Awakening memories of Gillygate

Has Gillygate appeared in your dreams. Do you know any of the history of Gillygate?

Do you know why What’s On is asking you these questions?

All will be revealed by Gillygate Sleeps, the latest research and development project by Dr Claire Hind, associate professor and leader of the Theatre and Performance MA course at York St John University, and her creative cohort Gary Winters, co-artistic director of the internationally-renowned company Lone Twin.

You may recall their Dream Yards walking tours, dressed in gorilla suits on the streets of York last year as they gave a guided tour to sleep patterns and told dream stories gleaned from the public.

Now Claire and Gary want stories of Gillygate for Gillygate Sleeps, and to help them in their project they have placed green boxes marked Tell Us Your Stories in various shops and businesses on the street.

At the front of each box are forms with the aforementioned questions and many more besides.

Have you ever lost anything on Gillygate?

Have you ever found anything there?

Do you know any hidden tales of the street?

What conversations have you had there?

What ideas were born on Gillygate?

“As part of the project we’d love to collect your stories, anecdotes or historical facts to help us develop a portrait of this medieval street across the years,” say Claire and Gary, who ask people to write on the card and post it in one of their Perspex green boxes.

The responses will help to produce a series of Gillygate Sleeps events, beginning with Claire and Gary’s celebration of the Feast of Giles on Gillygate on September 1 and an exhibition of photographs and neon signs of quotes from the research at City Screen, York, on September 3.

“We’ve invited shopkeepers to take part in the feast day and they’re keen to be involved,” says Gary. “We’ll be on the street from 9am to 5pm on September 1, performing and filming, and then we’ll be in The Gillygate pub, performing there too, telling people’s stories and the street’s history and some fictional folklore too,” says Gary. “We’re also thinking of creating a pub game that can be played in the garden, based on the life of St Giles.”

More details will follow on the City Screen show. “But I can confirm we hope to then take it to Gillygate as a site-specific response to the street,” says Gary, who also has plans for another Gillygate Sleeps event at York Art Gallery after its grand re-opening next year .”Our film should be finished by October, and the Art Gallery has expressed an interest in showing it for a period of time as part of their opening content.”

Should you want to add to the list of Gillygate questions, here is another. Why pick Gillygate for the project? “It’s a thoroughfare into York city centre but it’s outside the city walls,” says Claire. “Significantly, it’s a street of independent traders and businesses and that’s one of the things we wanted to capture, so that’s why we’ve placed the boxes in Wackers, The Ink Well, the Surgery, Snowhome and The Gillygate pub, and over the next few weeks we’ll be moving the boxes to other shops and establishments too.”

Claire and Gary’s research already has thrown up cause for thought. “The street is named after St Giles, the patron saint of hermits from the 7th century, who was from Greece originally but ended up living in a cave in France,” says Claire. “We’ve discovered that every St Giles street or church has never quite made it into a city centre. It’s always on the outside, just like St Giles in his cave.

“Just as Gillygate’s history has never been as well documented as other streets in York, because it’s outside the city wall.”

This was one of the key reasons for Claire and Gary to mount their project, especially their filming of the street. “We’re making an art film responding to life on the street now, filming people at work on Gillygate from early in the morning and people with knowledge of the street from the past,” says Gary.

“We’re using Super 8mm film, which is a [home movie] medium we really like, and we’ll be offering the material we shoot to the Yorkshire Film Archive, who don’t have enough film material on Gillygate.”

The Gillygate Sleeps project has the motif of a deer, or a hind, and if you are wondering why, here is Claire’s explanation. “What’s so lovely about doing the Gillygate story is that things seem to happen to us serendipitously, just like they did with our last project on dreams. This time, all the images of St Giles are of him taking an arrow intended for a hind, so saving the animal – and ‘Hind’ is my surname, so we’re playing on that story,” she says.

“We’ve also discovered that St Giles died on September 1 after being warned in a dream, which gives us a chance to return to our dream theme from last year.”

How will they trump last year’s Dream Yards gorilla gear in their Gillygate Sleeps performances on September 1? “There’ll be a quilted gown with deer imagery and we’ll be wearing antlers – and Gary will be taking an arrow for me on several occasions,” says Claire. “We’ll have a pop-up ‘cave’ on the street too.”