As I chat over the phone to artist Peter Reder about The Contents of a House, his latest project for this year’s Brighton Festival, I’m on a train, contesting with temperamental mobile signal and occasional off-putting jolts. For a conversation about place, my own location is particularly unstable, shifting and continually disrupted. In a sense, this mirrors the format of much of Reder’s work; guided investigations of sites peppered with detours and interruptions.
“I like that you’re telling this story but there are also all the digressions,” says Reder, musing on his continued fascination with the guided tour format. “Like in a travel book, you might enjoy that you find something out about the author as you go along; you perhaps learn about why they’re on this journey themselves. There’s a lot of potential to mix in quite disparate things.”
The latest location that Reder is leading audiences on a journey through is Preston Manor, a historic house and museum just outside Brighton. Reder explains that he was drawn to this particular building because it exists “very much on the fringes of everything” – on the outskirts of Brighton itself and at the peripheries of people’s awareness. With a history stretching back to the Domesday Book, the present house is a mixture of a 1738 rebuilding of the 13th century structure and a series of extensions made in 1905. Now functioning as a museum on Edwardian life, the manor is visited mostly by school groups, but is only vaguely known by many residents of the surrounding area. “I was intrigued by this building which is really interesting in its own right, but which is hovering there kind of half-known,” Reder adds. “There’s an air of mystery around the building.”
Reder also feels that, unlike many of the more famous historic homes across the country, Preston Manor has an accessible, tangible aspect. “What’s attractive is that everything’s quite small scale, it’s very intimate on every level,” he says. “Nothing is of huge significance; it wasn’t lived in by anyone that famous, nothing of national importance happened there. It’s interesting as an example of an Edwardian, relatively wealthy home, but it’s not got that grandeur, so in a way it’s very touchable – you feel it’s on a level that anyone could understand.”
Accessibility is also an element of the guided tour set-up, a format that is instantly familiar to audiences. Although this format is one that Reder has kept returning to in his work, it was one that he initially fell into almost by accident. During a period of research and development for a new show at Somerset House, Reder had a number of found objects to show to a small invited audience and naturally found himself presenting them, guiding spectators through his discoveries. “What I really stumbled on is that speaking about these things was a sort of performance,” he remembers. Intrigued by what could be achieved by adopting this presentational style, it quickly spilled over into the finished work and became a recurring technique.
“I’m aware that it’s a very familiar thing and in some ways I rather enjoy that,” Reder says. “It has a comfortable feel; people know how these things operate.” But he’s not content with simply appropriating this format without interrogating it; there’s a desire in the work to gently provoke and subvert, to acknowledge the way that guided tours traditionally “pander to what people want to hear” and dig away at what latent desires people bring to these tours. In this sense, Reder argues, it’s almost “anti-tourism”.
Peter Reder at Preston Manor
Recalling one production in Edinburgh, in a context surrounded by lots of real guided tours, Reder explains how they used fabrication to reveal what audiences wanted to hear. “In that particular show I always made up a story about a building that was a phantom, that had been in that place before the current building, which sometimes was true in some of the buildings we used, but at other times was entirely fictional. I realise that’s a very strong desire, that there should be something underneath the layers, that people like the idea of a ruin beneath the current building – a sort of archaeology.” It’s a desire that shares a kind of kinship with the experience of watching theatre; the impulse to peel back layers, to reveal something buried and authentic underneath the artifice.
As Reder has gone on, however, he’s had less recourse to fiction in his work. Whereas previously he would seek to change spaces or populate them with imaginary narratives, now he is more interested in “exploring how they already work and trying to see what I see in them as they currently exist”, noting in this a kind of acceptance. “I want to delve into their reality a bit,” Reder explains, adding, “I would go as far as to say that everything I say in the show is true.”
With this particular project, Preston Manor has revealed more than enough material for Reder to work with. After a lengthy and painstaking process of research, the task was to shape that nebulous mass of history and memory into a piece with a negotiable path through it, a process that Reder admits is “a bit mysterious even to me”. “Bit by bit there is some process of natural sifting where certain things feel more essential than others,” he tentatively continues. “But sometimes what seem like irrelevant things can be very vivid, so it’s a bit hard to explain. There’s some natural selection of the ideas that seem to stay with me and others that slightly fall to the wayside.”
Beyond his guided tours, the interest in space bleeds out into much of Reder’s other work; his City of Dreams project, for instance, created live performative maps of a number of cities across the world, fleetingly capturing the living memory of a place through the illusionary machinery of theatre. For Reder, however, place is never the primary concern. “I’d say my major preoccupation is probably to do with memory, but I think that’s played out often in experience of a place,” he says. “They’re very hard to divide, because I think so many memories inhabit landscapes of one kind or another, so what’s conjured up in your memory is full of spaces you’ve experienced and the atmospheres of particular spaces. I think that when you enter a space, even if it’s an entirely unfamiliar one, your memory of other places is always in play – otherwise how do you understand anything?”
Memory, of course, is inevitably delicate and personal, leading to the strong presence of Reder in his work, with The Contents of a House being no exception. “This current show is about the history of Preston Manor, and it’s also about me in some way. But it’s only me in relation to Preston Manor; it’s the bits of my own history that have been prompted by the things I’ve seen in Preston Manor. The two strands are completely enjoined and dependent on each other.”
“I have an anxiety with these performances that they don’t just become entirely self-indulgent, me rambling on about my own memory of things,” Reder is quick to add, expressing his desire to widen that circle of memory to include his audiences. “I’m very interested in the overlap with other people’s memories. As much as some of the things I talk about are genuinely quite personal, they’re there because I think other people will share quite similar associations. Maybe the personal can become a bit more publicly shared.”
This is not interactive theatre in the way it’s typically understood – “there’s no obligation for anyone to share anything” – but there is clearly a hope that those who join the tour might find their own memories being stirred by those that are revealed in the building. “It’s very rewarding to see that I’m not just communing with myself, that it does touch people,” Reder says. Returning to Preston Manor’s lack of historical or national significance – what Reder characterises as its “lightweight” quality – he wonders aloud whether ultimately it’s less about the place itself than the offer it extends to those who come to wander through it.
“I think it’s a place of some quiet reflection; maybe it doesn’t really matter what it’s about. It’s a contemplative space.”
The Contents of a House is presented as part of the Brighton Festival from 4th – 26th May at Preston Manor.
