Whilst developing our group’s piece at the Grandstand, we wanted to explore the relationship between the tank and its evolutionary roots. During the First World War, heavy haulage tractors were used to transport naval guns. The concept of the tank was first touched upon by Admiral Bacon in 1914 when he remarked, “If a machine could be capable of laying its own bridge, being equipped with means of offence and defence, it would be of assistance in trench warfare.” (( William Foster & Co (1920) The Tank: Its Birth And Development, Tee Publishing))
Before the invention of the tractor and the complete mechanisation of farming, horses were the farmers’ choice in work animals. They were used to pull ploughs and transport everything from carts of produce and raw materials to people and their tools. Other breeds of horses were bred for the purpose of entertainment, such as the racehorses that would have attracted the crowds to Lincoln’s own Grandstand.We wanted to show the relationship and transition between horse and machine in our performance piece. We felt it would create a stronger link with the site, through Lincoln’s rural setting and the role of the horse at work and in entertainment.
Mike Pearson says in Theatre/Archaeology, “The assemblage of performance may be extremely schematic, requiring the spectator to elaborate a mental construct from a limited range of illusionistic or even two-dimensional clues.” ((Pearson, Mike and Shanks, Michael (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London:Routledge, p.56)) We had planned to suggest the claustrophobic atmosphere of a tank by closing off a segment of the audience under a sheet of material. We tried cloaking two students in the material in similar positions to the people inside a pantomime horse costume. We used the folds in the material and the raised arms of the person in front to create the shape of a horse’s neck, head and ears. The aim was to have the ‘horse’ stand in the middle of the room as the audience walked in, making subtle movements such as shuffling its feet or flicking its head. The remaining two performers would have made a structure suggesting the shape of a tank around it. The performers inside the ‘horse’ would unfurl the material to create the roof and main body of the tank, and the audience would have been invited inside for the next stage of the performance.
Unfortunately, in practice, the shape and movement of the horse was too difficult and time-consuming to recreate reliably. We were lucky on our first attempt, but all following attempts failed to match the eerie horse-like quality of the first try.
From there, we concentrated on creating a structure that would suggest the presence of one of the original tanks. In earlier discussions we had gone from bales of hay (to suggest an agricultural link), to cardboard boxes covered in hay, to a large cardboard cut-out of the side view of the tank. We became concerned with the thought that if the construction material did not work, in a similar way that the ‘horse’ was unsuccessful, we may not have time to source other options guaranteed to produce the effect we were looking for. In Theatre/Archaeology, Pearson goes on to say”It may work with extremely limited material and performative means. Everyday objects may be included, though their placement, ratios and combinations are governed by extra-daily principles.” ((Pearson, Mike and Shanks, Michael (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London:Routledge, p.56)) We wanted to find an everyday object on site so that it could hold the essence of the site while we used in a way that might come to represent something about the tank or tank crew. Consequently we returned to procuring materials on site, using chairs found in the weighing room as the caterpillar tracks for our tank.
We assembled two parallel lines of chairs and moved the rear chairs to the front of the line, one by one, to represent the movement of the caterpillar tracks and the symbiotic teamwork needed to keep an early tank prototype running in the field. It is a simple idea but one that we feel may be developed into something stronger through the use of other performative elements and motifs to denote the movement of machinery and the bond of teamwork.