Every
Penny
Helps
Adele Prince is an artist based in London who works on a varied amount of projects based around the idea of durational art, through the use of media including the web and moving image. A piece of her artwork which links directly to our piece is called Lucky World. Lucky world involves the use of pennies, with the ideology of ‘find a penny, pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck’ she began this process by picking up seven pennies and creating a journal of her luck for seven days. She then distributed the coins for other people to do the same, and they too would fill in their own journals using many forms, including pictures and written evidence. This piece links to our group through the audience participation and the idea of having them bring a penny to the piece to ‘donate’. Although they are considered as a spectator within our piece, they are also considered a performer as stated by Cathy Turner ‘every audience member has a vast range of perceptual roles at their disposal: theatre spectator, tourist, game player, partygoer, voyeur, connoisseur, witness, scientific observer, detective. ((Turner, C (2000) ‘Framing the site’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Supplement 5, pg. 25)) The idea of bringing a penny also symbolises the journey that our research has taken to reach the point of performance, much as a penny shows it journey through its shine or its dents, its rust and even the dating upon it. We want to show how we are still affected by the losses of War and the Grandstand being what it once was. To achieve this, we are initially setting out many of the coins to represent the many lives that have been lost but by asking the audience to bring a penny we are spreading our knowledge to the masses, and highlighting how it is still relevant to today’s generation with the Iraq War and even Margret Thatcher’s funeral. The funeral included 700 troops due to their involvement with her in the Falkland’s war; this therefore shows how the theme of our piece is current to todays’ ever changing society.
By placing the penny with the Queens face facing upwards we are again reminding the audience of the ideology of the war theme running parallel to that of the Site. The ideology of fighting for the monarch and country is visible through the placing of the coins face up, hopefully conjuring the image of medals such as The British War medal, given to brave soldiers during the First World War.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
This quote stated by Martin Luther King Jr highlights our groups’ opinion towards the use of the coins within our piece, after spending time collecting donations from various people and spending a week visiting multiple banks we are finally reaching the target of 9000 coins. Each member of the class has given £3 and as a group we had realised and have come to appreciate the amount of money we have raised for a performance. Would we leave the coins as dead space? Should it remain dead space like the Grandstand, unused and unwanted, or, should it be put back into the community?
We decided with the help of the fellow donators to donate the money to two charities which are best associated with our piece, the charities we have chosen are; ‘Bransby Horse, rescue and welfare’ this is a local charity, which has two bases and one of which is in Lincoln. This charity is concerned with providing a sanctuary for abused equine based animals and re-homing them’ ((http://www.bransbyhorses.co.uk/home/home%20about%20us%20NEW.html))
The Second Charity is; ‘Scotty’s Little Soldiers, this charity helps to support the children of the serving/fallen soldiers’ ((http://www.scottyslittlesoldiers.co.uk)) We feel that by donating the money to charity we are keeping the project and the performance alive, and in turn commemorating the soldiers and horses that have fallen from Lincoln.