Usually objects and people will have to conform to the space available to them but last Friday we had to take it to a whole new level. Using the inspiration of Will Dorner’s Bodies in Urban Spaces, that our tutor showed us in our seminar, we set out to find hidden spaces and put them on show by forming our bodies to the spaces around the grandstand.

In the picture above two performers took up the space inside a small tree to show both the potential of the space in which the tree takes up and also the fact that it is not noticed due to its location. It is situated by a metal fence, which people walk through,  to get from the golf course to the car park.

Another picture we captured was the one above which 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, through changing the height of the chairs.

Our last task was to create 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 being popular to not being noticed. It was, however, interpreted differently by our tutor who felt it was almost like a destruction had occurred and we were then piecing it back together. Our tutor felt it linked back to the idea that the grandstand was considered to be a possible mortuary in World War II. This was something we didn’t consider and then when it was pointed out to us we realised that it could be seen as that. We then instead ran with that idea and decided to take our shoes off and dot them around the floor by the chairs. We then, as performers, had to retrieve our shoes. One of our group members also suggested that the 3 performers that were stacking the chairs could try and form shapes on 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 then finally finding their way home (the shape that is formed at the end).

Work Cited

• Will Dorner (2008) Bodies in Urban Spaces, USA