Filling the Dead, Finding the Beauty.

“I got to see a place which seemed to me empty, silent and uncared for.” ((Pinchbeck, M (2005) NottDance 2005 Toolkit. Dance4: Nottingham)) ,
To fill these empty corners and walls, the floor and the doorways doesn’t seem enough. As many of the group experienced on their ‘drifts’ people do not always look up. Why is this? I found myself asking when I, myself, went on a drift and discovered beautiful architecture that existed above the shop windows of Lincoln high street, for the first time. With such a mass of people walking around and never looking up in everyday life, it would be interesting to see whether this behavior changes in a performance environment.
The long piece of cloth, inspired by The Riddlers Jacket by John Newling, that the group have been sewing since the very start of our project at the Grandstand site has now reached almost the full length of the weighing room. With the image of ‘looking up’ in mind, the group have decided to hang the cloth from the ceiling using horse hair twine. In trial this looked like bunting which links in quite nicely with the community feel. Because it is on the ceiling, however, the question remains as to whether the audience will look up during the performance.
“How might its dimensions, the configuration of its architectural elements – walls,floors, surfaces – and existing spatial arrangements inform the placement and
dispersal of both performance and audience? Do they limit or broaden
performative potential? Do they facilitate the provision of close-up, shifting focus,
multi-focus?” ((Pearson, M (2011) Arts and Humanities Research Council Toolkit: Landscape and Environment)) this question, asked by Pearson, evokes thoughts about the multi-focus of our piece. As a group we want the cloth to lead the audience through the center of the room and into the factory in which the Women of War are still working on the ‘make do and mend’ patchwork ‘ airplane wings’. By having a centre of focus leading into us, it eradicates any dead space between the other happenings and ours. The spatial arrangement of the cloth and the Women of War piece does allow for a shifting of focus from the ceiling of the building all the way down the drains of the urinals. This gives us the opportunity to capture the whole building and frame it with our performance, hopefully giving the audience a chance to absorb its floors, and its potential, all at once.