After visiting the Lincolnshire Archives, I felt I had a lot more to work with in terms of being inspired to create a performance within the Grandstand. The session on the site the next day began with a whole group writing task where we individually wrote letters to the Grandstand, about what we had learnt at the Archives, how we felt afterwards and our thoughts towards the site itself. Many members of the group wrote letters about how they learnt of the sites past and several uses and how this has made them feel a certain way. The activity after this task was to use the letters to create a collage of thoughts about and towards the building. To start with we got into groups of 3 or 4 and then later we worked together as a massive group where we all said a sentence of our letter in turns, creating a combination of many thoughts and ideas which linked really well and created an interesting dramatic atmosphere for us to work with. I think this task has a lot of potential to turn into a full group performance work.

Later in the session, we split into 2 smaller groups where the aim was to develop previous 2 ideas shown last week; one performing outside on the gates surrounding the site and one which I worked on which was to explore the use of the main space in relation to the original blueprint plans for that room to become a mortuary. When seeing a part of this work last week I felt some speech and maybe a situation/theme was needed to link the action together so taking inspiration in the realisation that the main room was going to be used a mortuary allowed this transition to take place.

A lot of what people had said in their first task letters related to the mortuary plans and specifically personal feelings about it, so to add some speech I thought it would be interesting to turn it into dialogue. We used sticky notes to gather and write down particular parts of letters that related to the mortuary and stuck them around the set which was created with around 50 chairs to create a war/destruction scene. I directed the group to combine the same elements of the performance last week like hiding their shoes and lying down within the set as well as adding in some new concepts such as picking one of the sticky notes, saying it out loud and then sticking it to themselves to symbolise a mortuary tag.

When we performed this to the other group, during the end of the piece the performers in the group laid down side by side like dead bodies in the kitchen area, I led the spectators into this area which we had decided on as it is on the mortuary plans as the ‘Viewing Room’, a place where family would view the main room to identify their past loved ones. This piece overall was shown as a re-enactment of the situations that could have possibly happened years ago, as well as adding in contemporary dialogue and thought process. In relation to my previous post, this piece along with many others to follow was heavily reliant on the documents and pictures that were discovered in the Archive, showing the high importance of historical backgrounds of a site.

‘Where physical traces of a building’s past operate metaphorically to render absent present and function to introduce the spectator into other worlds and dimensions of our world that are other. The material traces evoke worlds that are intangible and unlocatable: worlds of memory, sensation, imagination, affect and insight’ (Irwin, 2007, p. 37) in (Pearson, 2010, p. 10)

References

Irwin, K. (2007) The Ambit of Performativity: How Site Makes Meaning in Site- Specific Performance. PhD. University of Art and Design: Helsinki in Pearson, M (2010) Site Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillian.