Our groups new, updated idea for the audio walk was still to have our participants split into two groups (we did this because we liked the idea of giving our audience two separate and opposing experiences that they could talk about with each other after the audio walk was over).
Our idea for the separate audio tracks this time was to have one of them listening to our own take on the 1185 earthquake that cause the cathedral to collapse while walking up the hill towards Castle Square and then further to the cathedral itself. While doing this, we were going to have them listening to sounds of the town (as it would have sounded in 1185) such as horse and carriages, market sellers, general hustle and bustle etc. however, as they get further up the hill and closer to the cathedral, the sound effect of and earthquake in progress will gradually get louder and louder so that, when the audience reaches the front of the cathedral, the earthquake is in full force. Then, we would walk them around the cathedral while listening to the aftermath of the destruction and end outside of the Chapter House.
While that is happening, the other group is listening to sounds of planes, guns, marching, music from the 1940 etc. This will be our representation for the Lincoln R.A.F base and their contribution to the war. we were going to start this group in front of the war memorial by the entrance of the castle. We would then slowly walk to the cathedral listening to the army sounds as they turn from “training camp” sounds into “fully fledged war” sounds. They would then walk around the cathedral (The opposite way to the other group), all the while still listening to war sound effects.
When both groups reach the outside of the Chapter House, they would then line up opposite each other and there would be some type of interaction between the two of them. We always believed that our audio walk should slowly lead up to ‘a moment’ which would surprise the audience. What the moment would have been in this version of the audio walk we did not think of at this time.
When we showed this to our tutors, they, unfortunately, were not as enthused at the idea of this style for our audio walk as we would have hoped. They told us that they enjoyed the earthquake side of the performance idea but were not as keen at the R.A.F side of the performance, because the R.A.F base that is located in Lincoln was not anywhere near Castle Square so it did not made much sense to create an army audio walk if it had nothing to do with where our site was.
When our tutors put our idea in that light, it did seem like a bad idea. So we decided to continue down the earthquake idea.