“Is That Even In Lincoln?”

Daniel Ridealgh / / A Restoration

As part of our restoration site-specific project we have recently finished collecting information and now have the oportunitity to anaylise what we’ve found. After spending a few weeks in Lincoln town centre asking people to answer a quick questionnaire we collated all the data we took. We showed 200 people two photgraphs, one of the Grandstand, Tattershall and Silver Ring stands in the early 20th century whilst a race event was happening, and one of the remaining stand today.  Inspiration for this was drawn from a project carried out by John Newling called Make a Piano in Spain.  In this project Newling asked 500 people “What do you do to make yourself feel better?”, he then sought out to transform these responses, gathering qualitative data.  This is similar to what we have done below, although we asked 200 people rather than 500.  The title of the project Make a Piano in Spain, was actually someone’s response to the question he asked, likewise we had a response to our question, “Is that even in Lincoln?” which has inspired the title of this blog post.

 

old stand3006598

 

We then asked the question, Do you know where this is?

Do you know where this is

 

These five answers were the responses we found. As you can see over half of the people asked could not place this stand in Lincoln as we recieved the “I don’t know” answer from 78 people and “Is that even in Lincoln?” from 30. This in itself is quite alerting information, as you have read from previous blog posts on this site, the Grandstand’s history holds great significance in Lincoln’s past. This then may fuel the interest in our group project as we all immerse ourselves in the history of both the city and the Grandstand. Using this information we can identify that the majority of our audience may know nothing about the grandstand or it’s past. This allows our projects to contain an educational and informative element when we present them to the audience.   Another response that gives prominence to this argument would be that 35 people thought the grandstand is “On the golf course”.  Thinking the building to be part of the golf course would imply that it holds little significance other than to upgrade the aesthetic of the course to it’s users.  The Project as a whole can draw confidence from this information, the grandstand at present holds little demand from the city of Lincoln, so drawing on its past importance and getting the public to contribute to the idea pool for it’s future, may help the building see heights of activity that it was used to 60 years ago.

Next we informed those who had agreed to answer our questions on the high street what it was we had planned, explaining:

“The Grandstand held three day racing meets three times a year for almost 160 years.  During World War I the stands, and the surrounding common, were used as an airbase for the Royal Air Force.   As you can see in the two photos, the grandstand pavilions were demolished down to one stand in the 1960’s because the Lincolnshire handicap moved to Doncaster.  We are creating a project which regenerates these other two stands, hoping that by engaging an audience in the busy past of the buildings, we can change the dormant nature of the stand now into a place people often visit once again”. 

After a short explanation of what our site specific performance entailed, we asked our volunteers a second question: What do you think the Grandstand should be used for now?

What now

The biggest response here involved, in some way or form, returning horse racing events to the Lincoln west common, rather than at the showground where some races are carried out currently.  This was suggested by 62 people, many of whom mentioned that it may bring a great deal of income into the city and boost the local economy.  On the 24th March 1903 a record number of 7700 tickets were sold each day during the race meeting, ticket buyers coming from all over the country, tourists that no doubt contributed greatly to Lincoln’s economy that particular weekend. Sadly the second most frequent response was a call to have the stand demolished, with 37 people suggesting that there was no point having a building lying around doing nothing for the city.  Although their want to cut out inefficiency is justified, again the question of lack of knowledge around the grandstand arises.  I think back to how extensive my research was to find out the basic happenings of the building.  Compare this difficulty to the ease of learning anything about the Lincoln Cathedral or Castle, two buildings that you would struggle to find anyone in favor of demolishing.  This leads nicely to another favored suggestion, turning the stand into a museum in itself.  Making the information of the grandstand’s impressive history easily accessible would aid the local population to agreeing with our project’s intentions.  Again the five most reoccurring suggestions have been represented, the “Other Suggestions” segment contained ideas such as: An outdoor cinema, swimming pool, mosque, football pitch, marketplace, shopping mall, park and ride station, zoo, war memorial and a nightclub.

Place your bets please.

Emma Taylor / / The Odds Are Stacked

‘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.

We are Strangers to These Walls.

Emily Holt / / Women of War

Offering the audience juxtaposing views of the Grand Stand has been the groups aim throughout. With the senses of smell and taste being tantalised with food and drink in such a damp and dirty environment and people being brought into a space that is so dead, we already offer contrasting views of the space. To take this further the group needed to attain a specific space with the Grandstands weighing room to work with. Since we wanted to create a ‘factory’ environment, using our sewing machines to exhibit the work of the women in Lincoln during WWII, we needed a space that was mechanic, cold and quite harsh. The room that the group were instantly drawn to was the bathroom. With its exposed urinals, singular shower cubicle and revealed boiler it created the effect that we needed. On further inspection there are open pipes, holes in the walls and uneven surfaces which work well to juxtapose the bustling factory environment, created with the piece, with the abandoned building that the group are actually working in and with.
Coming to the Grandstand, the group made sure to remember that they are actually strangers to the space, and pondered on the question as to how long they would remain in that status. Being strangers, it could be difficult to really understand the space and its design, uses and history without really thorough research. For the Women at War group this was not so much of an issue. The toilet space had an obvious use, it was a bathroom, somewhere to relieve oneself, to powder the nose and even to taken a shower after a race. It was apparent that the facilities (especially the shower) were not regularly in use, the cobwebs and dirt had built up over time. However, although we were familiar with the uses of the space, we were still strangers to it. We therefore wanted to play with it in a juxtaposing way. Placing lipstick, perfume and toiletries around, their scent alongside the smell of freshly brewed tea, so that the “Scents mingle and intertwine” (( Curious (2003) On The Scent, Online: http://www.placelessness.com/project/1121/on-the-scent/ (accessed: 19th April 2013 ))  as we wanted to offer a new viewpoint and use of the space. “The strangers’ perspective may result in the space itself appearing strange to the spectators as the visiting artist offers up new understandings of the location and practices within the site” ((Govan, Emma et al (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, London and New York: Routledge)) Our new understanding of this masculine place full of decay and rot as a feminine one, full of tea and productivity, will hopefully provide that strange and confusing atmosphere for the audience to take pleasure in, finding meaning from the semiotic of giving, and taking away the tea.

T.A.N.K Part 4 – Smaller on the Inside

Callum Pepper / / T.A.N.K

When it came to rehearsing our section, now that we had created the caterpillar tracks added some movement, applied some text to the movement, what should we do next? What more could do to give the impression that the audience were seeing a tank from the First World War? After a another trip to the museum of Lincolnshire life and reading more into what it would have been like for the crew inside the tank. The idea that we came up that we should place our audience on the inside of our caterpillar tracks, placing a piece of material over them like a roof and squeezing the audience together to give that Claustrophobic feel that they are inside this killing machine with no way of escape.

Inside a World War 1 Tank

The original Tank crew shared the same space as the engine. The environment inside was extremely unpleasant; since there was no ventilation, the atmosphere was contaminated with poisonous carbon monoxide, fuel and oil vapours from the engine, and cordite fumes from the weapons. As you can see from the video it was a claustrophobic space for someone to be in, although they were protected from any outside force, it was the inside that was more deadly. The crew themselves were only issued with leather-and-chainmail masks plus a helmet to protect their head against projections inside the tank. Gas masks were standard issue as well, as they were to all soldiers at this point in the war. 

Steering a tank was difficult; it was controlled by varying the speed of the two tracks. Four of the crew, two drivers and two gears men were needed to control the direction and speed. As the noise inside was deafening, the driver, after setting the primary gear box, communicated with the gears men with hand signals, first getting their attention by hitting the engine block with a heavy spanner. For slight turns, the driver could use the steering tail: an enormous contraption dragged behind the tank consisting of two large wheels, each of which could be blocked by pulling a steel cable causing the whole vehicle to slide in the same direction. If the engine stalled, the gears men would use the starting handle – a large crank between the engine and the gearbox. Sadly many of these vehicles broke down in the heat of battle making them an easy target for German gunners. 

Untitled

Now that we had an idea of what we wanted to with the audience, we decide to apply some more text to our piece, this time it was instead of the tank crews motto, we were going use the a newspaper article form the Lincolnshire echo from 1965 entitled ‘Men and Machines’. The article itself was someone opinion on how we now relying on machines to do our fighting instead of an army.

“The improvement in machines far outstrips the improvement in a man as a fighter as so we become more and more mechanized”

Works cited:

www.firstworldwar.com/weaponry/tanks.htm (Accessed 14th April 2013)

www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/animations/mark_one_tank/index_embed.shtml (Accessed 19th April 2013)

Linconlshire Echo,Men and Machines,1965

Penny for your thoughts?

Chloe Pitts / / 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.

 

Thatchers' funeral

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.

british-war- - Copy

“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.