Here are some pictures I have taken of the site I have chosen for this research project: St. Nicholas Church, Leicester.
St. Nicholas is the oldest church in Leicester, dating back 1200 years, and sits next to Jewry Wall, the largest Roman structure of its kind still intact in England. Underneath the church’s foundations, some fifty inches below the floor, indicate that there was a colonnade east of Jewry Wall.
Parts of the church date back to Saxon 900AD, although it wasn’t the first church to stand on the site (the first incorporating Jewry Wall as part of its architecture, which is why that part of the wall still stands today). Through into Norman times, the church saw several additions, notably the (now partly restored) Norman tower, a rebuilding of the original Saxon tower. In the Middle Ages, the Early English arcade was built. In the 16th century, the timber-framed porch was added, which was restored in 1975. Renovation continued through to the 19th and 20th centuries, seeing the addition of a typically Victorian archway in the church.
Walking around St. Nicholas, it is easy to see the many layers of history embedded into one place; from the small saxon windows to the 21st century kitchen, one sees how, over the years, the place has adapted to each time in history, yet still retained the impression of each period that preceded it. St. Nicholas feels like a meeting-point of many locations and times, all interceding in multiple layers; where Roman worshipper may converse with a visitor born in 1991; where, if you look, you can imagine the candlelit vestiges of century-old worship, or if you put your ear against the stone, you hear the faint traces of hymns once sung.
It is apt, therefore, for me to stage this research enquiry into mixed-reality performance in such a place that already has the qualities of a mixed-reality, without artistic augmentation of any type. For me to further deconstruct and reappropriate the complex mesh of location and time seems to add to the church’s sense of multiplicity. When I first visited the site, it was pleasing for me to see the sheer scale of adornment dedicated to people’s beliefs over many hundreds of years, and it seemed to me that despite what people have believed – Krishna, Yahweh, Allah, Buddha or Jesus Christ – they all seem to be pointing in the same direction: toward the unknown, the Other, and each are given human form in a vast fractal of beautiful representations in architecture, art and scripture. With this assumption in mind, I aim to gratefully give thanks to one very tiny example of the Other given form in St. Nicholas, and to show how one such example need not be the authoritative example of spiritual representation. It remains for me to explore how, through deconstruction of the church as a site, we may lift some of the negative (and perhaps fearful) feelings we have towards the church (in general) in regard to the heinous acts certain individuals have committed in the name of their beliefs. Is it possible for me to inspire a transcendental and spiritual encounter, by pointing towards a place that has traditionally been the only place to do so, but, paradoxically, in doing so, to suggest that such a place need not be the only place to do so?
throughthehypersurface 