Monthly Archives: May 2014

Final Blog Submission.

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Welcome to The Waiting Room.

The Waiting Room is the site-specific performance I have been part of developing for the past four months.  The site was Lincoln grandstand and was performed on May 8th between two and five o’clock.  There were four performances and each performance had a maximum capacity of eight audience members.  The piece itself was fifteen minutes in length and depended highly on audience participation.

Inspiration for The Waiting Room came from various places, mainly the history of the site itself.  A lot of research went into learning about the grandstand and we developed a performance that we felt responded to that history with influences for the structure of the performance being influenced by companies and practitioners such as Rotozaza and John Newling.

In terms of developing the piece, we had very early inspiration from Rotozaza which seemed to stick with us throughout but that influence was mainly in regards to the set up of the performance.  Further developments and the content and structure of the piece really came from the research we carried out and the feedback we received throughout our process.  Of course we did research into many practitioners who had created pieces surrounding the passing of time such as Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece (as is informally known).  It was useful to do research into projects such as these because they gave suggestions for how we could emphasise the passing of time but as none of these elements really came into play in our site-specific performance therefore are not mentioned throughout this blog submission.

Other influences into our development are from the likes of Mike Pearson who’s works encouraged the exploration of the site and prompted me to ask questions about the site that I wouldn’t have thought of myself in regards  to my rights being at the site: “Am I there by invitation or am I trespassing?” (2010, p.19) as well as encouraging me to allow my feelings toward the sit to inspire the creative process of developing a piece.

The start line.

My first visits to the grandstand were under the influence of Smith’s The Handbook To Drifting (extracts) particularly the third instruction, “get your nerves out…Walk slowly and look for meaning in everything.” (2010, p.119).

The main space I was introduced to was the grandstand community centre, a space that is used for a variety of things from children’s day care to a mosque once a week.  The space that I was originally drawn to in the building was a small corridor lined with windows facing an enclosed outdoor area.

Robinson, A. (2014) [Image online] Available from https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/02/13/an-a-with-no-b/ [Accessed 12th May 2014].

Robinson, A. (2014) [Image online] Available from https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/02/13/an-a-with-no-b/ [Accessed 12th May 2014].

This was the original space we worked in and our idea was to draw on the windows – from the outside – the stories and history of the grandstand.  In the very first session, lacking the research and materials necessary, we breathed on the windows and wrote words that we used to describe the space or how it made us feel.  We planned to develop the idea to contain a great deal of visual art and colour – to be more of a working art piece.

Another space I found particularly interesting was what I fondly know as the RAF room.  This is a slightly smaller room in the building which features a stunning RFC mural over the fireplace.  Mike Pearson writes that when you are exploring a site you should ask yourself “How am I affected? What do I feel?  What do I perceive?  What do I experience?” (2010, p.22).  I had a very strong personal response to this room because my Grandfather had served in the RAF for years, however I didn’t explore this space creatively first because I felt like the shape of the corridor was more exciting and had the potential to tell stories in an exciting way.

The archives and a breakthrough.

The next step in developing our pieces was to gain more knowledge of the history of the site and to do this I visited the Lincolnshire Archives.  Here I was overwhelmed by the history of flight and Lincoln’s contribution to the services of the RFC and RAF during the world wars.  More information found was a plan of the grandstand showing how it may have been used as a mortuary during WWII as if it happened the RAF room would have been used as an office/waiting room.

Imge courtesy of artist, S Milne.

Imge courtesy of artist, S Milne.

I also learned about an expo that took place on the West Common in 1969 and this caught my eye as well because I felt like everybody else was focusing on the more morbid elements of grandstand history; however I let the idea go because it didn’t actually happen in the site and I didn’t feel as much of a connection to the idea.  I made the decision to create a piece that made reference to a lot of grandstand history because I felt as though none of it should be neglected.  Alice suggested the original idea of The Waiting Room and we agreed that the content should acknowledge a great deal of grandstand past.

We proceeded to put The Waiting Room into practice and began with setting up the space as a waiting room.  Twenty-one chairs were used and we also pulled round a table to create a ‘reception’ area.  It was decided very quickly that we wanted to highly involve our audience and use influence heavily from Rotozaza, Etiquette. This is a piece in which two participants go into a café wearing head sets and follow the instructions given to them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iU7mzaktsQ 
(RosieArches, 2010)

‘Etiquette exposes human communication at both its rawest and most delicate and explores the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust.  A young girl and an old man lead the participants into several micro-situations, often borrowed from film or theatre, wherein the private worlds shared between two people split and reform incessantly.’  (Rotozaza, 2007).

This statement highlights two things: the term micro-situations to me implies a moment, such as the touch of a hand or the brushing of fingers, that to anybody who can’t feel it on their skin doesn’t even recognise it happen.  Secondly, the manipulation that comes with the participants’ private world being connected and then split in a second.  This is something I was instantly drawn to and this idea of controlling and manipulating participants was something that The Waiting Room set as its basis.  Another piece that enforced this was Ligna, Radio Ballet which took place in the main train station in Hamberg, the following link is to a performance in 2003:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3pfa5QNZI
(Radiodispersion, 2008)

Ligna’s blog informs readers that:

‘A Radio Ballet is a radio play produced for the collective reception in certain public places.  It gives the dispersed radio listeners the opportunity, to subvert the regulations of the space.’ (Ligna, 2008)

My first response to this piece was ignorant to its political groundings and I was merely attracted to a piece that made strange ordinary behaviour.  The difference in pace and attitude of participants compared to the rest of the public, that contrast, is what I wanted for the waiting room.

Evidently both of these pieces involved using headsets to control the audience however we decided against this as we were limited to having only two channels on the headsets which would massively challenge the personal feeling we wanted participants to have.  Instead we decided to use envelopes with instructions inside ion order to control our audience.  This was meant to be reminiscent of letters sent during the war.  The envelopes manage to keep the audience focused because they are constantly waiting for the right time and wondering what is in their envelope. We also discussed wearing name tags and giving them to audience members, a gesture towards the possible mortuary, we eventually decided that these could be fictional identities combined with actual people who perhaps worked or had a story to tell about the grandstand.

Waiting for time to pass us by.

The next step was to gain content for the performance; I decided to set up an online survey to ask the questions: what are you waiting for and what do you think the grandstand is waiting for?  We eventually gained twenty-eight responses but we were unsure of exactly how to use them in the performance.  What I found was strange was that very few of the things people said they were waiting for were durational and they certainly wouldn’t be spending their time in a room waiting for the events to happen:  “This process of making strange enables the artist to relate to the site in a way that may educate, inspire and politicise an audience.” (Govan, 2007, p.122).

We moved on to the most important element of the performance, we had established that the piece should emphasise the passing of time in the grandstand and how we wished that we could stop time and preserve some of the things that had happened in the site because it all seemed to go completely unknown.  We discussed the idea of a durational performance but quickly dismissed this as it would spoil the effects of timing all the instructions and envelopes to give to audience members.  The agreed performance time was thirty minutes and we would emphasise the passing of time by giving each audience member a clock and having several clocks around the room, with a possible installation piece.

Instructing the audience.

The envelopes that we used contained instructions such as ‘go over to the kettle and turn it on, make yourself a coffee’ or ‘cry, audibly’.

Milne, S. [image online] Available at https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/03/10/talking-sense/

Milne, S. [image online] Available at https://sitespecific2014mpi.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/03/10/talking-sense/

These are just two examples but the aim was get the audience moving around the space freely.  These also included our attempts to heighten the senses, going back to a reference in The Guide To Drifting (extracts) regarding sensitisation.  We wanted the audience to notice everything happening around them and by changing the smell or temperature in one part of the room it may force them to take notice of the space they are in.

Getting half way.

After another feedback session we started to work on the silence issue.  We were inspired by John Cage’s 4’33 which highlights the fact that when you make no sound, what you can hear is music.  We wanted to carry this idea of silence and the sound of clocks being the ‘music’ however we were encouraged to add narrative to fill silences.  A specific narrative we were recommended was the poem Funeral Blues, W. H. Auden.  This wasn’t included in our piece until we made a last minute decision about an installation at the end of the performance and the poem fit perfectly. We developed our other narratives using the public research we had done as well as what we knew people had waited for in the grandstand; a practitioner who influenced this was John Newling who carried out a site specific performance in a shopping centre in Nottingham. His Ecologies of Value, 2011 traded in what members of the public found valuable (just information) for a piece of a giant riddler jacket.

Newling, J. (2013) 'Where a Place Becomes a Site: Values (part 1), 1995-2013' [image online] Available at http://www.john-newling.com/2013/05/where-a-place-becomes-a-site-values-part-1-1995-013/ [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Newling, J. (2013) ‘Where a Place Becomes a Site:Values (part 1), 1995-2013’ [image onlne] Available at http://www.john-newling.com.2013/05/where-a-place-becomes-a-site-values-part-1-1995-013/  [Accessed 10 May 2014]

The responses he got from this then went to form a text for a later performance.  A similar piece of work he did Make A Piano In Spain took 500 responses to the question ‘What do you do to make yourself feel better?’  “Newling explains: ‘Each situation becomes a potential event that makes for a very human kind of medicine; both a cartography of us and a conceivable territory to experience. They represent a programme of possibilities and a series of dramas made possible through the generous engagement of 500 people…’”  (Newling, 2009).

As we carried on developing our narratives and doing further research we discovered the story of Willoughby Spendlow, an old groundskeeper of the grandstand, and the story of a man who looked at the RFC mural while he waited to give blood.  These were all incorporated into our narrative.  There are examples of these narratives in any of our previous blog posts.

Improving aesthetics and atmosphere.

So far the performance was full of good content but was looking a little shabby so we talked about ways in which we could improve the aesthetics.  We decided first that we would print off templates for all the paper airplanes so that the ending of the piece was effective but didn’t look so messy.  We also made the decision to print labels to go on envelopes and type up and print all of the narratives.  Although we thought that handwritten instructions seemed more personal we agreed that it was difficult to read and may affect the performance.  We also decided to have a typewriter for Sam to type up her final narrative throughout the performance so it’s developed with the piece before it is delivered.

The final meeting and last minute changes.

The day before our tech rehearsal we made some quite drastic changes to the performance.  Firstly we cut the performance in half to fifteen minutes as well as cutting our audience capacity practically in half; this meant restructuring the piece and prioritising which narratives and instructions we wanted to keep.  The reason for doing this was so that the performance was more accessible to audience members.  We knew that any of our participants would want to view different performances in the site and we didn’t want to put ourselves at a disadvantage by asking for too much of their time.   We decided to only have one paper airplane in the performance rather than our original plan to have all audience members folding and throwing one at the end of the piece.  This also meant that we had to change our idea for an installation piece at the end of the performance which I think was a great thing because we had no solid plans before, we had just agreed that we would develop something.

Installation: then and now.

Our original installation piece was based on having a number of paper airplanes and our research lead us to this image by Dawn Ng, from her work I fly like paper get high like planes:

Ng, D. (2009) ‘Dawn Ng’ [image online] Available at http://www.dawn-ng.come/new/paperplanes/4.html [Accessed 1 May 2014].

We liked the idea of the planes being suspended in time and having that striking image but my fear was that the piece then would be overwhelmed with the themes of the RAF and we never wanted for it to have a singular theme.  However we did take the idea of suspending time in an attempt to let what has happened in the space remain in the space.  The idea of taking all the batteries out of the clocks at the end of each performance and storing them in a jar in order to stop time while the Funeral Blues poem was read was confirmed as how we would end each performance – each time building on the installation.  Alice also suggested that we use the end of our time at the site to bury a time capsule which I immediately loved; it made sense of everything we wanted to achieve in terms of preserving something that had happened in the site on that day.  The following is a link that shows the journey from outside the grandstand to the burial site of the time capsule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHRYiH8IqM8
(alicedalemusic, 2014)

Final Rehearsal.

This rehearsal was all about ensuring that our last minute changes had worked, we were fortunate to have a full audience to do a run of the performance and thankfully it all went well.  We set up the space with fewer chairs than we had previously and it looked a lot more effective as well as making the performance more manageable:

All that was left to do after today was to print of labels for envelopes and correct a few spelling mistakes in the narratives we had printed off but other than that everything was ready to go.

Performance – Evaluation.

We had planned for four performances to begin at 2.15, 2.45, 3.15 and 3.45.  We informed audiences via an information notice on the door which also contained background information on The Waiting Room in order to give it some context.  We also informed audiences that the time capsule would be buried at 4.30.  The room was set up for 2 o’clock and the difference is aesthetics from week one was huge:

Photograph taken at the site.

Photograph taken at the site.

Not yet published online.

Image courtesy of artist, A. Dale.

Due to low audience members our first performance was cancelled but fortunately this meant that the 2.45 performance had seven audience members.  This was by far our most successful performance; the audience responded well to the text and to the site and there were varying moments of awkwardness and discomfort that achieved exactly what we had aimed for.  The most successful moment for me was when an audience member laughed for two minutes; it overlapped with a girl crying and a narrative about wedding vows and the moment wasincredibly surreal.  The laugh didn’t belong in that moment and that is what made it so poignant

The second performance had only three audience members, therefore it was not as successful by far.  One of the performers lost focus nd the audience did not respond so well to the text which may have been because they felt so isolated in the room.  The third performance was much of the same though the group had fortunately managed to regain their focus.  As the first performance had been cancelled we thought the third performance would be our final one but there had been miscommunications which lead to a full audience expecting a performance.  As we had labelled all of our envelopes according to our planned performance times we managed to salvage a final performance by turning back all the clocks in the room and running the piece as though the time was 2.15.  This performance ran well but still didn’t seem to evoke the same reaction as the first performance.

For me our entire process highlighted the dangers of relying so heavily on audience participation. In order to have improved the final performances I would have ensured that we always had a full audience, we could have combated this on the day by simply not performing until we had between six and eight audience members, but we didn’t feel like we shouldturn down audience members who did arrive.  I would also ensure that all group members kept focus during the performances.  I can admit that I lost focus slightly during our reset periods however it was very frustrating to see that the lack of focus from a performer effected the running of the piece.

Another change I would make would be to make more of the time capsule; I feel like it was such an important part of our piece that went slightly unnoticed by everybody whereas it could have been something that audience members were also a part of.

If I were doing the performance over again I would make a lot of changes, mainly because the way I interpret readings and works of other practitioners now is different to how I interpreted it at the start of this process.  I feel as though The Waiting Room should have used a larger variation of works as inspiration becasue we seemed to decide on two performqnce influences and then let the site do the rest of the work.  This being said, I am proud of our final performance.  Of course there are things I would change however I think what we achieved was a success, certainly considering that four months ago I was being introduced to the concept of site-specific performance for the first time.

Works Cited

Alicedalemusic (2014) ‘The Waiting Room’ Time Capsule (Post Performance) [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHRYiH8IqM8 [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington, K. (2007) Making a Performance. London and New York: Routledge.

Ligna (2003) Exercise in lingering not according to the rules [online] Available at http://ligna.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/radio-ballet.html [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Newling, J. (2009) Make a piano in Spain, 2008 – Wellcome Collection, London [online]  Available at  http://www.john-newling.com/2009/05/making-a-piano-in-spain-2008-wellcome-collection-london/  [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London:Palgrave

Ng, D. (2009) Dawn Ng. [online] Available at http://www.dawn-ng.com/new/paperplanes/4.html [Accessed 1 May 2014].

Radiodispersion (2008) Radio Ballet Leipzig Main station Part 1 [online video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3pfa5QNZI [Accessed 10 May 2014].

RosieArches (2010) Rotozaza’s Etiquette // Part of the Arches OFF-SITE // 9-13 Feb 2010 [online video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iU7mzaktsQ  [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Rotozaza (2007) Etiquette. [online] Available from http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/etiquette2.html [Accessed 10 May 2014].

Final Blog Submission – Adam ate the apple and my teeth still ache.

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Adam ate the apple and my teeth still ache, was a performance installation performed on the 8th of May with one on one audience member interaction, performed by two female artists in a ladies bathroom at the Grandstand in Lincoln. The piece explored the decomposition of the Grandstand and what the ‘core’ of the Grandstand was/is and its previous, present and future inhabitants, through Apples.

The concept originally derived, from Alice’s personal connection to the Grandstand. In which in one of the first weeks of development and research, we were asked to bring a gift to the Grandstand, Alice brought a perfume in a bottle shaped like an apple. Thus a narrative derived from the gift about how the apple had fallen from a special tree in which all the horses who ate from it won their race. Immediately the connection of Apples and horses became apparent, even more so with our site being a Grandstand which used to be a part of a racecourse. This later developed into the ideology that, the core of an apple represents the Grandstand, the surrounding apple/pieces of apple represents the previous, present and future inhabitants of the grandstand. Thus if our performance installation was to be placed in any other site the context would be completely irrelevant therefore applying the principles that is/are site-specific.

The performance installation took place in a ladies bathroom, in which an audience member entered by themselves one at a time and explored the space in full, looking around the open space where most were invited to wash apples in the sink with me and to re-core certain apples.Then exploring each toilet cubicle, two out of four cubicles just contained an audio, one of a horse eating an apple and the other playing a song by the Andrew sisters called Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. In one cubicle we plastered pictures of Alice’s teeth scan, my teeth biting into an apple and horses teeth. In the final cubicle Alice sat with her hands and feet tied with twine, a cheek retractor in and the spiel of Appletite playing.

Apples and Teeth

 

2/05/14 Lincoln Grandstand 

 

Alice

 

2/05/14 Lincoln Grandstand 

The piece took place for 15 minutes, twice every hour for 3 hours due to health and safety as Alice could not sit for any longer with a cheek retractor in.

The audience’s part in the final performance was vital, in previous weeks whilst ‘rehearsing’ we were unable to imagine and re-create weekly what the space would look like in the final performance due to the vast amount of apples and jars that were needed and the arrangement that we could only get those there on the day of the performance. Thus throughout the creative process it was difficult to practice so to say to audience members, therefore it was all or nothing on the performance day which although nerve-racking was also exhilarating seeing the whole process and hard work come together. Having no pre-conceptions of what to expect from audience members, it added to the experience as many were willing to interact and wash apples, however others just wanted to explore and watch. Some vocalised their thoughts and feelings, others were completely silent throughout the whole exploration, and this made each performance unique to each audience member who experienced it, an advantage of using one to one performance.

Pearson notes that site-specific performance ranges “…from taking audiences to unusual sites, to bringing unusual sites to them.” (Pearson, 2010, p.5) This is true in the case of our piece. Firstly taking audiences to an usual site, the Grandstand. Although some members of the audience may be familiar as to what a Grandstand is and what its purpose is, when they arrive they do not expect to be seeing a performance, especially not within the context they normally associate performing with. Secondly, bringing unusual sites to them also applies to our performance piece. In the ladies bathroom, we installed approximately 300 apples and around 130 jars, filled with decomposing apples and tea lights; a site we presume is unusual to most audience members.

As mentioned previously, the connection of apples and the Grandstand was initiated by Alice’s personal gift to the grandstand. With guidance, we knew we wanted to have apples heavily involved in our piece due to the connection that horses eat apples; horses were and are still present at the Grandstand.

Firstly we experimented with a corridor as our original performance space; it had full length windows on one side and was full of natural light shining through from outside, much like a greenhouse. We thought this narrow spaced corridor would be brilliant for creating an installation piece by aligning our jars of decomposed apples, re-creating a production line in which the apples would go from fresh to rotting/de-composed, re-iterating the decomposition of the Grandstand.

Our research became concentrated on apples and everything or anything to do with apples. An apple is the fruit of knowledge, Sir Isaac Newton found the notion of gravity due to an apple falling on his head, and it’s a forbidden fruit in the bible. Initially from our first research, we decided to concentrate on the biblical aspect of the apple, looking at apple sayings and references in the bible for example;

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her and he ate it.” (Gen 3.6)

However whilst exploring the Grandstand as a space further,  we then found the ladies bathroom towards the rear of the Grandstand,which led off of our original corridor ‘performance space’. This new ‘found’ space excited us, it seemed appropriate for what we were trying to create. The space gave off an eerie ‘vibe’ even though there is a prominent sound of an extractor fan.

Whilst experimenting in the space we developed a divide between the space, creating two performance spaces. One area being a wide open space in which the bathroom sinks are situated with a mirror on one wall and a door on the adjacent wall. The other space consists of the toilet cubicles and a very ‘peculiar triangular pointed’ corner. We decided to experiment with the first performance space being the ‘Biblical space’ and the second as the ‘personal space’. The ‘Biblical’ performance space really developed in one week’s session. Our tutor, Michael noted to us that the space can ‘give’ you ideas and thoughts in a sense, for example the mirror on the wall. If you stood looking into the mirror at the door and another person stood looking into the mirror from the door you could create this contact that was personal yet distant. We’d been experimenting with different texts relating to apples and the importance of the fruit.

In the ‘personal’ space, which we had developed and worked in, in previous weeks we experimented with this being a space where the audience learnt about Alice’s personal experience with apples. We recorded a text that Alice had written which was a brief history of why she cannot eat apples, named Appletite. This played on a speaker in a toilet cubicle whilst Alice stared at the audience member who was stood in the ‘corner’. This as Mike Pearson notes used the architecture of the building to “…impose new arrangements with the audience in lines, alleys or blocks to conspire effects of distance, closeness, obliqueness, etc.” (Pearson, 2010, p.176)

After bringing an audience member into the space, we received some feedback which helped shape our piece drastically into what it became in final performance. The audience member enjoyed the spiel of Alice’s personal connection with apples and we received notes to incorporate key words into the text relating to apples, horses or the Grandstand. Therefore we added these to the text as shown below;

“…That was until the cores of my two most visible teeth decided to grow wrong. When I say wrong, I mean they grew through as if I were a baby vampire. From the ages of nine until eleven, I never smiled in pictures, and became reliant on eating with my molars. I found myself more tempted by foods that usually I had no interest in. After numerous trips to the orthodontist, it seemed my only option was to have the pips removed, and tracks of braces to fill in the gaps…” (Saxton, 2014)

Although the audience member also enjoyed the biblical reference, they noted that the configuration of looking into the mirror and talking to the audience member could create potential issues of not being able to see each other properly, thus losing the personal connection intended. From this we adapted the ‘biblical’ space and focused more on creating an installation in the area with the jars and apples we had, having the sinks over flowing with apples as shown in the pictures below;

DSCF0485

 

08/05/14 Lincoln Grandstand

As noted in the early stages of the creative process, the bathroom had a strong sanitary smell of bleach; this sanitary and quite clinical smell was something that the audience experienced as soon as they entered the space as it was very overwhelming. Due to this I decided to research into site and sense. We understood that as humans, everything we know in life is recognisable due to our senses. Be it, sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. These senses can also evoke the mind and bring back memories of the past.

From research we found that this concept, of exploring sense in site specific performance had been adapted by several solo artists and companies. Curious, in their performance entitled “On the Scent” (rather fitting) explored the sense of smell and led audience members on a guided tour through different rooms in the house, which had different scents and performers doing different activities.This particular exploration of the senses inspired me to relate this to our potential performance idea’s revolving around apples. First was the obvious smell created by apples, both fresh and rotting; both can be overwhelming in great quantities which we established we both wanted to work with mass amounts of apples.

on the scent

Applying this also to most people’s interest in the potential for the site to have been a mortuary, I thought there could be a potential to experiment with making a particular space smell ‘clinical’. For example the space that is now used as a kitchen was planned to be a ‘Sluicing’ room, where bodies would be washed down and would hence have to be very clean and hygienic, much like a kitchen.  However you could also ‘flip’ this around and either make a space that should ideally be clean, smell disgustingly filthy such as the scent of rotting apples, or make a space that is filthy smell clean.

The clinical smell, was adapted for our final performance piece and influenced us in terms of costume, for example Alice’s personal connection was because she couldn’t bite into apples due to her false capped teeth, this linked with the dentist who told her she was unable to eat apples, which then connected to the clinical smell within the bathroom and our costume; which was a dentists ‘apron’ and Alice wore a bib, given to us by a dental practice. This concept of sense and smell in particular was then applied to our piece, with the mass amount of apples we had (300+) which amplified and filled the space with the smell of apples much like Curious did, filling the house with different scents.

Another artist’s work that coincides with our piece was that of Sam Taylor-Wood and in particular the piece Still Life which was a film created in 2001 that looked at the decomposition of a fruit bowl with contexts of life, death and decay. This was very much like our piece, the decomposition of the fruit bowl represented the inevitability of decomposition of life leading to death, much like the decomposition of the Grandstand losing its true purpose, losing life and decaying. Like Sam Taylor- Wood we documented part of the decomposition but instead of using this to make a film, we decided to showcase the decomposition of the apples and apple cores in jars and place them in the performance space.

Whilst experimenting in our decided performance space of the bathroom, and using Tim Etchells notion of play in which he notes “play as a state in which meaning is flux, in which possibility thrives, in which versions multiply in which the confines of what is real are blurred, buckled, broken. Play as endless transformation, transformation without end and never stillness.” (Etchells, 1999, p.53) we decided to use this notion to indeed encourage possibilities to thrive, therefore when the idea of originally putting apple slices in the sinks was first and foremost for storage we never intended the possibility of it being a key feature in our final performance. We noted that it was quite a strong visual and increased the smell of apples within the space, therefore we decided together that we would fill the sinks with apple slices and when it came to the final performance several audience members were impressed with the image.

Without a doubt when the time arrives in the creative process when you have to name your piece, I personally find it difficult. You want to give your piece the justice you believe it deserves, and the wording of a title can be interpreted in so many different ways that it is so important to get it right. When deciding on a title for our piece, we first though of Appletite from the text we had written about Alice’s teeth. We liked the clever play on words, however we realised this perhaps didn’t link to the Grandstand or represent our work clearly. Therefore we looked back on our research of apple sayings and references. We were struck by the biblical reference “Adam ate the apple and our teeth still ache” which was re-iterating the consequences of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. Whilst playing around with the saying I noted that we should change the ‘our’ to ‘my’, this meant that the title had reference to apples, the biblical aspect and by changing it to ‘my’ linked to the personal connection with Alice and exploration of our piece.

The final performance, overall I believe was successful; we produced a performance installation which had a clear and deeper contextual connection with the site. We had elements of pre-performance, performance and post-performance, in which we had audiences members explore the space and see the jars of decomposed apples as the pre-performance, then for the performance they were invited to wash apples. As regards the post-performance we collected in jars after each 15 minute interval of performance, the cotton wool and twine Alice had used. For each audience member that came to see the piece, I also re-cored an apple. As seen below;

Wool and Twine

 

08/05/14 Lincoln Grandstand

Re-Cored apples

 

08/05/14 Lincoln Grandstand

Throughout the duration of the piece, several audience member’s involvement and reactions to the piece were positive. They engaged with tasks such as washing apples in a sink and explored the space fully like intended. However after one performance, a few audience members waited to speak to us, they spoke of how they liked the piece and had an idea as to what the piece was about but wanted clarification, this is both a strength and a weakness. Firstly, it’s a strength as they had a positive response to the piece, they liked the piece and were intrigued by the work and wanted to know more. However it was also a weakness as perhaps we hadn’t got across the connection as clearly as the audience perhaps hoped. I say as the audience hoped, due to the fact that it was an artistic decision between Alice and I not to bombard and literally tell the audience the connection between the piece and the site to leave some room for personal interpretation.

If I could go through the creative process again, I think I would research further into apples and horses, looking further into the connection between and somehow focusing more on how we could visually represent the importance of horses at the Grandstand and the lack of them racing there now. This added research and representation I believe would make it clearer to audience members the connection and the purpose of the piece without as previously mentioned, telling them. I also would make sure the decomposed apples in the jars were more noticeable. Although the audience could clearly tell there was a mass amount of jars present; some didn’t notice the decomposed apples which represented the decomposition of the Grandstand. Therefore we could have displayed the jars on a table for the audience to see clearer. As well as displaying the jars clearer, if I could do it again I would prepare more decomposed apples, the same amount as fresh apples we had in the sinks so that, that visual was also overwhelming however this as we established throughout our process was and is costly.

My experience of studying and performing as a site-specific artist has developed me as a person which I did not expect,  it enabled me to approach both theoretical and practical practices with an open mind  thus allowing me to further my knowledge in theatre and performance practice. It also gave me the opportunity to experience great and influential work from artists I had not previously been aware of and create new and innovative work myself.

 

Word Count:2,935.

Bibliography:

Apple Text Genesis 3.6

Curious, On the Scent [online] Available from http://www.placelessness.com/project/1121/on-the-scent/ [Accessed 05/03/2014]

Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments, Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. New York: Routledge.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillian.

Saxton, A. (2014) Appletite.

Taylor-Wood, S. (2001) Still Life. [online] Available from http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/sam-taylor-wood-still-life-and-the-acceptance-of-mortality/ [Accessed 18/04/2014]

 

Site-Specific: Final Blog Submission

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“Photofinished” was developed as a piece of site-specific performance work which was performed at the Grandstand Community Centre on Carholme Road in Lincoln, on Thursday, 8th May, 2014. The piece was a one-to-one experience lasting around 10 minutes, and performed repeatedly for multiple individuals throughout the three hours of performance.

The piece was staged within a long brick cellar space beneath the main seating of the Grandstand, accessible from a corridor in the main building. I created a photographic darkroom, using trappings of the aesthetic of the darkroom such as the red safe light, trays and bottles of chemicals and analogue cameras. Audience members entered the space through a small door and descended the steps into this space, and were instructed to close the door and put on a white lab coat, safety goggles and a mask. They completed this action by themselves, before entering the main space, entering past plastic curtains which masked the main space on entry. After entering the space the audience member was invited in, and engaged in a conversational narrative which asked how they thought a photograph could simultaneously be a beginning, a middle and an end. During this process, they were invited to develop a print of a photograph of the West Common racecourse.

The piece examined photography through the lens of the Grandstand, and the Grandstand through the lens of photography, studying how the Grandstand might be seen to be, like a photograph, a space frozen in time. It considered acts of creation, like capturing a photograph or the construction of a building like the Grandstand, to be simultaneously beginning, happening and ending. The idea was informed by the idea of the photo-finish moment within horseracing, a link to the racing heritage of the Grandstand and the West Common. The piece studied the singular moment, such as that frozen in a photo-finish shot, and how the act of taking that photograph is a creative act that begins a process of production; but is also a constant middle, frozen in stasis, and also the final destruction of a real moment by shoehorning it into a new form. The performance was a one-to-one experience, made up of an aesthetic installation of all the props and kit of the developer’s darkroom, which was interacted with through a performative narrative.

The space itself was a difficult one within which to work, and posed challenges that needed to be considered. The space was very dark, which was useful for its function in the performance as the darkroom, but this was controlled by providing light which fit the aesthetic but could still be used to see, and each individual was given a torch to use should they need it when they entered. The space was also very cold, a product of its lack of heating and various open vents; audience members were warned of this on the blurb affixed outside the space, and the lab coat they were asked to wear acted as another layer to mitigate the short-term effects of the lack of heat. The other challenge was that the door to the space was quite inconspicuous, and might have led to audience members not entering due to not knowing it was being used as a performance space. I avoided this by affixing a blurb to the door of the cellar space to encourage audiences to understand that they could enter and that it was being used.

The first development in my piece of site-specific performance took place very early into our first explorations of the Grandstand site. An early session at the site led to the capturing of photographs of the site for documentary purposes, and the creation of short texts, as a method of capturing and archiving our early initial interactions and impressions of the site. I documented these in a blog entry named: “Response, creation and site: discussing space through authorship.” The small texts led to a consideration of what purpose they had other than the purely documentary, even though the initial motivation behind writing them was as a documentary exercise. Through some further research into theoretical approaches to site-specific performance, I began to consider these mini-stories as narratives which responded to the narrative of the site itself, a cyclical process of representation and re-representation, in which my mini-narratives not only serve as recognition of the past existence and story of the Grandstand but also form a stimulus work for further consideration of the site and development of work. The theoretical research led to the idea that the conventional understanding of ‘site’ has shifted “from a physical location […] to a discursive vector” (Kwon, 2004, 29-30), and this idea of a site as discursive rather than purely physical led to my understanding of a site as a narrative. My creation of small texts, like the creation of photographs in my final piece, was “a distribution of stories and dramatic episodes” (Lorimer, 2006, 515) designed to create a narrative of site. Fiona Wilkie’s idea of “site as story-teller” (Wilkie, 2002, 158) cemented this idea of site as a narratological vector rather than simply a physical construction, a “space of encounter” (Wilkie, 2008, p. 101) which both told a story, and could be used to tell a new story. These short textual responses were the first instance in my process of using documentary recordings to freeze the narrative of the site in stasis, and it was these short texts – as well as my understanding of how a document can be a device through which to narratively represent the story of the site – which led inevitably to the use of physical photographic prints for the same purpose in the final performance.

Following my exploration of short texts and other similar items as narratological devices, and the idea of site as a discursive space, I was interested to consider the way in which, since our first visitations to the Grandstand, I – and, indeed, the rest of the group – had used photography and the taking of photographs as a method of documentation, and how our experience of the site to that date had been almost wholly mediated through the use of the photographic image, seen and documented through the camera viewfinder, on mobile phones or high-end DSLRs. I was encouraged, having studied my use of short texts as a form of documentary or archival process, to consider the same of the photographs that I had taken of the site when we were first exploring, and in our subsequent returns to the site. I did further research into the ways in which the photographic image and performance interact and collide, and the results were extremely influential to my final performance piece. The most influential piece of research at this point in the process was Karel Vanhaesebrouck’s essay ‘Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination’. His work signposted the way in which photography and performance are continually “contaminating each other in a permanent and systematic way” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97), for the reason that “theatre photography is an integral part of the signification process which is at the very heart of performance studies” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97); that the performance itself – or, in our case, the site itself – is not the sole signifier of meaning for an audience member, but that the peritextual documentation surrounding the site, such as my mini-texts or the photographs taken at the site, are equally important in signifying meaning, and therefore the surrounding documentation can “serve as dramaturgical matière brute, or it can be utterly performative in its own right” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 97) The idea of photography not only being a creative act of bringing into being, but also of being a trace of a lost or dying moment, and therefore representative of ending, is also seen in the statement that “one cannot consider theatre photography […] to be a direct residue of an event that disappeared from the moment it was acted out” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 100), an idea backed up in further research, which also identified how “an image […] cannot necessarily fully capture or evoke […] rhythms or their qualities” (Simpson, 2012, 425). Overall, in considering those photographs I had taken at the site through the frame of photography, and the ways in which photography interacts with performance, I took away the central understanding of my piece, of “photography as an autonomous performative practice” (Vanhaesebrouck, 2009, 105). My research also validated my idea of the photographs we take being a part of the overall narrative of the site, and therefore photography as being central and inseparable from the process of developing my performance.

My understanding led me to take a series of images on our next visit to the site, which were designed not only to document the site purely for the sake of creating a record of our interaction there, but are also designed to be a story within themselves and also to be a part of the overall story of the site. I made the creative decision to shoot most of these images in black-and-white, despite colour photography being an available option, as the act of shooting in black-and-white meant when taking each image, I was more likely to look closely at the subject of my shot for contrast and tonal range. While this is a technical requirement of good black-and-white photography, the act of looking for those technical ideals meant that I studied my subject more closely and therefore noticed more detail, which led my photographs to tell a richer and more detailed story as narrative devices in their own right. I attempted to identify details about the Grandstand that might go unnoticed, to create images that adhered to the idea of photography as an autonomous performative form, my central idea at that point. Some of those photographs are embedded below.

Following some weeks of exploration of these ideas at the site, documentation through photography and theoretical research, I developed a pitch idea to be presented in a seminar for feedback. The idea at this point, based upon these ideas, focussed on the idea of performance as photography, and was intended to tell the story of the site through photographs which represented the narrative of the space. These would be developed using traditional photographic methods within the space as a durational piece, to create a visual timeline of sorts. Based on my earlier research about the photograph itself as a performance site as well as a signifier of narrative and basic factual information, this idea was developed. Within the pitch seminar, further ideas contributed by classmates and tutors, and through discussion about the ideas, led to a more solid overall concept that centred around the idea of the ‘photo-finish’, the photograph taken at the end of a horse race which decides the winning horse in a race, relevant considering the Grandstand’s previous use as seating for the West Common racecourse. I later found out the photo-finish image was used for the first and only time at the Lincolnshire Handicap at the Grandstand in 1964, and so this idea generally seemed a relevant and compelling lynch-pin for my performance, which drew clear links between the site and its heritage, and photography as a site and a narrative in itself.

Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s Blownup takes place under the red wash of the developer’s light, a familiar representation of the darkroom. Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available at: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s Blownup takes place under the red wash of the developer’s light, a familiar representation of the darkroom.
Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available at: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Given these decisions, I decided to conduct some research into contemporary artistic representations of the photographic darkroom within performance works, and how the darkroom is used as a symbol, a setting and a space. I considered the way in which the photographic darkroom in performance is seen as a performance setting, a literal ‘dark room’, a catalyst space of creative potential and experimentation, and a static space of archival. Following a seminar using ‘The Many Headed Monster’, a performance lecture pack which gave many examples of contemporary and site-based performance, I decided my best approach was to look at a wide range of contemporary performances and how they represent the contemporary darkroom. I considered Revelation in a Dark Room  by Martha Jurksaitis, in which her piece is “situated in a photographic darkroom” (Jurksaitis, 2012), in which the “audience were invited in while the red darkroom safelight was on” (Jurksaitis, 2012). I also studied Metro-Boulot-Dodo’s Blownup, which encourages the audience to “enter the darkroom as [they] expose the very private world of photography” (Metro-Boulot-Dodo, n.d.). Both consider the darkroom as a performance setting. The idea of physical darkness is seen in the Crispin Spaeth Dance Group’s Dark Room, which is performed “in a lightless room for a small audience” (Novek, 2006) and The Dark Room by the Black Swan State Theatre Company sees the darkroom as a “dark and dangerous territory” (Black Swan State Theatre Company, 2009). Furthermore, within the theatre industry more widely, I found many examples of the idea of the dark room as a “‘creative place for imagination’ – much like a theatre” (Spontaneous, 2013), a space of creative potential, with many programmes for experimental, untested material and workshop development called ‘Dark Room’, hosted as widely as Battersea Arts Centre, the Cleveland Public Theatre, the New Life Theatre Project and the Roundhouse. Overall, this research provided examples of the dark room within the overall scheme of contemporary performance, as well as where photography and its surrounding aesthetic is used within performance. From this research, I decided to use many similar trappings of the photographic darkroom to those used in the pieces I researched, such as the red photographic safelight, chemical trays and photographs hanging to dry. I also decided to explore the idea of the photograph as a creative space within itself, and how it might simultaneously be the beginning, middle and end of a creative process as well as a documentary one, and decided to engage audience members in a collaborative idea-creation process by asking how they thought a photograph could be each of those three stages, and what they thought a photograph might be.

My final performance saw a traditional image of the photographic darkroom established, with a dark, quiet and isolated space set up as the photographer’s laboratory. The use of the red light established a familiar image, as well as trays and bottles of chemicals, and various safety equipment, including lab coats, which created a recognisable impression of the photographer’s darkroom. The series of photographs being developed contained a narrative within each individual photograph, and also told the story of the West Common racecourse, where all of the photographs combined created a series of images documenting the course. Each image was taken 201 paces precisely after the last, where the number 201 represents the number of metres in a furlong, a measurement of racecourses. The cameras used as props were from the 1950s and 60s, establishing an aesthetic true to that of the final years of the Grandstand’s racing activity. The audience member was encouraged to develop the photograph, to contribute themselves to the narrative of the Grandstand and the course and to engage them in the photographic process being questioned; and they were also asked to brainstorm ideas surrounding how a photograph could be a beginning, middle and photo-finish ending. The fact that the photo-finish was used for the first and last time at the Lincoln racecourse in its final year, 1964, was used as a final point to tie together the strands of the performance relating to photography and those relating to the Grandstand and its heritage, to create a single, rational overall point that the audience member could take away.

Through my engagement with the theoretical concepts underpinning site-specific performance, I have been led to challenge some of my understandings of performance more generally. Site-specific performance has shown that to perform is not always to act, and that any site can constitute a performance space. It has led me to approach work as an artist rather than as an actor, considering details beyond simply the content or delivery of the performance, such as the challenges and constraints of site and details such as its historical and social background which the performer might not consider in more traditional forms of performance. The final performance was a five-to-ten minute one-to-one experience within the darkroom space, in which I represented the photographer and the audience member represented the photographic assistant. I feel that the overall aesthetic of the piece was impressive, with key trappings of the darkroom such as trays, the red safelight and photographs hanging to dry, establishing a convincing aesthetic of the darkroom. The use of the process of developing a photograph as an activity for each audience member was a strong method for establishing a comfortable environment within the one-to-one piece, which might otherwise be daunting, and led to the audience members being open and willing to engage with the activities and ideas within the piece. However, while the narrative was designed to be a natural conversation rather than a staged script, I feel the narrative could have mean further structured to lead to a more standard experience across all the individual interactions and with more time to develop the piece I would restructure the narrative, rehearse it further and ensure the semi-improvisational dialogue had a very solid groundwork to prevent the narrative from feeling under-rehearsed or awkward. Throughout the three hours of performance, the piece was undertaken a total of eight times with eight individuals. This was slightly disappointing as, even with a full ten minutes for each piece, I could have catered for a total of eighteen different audience interactions. This weakness I feel was due to a combination of the lack of forced interaction – audience members could choose whether or not, and indeed when, to enter the space – and also the fact that audience members entering the space would take a good amount of exploration time, taking in the various other pieces which were more instantly present than Photofinished before discovering my space. While the time they take for exploration is difficult to control, if I were to develop the piece I might take bookings for slots prior to the event to maximise the number of potential experiences of my piece. If I were to perform the piece again, I would maintain the visual aesthetic, including performing in the same space within the Grandstand site, but would restructure the narrative to make the overall ideas of the piece more apparent to audience members experiencing the piece for the first time.

 

Word count: 3,048.

 

Works cited

Black Swan State Theatre Company (2009) The Dark Room by Angela Betzien. [online] Perth, Australia: Black Swan State Theatre Company. Available from: https://www.bsstc.com.au/about/archive/2009/the-dark-room/ [Accessed 23 March 2014].

Jurksaitis, M. (2012) My live film performance ‘Revelation in a Dark Room’.[online] Available from: http://cherrykino.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/revelation-in-dark-room.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Kwon, M. (2004) One Place After Another. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lorimer, H. (2006) Herding memories of humans and animals, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 497-518.

Metro-Boulot-Dodo (n.d.) Blownup. [online] Leicester: Metro-Boulot-Dodo. Available from: http://www.metro-boulot-dodo.com/blownup.html [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Metro-Boulot-Dodo [Production still from Blownup] n.d. [image online] Available at: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5222937999_2e0db20c78.jpg. [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Novek, Y. (2006) Dark Room. [online] Available from: http://www.yannnovak.com/works/score/dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Simpson, P. (2012) Apprehending everyday rhythms: rhythmanalysis, time-lapse photography, and the space-times of street performance. Cultural Geographies, 19(4) 423-445.

Spontaneous, C. (2013) A Union of Disciplines and Minds: The Body Narratives Collective and Their Upcoming Production, Dark Room. [online] Vancouver, Canada: Vandocument. Available from: http://vandocument.com/2013/11/a-union-of-disciplines-and-minds-the-body-narratives-collective-and-their-upcoming-production-dark-room/ [Accessed 22 March 2014].

Vanhaesebrouck, K. (2009) Theatre, performance studies and photography: a history of permanent contamination. Visual Studies, 24(2) 97-106.

Wilkie, F. (2002) Archaeologies of memory: Mike Pearson’s Bubbling Tom. Unpublished paper.

Wilkie, F. (2008) The production of “site”: Site-Specific Theatre. In: Holdsworth, N. and Luckhurt, M. (eds.) Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.

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A Body Without a Home

 

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A Body Without a Home was a site-specific performance that concentrated on the idea that the Lincoln Grandstand was planned to be a mortuary during World War II. It was never confirmed that the Grandstand was in fact converted into a makeshift mortuary; however the blueprints for the mortuary are maintained in the Lincolnshire archives, and as such must be considered a valid point in the Grandstand’s history. Govan, Nicholson and Normington describe “Ben Harrison not site-specific but site-sensitive” (Govan 2007, p. 119) this was partially what A Body Without a Home was based on. Naturally we required the piece to be site-specific, but we also wanted the piece to be site-sensitive. We did this by adding a mosque element into our piece, as the Grandstand is used to hold mosque services. However it was difficult to add the mosque element into the piece without linking it too heavily with the death of the mortuary, so our piece also had to be site-sensitive. The performance was a durational performance that lasted for three hours. It involved using shoes to represent dead bodies in a mortuary, but also used empty shoes to symbolise the removal of shoes before entering a mosque. The piece involved over two hundred and fifty shoes, initially they began scattered along a “drop off point” however as performers we lifted a shoe each and took it to the back of the grandstand, symbolising the moving of the dead from the streets of Lincoln to the mortuary itself. The fact the shoes started disorganised represented the massive death toll during the war, the figure being over 65,000 non-military personnel killed on the British Isles. However when we moved the shoes and placed them around chalk outlines of our bodies this represented the organisation of the dead within a mortuary. We began the piece standing sombrely above the scattered shoes as if we were watching the dead. Then we carried the shoes to the mortuary area, firstly one by one, then at a more fast pace, showing the increasing death rates during the war and the increased work load on the mortuary workers. We then lay in our chalk body outlines and each member of the group recited a piece about a mortuary, apart from one who spoke of the Grandstands use as a mosque. After these pieces had been recited for around half an hour each group member collected a pair of shoes and took it back to the drop off point. However at the end of the piece the shoes were paired and lined up in an orderly fashion, much like they would be at a mosque service. This was used to show the transition from death to life, an idea that Muslim ideology is based on.

Devising Process

In the early stages of performance development our group was planning on producing several installations to create a timeline of the Grandstands history. “my impulse is to concentrate on the yard: to work with moments from its history” (Pearson 2006, p. 75) this is what we decided to work on as a group, the piece needed to reflect on the Grandstands history, and as such would be specific to the site itself. Our idea began when we went to visit the Lincolnshire life museum. At the museum we encountered the first tank ever to be built. “Flirt” was created and tested in Lincoln and we decided to create an installation around this part of the history. To show the tank in the installation, it was decided that the group would use tables and chairs from the Grandstand to represent the tank. This was used to symbolise the past through the present, another way of showing the Grandstands history on a timeline as we were using materials present at the Grandstand now to represent a part of its history.

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Chair Tank

 

However, we decided this one installation was not enough to justify an entire performance. As such we decided that doing several different installations would be beneficial to the performance as a whole. So after more research we found that the Royal Air Force used to train pilots on the west common near the Grandstand; they would use a chalk circle to train pilots to land their planes accurately. To represent this we decided to have the audience create their own paper aeroplane, and throw it into a chalk circle we had drawn out on the Grandstand. We also researched names of squadron’s who flew from Lincoln in the war itself, with the intention of writing a squadron name on each of the pieces of paper, as to add to the authenticity of the piece. But these squadron names were hard to come by, and as a group we decided that we could not be fully factual if we pursued this idea. So we decided to just use plain paper aeroplanes.

As our piece started to revolve around a war theme we had an idea of a third installation, an obstacle course. As soldiers were trench trained at the Grandstand during World War One. This obstacle course involved the audience actually taking the obstacle course as the group barked orders at them from the side wall. The obstacle course involved exercises that both mimicked military training regime, but also could be seen as quite equestrian movements, showing a link between the Grandstand and its horse racing history.

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Obstacle Course

 

Our final installation was set to be placed on the grass just outside the Grandstand. The group planned to use overturned chairs and shoes scattered across the floor to represent devastation during war time. We intended to get an accurate figure of the death toll in Britain during World War Two and use shoes to represent a large percentage of the dead with each individual shoe. The shoes also were used to represent a powerful image during World War Two itself, of the piled shoes in Auschwitz during the holocaust.

As the piece progressed the idea seemed to become more and more convoluted. The piece felt as though there were too many ideas going on at one time. On top of this, each individual idea had its own flaw. The tank that we build did not look like a tank at all, the tables and chairs merely looked like stacked tables and chairs, without clear explanation the audience would not have been able to relate the installation to a tank. The paper aeroplane idea relied heavily on the weather, if it was too windy or if it rained on the performance day complications would arise, the paper aeroplanes would not fly, nor would the audience be interested in going out in the rain just to throw a paper aeroplane. The obstacle course relied heavily on audience participation; something which the group could not ensure would happen on performance day. Without this participation the installation would have been pointless. With the chairs on the grass the group decided the image was not strong enough. It was not a clear scene of devastation and would appear to the audience as just chairs scattered on the floor, and as for the Auschwitz image, this could not be considered site-specific as it had nothing to do with the Grandstand itself. As such the group decided that the idea of creating a historic timeline was not convincing enough to an audience and too overcomplicated.

Shoes

The group did decide to keep one idea from the initial devising process, the shoes. We believed that the shoes were a very powerful image as shoes without ownership is an intriguing prospect, making one wonder about the owners of the shoes and why they are separated. As a group we decided one part of the Grandstands history that had been overlooked was its proposed mortuary status during the war. Due to the dead having their shoes removed in a mortuary we decided to use a magnitude of shoes to represent death within a mortuary.

The shoes were clearly the most important part of the performance and we decided that we wanted to inhabit our space by completely filling it with shoes. This meant we had to gain access to as many shoes as we could. We used many different methods of gaining this access, including charity shops, friends and family. As a group we all went out and purchased pairs of shoes from shops, went to charity shops and asked for their shoes under the promise of their return, and we placed a box in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre for any unwanted shoes to be placed to aid our performance. By the end of this vigorous process the group managed to gain access to over 300 shoes to use in the piece. This helped to make the image far more concrete.

Our initial idea in the process was to just have the shoes scattered all over our space and have chalk outlines in between them to represent the death within the mortuary, however when we first tried this it was apparent that we did not have enough shoes to make this image powerful enough to stand alone. We wanted to invoke emotions within our piece somehow, so we gathered more shoes to fill the space and decided to place our bodies within the chalk, to offer an element of realism in the piece, the motionless people within these mounds of unclaimed shoes was a powerful image in itself.

We ran this installation numerous times but it still felt like something was missing, it did not invoke enough emotion to satisfy the group. It was due to this that we decided the piece needed some sort of speech to give the image even more power. We decided that the piece, despite being powerful did not immediately represent a mortuary, as such we decided as a group to all find a speech about a mortuary and recite it over and over again. All speaking over each other at once at differing levels meant the audience had to get closer to one group member individually to hear what they were saying. This closeness was intentional to create a bond between the audience member and the individual, and as such make the piece stronger as the audience does not only see bodies on the floor, but creates an intimate relationship with the performer in that moment.

The Poem

As an individual I decided to use a poem about a mortuary to recite during our performance. Poetry is a brilliant way to portray emotions as it uses symbolism to invoke an emotion that the poet desires.

Mortuary Lullaby

Sing to me, as I’m drifting off the sleep
Faded charts beside my feet
I don’t want to die alone

Close your eyes, as my body is being lit
Buried in an iron casket
Flying too high for the embers to glow

I’m too scared to land
Please hold me by the hand
I think I am drifting away

Please hold my tight
Where I am there is no light
To comfort me as I begin to dream

And if you can’t hear breathing
Don’t worry about a pulse that isn’t there
Don’t hold on however much you care

Just don’t stop singing
We can always sleep
Another day

Sing with me, I’ve drifted off to sleep
Name tag tied to my feet
I do not want to die alone

Sing with me
I’ve drifted off to sleep
And I do not want to die alone

(Hau, 2014)

 

This poem shows a person’s thoughts within a mortuary, it show the fear of being alone, the fear of death and the longing for comfort. Everyone has encountered death at some point, but the fact that this poem is from the narrative of the person dying makes it much more powerful. It is this idea of death that I wanted the audience to empathise with; I wanted them to understand my loneliness as the character and connect emotionally with my character, creating a stronger image within the space. I chose to almost whisper the poem as to almost force the audience member to get closer to me, not only physically but also emotionally.

 

The Mosque

Another aspect of the Grandstands history which had been overlooked overall within the site was its current state. Regularly the Grandstand is used as a place of worship for the Muslim community. As our image used shoes, we wanted to link this with the Muslim tradition of removing their shoes as they enter the building, as to link the death and pessimism of the past with the life and belief of the present. To do this we decided we decided we would organise the shoes into pairs and straighten them out, to represent the Muslim community removing their shoes and also to show that the unorganised death had been converted into organised life.

 

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Organised shoes.

 

The Drop Off Point

During the final rehearsal our group discovered a part of the Grandstand car park labeled the “drop off point” which we thought we could place our shoes in initially. This would be the first thing the audience would see and we decided to stand over them in funeral clothes as to provoke intrigue. So the disorganised shoes had been moved in the final rehearsal from our actual performance space to the “drop off point”. “Waiting for take-off. While newspapers were being distributed, he glanced through the company’s in-flight magazine and ran his finger along the imagined route of the journey.” (Augé 1995, p.3) Marc Augé’s description of a journey interested the group. The fact that that he made a journey on a flight so interesting and extensive inspired the group to use the Drop off zone to greater effect, the walk from there to the actual performance piece could be seen as a performance in itself.

 

 

 

IMG_1276Drop off point.

 

The Final Performance

The final performance took place in three stages, the initially disorganised piling of shoes in the drop off point, from which we each individually grabbed a random shoe and took it to our performance space in the back of the Grandstand which already had chalk outlines of our bodies, around which we placed the shoes in a semi-organised fashion. As this stage of the performance progressed to the hour mark, we increased the pace of the shoe gathering, as to represent the increased stress and workload placed upon the mortuary as the death toll increased.

When all the shoes had been removed from their initial resting place the group laid down within their chalk outline. When there they recited their individual speeches for around forty-five minutes, enough time for the audience to witness the speeches several times and become more and more enticed.

 

Finally the third stage of the performance was taking the shoes back to their initial space, but this time they were placed in an organised fashion, in pairs, as to represent the removal of shoes within Muslim culture.

 

Post-Performance

On the whole the performance seemed a success, with a satisfactory amount of audience members to witness each stage of our performance. The audience seemed very involved in all three stages of our performance. Watching with intrigue at the initial removal stage. Getting close to the performers during the recital period. And even following the performers to see where the shoes ended their journey. “Rising and falling in response to weather conditions or tidal flow, prone to breaching the boundaries imposed by human” (Donald 2012 p.213) Despite being based on a site-specific performance based on a river, the concept of weather interested the group. Despite it raining on the performance day, we thought it added to the bleak atmosphere of the performance and as such made the piece even more effective. The shoes definitely were used to full effect; they portrayed a powerful image of loss, an image that the performers wanted the piece to show. If the performance could be repeated, I would have wanted the group to start removing the shoes quicker sooner as to leave more time for the recital period as it seemed as though an hour of recital would have been very interesting and challenging for the performers. The performance however opened my eyes to an original way of performance. Performing in a non-traditional venue mad the performance so much more interesting. Having a keen interest in historical context it was a very enjoyable process on the whole. Having to do hours of research into the history of the Grandstand, as a performer you seem to create a bond with the space. It is as though you are creating part of your own history within this already historical venue. I felt as though the space we inhabited over the eight weeks was our space, we claimed ownership over that space, a feeling you rarely feel in a traditional theatre atmosphere. As such I believe the performance was stronger due to the bond we created with the site.

Works Cited:

Augé, Marc, 1995, Non-Place Introduction to an Anthropology and Supermodernity, Verso. P.1-7.

Donald, Minty, 2012, The Urban River and Site-Specific Performance, Routledge. P.213- 223.

Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington, 2007, Making a Performance, Routledge. P.114-119.

Hao, Kenneth, 2014, Mortuary Lullaby. Poem.

Pearson, Mike, 2006, In Comes I, University of Exeter Press. P.75-79.

 

 

 

Final Blog Submission – Callum West

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Final Blog Submission – Second to Last

Being influenced for our Site Specific performance felt to different to other performances. Influences can come in many forms; however, with Site Specific you are first influenced by the site itself. As the site is central to your piece it has to be a real site.

“This term refers to a staging and performance conceived on the basis of a place in the real world (ergo, outside the established theatre). A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere” (Pavis, 1998)

Sometimes limited to what you can research or what you turn into a performance. On first arrival at the Grandstand you expect it just to be an old racecourse stand. “Artists may also clearly identify themselves as outsiders within a space” (Govan, 2007) However, you are hit with the realisation that this particular place is littered with history. Even though they were many topics to choose from, I knew myself that I definitely wanted to use this site for what it is most remembered for. Horse racing is huge sport in England, however Lincoln has not seen this since 1964. As I am keen on the sport myself, I see that as an influence in wanting to recreate something at this particular site.

“Site-Specific performance can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remembering and forming a community for at least two reasons. First, its location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to evoke specific past times related to the place and time of performance and facilitating a negotiation between the meanings of those times.” (Pearson, 2010)

Something that excites me with certain sports is gambling, or ‘having a bet’. Although I’m not a heavy or constant gambler, there is something special about the feeling you get when you have won something no matter how small. I felt this was a feeling that people would have felt at some point at the Lincoln Grandstand, no matter how long ago. Upon starting my research into the Grandstand it became clear that it hasn’t been fully working racecourse since 1964, which did interest me as it was exactly fifty years ago this year. However, one fascinating fact was that the actual last recorded race day was 16th March 1964, however the actual last day was the 17th, but it was never recorded. Meetings were meant to take place on May 20th and 21st and two in the autumn, 16th and 17th of September to discuss the racecourse and it’s future, however the racing was stopped and the meetings never took place. The fact that the racecourse had been cast aside in such a way was an influence in its own right as these facts had begun to give me an idea of a performance. Racehorses themselves have been the centre of theater and cinema, which convinced me to make them central to my performance since we were at a racecourse. The most famous of these, would be Warhorse, which started as a theatre performance with life size puppets of horses. Capturing the friendship between man and animal the play was eventually made into a film. Although, Warhorse isn’t about a racehorse it still influenced me in thinking that the piece could centralise the animals at this site. As also did the film Seabiscuit, which was a true story about many Americans favourite racehorse. The underdog who eventually became a Champion was a huge figure during times of great suffering in America after The Great Depression.

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main research, which influenced me the most, was the fact that the racecourse just seemed to be forgotten about. Upon my first visit to the site, I felt disappointed in how the racecourse looked. I wanted to recreate the feeling of a day at the races that people would’ve once enjoyed and also was never completed.

 

The final performance became very practical from the first ideas we had as a group. There was constant interaction with audience members throughout and that made their part incredibly important. It was important that the audience were responsive and prepared to interact with the performance, Charlotte and myself, as this was an extremely important part of our entire piece. It was also essential that we didn’t just have the same members of the audience coming round and engaging throughout the performance, as there wouldn’t be many differences during each bit of our performance. We would be explaining our reasons for why we had chosen these specific ideas and it would have been a waste to not explain them to new audience members. We had been given the time of how long our performance would last and had to work around those times with our ideas, it was ideal that our ideas and times helped the performance flow and run smoothly. Once our own times and dates were sorted it was easier to know how the performance could take place.

Once you establish what you want to be the main theme in your site performance, you find you are asking yourself dozens of questions about your own ideas. Questions such as, how can I present this, would that work, how could that be simpler and is this Site Specific? After been heavily influenced by such things as theatre and films having horses as main characters. It seemed clear that I wanted to involve the site for the horseracing part. As Seabiscuit is one of my personal favourite films, I started out wanting to tell the story of this particularly special racehorse in a timeline around the site. However as I started to collect important parts of the horses life, in dialogue, audio and video. It became clear that even though this was relevant to the site it wasn’t relevant enough in my opinion, there had to be a stronger connection between performance and site. However, I knew I just didn’t want something that concentrated on the horses, I knew my group and I had to go deeper into the history of the Grandstand. As we already know the racecourse at Lincoln closed in 1965 after meetings to discuss the future of the site failed to happen. Which we know made this year exactly 50 years since a recorded race. Once realising this, it made our decision automatic that we wanted to bring racing back to Lincoln Grandstand. As we went deeper into the history of the grandstand we found that Lincoln racecourse was famous for the Lincoln Handicap. Once racing at Lincoln stopped this specific race was moved to Doncaster Racecourse and still runs today. This intrigued the group, and myself as it had more of a connection to the site itself. We saw an opportunity of returning the Lincoln Handicap to the Lincoln Racecourse, fifty years after it had stopped, by using recordings, videos and old statistics. We wanted the audience to feel as though they were both in the past but also the possible future. The handicap took place on the 29th of March and we wanted audio and visual recordings for the audience to witness. In preparation, we listened to and watched other races to hear how the commentators deal with the high speeds of the horses and how they get the description of a race across to audiences without interruptions, I even attempted to commentate a made up race to understand how hard it actually was.

However,one thing that helped me towards the final piece was that when people are at the races it is always live and not in the past. It would be sentimental, however I felt it was taking something away from the performance that it could only get from live racing. Knowing that the date of our performance was the 8th May, we looked in to races taking place on that date. Luckily, we found that Chester Racecourse, which is the oldest racecourse still in use in England, was having the Chester May Festival. Our performance date was in the middle of the chosen dates for the racing. Here we saw an opportunity to have live racing return to the Lincoln Grandstand, possibly for the first time since it stopped. However, we didn’t want to stop there, we felt that it was important to represent both the past and present of racing at the grandstand.

 

The trip to the archives was very beneficial as it gave us valuable information to support this idea. Although the trip to the archives was to look at every possible aspect, we found horse names and the weights of jockeys from previous races at Lincoln racecourse. We saw this as our opportunity to connect both past and present in our performance. The question was now how to present both these ideas and as one? With weights being in stones and the pounds, we decided to use actual stones from the site itself and pound coins. So for example, if a jockey weighed 9 stone and 10 pounds we would obviously use nine stones from around the site and we would need 10-pound coins. We already knew that we wanted live racing and we knew which races we were going to use. We decided that we would use two specific dates to help the audience understand what the piece was symbolising. The 16th March 1964 was the last recorded race at Lincoln Racecourse and May 8th 2014 was the date of our performance. This again highlighted the large gap of fifty years since racing was at the Grandstand, with these dates we would have two separate parts of the piece that would come together as one. As we had found horse names and jockey weights from the past, these would be central for the date in 1964. We were then interested in differences between horse names of the past and today. This again brought me back to something I had thought about before and it would definitely add something to the present and live part of the performance. If we were going to give the audience the opportunity of live racing at the Grandstand, why not give them the opportunity of live gambling or ‘bets’ in these particular races. We first had to discover how many races were available for us to use in the performance. We knew that the performance was going to take place between 2-5 on the day and we found that there were five possible races for us to use. Knowing that this could be an expensive, we decided that we would only purchase fifty pence bets. This was to draw attention to what gambling is all about; even though some people disagree with it many believe that there is a lot of excitement when you take part. Even if you bet on the favourite and win the return isn’t going to be as much as an outsider. With fifty pence bets like all others, you have to make the decision do you want to win very little but play it safe or risk it and bet on longer odds and get a bigger return. These are decisions and emotions that we wanted the audience to feel on the day of the performance.

 

We know had, for the first time what we felt was potentially a full performance. The first and present part was bringing live bets and racing back to the grandstand and the second was looking back at the past of the past of the grandstand, with the old names and jockey weights. We now had to think of ways of getting these races into the site for our audience. We began by looking into specific sport and racing channels either on television or on the Internet. Unfortunately we couldn’t find any channels that had live coverage until we looked at the Chester Racecourse website and found that Channel 4 we’re covering the festival rather then any sky or Internet channels. This made the preparation much simpler for getting live races into the Grandstand. However, even though we were able to cover three out of five races with the Channel 4 coverage, the two final races were not going to be shown. We then had to find a way of getting the last two results to the audience. It became clear that there was not going to be any live streams anywhere else other then Channel 4, this may have something to do with owning rights for the races. However, we found that the Sky Sports website was giving live updates on the races not just the final two. We saw this as something that needed to be in the piece not only as a backup but also as another way of giving the audience an experience as the site was also giving out information, form and statistics on the horses in the race. This would give us as a group ways of assisting audience members if they required helped in placing their bets. The performance now needed a set and ways of presenting what we wanted in our piece. We knew that the races would be on a television I was providing and the other information was going to be on a laptop. The betting slips would be purchased on the day of the performance to make sure there were no last minute chances in the races. What we had always been unsure about was presenting the old names of past horses and the names and odds of the horses in the live races. In previous rehearsals we had used only paper just to show how we wanted the set to be arranged but we knew this wouldn’t be enough and we were sure we could find a way of showing this with a stronger connection to the piece.

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking back at what used to be used at races in the past it became clear that chalkboards were used heavily most notably bookies would use them to write up their bets. We thought this was a good way of using something from the past for the present. Chalkboards are now rare in places like schools due to interactive whiteboards and more electrical gadgets being invented. However, chalkboards are usually not available in the size we needed. After Michael suggested black board paint instead of blackboards and Charlotte had said she would be able to acquire pieces of wood for the piece, we saw this as a better way to present horse names as they could have their own individual piece of wood. This was a more unique way of presenting the information and also it had more a connection to the theme.

 

When you finally have your performance and the performance day finally comes you have to feel prepared and ready. I felt that even though we had a lot to do in the final days before the performance, we had everything in our control. Although, the setting up proved difficult (as we were using an aerial with the television) we still managed to arrange everything the way we wanted. I feel the performance had strengths in all areas. Firstly, we had a good number of audience members that took part in the performance. What also helped was that audience members didn’t just arrive all at once, we had good amounts of people come to the performance over the course of the three allotted hours. The audience who participated, were excited to take part and were always excited to watch the actual races. Many had not betted before and were keen to ask for advice on which horse to bet on, how the process works and why we were doing this at the site. Whenever you have finished a performance, you always think of new fresh ideas. It’s how a process works, once you evaluate your performance you always seem to think, maybe I could have done that a different way or this would have been useful. Working with such an illustrious site such as the grandstand, you will always see more opportunities and ideas. The races that were taking place during the three hours we were performing gave us plenty of time between each race to make sure we were ready for all of them. The wood we used I felt was a unique way of displaying the horses names and their odds on the day of the racing as it was a connection between past and present. This was a reason why we waited until the day of the performance to purchase the betting slips as there may have been withdrawals and odds may have changed. This way we had the most up to date races.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The one thing that I thought went really well together was the two parts of the pieces, using the same equipment for different times connected the piece. Bringing back racing to the Lincoln Grandstand was what we wanted to do but we also don’t want people and the audience to forget that there once was racing in Lincoln, no matter how long ago. Nearly all performances can be improved, and our site performance is no different. One thing that we could change was the date of the Lincoln Handicap; it would have been exceptional to have this race brought back to the Grandstand. However, live racing is what we wanted so we made this decision quite early in the process. If I could do this performance again, this is something that I would look into. I would pay more attention to this one race by going into the history of this particular race and what it meant to the city of Lincoln. I would also offer the audience the chance to take more of part in the betting side of things. This module has helped me dramatically understand the importance of a site in Site Specific. I feel we were incredibly lucky to be at a site such as the grandstand. The place is full of history, which provides the users with tools, and knowledge that some other sites cannot give. When we entered the site we had to have an open mind and willing to look into anything. As artists we much respect a site, this project has made me respect was sites and spaces are used for in theatre and performance.

 

Bibliography

Pearson, M. (2010). Site-specific performance. 1st ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington, K. (2007). Making a performance. 1st ed. London: Routledge.

Pavis, P., Carlson, M. and Shantz, C. (1998). Dictionary of the theatre. 1st ed. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press.