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.