During Tuesday’s session, I wasn’t present but my group visited the location of our site and tried to get a clear idea of where certain sounds need to be played, the placing of the monologues and the actions etc. They also went to the Lincoln Archive in which they found letters from the Beechey family. They couldn’t take photos of the letters as you had to pay but they had taken notes and written down some of the sentences from the letters that we could use in our audio track. Furthermore, because Florence Bonnett built tracks for the tanks during the war, we thought it would be a good idea if we built planes with the audience to symbolise that we too are helping build necessities for the war. By using foam planes, the audience can gradually “build the planes” on their journey up Steep Hill and this will be good for our performance because we are using interactions and audience involvement.

We thought during the classroom scene, the person guiding the audience could ring a bell to signify the children coming into school or the end of play time. We also thought that the tour guide could start moving around like a plane and whilst doing so, dropping stones to signify bombs dropping from the planes. Finally, we thought that using an old war song such as “We’ll Meet Again” would be nice to add to the audio after Florence talks about her Fiancé Richard. The only problem is, we won’t be able to use an actual track and so we will have to sing it ourselves. These are just a few little ideas we thought would be interesting to consider.

During today’s session, we made a list of the definite structure of our performance and so all we need to work on now is the audio track and the actions. It would be wise if we started working at our site location a lot more from now on, just to make sure everything fits together and we feel comfortable with our ideas. Karen joined us on our walk to our site location and she suggested ideas and advised us on where would could improve or what not to include and this was really useful. Ultimately, we need to work and think carefully about the timing in our audio track, making sure that the audio moves smoothly with the walk up to the museum and with the actions. With this in mind, our main objective is to finish the audio track as soon as possible, but without rushing it, so that we can begin practicing and making sure our performance is precise.

Amy Clarke