Do you like to people watch?
Reflections on Landmark’s 2024 R&D from Craig (written January 2026)
I asked people who live near me in the Southside of Glasgow to do what they do at home but do it on stage. I wanted to test a smaller version of a three storey monument I hoped to build outdoors in a town square, where private lives unfold in public space.
I've been inspired by the paintings of Bruegel, crowded panoramas where many lives exist within the same frame. Christ collapses under the cross while another man pees against a wall. A shepherd checks the weather while winter's war is waged without mercy. Children play games in the foreground while wedding carnivals unfold in the background.
Living in a tenement in Glasgow, I look across the street and catch glimpses of my neighbours - I know that one of them has a new baby and another was watching Masterchef at the same time as me last night. And yet, I don't know them at all. This morning I woke up at 5am because I thought something was burning but it was just my neighbour smoking a cigarette.
I keep returning to these questions across all my projects. How does your life intersect with mine? What do we imagine of each other? How do we live together when it's harder than ever to share space with those different from us? Don't we all just love to people watch?
Looking back, some of this R&D from 2024 feels too staged, too actor-y, not real enough. Everything has a kind of meditative quality that feels somewhat too polite. Rather than attempting to reconstruct everyday life, how do I build something where it can simply exist? All of the day's emotions: boredom, longing, doubt, fear, joy, grief, insecurity, anticipation, voyeurism, belonging, safety and chaos - how is it all allowed to emerge through time, conditions and a sense of situation, rather than constructed?
How might we actually live together for a few days and see what happens? How might we propose a new way of existing in the same house? How do we eat together, build together, live together? Is any of this possible?
These questions continue to sit with me, choosing to stay with the big ideas, and I am now looking for new relationships able to go on this journey with me ahead of the work’s onward development.
Revisiting the idea of city landmarks, their function and ability to reflect the lives of the people who live nearby, a temporary monument is built in public spaces around the world and occupied by local households.
Part event theatre, part experimental architecture, and part live cinema, an alternative landmark is literally built in front of a pre-existing one: a four-storey-scaffolding structure populated with the lives of local people. A social sculpture about the daily life of local people, audiences watch their neighbours’ private spaces elevated to the scale of the monumental.
This scaffolding will be occupied by a selection of households, across various levels, in replicated dioramas of their living spaces. It's as if we are walking home, gazing up at the windows of strangers. Simply people watching.
Sometimes these people tell us stories about who they are at home or in public, sometimes we just witness them in a sequence of tableaux: they cook, eat, unwind, exercise, talk with, embrace or take care of their loved ones. With live cameras constructing filmic portraits to screens above, and a live band orchestrating this outdoor spectacle, the work dares to comprehend how grief, joy, ennui, disappointment and the voyeuristic all exist side-by-side.
Trailer from first phase of development here.
Credits
Concept and Direction Craig McCorquodale
Producers FERAL (Kathryn Boyle + Jill Smith)
Scenography Rachel O’Neill
Composition / Sound Design Greg Sinclair
Cinematography Kirstin McMahon
Video design Tim Reid and Dan Brown
Performers Minnie, Dan, Pat, Jasmine, Wesun, David, Rowan, Bart, Georgia, Ali and Ally.
Production Managers Craig Fleming + Suzie Normand
Technician Craig McNeill
Supported by Tramway, the Jerwood Arts New Work Fund, Creative Scotland Open Fund for Individuals and National Theatre of Scotland.
How do we live alongside each other?
