Monthly Archives: March 2014

The Dying Breath of a Moment in Time

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The following is a slightly edited transcript of a narrative I wrote at the Grandstand on 21/03/2014, for use within my performance. I include it here for documentary purposes.

There are still people who believe that, if you’re caught in a photograph, a small part of you is taken, captured within a frame. Photographs as moments, held in stasis, frozen. When you think of it that way, the photographer – or photographic assistant – wields a lot of power. Behind a lens, with the godlike choice of whether to destroy a moment, to crush it and push it and flatten it into a single, static negative. Maybe that’s not destruction. Maybe that’s creation. Either way, there’s a responsibility which comes with it that you have to take seriously.

Imagine the photograph doesn’t exist until an hour, or a day, or a week after you first press the shutter release. Imagine that moment is just trapped inside that light-sealed box – your camera – and the only way to set it free is to develop the film, and print the picture. But it isn’t the same thing as what you captured. In bringing the image into creation, you’ve destroyed what trace of the original moment remained, and the thing you have is a very different thing to the live moment you decided to encapture.

That’s responsibility.

You’ll see on the table in front of you that there are some pieces of photographic paper. Take one of them. The first tray you’ll see on the table in front of you is filled with developer, a type of chemical which will develop the image. You need to place the paper, face down, into the chemical.

Imagine someone, a photographer, at a race. The finish line, lining up the perfect shot. And it needs to be perfect, because that photograph will decide the race, will win or lose bets, will make or ruin a day, will bolster or destroy marriages. And then imagine, just a few years later and on the same spot, with the same photographer, but he’s photographing bodies now. The civilian war dead, brought to this site, earmarked as a mortuary.

“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Time shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Frozen, static within photographs, we will remember them.”

Take the photograph out of the developer, but keep it face down. The second tray is filled with a chemical which will stop the developing process. Just do the same as last time. Pop it in.

Imagine the photograph as being this building. The idea, captured, is finally developed. The act of creation destroys the original idea – it’s no longer needed. The thing is constructed, the bricks and mortar assembled; an act of creation, like the printing of a photograph. And then it’s put somewhere, and is forgotten, and it slowly fades until just the blurs of faces and colours can be made out, if you look hard, as traces of its history. Frozen and forgotten in time, this place is a photograph of a building, still kept in the album but barely looked at. Just there.

Take the photograph out of that tray, then. Swap it into the third bath, which will fix the image, permanently capturing it within the paper. It won’t take long.

64, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, 54, 53, 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Done. Take it out, quickly, and pop it into the water. Just a quick dip. And then pass it here.

A photograph is an end. The final product of a process; the end of an exposure; the dying breath of a moment in time which won’t ever be experienced again. It’s a final moment, and it’s fixed. And you’ve done an excellent job with this ending. You’ve developed your photo finish.

I’ll peg it up to dry.

 

Notes on the transcript

The narrative itself came out of a process of exploration of the role of the photograph within traditional and experimental forms of theatre, and through continuing discussion with Michael Pinchbeck and also classmates about the ideas surrounding photography and how the idea of the creation and development of the photograph could become an extended metaphor for the development and subsequent decline of the Grandstand.

The idea of the ‘photo finish’ came out of an informal pitch made to the class and to Michael and Conan Lawrence (Pinchbeck and Lawrence, 2014) some time into the process. With the history of the Grandstand being so bound up in its original purpose, linked to the racecourse, the idea of the photograph’s purpose within horse racing – the photo finish, captured to establish a winner – seemed a logical conclusion.

The lines of poetry in the middle of the narrative are taken from the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ from Laurence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen (Binyon, n.d.). It is a re-imagining of a standard remembrance poem hashed out about the war dead every year which links the idea of freezing or holding part of a person in stasis within the photograph to the large-scale civilian casualties seen during the war, linking to the Grandstand’s planned purpose during the war as a mortuary.

Throughout I attempt to use photographic terminology. For instance: capture, negative, develop, print, exposure.

The countdown towards the end of the piece not only provides a temporal structure, a measure of time that suggests both an inevitable journey towards an ending point, and the sort of measurement of time that one would use within the process of developing a photograph. The countdown begins at 64, a reference to 1964 as the year in which racing at the Grandstand ceased and it became static and fixed.

 

References:

Binyon, L. (n.d.) The Ode. [online] Sydney: The Australian Army. Available from: http://www.army.gov.au/Our-history/Traditions/The-Ode [Accessed 21 March 2014].

Pinchbeck, M. and Lawrence, C. (2014) Site-specific performance pitches. [seminar] Site Specific Performance DRA2035M-1314, University of Lincoln, 6 March.

Waiting, part 1.

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As part of the development of our site specific performance I set up an online survey to try and ascertain what people are waiting for, and what they think the grandstand is waiting for.  There were 28 responses to the first question “What are you waiting for?”, 28 responses to the second question “Have you ever visited Lincoln grandstand?” and 26 responses to the final question, “What do you think, if anything, the grandstand is waiting for?”  Now, not all of the answers that were collected were even remotely useful, for example one response to the first question was “for this survey to be over”, although this is an honest answer it’s not entirely useful to our creative process.

This idea behind doing this research is that we know that this specific room that we are working in within the grandstand has been used in a variety of waiting room settings and we, as a group, were interested in what people generally waited for outside of the grandstand setting.  We were interested in the idea that the passing of time while you wait for something to happen was more important than the actual event you are waiting for.  This is reflected through the fact that if you go into the space now you don’t have any indication of a majority of the events that happen or have happened there.  The grandstand, it seems, is waiting for something to happen to it and what happens now isn’t leaving a mark so time is just passing until something stands out and catches the attention of the public.

We are currently in the process of developing narratives that incorporate what we know about the space, how it has been used to wait, and add into those narratives the answers we have collected from the public.  Here is the narrative I created using the following things: the grandstand is currently used to host carpet boules for seniors; survey responses that a member of the public is waiting for a wedding and that the grandstand is waiting for some T.L.C.

You know your immediate future, you know that after Margaret has had her go it will be your turn again.  You also know that Margaret isn’t very good so you’re going to have time for a cup of tea.  You stand there, you glance around the room, you wonder why the bloody windows don’t open.  You think about how warm it will get here in the summer, how you’ll probably need one of those hand held fans.  You think about the wedding you’re looking forward to so much.  You think about how happy everybody will be.  You look around the room and you wonder how many happy moments it has left in it.  You think about this place, how all that it is waiting for is some T.L.C. and if somebody just did something it could thrive.  You think about how this place deserves so much more than carpet boules on a Wednesday afternoon.  And then it’s your turn again.

It’s Just You and Me, One to One performance

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When I presented the installation I had created in the toilet cubicles I realised a flaw that existed and that was the size of the space, with the audience continuously funnelling in and getting in the way of one another the issue arose that too many people were trying to get in one tiny space. As I explored this difficulty I came to the realisation that people would have to enter the space one at a time, this led to me to doing research into the idea of one to one performance “One to One performance… affords the spectator to immerse themselves in the performance framework set out by the practitioner. This can be a seductive / scary / liberating / boring / intimate prospect and an even more intensive experience.” (Zerihan et al, 2009) I wanted the audience to appreciate the grandstand in its full glory and with my begun research one to one began to become the ideal option. However, I didn’t want this performance to become something I act in, I want it to become something more and so I begun to look at types of site performance that could be fused with one to one performance and the concept of live art stood out “Performance, in fact, is now where it’s at; it’s hard to think of much recent art that isn’t, at some level, performative.” (Searle, 2012) Art and performance aren’t just a fusion, they are in fact one of the same thing and so through this I began to understand the piece I wished to create.

Further research into one to one performance helped me to understand what I wanted to undertake to a greater extent “One to One performance foregrounds subjective personal narratives that define – and seek to redefine – who we are, what we believe and how we act and re-act.” (Zerihan, 2006) This lead me to another realisation that it was enough to just display pictures but to give voice, my own voice and narrative I needed to research and create for the intimacy of this performance. Zerihan in fact proved to be an ideal practitioner when studying then concept of one to one performance and so I continued to read through her studies and she shed a lot of light on the topic particularly.

I researched into practitioners and there one to one performances and all featured a very intimate settings for example Pinchbeck’s, The Long and Winding Road, in which the audience member is in the car with the performer as they literally and figuratively take a journey together in a very intimate space.

Pinchbeck's performance

Pinchbeck, M. [The Long and Winding Road at Birmingham Public] 2008 [image online] Available from: http://julianhughesphotography.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/long-and-winding-road-michael-pinchbeck.html [Accessed on 19 March 2014].

Martina Von Holn, used one quote in her interview that particularly stuck in my head with reference to her piece Seal of Confession “What is essentially occurring is a making oneself vulnerable, the unpredictability of the audience… is an expression of that ‘disarming’ process. The negotiation of trust through taking risk lies necessarily at the heart of the encounter.” (Von Holn and Searle, 2009) I wanted to explore this, the concept that one to one performance is also about exploring your own vulnerabilities as well as the sites.

I looked back through my research and began to understand that for this performance I personally wanted to embody that decay, I wanted to represent the decay of the site through a platform that could be accessed by the performer and the audience. I watched the video I had created previously “What use to be” (Robinson, 2014) and a theme that continuously appeared was a horse, a decay in the stables the horses were kept in, a decay in the grandstand of which they would be weighed in and I realised that this needed to be incorporated into my performance.

Performances Cited:

Martina Vol Holn: Seal of Confession (2007)

Michael Pinchbeck: The Long and Winding Road (2004-2009)

References:

Robinson, A. (2014) The Art of Installation. [blog entry] 12 March. Lincoln: University of Lincoln. Available from https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/03/12/the-art-of-installation [Accessed 19 March 2014].

Searle, A. (2012) How Performance Art Took Over. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jul/03/performance-art-abramovic-tate-modern [Accessed 19 March 2014].

Zerihan, R., Ashery, O., B, F., Bartram, A., Dobkin, J., Freeman, D., Howells, A., Johnson, D., Kartsaki, E., Kela, L. Louise, B. Mendes-Silva, S. O’Reilly, K., Parthipan, J., Pinchbeck, M., Rose, S., Sweeting, S., Von Holn, M. (2009) Live Art Development Agency Study Room Guide on One to One Performance. 

Zerihan, R. (2006) Intimate Inter-actions: Returning to the Body in One to One Performance. [online] Available from http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol0601/rachelzerihan/home.html [Accessed 19 March 2014].

The line between fact and fiction – accidentally not posted in February…

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It was mentioned that the Lincoln Grandstand may have been used as a mortuary during WWII, during a visit to the archives I took this picture of a map of the place.  It’s not very clear but it is certainly clear enough that when you look at it you can see the word PLAN in capital letters at the bottom of the page.

P1040097

The friendly gentleman who was introducing all the information on the grandstand explained that it is unknown whether the grandstand ever was used as a mortuary and all the evidence we have of that is the map in the picture that clearly says PLAN.

The council, I imagine, would have put the plan in place as a precaution.  If the bombing in Lincolnshire got so bad, the grandstand would be an ideal place to keep the dead – after all, what else would it be doing?

Town Halls, schools, drained out swimming pools, gymnasiums… all examples of the kind of place where you could find a make shift mortuary during WWII.

Now, we know that during WWI much of the West Common was used to test aircrafts and as a location for training men to dig trenches.  But what do we know of the West Common in WWII, I myself know nothing, and this is not through lack of looking it is merely through not finding anything.

Perhaps I am too fixated with the issue that it is not a known fact that the grandstand was used as a mortuary.  The only evidence is a precautionary map and I think it is foolish to allow oneself to be overcome with a chill of what it could have been – the idea that had it have been a mortuary, it wouldn’t be used today as a community centre where children play or used as a makeshift mosque; that it would be more neglected than ever and wouldn’t be a place for anybody except ghosts.

All this being said I appreciate the idea of site specific performance being “a balance between ‘the host and the ghost’”. (Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks quoted in Govan).  I understand that we must take into consideration the history of the grandstand when creating a piece that reflects it, but the mortuary is an assumed past – we do not know it to be true, therefore is it right in supporting Govan’s thoughts in that “fiction and fact are shown to be equally unreliable and the notion of history as a stable entity is banished.”  The past of the grandstand is that it Could have been used as a mortuary, but this capitalised Could is what is blurring the line between fact and fiction.

 

 

References

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

Pieces coming together…

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So finally we got the three musketeers in a lesson together and brought all our ideas together, which has made us panic a little less.
We visited the the ‘Life of Lincolnshire’ museum which to me and Charlie there wasn’t that much we could use for our idea. But we did come across a bit where you could dress up in old clothes, this was brilliant as now we have a costume choice to use for the old part of the grandstand we are doing. This suggested we should dress Charlie up in 1960’s clothes as the date we are using on one side is 1964 and the other will be the current day. site work5
So as you can see on your left is the past date we will be using and on the right is the date of the show but as well as the day off the races. that is happening in Chester. As you can also see they are 50 years between the dates which brings us to using 50 years of the race track/grandstand history. But also the Lincoln City Council plaque is dated 1990 which makes it look a bit better, showing a bit more history but also a date in between the two that is used.

One thing that really caught our eye at the museum was the end of the race track pole. Which we are now going to use cardboard and cut up are own pole and stick it to one of the post at the front.site work6 We like the history behind the pole and the fact it is still in a museum and we never knew, like they said ‘you learn something new everyday.’
So like before we made a race track for the 1964 part, we used all the old horses names again and the jockey’s weights which we used stones and pennies the represent the weights. The old pole looks good on the post we are using as it makes it look like it’s the end of the track. site work3

site work4 You can’t see what is written on the pieces of paper but we put the times at the bottom and the lengths of the races at the top, also in the centre of the shutter window is a piece saying what the actually event is called. So after using these ideas Michael was telling using about using chalk paint on wood which we think is brilliant. So instead of paper we are going to use wood, paint them with chalk paint and write each event before the race times on them. Like being in an old bookies.

site work1 With the present side we have been playing around with it due to not being able to know the horses racing yet or even the bet ranking on them. Callum recorded a made up horse commentary so we could show what we was trying to do and how loud it would be on the day. This is one of our most exciting parts of the piece, using real life betting slips and the audience are involved with the piece by the history (some may remember) and the bets which if the horse wins they win money.
After looking around museums and how old races was done we like the idea of a news reporter but also a tour guide. In the present it’s like your there on the day getting your bets, everyone’s cheering or worrying about their winnings and you have the news reporting, reporting the facts but then you have the tour guide telling you about 50 years at the grandstand and the race track.
Finally getting the pieces together.