The Britannia Panopticon is a building with a long and storied history.
It began life on the Trongate as an anonymous warehouse - no-one is quite sure when - before architects Thomas Gildard and H M McFarlane transformed it into a music hall in 1857, adding the familiar facade and, inside, a proscenium arch and tightly packed stalls.
The transformations continued apace, with the advent of moving pictures in the late 1890s, and, once impresario A E Pickard took over, a programme that added freak shows, waxworks, the amateur talent contests that saw Stan Laurel make his stage debut and even a zoo to the playbills.
Its name has changed over the years, too, from the rather unimaginative Campbell's Music Saloon to the gloriously euphonious Hubner's Animatograph, not forgetting its current nickname, the Pots and Pans.
Although the music hall closed its doors in 1938, as the appeal of such amusement faded, the building continues to entertain, with its lower floors home to a bustling arcade, and the crumbling auditorium playing host to performances and screenings arranged by the volunteers of the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall Trust.
The latest chapter of the Panopticon story comes courtesy of artist Minty Donald, whose Glimmers in Limbo project directly addresses the building's past, present and future, examining and interpreting its varied uses, and the decaying fabric of the music hall, too.
She has responded with a set of "interventions", each as layered as the palimpsest of the Panopticon.
"It was daunting at first," Donald admits, explaining the genesis of her project, "and really hard to know how much to do. It's such a busy space, with such a lot going on - the displays of the building's history, the decay upstairs, the arcade downstairs. I felt uncomfortable doing too much."
This unwillingness to overstep the mark has resulted in a series of installations, performances and projections that share an air of understated eloquence.
Against the rear wall of the auditorium sits Shoebox Archive, 600 white shoeboxes piled up in stacks. Some contain artefacts Donald found in the building - everything from rusty safety pins to scraps of celluloid - and, when opened by visitors, light up to reveal their contents. Others are empty, and visitors are invited to leave artefacts of their own. "I'm trying to get people to really engage with the space," Donald explains, "and the piece is also a sort of memorial to the space, which at one point was a shoe warehouse."
Donald has also engaged with the Panopticon's faded exterior. From the street below, passers-by will be treated to projected animations, turning the upper windows into a giant fruit machine. "Instead of fruit," Donald says, "letters spin in the windows, sometimes they resolve into words, sometimes they don't." Like the shoebox installation, Facade Fruit Machine is packed with allusions to past and present alike, the letter forms based on signage that has adorned the building over the years, the rolling drums a nod to the arcade that occupies the ground floor. That, too, has been transformed, with photographs of the dilapidated architecture inside, inaccessible to the public, displayed like estate agent's particulars in the arcade window.
The heart of the show, though, is a performance, and the traces it leaves. Last night, 12 singers performed accompanied by a pianola, its reels made according to piano arrangements by Giles Lamb of Savalas. For the remainder of the show, recordings of the event will play out, with selected lyrics projected onto the hall's walls, an installation which Donald calls "a ghost of a performance". "I'm not trying to recreate the old-time music hall," she says, "so all the songs were chosen as a personal response to the building. Some fit perfectly: the Orange Juice song Wan Light has the line, There is a place which no-one has seen, where it's still possible to dream'."
That combination of personal response and unexpected resonance seems key to Donald's work, which looks beyond the specific history of the Panopticon. Glimmers in Limbo is part of an ongoing research project, with a second stage due to interact with another Glasgow building with a rich heritage and uncertain future, the Tramway.
"I'm interested in asking questions about the goals of site-specific projects," Donald explains, "and about the spaces people are deeply invested in, looking at the built environment in terms of memories and emotions, not just bricks and mortar." Interaction and involvement are, too, central to the project. "It's really important to me that people participate," Donald says. "We can keep writing histories and rewriting them, even falsifying them."
The result of this deep thinking about places and spaces, and the way artists can respond to and transform them, has rejuvenated the Britannia Panopticon, and looks set to draw in a new audience, an effect that will last beyond the end of Glimmers in Limbo's run. It seems fitting that, given time, Donald's careful, thought-provoking work will become another story, another memory attached to the Britannia Panopticon.
- Glimmers in Limbo is at the Britannia Panopticon until October 27. For opening hours, visit www.glimmersinlimbo.co.uk
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