FINAL POST

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Samuel Bernard

The wait on my shoulders & The pork in my pie.

As part of The Grandstand Project, I was involved in the construction and execution of two pieces, ‘The Waiting Room’ and ‘EXPO ’69’. The reason for this is solely a result of research and the vast amount of history that the site had to offer. The idea for the ‘EXPO ‘69’ piece first formed when researching on a visit to the Lincolnshire Archives, the three of us who eventually collaborated on this piece were drawn to the articles and advertisements about the event which had happened forty four years before. The pictures which we took that day eventually formed the window coverings for the space and remained with us throughout the process as a form of inspiration, insuring we all worked towards the same vision, one of nostalgia and fun, juxtaposing the dreariness of the site and darkness of other pieces.

In contrast to ‘EXPO ‘69’, ‘The Waiting Room’ was inspired entirely by the space. The four of us chose the room and then went away and did research. Upon bringing the research together, one commonality ran through all aspects of that room’s history, people waited there. With the idea of waiting we set out chairs as a basis to work from and took to researching behaviour and control as well as more thoroughly into the individual stories of the people who waited and why.

At 14:00hrs on the 8^th of May 2015 I opened the doors to the Grandstand and announced the performances beginning to the four audience members who were stood in the rain waiting to enter the space. The first piece they saw was ‘EXPO ‘69’ as this was positioned in the entrance hall. The piece consisted of a small 7ft by 9ft room with two windowed walls, two brick walls and a sloped Perspex roof. We covered the roof in red material which hung like a tent roof, had a table of food which reflected the menus found during research, covered windows in collages of relevant pictures and newspaper cuttings, hung bunting and a banner on the railings outside, installed shimmer curtains on each doorway to enclose the space, had coloured lights which reflected on every surface, made a dress out of foil to represent the metal dress showcased on the runway of the EXPO, had Mr and Mrs EXPO sashes to represent the competition of the time and finally played the music of a performer from the original EXPO. All this created a space full of the atmosphere and nostalgia which captured history in a fun and unexpected way.

‘The Waiting Room’ was set in a space down a corridor and away from the main action of the day. On the day only four performances of fifteen minutes took place with a fifteen minute interval between the end of one and beginning of the next in order to re-set the space. The space contained eleven chairs and a receptionist desk, there was a clock on each chair and others positioned around the room. Also on the chairs were envelopes containing text to be read out or instructions to be followed at certain times. The envelopes were designed in such a way that a chain of events would happen as we wanted it to and that the performance would end with a reading by the receptionist of a list she had typed during the piece, before me reciting the poem ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden to which all participants removed the batteries from their clocks, placed them in a jar and left. The piece was about the pressures of waiting and the effects of time, as well as stepping outside the boundaries and constraints which these put on us.

Waiting for an epiphany & The singing, swinging sixties.

Week one saw us being introduced to the space and then exploring it for ourselves. We measured the space with our eyes and bodies, as well as gathering objects from around the site and bringing them together in the largest of the spaces. Once we had explained why we had chosen our objects, we began a discussion of our first impressions of the site, with words of description including dull, old, painted, clinical and characterless to name a few. Finally we chose a room to explore in more detail. It is strange that the room in which I spent the first hours of my time at the site was the room in which the majority of my work took place. The room I chose, along with three others, was then dubbed the ‘RAF room’ for the mural above the fireplace.

The mural, as the most prominent feature of the room, was the thing which grabbed our attention and which we instantly started to research on our phones. We found out almost instantly that the Grandstand had been used to test WWII planes before dispatching them overseas. Once we had this information, however, the next issue was knowing what to do with it and completely by chance I happened to roll over and notice that, from the angle that I was laid, the lights on the ceiling looked just like those either side of a runway. For the piece that we showed that week, we played airplane noises from our phones and asked audience members to lie in the place that I had, whilst we explained some of the history we had surfaced.

Although this was a simple piece it established a way forward which saw research and spaces come together to create something entirely new and different. Week two, however, could not have portrayed a more different message. ‘Drifting through Spaces’ was the allocated reading and this paved the way for a completely more organic exploration of a space. Smith says that you should ‘Avoid art’ and ‘seek those public places that are ‘hidden in plain sight’ and not visited by many’ (Smith, 2010 p.118). I was not in attendance for this session, however the reading still had the effect of making me stop and question whether history has to be such an important factor in a site specific piece, or is it simply about the space and what you find and what can be done with it. For example, if we were applying this technique in week one, all research would be discounted and all that would matter is the space, a difficult task in a site which oozes history like the Grandstand does.

The third week of the project was a huge turning point for our process and whilst visiting the Lincolnshire Archives we split into smaller groups of interest and ideas for pieces began to form. The two things that interested me were, as I mentioned, the advertisements and newspaper articles for the EXPO ’69 and the pre-world war two plans for the Grandstand which involved a mortuary, a viewing room and a waiting room, the room in which I had been mainly working.

With the new information fresh in our heads, we worked that week on extending two ideas which had been established in the previous session, one group inside and one group outside. I worked inside on a piece which dealt with the mortuary idea and played with a scene of scattered chairs and shoes in which we fell whilst walking through the space in order to represent a battlefield. We then got up, found our shoes and then went to lay down in the ‘viewing room’ with a sheet over us to depict the transition from war to the Grandstand.

After this session I revisited Mike Pearson’s questions in ‘Site Specific Performance’ and answered a selection which would best explain my feelings about where we were in the process.

‘Am I purposefully lost in space, trying to get my bearings?’

Yes would have definitively been the answer before the session in week three. Now I only answer yes with some hesitancy, as I feel as if the space is starting to reveal itself to us, revealing its history, charm, struggle, loneliness, helplessness, willing and needs. As each one of these rounds the bend and canters into sight, it feels as if we are that much closer to understanding how we can draw attention to the things that the site speaks of, for it does speak, to each of us individually, instructing our decisions on performance whether consciously or not.

‘As I move around do I leave marks: ‘to walk is to leave footprints’ (Roms, quoted in Whitehead, 2006, p. 4)’

We are leaving ‘footprints’ and impressions on the site and the people who inhabit it alongside us. From something as little as a mother from the playgroup placing her hand on a pillar directly where a post-it note had resided the day before and wondering why it is sticky, to the memory the man walking his terriers will have of half of the group clambering along the railings of the courtyard area, to the litter which we may leave in the bins on a weekly basis and to a stray balloon making its way onto the sixth putting green, we leave marks, there is no doubt. (I have since thought about this and a piece of string from week 7 was still tied to a pillar in the waiting room when we left after our final performance). The final footprint we will leave will, inevitably be the performance, and as I grow more and more attached to the site, I feel that it is our duty, and my right to make known to others what the site has to offer today, and what it has offered in the past.

‘What are the circumstances of my presence? Am I a stranger or an inhabitant? Do I pass unnoticed or do I stick out? Are my actions clandestine or do I draw attention to myself?’

The answers to all of these questions will change the longer I spend time at the site, however, I feel that after reading Govan’s ‘Inhabited Spaces’ and ‘Architectural Spaces and the Haptic’, it wouldn’t be wise to forget that spectators will be asking themselves these questions and, at that time, will be reaching near opposite conclusions to us. Yi-Fu Tuan said that, ‘architectural space reveals and instructs’, with the suggestion that a cathedral (the building and parts thereof) becomes a symbol for the values it projects (Govan, 2007 p.114). In this light, whether the grandstand projects to us a feeling of loss, dilapidation, renovation, rejuvenation, hope, sorrow, misery, heartache, former glory or boredom, it is not a given fact that a spectator will see the same, meaning a performance with a high level of ambiguity is surely out of the question? The Grotowski example, which is provided in ‘Inhabited Spaces’, created a living environment in which spectators joined in, is this the way to draw an audience to the point of realising the subject and motive? The Reckless Sleepers example used the incongruity of an industrial backing and lavish tables dressed in period banquet style to heighten the irony of the space, is this a possibility to provide a clear subject and motive? Or, do we look at this another way, do we want to be so ambiguous that the audience can draw their own conclusions? Is it an idea to ask in some way what exactly they got from the performance? Do we want our audience to feel every single emotion of alienation and the feeling they’re intruding or that they simply don’t belong?.

‘Who am I and what am I doing?’

The answer which I gave at the time was ‘[Answer to follow shortly]’, and indeed it did.

(Pearson, 2010 pp.19)

From this point of the process it was a case of working from an initial short performance devised over one session and expanding and improving it into a piece which we were proud of and which fit the criteria. The Waiting room was a piece which developed subtly and slowly throughout the rehearsal stages. We thought of new ideas and took inspiration from existing works, tried them out on our peers and then moved on. One example of this was the idea taken from German artist S. Astrid Bin and their piece, One Thousand Means of Escape, involving paper airplanes being suspended in flight, all pointing in the same direction, providing the sense of a need to escape. This would have worked within our piece as a gradual installation which built over the four performances, however in practice, audience members weren’t that good in making paper airplanes and we weren’t any good at making them look good either.

http://www.astridbin.com/one-thousand-means-of-escape/

There were many setbacks similar to this, such as the idea of tagging our audience with a brown label as they came in, giving them a name and a reason to wait. We found that this overcomplicated things and discarded of the idea which we had originally seen as being a main part of the specificity of the performance to the site. After hours of worrying that our piece was not specific enough, we decided to go home and simply research whatever we could that had any relevance to the site. When we came back together we discovered that there were more than a few cases of people waiting in our space and we decided to write down their stories and experiment with the idea of reading them out during the performance. Eventually the audience read these out as part of the instructions in their envelopes in a style which had ties to Fuel Theatre’s ‘While you wait’ project which is a chance to listen to ‘a series of podcasts, each of which is a different meditation on the idea of waiting’. Ours was similar in that the stories which were read were also different ways of waiting; the difference being that the audience themselves performed our text. Along with this, many other ideas lasted the process, like the individual clocks on seats, the list of things which the receptionist typed during performance and read at the end, as well as the controlling of the audience through instructions in envelopes.

In the final days of the process three major things changed, our audience size shrunk to 8 from 21, our performance length went from 40mins to 15mins and we decided that a poem should read a poem at the end which linked well with the piece and its message. The poem was ‘funeral blues’ by W. H. Auden and the first line is ‘Stop all the clocks’, at this point I took the battery out of my clock as the receptionist began to pass round a jar for the audience to do the same. The batteries worked as a small scale gradual installation on the fireplace, but the poem had many further links to the site as it spoke about death, airplanes and clocks.

EXPO’s process was fairly simple; we knew from the outset that what we wanted was a small space with lights and music and food, fun and atmosphere. In the early stages, we planned a lot, there was no rehearsal as the installation piece would be unattended for the majority of the performance. One thing that did change during our process was the space, a decision which came because we found the original space too small for an audience to enjoy. When looking for a new space, we found that if we were to set the piece in the entrance hall, you could see the original Expo site, making our piece even more specific. Along with all the old ideas, such as taking menus from the archives and planning the food, making the foil dress and Mr & Mrs EXPO sashes, buying material to drape from the roof an over the table and plants to add to the ambiance, the new setting brought new elements to the piece, such as a text which echoed a task from week one of the process where we wrote letters to the Grandstand, the text was a combination of individual letters which my collaborators and I wrote from the Grandstand, here is an extract:

‘Throughout those years of ache and sorrow, one week in particular has etched its way into my mind in the form of the darkest memory, and never have I been as lonely as I was in the week of the 24th May 1969 … And now, (would you believe it?) all these years later, I am to host my own sample of EXPO69. So here is my plea to you, audience member; Imagine you are there, imagine the atmosphere, the excitement and the possibilities, smell the smells, hear the sounds and see the sights. Let me watch, like I always have, and see, for the first time in years, happiness, affection and appreciation.’

Once the setting changed things started to fall into place and a plan which was drawn up in the middle of the process was practically unchanged right up to the performance.

Metal Dress

Audience

I’ve finished waiting & I’m all full up.

The performances are finished and I believe that we achieved reasonable success. For a site that is as remote as the Grandstand and a day as miserable as the 8th was, audience numbers were high enough that ‘The Waiting Room’ could run four successful pieces and ‘EXPO ‘69’ ran out of food. When I returned home my housemates who had been audience members described ‘The Waiting Room’ as ‘alienating’ and ‘like a real waiting room’, comments which I believe make the performance a success. From the lack of leftovers, the greasy fingerprints on the laminated texts and the number of audience who were dancing along to the music, I also feel that ‘EXPO ‘69’ served its purpose. In absolute honesty, better preparation for ‘EXPO ‘69’ is the only thing that could have improved the piece, along, of course, with a bigger budget. With ‘The Waiting Room’, I believe that we could not have improved it, only made it different, and as we changed so many aspects along the way, I feel like we reached the best possible performance in the end, the post-performance of burying a time capsule with something from each piece inside also added to this, signifying the constancy of the grandstand in an ever changing world as well as our faith that it will remain so for years to come.

My time in Site Specific has taught me many things, the diversity of performance, the influence of history and of a space and the importance of process, along with many others. Working at the Grandstand has had an unexpected effect on me, which is that I know feel more able to work in unconventional spaces, as well as feeling like when working in a traditional theatre, I can transfer the experiences and techniques I have learned in order to feel more comfortable with that space as well. I have learnt that any devising process draws on the values of site specific and that there are two different kinds of ‘place’, ‘On the one hand the kind of place in which Live Art practices are made, on the other, the kind of place in which Live art practices are presented’. ’ (Kiedan, 2006 p.8)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kiedan, Lois (2006) ‘This must be the place: Thoughts on Place, placelessness and Live art since the 1980’s’ in Leslie Hill and Helen Paris’ (ed.) Performance and Place, London: Plagrave Macmillan pp.8.

Smith, Phil (2010) Mythogeography: aguide to walking sideways, London: Triarchy Press, pp.118-121.

Govan, Emma (2007) Making a Performance. Coxon: Routledge P114-119.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan: London. P19.

Bin, Astrid: http://www.astridbin.com/one-thousand-means-of-escape/ [accessed 16^th May 2014]

http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/while-you-wait [accessed 16th May 2014]

Poppy Stockdale (12258957) Final Blog

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Poppy Amelia Stockdale

‘It’s not just about a place, but the people who normally inhabit and use that place. For it wouldn’t exist without them’ (Pearson, 2010, 8)

During the Second World War the Lincoln grand stand was set to be used as a mortuary. It is currently being used as a playgroup centre for toddlers- an interesting juxtaposition to its potential former purpose. This contrast between new life and death influenced my group to research into the children who would have been taken to the mortuary during World War 2, however with very different intentions than today.

In our work we used the information we found at Lincoln’s Archives, as ‘A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permitted with atmosphere’ (Pearson, 2010, 7). We found information on a young girl named Margret, who was from Lincoln and unfortunately died in a explosion during the Second World War, so we initially used her story to base our performance on, however, during our research process I found that two more children also died in the same event, Anthony and Lawrence Thacker. All three children of Highfield Avenue, Lincoln were in their houses when the explosion went off and sadly they all lost their lives, therefore all three bodies would have been preserved at the mortuary. As Carley writes when speaking about Rachel Whitereads Ghost, ‘To be haunted is to bring past impressions to bear on current circumstances, interpreting new phenomena in light of them’ (2008, 27). A modern day nursery is happy place- active children, a place to socialise and a room where futures begin. To think that this room was once a mortuary is haunting in itself. With this in mind we decided to place the story of the three children’s premature death within this happy environment, creating links between the cupboard that stores the children’s toys in today and the corpse outline we would create on the floor to portray the vast journey and transformation of this single room within the past 60’s years.

Our performance took place at Lincoln’s Grandstand main room on the 8th May 2014 from 2pm-5pm. The audience were invited to the ‘Mortuary room’ to watch a video showing us recreate the journey from the houses of the three children on Highfield avenue, to their gravestones and finally to the grandstand’s mortuary room where the performance took place. The audience were also able to view the taping of the bodies and pay their respects for the three children whilst listening to an audio recording describing what happened in the accident.

Our overall intention was for our audience to see the grandstand in a different light to how they may see it today. Pearson states that performance can ‘illuminate places that do not so easily reveal themselves but which have their own unique characteristics, qualities and attractions’ (2011), therefore we wanted to show this unique characteristic the grandstand once had in our performance.

If we were to visit a site on a one off occasion or pass by in a car we would think subjectively about it for example, what colour the building is or what material it’s made out of ect. As Lincoln’s grandstand was a site we would start visiting weekly it would become personal to us, therefore we decided look deeper into the historical content of the building as, ‘Layers of the site are revealed through reference to: historical documentation’ (Pearson, 2010, 8). We began to search the space and for clues, in one room there was Latin language painted on the wall, these words translated to ‘through struggles to the stars’, as we researched into this we found that it was written in memory of the RAF members who died in the war, this showed us an example of Macaulay’s idea that, ‘The site may begin to tell its own story’ (Pearson, 2010, 9) . This small piece of information led us to do more research into the grandstand during the war time, this was the moment we found that it was set to be used as a mortuary- our first and most important piece of information that would begin our Journey towards our performance.

Willi Dorners ‘packed bodies in urban spaces’ inspired us to begin to measure the space with our bodies. Dormer’s performers used their bodies to fill a small space in public areas creating juxtapositions that would stand out. Physically using our bodies gave us a better understanding of how the mortuary may have looked for example laying our bodies in the small kitchen area created an overflowing atmosphere- this is how we imagined the mortuary to look with all the dead bodies. We then took Dorner’s idea to, ‘Build a space- with chairs and tables plot journeys through the space and then move the chairs and tables and try to make the same journeys’ (2005). This influenced the way we walked as we had to slow down and concentrate on our balance in order to dodge chairs and obstacles. We then realised that people would’ve walked around the mortuary in the same way- out of respect, whereas today the room is full of fast movement and pace when the children go for their play group sessions, therefore Dorner’s guidance helped us find a juxtaposition between the grandstand during the war time and the grandstand today, ‘Play around with ideas. Very important- when you lose playfulness you lose inspiration. Stay playful. Set tasks. Find juxtapositions’ (Dorner, 2005). This then inspired us to somehow incorporate the children of today into our performance, as they show a huge juxtaposition between the atmosphere at the grandstand now and the atmosphere at the grandstand during the war. Rachel Whiteread’s first solo exhibition ‘ghost’ was also an inspiration for our performance because she brought history from war time to create her performance, ‘The exhibition consisted of a collection of plaster casts derived from pieces of post war furniture’(Carley, 2008, 26). She took pieces of history and brought them to a modern day setting, ‘Ghost foregrounds the inward-looking, opaque qualities of Victorian domestic spaces, in contrast to Modernist space conceptions of the interior’ (Carley, 2008, 26) therefore this juxtaposition between past and present would’ve also been the main focus of her performance.
As the mortuary was going to be the main focus of our site-specific performance, we decided to visit Lincoln Archives to try and find any information that could inspire us as, ‘both archaeology and performance involve the documentation of practices and experiences’ (Pearson, 2001, 55). At the archives we found information on a young girl named Mary Elaine Marriott who passed away on the 11th June 1943 in her home whilst doing her homework. Her death was caused by a bombing plane, its wing tipped onto a telegraph pole; this caused an explosion and hit 3 houses on the street including hers. The next day when we visited the grandstand we all wrote response letters from what we had found at the archives, when everyone read their letters out at the same time it made me think of prayers being read and therefore urged me to want to do a performance in memory of Margaret. Racheal Whitereads Ghosts, was described as ‘carefully and deliberately conjured from the ether blanketing the interior limits of the room, manifesting an afterlife for an abandoned piece of architecture.’ (Carley, 2008, 26). This interested me as is shows you can recreate a memory through symbolism, this gave me the idea of taping a body on the floor to representing Margaret’ presence in the room when it was used as a mortuary. The marked out body made me think of a crime scene, we then added post-stick notes to the body labelling possible injuries Margaret may have had. We hoped that the taped bodies would ‘illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted; and help us make sense of the multiplicity that resonate from it’ (Pearson, 2011).

Using a family tree software I was able to find out who else was injured in the event and what injuries they suffered from, ‘performance can enable integrations of academic research’ (Pearson, 2011). I found an article from the Lincolnshire echo that was written one day after the event (12th June 1943):

‘Ten people were killed and 3 seriously injured when a plane crashed on houses in Highfield Avenue, Lincoln, early last night. 8 people – 5 members of the crew of the plane and 3 civilians were killed instantly and another member of the air crew and a child died later in hospital. Civilians killed were Margaret Marriot age 11 of 25 Highfield Avenue, Mrs. J. Thacker of 24 Highfield Ave and Miss Gwendoline Whitby age 42 of Hykeham Road, Lincoln. Laurie Thacker aged 4 who was admitted to hospital with burns died during the night. The 3 injured who are detained in hospital are Harry Bishop of Highfield Ave., his wife Mrs. Esme Bishop and Anthony Thacker aged 3 also of Highfield Ave.’ (Unknown, 1943).
After finding this information we began using our time at the grandstand to tape around each other’s bodies to represent the ten that had died, hoping to show that, ‘location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to evoke specific past times related to the place and time of the performance and facilitating a negotiation between the meaning of those times’ (Pearson, 2010, 9). The picture below shows our first attempt of taping a body,

Stockdale, P. (2014) First attempt of taping. Lincoln: The Grandstand.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Potential Injury Documentation

This took 5 minutes to complete, as you can see it didn’t look very realistic, we realised that in order to create realistic outlines of all the bodies it would be time consuming, and because the grandstand was only open for three hours on our performance day it was a sensible idea to tape less bodies, we wanted to do Margaret’s as she was our initial stimuli, we also wanted to do Laurence’s body as he was another child that died. Focusing on the children affected by this incident would make more sense as we wanted to show the juxtaposition with the toy cupboard. Whiteread’s Ghosts, ‘bears the impressions of the specific room from which it was cast, but it is also laden with the impressions of past rooms brought to bear on it by viewers.’ (Carley, 2008, 27). This shows how past life can be brought to new surroundings and still fit in, just like the children that died would fit in at the grandstand now as it’s a place for children. With this in mind i went to do some more research to find if Anthony Thacker (the boy who was taken to hospital) had died or not in this incident.

Searching through documents of deaths i found Margaret’s and Laurence’s documented death both in June. Antony died in September after suffering with extremely bad burns in hospital. As there were three people in our group we decided to focus on the three children that died and have an outline of each of our bodies, representing the three deaths.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Margarets death.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Lawrence’s death.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Antony’s death

The group then visited the Lincoln Life Museum in hope of finding any more information that could influence our performance, I found a song that young children would’ve sang during the war time called ‘Miss Polly Had A Dolly’ The song had lyrics such as ‘she called for the doctor to be quick’. As the song was time relevant to when the children were alive and fit well with the mortuary and the children’s play centre theme I decided that we should incorporate it into our performance as ‘both archaeology and performance involve the documentation of practices and experiences’ (Pearson, 2001, 55).

Stockdale, P. (2014) Miss polly had a dolly- Nursery song

Michael Pinchbeck’s performance, The Long and winding road shows Michael on a journey where he filled a car with his brothers memories and drove them to the scene of his death, Michael explained,
‘The car was packed with 365 mementoes wrapped in brown paper and string, tagged and logged. The journey lasts until 17 May 2009 when I will drive the car into the River Mersey. The journey started with a letter to my brother. The letter became a parcel. The parcel became a suitcase. The suitcase became a car. This is my car. This is my car history. This is the end of the road. (Pinchbeck, 2009)

This inspired myself and my group into recreating the three children’s journey, where we would also finish the journey at the end of the children’s road- the mortuary. We decided to start the journey at the houses where the children lived, number 25 for Margaret and number 27 for the Thacker brothers as this was where we expected these children to have held most of their memories.

Stockdale, P. (2014) 25 Highfield Avenue

Stockdale, P. (2014) 24 Highfield Avenue- Today

Next we walked to the children’s gravestones. This for me was the first time I felt a emotional connection with our piece as it finally felt real and I knew these facts I had researched were all correct, ‘a shift in form can be noted from performance that inhabits a place to performance that moves through spaces’ (Pearson, 2010, 8) As we walked to the graves we passed a field with a park, it made me wonder whether these children would have played on this field like the children now play at the grandstand, ‘moving between places, wayfinding, more closely resembles story-telling than map using. As ones situates ones position within the context of journeys previously made’ (Pearson, 2010,15).

Stockdale, P. (2014) Me at Lincolns war memorial

Stockdale, P. (2014) Thacker Brothers Graves

Stockdale, P. (2014) Margarets Grave

And finally we then walked up to the grandstand, where the children would have been taken after their deaths. As we wouldn’t be able to have our audience with us on our 3 hour journey we had to show the footage on the day of the performance, this explains the reason we made the journey to the grandstand our last so that the the audience would get the sense that we had just finished the walk and at that moment we were bringing the memories of these children to life once again at the grandstand. Haunting can be both extramundane and mundane; it can be mobile or site specific. To haunt is to be insistently and disturbingly present,particularly in someone’s mind.’ (Carley, 2008, 27)

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Her Long Black Hair also shows a journey. This journey retraces the footsteps of woman. Cardiff describes this performance as, ‘one foot in the past and one foot in the future” (Derkson, 2012, 4). Therefore I took an interest in her work as we wanted to show the same juxtaposition. In this performance audio was used, therefore audience members were able to hear memories of this woman and also see pictures. On our journey we were not going to have the audience with us which meant they may not understand what actually happened to these bodies we were going to be taping or who’s bodies they were. Therefore we decided to add audio into our performance so that the audience knew the real facts. I researched and found quotes from the Eco on the event such as;

‘Mr. W. H. Chester of 20 Highfield Ave. gave a vivid account of the crash. “We heard a roar of engines”, he said. I remrked to my wife “Surely this is going to crash” and we dashed to the back door’

“The plane was just coming over the house tops behind Highfield Ave”. As I got to the doorway it seemed to be heading straight for our house, but he dipped one wing and banked away. The same wing then struck a telegraph pole and snapped it off.’

‘The impact toppled the plane over so that it crashed into the houses on the opposite side of the road and finished facing the direction it had come. As it struck the houses there was a blast of explosive petrol and oil was thrown over’ (unknown,1943)

Stockdale, P. (2014) Lincolnshire Echo 1943

We decided to write these quotes incorporated with descriptions of the children such as age, birth date, death date, address ect and read them out in the style of a news report this would create a sense of seriousness while we were taping the bodies, this reflects De Heddon’s idea of juxtaposing the ‘the factual with the fictional, event with imagination, history with story, narrative with fragment, past and present’ (Pearson, 2010, 9)

As we used the main room, audience members were constantly passing through and therefore could see the process of our performance, firstly the video of our journey during the first hour and secondly the taping and covering of the bodies whilst listening to the audio. We had cards and flowers laid out on the floor next to where we were taping the bodies during our performance; this explained briefly information on the event and the three children. As these cards were laid on the floor audience members had to kneel down to read them, this looked like they were praying for these children and was an effective example of Rom’s opinion that, ‘it was frequently not the locations that invested the performances with a sense of identity, as Harvie proposes, but the performances that made these locations and histories associated with them representative of such an identity’ (Pearson, 2011,9). Therefore the audience were involved in the performance without even realising.

When I noticed the audience members kneeling down I thought it would’ve been interesting if we had a whole bucket of flowers rather than just the three that represented the children, this way the audience could’ve laid a flower in respect to the children, however even without this act in our performance I believe the audience showed enough respect, we were in the main room and therefore it was quite noisy however on our half of the room audience members tended to quieten down. As the audience gave this type of reaction, I believe that we showed the representation of the children well, Like in Whiteread’s Ghosts ‘the viewer observes the cast of the room from the perspective of the room itself. A ghost usually returns to haunt the terrestrial scene of its death’ (Carley,2008, 28) I believe that we showed the presence of Margaret, Laurence and Anthony in the building which was challenging to do so as looking at the grandstand today its extremely hard to tell that it was set to be a mortuary. The video also worked well as ‘receiving landscape is this ‘to carry out an act of remembrance’ (Pearson, 2010, 16)’ which is what our main focus was.

Our final performance should have used the to cupboard that is used today however on the day we were not able to access it, therefore we improvised with a projected image of child onto the toy cupboard door to show the connection. I believe that if we were able to have access to the cupboard (as we had been told we would) then our performance would have been improved as it would have given solid proof to audience members that the room is now used a playgroup and therefore would have shown the juxtaposition more clearly.
When I first saw the grandstand i thought the only type of performance we could’ve created would have been horse-related, what I did not understand is that ‘within contemporary performance, site related work has become an established practice where an artists intervention offers spectators new perspectives upon a particular site or set of sites’ (Govan et al, 2007, 121) therefore through my own journey I have realised that sites are not always what they seem to be and there is always a historical story behind it.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Final Performance

Stockdale, P. (2014) Toy Cupboard- Final Performance

Stockdale, P. (2014) Memories

Stockdale, P. (2014) Projection Of Walk

Works cited
Carley, R. (2008) Domestic Afterlives- Rachel Whitereads Ghost. Architectural Design.78 (3) 26-29.
Derkson, C. (2012) Walking the edge of the stage in theory; or, Janet Cardiff’s sensorium for intermedial . Theatre research in Canada, 33 (1) 1-23.
Dorner, W. (2005) In: Pinchbeck, M. (2014) ‘Site Specific Peformance, Week 2: Practice’. Lecture, Seminar Room MB1008, Lincoln: University of Lincoln. 6 February.
Govan, E. Nicholson, H. and Normington, k. (2007) Making a Performance- Devising Histories and Contemporary practices. Oxon: Routledge.
Pearson, M (2010) Site specific performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pearson, M. Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. Clondon; Routledge.
Pearson, M. (2011) 1) Why Performance? [online] Nottingham: Landscape and Environment programme. Available from, http://www.landscape.ac.uk/landscape/documents/eventpapers/toolkit/1whyperformance.pdf [Accessed 16th May 2014].
Pinchbeck, M. (2009) The Long And Winding Road- An online account of a 5 year live art project from 2004-2009. [online] Available from: http://www.acarhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/final-words.html [Accessed 16th May 2014]
Unknown. (1943) TEN KILLED, THREE SERIOUSLY HURT, 4 HOUSES WRECKED BY PLANE CRASH IN LINCOLN. Lincolnshire echo, 12 June.

Ashleigh Parker Tragedy at Highfield Avenue – Final blog

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Ashleigh Parker

Framing Statement

What? Where? Why?

Our final performance piece ‘Highfield Avenue’ was a pieced based on a journey, we found this very fitting because we were showing a physical journey and mirrored the journey we’d experienced in discovery on the course. We followed the death of three very young children who died in a war accident on their road. We were videoed going from their homes, their graves and then back to the grandstand. This video process took an hour. After that hour had finished we taped round each others bodies in turn.

This process of the taping took two hours, including covering the bodies with a sheet and adding a flower at the head singing a nursery rhyme that would have been used at the time. We had the video playing for the first hour of our time in the space. On the day of the performance we wore what we did on the video to try and give the impression of a live feed when we walked in to begin our practical piece in front of an audience.

Our piece showed development. If you saw a few minutes of our video, went to see another piece and then came back you would see on screen how far we had gone. After the video you would see us doing the taping. By the time an audience member came back we may have done a whole a body by then so you would see that progress on the floor. We had three pieces of laminated paper on the floor, typed on was this

‘We’ve been on a journey, we want you join us.

We traced the steps of three young children; Margret Elaine Marriot, Anthony Thacker and Lawrence Thacker, all who lived and died on Highfield Avenue in a tragic war accident. When a plane flew into a telegraph wire and set alight their homes became engulfed in flames. These children may have lain where you stand now. Plans suggest The Grandstand may have been used as a mortuary for the war dead. From their homes, to their graves, to where you see us now we have brought the memories back for a day. The grandstand is now used as a children’s play area, we bring Margret, Anthony and Lawrence here to play, to live as children seeing as their innocence and life was cut so short by things they did not even understand. These are real people who need to be remembered and respected. We walked their footsteps and they touched our heart, years after they had been taken.’

Because much like with many peoples site specifics, it can be seen as unclear as to what is happening, because with a durational piece you do not watch the whole thing and the audience walk around.

We had an audio track playing for each body on the floor. Obviously as three twenty year old students we were not trying to pretend to be three young children, we were an embodiment of their story and memory. To try and show this we played an audio about each child. Lawrence, Margret and Anthony, we played the audio at the time the child we were portraying. The audio contained how they died. We did not make up these pieces but got them out of the Lincolnshire newspaper, so they were authentic pieces of research. Our piece was performed at the grandstand but was filmed across Lincoln. We had never been out into Lincolnshire before. IT was interesting to see. Being from Nottingham I always see Lincoln as so small so to get into the actual places where people live and work instead of just the university and high street really interested me. The key word for all of this is journey!

Analysis of process

How it all began!

Like many members of my site specific I did not have a large amount of prior knowledge about The Grandstand. I decided not to do any real extensive research until I had visited the site so I could go in and at first see the site as an empty canvas for performance void of prior knowledge to what room was used for what. However, I had seen the building. The building is what I see every time I drive in and out of Lincoln to go to and from home and university. When I see the building, I know I am near. On my first drive into Lincoln I noted the buildings exterior and admired the stand outside. I was told it was used for horse races. I could see memories of past spectators ready for a day at the races. The illusion of how busy the site would have been was very vivid and real to me. In my mind the steps outside are filled with people sat there. There are railings in front of these steps now, to keep people out and to keep the memories in. To see it stand alone was rather disheartening. We turned up early to the first practical session at the site and we were able to look around the grounds. We saw the golf course, the horseboxes and the back of the building with its beautiful windows. The back of the building seems a lot more authentic because you’re away from all the cars and main road.

On first entering the site I was extremely disappointed. Here stood a building that once thrived from life, standing solitary and alone with traffic driving past without a glance. The windows and roof are beautiful and original, the building deserves it’s grade one listing. Inside however it is a simple community centre void of anything to do with it’s past.

I knew I wanted our performance to bring life the building that I felt had been abandoned.

We all wrote letters to the grandstand and read them out and the theme of lifelessness was strong.

We learnt very quickly about the links the Grandstand had to the war and steelworks. The pillars in the Grandstand have ‘Ruston’ written on them which is a very well-known Lincoln steel works, the name still lives on and I made the link that my student house is located on Ruston Way.

When little things like this came out to us then the site became more interesting. We suddenly had a world of research to look into. Everything also became clearer when we were given examples of past performances at the site. It was more obvious then what we were being asked to do.

As a group we went to the Lincolnshire Archives to research more about our site.

This is where we found out a lot more about the links The Grandstand had to war, we found out about the War bonds that were dropped over Lincoln, the women who used the Grandstand as a factory would have created these war bonds, the drop of 100,000 war bond flyers was so successful that they did it again later. This was interesting to us and after the previous performances we heard of we could see this being an installation piece. This was the first idea we had for a performance. As the day at the archives went on, we learnt a more shocking piece of information about what the grandstand could be used for. During the war plans were made for The Grandstand to be turned into a mortuary for the war dead. This was only so strange and shocking because today The Grandstand is used as a children’s play area so the contrast between the two is interesting.

The day at the archives we found the story of a young girl called Margret Ellaine Marriot who died on Highfield avenue in Lincoln, not far from us. The story stuck with us and would become our end project.

The next time we went for a practical session at the grandstand we worked more with this mortuary idea and thought about how we could show a children’s play area for what it could have been. A typical scene for a dead body is the outline around the body. We did this next to the door in the grandstand that now hold children’s toys. In this process we did not use the story of Margret we were just seeing how we could physically bring the mortuary back to the grandstand. The kitchen area in the grandstand would have been used as a viewing room, we wanted to work with another image of death and bodies. In the viewing room we lay on the floor with a white sheet covering each of us while members in other groups came to ‘view’ the bodies. The feedback we received from classmates was that it was really unnerving to see people they knew pretending to be dead and because we were real people it made it a lot more touching to see.

Making our performance

Meet Margret, Lawrence and Anthony

We first tried with the idea of filling the area with bodies. We were going to find everyone who died in Lincoln in the war and tag their foot like you see in a mortuary. We knew we definitely wanted to use real stories of real people. We did not want to make anything up about people’s situations, that was the point of bringing life to the building. The idea of filling the space with bodies seemed great in our heads but we didn’t want to just be doing that as our practical. We chose to cover each other in a sheet after the body had been taped because that we had been told was a powerful image and we did this in a ritualistic way, along with how slow and solemn our rendition of the nursery rhyme ‘Miss Polly had a dolly’ – a song that would have been used at the time

We were going to set one person the job of being taped around, one person to do the taping and I was to read a poem. This was at the stage when we were still going to go forward with using everyone who had died in Lincoln due to war accidents. We were going to write a eulogy for the people we researching

1. Kids

She may have lay at your very feet

where youth and demise meet

who’s looking right now

How they got here, we know how

left them young, she left them sad

Young brothers, mum and dad

Who were not there when she was scared and crying

When the bomb hit and She lay dying

Where have we seen this before?

Every day, the picture of war

The warning sirens that fill your head

Warn, if you’re not fast you could end up dead

Like the people brought to this place

No longer named, without a face

Their stories need to live on for all

No matter how young, no matter how small

Not all war dead flew the planes and held guns

Some lost daughters and most lost sons

Victory, a small price to play, to no longer see them every day

Elaine may have been set upon this floor

Family couldn’t recognise her anymore

Mother clinging to fathers arm, thinking of their girl in harm

Father in the viewing room, having to look away

We bring her to life for one more day

When looking at memorial stone, think of these who lie alone

Who had no say in going to fight, who just assumed they’d make the night

Who never thought it would hit their home

And now lie in the grandstand

All alone.

2. Crew member 2

3. Miss Gwenodine

4. Crew member 4

5. Kid

6. Crew member three

7. Mrs

When we narrowed down our performance and made it specific to three children we researched more on Margret Elliane Marriott and her life and death. We found newspaper articles reporting on her death. On the street she died we also found two other very young boys who died in the same accident on Highfield Avenue. This then linked to the site now being used as a children’s play area. Bringing both contrasting situations to the site to meet as one was a concept we were really interested in.

We did further research on the street and disaster and found where the children were buried, it was not far away from the street. We wanted to make the link between all three spaces.

Originally we just filmed each other walking on the road of the house, standing next to the grave and then walking up to the grandstand.

We then changed this to having the whole journey videoed in one take, from the house to the graves to the grandstand, so our audience could see where we had been.

We took time at the houses and graves to really document what we had found.

Evaluation

Shouldda, wouldda, couldda

We wanted to add some kind of audience interaction and we didn’t get a chance to do this. However on the day, audience did walk around our set and go and watch our video and while I was being taped around I heard somebody read out our ‘About our piece’ on the floor. . A lot of people also stopped to listen to our audio accounts. People did what we intended them to do and saw our set progress from one body to three and saw how far we had walked on the video but we could have added a one on one element with the audience because in the other site specific performances we had seen that had involved it a lot and other members of the group created good one on one situations.

We wore the same outfits in the performance as we did on the video to give the feeling of a live feed, we ended with our hands on the door to the grandstand but unfortunately nobody was watching our performance at that point to see the effect we were going for.

We had a few technical problems on the day. We thought we were able to have the door open for the toy cupboard but on the day we were told we could not have access to this. This got rid of our link between childrens play area and what we were doing so we had to do some quick thinking and project a childlike image on the door instead to make the link.

It was a challenging unit for us and we struggled a lot with our theme and concept. To get there in the end was very rewarding. The hardest thing we had to deal with was making sure we remained respectful and truthful to the stories of the children.

Our set was very minimal and we could have added more to create a more dynamic area. Amongst the body outlines it would have been quite striking to add a few childhood toys. Also, to show to our audience that all of our research was authentic we could have given them more documentation to look at because everyone who came to see took time to read our little pieces on the floor so to have more of that would bring together the audience interaction and say more about our piece.

We used the room we thought was appropriate for our piece but on the other side of the room there was a loud and dynamic piece so a lot of our audio got lost in the other peoples performances but that is just the logistical issues we had to deal with as a process.

Due to all the site specific performances being in the same week our audience was a little low so my group had to be an audience for other groups. This was good because we got to see other members of our classes performances but it was harder than usual performances for us to really get into the mood a performance. The editing of our video also gave us a great deal of trouble, we had to find someone to video us walking for an hour in one take, then we had to find someone to edit our video.

We had no camera or editing skills and our video file was huge so that was a very stressful process but we were all very pleased when that bit of the performance had been completed.

If we could re do our performance I do not think we would take anything away from our performance, we would just add more audience reaction.

A Body Without a Home: Final Blog Post.

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Lauren Brook

Word Count: 2,734

Framing Statement

A Body Without a Home is a piece of site specific performance, working in the outside spaces within the Grandstand in Lincoln and exploring the site’s roles in the past and the present. Starting out on the project my initial ideas, especially after the classes’ visit to the Lincolnshire Archives, centred on mortuaries and the way the Grandstand may have been viewed by horse racing spectators- if it had been utilised as a place in which to keep dead bodies in World War Two, a time of mass death, would they have abstained from attending?

As I continued developing my performance with the three other students in my group, influenced by the drawn up plans of the Grandstand transformed into the different rooms needed for a mortuary we viewed at the archives, we steered away from the way the space may have been viewed following the presence of dead bodies and began to focus much more on the actual idea of the mortuary itself. We decided, with the advice of our tutors, to come up with a way of symbolising the bodies which could link back to the Grandstand’s roles in the community right now.

Many isolated ideas later, our lengthy thought mapping sessions culminated in making a durational performance lasting three hours, in which we would collect lots of pairs of abandoned, unwanted shoes and use them as a symbol for the dead bodies the Grandstand would have seen had it been a mortuary. In contrast to this, we would also explore the site’s role now as a mosque, as part of the process of praying every day is taking off your shoes and leaving them outside.

The shoes also represent the fragments of the Grandstand’s history and its present, which comes from one of our major influences- Tim Etchells’ Certain Fragments. One quote in particular has stuck with me throughout the process- “‘It should all be considered like a letter- written to a long lost friend…’” (1999, 76). The Grandstand, as a site, has connected a lot of people over the years in terms of being a service to the public, whether a racecourse or a community centre, and so to perform inside it is like writing to someone who hasn’t been there for a long time, or only knew it when it was a racecourse, or will only ever know it to be a community centre. The space ties its inhabitants together as it has changed and mutated, and we are all connected to a particular fragment of its history.

Toothpaste- A Different Kind of Litter.

On my first visit to the Grandstand, I didn’t know what to expect or what I was going to find. The Theatre/ Archaeology text says that when we enter a new space, “…everything is potentially important, as ‘every contact leaves a trace’.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 59). We look at every element of the site with detail, analysing its meaning and becoming absorbed in the architecture and history when it was at its best. In relation to the Grandstand, I found myself taking pictures of everything in the building, documenting them for inspection later when I began to think about performance ideas.

Walking around the perimeter of the Grandstand in Lincoln, I stoop down under a tree to find an old, empty and slightly grubby tube of toothpaste. Why, you ask, am I spending my time rooting around under bushes to find used toiletries? Well this is site specific performance, and if a urinal can be art then so can a bottle of Colegate’s finest.

I am joking, of course, but my find did spark rather a lot of thinking once I had returned home from our morning exploring the Grandstand, its history and its architecture. A thriving racecourse before its demise in 1965, the space is steeped in history, and looking out across the green fields surrounding the building I can’t help but imagine hoards of men and women, clutching betting slips and intently watching the horses thunder across the track.

A road goes right through what would have been the track now, and while seeing many cars go past during the three hours we were at the site didn’t break the sense of nostalgia and history, the toothpaste certainly did. Its presence within the grounds of the Grandstand threw me off completely, as I was looking at such a representation of the modern day when the objects which used to litter the site would have been discarded betting slips and cigarette stubs.

The toothpaste was found as a result of a task we were set to find objects on the site of the Grandstand. While I wasn’t surprised to find it, it also made me think very clearly about the changes this place has gone through, and the changes many other places have to endure, as communities place pressure on these sites to be utilised as community centres or golf courses or other things our growing populations need.

The Grandstand is still a wonderful site, and I can’t wait to get to know it more as we get further through the process- but knowing that among the users of the golf course and visitors to the community centre there are also people who are using the space as a litter box for their 21st Century toothpaste tubes, makes me a little sad and put out.

Can a Space be Tainted?

During the process, we visited the Lincolnshire Archives, and the concept of a space becoming tainted was something I definitely considered when trying to create my performance. I wanted to produce something that would play on the Grandstand’s history and the knowledge I had gathered about it as a building. In my view, site specific performance is taking an idea or an object and presenting it in a space, where it has to stay as it only retains meaning within that site- and I knew that I could take information and turn it into a form of performance specific to the Grandstand.

In Making a Performance Devising Histories and Contemporary Practises, the text says “…collections of objects and materials from the external world have been brought into the arena of the performance space. This process has forced audiences to re-examine the nature of the place where the performative act occurs.” (Govan et al, 2007, 106). Finding out information about the site from external sources and then placing that material back in to the space is how I see site specific performance in relation to my piece, and I was keen to use this to give the Grandstand back its history, even just for a day.

So among other interesting facts, while at the archives I discovered that the Grandstand could have potentially been used as a mortuary in World War Two- which sparked off a lot of ideas for our performance piece, as the contrast between a mortuary and a racecourse is very stark and could become a really interesting piece.

As we were shown around the archives and given information about the Grandstand’s history as an RAF training site, a thriving racecourse and its’ Expo in 1969, the thing that interested me the most was definitely the contrast between all these roles- particularly that before being used as place where people placed bets and jockeys got weighed, dead bodies may have been laid in these rooms, and families may have come to say a final goodbye to their loved ones.

The idea of tainting a space became something I held onto throughout the visit, and I began to form links to the modern day too, and the Grandstand as it is now. The space has become a Community Centre over recent years, where children come to be looked after; yet, just 70 years ago that very same spot where a child may play with a toy, could have been the place where someone’s dead body was left until a family came.

We will never know if the site was used as a mortuary, but we can analyse how the space would have been viewed by people in the past, and now, if we knew for sure that it had. For me, before I knew it potentially could have been a mortuary, I looked at the Grandstand with a lot of nostalgia at its racecourse days, imagining men and women betting on horses and their reactions when theirs didn’t win. Now the image itself is tainted and so is the space.

Creating a Space

During one session at the Grandstand, our lecturer asked us to create a space with masking tape, and then construct a tour of the space- modelling it on a room in the Grandstand building. We decided to focus on an unused bathroom, and below are the notes I made after the session. It reads:

“We were asked to create a space using masking tape and post it notes, and then describe a room in the Grandstand within that space. From this I started describing the toilets behind the kitchen as I had used them in a previous exercise, and I used post it notes to map out where the fittings were situated e.g. the toilets, the sinks, the doors. I then got Brad to become the mirror on the wall with a post it note on his forehead, and Tamsyn and Kent became doors that I moved when I guided the audience into the space. I was a tour guide of some toilets. I also stuck post its on the posts with words used to describe the space.”

This exercise was really interesting. It made me think about the recreation of space through different mediums as a performance, and how insignificant toilet spaces usually are; yet I was part of a tour of one, and its different elements were exposed in great detail when usually this kind of site is ignored.

What initially was just a part of the main room in the Grandstand was suddenly transformed with detail into an exact replica of the bathroom with masking tape. If someone had told me I would be doing that as a form of performance last year, I would have laughed, yet now this kind of creation of space really inspires me, and relates strongly to the Theatre/ Archaeology text: “…spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces: architecture and events constantly transgress each other’s rules.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 23). Constructing a masking tape bathroom in a space gives a purpose to that space, yet it has its own meaning before recreating a bathroom in it- the Grandstand’s many different rooms and spaces all have their own actions which are changed and explored through site specific performance.

Fragments

Our performance is essentially fragments of the Grandstand, symbolised by shoes, and this was an idea we focused on from the beginning of the process as a class. In the first few seminars we talked a lot about how devising performance is essentially taking fragments of history and piecing them together “What begins as a series of fragments is arranged in performance: dramaturgy is an act of assemblage.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 55). We began with a series of fragmented pieces of information about the site, parts of its history, and our devising process was filtering through it all until we had a coherent performance piece.

What were once just pieces of information we knew about the Grandstand, are now organised into a performance. Like archaeologists, the process is sorting through lots of information and artefacts to pick out the things that matter and then putting them in front of an audience. The text says “Archaeologists excavate an indeterminate mess of flows of things and particles…these constructions remain as pieces of evidence, stored in museums and libraries, to be reworked, reassembled, recontextualised.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 55). Using a space like the Grandstand for performance has meant that myself and my group have had a lot of information to comb through in order to create a put together performance, but it has also meant we’ve encountered a lot of really interesting material to choose from, and this has made our devising journey really enjoyable.

Evaluation

A Body Without a Home was performed on the 8^th May 2014 at the Grandstand, Lincoln. By the final performance day we had gathered 160 pairs of unwanted shoes from charity shops (320 individual shoes), and during the three hours of durational performance we transferred these shoes from one space to another twice, with a half an hour slot in the middle in which we recited pieces of text about mortuaries. The piece is an exploration of the Grandstand’s roles then and now, using shoes as symbols for the dead and also as a representation of the shoes left outside when the space becomes a Mosque.

The piece in my opinion had a rather slow start. We began with all the shoes scattered on the ‘drop off point’ at the front of the building, to signify the bodies and the way they may have been received during WW2, and the four of us stood by them dressed formally and appearing like it was a funeral. We then took it in turns to take one shoe each through the main room and into the courtyard situated at the back, where we would place it somewhere around the four chalk outlines of ourselves we had drawn before the piece started. Although it was slow at first, the process of picking up a shoe, holding it in your hands and taking it through to its resting place in the courtyard soon became extremely absorbing, and this part of the performance ended up taking us an hour and a half- yet it felt like it had only been 20 minutes.

As we continued taking one shoe each through the building to the courtyard, the audience coming up the road could see the masses of shoes, one commenting that it was “a really lovely image” to look at as they came to the entrance of the Grandstand. We started to speed up, taking two or three random shoes at a time to symbolise how the Grandstand, had it been a mortuary, may have become overstretched during the war with so many bodies being brought through its doors. One audience member asked if “the movement of the shoes” was the focus of the performance, which in a way, it is; the movement of the shoes from one place to another, symbolising the dead and their journey from the masses of bodies to an individual place where their family may identify them, contrasted with the movement of time from 70 years ago to now, from mortuary to mosque, creates the basis of the piece.

One strength of our piece in my opinion was the part where once we had put all the shoes in the courtyard, we lied down in the chalk outlines of ourselves surrounded by shoes and recited monologues we had sourced about mortuaries over a duration of half an hour. One particular line stated “Death space is created and defined by the web of relationships that include them.” (Horsley, 2008, 134-135). This is particularly prominent, because as I talked about earlier the Grandstand connects people through a mutual understanding of the space in its different states. A mortuary’s characteristics are defined not by the lifeless bodies it contains, but by the relationships that person has formed during their lifetime and the memories those people will think about when their loved one is gone.

I also think that there were weaknesses, particularly at the start of the piece when it moved rather slowly as we were only taking one shoe through to the courtyard at a time, meaning there were long periods of time when nothing was happening outside while one person was busy transferring a shoe.

Overall, I think we created a piece that explored the fragments of the Grandstand’s history really effectively, taking unwanted shoes on a journey from representing bodies in a mortuary, to simply being shoes left outside while their owners pray inside. This space has been a really interesting site to explore and create in, and the work we have produced was well received and seemed to attract a good audience to all three parts of the performance.

Works Cited

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. Routledge.

Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington K. (2007) Making a Performance Devising Histories and Contemporary Practises. Routledge.

Horsley, Philomena A. (2008) Death dwells in spaces: Bodies in the hospital mortuary. Anthropology and Medicine, 15 (2) 134-135.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/ Archaeology. Routledge.

A Body without a Home – Final Blog Submission

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Tamsyn Webley

My introduction to Site – Specific

As a performer, Site-specific was a very challenging and hard concept for me, to understand, ‘although the search for a practicable, encompassing definition of site-specific performance has long claimed scholarly attention, it remains slippery’ (Pearson, 2010, p.7). To learn and understand how to perform without acting was difficult. My overall performance process was slow for this reason, however near the end of the module I started to grasp the concept more and found it to be more enjoyable.

My site-specific piece was performed outside, in a durational piece of three hours, at the Lincoln Grandstand. It consisted of a lot of movement and as it was outside we had to take the weather into consideration. We performed on Thursday 8^th May to a limited audience. This was as a result of the sites location but this had no effect on our piece as we did not need audience participation, as our performance was more visual. It did, however, happen that the audience walked around by our group as we lay on the floor.

Over the course we studied the performances of many performers and got inspiration from their work. This helped guide our group toward our final piece. Our idea for our final piece originated from a workshop in which we looked at Bodies of Urban Spaces and many site-specific theorists’ ideas of what makes a performance site-specific, such as Elliot, Govan, Nicholson, Normington and Turner.

The process to get to my final performance was very long, as our group’s final performance idea was constantly changing; however we had a good concept in the end which seemed to work. We made the audience think about the Grandstand in a new way, ‘as site of cultural intervention and innovation, performance is a place of experiment, claim, conflict, negotiation, transgression: a place where preconceptions, expectations and critical faculties may be dislocated and confounded’ (Pearson, 2010, p.141). Through our performance we changed the audience’s perceptions of the site.

The Site – First Thoughts

Upon arriving at Lincoln Grandstand I was taken aback by the difference between the front and the back of the building. The front of the grandstand, where the stairs are visible, was dreary and dull. The wooden steps had been left to rot and the paint was clearly cracking. However the back of the building, with its two levels and windows, could have been mistaken for a large house or even a small hotel.

The area was very isolated considering it is joint to a busy road, as the houses and shops disappear as you approach the site. It is found opposite a field where horses are allowed to roam; partially giving the public an insight into what the grandstand would have been like when it was used to watch the horse racing. The only sign that the area has not been totally abandoned is the car park next to it, and the golf course and stables behind it. The locks on the metal gates preventing access to the stairs make it harder for the outside of the grandstand to be used to its full potential, which further isolated the site.

First performance

Sometimes when creating a performance within a space you can alter the image the audience had of it, “…people had a real familiarity with the space that was being worked with yet they were invited to experience the environment from a new perspective due to the performance that was enacted within it” (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2007, p.120). This can be for the better or for the worse or even just to make an audience aware of the potential the space had or has. My first performance piece at the site was created in a group. We took the idea of the races and had a character each who was reporting on the race, we did this to link back to the history of the Grandstand as a racecourse. We had planned to perform this piece in the stables but unfortunately that area was out of bounds so we instead performed on stairs that look out onto the main road. Looking back on this piece I was acting and not performing in the site. This is something I needed to develop for my final piece.

Starting Idea

During one of our earlier site visits, using the inspiration of Will Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces (which our tutor showed us in our seminar), we found hidden spaces around the Grandstand and put them on show by forming our bodies to them.

Figures in a Turnstile from Webley (2014)

The picture I captured above shows three performers using their bodies to fill the space of an old metal turnstile. This created a layer effect which we then decided to use in our next task; which was to re-create a shape we made outside, in a space inside the Grandstand. We choose to use a space which consisted of a small area with lots of stacked chairs. The use of chairs worked to our advantage to help reproduce the layers of the shape, we previously made, by changing the height of them.

We were then tasked with creating a piece from the spaces we had used inside the building. We made our piece to focus on a lively place becoming an abandoned place. We wanted to depict a place going from popular to unnoticeable. It was, however, interpreted differently by our tutor, who felt it was almost like destruction had occurred and we were then piecing it back together. He felt it linked back to the idea that the Grandstand was considered to be a possible mortuary in World War II. Upon hearing this feedback, we ran with that idea and decided to further it, taking our shoes off and dotting them around the floor by the chairs. This meant, during the performance, we had to retrieve the shoes. One of our group members also suggested that the three performers that were stacking the chairs could try and form shapes in each others spaces until they ended up in the space they should be in. In running with the mortuary theme, this could have been seen as soldiers putting their lives back together (putting shoes on and stacking the chairs), then trying to find their way home (forming shapes in the wrong spaces) and finally finding their way home (the shape that is formed at the end).

The Inspiration for development

Having learnt the Grandstand might have been a mortuary, we ventured to the Archives, in Lincoln, to delve further into the history of the site. Whilst at the Archives we discovered a detailed plan showing the layout for the mortuary within the Grandstand, as shown below.

Mortuary plan from Webley (2014)

Although we knew the building could have been a mortuary, seeing the plan really made me think about the space and the layout of the Grandstand. It showed the kitchen as being the viewing room and the mortuary in the main part of the building. This made the mortuary seem real even though we still don’t know if it ever happened.

Developing our starting Idea

As a big group of students liked the mortuary idea, we decided to develop it. This was achieved by incorporating text. On post-it notes we wrote down sayings to do with death, sadness and the war. This allowed us to focus on the destruction the soldiers and their families went through during World War II. The destruction could also be a metaphor for how, if the Grandstand was used as a mortuary, the family friendly image it once had would be destroyed.

Our performance involved the performers walking through chairs that are knocked over as if something has ruined the site. The performers then slowly, and when they felt like doing so, lied down on the floor. This represented the victims of the war and highlighted the area as a place where bodies could have been. Then one-by-one the performers rose up and collected their shoes and found a post-it note which they then read out. Once they had done this, the performer proceeded to stand in front of the audience and stared at them without emotion. Once all the performers were lined up they read out their post-it note again and put it on the post. They then walked into the kitchen and lay down on the floor (one-by-one) where I covered them, from the waist up, with their coats. Then another performer brought the audience into the kitchen and in this tiny cramped room the faces of the ‘bodies’ (the performers on the floor) were revealed whilst the audience were being asked if they recognised anyone. We used the kitchen in this performance because , according to the mortuary plan, it would have been the viewing room.

We wanted the audience to feel a part of the piece, that is why we made them feel like they were involuntarily in a room identifying bodies, similar to how the families of the World War II victim’s would have felt, “…the work is constructed so that the performers interact with the people who inhabit a particular place” (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2007, p.122). By having the audience crammed into a small room and showing them faces of people, as if they were dead, it caused the Grandstand to be seen as a dark place rather than the happy one it is depicted, through the brightly painted walls. It also allowed the audience to feel closer to the performers and therefore more apart of the piece.

Finding our group Idea

After developing a starting idea as fairly big groups, we split off into smaller ones. So after forming a group of four, we decided that we very much liked the idea of the Grandstand during the War time and the mortuary plans. In keeping with these themes we came up with many ideas. One of these included making a tank and obstacle course out of the objects around the Grandstand, as seen in the picture below. We did this because we wanted to incorporate the modern Grandstand with the older version of the site.

Making objects out of objects from Webley (2014)

These ideas then lead our group to decide to relocate our piece to behind the Grandstand and split it into three parts. We decided we would start off on the ground and use the starting idea that we had in the bigger group and lay amongst chairs and put our shoes around us. This would reinforce the Grandstand in the war and represent the fallen soldiers. We would then climb around the fencing and have the audience complete an obstacle course. This was an idea we had to incorporate the type of training the soldiers may have done when they were building the trenches at the Grandstand. Then our group would have the audience fly paper planes into a chalk drawn landing circle, which again was taking the war theme and creating a representation of the part the Grandstand played in it. We then planned to put the performance in reverse and do the piece three times in three hours. However reflecting upon this idea it would have been overly complex and not that effective. It may also have become tedious for the audience and unpredictable weather may have caused problems.

Forming our Final Idea

During one of our final rehearsals at the grandstand, upon hearing feedback from a tutor, we decided to focus on one aspect of our performance and removed the other parts to make the piece less complex. This left us with a piece that focused solely on mortuaries. The idea involved our group lying amongst shoes and talking about mortuaries using texts we had found. I recited the Abstract from a piece of text I found, “Emergencies that cause the deaths of large numbers of people can result from major accidents, natural disasters or acts of hostility. While what has happened cannot be undone…” ((Elliot, 2011, p.430) this is a small extract of the text I spoke). The text explained about emergency mortuaries and how they are planned. This was a relevant text for the Grandstand as it is a possible reality of what might have happened at the site. This final idea explored the site and what it could have been.

The following quote, by Cathy Turner, best describes how my performance at the grandstand was relevant to the site, ‘If the dramaturg attempts to sketch a “map”, perhaps this will always be in pragmatic and tentative relation to the territory of the performance event’ (Turner, 2010, p.150). We as performers created a ‘map’ or what could have been seen as a ‘timeline’ of the Grandstand’s history by showing glimpses into it’s past through our pieces. For example, our group settled on portraying the mortuary that may have been at the Grandstand, in our performance, and this was done in a serious manner but our ideas were based on the facts we know about the site and are not true portrayals. They were our interpretations of the knowledge we had of the Grandstand. We brought the history of the site to life.

Final Idea

When looking at our piece, it was brought to our attention that the Grandstand is used as a Mosque now and so people would remove their shoes outside the building before entering. So we decided to place the shoes outside the front of the Grandstand and walk them through to the back of the building during our piece.

Drop off Point from Webley (2014)

Outside the front of the grandstand there is a designated ‘drop off point’ which we felt would be a great starting place for the shoes (as shown in the picture above), as it is like the shoes have been ‘dropped off’ and as the shoes represent the bodies of the mortuary it gives a metaphorical insight into what the grandstand might have been like as a mortuary. After completing our final rehearsal it became clear more shoes were needed to have our desired effect. The picture below shows just some of the shoes we managed to collect for our final piece.

Shoe Collection from Webley (2014)

Most of the shoes came about through donations and charity shops. However some were purchased. The collection of shoes really enhanced the experience for our audience members and helped our piece drastically.

My evaluation of my final performance

My final performance was performed for the duration of two and half hours. Dressed in funeral attire we transported the shoes from the drop off point to the back of the Grandstand. Then we proceeded to lie amongst them whilst reciting texts we had memorised. After a period of time we rose up and then took the shoes back to the drop off zone but this time we paired them off and lined them up neatly. This allowed our group to show the Grandstand’s use as a Mosque as well as its possible use as a mortuary.

Due to not having the right amount of shoes till the performance day, the timings of our final performance were different to those we had planned. Our performance was split into three parts, an hour performance for each section, however the first part ended up taking an hour and a half and so the second part was shortened down to half an hour. This worked in our favour as the weather was unpredictable on the day and it had been raining, so an hour lying on the floor would have made the performance difficult because of health reasons. The timings of the final piece were a weakness of our performance. If we could have altered the piece, to make the timings better, we could have taken two shoes at a time round to the back of the Grandstand.

Unfortunately, as a result of the location of our site and the weather the audience numbers were very limited. Our piece did not have audience participation but the audience did engage with our piece. When we were lying on the floor reciting our memorised texts, the audience proceeded to walk around us to hear what each individual was saying. When lying amongst the shoes, we seemed to get a good response.

Our final performance helped me visualise how the Grandstand had developed over the years. From the shoes being spread out to represent that of a mortuary, to the shoes being lined up in pairs representing that of a Mosque (as seen in the picture below), the Grandstand’s history unravelled in front of my eyes.

A Body without a Home from Webley (2014)

One skill I have learnt from site-specific is how to perform without acting. I struggled with this greatly as I find the best part of performing is becoming a character. However performing at a site does involve just as much concentration as being a character. Although you are yourself you have to really concentrate on what you are doing to create a successful piece.

Word Count: 2842

Work Cited:

Elliot, A. 2011, ‘Abstract’, ‘Mortuary provision in emergencies causing mass fatalities’, Journal of Business Continuity and Emergency Planning, 5, 1, Business source Complete, EBSCOhost, p.430-439, [accessed] 17 April 2014.

Govan E., Nicholson H. and Normington K., 2007, ‘The Place of the Artist’ Making a Performance, Oxon: Routledge, p.120-135

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Turner, C. (2010) ‘Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 20(2), Routledge, P.149-161

Webley, T. (2014) Drop off Point

Webley, T. (2014) Figures in a Turnstile

Webley, T. (2014) Making objects out of objects

Webley, T. (2014) A Body without a Home

Webley, T. (2014) Mortuary plan, PLAN courtesy of the Lincoln Archives

Webley, T. (2014) Shoe Collection

Will Dorner (2008) Bodies in Urban Spaces, USA