From our first idea of doing a drill and having the audience marching and completing tasks as soldiers, too deciding on having stations where they perform 5 sensory tasks, such as polishing boots, seeing images, listening to an audio recording of all the noises that would’ve been heard over the years in the drill hall, such as bingo calling, marching, the rolling stones music… it all was becoming too complicated so I decided on a few main things I wanted to focus on.
Audio- I like the idea of the audience listening to something through headphones, I want the audience to walk away from our performance taking away something about the history and one grasping way to do that would be to use poems or diary extracts which make the audience feel the emotions of WW1.
In the workshop Michael performed to us a piece he has worked on before (but in busy spaces outside not in a studio) Sit with me for a moment and remember
‘A bench with a plaque reading Sit with me for a moment and remember is placed in a public space. It is both a dedication to a loved one and an invitation to a stranger. You are invited to sit on the bench to listen to a recording that reflects on what it means to sit for a moment and remember. Site-specific piece presented in Derby, Leicester, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield.’
The audience member sitting on a bench puts headphones on and follows the instructions “look at the plaque… close your eyes… ” and they are told someone will appear sitting next to them… I found this piece very moving as it was so intimate yet it was so unsure as to what the piece was precisely about and I loved the text “you might not see me but I will see you…I hope you remember me…a two minute silence to remember”, along with counting to ten along with eerie music was really impacting.
Forced entertainment
A Broadcast / Looping Pieces is an improvised text and performance work by theatre maker, artist and writer Tim Etchells.
‘The heart of this mesmerising and provocative work is a live remixing of pages from Etchells notebook – a computer document in which, over many years, he has gathered texts of many different kinds. Fragments of overheard conversation, cut-paste quotations direct from newspaper articles and web pages, ideas for performances, rough drafts, and other notes sit side by side in this textual scrapbook. For the performance Etchells selects, intercuts and remixes material from these texts which he has stored away over the years, creating a torrent of language that often loops and repeats on individual lines, editing and re-writing on the fly, creating new dialogues and juxtapositions’
I decided to use a piece of writing that i wrote at the drill hall from our task of spaces and my reaction to it and used Tim Etchells fragmented speech idea which i think works nicely and enhances key words which we could use in our piece but with texts that are maybe from diaries of soldiers who trained at the drill hall.