grandstand – Safe Bet

In Reflection

Sophie Jane Bullivant / May 7, 2013May 8, 2013 / Women of War

The Women of War characters were a prominent part of the beginning of our performance, Safe Bet. We performed a repetitive sequence in front of the wall, next to the Weighing Room. The four hooks on the wall symbolised a mirror for each woman, and we continuously moved down the line of hooks, applying different make-up at each mirror. For example, I applied powder at the first hook and then moved to the next hook, passing the object to another woman, whilst also receiving the lipstick. The sequence continued while the audience were greeted by the sound of the megaphone.

The first performances took place in a rotation format, and the audience went to the different performances in small groups. During the rotation, the audience returned to the seating area in the Weighing Room, to await the next performance/activity. We, the Women of War, remained in the corner of the room, and applied make-up and styled our hair. We also dabbed tea onto our legs and drew black lines onto our calves, which was a popular act of women during the war, to create the illusion that they were wearing silk stockings. Thus, the scent of tea and sweet perfume drifted through the room, for the audience to feel absorbed in the piece, as their senses were heightened. The action of waiting was also a chance for the audience to reflect on what they had experienced so far. Wolfgang Iser states that “Social communication […] arises out of the fact that people cannot experience how others experience” ((Iser, Wolfgang (2001) ‘Interaction between Text and Reader’ in Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (ed.) Performance Analysis, London: Routledge.)). As a result, the ‘waiting in limbo’ space that was created was an opportunity for the audience to briefly share opinions.

After the application of make-up, we (as the women) stood proudly in front of the audience. We wanted the audience to see the women as merely being on display, as they were during the pre-war period. Thus, we highlighted our smart, feminine attire and pristine make-up by posing in a row. Our position was a direct contrast to the factory scene that occurred later, where the women had a true purpose and an important role in Britain’s success in the war. Our journey and the transformation of the women throughout the performance is represented through the large cloth that we hung above the length of the Weighing Room ceiling. The cloth also symbolised the aeroplane wings that the Women of War sewed in the factories, and the fact that we used unwanted clothing of our fellow group members also emphasised our strong theme of community.

The Women of War’s main piece of the performance was the factory sewing scene, in the kitchen/shower room. The scene can be regarded as an exhibition and a piece of ‘Museum Theatre’. Catherine Hughes states:

In this age of deconstruction, the new focus on education has rattled the foundations of museums by bringing up questions about how we view knowledge, how we perceive the learning process, and how we determine whose point of view is dominant ((Hughes, Catherine (1998) ‘The Nature of Museums and Theatre’, Museum Theatre, Portsmouth: Heinemann.)).

Thus, the audiences’ reactions made each of us realise how thought provoking our scene had been. For example, my role was to greet the audience and invite a maximum of five people into the kitchen space. Ironically, the audience members that I chose were all male, yet this happened at random. However, a member of the audience later stated that he found the close proximity of the male audience highly poignant, as it highlighted the contrast between the genders, and suggested that the women’s hard work was, in contrast, overlooked by the men during the war. I informed the audience member that this was unintentional, yet the selection of the five males had created a new perspective of our scene. Another unexpected audience reaction that occurred during the scene was when the audience had their tea swiftly taken off them and poured down the urinals. There were many sighs of disappointment and reluctance, which highlighted the happiness and comfort that people feel with a cup of tea. Furthermore, the reactions emphasised the important message of the scene, which consisted of the tea representing community, and how community is literally being ‘poured down the drain’. Also metaphorically, the removal of the tea signifies how the Grandstand site is currently wasted and discarded. Cathy Turner reflects on such an occurrence, believing that “each occupation, or traversal, or transgression of space offers a reinterpretation of it, even a rewriting” ((Turner, Cathy (2004) ‘Palimpsest or Potential Space? Finding a Vocabulary for Site-Specific Performance, New Theatre Quarterly, XX (4) pp. 373-390.)), and personally, the opportunity for a plethora of meanings and audience interpretations, is the essence of site-specific performance.

The T.A.N.K: Performance Reflection

Ben Middleton / May 7, 2013May 7, 2013 / T.A.N.K

One of the highlights of the tank group’s performance I think was the atmosphere we created the moment the audience walked into the room; with the rumble of the tank sound effect in the background with the monotonous chant of ‘From the blood, through the mud, to the green fields beyond.’ We created a sense of unease and tension within the audience since they did not really understand what was so far happening. Also, with the audience being cramped in right at the beginning it heightened the atmosphere because it gave them a sense of being trapped. Moreover the use of the chairs and netting, although ambiguous at first the audience soon got the idea of what we were creating, plus with the use of the netting whilst the audience would get the claustrophobic feeling we wanted, the netting still gave them some source of viewing, yet, I would have liked to experiment with restricting the audience’s view because the view inside a real tank was limited.

Moreover, the fact we used diary entries from soldiers who were in the tanks during the first world war brought a different sense of atmosphere to the performance ‘narratives provides coherence, a process of emplotment which configures these actions into a meaningful, comprehensible interpretation’ (( Postlewait, T. (1992) ‘History, Hermeneutics, and Narrativity’ in J.G Reinelt and J.R Roach (eds) Critical Theory and Performance University of Michigan Press pp. 356-368)) By using the diary entries we were bringing the piece back to the community and giving a voice back to the tank which would have otherwise not been there, plus the fact that one of the main aims of the whole safe-bet performance was to bring back the community and the voice to the grandstand. The narratives created by the use of diary entries are self-explanatory and not closed ‘but flexible and dynamic social practices, and this means that the experience of belonging to community always represents a partial account of experience’ ((Govan, Emma; Nicholson, Helen and Normington, Katie (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices London: Routledge)) which shows how the audience would have understood the diary entries for actual experience and would have been able to empathetically imagine the happenings, in addition to this, the fact we used German diary extracts as well as English diary entries, we gave a balanced view point of the tank from both the victor and the victim.

However, one of the performances weaknesses was that we were still shaky with our lines, which caused some minor confusion and some delay which stopped the performance flowing fluidly. For me personally I kept rushing my lines from nerves of not fully knowing them and so I continually tripped over my lines which stopped the flow of the performance. We could have overcome this problem by rehearsing our lines more often so we could memorise them easier to make them flow better, on the other hand, we had to change our lines on the day of the performance since one of us almost did not make it due to serious illness, we had to change our lines round in order to fit this change and so on the performance we got muddled with the lines that had been cut and the new lines that had been introduced.

Another minor problem with our performance I believe was the chairs, although we had practiced placing them perfectly, the chairs can still be unpredictable and in one of our three performances one of the chairs did fall down. We could have tackled this problem by once again, practicing with the chairs more thoroughly or even choreographed the chair sequence so as to move and place the chairs perfectly so as to not let them fall down.

Another issue I think we should have addressed before the performance was the moving of the audience and the flow of the piece, the movement and scene changes were quite slow and I think we lost the energy during the scene changes as we re-positioned the audience for the next bit, also, I believe that in one scene, the dialogue was slow on delivery between us performers and it also lost some of our energy, this could also be contributed to the fact we had recently changed our lines and were still new to the new lines. We could have combated the lack of energy whilst moving the audience by maybe having some lines to say whilst the audience moved or even we could have started the different scenes earlier in order to counteract this lack of energy in the scene changes.

If we were given more time I would have liked to experiment with more ideas relating to the tank. For instance we wanted to experiment with messing with the audience’s senses. ‘The noise is horrific and the heat was very considerable, and the smell of cordite and engine exhaust fumes was pretty nasty’ ((Mark Dillon (2010) What was is like in a WWI tank? Online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/what-was-it-like-in-a-ww1-tank/12726.html (accessed 6th May 2013) )) although we had the sound effect of the tank playing throughout to give them the sense of the sound level, we only had this on low so the audience could hear our dialogue over it. We had, alternatively looked at the smell and feeling of being in a tank, we wanted to create the smell of a tank and its fumes which were not properly vented, we looked at the smell of petrol but we could not replicate the smell without using a highly flammable substance which we believed to be too dangerous. We looked at the idea of having a rag sprayed with WD40 in the corner, on the contrary we decided against this because WD40 is still highly flammable and the rag in the corner might have confused the audience to its use being there.

Furthermore, if we had more time I think we could have looked at making the audience more involved within the project, by possibly making them help us build the tank. They could have gotten a sense they were part of the creation process and understood what we were doing more closely; on the other hand, this would have taken a lot of careful planning since the chairs were tricky to place and even in our final performance one of the chairs slipped causing the tanks to collapse, if we had gotten the audience to build the tank maybe the chairs would have been more likely to collapse and we could not take that risk. Alternatively, we could have made them more involved by maybe getting them to dismantle the tank at the end, unfortunately, due to time restrictions we could not do this because we needed to get the audience back into the main room so they could see the other two performances that were similarly going on at the time.

The T.A.N.K: Part 2

Ben Middleton / May 7, 2013May 13, 2013 / T.A.N.K, Uncategorized

Once we had decided on creating the tank as a model, like the monument to be established on the roundabout at Tritton road, we thought about how we were going to make the tank. Several suggestions were tried from hay to cardboard boxes but we decided on using the chairs from the Grandstand because ‘materials themselves have been limited to those that efficiently make the general object form’ ((Morris, R (1993) ‘Anti-Form’ in Morris, R’s Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris London: MIT Press)) the chairs replicated the tank in an easy, but still ambiguous way. Plus, we liked the idea of creating the tank out of objects that were already in and or left in the grandstand because, like the grandstand they had equally been forgotten about .

Since we decided to build the tank out of the chairs, we experimented with looking at the chairs already being there when the audience walked into the room, this worked well because at first the audience had no clue what it was, being just a pile of chairs and some netting set up in a specific way the tank still looked ambiguous enough that the audience would not understand what it was until the performance was underway and the use of soundscapes and dialogue would help them to understand what the sculpture was representing. Alternatively, we looked at simulating the movement of the tank’s caterpillar tracks with the chairs, we thought this image worked well and we decided to build the tank movement wise whilst the audience walked in.

Furthermore, we looked at how this movement was quite repetitive and we believed that each movement we made should be precise and repeatable; this is since the tank was quite mechanical we wanted to replicate that mechanical sense by making the movements accurate and in a form of repetition. We did this by using the whole group to move the chairs where two people would be in perfect sync with each other on each side to make it look like the tracks were moving perfectly; also, we would hold the chairs over the line of the other chairs to make it look neat and mechanical. We decided to add the mantra of the tank force ‘From the blood, through the mud, to the green fields beyond’ here since we believed that the mantra spoke of the goal of the tank and its forces.

Once we had established this much we wanted to look at how we could integrate the tank to the Grandstand, although the tanks were never really used or tested at the grandstand, however, we know there was trench training on the west common ‘Crenelated earthworks just south of the grandstand identify the location of a former training trench from WWI.’ ((Heritage Connection Lincoln West Common online: http://www.heritageconnectlincoln.com/character-area/west-common/64/description (accessed 25th March 2013) )) Additionally we found a picture in the archives on the first tank, Little Willie on the west common,

we can assume here that maybe the tank was brought to the west common to test out on the practice tranches to see whether it would be able to cross the trenches on the warfront. Even though the tank was never really at the Grandstand we still believed it to be a strong part of Lincoln’s history much like the Grandstand that had been forgotten.

Proxemics: ‘Taking a peek at the Women of War’

Sophie Jane Bullivant / April 24, 2013May 7, 2013 / Women of War

During the last session at the site, the Women of War group decided to alter the proxemics of the audience to the performers. Since our piece is set in the kitchen/washroom and has limited space, the group decided it would be more appropriate to keep the audience partitioned from the acting space. We recently visited The Museum of Lincolnshire Life, inspiring the idea of an audience viewing our piece as a form of an exhibition, which will create a different experience for the audience, as opposed to the rest of the performance. Furthermore, the journey that the audience will take through the site is largely participatory and the audience are controlled by a narrative. However, our piece is now designed to be seen ‘in passing’, and cordoned off by twine, to resemble a museum display. Mike Pearson states:

Both proxemics, interpersonal distances from performer to performer and performer to spectator, and haptics, the touch of self and other, may become part of the expressive repertoire of performers and of the dramaturgical fabric of performance ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.)).

In reflection of Pearson, the Women of War group have recognised the effectiveness of framing the piece, by only allowing the audience in the alcove entrance of the room. Therefore, this creates either a highly intimate viewing point, if there is a large audience watching at the same time, or contrastingly, an isolated, reflective space for a single audience member. The literal framing of our piece also emphasises our cloth installation as a “theatrical vignette” ((Pinchbeck, Michael (2013) ‘Safe Bet’, seminar, Site- Specific Performance, Lincoln: University of Lincoln, 17 April.)), as apposed to the view during the journey of the performance, where it hangs above their heads. Instead, the installation in the framed ‘exhibition’ space can be viewed much more intimately, and its connection to our factory scene can be recognised.

Performance Rituals

Sophie Jane Bullivant / April 9, 2013May 7, 2013 / Women of War

In my previous blog (The Wall), I touched upon the notion of rituals. The whole group has seemingly integrated the idea of rituals more and more frequently as the performance rehearsals have progressed. For example, the T.A.N.K group have recently explored the technique of repeating a series of moves with chairs, to create the simulation of a moving tank. The regimented physicality of the piece also suggests the serious backdrop of warfare.

The art of performance itself is speculated in site-specific performance, as performers are exposed to “extended conditions of surface, climate and architectural enclosure” ((Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.)) that we are not usually subjected to in a theatre. Furthermore, our bodies and voices are affected by sites not designed for theatrical performances, and the performers must adapt. For example, our Women of War piece is largely set in the kitchen/shower/wash room, located at the far end of the Weighing Room. Becoming factory women of the war, we perform patterns of movement and actions that resemble their roles. Phoebe and Emily’s characters’ perform a sewing routine, folding and cutting material, whilst my character weaves through the space pouring tea and sweeping the floor. The ritualistic movement demonstrates how we are at one with the site, and are responding to the objects around us. Moreover, “Tschumi speaks of ‘architecture in an expanded sense whereby the movement of bodies in space [is] just as important as the space itself’” ((Turner, Cathy (2010) “Mis-Guidance and Spatial Planning: Dramaturgies of Public Space”, Contemporary Theatre Review, XX (2): pp. 149-161.)). Gododdin (1988), performed by Brith Gof, also suggests that site-specific performance is strongly associated with physical theatre, as the “performers are put to the test” (Pearson 2010, p. 173). Totem (1998), by Lone Twin, also demonstrates how “the physically gruelling effort expanded by the performers drew attention to the actual process of labour inherent in the piece” ((Govan, Emma, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, London and New York: Routledge.)). Thus, the audience are watching something real occur, and the repetitive, formulaic movements that we have created, help to exaggerate this concept.

Another form of ritual that occurs is the journey that binds the Grandstand performance together. As part of the Women of War group, it is planned that our characters will become guides for the audience. Our leadership though the performance demonstrates our on-going exploration of the site, and is a method of chorography. Ingold states that “To be a place, every somewhere must lie on one or several paths of movement to and from places elsewhere. Life is lived, I reasoned, along paths, not just in places, and paths are lines of a sort” ((Ingold, T. (2007) Lines: A Brief History, London and New York: Routledge.)). In effect, we are mapping out the site with our movement, which is similarly presented towards the end of the performance. A key idea of the Restoration group is to plot the outline of the original Grandstand that once stood on the site, with yarn, so that the audience have a vivid image of the site’s past. The audience will be led around the shape, in silence, for each of them to read the ideas about the site’s future that have been attached to the yarn. This journey is itself a moment of ritual, as the audience can reflect on what they have seen and imagine what they would like the site to be.

Ultimately, the use of ritual, through journeys, physical theatre and repetitive sequences, will emphasise our connection to the site and encourage the audience to respond themselves.