War and Loss – Page 2

RAF At The Grandstand – Memorial Flight

Christopher Greg Sellers / April 29, 2013May 13, 2013 / War and Loss

During the final rehearsal for Safe Bet my idea has developed a good deal. I looked at the RAF debrief I had constructed and saw that the main focus of this was to fly the aircraft continuously I thought therefore that the audience could practice flying over and over again and I didn’t want to give them another speech. As we are trying to depict the horrors of war I thought it would be a good idea to juxtapose this with something negative. I therefore had another inspection of the Dambusters book and found a list at the back of all those aircrew who had lost their lives. I have consequently decided to read these, ordering the recruits to practice flying during this. My main aim in giving the piece a memorial was to portray issues of” ownership and occupation, individual and group identity, power, boundaries, rights of inclusion and exclusion, memory” ((Pearson, 2011, p144)).

Following this sequence, I wanted the audience to wreck their planes, just like the airmen’s lives were wrecked. My first idea was for the audience to place their planes in a burning bin for them to be engulfed by the flames. However, due to health and safety procedures this was discarded. I then thought the same effect could be given if the planes were ripped up and then scattered on the ground , like a battlefield. Though a defect in this plan came when I was reminded that I am repeating this exercise three times, therefore the new groups would already predetermine the activity before it was started, if planes are lying on the ground The world I am presenting depicts “performance as overlapping situations: one place in two different social occasions at one time ” ((Acconci, 1996:65)). Therefore, I thought the audience members could tear their planes to pieces then drop them in a bag. Yet, during the final rehearsal , due to the windy weather the pieces blew away. Thus, I needed to take the pieces inside.

Forgotten Items Housed In The Grandstand, One Of These Being The Tombola Which I Have Utilised

As the performance is centred around betting, one of the forgotten items housed in the Grandstand is a tombola. I am therefore going to ask the audience to place their scattered planes into the tombola drum . By theoretically gambling with lives , I am emphasising how poignant the situation is . Once the names are in, I will turn the tombola , as if they have become one of many forgotten many . Through the glamorisation of war, the audience will react naturally given the sad circumstances. However, I do mention that by gathering up the remains they will never be forgotten, highlighted by the RAF motto.

During feedback, I was told that people found it hard to tear up what they had made , and gradually, as the names sink in, the audience no longer want to fly their planes. This is , in effect ” A restoration of the absent present” ((Pearson, 2010, p46)).

Works Cited

Kaye, Nick (2000) Site-Specific Art, Great Britain: Routledge

Pearson, Mike (2010) Site- Specific Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Aircraft At The Grandstand- Flying Solo

Christopher Greg Sellers / April 26, 2013May 13, 2013 / War and Loss

As ideas progressed in groups , the structure of the performance began to change. The performance begins with the audience being led to the main room , where me and Jordan greet them, give them betting slips and introduce them to the activities. It seemed sense after this for me to lead them to an activity , after all “The solo voice can orientate, guide,” ((Person, 2011)). Because other groups styles were practical, I felt mine should too. To give the audience planes to fly and for them then to have to concentrate on the 9,000 pennies and speech simultaneously would be too much. Instead, by utilising solo performance I “can play a generative role in interpretation and the creation of new ways of perceiving; animating through fiction ((Pearson, 2011)).
Another reason for converting my contribution to a solo piece is due to the layout of the performance. There would need to be a maximum of approximately 20 to enable each participant to receive the full experience . Therefore, these practical activities will revolve so that each group can participate in each exercise. Bearing in mind that the penny for your thoughts display is a continuous piece in which the audience can place their pennies this gives me no choice but to perform my piece as a solo performance There was also a suggestion that I could lead the audience to the ‘penny for your thoughts’ section however the tour guide instead will be one of the ‘ women at war’.

A Copy Of A Betting Slip I Will Hand Out As The Audience Enter The Grandstand

Works Cited

Pearson, Mke (2011) Why Solo Perfomrance? Online: 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

(accessed 28th April 2013)

Aircraft At The Grandstand- RAF Debrief

Christopher Greg Sellers / April 26, 2013May 13, 2013 / War and Loss

After the introductory speech, all aircrew (audience members) must be given a debrief by me . Originally this was going to be delivered outside , along the wall next to the Penny For Your Thoughts display and original landing pad. However, this wasn’t very realistic judging the scenario so the debrief will be held inside. I next pondered for a while of where I could find a template speech . I scoured the RAF archives website , but finding only speeches delivered in ceremonies or as after dinner modern speeches , decided to look elsewhere. I , next, dipped into films of that era , including Battle of Britain, Dambusters and An Appointment In London.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAPOpPqA7M8 (You tube Video Of An Appiontment In London Movie)

These were all concerned with the air missions of this period. An Appointment In London, in particular, includes a briefing scene which could connect well to this promenade performance The audience will be able to visualise , in my piece, “What media are employed?” and How might different orders of material be attributed to different voices or media?” ((Pearson, 2011)).

During the introduction we informed the audience that they would be testing aircraft.I therefore researched books based on the RAF . This drew me to my then participation in Dambusters 70 : After Me The Flood , a piece commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Dambusters raids and to Max Arthur’s Damubsters. Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who assembled 617 squadron to blow up the dams , trained them on aircraft at Scampton in Lincolnshire Dambusters reveals exactly what he said to the crew before they began their training, this is consequently what I will replicate. This speech begins “your’e here to do a special job” and ends on “Discipline is absolutely essential” ((Arthur, 2009, p25)).

I didn’t want to imitate the speech so broke this down to the topics discussed. I then recorded my views and compiled my script from these. I will debrief the audience after the introduction .

Research Into Models Of Royal Air Force Aircraft In World War II, Lincolnshire Aircraft Manufacturers Of RAF Aircraft And Royal Air Force History

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A final decision I have come to make is to leave the planes blank. Without any design they appear lifeless , akin to the fact that those that flew the planes died. As my ideas developed I have also decided to hand out paper for the audience to make their own aeroplanes during the debrief . Firstly I will demonstrate this and they will copy. The audience therefore feel that the plane is more personal to them also they are participating in the activities rather than just watching. They appear “‘to consciously look at continuities or continuities that are being made’,again evoking the notion of dramaturgy as always in process, always emerging in relation to its context” ((Turner, 2010, p151)).

Works Cited

Arthur, Max (2009) Dambusters, Virgin, London

Pearson, Mike (2011) Some Exercises In Perfomrance Composition , Online: 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

(accessed 26th April 2013).

Tunrner, Cathy (2010) ” Dramatrugy and Architecture” on Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space’ Contemporary Theatre Review

, Vol. 20(2), 149–161.

Penny for your thoughts?

Chloe Pitts / April 17, 2013May 10, 2013 / War and Loss

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.

‘War and Loss’… expanding ideas

Chloe Pitts / April 9, 2013May 10, 2013 / War and Loss

Our concept was “inspired by…the characteristics of the place” ((Pearson, 2010, p.148)) it gave us our concept as McLucas comments “deciding to create a work in a ‘used’ building might provide a theatrical foundation or springboard…it might get us several rungs up the theatrical ladder before we begin” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)). In terms of Brith Gof’s considerations of the ‘host’ and the ‘ghost’, the building was such an imposing host that regardless of what the ghost was that we brought into the site, the host and the ghost would begin to “bleed into each other” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)) and therefore the site would heavily influence the performance. As, even though the site had been emptied of the majority of its paraphernalia which had been left behind when it closed in 1965, there were still a large number of traces of what the race course once was. There still remained the old weighing rooms, and remnants of the old course. These were all part of the “fixtures and fittings” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.35)) and from this we wanted to create something that would become, as McLucas calls it, a hybrid of performance 20 which combines the “performance (ghost), the place (host) and the public” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.143)). We wanted to make the piece specific to the site in some way whether that is in “subject matter, theme, and dramatic structure” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.149)). We wished ultimately to explore the notions of site-specific performance in our work and where our performance could fit into this field. We wanted the site to be a central influence to our piece and using it as our primary stimulus for devising helped us in this. We started our devising process similarly to Pearson’s process with “a process of research, frequently interdisciplinary research: into site and subject” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. p.151)).

After doing our own separate research and finding key areas of interest, we, as a group had a turning point after visiting The Lincolnshire Archives, ‘of over 50,000 men recruited into the Lincolnshire Regiment during the First World War, almost 9,000 were killed and at least 30,000 more were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner’. The sheer quantity of Lincolnshire men that died shocked our group and we decided to make this our focal point. Researching further we found an estimate of the amount of money which was given to the soldiers as a ration, one penny. Using these two strands we decided to construct an installation piece of artwork with 9,000 pennies, portraying 9,000 lives. We decided to do this by creating a giant Union Jack which was found in the Lincolnshire Archives, the flag was created by a Lincolnshire man; in essence bringing Lincoln’s heritage back to the Gateway of Lincoln.

The idea of using the coins also links directly to the site; the idea of placing bets, this although sticking to the conventions of the site also brings fantasy into the piece with the idea of War being a theme, much like Gob Squads work in 1995. We wanted to create an installation piece of work that the audience could be involved with by allowing them to place down coins as well as the ‘performers’ doing it. Whilst doing this we decided to also read out facts that we have researched; The Beechy boys story and the facts about the artwork, this will enable us to create poignancy and much like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Relational Aesthetics below we are placing the lives of the soldiers in a live social context (performed) rather than it being kept in a private space (kept as a fact)

“Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Relational Aesthetics” ((Weburbanist.com (2008) Amazing Collection of Artworks Made From Money | WebUrbanist. [online] Available at: http://weburbanist.com/2008/12/14/art-from-money/ [Accessed: 10 May 2013].))

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist known for exploring the social role of the ‘artist’ using the ideology of relational aesthetics. The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity, the idea of creating a piece in which the audience can participate is an idea that we want to include. Bourriaud claims “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist.” ((Bourriaud, Nicolas, Caroline Schneider and Jeanine Herman. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.)) In Relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community, rather than artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija is most famous for installation art pieces where he cooks meals for gallery-goers, reads to them, or plays music for them. However in this piece he used money in order to create a reaction from his audience. Rirkrit’s treatment of money, above, is a perfect example of the examination of human beings in their social context rather than in a private space’. ((Weburbanist.com (2008) Amazing Collection of Artworks Made From Money | WebUrbanist. [online] Available at: http://weburbanist.com/2008/12/14/art-from-money/ [Accessed: 10 May 2013].)) Much like this art work we want to use the coins to send a message – to highlight the vast quantity of men that died from Lincoln to protect our country.

Another Practitioner that we have taken inspiration from for our Piece is John Newling’s ‘Ecologies of Value’ in which he used explored the social and economic system of society with 50,000 two pence coins; much like our installation piece he replicated a static object (a cash machine) but also related his artwork to the act of taking communion in the Christian church. This idea of using two themes relates to our work with the aspects of war and betting creating one united installation. These ideas further link to Higgins and his theory of how artwork links what is understood to what is not ‘The concept is understood better by what it is not, rather than the what it is’ ((Higgins 1969:25)), much like Higgins and Newling the piece is more focused upon conceptual art, as the group is more focused upon the ideas presented compared to the finished article.