A stimulus I engaged with when we first found our Site, was Brecht’ theory on ‘Epic Theatre and the ‘Street Scene’. The relations between site specific work and Epic theatre is that of ‘Eschewing the usual depiction of human action as psychology driven to show instead causes of a social, historical and political kind; thus representing the individual less as the agent of events than the focus of external forces.’ (Counsell, Wolf & Wolf, 2001, 43). This I feel fuelled my interest with my groups Site area, as it made me think not just of what we could create within our site but, what has been there before ‘the park’ and what will become of the place in time?

Counsell,C et al. (2001) Performance Analysis: An introductory Coursebook. 1st end. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis.

Earlier this week, my group and I had a meeting with Conan about his performance “Leaving Home” which is based on Amy Beechey and the loss of her sons, which is one of the stories we would like to involve in our performance. We spoke about using costumes to help develop characters and Conan mentioned that the female cast members in Leaving Home had to wear corsets and therefore they needed to see how their bodies worked differently in those types of clothes. We also spoke about sounds and music in our performance and he advised us to research the sounds and music of 1915 to have a clear idea of what would be appropriate for our piece. Conan also told us the location of Amy Beechey’s grave and so a visit to her grave might be useful. Additionally, Conan advised us to start with a theme first and possibly use 1915 as a base time. He said it would be a wise idea to research into how war changed women and the patronizing expectations of women and also events involving women, during the war. I found it really useful that Conan said to focus on symbolic small moments that involve audience participation rather than just creating a grand performance alongside the audio track. The main things mentioned in the meeting was to involve the audience a lot more, use symbolism and think carefully about how audio and performance integrate. The meeting was very useful and much appreciated.

Furthermore, after the meeting we began engaging in further research about women in 1915 and thinking about the expectations of women before the war such as housework, cooking, looking after the children etc. and then the masculine jobs that women had to do such as working in factories making tracks for the tanks, like Florence Bonnett. We also managed to type up a rough copy of something that could be mentioned in our audio track to introduce the topic of the performance and give the audience an idea of what the theme of the performance is.

Today we spent time at our site (Steep Hill) and recorded various sounds. We recorded sounds such as people walking and talking up Steep Hill, sounds in the sweet shop such as the cash register, the door bell and the sound of sweets being measured and also we recorded the sound of some machines that were being used for road works because that made us think of the factory work during the war.

Karen suggested that listening to the sounds can make you think of other sounds for example, Karen thought the sweets being poured sounded like pebbles and Laura thought it could be bullets. With this in mind, we decided that we are going to record sounds that we hear over the weekend and see if it reminds us of anything that could be relevant to our piece. We also agreed that we should start thinking about monologues.

Amy Clarke

we have planned our route now and it is set in stone, after discussing with Karen and my group we have decided to focus our walk to the site more on our stimuli of time. Rather than a ‘Wander’ to the site, which involved a longer and more complex route.

This week, we had a meeting with Conan to discuss our ideas about using the Beechy family in our piece. The meeting made us as a group think more about our piece and how we can improve with our ideas. In the lesson we had on Tuesday, we came up with a possible introduction for the performance and did research on Women during 1915 and how women had to work when the men went away to war. Also we would like to portray how women, before the war, had their ‘traditional roles’ cleaning the house, having children etc, and how from the women’s perspective was ‘not enough’, they were being patronized. When the women then went to work during the war, they finally had a voice and could do something other than their usual daily routine. Using symbolic movements in our performance I feel will be a nice way of audience interaction. The theme of ‘Working Women during the war’ is what we would like to base the performance around.

For symbolism in our performance we are thinking of getting our audience to use rubber bands and linking them together to represent the tracks of a tank for example. From the meeting we learn’t that that a minimal, but symbolic performance-using small movements, can have more of an impact on the audience.

We are also going to research women’s narratives during the war, to see what their views where like.

When we were at the Arboretum, to make sure we remembered the different locations we decided to take pictures of several of them such as the Bandstand, the Lion Statue and the Cold Bath. The Cold Bath was hit by a bomb during World War Two, this was the information that aided us in cementing the World War Two topic for our audio tour. Hayley drew a picture of the large steps that are central in the Arboretum as it was another form of documenting our drift. Furthermore, we thought that these steps could be an aesthetic way to end our performance.

After we visited the Arboretum and got back in to the studio, we decided to draw a map of the location so we could see how much we remembered and also we wanted to begin preparations for our piece by mapping the route we would like to take our audience on, whilst also trying to create the most interesting and engaging your possible for them.

Mike Pearson makes a point about incorporating the process into our performances. One suggestion is “Describe the location, orientating your listener: Sights, Sounds, Smells.” From this he gives us the idea of engaging the audience member(s) into our performance using these techniques and how describing these senses can immerse the audience further into our tour.

(Not sure how to cite that source, its ‘Mike Pearson’s Place Exercises’. Some help would be great, thank you.)