My drift took me to places I have never seen before in Lincoln. As I walked through the harsh wind it became difficult to detach my thoughts from rationality; how cold it was, how physically tiring the walk had become, and how pointless the walk felt. However as I became more and more unfamiliar with my surroundings I began to lose myself into imagination.

It began with me walking in a completely different direction to my normal journeys. Along the way I saw buildings that I had never seen before. Somehow the further I got away from Lincoln, the more the architecture seemed to change. This led me to imagine the history of the buildings, who are the owners, how the derelict buildings had been so neglected, how I would change said buildings. As my imagination took over I began to imagine the lives of people living there, what occupations would amount to such accommodation. These scenarios played out in my head as I walked, creating somewhat of a performance in my head, forming imaginary relationships and characters.

After walking further down this road I encountered a train track, the sirens distracted me from my initial thoughts and I began to go on another journey. As the train passed I saw the faces of the passengers, I began to empathise with them; their boredom, excitement, and anxieties. Again I found myself creating characters in my mind. The businessman that is travelling his way from stop to stop, longing for home. The excited students returning home to see their families.

I then began to imagine my own home, the idea of living away and being an adult. It reminded me of a performance in itself, how I am performing everyday as a mature adult, how much my life has changed and as I walked home the idea that you can feel a connection to anyone began to overwhelm me.

The Grandstand begins to feel less and less empty every week. The more I visit it the more interesting it becomes. I begin to feel its history. I long to learn its future. The more of a relationship I build with the building itself, the more inspiration I seem to get from it.

Initially the Grandstand felt like a dark, lonely place to me. I felt little connection to it. However the more I find out about it, the more I delve into its history, the more interested I become. For instance its horse racing pedigree. The fact that the main road used to be closed for horse racing astounds me still. The amount of cars that pass through that road every day and seem to pay no attention to the building itself. I feel a sense of irritation at their ignorance to its history, its architecture, its warmth. Little do they know the potential and history the Grandstand. The thought that that road was once considered entertaining, and now is polluted with people doing their daily errands makes me wonder how it could be returned to its former glory.

This makes me inspired to create a piece that completely rejuvenates the Grandstand. An idea that changes popular beliefs about the building as cold, dark and desolate. Instead making it seem more of a warm building, celebrating its past in a way that entertains, much like the horse racing of old. A piece that reminds the public of what the Grandstand used to be, how it is a vital part of Lincoln’s history. Rather than it just being the building they drive by on the way to work.

I also can’t help but think about the Grandstands future. Such a brilliant building with great rooms, a beautiful fireplace, and working facilities. The amount of space that seems wasted and empty. I would like to do something that fills these spaces entirely, to represent how I feel the Grandstand should be filled by something.

I can’t help believe that the Grandstand should be something more than it is, the fact it is in this almost middle ground frustrates me. A building with so much potential and history, I believe, should be used. This is why I want to create something that brings back some level of excitement to the Grandstand.

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.