The Big Border Bogle Hunt is an interactive story experience created as part of my residency with Alchemy Film & Arts. It culminated in a Halloween play with panto elements at Heart of Hawick, and an augmented reality (AR) film exhibition at Wilton Lodge Park.
The Story
The play imagines Hawick caught in the epicentre of a rift in the space-time continuum, possibly caused by local floodworks and the underlying Borders geology of Hutton’s Unconformity.
Through this rift, mysterious ‘bogles’ (Border ghosts) are appearing and causing mayhem. The townsfolk gather in the venue, styled as a council incident room, for a performance inviting them to be potential bogle hunters. They then head up the park.
Photographer credit: Joe Somerville, with thanks. (10-14, 18 by JH).
Multimedia
The bogles were represented by semi-transparent AR film clips placed in the park. The story combined local landscape, folklore and film archive with hyperlocal place, Scots language and audience interaction, in the style of a panto. The local performers sustained their characters to interact with the audience when they headed up the park to see the AR exhibition.
The performance included archive film reframed in newsreels, as well as prerecorded inserts from local people playing themselves, including terrific contributions from the museum curator, a teacher and the town provost. Their knowing participation in the story was fun for the audience and also allowed greater inclusion of Scots language speakers.
An accompanying book doubled as ‘field notebook’ for people’s bogle sightings, along with background information on the film clips, Alchemy and the project. It was printed in two halves with two front covers, with a middle spread on Hutton’s Unconformity and the time-split in Borders geology. It was conceived as self-contained, so that people could enjoy the book and/or AR without attending the performance. I was keen to include less familiar Hawick history and also celebrate the uncredited filmmakers, including my dad.
Inspiration
The plan for the Alchemy residency was to experiment with ways to reanimate and celebrate Hawick’s wonderful community film archives from the 60s and 70s, and invite people to experience vintage material in new ways. As a Hawick native with family connection to the film club, I was interested in how democratisation of media and accessible filmmaking can help to create new local stories. More generally, I’m interested in the interplay between past and present in a town steeped in history, the psychology of received stories and the potential for activism and agency in storymaking. I saw potential for citizen journalism, writing and media skills workshops within the story framework.
During the project, I was also influenced by learning about hauntology and the writings of Mark Fisher on capitalist realism and lost futures. This chimed with what I was learning from close viewing and selection of film clips. I was deeply struck by the scale of communal participation in events such as sports, dancing, theatre, fund-raising and strike action, as well as a recurring theme of building demolition and renewal. The compressed timeframe shows the closure of the Waverley railway line, the decline of the knitwear industry, and the rise of other industries (and buildings) which have in turn disappeared. The town’s annual Common Riding pageantry meanwhile shows a thread of remarkable continuity, although fashions, hairstyles, shops and vehicles change.
As someone who grew up locally, I was struck, too, by the unselfconscious joy in much of the footage, and the reactivation of completely lost memories in full sensory detail. Hawick was more diverse and colourful than I remembered, and full of different groups and passions that seemed a clear expression of people’s identity, pride and life-force. Spectatorship was live participation, outdoors and in civic spaces. Looking closely at people and their expressions and gestures through the editing process made them familiar, endearing, somehow known. Of course, it’s easy to romanticise and see what you want to. I also saw disturbing fancy dress, gestures and social hierarchies that aren’t acceptable today. And I wondered about the people missing from not just participation, but also spectatorship. I wondered, too, about lost futures, lost agency, about the film medium itself, the passivity of today’s screen consumption, sitting, watching. The democratisation of media production feels enormously important as an antidote to constant receiving.
AR is just another screen medium, of course. But it’s interesting because it brings film outdoors and into public spaces. It’s still early days, and it feels gamelike. At The Big Border Bogle Hunt, I found strangers chatting together, telling stories of people they knew, sharing phones, helping each other access the tech. It was something of an ice-breaker. That was my hope. Odd juxtapositions of images, timezones and people who are given a reason to speak to each other through a game. I felt that sense of connection taking part in the audio game Unveiled in Edinburgh – the feeling which helped to inspire this project. It’s something I never take for granted, and am keen to explore this further. I’d like to thank Alchemy Film & Arts, Rachael and Michael and the amazing team for the chance to make The Big Border Bogle Hunt together, the brilliant director, Fiona Mackinnon, and the lovely actors who were happy to meet the audience and work in a hybrid experimental form, with tremendous skill and fun.