Exploring senses had a huge input into the creation of our site specific performance, once we had decided to take the sense of sight away. We explored with blindfolds and tried to identify a body by touch. Guessing who’s body was laid on the floor by feeling their hair, hands and facial features was extremely interesting and made me think about the families who had visited the moutrey to identify the bodies of loved ones and how they may have also struggled in cases where bombs had caused injuries so brutal that faces became disfigured. This would have meant that these families would have had to try and identify the bodies using the rest of their senses if what they were seeing wasn’t useful in helping to identify.

After this had happened we decided to tape around a body the body that was laid on the floor (mine) as shown in the pictures below.

The marked out body made us think of a death/crime scene, we then added post-stick notes to the body labelling possible injuries people who were brought to the maurtey may have had. As Pearson stated that performance can ‘illuminate places that do not so easily reveal themselves but which have their own unique characteristics, qualities and attractions’ we believed that a performance with lots of bodies taped and post-stick notes of injuries would help an audience see the connection with the room as many people are unaware the grandstand had different purposes other than horse racing- ‘Performance can 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, M. (2011) why performance?