When I first started research for inspiration for our performance, I was looking at site-specific performances that took place in hospitals and stumbled upon one event that took place at the closing and relocating of Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital. The event was called One Last Look, and took place on the 5th and 6th August 2006. The hospital opened in 1838 with only 12 beds and three doctors, but over time the hospital expanded and in 2006 it outgrow the site the hospital originally stood on.
During One Last Look a vary of events and performances took place, including a performance called Three Doctors created and performed by Talking Birds. Talking birds are an theatre company that have created many site-specific performances, particularly interested in ‘Places which have interesting features, histories and former uses, perhaps layered with recollections and associations which are on the brink of slipping from living memory.’(Online) This relates to the Drill Hall as it is known by its current use, but over the years it has been moulded to the needs of the time, and some of these uses are being forgotten and unrecognised by the general public.
In Three Doctors the performers took on the roles of nurses and doctors, performing to only 12 audience members at a time, a representation of the amount of beds when the hospital first opened. This inspired our performance in terms of our audience members, as we wanted to represent the three weeks of illness when someone suffers from Typhoid; our audience size is dictated by this by being limited to three people experiencing out performance at a time.
The performance consisted of the audience taken on a journey through the hospital corridors and visiting operating rooms. Everything seen by the audiences were devised around oral history interviews on the hospital of the local people. ‘A walk through an empty hospital will always be charged with the stories that have played out there, and we have tried to suggest a few of these stories.’ (Online)
An exhibition also took place during One Last Look called Sites of Memories. The exhibition displayed objects from the hospital alongside memories former staff and patients. The exhibition displayed objects showing the progress of the hospital from when it opened its role in any major event, for example the blitz, up until the closing.‘Utilising the empty space of the hospital, and filling it with these traces of the past’ (Online) this is what we want to achieve through our instillation of the water bottles, we are using empty unnoticed spaces, and filling it with a representation of those that suffered and died at the Drill Hall during the Typhoid outbreak.
In these two events memories are a significant part, which inspired us to read memories found in the archives of the typhoid epidemic in Lincoln. It adds the emphasis that it is important to moralise these events, moralising is important to our performance as our process and performance is happening exactly 110 years since the outbreak.
Works Cited
Talking Birds. Site-specific and site-responsive works [Online] Available from http://www.talkingbirds.co.uk/pages/sitespecific.asp
University of Warwick, (2012) One Last Look: Three Doctors [Online] Available from http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/cwhp/events/onelastlook/3docs/
University of Warwick, (2010) One Last Look: Sites of Memories Exhibition [Online] Avaliable from http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/chm/outreach/cwhp/events/onelastlook/sites