‘The Many Headed Monster’- Ideas about audience.

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Alice Dale

This week we looked at ‘The Many Headed Monster’ which looks at different ideas of audience and how these are portrayed in contemporary performance. It looks at examples of audience in pre-performance, performance and post-performance. Obviously as our performance uses a lot of audience participation we found a few similarities between some of the performances and ours.

The first one that pushes the idea of audience is Joshua Sofaer’s Scavengers during which teams of participants travel around the host city finding a number of absurd items. These are then all put on display in a museum post performance. I really like the idea of displaying what is used within the performance in a post performance environment. I think it could be interesting to see what kind of installation we could build using the airplanes and letters that we use during the perfomance. Sofaer says that he want to “use art to enable people too see the world as a place of potentiality and to become more active citizens” (Sofaer, 2014). I think this is something at also applies to our performance in how it is completely reliant on audience participation and without it the performance would fail. This is the same for Sofaer’s work- without participants there would be no art.

The next piece of work that interested me was Oreet Ashery’s ‘Say Cheese’ (2002). In this one to one performance a woman is dressed as a Jewish man and performs something that resembles a therapy session with the participants. The performance is very intimate and the audience members at times can be made to feel uncomfortable. Within our performance this is something we are want to achieve. Although our performance is not one to one there are still moments when we will be able to address one participant in an intimate way. For example laying your head on their lap or shoulder and holding their hand close to you. Some participants may not find this awkward and off putting but many of them will. Pictures were taken of each audience member with Ashery and these were sent out at a later date so the audience were reminded of the performance once again a few weeks after their initial experience. This is another idea we could toy with. We could send them away with a memento of the experience so that every time they see it their feeling towards the performance are reinstated.

Another piece of work that shows a fully co-operative and active audience is Hermann Nitsch’s Action 122 (2005). If you examine this work carefully you can see that there are several types of audience within this performance. Firstly, there is the audience that comes along to participate and help create the work. Secondly, there is the audience that come to be an audience. Thirdly, there is the unknowing audience who catch a glimpse of the performance as it leave the theatre and spills out onto the street. This is definitely something that we will want to look into. There is the audience currently that participates in the performance and the those that do not take part and just watch the action unfold in front of them. It would be interesting to see if we could some how incorporate the third type of audience. This could possible be done by letting the third type of audience observe the installation that we may include or maybe we could somehow incorporate the general public that pass the grandstand on a daily basis.

References-

Sofaer, Joshua, 2014, About Joshua Sofaer [online] Avaliable at:http://www.joshuasofaer.com/about/ [Accessed March 29th 2014]

A Cold March Morning…

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Alice Dale

This is dialogue written by me that will be used within our site specific performance.

I took a seat on an uncomfortable stiff chair on the outskirts of the room. Behind me was a large window with a sheer layer of condensation slowly evaporating from it. Beyond the foggy glass I could see a field blessed with the first signs of Spring. White specks of daisies broke up the eternity of green grass and the shadows of the trees were more prominent after a bare and leafless winter. Although a cold March morning, the sun broke through the clouds allowing the room to be lit by the purity of its light. Feeling flushed, I unwrapped my woolen scarf and instantly felt the bitterness of the season on my neck. The cold intruded upon my bare skin refreshing my body, making me aware of the tense atmosphere in front of me. The silence of the room pierced my ears like the scream of a child falling on a gravel path. Suddenly, the freshness of the spring seemed distant from the darkness.

The loudest sound in the room was that of a young girl sobbing into the shoulder of a dark eyed man. A man who did not cry or yell or even show emotion on his pale face but you could tell the things he had seen, he would not wish upon his greatest enemy. The memories of his time stained to the inside of his eye lids, denying him the pleasure of a sleeping man.

No eyes met across the room, no smiles were exchanges, no laughter shared between strangers. Red tear stained eyes gravitated to the floor denying the opportunity to be polite and even to offer sympathy or comfort. Not knowing what new information I was going to leave this room with, I hoped and prayed for the best, for the rumours to be wrong, for it to just be a misunderstanding. The thought of this brought the taste of blood to my tongue. A salty metallic flavour, like when you drink water from an old copper cup. The taste infected my mouth leaving me feeling nauseated and faint. In this moment I knew I would be leaving this room with the weight of sadness on my shoulder. I then wished I could sob into the sleeve of a dark eyed, emotionless man just to feel the warmth of another body close to mine. Envious of the young girl across the room I stared at my fingertips, tracing the unique outlines attempting to think of anything other than images that were soon to be stained to my eye lids. The image of a man, a lifeless man, my husband.

A Fusion of Then and Now

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Samantha Milne

As I suspected, the visit to The Museum of Lincolnshire life did us the world of good and as a group we felt even more inspired by the stories that surround the Grandstand and Lincolnshire in general. Even though there wasn’t much information on the Grandstand in the museum itself, a leaflet given to us by a member of staff at the museum allowed us to expand on our research (www.lincstothepast.com).

Sam discovered a story about the keeper of the keys at the Grandstand and how he was sent to prison for thieving [1]. We discussed how this man would have waited. For things such as events on this site to start and to finish so he could lock up the building. This discussion led us to creating our own narratives based on the stories of those who waited in the site and particularly the RAF room. As we had gathered information and knowledge on the use of this room, we decided that we would use this to individually write narratives influenced by different story/use of the ‘Waiting Room’; from its uses years ago to what it is presently used for. Alongside this we were aiming to combine some of the answers from our questionnaire and therefore with an aim to create the idea of a fusion between the past and present of the Grandstand’s context within our narratives.

I was given the topic of the RAF and particularly how this room was possibly used as a waiting room for those waiting to test aeroplanes during World War 1. I found it difficult to make up a story but I tried to visualise somebody waiting in that room as a soldier of the war, waiting to train and test some of the planes that were going to be distributed.

The following text is the first draft of a narrative created for the ‘Waiting Room’:

Waiting to fly my plane
Waiting to fly a plane
Waiting to concur
Waiting to fall
Waiting to fight
Waiting to flight
Waiting to battle
Waiting to shoot
Waiting to hit
Waiting to die, ready to die, waiting to die
Waiting to achieve
Waiting to crumble
Waiting to soar, ready to soar
Waiting for the dark
Waiting for the stars, ready to soar, struggle, soar
Waiting for a challenge
Waiting to fight
Waiting to stop waiting

When I read this out in front of the rest of the group, Alice and Katherine said how it reminded her of the RAF recruitment TV advert that she had seen, in terms of the content and how the speech is delivered. I visualized a trainee pilot being anxious waiting to fly a plane to write this narrative as well as drawing on inspirations from the translation of the motto ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’ to ‘Through adversity to the stars’.

The mural on the wall in the RAF/Waiting Room

As this is just a draft, in the next week I aim to do some more research into the Grandstand’s present and past through the questionnaire we set up for our group to develop this narrative. This will allow me to gain inspiration from answers and incorporate them into what I already have. I also think more detailed research is needed on the Grandstand being used as an aeroplane testing site to develop my narrative further, hopefully gaining more insight into the relevance of the RAF mural on the wall in that room.

References

[1] Lincolnshire County Council (2014) Charge, examinations, restitution order and conviction. [online] Available from http://www.lincstothepast.com/Charge–examinations–restitution-order-and-conviction/747926.record?pt=S [Accessed 23 March 2014]

Waiting, part 1.

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Katherine Alice Copley

As part of the development of our site specific performance I set up an online survey to try and ascertain what people are waiting for, and what they think the grandstand is waiting for. There were 28 responses to the first question “What are you waiting for?”, 28 responses to the second question “Have you ever visited Lincoln grandstand?” and 26 responses to the final question, “What do you think, if anything, the grandstand is waiting for?” Now, not all of the answers that were collected were even remotely useful, for example one response to the first question was “for this survey to be over”, although this is an honest answer it’s not entirely useful to our creative process.

This idea behind doing this research is that we know that this specific room that we are working in within the grandstand has been used in a variety of waiting room settings and we, as a group, were interested in what people generally waited for outside of the grandstand setting. We were interested in the idea that the passing of time while you wait for something to happen was more important than the actual event you are waiting for. This is reflected through the fact that if you go into the space now you don’t have any indication of a majority of the events that happen or have happened there. The grandstand, it seems, is waiting for something to happen to it and what happens now isn’t leaving a mark so time is just passing until something stands out and catches the attention of the public.

We are currently in the process of developing narratives that incorporate what we know about the space, how it has been used to wait, and add into those narratives the answers we have collected from the public. Here is the narrative I created using the following things: the grandstand is currently used to host carpet boules for seniors; survey responses that a member of the public is waiting for a wedding and that the grandstand is waiting for some T.L.C.

You know your immediate future, you know that after Margaret has had her go it will be your turn again. You also know that Margaret isn’t very good so you’re going to have time for a cup of tea. You stand there, you glance around the room, you wonder why the bloody windows don’t open. You think about how warm it will get here in the summer, how you’ll probably need one of those hand held fans. You think about the wedding you’re looking forward to so much. You think about how happy everybody will be. You look around the room and you wonder how many happy moments it has left in it. You think about this place, how all that it is waiting for is some T.L.C. and if somebody just did something it could thrive. You think about how this place deserves so much more than carpet boules on a Wednesday afternoon. And then it’s your turn again.

The line between fact and fiction – accidentally not posted in February…

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Katherine Alice Copley

It was mentioned that the Lincoln Grandstand may have been used as a mortuary during WWII, during a visit to the archives I took this picture of a map of the place. It’s not very clear but it is certainly clear enough that when you look at it you can see the word PLAN in capital letters at the bottom of the page.

The friendly gentleman who was introducing all the information on the grandstand explained that it is unknown whether the grandstand ever was used as a mortuary and all the evidence we have of that is the map in the picture that clearly says PLAN.

The council, I imagine, would have put the plan in place as a precaution. If the bombing in Lincolnshire got so bad, the grandstand would be an ideal place to keep the dead – after all, what else would it be doing?

Town Halls, schools, drained out swimming pools, gymnasiums… all examples of the kind of place where you could find a make shift mortuary during WWII.

Now, we know that during WWI much of the West Common was used to test aircrafts and as a location for training men to dig trenches. But what do we know of the West Common in WWII, I myself know nothing, and this is not through lack of looking it is merely through not finding anything.

Perhaps I am too fixated with the issue that it is not a known fact that the grandstand was used as a mortuary. The only evidence is a precautionary map and I think it is foolish to allow oneself to be overcome with a chill of what it could have been – the idea that had it have been a mortuary, it wouldn’t be used today as a community centre where children play or used as a makeshift mosque; that it would be more neglected than ever and wouldn’t be a place for anybody except ghosts.

All this being said I appreciate the idea of site specific performance being “a balance between ‘the host and the ghost’”. (Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks quoted in Govan). I understand that we must take into consideration the history of the grandstand when creating a piece that reflects it, but the mortuary is an assumed past – we do not know it to be true, therefore is it right in supporting Govan’s thoughts in that “fiction and fact are shown to be equally unreliable and the notion of history as a stable entity is banished.” The past of the grandstand is that it Could have been used as a mortuary, but this capitalised Could is what is blurring the line between fact and fiction.

References

Govan, Emma (2007) Making a Performance. Coxon: Routledge

The Grandstand Project

A site specific performance at the Grandstand in Lincoln

Category Archives: The Waiting Room