67 Bodies, 37 Monks Road, 4×3 Space
On commencing performance day I was concerned about structure of the piece, drawing out the grids and if it will run smoothly. Because of the in depth content and the amount of work to do in the one and a half hours we had, our feedback was that it felt rushed.
If I were to do it again I would chose to do more grids, more sweeps of Lincoln and I would continue the piece for longer, to allow the history more time to unfold.
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Total Blog Word Count: 4086
Our performance went exactly to plan! The ideas of combining three spaces and contamination worked really well we heard in our feedback.
For our final performance Dr. Dixon let us have the use of the real bones from the actual excavation at 37 Monks Road back in 2003.
Grid one consisted of writing, much like the sweeps in studio two and on Monks Road. Audience members were invited to put on suits and take part in our forensic sweep. We didn’t speak to the audience we used audio recordings to communicate our message. The recordings were short and clinical.
Grid two consisted of our research, laying it all out neatly then adding layers of storage materials such as DVD’s, videos, books, file dividers and folders. Adding yet another layer, completely contaminating the previous two, we added shreds of paper, our old research. We began a ‘forensic sweep’ through the layers of shreds to see if we could pick out any bits of interest, e.g bits of an old map or any sentences or quotes. We then continued our mission of contamination by ripping apart all of the research under the shreds completely muddling it up.
For our third grid we gathered soil from West Common and began laying out the soil in different squares across the grid. The bones were then brought out and laid in the grid carefully. We added some of the shreds from the previous sweep adding to the contamination.
In the clear up we placed the bones back in to their box and let the clearing up commence. The process left the sense of absence and presence. The fact that we were once here, but without leaving a trace how will anyone know? Everything was cleared into one pile including our suits.
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Our final performance piece will be a mixture of audio recordings, videos, still images, live writing, research and performance elements.
We will be exploring the use of a filing cabinet to structure our piece and store all of our performance props such as our suits, research, storage materials and bones.
The cabinet at the moment is a creamy colour we have come to the decision to paint it black in contrast to our suits and the live projection. We like the idea of projecting live writing on the cabinet and our suits.
We have also decided that in our performance we will create three grids over lapping on and other.
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Stephanie Doe has kindly edited a short promotional video together for our groups advertisement.
The video shows different elements of our performance.
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Works cited
Our third sweep took place on west common. This time instead of contaminating the grids with our traces, we searched for other peoples traces. Our findings will be displayed in our live writing from the site.
This grid resembles the excavation that took place at 37 Monks Road. We carefully searched through the shrubbery in front of us grid by grid. Once we had finished a square we gave a signal to move on to the next much like the police would do in a forensic investigation. In this sweep we also wore our suits gloves and masks.
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