With our Tank full established and now in a complete form we now felt it was time to do the first test, as we had a preview at lunchtime on the morning of our performance, we could you use this time to see what did and did not work.
One problem which did occur was the absences of one of the crew, so we had to quickly find a solution on how our tank would work with only 3 crew members. After discussing through the possibilities and improvising around having only 3 crew members we came up with a solution.
The solution was just to carry on as normal, do everything we had practised before, but this time with a slight difference. The Tank Officer would hold the netting over the audience at the front by himself and the 2 crew members left would move the chairs alongside the black box. Normally it would be 4 crew members moving the chairs which gave it that caterpillar movement. This decision would make the tank move a little bit slower, but the essence of what he a trying to portray would still be there.
The Tank Officer would set the scene, lead the audience into the testing zone, and place them into the black box, while the tank crew spoke their motto “From the blood, through the mud, to the green fields beyond.’ and moved the chairs alongside them.
Analysing the Preview, (the first test), everything went as we had plan earlier only a couple minor hiccups happening during the performance. One notably hiccup was the back end of the tank (Chairs) collapsed. But all we could do was carry as normal getting through the first showing to the 2 audience members that were involved, and then rebuild our machine for the second showing. The Preview gave us a great opportunity to practise and to see how the machine we had created would affect the space we were working in. The space surrounding the tank, I would say was not affected in our performance, but the space that we had created inside the Tank, were the audience would stand or sit, we had created a kind a claustrophobic atmosphere were by anyone standing or sitting inside would feel trapped with now kind of escape from being inside this killing machine.
What also gave the space its atmosphere was the crew reading out the dairy extracts while facing inwards towards the audience entrapping them in moment of realisation that the machine they were in, eventually became one of biggest changes in warfare. Not only did the tank change the face of warfare, but it affected those who powered the machine into battle and also those who came face to face and lost their lives at the hands of this new machine.
As LT. Otto Schulz of the Germany Infantry said in his diary: “One stared and stared as if one had lost the power to move ones limbs. This big mental monster approached us slowly; someone had shouted ‘THE DEVIL IS COMING’” ((http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y0ZHESxVEc))