‘Performance can illuminate the historically and culturally diverse ways in which a particular landscape has been made, used, reused and interpreted; and help make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate from it’ ((Pearson, M. (2011) Why Performance? http://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_67088_1%26url%3D))
The Grandstand contains many histories and potential histories, some of which are being explored by the other groups within our site-specific performance. Each piece transitions smoothly into the next with the audience being taken on a guided tour of the Grandstand, intertwining the different histories to shine a new light on this forgotten gateway to Lincoln. This is similar to the aims of theatre company Talking Birds, who’s site-specific and site responsive works use ‘places which have interesting features, histories and former uses… which are on the brink of slipping from living memory’ ((Talking Birds, (2013) Site-specific and site-responsive works. Online: http://www.talkingbirds.co.uk/pages/sitespecific.asp)) We want to reawaken the memory of the Grandstand, and to stop it from becoming forgotten.
My group has decided to focus on the Grandstand’s most prominent and well known history of being a venue for horse-racing. In previous sessions and rehearsals we have experimented with covering the walls and also ourselves in newspaper, making pages from the ‘Racing Post’ the most obvious, and then also reciting the poem ‘the horse that I am riding’. These ideas are working really well, but take a lot of time to set up and prepare. So it is now time to focus on making our piece more of a journey, and to look more at the theme of betting and loss as this was where our idea initially developed from. The original idea was to have post-it notes covering our mouths and silently rip them off and drop them on the floor replicating the notion of discarded betting tickets. This is something we want to bring back into our piece, so we managed to get hundreds of used betting slips and use this idea of littering them on the floor. As we ‘discard’ them we walk around the audience (who are stood within a drawn out box on the floor) reciting names of horses with betting odds, therefore introducing the theme of betting and gambling, which as quoted from the William Hill website is “ingrained in our culture.” ((William Hill (2013) History, Online: http://www.williamhillplc.com/media/history.aspx)) Everywhere we look now there are adverts for gambling, betting and online casinos. It has become completely socially acceptable in our culture today, compared to what it was like around 100 years ago where “most gambling was done behind closed doors” ((William Hill (2013) History, Online: http://www.williamhillplc.com/media/history.aspx)) We each picked two or three names of horses from out of the Racing Post, so that we were using real horse names- I chose ‘Midnight Whisper’, ‘One night Only’ and ‘Charlie Bucket’. The reciting then becomes quicker and quicker and more chaotic, replicating the chaos and excitement that there would have been during the races in the past. Then we fall silent, and all that is left is the litter of losing betting tickets, which have been discarded, abandoned and forgotten.
During the entire performance we are planning on having a projection of the first ever moving horse film by Eadweard Muybridge, projected into an alcove that we are not currently using. This film will be on a loop and will be in silence. However at one stage of our performance, we all line up in front of the projection with copies of the racing post under our arms, as if we were queuing up to place bets. In rehearsal we started to make tapping noises with our feet, and realised that this sounded like the noise of horse hooves when trotting on hard ground. So we worked more to further emphasise this.