Framing Statement

What? Where? Why?

Our final performance piece ‘Highfield Avenue’ was a pieced based on a journey, we found this very fitting because we were showing a physical journey and mirrored the journey we’d experienced in discovery on the course. We followed the death of three very young children who died in a war accident on their road. We were videoed going from their homes, their graves and then back to the grandstand. This video process took an hour. After that hour had finished we taped round each others bodies in turn.

This process of the taping took two hours, including covering the bodies with a sheet and adding a flower at the head singing a nursery rhyme that would have been used at the time. We had the video playing for the first hour of our time in the space. On the day of the performance we wore what we did on the video to try and give the impression of a live feed when we walked in to begin our practical piece in front of an audience.

Our piece showed development. If you saw a few minutes of our video, went to see another piece and then came back you would see on screen how far we had gone. After the video you would see us doing the taping. By the time an audience member came back we may have done a whole a body by then so you would see that progress on the floor.  We had three pieces of laminated paper on the floor, typed on was this

 

‘We’ve been on a journey, we want you join us.

We traced the steps of three young children; Margret Elaine Marriot, Anthony Thacker and Lawrence Thacker, all who lived and died on Highfield Avenue in a tragic war accident.  When a plane flew into a telegraph wire and set alight their homes became engulfed in flames. These children may have lain where you stand now. Plans suggest The Grandstand may have been used as a mortuary for the war dead. From their homes, to their graves, to where you see us now we have brought the memories back for a day. The grandstand is now used as a children’s play area, we bring Margret, Anthony and Lawrence here to play, to live as children seeing as  their innocence and life was cut so short by things they did not even understand.  These are real people who need to be remembered and respected. We walked their footsteps and they touched our heart, years after they had been taken.’

Because much like with many peoples site specifics, it can be seen as unclear as to what is happening, because with a durational piece you do not watch the whole thing and the audience walk around.

We had an audio track playing for each body on the floor. Obviously as three twenty year old students we were not trying to pretend to be three young children, we were an embodiment of their story and memory. To try and show this we played an audio about each child. Lawrence, Margret and Anthony, we played the audio at the time the child we were portraying. The audio contained how they died. We did not make up these pieces but got them out of the Lincolnshire newspaper, so they were authentic pieces of research.  Our piece was performed at the grandstand but was filmed across Lincoln. We had never been out into Lincolnshire before. IT was interesting to see. Being from Nottingham I always see Lincoln as so small so to get into the actual places where people live and work instead of just the university and high street really interested me. The key word for all of this is journey!

 

 

Analysis of process

How it all began!

Like many members of my site specific I did not have a large amount of prior knowledge about The Grandstand. I decided not to do any real extensive research until I had visited the site so I could go in and at first see the site as an empty canvas for performance void of prior knowledge to what room was used for what.  However, I had seen the building. The building is what I see every time I drive in and out of Lincoln to go to and from home and university. When I see the building, I know I am near.  On my first drive into Lincoln I noted the buildings exterior and admired the stand outside. I was told it was used for horse races. I could see memories of past spectators ready for a day at the races. The illusion of how busy the site would have been was very vivid and real to me. In my mind the steps outside are filled with people sat there. There are railings in front of these steps now, to keep people out and to keep the memories in. To see it stand alone was rather disheartening. We turned up early to the first practical session at the site and we were able to look around the grounds. We saw the golf course, the horseboxes and the back of the building with its beautiful windows. The back of the building seems a lot more authentic because you’re away from all the cars and main road.

 

On first entering the site I was extremely disappointed. Here stood a building that once thrived from life, standing solitary and alone with traffic driving past without a glance. The windows and roof are beautiful and original, the building deserves it’s grade one listing. Inside however it is a simple community centre void of anything to do with it’s past.

I knew I wanted our performance to bring life the building that I felt had been abandoned.

We all wrote letters to the grandstand and read them out and the theme of lifelessness was strong.

We learnt very quickly about the links the Grandstand had to the war and steelworks. The pillars in the Grandstand have ‘Ruston’ written on them which is a very well-known Lincoln steel works, the name still lives on and I made the link that my student house is located on Ruston Way.

When little things like this came out to us then the site became more interesting. We suddenly had a world of research to look into. Everything also became clearer when we were given examples of past performances at the site. It was more obvious then what we were being asked to do.

As a group we went to the Lincolnshire Archives to research more about our site.

This is where we found out a lot more about the links The Grandstand had to war, we found out about the War bonds that were dropped over Lincoln, the women who used the Grandstand as a factory would have created these war bonds, the drop of 100,000 war bond flyers was so successful that they did it again later. This was interesting to us and after the previous performances we heard of we could see this being an installation piece. This was the first idea we had for a performance. As the day at the archives went on, we learnt a more shocking piece of information about what the grandstand could be used for. During the war plans were made for The Grandstand to be turned into a mortuary for the war dead. This was only so strange and shocking because today The Grandstand is used as a children’s play area so the contrast between the two is interesting.

The day at the archives we found the story of a young girl called Margret Ellaine Marriot who died on Highfield avenue in Lincoln, not far from us. The story stuck with us and would become our end project.

 

The next time we went for a practical session at the grandstand we worked more with this mortuary idea and thought about how we could show a children’s play area for what it could have been. A typical scene for a dead body is the outline around the body. We did this next to the door in the grandstand that now hold children’s toys. In this process we did not use the story of Margret we were just seeing how we could physically bring the mortuary back to the grandstand. The kitchen area in the grandstand would have been used as a viewing room, we wanted to work with another image of death and bodies. In the viewing room we lay on the floor with a white sheet covering each of us while members in other groups came to ‘view’ the bodies. The feedback we received from classmates was that it was really unnerving to see people they knew pretending to be dead and because we were real people it made it a lot more touching to see.

 

Making our performance

Meet Margret, Lawrence and Anthony

We first tried with the idea of filling the area with bodies. We were going to find everyone who died in Lincoln in the war and tag their foot like you see in a mortuary. We knew we definitely wanted to use real stories of real people. We did not want to make anything up about people’s situations, that was the point of bringing life to the building. The idea of filling the space with bodies seemed great in our heads but we didn’t want to just be doing that as our practical. We chose to cover each other in a sheet after the body had been taped because that we had been told was a powerful image and we did this in a ritualistic way, along with how slow and solemn our rendition of the nursery rhyme ‘Miss Polly had a dolly’ – a song that would have been used at the time

 

We were going to set one person the job of being taped around, one person to do the taping and I was to read a poem. This was at the stage when we were still going to go forward with using everyone who had died in Lincoln due to war accidents. We were going to write a eulogy for the people we researching

1. Kids

She may have lay at your very feet

where youth and demise meet

who’s looking right now

How they got here, we know how

left them young, she left them sad

Young brothers, mum and dad

Who were not there when she was scared and crying

When the bomb hit and She lay dying

Where have we seen this before?

Every day, the picture of war

The warning sirens that fill your head

Warn, if you’re not fast you could end up dead

Like the people brought to this place

No longer named, without a face

Their stories need to live on for all

No matter how young, no matter how small

Not all war dead flew the planes and held guns

Some lost daughters and most lost sons

Victory, a small price to play, to no longer see them every day

Elaine may have been set upon this floor

Family couldn’t recognise her anymore

Mother clinging to fathers arm, thinking of their girl in harm

Father in the viewing room, having to look away

We bring her to life for one more day

When looking at memorial stone, think of these who lie alone

Who had no say in going to fight, who just assumed they’d make the night

Who never thought it would hit their home

And now lie in the grandstand

All alone.

2. Crew member 2

3. Miss Gwenodine

4. Crew member 4

5. Kid

6. Crew member three

7. Mrs

When we narrowed down our performance and made it specific to three children we researched more on Margret Elliane Marriott and her life and death. We found newspaper articles reporting on her death. On the street she died we also found two other very young boys who died in the same accident on Highfield Avenue. This then linked to the site now being used as a children’s play area. Bringing both contrasting situations to the site to meet as one was a concept we were really interested in.

We did further research on the street and disaster and found where the children were buried, it was not far away from the street. We wanted to make the link between all three spaces.

Originally we just filmed each other walking on the road of the house, standing next to the grave and then walking up to the grandstand.

We then changed this to having the whole journey videoed in one take, from the house to the graves to the grandstand, so our audience could see where we had been.

We took time at the houses and graves to really document what we had found.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Evaluation

Shouldda, wouldda, couldda

We wanted to add some kind of audience interaction and we didn’t get a chance to do this. However on the day, audience did walk around our set and go and watch our video and while I was being taped around I heard somebody read out our ‘About our piece’ on the floor. . A lot of people also stopped to listen to our audio accounts.   People did what we intended them to do and saw our set progress from one body to three and saw how far we had walked on the video but we could have added a one on one element with the audience because in the other site specific performances we had seen that had involved it a lot and other members of the group created good one on one situations.

We wore the same outfits in the performance as we did on the video to give the feeling of a live feed, we ended with our hands on the door to the grandstand but unfortunately nobody was watching our performance at that point to see the effect we were going for.

We had a few technical problems on the day. We thought we were able to have the door open for the toy cupboard but on the day we were told we could not have access to this. This got rid of our link between childrens play area and what we were doing so we had to do some quick thinking and project a childlike image on the door instead to make the link.

It was a challenging unit for us and we struggled a lot with our theme and concept. To get there in the end was very rewarding. The hardest thing we had to deal with was making sure we remained respectful and truthful to the stories of the children.

Our set was very minimal and we could have added more to create a more dynamic area. Amongst the body outlines it would have been quite striking to add a few childhood toys. Also, to show to our audience that all of our research was authentic we could have given them more documentation to look at because everyone who came to see took time to read our little pieces on the floor so to have more of that would bring together the audience interaction and say more about our piece.

We used the room we thought was appropriate for our piece but on the other side of the room there was a loud and dynamic piece so a lot of our audio got lost in the other peoples performances but that is just the logistical issues we had to deal with as a process.

Due to all the site specific performances being in the same week our audience was a little low so my group had to be an audience for other groups. This was good because we got to see other members of our classes performances but it was harder than usual performances for us to really get into the mood a performance. The editing of our video also gave us a great deal of trouble, we had to find someone to video us walking for an hour in one take, then we had to find someone to edit our video.

We had no camera or editing skills and our video file was huge so that was a very stressful process but we were all very pleased when that bit of the performance had been completed.

If we could re do our performance I do not think we would take anything away from our performance, we would just add more audience reaction.