At the beginning of this week, my group and I sat down and devised some monologues that could be included in our audio track. We managed to write three draft monologues for Amy Beechey, Florence Bonnett and the teacher. We tried to use words and phrases that would have been used during 1915 instead of using modern language and also we chose to write the monologues in present tense to make it feel like the women are talking to you in the audio track. Although what we have written so far are just rough ideas, it is relieving that we are finally starting to go somewhere with our performance progression, our audio track and also our understanding of the whole idea of site-specific performance.

Today we managed to record two of the monologues but there is still a lot of work to be done. Additionally, Amy Beechey’s monologue needs to be more emotional and because I am the one speaking on the track, I need to work on making sure my voice sounds clear and I pronounce words correctly, instead of feeling too comfortable in my own accent. By adjusting how I pronounce certain words and the way I speak and if I try to sound like I am a mother who has lost her sons in the war, it will make the audio track more interesting and believable. The same goes for Florence Bonnett’s and the teacher’s monologues, the characters will sound more convincing if the monologues sound clear and the words are spoken correctly. This is something that we can work on over Easter in time for when we all return and it is closer to our performance and by then, hopefully we will have most of our audio track completed, if not, then at least a rough copy.

Furthermore, next week we are taking a trip to the Lincolnshire Archive to look at the many war letters from the Beechey family. This will be useful for our audio tracks also because we’d like to include some, or at least one, of the letters. Also, we will most likely be visiting our site because recently we have spent a lot of time on the audio rather than the site.

Amy Clarke