they wished during the course of the five hour event, which began and ended at the company’s temporary base in Hillfields.
Triangle's experimental performances – often provocative, sometimes bewildering – attempt to map the affective, cultural and historical terrain in and around Irving Pollard’s former stamping ground. This theatrical and archaeological hunt for a voice and memory, resonant of Pollard's clown Chico, took the performers from Hillfields, Coventry, where Pollard lived for most of his life, to the Llyn Peninsula in Wales, where he is buried. [Parts of Hillfields are currently undergoing destruction and regeneration, a process which threatens to eradicate finally all traces of Pollard’s working environment: an ironic echo of the concentrated bombardment which contributed to Pollard's wartime trauma.]
The performances documented in our research were not attempts at an historically faithful depiction of Pollard’s life. The inclination of the performances was – in the words of the Company – ‘towards collapse, failure, incongruence and their attendant clownesque comedy’. Triangle (and the CMP Soc) were driven by a curiosity about the encounter between Pollard's story of accident and recovery and the carnivalesque and haunting figure of the clown. The trail was in part a quest - for an alternative language for collecting oral history and curating stories of destruction and recovery, including those of the current immigrant residents of Hillfields.
For more information on the look and feel of the Pollard Trail, see Report: Data Trawl 3.
