Last week as a class we went to the Lincolnshire Archives to research a bit more about the historical background of the Grandstand. Whilst there Eloise, Emma, Kash, Rachel and myself came across a document which was designed in 1939; it was a drawing of a plan to turn the grandstand into a mortuary if Lincoln was badly bombed during the Second World War. It was there, at that moment in the archives where we realised that we all had an interest in this plan, so as a collective we decided to carry on this module as a group.
During last week’s afternoon lecture, in groups we had to create a sneak peek performance of what we were thinking at the time to do for our final piece. After talking to my group about ideas we decided that we wanted to incorporate something about horses within our final piece.
One of my ideas that I had was to have the audience wearing headphones and have a soundscape of horses, trotting, galloping or neighing playing on a loop through them. I wanted to incorporate something to do with the five senses within our piece. Another idea I had thought of was to put some horse manure in the room so that when the audience walked in they could smell it and relate the stench to the horse as we physically could not get a horse for our performance.
Individually before the group task of creating a 5 minute performance we had to answer the Mike Pearson questions about exercises in place after visiting a location. The task that I found the most difficult was the ‘ Write a postcard, describing the place with five words beginning with the same letter’ ((Pearson, Mike (2011) Exercises In Place))
The letter I picked for this exercise was the letter “L”, I selected this letter because when I first saw the grandstand I thought that the site looked “Lonely”. The Grandstand is an isolated building which is placed on the outskirts of Lincoln. I feel that people drive past the grandstand everyday but do not really notice it because it is unused. The only time when the Grandstand gets company is when someone is hiring the hall out for a children’s nursery or someone’s birthday; it is now known as a community centre not a racecourse.
The second word I had written down was “Lost”, I believe that the Grandstand is excluded from civilisation. When you stand on the steps of the Grandstand and face the west common you can see the top of the Lincoln Cathedral on the right-hand side above the trees. I feel that the Grandstand is quite a distance from the cathedral, because it is located away from the middle of the city and I believe that is where most of Lincoln’s citizens is.
The final word I had written down was “Large”, to me I felt that the Grandstand was quite big, I did not expect it to be that huge, I believe that when you view it from the golf course it looks like an old fashioned school.
I generally could not think of any other words that began with the letter L so I moved on to the next task. After I had finished the whole exercise, my group and I got together and discussed our answers to the questions. We decided to use the letter exercise to incorporate into our piece; we did this because both Eloise and I picked the letter “L” and for some strange reason we both had written down the exact same words.
When it came to show our performance myself, Eloise, Emma, Kash and Rachel all stood in a line in front of the class with post it notes on our faces covering our mouths. Written on the post it notes we had a selection of words that we felt as a group associated with the grandstand. For example we had words like “Derelict” “Damaged” Abandoned” and “Lost”. To portray the contrast we had an old sepia photo of the Grandstand demonstrating a busy day at the Lincoln Handicap which projected on the white board. To heighten the difference even further we had a sound effect of a busy crowd playing in the background. For the piece, we stood in front of the projection with neutral faces , one by one we slowly peeled a post it note of our face and then dropped it gently to the ground letting the post it note fall wherever it wanted to.
After performing the piece we received some feedback, what really intrigued my group was when someone in the class mentioned that the post it notes reminded them of betting slips especially when we let them fall on the floor as to them it looked like lost betting slips after a horse race.
