Sweets eaten during the war:

After researching what penny sweets children would eat during the war, liquorice appears the most popular.  Gobstoppers and ‘bulls-eyes’ also seemed a great buy for the children, using their pocket money.  For our piece, we are thinking about including the sweet shop located near Steep Hill, as we can take our audience into the shop and buy the liquorice. This will then hopefully keep the audiences attention, and is also a type of audience interaction we could use in our piece.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/0/ww1/25415720

War Time Songs:

Researching war time songs, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, seems a popular song from the time.  Other war time songs include: ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Run Rabbit Run’ ‘Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree’ and more. I feel that we could use sections from these songs in our performance, when moving on to the next scene perhaps. I feel that if we use songs that were played during the war, it will make the audience feel part of the performance and it could also create further imagery in their minds about the time period.

http://www.classicsonline.com/catalogue/product.aspx?pid=836389

During Tuesday’s workshop, after previously researching the events and topics that we came across during our drift to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, we wrote down the ideas that we all agreed would be relevant to include in our performance.  The photos presented show some of our definite ideas including; the story of Amy Beechey and her sons who went to war, the rules for women specifically women teachers and the story of Florence Bonnett and her life as a munitionette.

Throughout Friday’s session, we discussed the organisation and structure of our performances using keywords such as linear, space, symbolic time etc. So far we are focussing on creating a linear performance, given that our performance will include moving from place to place within a set time limit and therefore time is also an important aspect to consider. In order for our audience to stay interested in our performance, we need to make sure that the stories we will be telling are quick to the point, including lots of important historical information rather than dragging it out and losing the audience’s focus. There might be moments where we instruct the audience members to collect something or they notice something that is outside of our performance and if they take too long, it could obstruct the flow of the performance and this is something we need to carefully consider. We also need to focus on how to make our performance present including thinking about the environment and the clothing and therefore costumes are a definite idea to create our characters.

Furthermore, I was set a task to research into the life of Florence Bonnett, a woman who left school at the age of thirteen and signed up for war work at William Fosters. Originally, Florence left school and joined the family business that her mother and father owned, trading as fishmongers. However, she soon started working in heavy engineering which included making tracks for the first tanks and undertaking twelve hour shifts. The women, known as ‘munitionettes’ would wear smocks and mop-caps and one of the photos above shows the munitionettes working at William Fosters in 1917. During her time at William Fosters, Florence had a lover in the Lincolnshire Regiment called Dick and one of these photos shows Florence and Dick engaged to be married (Florence is pointing at the ring). Unfortunately he was killed in action and Florence carried on building tanks but when the men returned, naturally the ladies lost their jobs but Florence found work in Nottingham and carried on her life eventually marrying a man called Joseph Harrison and having three children.

The research I found on Florence Bonnett could be useful in a section of our performance, especially because she lived and worked in Lincoln. I think the audience would find the history of her life and work very interesting and therefore I will need to research more into the little details of her life such as her love life with Dick, other jobs she had to do at William Fosters and also what her life after the war was like.

Amy Clarke

The concept of time is a tricky one in our piece, on the one hand we are using Symbolic time as we are condensing 5 years of WW2 into one performance. We plan on using different places of the Arboretum to signify various life changing moments of our characters. On the other hand we have a set time, we need to fit going round the whole of the Arboretum into about 30 minutes. As well as that we have are planning on a few moments where timing with our audio needs to be spot on. Choosing a piece that revolves so much around the past has problems of it’s own, our plan is to take them back in time make them feel although they are living through this time along with our characters. However this does not come without problems that will take some serious thinking to over come a prospect that I find exciting.

As the performance is a lot to do with audio, I’ve been thinking about the different sound effects and music we could use for our journey. As our journey is mainly based around the children of Lincoln and how it used to be and it is centered around an abandoned children’s park, we started thinking about children laughing, nursery rhymes and certain other sound effects. I decided to ask my Dad what sort of music/sound effects he would want to hear on a radio play (as he listens to them regularly). He said what would keep him interested would be a variety of different sound effects and only a little bit of music as otherwise it would take away from the story line. We’re definitely going to take this into account for our journey and start to experiment with some sound effects and recordings soon.

Emily Jeffs

Visiting Lincolnshire Archives has really shown a side to the Lawn i wasn’t expecting as since we found out it was once a lunatic asylum it initially created some rather harsh images of what the building use to be like. After going to the archives though and reading through a physicians journal from 1824 it actually paint the Lawn in a much more generous and sympathetic light:

‘Christopher Bonner aged 25 was admitted on 4th (May 1824) He has [suffered] from his childhood, and just showed symptoms of insanity about a year since: this is his second attack. He has also congenital [diseases]. He is occasionally violent…’   (6th May 1824 J.M.)

‘Bonner has had several [attacks] of violence since his admission, he is very noisy today and is confined in a cell in a strait waistcoat.’   (9th May 1824 J.M.)

‘Bonner and Giston are dining in the adjoining room. The latter became violent yesterday and is confined with a chain around his waist and hand cuffs attached to it. Bonner remains convalescent.’   (24th May 1824 J.M.)

Reading further through the journal of this particular physician the worst that ever really came up in terms of a punishment towards patients was just mild restraints. I feel this research really showed a lot of insight into the Lawn to help the group make some good decisions about making our performance as true as possible.

After reading The Place of The Artist chapter I found it particularly interesting, the question posed by Tim Etchells ‘[h]ow long do you have to have lived somewhere until you are allowed to lie about it’ (Etchells, 1996 pg 51) Are we ever allowed to lie about a place when we’ve trusted by an audience to pass on the information? Why wouldn’t we be allowed to lie? and if we did enough research into the Lawn as an institute then how much would we be able to fabricate the script of the performance whilst still keeping it true to the events that happened when it was still running?