Locations & Inspiration - LV21

One of the Locations we've looked at is the LV21.

The LV21 is a "historic, 40 metre steel-hulled lightship transformed into a floating art space and performance facility."

Before we even looked at this location there was talk of 1920's America and Prohibition which when we then looked at this ship, I thought about possibly a story about bootleggers, people who would smuggle alcohol from Europe into America for illegal distribution, and than also hijackers of the ship.

The Purple Gang might be a group we could look at as they were especially violent and were responsible for over 500 deaths during the Detroit bootleg wars. Furthermore in later years a separate faction was created; 'The Little Jewish Navy' who owned several boats and participated in rum-running as well as hijacking.

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Another idea I had to do with the LV21 away from the 1920's theme is a piece around the Naval Blockade of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I think by showing a stand off between an American ship and a Russian Ship (we would only show the story of the American sailors) we can create real tensions and show panic. This was done briefly in the recent X-men movie 'X-men First Class' however I think we could expand on the events and maybe show some the key worries during the blockade which I believe lasted 5 days.

General notes

Before we start a site specific piece I think it's very important to keep in mind, especially when devising:

• We can't take any real major pieces of set to the site so everything we really need should already be there
• We need to find space for the audience to stand/sit on site
• The performance will be on one location/in one specific space and so the performance need to suit that performance space. The way I think we could best perform a dramatic piece in one space would be to make it real time, i.e. if we were to perform for 30 minutes for example, we should show 30 minutes of those character's lifes
• We need to be able to give a fairly equal role to everyone which will be even more difficult as we are devising in one big group