Crime scene

Sophie Jane Bullivant / / Women of War

The company Forced Entertainment stated how once you know a place well you can confuse the notions of fact and fiction when presenting to an audience. The idea was portrayed in their coach tour performance Nights in this City (1995), where the guide pretended through a comical narrative that Sheffield was alternative cities, such as Rome and Berlin.

Similarly, it feels as though our Site-Specific group are gradually becoming more familiar with the Grandstand location, and we too can start to “negotiate the collapses and collisions of facts and fictions” ((Hill, Leslie and Helen Paris ed. (2006) Performance and Place, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.)). For example, after last Wednesday’s practical session exploring the exterior and surrounding environment of the Grandstand, Phoebe, Emily and I ‘reconstructed’ our findings in the LPAC. Our discovery of vehicle tracks, paw prints, a hearing-aid, a pair of boxer pants, barbed wire and a glove, (being factual pieces of the site) then became part of a ‘crime scene’ narrative.

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Furthermore, Mike Pearson’s question of whether the experience was a “quest” (2010, p. 21) emphasised our imaginary roles as ‘detectives’, and consequently we saw the Grandstand from a different perspective. The question of a “prescribed or proscribed” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.)) site also sparked our imaginations, and helped us to envisage new themes for our performance.

Entrances to Hell

Stephenie Clubley / / Uncategorized

Entrances2Hell.co.uk describes itself as “The constantly updated catalogue of entrances to Hell in and around the UK”. It is a tongue-in-cheek collection of photographs depicting dilapidated or unusual doorways that don’t seem to fit with the scenery around them. They are submitted by users from all around the UK and after being authenticated by the website administrators they are listed on the website with a name and it’s own fictitious mythology, often with humorous results.

"Airfix"

“Airfix has a reputation as a place where lovers meet and is where the devil finally married his 2 childhood sweethearts Milly the Milkmaid and Linda M. Daventree in 1761. Since their marriage these two have given birth to almost 17 billion little-devils who have already been sent to distant star systems to follow in their fathers foosteps. Birdsong here is always performed as an improvisation around the chords B flat minor and G7. The tunnel of Airfix has had the new long-life light bulbs installed along its entire length.” (Entrances to hell around the UK: Airfix, n.d.)

There do not seem to be any specific guidelines for spotting an ‘entrance to hell’, but from studying many of the photographs the general consensus is that these places are mostly neglected, grubby spots in an urban landscape that look anomalous. Many of them are places that would be unsettling to loiter around alone in the dark, and if they did happen to be portals to an other-worldly dimension it may be fair to say that it would not be an ideal tourist attraction.

Bricked up wall at the grandstand

This photo, taken at the Lincoln grandstand, depicts a keystone and archway above a patch of brickwork that looks conspicuous amongst the rest of the wall. This suggests there used to be a doorway here. In Mike Pearson’s Theatre/Archaeology, he asks us to consider an archaeological artefact. “Do not begin with the question, ‘What is it?’ Instead ask ‘What does it do?’. Enquire of its social work: What does it connect through its design, exchange and consumption?” (2001, p.53) The reason for the closure of this door is most likely simple disuse, but walled-up doorways always present room for curiosity and questions. One cannot help but wonder what kind of doorway once stood there, for whose use it was intended, and where it once led. Are there any traces of the other side of the doorway on the interior of the building? If there are not, it only adds to how unnatural the traces on the outside look. An open doorway can look mystical and inviting; a closed doorway can look threatening but still prompt our inquisitiveness.

Continue reading “Entrances to Hell”

Muted in Metal

Daniel Ridealgh / / A Restoration

The Lincoln grandstand hosted the Lincolnshire handicap race for 111 years before its move to Doncaster.  For over a century this ground was one of the busiest places in the county.

On the latest exploration however, we found this…Where's the announcement?

The remnants of an old Tannoy system.  The very voice of the stand, now robbed.  Years of commentary and race announcements silenced, with not even an echo in the air that could hint towards the atmosphere of the past.  Imagine walking up to the stand on race days, the smell of horses and hot food, the sight of a crowd squeezing themselves onto the stand, but picture that without the sound from the loudspeaker directing people of the day’s entertainment.

The voice could still be existent somewhere in the venue, but it would be behind a parameter of iron.

Another gateA close up of the back of the Grandstand Side gate

Metal gates and bars surround the grandstand now,  giving out a sense of entrapment and imprisonment.  The initial response to this is how the atmosphere of what the stand was before, is now changed to one of an eerie, dark and dangerous place.  The lives, the voices of the past and the stand itself is now guarded under lock and key.  A place that once brought excitement, now an emptying space.

How can the sounds of the past be recreated and where would anyone begin?  The grandstand itself was a means to (unintentionally) infuse two separate comings together; the races and the RAF base.   Mike Pearson states that the answers start from the site itself through exploring ‘ two basic orders: that which is of the site, its fixtures and fittings, and that which is brought to the site, the performance and its scenography’ (2010, p.35).  The images above show what is of the site, but that which was brought to the site will be the challenge to locate.  The Lincolnshire handicap, the biannual three day race, moved to Doncaster in 1965.  The RAF activity during the war ceased and now operates in surrounding bases.  Although there is nothing being brought to the site that relates to its past today, these events ‘are inseparable from their sites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible’ (Pearson, 2010, p. 35).

First Impressions…

Phoebe Wall-Palmer / / Personal Posts, Women of War

‘I don’t particularly mind waste, but I think it’s a pity not to know what one is wasting. Some old ladies use pound notes as bookmarks: This is silly only if it is absent-minded.’ ((Brook, Peter (2008) The Empty Space, London: Penguin Classics, p. 45))

Walking through an open space, or down a street, the details are missed. Of course it’s not until you consciously look for something that you notice the details, the intricacies of both the man-made and the natural. You also begin to develop something seemingly uninteresting into an installation piece, or as if there was motive behind randomly placed coincidences. I guess we can all find art in anything; it’s how you perceive it.

Our first visit to the Grandstand conjured the same feeling: what was waste and what was wanted?

‘In what guise do I visit?’ ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 19)), is a question Mike Pearson suggests asking oneself before visiting a site. As students, we have the intention and motive in finding potential for art, in a place that could have been previously neglected. An employee of Lincoln County Council guided us around the rooms of the Grandstand. He told us what he could about the history of the site, but seemed bemused by our excitement of the small, ostensibly insignificant, aspects to each room.

 ‘Yet with the freedom to loiter, to witness and interpret passing scenes and incidents, diverse activities, unpredictable juxtapositions, fleeting occurrences, multifarious sights and sounds… Gazing, grazing, consuming.’ ((Ibid, p. 20))

We all began finding interesting spaces, with the original architecture in mind; we could place performance and art within the existing walls. For example, the corridor below stretched along half of the length of the building. The natural darkness and eeriness invited the possibility of using projections, or introducing light in different ways to transform a corridor into a performance. The particular space is currently wasted. This allowed us to see a blank canvas for a performance potential.

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One of the rooms in particular seemed to inspire and surprise all of us. The war memorial below encouraged a whole new strand to our ideas, originally thinking that horse racing would be at the forefront of our research and the final piece.

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It was not long before we all felt passionate that the Grandstand deserved to have a voice returned to it. Another of Pearson’s questions to consider is: ‘am I simply enthralled by the place? Or is it difficult to know where it ends and I begin?’ ((Ibid, p. 21)) After I left the site I felt some sort of ownership and pride in the Grandstand, I was enthralled by it’s history and potential for our work. The whole site is wasted now, only used for the odd fitness class or brass band rehearsal- it is not being celebrated and treated with the grandeur it deserves; it is the gateway to Lincoln. It’s an exciting prospect to think that we will become part of its history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Non-Places and the personal

Stephenie Clubley / / Uncategorized

“Walking through
the underpass
under Cold Blow Lane
near Millwall
football ground
surrounded by mad fans
fighting
and police
while carrying two bags
of food and drink
I just walked
through it all
like walking through a film”

(Mirza/Butler, 1999)

In this ‘age of information’ we are constantly immersed in multimedia everywhere we look. For someone living in this age, it is quite easy to imagine your personal life as a film. As day to day events unfold and coincidences reveal themselves, they can become interlinked in ways that sometimes seem like they must have been scripted.

This illusory ‘film’ of your life is something only you will ever be able to see through your own unique viewpoint. No two people experience the same sights and sounds around them in the exact same way. If you were a Hollywood producer striving to recreate someone’s life on the big screen, you would edit out the majority of the mundane and the everyday. People would be interested in watching the immediate events leading up to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but less so in watching the three hours spent on an aeroplane between Washington D.C. and Dallas.

Marc Augé states that “If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.” (1995, p.77-78) However this does not prevent non-places like airports, bus stops and elevators from becoming  concerned with identity on an individual level. This is exemplified in Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s film extract of ‘Non Places‘, where personal experiences are written as subtitles and laid over monochrome shots of ordinary walkways and stairwells. These places are not unfamiliar to anybody who has visited an urban area, but the subtitles illuminate invisible echoes of inner thoughts. “…the personal voice, translated into subtitles. There is no voice-over, so the lines are read, as it were, in the viewer’s own head. Personal memory, which might be thought alien to the very idea of a non-place, is here drawn close to it.” (Rees, 1999)

Mirza and Butler bring the personal in the non-place to light by evoking subconscious memories of non-places within the viewer that they may have previously overlooked.  “Some shots evoke an oblique connection between the story and the image – a train passes as the text refers to a railway station – but others imply a greater distance, a space for the viewer to fill by drawing on their own memories.” (Rees, 1999)

This ‘space for the viewer to fill’ invites the viewer to consider non-places with a dormant significance. Perhaps next time they pass such a non-place, they may find themselves smiling as they remember it afresh as their main meeting point for friends in their first year at university; the place where they sheltered from the rain the one time they locked themselves out of the house; or the first pedestrian crossing where their crush held their hand while waiting for the green light.

 

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