Word Count: 2,734
Framing Statement
A Body Without a Home is a piece of site specific performance, working in the outside spaces within the Grandstand in Lincoln and exploring the site’s roles in the past and the present. Starting out on the project my initial ideas, especially after the classes’ visit to the Lincolnshire Archives, centred on mortuaries and the way the Grandstand may have been viewed by horse racing spectators- if it had been utilised as a place in which to keep dead bodies in World War Two, a time of mass death, would they have abstained from attending?
As I continued developing my performance with the three other students in my group, influenced by the drawn up plans of the Grandstand transformed into the different rooms needed for a mortuary we viewed at the archives, we steered away from the way the space may have been viewed following the presence of dead bodies and began to focus much more on the actual idea of the mortuary itself. We decided, with the advice of our tutors, to come up with a way of symbolising the bodies which could link back to the Grandstand’s roles in the community right now.
Many isolated ideas later, our lengthy thought mapping sessions culminated in making a durational performance lasting three hours, in which we would collect lots of pairs of abandoned, unwanted shoes and use them as a symbol for the dead bodies the Grandstand would have seen had it been a mortuary. In contrast to this, we would also explore the site’s role now as a mosque, as part of the process of praying every day is taking off your shoes and leaving them outside.
The shoes also represent the fragments of the Grandstand’s history and its present, which comes from one of our major influences- Tim Etchells’ Certain Fragments. One quote in particular has stuck with me throughout the process- “‘It should all be considered like a letter- written to a long lost friend…’” (1999, 76). The Grandstand, as a site, has connected a lot of people over the years in terms of being a service to the public, whether a racecourse or a community centre, and so to perform inside it is like writing to someone who hasn’t been there for a long time, or only knew it when it was a racecourse, or will only ever know it to be a community centre. The space ties its inhabitants together as it has changed and mutated, and we are all connected to a particular fragment of its history.
Toothpaste- A Different Kind of Litter.
On my first visit to the Grandstand, I didn’t know what to expect or what I was going to find. The Theatre/ Archaeology text says that when we enter a new space, “…everything is potentially important, as ‘every contact leaves a trace’.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 59). We look at every element of the site with detail, analysing its meaning and becoming absorbed in the architecture and history when it was at its best. In relation to the Grandstand, I found myself taking pictures of everything in the building, documenting them for inspection later when I began to think about performance ideas.
Walking around the perimeter of the Grandstand in Lincoln, I stoop down under a tree to find an old, empty and slightly grubby tube of toothpaste. Why, you ask, am I spending my time rooting around under bushes to find used toiletries? Well this is site specific performance, and if a urinal can be art then so can a bottle of Colegate’s finest.
I am joking, of course, but my find did spark rather a lot of thinking once I had returned home from our morning exploring the Grandstand, its history and its architecture. A thriving racecourse before its demise in 1965, the space is steeped in history, and looking out across the green fields surrounding the building I can’t help but imagine hoards of men and women, clutching betting slips and intently watching the horses thunder across the track.
A road goes right through what would have been the track now, and while seeing many cars go past during the three hours we were at the site didn’t break the sense of nostalgia and history, the toothpaste certainly did. Its presence within the grounds of the Grandstand threw me off completely, as I was looking at such a representation of the modern day when the objects which used to litter the site would have been discarded betting slips and cigarette stubs.
The toothpaste was found as a result of a task we were set to find objects on the site of the Grandstand. While I wasn’t surprised to find it, it also made me think very clearly about the changes this place has gone through, and the changes many other places have to endure, as communities place pressure on these sites to be utilised as community centres or golf courses or other things our growing populations need.
The Grandstand is still a wonderful site, and I can’t wait to get to know it more as we get further through the process- but knowing that among the users of the golf course and visitors to the community centre there are also people who are using the space as a litter box for their 21st Century toothpaste tubes, makes me a little sad and put out.
Can a Space be Tainted?
During the process, we visited the Lincolnshire Archives, and the concept of a space becoming tainted was something I definitely considered when trying to create my performance. I wanted to produce something that would play on the Grandstand’s history and the knowledge I had gathered about it as a building. In my view, site specific performance is taking an idea or an object and presenting it in a space, where it has to stay as it only retains meaning within that site- and I knew that I could take information and turn it into a form of performance specific to the Grandstand.
In Making a Performance Devising Histories and Contemporary Practises, the text says “…collections of objects and materials from the external world have been brought into the arena of the performance space. This process has forced audiences to re-examine the nature of the place where the performative act occurs.” (Govan et al, 2007, 106). Finding out information about the site from external sources and then placing that material back in to the space is how I see site specific performance in relation to my piece, and I was keen to use this to give the Grandstand back its history, even just for a day.
So among other interesting facts, while at the archives I discovered that the Grandstand could have potentially been used as a mortuary in World War Two- which sparked off a lot of ideas for our performance piece, as the contrast between a mortuary and a racecourse is very stark and could become a really interesting piece.
As we were shown around the archives and given information about the Grandstand’s history as an RAF training site, a thriving racecourse and its’ Expo in 1969, the thing that interested me the most was definitely the contrast between all these roles- particularly that before being used as place where people placed bets and jockeys got weighed, dead bodies may have been laid in these rooms, and families may have come to say a final goodbye to their loved ones.
The idea of tainting a space became something I held onto throughout the visit, and I began to form links to the modern day too, and the Grandstand as it is now. The space has become a Community Centre over recent years, where children come to be looked after; yet, just 70 years ago that very same spot where a child may play with a toy, could have been the place where someone’s dead body was left until a family came.
We will never know if the site was used as a mortuary, but we can analyse how the space would have been viewed by people in the past, and now, if we knew for sure that it had. For me, before I knew it potentially could have been a mortuary, I looked at the Grandstand with a lot of nostalgia at its racecourse days, imagining men and women betting on horses and their reactions when theirs didn’t win. Now the image itself is tainted and so is the space.
Creating a Space
During one session at the Grandstand, our lecturer asked us to create a space with masking tape, and then construct a tour of the space- modelling it on a room in the Grandstand building. We decided to focus on an unused bathroom, and below are the notes I made after the session. It reads:
“We were asked to create a space using masking tape and post it notes, and then describe a room in the Grandstand within that space. From this I started describing the toilets behind the kitchen as I had used them in a previous exercise, and I used post it notes to map out where the fittings were situated e.g. the toilets, the sinks, the doors. I then got Brad to become the mirror on the wall with a post it note on his forehead, and Tamsyn and Kent became doors that I moved when I guided the audience into the space. I was a tour guide of some toilets. I also stuck post its on the posts with words used to describe the space.”
This exercise was really interesting. It made me think about the recreation of space through different mediums as a performance, and how insignificant toilet spaces usually are; yet I was part of a tour of one, and its different elements were exposed in great detail when usually this kind of site is ignored.
What initially was just a part of the main room in the Grandstand was suddenly transformed with detail into an exact replica of the bathroom with masking tape. If someone had told me I would be doing that as a form of performance last year, I would have laughed, yet now this kind of creation of space really inspires me, and relates strongly to the Theatre/ Archaeology text: “…spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces: architecture and events constantly transgress each other’s rules.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 23). Constructing a masking tape bathroom in a space gives a purpose to that space, yet it has its own meaning before recreating a bathroom in it- the Grandstand’s many different rooms and spaces all have their own actions which are changed and explored through site specific performance.
Fragments
Our performance is essentially fragments of the Grandstand, symbolised by shoes, and this was an idea we focused on from the beginning of the process as a class. In the first few seminars we talked a lot about how devising performance is essentially taking fragments of history and piecing them together “What begins as a series of fragments is arranged in performance: dramaturgy is an act of assemblage.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 55). We began with a series of fragmented pieces of information about the site, parts of its history, and our devising process was filtering through it all until we had a coherent performance piece.
What were once just pieces of information we knew about the Grandstand, are now organised into a performance. Like archaeologists, the process is sorting through lots of information and artefacts to pick out the things that matter and then putting them in front of an audience. The text says “Archaeologists excavate an indeterminate mess of flows of things and particles…these constructions remain as pieces of evidence, stored in museums and libraries, to be reworked, reassembled, recontextualised.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, 55). Using a space like the Grandstand for performance has meant that myself and my group have had a lot of information to comb through in order to create a put together performance, but it has also meant we’ve encountered a lot of really interesting material to choose from, and this has made our devising journey really enjoyable.
Evaluation
A Body Without a Home was performed on the 8th May 2014 at the Grandstand, Lincoln. By the final performance day we had gathered 160 pairs of unwanted shoes from charity shops (320 individual shoes), and during the three hours of durational performance we transferred these shoes from one space to another twice, with a half an hour slot in the middle in which we recited pieces of text about mortuaries. The piece is an exploration of the Grandstand’s roles then and now, using shoes as symbols for the dead and also as a representation of the shoes left outside when the space becomes a Mosque.
The piece in my opinion had a rather slow start. We began with all the shoes scattered on the ‘drop off point’ at the front of the building, to signify the bodies and the way they may have been received during WW2, and the four of us stood by them dressed formally and appearing like it was a funeral. We then took it in turns to take one shoe each through the main room and into the courtyard situated at the back, where we would place it somewhere around the four chalk outlines of ourselves we had drawn before the piece started. Although it was slow at first, the process of picking up a shoe, holding it in your hands and taking it through to its resting place in the courtyard soon became extremely absorbing, and this part of the performance ended up taking us an hour and a half- yet it felt like it had only been 20 minutes.
As we continued taking one shoe each through the building to the courtyard, the audience coming up the road could see the masses of shoes, one commenting that it was “a really lovely image” to look at as they came to the entrance of the Grandstand. We started to speed up, taking two or three random shoes at a time to symbolise how the Grandstand, had it been a mortuary, may have become overstretched during the war with so many bodies being brought through its doors. One audience member asked if “the movement of the shoes” was the focus of the performance, which in a way, it is; the movement of the shoes from one place to another, symbolising the dead and their journey from the masses of bodies to an individual place where their family may identify them, contrasted with the movement of time from 70 years ago to now, from mortuary to mosque, creates the basis of the piece.
One strength of our piece in my opinion was the part where once we had put all the shoes in the courtyard, we lied down in the chalk outlines of ourselves surrounded by shoes and recited monologues we had sourced about mortuaries over a duration of half an hour. One particular line stated “Death space is created and defined by the web of relationships that include them.” (Horsley, 2008, 134-135). This is particularly prominent, because as I talked about earlier the Grandstand connects people through a mutual understanding of the space in its different states. A mortuary’s characteristics are defined not by the lifeless bodies it contains, but by the relationships that person has formed during their lifetime and the memories those people will think about when their loved one is gone.
I also think that there were weaknesses, particularly at the start of the piece when it moved rather slowly as we were only taking one shoe through to the courtyard at a time, meaning there were long periods of time when nothing was happening outside while one person was busy transferring a shoe.
Overall, I think we created a piece that explored the fragments of the Grandstand’s history really effectively, taking unwanted shoes on a journey from representing bodies in a mortuary, to simply being shoes left outside while their owners pray inside. This space has been a really interesting site to explore and create in, and the work we have produced was well received and seemed to attract a good audience to all three parts of the performance.
Works Cited
Etchells, T. (1999) Certain Fragments. Routledge.
Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington K. (2007) Making a Performance Devising Histories and Contemporary Practises. Routledge.
Horsley, Philomena A. (2008) Death dwells in spaces: Bodies in the hospital mortuary. Anthropology and Medicine, 15 (2) 134-135.
Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/ Archaeology. Routledge.