FINAL POST

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Samuel Bernard

The wait on my shoulders & The pork in my pie.

As part of The Grandstand Project, I was involved in the construction and execution of two pieces, ‘The Waiting Room’ and ‘EXPO ’69’. The reason for this is solely a result of research and the vast amount of history that the site had to offer. The idea for the ‘EXPO ‘69’ piece first formed when researching on a visit to the Lincolnshire Archives, the three of us who eventually collaborated on this piece were drawn to the articles and advertisements about the event which had happened forty four years before. The pictures which we took that day eventually formed the window coverings for the space and remained with us throughout the process as a form of inspiration, insuring we all worked towards the same vision, one of nostalgia and fun, juxtaposing the dreariness of the site and darkness of other pieces.

In contrast to ‘EXPO ‘69’, ‘The Waiting Room’ was inspired entirely by the space. The four of us chose the room and then went away and did research. Upon bringing the research together, one commonality ran through all aspects of that room’s history, people waited there. With the idea of waiting we set out chairs as a basis to work from and took to researching behaviour and control as well as more thoroughly into the individual stories of the people who waited and why.

At 14:00hrs on the 8^th of May 2015 I opened the doors to the Grandstand and announced the performances beginning to the four audience members who were stood in the rain waiting to enter the space. The first piece they saw was ‘EXPO ‘69’ as this was positioned in the entrance hall. The piece consisted of a small 7ft by 9ft room with two windowed walls, two brick walls and a sloped Perspex roof. We covered the roof in red material which hung like a tent roof, had a table of food which reflected the menus found during research, covered windows in collages of relevant pictures and newspaper cuttings, hung bunting and a banner on the railings outside, installed shimmer curtains on each doorway to enclose the space, had coloured lights which reflected on every surface, made a dress out of foil to represent the metal dress showcased on the runway of the EXPO, had Mr and Mrs EXPO sashes to represent the competition of the time and finally played the music of a performer from the original EXPO. All this created a space full of the atmosphere and nostalgia which captured history in a fun and unexpected way.

‘The Waiting Room’ was set in a space down a corridor and away from the main action of the day. On the day only four performances of fifteen minutes took place with a fifteen minute interval between the end of one and beginning of the next in order to re-set the space. The space contained eleven chairs and a receptionist desk, there was a clock on each chair and others positioned around the room. Also on the chairs were envelopes containing text to be read out or instructions to be followed at certain times. The envelopes were designed in such a way that a chain of events would happen as we wanted it to and that the performance would end with a reading by the receptionist of a list she had typed during the piece, before me reciting the poem ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden to which all participants removed the batteries from their clocks, placed them in a jar and left. The piece was about the pressures of waiting and the effects of time, as well as stepping outside the boundaries and constraints which these put on us.

Waiting for an epiphany & The singing, swinging sixties.

Week one saw us being introduced to the space and then exploring it for ourselves. We measured the space with our eyes and bodies, as well as gathering objects from around the site and bringing them together in the largest of the spaces. Once we had explained why we had chosen our objects, we began a discussion of our first impressions of the site, with words of description including dull, old, painted, clinical and characterless to name a few. Finally we chose a room to explore in more detail. It is strange that the room in which I spent the first hours of my time at the site was the room in which the majority of my work took place. The room I chose, along with three others, was then dubbed the ‘RAF room’ for the mural above the fireplace.

The mural, as the most prominent feature of the room, was the thing which grabbed our attention and which we instantly started to research on our phones. We found out almost instantly that the Grandstand had been used to test WWII planes before dispatching them overseas. Once we had this information, however, the next issue was knowing what to do with it and completely by chance I happened to roll over and notice that, from the angle that I was laid, the lights on the ceiling looked just like those either side of a runway. For the piece that we showed that week, we played airplane noises from our phones and asked audience members to lie in the place that I had, whilst we explained some of the history we had surfaced.

Although this was a simple piece it established a way forward which saw research and spaces come together to create something entirely new and different. Week two, however, could not have portrayed a more different message. ‘Drifting through Spaces’ was the allocated reading and this paved the way for a completely more organic exploration of a space. Smith says that you should ‘Avoid art’ and ‘seek those public places that are ‘hidden in plain sight’ and not visited by many’ (Smith, 2010 p.118). I was not in attendance for this session, however the reading still had the effect of making me stop and question whether history has to be such an important factor in a site specific piece, or is it simply about the space and what you find and what can be done with it. For example, if we were applying this technique in week one, all research would be discounted and all that would matter is the space, a difficult task in a site which oozes history like the Grandstand does.

The third week of the project was a huge turning point for our process and whilst visiting the Lincolnshire Archives we split into smaller groups of interest and ideas for pieces began to form. The two things that interested me were, as I mentioned, the advertisements and newspaper articles for the EXPO ’69 and the pre-world war two plans for the Grandstand which involved a mortuary, a viewing room and a waiting room, the room in which I had been mainly working.

With the new information fresh in our heads, we worked that week on extending two ideas which had been established in the previous session, one group inside and one group outside. I worked inside on a piece which dealt with the mortuary idea and played with a scene of scattered chairs and shoes in which we fell whilst walking through the space in order to represent a battlefield. We then got up, found our shoes and then went to lay down in the ‘viewing room’ with a sheet over us to depict the transition from war to the Grandstand.

After this session I revisited Mike Pearson’s questions in ‘Site Specific Performance’ and answered a selection which would best explain my feelings about where we were in the process.

‘Am I purposefully lost in space, trying to get my bearings?’

Yes would have definitively been the answer before the session in week three. Now I only answer yes with some hesitancy, as I feel as if the space is starting to reveal itself to us, revealing its history, charm, struggle, loneliness, helplessness, willing and needs. As each one of these rounds the bend and canters into sight, it feels as if we are that much closer to understanding how we can draw attention to the things that the site speaks of, for it does speak, to each of us individually, instructing our decisions on performance whether consciously or not.

‘As I move around do I leave marks: ‘to walk is to leave footprints’ (Roms, quoted in Whitehead, 2006, p. 4)’

We are leaving ‘footprints’ and impressions on the site and the people who inhabit it alongside us. From something as little as a mother from the playgroup placing her hand on a pillar directly where a post-it note had resided the day before and wondering why it is sticky, to the memory the man walking his terriers will have of half of the group clambering along the railings of the courtyard area, to the litter which we may leave in the bins on a weekly basis and to a stray balloon making its way onto the sixth putting green, we leave marks, there is no doubt. (I have since thought about this and a piece of string from week 7 was still tied to a pillar in the waiting room when we left after our final performance). The final footprint we will leave will, inevitably be the performance, and as I grow more and more attached to the site, I feel that it is our duty, and my right to make known to others what the site has to offer today, and what it has offered in the past.

‘What are the circumstances of my presence? Am I a stranger or an inhabitant? Do I pass unnoticed or do I stick out? Are my actions clandestine or do I draw attention to myself?’

The answers to all of these questions will change the longer I spend time at the site, however, I feel that after reading Govan’s ‘Inhabited Spaces’ and ‘Architectural Spaces and the Haptic’, it wouldn’t be wise to forget that spectators will be asking themselves these questions and, at that time, will be reaching near opposite conclusions to us. Yi-Fu Tuan said that, ‘architectural space reveals and instructs’, with the suggestion that a cathedral (the building and parts thereof) becomes a symbol for the values it projects (Govan, 2007 p.114). In this light, whether the grandstand projects to us a feeling of loss, dilapidation, renovation, rejuvenation, hope, sorrow, misery, heartache, former glory or boredom, it is not a given fact that a spectator will see the same, meaning a performance with a high level of ambiguity is surely out of the question? The Grotowski example, which is provided in ‘Inhabited Spaces’, created a living environment in which spectators joined in, is this the way to draw an audience to the point of realising the subject and motive? The Reckless Sleepers example used the incongruity of an industrial backing and lavish tables dressed in period banquet style to heighten the irony of the space, is this a possibility to provide a clear subject and motive? Or, do we look at this another way, do we want to be so ambiguous that the audience can draw their own conclusions? Is it an idea to ask in some way what exactly they got from the performance? Do we want our audience to feel every single emotion of alienation and the feeling they’re intruding or that they simply don’t belong?.

‘Who am I and what am I doing?’

The answer which I gave at the time was ‘[Answer to follow shortly]’, and indeed it did.

(Pearson, 2010 pp.19)

From this point of the process it was a case of working from an initial short performance devised over one session and expanding and improving it into a piece which we were proud of and which fit the criteria. The Waiting room was a piece which developed subtly and slowly throughout the rehearsal stages. We thought of new ideas and took inspiration from existing works, tried them out on our peers and then moved on. One example of this was the idea taken from German artist S. Astrid Bin and their piece, One Thousand Means of Escape, involving paper airplanes being suspended in flight, all pointing in the same direction, providing the sense of a need to escape. This would have worked within our piece as a gradual installation which built over the four performances, however in practice, audience members weren’t that good in making paper airplanes and we weren’t any good at making them look good either.

http://www.astridbin.com/one-thousand-means-of-escape/

There were many setbacks similar to this, such as the idea of tagging our audience with a brown label as they came in, giving them a name and a reason to wait. We found that this overcomplicated things and discarded of the idea which we had originally seen as being a main part of the specificity of the performance to the site. After hours of worrying that our piece was not specific enough, we decided to go home and simply research whatever we could that had any relevance to the site. When we came back together we discovered that there were more than a few cases of people waiting in our space and we decided to write down their stories and experiment with the idea of reading them out during the performance. Eventually the audience read these out as part of the instructions in their envelopes in a style which had ties to Fuel Theatre’s ‘While you wait’ project which is a chance to listen to ‘a series of podcasts, each of which is a different meditation on the idea of waiting’. Ours was similar in that the stories which were read were also different ways of waiting; the difference being that the audience themselves performed our text. Along with this, many other ideas lasted the process, like the individual clocks on seats, the list of things which the receptionist typed during performance and read at the end, as well as the controlling of the audience through instructions in envelopes.

In the final days of the process three major things changed, our audience size shrunk to 8 from 21, our performance length went from 40mins to 15mins and we decided that a poem should read a poem at the end which linked well with the piece and its message. The poem was ‘funeral blues’ by W. H. Auden and the first line is ‘Stop all the clocks’, at this point I took the battery out of my clock as the receptionist began to pass round a jar for the audience to do the same. The batteries worked as a small scale gradual installation on the fireplace, but the poem had many further links to the site as it spoke about death, airplanes and clocks.

EXPO’s process was fairly simple; we knew from the outset that what we wanted was a small space with lights and music and food, fun and atmosphere. In the early stages, we planned a lot, there was no rehearsal as the installation piece would be unattended for the majority of the performance. One thing that did change during our process was the space, a decision which came because we found the original space too small for an audience to enjoy. When looking for a new space, we found that if we were to set the piece in the entrance hall, you could see the original Expo site, making our piece even more specific. Along with all the old ideas, such as taking menus from the archives and planning the food, making the foil dress and Mr & Mrs EXPO sashes, buying material to drape from the roof an over the table and plants to add to the ambiance, the new setting brought new elements to the piece, such as a text which echoed a task from week one of the process where we wrote letters to the Grandstand, the text was a combination of individual letters which my collaborators and I wrote from the Grandstand, here is an extract:

‘Throughout those years of ache and sorrow, one week in particular has etched its way into my mind in the form of the darkest memory, and never have I been as lonely as I was in the week of the 24th May 1969 … And now, (would you believe it?) all these years later, I am to host my own sample of EXPO69. So here is my plea to you, audience member; Imagine you are there, imagine the atmosphere, the excitement and the possibilities, smell the smells, hear the sounds and see the sights. Let me watch, like I always have, and see, for the first time in years, happiness, affection and appreciation.’

Once the setting changed things started to fall into place and a plan which was drawn up in the middle of the process was practically unchanged right up to the performance.

Metal Dress

Audience

I’ve finished waiting & I’m all full up.

The performances are finished and I believe that we achieved reasonable success. For a site that is as remote as the Grandstand and a day as miserable as the 8th was, audience numbers were high enough that ‘The Waiting Room’ could run four successful pieces and ‘EXPO ‘69’ ran out of food. When I returned home my housemates who had been audience members described ‘The Waiting Room’ as ‘alienating’ and ‘like a real waiting room’, comments which I believe make the performance a success. From the lack of leftovers, the greasy fingerprints on the laminated texts and the number of audience who were dancing along to the music, I also feel that ‘EXPO ‘69’ served its purpose. In absolute honesty, better preparation for ‘EXPO ‘69’ is the only thing that could have improved the piece, along, of course, with a bigger budget. With ‘The Waiting Room’, I believe that we could not have improved it, only made it different, and as we changed so many aspects along the way, I feel like we reached the best possible performance in the end, the post-performance of burying a time capsule with something from each piece inside also added to this, signifying the constancy of the grandstand in an ever changing world as well as our faith that it will remain so for years to come.

My time in Site Specific has taught me many things, the diversity of performance, the influence of history and of a space and the importance of process, along with many others. Working at the Grandstand has had an unexpected effect on me, which is that I know feel more able to work in unconventional spaces, as well as feeling like when working in a traditional theatre, I can transfer the experiences and techniques I have learned in order to feel more comfortable with that space as well. I have learnt that any devising process draws on the values of site specific and that there are two different kinds of ‘place’, ‘On the one hand the kind of place in which Live Art practices are made, on the other, the kind of place in which Live art practices are presented’. ’ (Kiedan, 2006 p.8)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kiedan, Lois (2006) ‘This must be the place: Thoughts on Place, placelessness and Live art since the 1980’s’ in Leslie Hill and Helen Paris’ (ed.) Performance and Place, London: Plagrave Macmillan pp.8.

Smith, Phil (2010) Mythogeography: aguide to walking sideways, London: Triarchy Press, pp.118-121.

Govan, Emma (2007) Making a Performance. Coxon: Routledge P114-119.

Pearson, M. (2010) Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan: London. P19.

Bin, Astrid: http://www.astridbin.com/one-thousand-means-of-escape/ [accessed 16^th May 2014]

http://www.fueltheatre.com/projects/while-you-wait [accessed 16th May 2014]

Poppy Stockdale (12258957) Final Blog

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Poppy Amelia Stockdale

‘It’s not just about a place, but the people who normally inhabit and use that place. For it wouldn’t exist without them’ (Pearson, 2010, 8)

During the Second World War the Lincoln grand stand was set to be used as a mortuary. It is currently being used as a playgroup centre for toddlers- an interesting juxtaposition to its potential former purpose. This contrast between new life and death influenced my group to research into the children who would have been taken to the mortuary during World War 2, however with very different intentions than today.

In our work we used the information we found at Lincoln’s Archives, as ‘A large part of the work has to do with researching a place, often an unusual one that is imbued with history or permitted with atmosphere’ (Pearson, 2010, 7). We found information on a young girl named Margret, who was from Lincoln and unfortunately died in a explosion during the Second World War, so we initially used her story to base our performance on, however, during our research process I found that two more children also died in the same event, Anthony and Lawrence Thacker. All three children of Highfield Avenue, Lincoln were in their houses when the explosion went off and sadly they all lost their lives, therefore all three bodies would have been preserved at the mortuary. As Carley writes when speaking about Rachel Whitereads Ghost, ‘To be haunted is to bring past impressions to bear on current circumstances, interpreting new phenomena in light of them’ (2008, 27). A modern day nursery is happy place- active children, a place to socialise and a room where futures begin. To think that this room was once a mortuary is haunting in itself. With this in mind we decided to place the story of the three children’s premature death within this happy environment, creating links between the cupboard that stores the children’s toys in today and the corpse outline we would create on the floor to portray the vast journey and transformation of this single room within the past 60’s years.

Our performance took place at Lincoln’s Grandstand main room on the 8th May 2014 from 2pm-5pm. The audience were invited to the ‘Mortuary room’ to watch a video showing us recreate the journey from the houses of the three children on Highfield avenue, to their gravestones and finally to the grandstand’s mortuary room where the performance took place. The audience were also able to view the taping of the bodies and pay their respects for the three children whilst listening to an audio recording describing what happened in the accident.

Our overall intention was for our audience to see the grandstand in a different light to how they may see it today. Pearson states that performance can ‘illuminate places that do not so easily reveal themselves but which have their own unique characteristics, qualities and attractions’ (2011), therefore we wanted to show this unique characteristic the grandstand once had in our performance.

If we were to visit a site on a one off occasion or pass by in a car we would think subjectively about it for example, what colour the building is or what material it’s made out of ect. As Lincoln’s grandstand was a site we would start visiting weekly it would become personal to us, therefore we decided look deeper into the historical content of the building as, ‘Layers of the site are revealed through reference to: historical documentation’ (Pearson, 2010, 8). We began to search the space and for clues, in one room there was Latin language painted on the wall, these words translated to ‘through struggles to the stars’, as we researched into this we found that it was written in memory of the RAF members who died in the war, this showed us an example of Macaulay’s idea that, ‘The site may begin to tell its own story’ (Pearson, 2010, 9) . This small piece of information led us to do more research into the grandstand during the war time, this was the moment we found that it was set to be used as a mortuary- our first and most important piece of information that would begin our Journey towards our performance.

Willi Dorners ‘packed bodies in urban spaces’ inspired us to begin to measure the space with our bodies. Dormer’s performers used their bodies to fill a small space in public areas creating juxtapositions that would stand out. Physically using our bodies gave us a better understanding of how the mortuary may have looked for example laying our bodies in the small kitchen area created an overflowing atmosphere- this is how we imagined the mortuary to look with all the dead bodies. We then took Dorner’s idea to, ‘Build a space- with chairs and tables plot journeys through the space and then move the chairs and tables and try to make the same journeys’ (2005). This influenced the way we walked as we had to slow down and concentrate on our balance in order to dodge chairs and obstacles. We then realised that people would’ve walked around the mortuary in the same way- out of respect, whereas today the room is full of fast movement and pace when the children go for their play group sessions, therefore Dorner’s guidance helped us find a juxtaposition between the grandstand during the war time and the grandstand today, ‘Play around with ideas. Very important- when you lose playfulness you lose inspiration. Stay playful. Set tasks. Find juxtapositions’ (Dorner, 2005). This then inspired us to somehow incorporate the children of today into our performance, as they show a huge juxtaposition between the atmosphere at the grandstand now and the atmosphere at the grandstand during the war. Rachel Whiteread’s first solo exhibition ‘ghost’ was also an inspiration for our performance because she brought history from war time to create her performance, ‘The exhibition consisted of a collection of plaster casts derived from pieces of post war furniture’(Carley, 2008, 26). She took pieces of history and brought them to a modern day setting, ‘Ghost foregrounds the inward-looking, opaque qualities of Victorian domestic spaces, in contrast to Modernist space conceptions of the interior’ (Carley, 2008, 26) therefore this juxtaposition between past and present would’ve also been the main focus of her performance.
As the mortuary was going to be the main focus of our site-specific performance, we decided to visit Lincoln Archives to try and find any information that could inspire us as, ‘both archaeology and performance involve the documentation of practices and experiences’ (Pearson, 2001, 55). At the archives we found information on a young girl named Mary Elaine Marriott who passed away on the 11th June 1943 in her home whilst doing her homework. Her death was caused by a bombing plane, its wing tipped onto a telegraph pole; this caused an explosion and hit 3 houses on the street including hers. The next day when we visited the grandstand we all wrote response letters from what we had found at the archives, when everyone read their letters out at the same time it made me think of prayers being read and therefore urged me to want to do a performance in memory of Margaret. Racheal Whitereads Ghosts, was described as ‘carefully and deliberately conjured from the ether blanketing the interior limits of the room, manifesting an afterlife for an abandoned piece of architecture.’ (Carley, 2008, 26). This interested me as is shows you can recreate a memory through symbolism, this gave me the idea of taping a body on the floor to representing Margaret’ presence in the room when it was used as a mortuary. The marked out body made me think of a crime scene, we then added post-stick notes to the body labelling possible injuries Margaret may have had. We hoped that the taped bodies would ‘illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted; and help us make sense of the multiplicity that resonate from it’ (Pearson, 2011).

Using a family tree software I was able to find out who else was injured in the event and what injuries they suffered from, ‘performance can enable integrations of academic research’ (Pearson, 2011). I found an article from the Lincolnshire echo that was written one day after the event (12th June 1943):

‘Ten people were killed and 3 seriously injured when a plane crashed on houses in Highfield Avenue, Lincoln, early last night. 8 people – 5 members of the crew of the plane and 3 civilians were killed instantly and another member of the air crew and a child died later in hospital. Civilians killed were Margaret Marriot age 11 of 25 Highfield Avenue, Mrs. J. Thacker of 24 Highfield Ave and Miss Gwendoline Whitby age 42 of Hykeham Road, Lincoln. Laurie Thacker aged 4 who was admitted to hospital with burns died during the night. The 3 injured who are detained in hospital are Harry Bishop of Highfield Ave., his wife Mrs. Esme Bishop and Anthony Thacker aged 3 also of Highfield Ave.’ (Unknown, 1943).
After finding this information we began using our time at the grandstand to tape around each other’s bodies to represent the ten that had died, hoping to show that, ‘location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to evoke specific past times related to the place and time of the performance and facilitating a negotiation between the meaning of those times’ (Pearson, 2010, 9). The picture below shows our first attempt of taping a body,

Stockdale, P. (2014) First attempt of taping. Lincoln: The Grandstand.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Potential Injury Documentation

This took 5 minutes to complete, as you can see it didn’t look very realistic, we realised that in order to create realistic outlines of all the bodies it would be time consuming, and because the grandstand was only open for three hours on our performance day it was a sensible idea to tape less bodies, we wanted to do Margaret’s as she was our initial stimuli, we also wanted to do Laurence’s body as he was another child that died. Focusing on the children affected by this incident would make more sense as we wanted to show the juxtaposition with the toy cupboard. Whiteread’s Ghosts, ‘bears the impressions of the specific room from which it was cast, but it is also laden with the impressions of past rooms brought to bear on it by viewers.’ (Carley, 2008, 27). This shows how past life can be brought to new surroundings and still fit in, just like the children that died would fit in at the grandstand now as it’s a place for children. With this in mind i went to do some more research to find if Anthony Thacker (the boy who was taken to hospital) had died or not in this incident.

Searching through documents of deaths i found Margaret’s and Laurence’s documented death both in June. Antony died in September after suffering with extremely bad burns in hospital. As there were three people in our group we decided to focus on the three children that died and have an outline of each of our bodies, representing the three deaths.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Margarets death.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Lawrence’s death.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Documentation of Antony’s death

The group then visited the Lincoln Life Museum in hope of finding any more information that could influence our performance, I found a song that young children would’ve sang during the war time called ‘Miss Polly Had A Dolly’ The song had lyrics such as ‘she called for the doctor to be quick’. As the song was time relevant to when the children were alive and fit well with the mortuary and the children’s play centre theme I decided that we should incorporate it into our performance as ‘both archaeology and performance involve the documentation of practices and experiences’ (Pearson, 2001, 55).

Stockdale, P. (2014) Miss polly had a dolly- Nursery song

Michael Pinchbeck’s performance, The Long and winding road shows Michael on a journey where he filled a car with his brothers memories and drove them to the scene of his death, Michael explained,
‘The car was packed with 365 mementoes wrapped in brown paper and string, tagged and logged. The journey lasts until 17 May 2009 when I will drive the car into the River Mersey. The journey started with a letter to my brother. The letter became a parcel. The parcel became a suitcase. The suitcase became a car. This is my car. This is my car history. This is the end of the road. (Pinchbeck, 2009)

This inspired myself and my group into recreating the three children’s journey, where we would also finish the journey at the end of the children’s road- the mortuary. We decided to start the journey at the houses where the children lived, number 25 for Margaret and number 27 for the Thacker brothers as this was where we expected these children to have held most of their memories.

Stockdale, P. (2014) 25 Highfield Avenue

Stockdale, P. (2014) 24 Highfield Avenue- Today

Next we walked to the children’s gravestones. This for me was the first time I felt a emotional connection with our piece as it finally felt real and I knew these facts I had researched were all correct, ‘a shift in form can be noted from performance that inhabits a place to performance that moves through spaces’ (Pearson, 2010, 8) As we walked to the graves we passed a field with a park, it made me wonder whether these children would have played on this field like the children now play at the grandstand, ‘moving between places, wayfinding, more closely resembles story-telling than map using. As ones situates ones position within the context of journeys previously made’ (Pearson, 2010,15).

Stockdale, P. (2014) Me at Lincolns war memorial

Stockdale, P. (2014) Thacker Brothers Graves

Stockdale, P. (2014) Margarets Grave

And finally we then walked up to the grandstand, where the children would have been taken after their deaths. As we wouldn’t be able to have our audience with us on our 3 hour journey we had to show the footage on the day of the performance, this explains the reason we made the journey to the grandstand our last so that the the audience would get the sense that we had just finished the walk and at that moment we were bringing the memories of these children to life once again at the grandstand. Haunting can be both extramundane and mundane; it can be mobile or site specific. To haunt is to be insistently and disturbingly present,particularly in someone’s mind.’ (Carley, 2008, 27)

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Her Long Black Hair also shows a journey. This journey retraces the footsteps of woman. Cardiff describes this performance as, ‘one foot in the past and one foot in the future” (Derkson, 2012, 4). Therefore I took an interest in her work as we wanted to show the same juxtaposition. In this performance audio was used, therefore audience members were able to hear memories of this woman and also see pictures. On our journey we were not going to have the audience with us which meant they may not understand what actually happened to these bodies we were going to be taping or who’s bodies they were. Therefore we decided to add audio into our performance so that the audience knew the real facts. I researched and found quotes from the Eco on the event such as;

‘Mr. W. H. Chester of 20 Highfield Ave. gave a vivid account of the crash. “We heard a roar of engines”, he said. I remrked to my wife “Surely this is going to crash” and we dashed to the back door’

“The plane was just coming over the house tops behind Highfield Ave”. As I got to the doorway it seemed to be heading straight for our house, but he dipped one wing and banked away. The same wing then struck a telegraph pole and snapped it off.’

‘The impact toppled the plane over so that it crashed into the houses on the opposite side of the road and finished facing the direction it had come. As it struck the houses there was a blast of explosive petrol and oil was thrown over’ (unknown,1943)

Stockdale, P. (2014) Lincolnshire Echo 1943

We decided to write these quotes incorporated with descriptions of the children such as age, birth date, death date, address ect and read them out in the style of a news report this would create a sense of seriousness while we were taping the bodies, this reflects De Heddon’s idea of juxtaposing the ‘the factual with the fictional, event with imagination, history with story, narrative with fragment, past and present’ (Pearson, 2010, 9)

As we used the main room, audience members were constantly passing through and therefore could see the process of our performance, firstly the video of our journey during the first hour and secondly the taping and covering of the bodies whilst listening to the audio. We had cards and flowers laid out on the floor next to where we were taping the bodies during our performance; this explained briefly information on the event and the three children. As these cards were laid on the floor audience members had to kneel down to read them, this looked like they were praying for these children and was an effective example of Rom’s opinion that, ‘it was frequently not the locations that invested the performances with a sense of identity, as Harvie proposes, but the performances that made these locations and histories associated with them representative of such an identity’ (Pearson, 2011,9). Therefore the audience were involved in the performance without even realising.

When I noticed the audience members kneeling down I thought it would’ve been interesting if we had a whole bucket of flowers rather than just the three that represented the children, this way the audience could’ve laid a flower in respect to the children, however even without this act in our performance I believe the audience showed enough respect, we were in the main room and therefore it was quite noisy however on our half of the room audience members tended to quieten down. As the audience gave this type of reaction, I believe that we showed the representation of the children well, Like in Whiteread’s Ghosts ‘the viewer observes the cast of the room from the perspective of the room itself. A ghost usually returns to haunt the terrestrial scene of its death’ (Carley,2008, 28) I believe that we showed the presence of Margaret, Laurence and Anthony in the building which was challenging to do so as looking at the grandstand today its extremely hard to tell that it was set to be a mortuary. The video also worked well as ‘receiving landscape is this ‘to carry out an act of remembrance’ (Pearson, 2010, 16)’ which is what our main focus was.

Our final performance should have used the to cupboard that is used today however on the day we were not able to access it, therefore we improvised with a projected image of child onto the toy cupboard door to show the connection. I believe that if we were able to have access to the cupboard (as we had been told we would) then our performance would have been improved as it would have given solid proof to audience members that the room is now used a playgroup and therefore would have shown the juxtaposition more clearly.
When I first saw the grandstand i thought the only type of performance we could’ve created would have been horse-related, what I did not understand is that ‘within contemporary performance, site related work has become an established practice where an artists intervention offers spectators new perspectives upon a particular site or set of sites’ (Govan et al, 2007, 121) therefore through my own journey I have realised that sites are not always what they seem to be and there is always a historical story behind it.

Stockdale, P. (2014) Final Performance

Stockdale, P. (2014) Toy Cupboard- Final Performance

Stockdale, P. (2014) Memories

Stockdale, P. (2014) Projection Of Walk

Works cited
Carley, R. (2008) Domestic Afterlives- Rachel Whitereads Ghost. Architectural Design.78 (3) 26-29.
Derkson, C. (2012) Walking the edge of the stage in theory; or, Janet Cardiff’s sensorium for intermedial . Theatre research in Canada, 33 (1) 1-23.
Dorner, W. (2005) In: Pinchbeck, M. (2014) ‘Site Specific Peformance, Week 2: Practice’. Lecture, Seminar Room MB1008, Lincoln: University of Lincoln. 6 February.
Govan, E. Nicholson, H. and Normington, k. (2007) Making a Performance- Devising Histories and Contemporary practices. Oxon: Routledge.
Pearson, M (2010) Site specific performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pearson, M. Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. Clondon; Routledge.
Pearson, M. (2011) 1) Why Performance? [online] Nottingham: Landscape and Environment programme. Available from, http://www.landscape.ac.uk/landscape/documents/eventpapers/toolkit/1whyperformance.pdf [Accessed 16th May 2014].
Pinchbeck, M. (2009) The Long And Winding Road- An online account of a 5 year live art project from 2004-2009. [online] Available from: http://www.acarhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/final-words.html [Accessed 16th May 2014]
Unknown. (1943) TEN KILLED, THREE SERIOUSLY HURT, 4 HOUSES WRECKED BY PLANE CRASH IN LINCOLN. Lincolnshire echo, 12 June.

Ashleigh Parker Tragedy at Highfield Avenue – Final blog

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Ashleigh Parker

Framing Statement

What? Where? Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of process

How it all began!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making our performance

Meet Margret, Lawrence and Anthony

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

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

1. Kids

She may have lay at your very feet

where youth and demise meet

who’s looking right now

How they got here, we know how

left them young, she left them sad

Young brothers, mum and dad

Who were not there when she was scared and crying

When the bomb hit and She lay dying

Where have we seen this before?

Every day, the picture of war

The warning sirens that fill your head

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

Like the people brought to this place

No longer named, without a face

Their stories need to live on for all

No matter how young, no matter how small

Not all war dead flew the planes and held guns

Some lost daughters and most lost sons

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

Elaine may have been set upon this floor

Family couldn’t recognise her anymore

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

Father in the viewing room, having to look away

We bring her to life for one more day

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

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

Who never thought it would hit their home

And now lie in the grandstand

All alone.

2. Crew member 2

3. Miss Gwenodine

4. Crew member 4

5. Kid

6. Crew member three

7. Mrs

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

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

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

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

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

Evaluation

Shouldda, wouldda, couldda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Blog Submission – Present or Past?

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Kento Ochi

Framing Statement

The Grandstand project, which is what we worked on since last January. ‘A body without a home’ was our performance piece that we mainly inspired from the idea of our module tutor mentioned and the idea is focused on to the Grandstand as a mortuary and we overlapped with the fact of Grandstand is a venue of Mosque services. The performance was involve with a pile of shoes and it is an images of ‘Holocaust’ for mortuary side and Mosques services are not allowing to pray with shoes on and this is why we chosen to put those different theme together. On the other hand, we tried to not create severe point because talk about something religion and death is has got some risks of to make feeling of shock and anxious to other people. For the actually performance piece, we used the ‘drop off point’ in first part and after wards we moved down to courtyards which located at behind the back entrance of Grandstand which is close to golf field and there was a fence in between Grandstand building and the field. The space of courtyard had got a big and long empty space to we were able to lie down, stretches ourselves and it was enough wideness to put the amount of shoes.

The duration of this performance was throughout three hours and performances are included following elements. The images of shoes in outside of the Grandstand’s ‘Drop off point’ area were for make a sense of the fact of majority of people’s existence and mosque prayers. In courtyard the shoes represent that people who passed away in both present and past especially in war time. The monologues we spoken were for to create an atmosphere of silence, the sense of different time period of the Grandstand. Also this is for throughout some questions for audiences about what can you see in your personal view. When the shoes are carried by pairs and individually, this was for to create the sense of dead body which was able to find out and did not find out. The visual images of missing were difficult to describe without a specific bodies but the shoes are normally in pairs and if it has missed by any chance it is also telling us to the idea of something must happened to the owner.

For the side of influenced, I personally found an interesting case which still connecting to the idea of in between shoes and war time such as from the article of South China Morning Post reported on 26, February 2014. The article is about the wartime compensation issues of Chinese forced labourers who worked in Japan and passed away during the World War II and there was a 6,830 pairs of cloth shoes forced labourers in Chinese park. According to this fact, war is a general historic event for most of people and almost every one is taking some damages and pain from it. A member of the class-action suit Zhang Shan said; “As there is no way to get justice in Japan, the Chinese victims of forced labour and their families are determined to sue in China the Japanese companies which did them harm,” (South-China Morning Post, 2014)

(South-China Morning Post, [Image]avaliable at http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1435587/chinese-workers-forced-wartime-labour-sue-japan-firms-damages [accessed on 3 April, 2014])

Development process

As an idea of this performance piece in the beginning, we originally thinking about to the idea of ‘time archaeologist of the war time’ which means we as an archaeologists of create some symbols of war time by using of materials which is Grandstand has got (chairs, tables etc) already. For example, to create a horse, tank, battle plaine and trench. This is because the fact of we found when we visited the Lincoln Archives and there was an evidence of the Grandstad was involved in world war as a factory of battle plaine. In addition, I researched about the war horse that also involved during the war time and I looked at the side of emotions of war horses rather than how we used them during the war. From the previous blog post that I posted on 12 of March, I mentioned the one of a book which written about war horses and author General Jack Seely illustrated that:

‘People who do not understand the realities of warfare think that horses are not required on modern battlefields. They think that all battles will be conducted by mechanical means. So they will be for the first few days, then it will be the horse. Truly the horse might cry out more loudly than any other creature, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.”‘
(Selly, 2011, p114)

and I thought this could be a good element for our piece because live art is the piece which create an impact for audience but the only problem is if it is not good enough to present, people will not understand anything from it. Throughout this development process, a module tutor of site-specific performance gave some ideas of ‘shoes’ and ‘mortuary’ which is we found more interesting therefore we changed the whole structures of the performance. Also the idea was very powerful and thoughtful rather than our original idea and that is another reason of why we changed our whole idea.
In the inside of meaning of shoes in our piece (and view points in a different way), shoes are represent a death of the owner in a war time and numbers of shoes are simply presents how many could have involved to the war. On the other hand, pair shoes presented the people who found out after the war but individual shoes are for someone who had not has been found since after the war. In addition, the pile of shoes as a visual sense it presents a scene of when people come to a mosques services of Grandstand. In a mosque services, people will take off their shoes to enter the venue for pray and might be there were a similarities as a ‘pile of shoes’ for both circumstances. However, it was too dangerous to connect each other because both of them are something severe and some people would not like to hear about these. In addition, shoes are material that really hard to vanish from our life and it also can be meaning of the shoes can present human being. By this I mean, shoes tells about us the life background of the person with evidences of how long has been used or the reasons for any damages that we could find on it but basically shoes are ‘signs of sensuousness, comfort, luxury and pleasure.’ (Rozovsky, 1943)

For development process of actual piece, we consider to use the space of ‘drop off point’ which located at front of Grandstand as simple meaning of the place as for drop something. After that, we decided to carry out all shoes to the courtyard of Grandstand which is still outside but much more limited space but it also create a different atmosphere rather than open space. On the ground of the courtyard, we drown around my body by using of a chalk which is present the dead body.

For this scene, we wrote some monologues that something about mentions mortuary, dead body and mosque as a grammatical sense. It was from poem, academic report and definition. For example my monologue was from the definition of mosque pray and BBC religious described it most:

‘Outside every mosque, or just inside the entrance, is a place where worshippers can remove and leave their shoes. There is also a place where they can carry out the ritual washing required before prayer.
The main hall of a mosque is a bare room largely devoid of furniture. There are no pictures or statues. Muslims believe these are blasphemous, since there can be no image of Allah, who is wholly spirit.
Everyone sits on the floor and everywhere in the mosque is equal in status.’
(BBC Religious, 2009, Online)

And my actual monologue was a:

‘Here, the Grandstand, is also open for local mosque services. The majority of people come here everyday and some people come to a big assembly on Friday called ‘Jammat’. They would leave their shoes outside similar to that which you see today in front of you.
During the service, everyone is the same status except in gender but no matter who you are, where you come from or how old you are. We are all going to the same place; cradle to the grave.
The shoes you see in front of you today could belong to living people, but if you go back over 70 years ago these shoes represent the dead. The space you are in, look around, take it in because this could have been where dead bodies lay, bodies without homes. These shoes could have been removed to pray, but also remove from the dead. Which do you see; the past, or the present?’

For additional performance piece that I inspired from, I looked at the piece called Walk a Mile in My shoes by Bedwyr Williams. The piece is about the shoes which Bedwyr Williams bought from second hand shop and he recommends to audience to have some walk with these shoes. All shoes have got a tag on it with some notes about the shoes and some of there are modern, gender mixed and ruined. The very concrete ideas of this piece, the report of Saatchi Gallery stated that

‘Walk A Mile in My Shoes celebrates diversity, inclusion, and community; through the simple practicalities of footwear, Williams extols the values of tolerance and individual difference’ (Saatchi Gallery, 2006).

In my personal view this piece is present the importance of owners’ existence and how shoes describe our history of our life. However, the Saatchi Gallery also reported that ‘The importance that each pair of shoes was purchased second hand underlies the key themes of Williams’s piece’ (Saatchi Gallery, 2006) thus this article is also mentioned that the relationships in between us and other people are also important.

(Bedwyr Williams, Walk A Mile in My Shoes, [Images]avaliable at https://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/bedwyr_williams.htm?section_name=shape_of_things2 [accessed on 29 April, 2014])

For tiny bit of we developed during our piece, we were thinking of to perform just in courtyard but I looked at following article which director of Forced Entertainment Theatre Company, Tim Etchells stated that:

‘The old dialectical separations between inside and outside, fiction and reality, self and other, audience and performer, were here exploited and blurred, leaving the strange sense that the city and oneself were now almost the same thing, a shifting network of narratives, places, touches, voices, lost puns, myths and intimacies’
(Etchells as quoted in Nick Kaye, 2003)

After I looked at this article, I recognised that the movement of us can explore the atmosphere of our piece and even this is able to guide the audience to the different scenes. It is true to say that, when we feel something there is some element around us: When, Where, Who (either with), What and as a visual sense the place actually we were in is very essential to memorise and people to recognise like flashback but it is difficult if it has got a big time gaps. The other part of we developed is the very last scene such as to carry out all shoes in pairs rather than transfer individually and this could made a sense of the number of people who found and have not found at all. However, if we do an exactly same movement as we done in first part, it is just take a while to do and will not make any sense at all (because initially we coming back from zero point) and it means also we distract the impact of that we could make in first part an second part. In the first part, we carry out shoes individually and in last part we changed to carry out shoe with pairs which means we as a finder of dead body and we place them to ‘drop off point’ again. However, in the last part all shoes are organised and it makes more sense to proper image of people who came to mosque service. In addition, in a fragmental way of we changed our piece we managed to finish off with a silence which is to present the sense of one minutes silence at the funeral. This kind of atmosphere is have been already presented during the piece but if we put on purpose, that is a more specific image to end of and the image also reminds that the entire cycle is never end (or the things we are always doing).

Performance Evaluation

For our actual performance, the bodies without home, we were able to engage some audience members throughout the whole piece. The first an hour was a bit of luck because of the beginning of the performance visitors (audience) were not alive yet but our piece takes nearly all 3 hours to complete and I think there was much more opportunity to encourage the audience some point. The audience reaction I could see clearly was when we lay down to the floor of courtyard with pile of shoes around us, I could hear some one was talking ‘this is very good’ and I could also hear shutter sound of cameras. In addition, during the first part which is we carried out all shoes from ‘Drop off point’ that located at front of Grandstand, some people were following us behind the back and it was great circumstances that audience was watching our piece via us but also it could be a guiding of direction to the performance venue for them. I personally believe that our performance could become an influence of work with Grandstand for our (or my personal) further performance in the future. By this I mean this time, we focused on to dead people as a historic context and mosque as a present context but if we slightly changed the focus point such as the people who lived during the war time like soldiers, nurses or people who has have been waiting the return of their important person etc.

For analysis of our final performance, the main point that we have to mention is we could collect enough shoes to perform. If this is not enough the whole impact of images very small. Also I think we were able to work out the time very well. This is because in first part of the performance we decided to carry out all shoes by first an hour but we recognised it took a long while to do it during the actual performance. According to this problem, we tried to change the numbers of shoe we carry out each time such as the first 20 minute we carried a shoe individually (one by one and when a person came back to the drop off point, next person get start to carry out) then after that we made the pace more quicker like as soon as the previous person could see the person comes back to the person get start to carry out even the previous person has not return to original position. The numbers of shoes we actually we carried out is also has changed to random 2 shoes to 3 but we were able to carry out all shoes during the first an hour. The second point that really worked well is again, the visual impact of when we lay down at the courtyard with a lot of shoes around us. This was also completely luck of the amount of shoes we could collect but we could encourage more audience members rather than first part. If we could improve this performance piece, I think we have to make sure everything is have to be sort out from ages before. This is because we took so much time to collect the shoes and the actual movement (to require some shoes donation) that we could get start to make was only 3-4days before of performance date and of course we have to think about time management more specifically. Also if we could change this piece something new, I would like to work on with idea of foot prints of shoes and someone who organising missing peoples’ list.

8/5/2014 from our A Body Without a Home (photos taken by one of a group member Lauren Brook)

The whole idea and theory of Site-specific performance was an essence of work with the venue even if the place is non-traditional in a modern style. Site-specific performance was all about how you feel about the place and how you look at the sense, atmosphere and materials which belong to the place from different angle. For the case of Grandstand, even the venue is non-traditional, we were able to find out some key elements which link to the Grandstand itself and we could develop the ideas of our piece from the facts.

Work Cited

BBC Religious (2009) Mosque, Online:http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/prayer/mosque.shtml [accessed on 27 April, 2014]

Brook, L. (2014) A Body Without a Home.

General Seely, Jack. (2011) WARRIOR:THE AMAZING STORY OF A REAL WAR HORSE, 2011, p.114, Racing Post, the UK.

Kaye, Nick. (2003) site-specific art: performance, place, and documentation, Routledge, London / the UK and New York/the USA.

Rozovsky, Lorne E. (1943) Jews and Shoes, Online: http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/407510/jewish/Jews-and-Shoes.htm [accessed on 19 April, 2014]

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

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Verity Ficken

Adam ate the apple and my teeth still ache, was a performance installation performed on the 8^th 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.

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;

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.

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;

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]

The Grandstand Project

A site specific performance at the Grandstand in Lincoln

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