In the last few weeks we have discovered that the Lawn has been bought by the coffee company Stocks. They are looking into creating a café and theatre/ arts centre. At first, we thought that this would complicate matters` because of the building work going on. Through discussions with the owners of the building, we can still use the building by working around the building work going on at the time. The news of the refurbishment made us rethink our ideas to include the resent history and the future of the Lawn. Doing this we will having to symbolise the passing of time, we have thought of doing this by using newspapers with information about the Lawn and to make them look period. The period between the end the Lawn was being used as offices to it sale, shows its absence of purpose and its emptiness.

We have changed our plans from touring around the building, meeting characters along the way, to sitting in a coffee shop with the audience as the characters. The audience will hear the stories of the whilst that character is sat opposite them. This change in plans has moved us to change the location of our performance to a coffee shop owned by stocks. This is to show the movement of the trace of the lawn and the perspective of the changing use.

The idea for future performance will be based on what the owners have planned for the buildings future. One of the plans is to create a theatre up stairs. These ideas will be incorporated into the performance along with the fiction of what is going to happen and what will happen.

Dear all. I thought I would put some comments from our Tuesday session here:

As you know we are rapidly approaching the easter break, and although you all have some interesting ideas I am concerned to make sure that you are making continuous progress in your groups.

The Lawn: It was good to hear the sample of your audio. The poetic tone in the voice makes a good contrast to the factual information that you have been discussing. Consider if and when the ‘wild-track’ should dip out. It can help to take the ‘listener’ into the internal mono/dialogue of the performer if we lose the backing track at significant points. I look forward to hearing more of the audio on Friday. Make sure you frame the factual information in a way that separates it from the more poetic personal disclosures, that way you will also have chance to move between the ‘off-stage’ space of the other table, and the one-on-one performative encounter.

We will try this out on Friday in Zing.

The Park: I think the idea of tracing the old playground equipment through the notion of presence and absence is really interesting and could be very effective. Consider how the people who have visited the site can come through in the tracing. Performatively this can be in simple actions, you don’t need to overcomplicate it with character. It will depend on the audio and how the encounter between the space/site and the audience/experiencer relates to the actions that you are performing with the trace.

You mentioned having emailed the Council for permissions. I would suggest actually going in to see them and explaining that this is now a derelict site, and that the materials you use are completely washable, and that you will return the site as you found it etc…You could wait forever for them to respond in writing, and we don’t have the time.

The Beechey group: I think it is good that you are thinking  about the relationship between the performance and the audio. The important things to do now are to decide upon the tense and the tone of the recording. Remember you are not taking the audience literally back to 1915, instead you are providing some essence of, a suggestion of rememberance, a poetic encounter with a ‘ghost’ from the past, a trace of previous narratives. And along with that you are introducing your audience to the site. Why this site? What is important about this site in connection with your ‘stories/encounters’? Thinking about the stones as a metaphor or a symbol to guide us through the experience is one that you can explore further.

The layering of this work should be detailed and thorough, but the performance style needn’t be complicated.

The Arboretum: It was good to visit the site with you. You need to consider the relationship between what we hear as an experiencer, and then what we see. How much can you control what we see? You need to guide us. You have started to think about greetings, and how the numerous and varied greetings can be sued performatively. I wonder if there is something to explore in the way that a greeting could be like an ambush (?) There are so many ways to say ‘hello’, and perhaps more significantly for the time period you are working with ‘goodbye’.

Be careful not to ‘show and tell’ in too literal sense. We won’t know if the actions you have discussed will work with the audio until we experience it. Be prepared to demonstrate the work in the space/site before I can feedback to you. We agreed to experience this in the Friday session next week, so you should work towards getting your audio recorded and on a sound player before then. If necessary, you could always download them as mp3s and put them on a phone so we can hear them at the site.

The Library (Chloe): It has been good to hear your ideas and hear how you are progressing. Your priority now needs to be in getting some recording done so that we can hear the ‘overheard conversations’ that you spoke about. It will be a detailed process of researching the ‘characters’ that would have been present in the building (in the past), and the sorts of conversations that will have taken place. You then need to script the contemporary ‘overheard’ words so that you can blend between the two. Of course after scripting these you will need to rehearse some performers to deliver and record the audio, before editing it and working it in the space/site. It’s a lot to achieve, particularly as you are working on your own, so you will need to be moving forward with this continuously. Once you have some of the recordings we can consider how to work the performance in the space.

When first visiting The Lawn and being particularly interested in the history behind it, we were inclined to dig deeper and discover more about the building. At first we saw the large open space as a great opportunity for performance space, however, after contacting the council to gain permission to use the site, we were informed that the building was about to be taken over by Stokes company. Plans had been made to turn The Lawn in to ‘a micro roastery but on a bigger scale’ (Whitelam, 2014) which meant that we could not guarantee that building work would not disrupt our performance. Govan states ‘contemporary public spaces present particular problems to the performance maker’ (Govan) which i believe definitely applied to my group. When we spoke to the managing director of Stokes, he was not sure on the exact date which the building work would begin which meant there was a possibility that the site would be clear. However, we decided that this was too much of a risk to take as

the factors which we had to consider included building noises, machinery and restricted access to particular areas. For this reason, we have decided to change the location of our performance to Stokes Coffee shop.

I think that the change of location has benefited us, as it now means that the audience can focus mainly on the audio aspect of performance. To ensure that they still have the vision of the original site we have planned to show photographs, both old and new, along with newspaper articles.

References

Govan, (not sure on reference, cant find any of the info.)

Whitelam, P. (2014) Stokes Coffee is to take on The Lawn. Lincolnshire Echo, 28 November, 1. Available from, http://www.lincolnshireecho.co.uk/Stokes-Coffee-Lawn/story-24829935-detail/story.html [Accessed 9 March 2015]

In discussion, our group has now decided that we may be performing our piece in a coffee shop, drinking a hot drink of choice,whilst listening to the audio through the headphones. Due to out site, The Lawn, having planned building works at the time of the performance we felt there was only so much per formative action we could take and we was unsure whether these actions would be truly interesting. The Lawn has been bought by Stokes coffee shop.

‘A former asylum in Lincoln is to be turned into a coffee roasting house and visitor attraction. Stokes, which has run a coffee business in the city since 1902, says The Lawn will become a “micro roastery on a macro scale”. The City of Lincoln Council has been trying to sell The Lawn, which is currently vacant, for three years.’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-30267928

we feel performing with in a stokes café it will give the audience an insight on what is yet to come from the Lawn, whilst reminiscing on the past facts and stories about the Lawn through a story telling process through the headphones and whilst viewing naturalistic performance actions by us the actors representing the important figures of The Lawn’s History.

implying Pearson’s writing Why Performance?, our piece will allow the audience to connect a deep factual understanding of the site and the process of the landscape.

‘Performance can enhance and inform public appreciation and understanding of places and describe the processes of landscape formation and the role of human agency in its making:’

 ‘How this place came to be as it is; and what it may yet become.’

https://blackboard.lincoln.ac.uk/webapps/blackboard/execute/content/file?cmd=view&content_id=_944813_1&course_id=_80857_1

For our piece, our initial idea was to dress in costume. We thought that by dressing in 1915 clothing, this could help to make the piece authentic and work as a disguising tool in order to send the audience back in time. Using Lone Twin as inspiration, we could interpret their idea of dressing up in costume. This would signify us as performers, and also allow the audience to recognise our characters are from a different period of time; therefore creating the idea of ‘otherness’.  ‘The performers costume and activity signalled their place as strangers yet also acts as a catalyst for the public to interact with them’ ( Govan, 125.)

After having a meeting with Conan, he suggested it might be difficult to find five costumes all the same. I’ve had a think about how we can show our theme of ‘Women of Lincoln within World War One’ through costume, and an alternative idea could be to have just two performers dressed up. One of the women could wear boiler suit overalls and the other could wear an apron. This would symbolise the change women have gone through from past to present, as both costumes highlight the idea of women producing things. In 1915, Women weren’t able to do the same things that men were able to. They could not work in factories and were considered to stay at home and bake. I feel this would demonstrate a claim for the future and break this traditional mould. This would also link nicely with our monologue we are still yet to write about Florence Bonnett, who was the first women in Lincoln to make the tank which would serve in the War. ‘Female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition be- comes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival-in other words, the time of history.’ (Jardine, 1981, 17).

Linking with the idea of time, we can show the linear path that women have gone through by using chalk to map out an image on the pavement of our site. We could draw an image of hopscotch, which can be shown as a time piece. This would also link to our theme of children in a playground, as this would have been a common 1915 game children would have played.

Hannah Taylor