Walking around the perimeter of the Grandstand in Lincoln, I stoop down under a tree to find an old, empty and slightly grubby tube of toothpaste. Why, you ask, am I spending my time rooting around under bushes to find used toiletries? Well this is site specific performance, and if a urinal can be art then so can a bottle of Colegate’s finest.

I am joking, of course, but my find did spark rather a lot of thinking once I had returned home from our morning exploring the Grandstand, its history and its architecture. A thriving racecourse before its demise in 1965, the space is steeped in history, and looking out across the green fields surrounding the building I can’t help but imagine hoards of men and women, clutching betting slips and intently watching the horses thunder across the track.

A road goes right through what would have been the track now, and while seeing many cars go past during the three hours we were at the site didn’t break the sense of nostalgia and history, the toothpaste certainly did. Its presence within the grounds of the Grandstand threw me off completely, as I was looking at such a representation of the modern day when the objects which used to litter the site would have been discarded betting slips and cigarette stubs.

The toothpaste was found as a result of a task we were set to find objects on the site of the Grandstand. While I wasn’t surprised to find it, it also made me think very clearly about the changes this place has gone through, and the changes many other places have to endure, as communities place pressure on these sites to be utilised as community centres or golf courses or other things our growing populations need.

The Grandstand is still a wonderful site, and I can’t wait to get to know it more as we get further through the process- but knowing that among the users of the golf course and visitors to the community centre there are also people who are using the space as a litter box for their 21^st Century toothpaste tubes, makes me a little sad and put out.

Today during our session at the Grandstand, our lecturer asked us to create a space with masking tape, and then construct a tour of the space- modelling it on a room in the Grandstand building. We decided to focus on an unused bathroom, and above are the notes I made after the session describing what I had done. It reads:

“We were asked to create a space using masking tape and post it notes, and then describe a room in the Grandstand within that space. From this I started describing the toilets behind the kitchen as I had used them in a previous exercise, and I used post it notes to map out where the fittings were situated e.g. the toilets, the sinks, the doors. I then got Brad to become the mirror on the wall with a post it note on his forehead, and Tamsyn and Kent became doors that I moved when I guided the audience into the space. I was a tour guide of some toilets. I also stuck post its on the posts with words used to describe the space.”

This exercise was really interesting. It made me think about the recreation of space through different mediums as a performance, and how insignificant toilet spaces usually are; yet I was part of a tour of one, and its different elements were exposed in great detail when usually this kind of site is ignored.

What initially was just a part of the main room in the Grandstand was suddenly transformed with detail into an exact replica of the bathroom with masking tape. If someone had told me I would be doing that as a form of performance last year, I would have laughed, yet now this kind of creation of space really inspires me, and relates strongly to the Theatre/ Archaeology text: “…spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces: architecture and events constantly transgress each other’s rules.” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p. 23). Constructing a masking tape bathroom in a space gives a purpose to that space, yet it has its own meaning before recreating a bathroom in it- the Grandstand’s many different rooms and spaces all have their own actions which are changed and explored through site specific performance.

Works Cited

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/ Archaology. Routledge.

Today the group visited the Lincolnshire archives, and among other interesting facts I discovered that the Grandstand could have potentially been used as a mortuary in World War Two- which sparked off a lot of ideas for our performance piece.

As we were shown around the archives and given information about the Grandstand’s history as an RAF training site, a thriving racecourse and its’ Expo in 1969, the thing that interested me the most was the contrast between all these roles- particularly that before being used as place where people placed bets and jockeys got weighed, dead bodies may have been laid in these rooms, and families may have come to say a final goodbye to their loved ones.

The idea of tainting a space became something I held onto throughout the visit, and I began to form links to the modern day too, and the Grandstand as it is now. The space has become a Community Centre over recent years, where children come to be looked after; yet, just 70 years ago that very same spot where a child may play with a toy, could have been the place where someone’s dead body was left until a family came.

We will never know if the site was used as a mortuary, but we can analyse how the space would have been viewed by people in the past, and now, if we knew for sure that it had. For me, before I knew it potentially could have been a mortuary, I looked at the Grandstand with a lot of nostalgia at its racecourse days, imagining men and women betting on horses and their reactions when theirs didn’t win. Now the image itself is tainted and so is the space.

Just a few photos showing the progression of the Foil Dress. Even though this is staying on a mannequin during the performance, this is one of the most important and charastistic features of our EXPO.Made from cotton, foil and cardboard I have made a dress from scratch that replicates the iconic dress shown at the EXPO 45 years ago.

With only a couple of days until our performances, we have gathered everything we need to build our installation. It has been difficult to visualize our final product, as it had been a very gradual development due to the amount of material needed to create it. From banners, to food, from posters, to buntin, everything we have gathered for our installation is utterly infused with the original ideas for EXPO 69- resurrecting and developing its legacy with Lincolnshire.