Month: April 2016

In the very center of Lincoln high street  stands the stone bow arches, every day the public pass through these arches, most of which are unaware of the local and national history..

“Kings and prisoners have walked this way. In 1541, Henry VIII and Catherine Howard passed through it on their way to the Bishops Palace, where Catherine allegedly committed one of the “indiscretions” that later led to her execution.

Richard II and his Queen passed under the Stonebow on a visit to Lincoln in 1387. He was rallying support in his struggle against the Lancastrian faction.

Richard’s sword was presented to the city and is now on display in the Guildhall treasury. It is part of what is believed to be one of the most important civic collections outside of London.

The Stonebow must have made an impression, as in 1390 it was Richard II who ordered the city to construct a new gate, as the medieval gate was in a dire state of repair. It took more than a hundred years to complete but the history of the Stonebow goes much further back than the Middle Ages.

The name Stonebow comes from “stennibogi”, a Norse word meaning stone arch. As far as we know there has been a building on the site of the Stonebow on Lincoln’s High Street since the Romans put a gate there in the 2nd century.

The original Roman structure consisted of the main gateway in the southern wall of the lower town, through which traffic from the south would enter the settlement. It was probably similar in style to the Newport Arch at the top of Bailgate.

After the Romans left Britain in the 5th century, the gatehouse continued to be used.

In 1237, probably due to its central location, it became the Lincoln Guildhall, a meeting place for the local governors of the city. Before that date there was another Guildhall in the city, although its whereabouts are unknown.

At this time the Stonebow was also used as a courtroom to hear disputes brought by local folk against their neighbours and to hear criminal cases when the king’s judges visited the city on assizes.

When Richard II decreed that a new gatehouse had to be built in 1390, public funds were raised but the monies were misused and it was not until 1520 that a new gate was finally built by William Spencer. He was a freemason of the city of Lincoln, and is responsible for the structure that we see today.

If you look at the south-facing front of the Stonebow you will see carvings of the Virgin Mary (patron saint of Lincoln and its cathedral) and the Angel Gabriel on either side of the main arch.

These are thought to be original. The carving of the arms of King James I, also on the south face, are believed to have been added in 1617 for his visit to the city. The clock set into the crenellated top of the south and north fronts of the building dates from 1888. This replaced an earlier clock which dated from 1835.

While the present structure is a gatehouse, there do not appear to have been any doors to impede access through its arches. There is, however, evidence to suggest that the central arch would have been barred to carriages and horses by a locked chain across its width, forcing all such vehicles and travellers to stop and state their business before being allowed to proceed into the city.

The eastern wing of the Stonebow was used as the city prison until 1586, when the facility was moved to an adjacent building.

In the Stonebow there were four rooms where prisoners were kept – two at ground level, for male and female debtors, and two dungeons below ground, for male and female felons.

As was customary at the time, debtors had to pay the gaoler for their keep. They did better than the felons in the dungeons below as they could access passers-by through two small unglazed ground floor windows which looked out upon the street. Through this, debtors could beg for money, food and drink and their family and friends would pass items through the bars to them. The prison was located in the Stonebow as it afforded close access to the courts being held in the Guildhall above.

It had a terrible reputation, even at a time when prisons generally were of a very poor standard.

It has been called by various authors of the time both “a loathsome place”, “a disgrace to humanity” and “the worst in the kingdom”.

One visitor described the prisoners as half-starved, half-suffocated and in a state of continual intoxication.

The prison next door to the Stonebow was finally closed in 1809, four years after a new prison had been opened in Lindum Road. In 1842 this building was demolished and the east wing we see today was built in its place, in a style sympathetic to the existing structure. There is a bell housed on the roof of the Stonebow called the Mote Bell which dates from 1371. This bell is used to call councillors to their meetings and is the oldest of its kind in the country. It still rings today

The Guildhall on the top floor of the building has been home to the city administration for many centuries. It comprises several rooms, the biggest of which is the council chamber.

This room has windows looking out to both the north and south and is covered by a marvellous oak beamed ceiling, the timber having come from Sherwood Forest, which in the Middle Ages was much larger and so would have been much closer to Lincoln than it is today.

In the centre of the room there is a large oak table around which are arranged 22 tilting seats. These are occupied by the city councillors when council meetings take place. The western end of the room contains a raised dais on which the Mayor sits when the council is in session.

It also contains further seating originally occupied by the city Aldermen but now used by the council’s committee chairpersons. In the council chamber is displayed the portraits of King George III, Queen Victoria, and Sir Francis Hill, who was mayor of the city from 1945 to 1946.

When the council is in session the mayor sits in his grand chair behind the mayor’s mace. This large and impressive piece of elaborate silver gilt dates to around 1660 and is carried before the mayor on all ceremonial occasions – it is present at all meetings at which the mayor is present.

Behind the chamber there is an inner chamber which was originally used as a meeting room for senior councillors and aldermen in advance of official sessions of council.

This room contains many interesting historical artefacts, including two metal Armada chests with highly intricate locking mechanisms.

These chests would have been used to store money and valuable documents, such as royal charters relating to the powers of the city council. The inner chamber again has an impressive oak timber ceiling that dates back to 1691.

In the eastern wing of the Guildhall is situated the Mayor’s Parlour, where she receives important guests and where she robes before attending official council meetings.” (Echo,2016)

Week two, today we headed back out on to Lincolns high street, this time with set of instructions written by other members of the class. This task was set by Steve, and inspired by Carl Laverys article, teaching performance studies.

Our first instruction was to simply let go of the instructions and follow them for five minutes with it being an incredibly windy day in Lincoln my group and myself knew that this was a terrible idea from the get go. We did let go of the instructions however, and followed them. Looking back into last week’s conversation on tacit agreements it was interesting to see that passers-by would stand on the piece of paper, attempting to pick it up for us as we were following the instructions.  Asking them to let it go again led to some very confused people. Due to the wind, the instructions blew into a bush and stayed there for the further five minutes.

Other instructions given included:

In the latest session our site was dressed with our props and set, and seeing them in the site showed us how homely a non-place can become with household items. Although we have many props to create our scene, we still have many more items to add and buy. The completion of this will extensively help create the feeling of ‘place’, and specifically the feeling of ‘home’.

We rehearsed a performance around our last ideas (mentioned in previous post) and practised with teabags, biscuits, books, cleaning products and a pack of cards. With these we paid attention on deconstructing the household products. We also focused on the fluctuation of place and non-place (and other opposites) whilst creating the performance to see how we could incorporate the audience member into the piece.

Once we showed Steve and Conan what we had created, we received feedback to make the performance simpler, and making the audience member feel unsafe/trapped/etc made them feel irritated and bored and there was no contribution to creating a place from a non-place. It also became clear when seeing the props in the space that natural speech between us and an audience member could potentially come quiet easily as the feeling of the site was much more homely than we originally believed it would. Because of this, it was decided that our original idea of creating a non-place into a place through conversational exchange with audience members would work much better than we first believed.

Now that we have finalised our idea, we know exactly where our direction is headed and we know what needs to be achieved before our performance. From seeing what the dressed site looked like with the items we have, we have now made a final list of items we still need to obtain to make the setting even more like a home. We are also creating a list of questions that we will ask out audience member, these are simple questions, such as “what is your name?”, “can I take your coat?”, “would you like a seat?” and “do you feel comfortable?”. We will also rehearse exactly what each person will do in the performance, and how they can chip into the conversation naturally when they aren’t the main person conversing with the audience.

We are feeling much more confident with our idea now that we have had constructive feedback and seen the props and set in the space.

This week was a particularly challenging one in the process as we had to alter and adjust our piece after feedback from the module leader. The first 3 hours of our 6 hour period were spent in the space experimenting with the aesthetics of our piece.

After spending weeks theorising our piece we thought it was time to put the theory into practice. We began with the footsteps. Every step that I took I marked the front and back of my foot with chalk. We took a video and watched it back. The audience reaction to this element of the piece was exactly what we expected and hoped for. The audience had no choice but to pay attention to the piece because it was taking place in their space and they had to actively go out of their way to avoid it.

We met with Steve, showed him the video and discussed with him the rest of our piece. He felt it was difficult to pass judgment until he saw the piece in full in the space. Steve and module leader Conan watched roughly 13 minutes of the piece and then gave feedback.

Conan enjoyed the concept of recorded sound in the space, the footsteps, the feeding of breadcrumbs to the pigeons and the moments where we were sat silently in the space whilst the sound played. He was concerned about our own voices being part of the soundtrack and was also concerned about the ‘performed’ nature of the lines. He felt as though the lines sounded acted rather than natural probably due to the fact that we had drama students record much of the lines who inadvertently ‘performed’ the lines. We were told our piece could be reduced to as little as 10 minutes.

Our response to this feedback was initially negative and frustrating because of the workload we had taken on over the past 5/6 weeks. After a further discussion with Steve and meeting as a group we came to a solution. We are going to go through our soundtrack and pick out the least contrived voices and then re-record some other ones.

We are going to get another three speakers and have the track playing out of the four speakers at different times. This means the sound will constantly move around the space as we do rather than us being stuck to a laptop which was a concern of Conan’s. We are going to keep the movements in the piece that worked (footsteps, breadcrumbs and the moments of silence that were really poignant) and experiment over the next fortnight with the speakers and what other movement we could potentially add to the space.

Joe Turner

Today I met with both Steve and Conan to discuss my performance whilst in my space, bringing with me all my materials and my script. However after a discussion with both it became apparent that actually my performance was not specific enough to my site neither did it meet the requirements of the module. So it became apparent that I had a lot of work to do in a short amount of time.

I decided to go back to all my original notes and ideas, reading through my original notes I realised my performance is less about what the suffragettes would be fighting about now, but the idea of having a voice and fighting for your opinion. The suffragettes fought for suffrage, which means the right to vote. The Suffragettes used Speaker’s Corner/ the Cornhill to hold a rally in 1908, for support to pass the Suffrage Bill. They used this site to air their voice. Today, Speaker’s corner, is our designated location of political activism, for the public to air their voice. Yet looking back on my notes on my visits to my site it became obvious to me that the commercialisation of the space was more important than the political activism of the space. Each time I visited there has been a new ‘pop up’ internet shop or fairground in the centre. Neither, encourage the public to air their voice but want to entice us for our money. We’ve aloud for our space of political activism to be over consumed by the ever growing ideal of capitalism and commercialisation. Just recently, the traditional outdoor market (the other side of the cornhill) has been closed down as the CO-OP have brought it out to build a new shop, leaving many out of jobs and loosing a part of the cities heritage.

Personally, I see the suffragette’s fight for vote, a fight for equality which is still an issue in Lincoln. There is an ever obvious inequality between big companies and small traditional markets. We’ve allowed for commercialisation and capitalism to become more important than the use of our voice. I want to remind the public and the audience the importance of the space, from the famous suffragette rally to it being named our official stage for political activism. I’ve been very intrigued by the Situationist and their artistic, political activist approach. From research the Situationist, I came across a beautiful academic article which explained my approach and whole idea properly; “But theories are only made to die in the war of time” (Shukaitis, 2013). Relating this to Speaker’s Corner its become clear that the idea of having a place of political activism was just an ideal, that over at the time was exciting and new, just like the Suffragette rally was in 1908, but presently seems unimportant to our everyday uses of the site. From this I have decided to do more research it what makes a site a place or a non place and apply these theories to my site. I’m also keen in the idea of a silent protest, I’ve designed and built myself some ‘sandwich’ bored styled placards, which I will wear as I walk around the space that was once the stage for the suffragette movement. On one side I will have a quote/slogan which the suffragettes themselves used when protesting for their bill and on the other side I will have con-temporised this quote/slogan to protest the current issues of commercialisation/capitalism/inequality and the lack of potential activism.  I will then move to the other end of the site, in which the mayor named the Cornhill “Speaker’s corner” and make the same journey around his stage wearing the same placard. I plan on doing this circuit of both ‘stages’ two/three times with sandwich boards that have already been designed, but for my final journey invite my audience to write on both sides sandwich board, so when I make my final journey of this circuit I will physically be carrying/ silently but actively broadcasting the public’s political views and free speech, using the site as the purpose expects, linking both the past and present together, from the inspiration of the suffragette movement which lead to the naming of Speaker’s Corner to ignoring what ever ‘pop up shop’ may be present and focusing on our political activism as an equal city. 

My next step is to build and design these sandwich boards, trial it in my site and also research the following: Barbara Kruger, Gurrila Girls, Situationist international, Guy Debord, Mike Pearson’s guided tours, Nicolas Bourniud, as well as researching works on politically reworking the city.