Suggestive

I have a new computer and google’s behaving differently, giving me what I imagine are the most commonly searched terms relating to whatever I type. The list it gives sometimes catches my eye. The less you enter the better it seems. I like the many references to people, songs, adverts, movies – how these lines dangle there absurdly in the googlesphere, stripped of glamour and harmony, back with the others where they were to begin with, daily fragments of desire and the unknown, arranged here in list form by a computer which we must continue to believe can’t laugh or write poetry.

A charming science

Various thoughts about live documentary, starting with Stefan Kaegi’s recent show Heuschrecken (Locusts) for Rimini Protokoll, at Schauspielhaus Zürich, September 16 2009. I somehow doubt this production will tour much, probably never making it to the English-speaking world, so I hope I’m not spoiling things for most people. If you plan on seeing it of course you might not want to read this one.

Photos taken after the show >

The audience are sat either side of a long tube, about 4 metres wide and, at a guess, about 20-25 metres long, made of transparent plastic. Inside is a meticulously crafted sand-landscape with all kinds of ‘features’ – a sort of gorge running down the middle, photos on sticks, some written signs, a mini swimming pool, a kind of wire ‘border’ fence, etc. And crawling around everywhere, thousands (10,050 apparently) of locusts. At each end of the tube, sunk into the ground a bit, are scientists and, mixed in with them, a musician who, with only a cello and a delay / sampler thing, did a brilliant job of subtley shifting the tone throughout, building up tonal layers and scattering fine strokes and plucks over the top (it’s not often that music in theatre manages to be both beautiful in its own right, live, and yet unobtrusive to the overall event).

It was mad, huge, completely unfeasible perhaps in any other country than Switzerland. Like Cargo Sofia (the truck) and Mnemopark (the mini people, train sets etc), watching it you feel like you’re balancing between a) a kind of wide-eyed, smiley kids’ geeky-dream-world (‘imagine if we put 10 thousand locusts on stage!!”) that could go anywhere and b) something very serious, focussed, detached, journalstic. I think this could describe everything i’ve seen of Stefan’s actually, but this was intensely so. There was a lot of german, lots of info, and my friend whispering into my ear did the best she could, but i know i lost a lot of nuance – the mischievous interweaving of ‘Curious Bit of Info X’ with ‘Curious Bit of Info Y’ which together form something far more mysterious / funny / revealing and perhaps wherein lie his real aims. The music certainly seemed to suggest this – that there’s a world beyond the statistics to discover, something implied - almost certainly a vision of post-global-warming at it’s heart, our future selves played out by a huge team of unsuspecting actors.

This was a nearly final rehearsal, so of course things went wrong. The tortoise with a camera stuck to her shell, walking down the central gorge, stamping on the odd locust and eventually pushing aside, with exquisite nonchalence, the wooden barrier that was supposed to keep her from venturing too far down the space. Or one of the scientists walking slowly down the space between the audience and the tube with a locust balanced on his finger, blowing it gently to encourage flight (the image was pure reverie, something from Joyce’s early dream of the Artist, far from his assigned role for a moment). But the locust ‘corpsed’ and despite his prompter (the french call him ’souffleur’)he didn’t budge and stayed perched, fascinated perhaps at the view from there, an astronaut’s, back at his world. (Perhaps this explains the final image: an actual astronaut space-walking through the tube, waving into the tortoise-cam…)

The scientists as performers, though, were pretty boring. I’m certain that everything they said was fascinating (the bits I got were), but as theatre animals they were quite flat. I wonder if that will change over time, if the idea is that they start to ‘inhabit’ the stage in similar ways to the locusts; ok, maybe not the mating and multiplying part, but they might start to come out of their skins and develop the organs and skills necessary for survival there.

The big question here is whether you think it’s OK to manipulate and ‘enhance’ the performative energy of your subjects, when directing a live documentary. This seems to divide practitioners in the field, and is something I’ll be looking out for when I eventually get to see something by Quarantine. I don’t really have a clear idea of where Stefan stands on this, but it seems like his approach is to take what comes, and be grateful. In two beautiful pieces involving artists working with their fathers – Martin Nachbar’s Repeater and Simon Bowes’s Kings of England project, it’s all about containment, restraint, chorreography. Vivi Tellas (who began working on her ‘live archive’ project partly as a result of seeing Stefan’s work in Cordoba) often speaks of getting the balance right. In an interview with her in 2004 we were at one point talking about her amazing show ‘Cozarinsky and his Doctor‘, and she gave an example of something she deliberately left ‘untouched’ -

AH – I like the way you let him [Allejo Florin, the doctor] perform with his back to the audience. So that whenever we see his face it seems almost a gift..

VT -  I pay a lot of attention to who they really are, what they give me and what they want to offer. He has this BACK thing that really has a sense for him, how he talks to someone else, and with his hand in his pocket throughout the whole thing. As a director it’s tempting to say TAKE IT OUT, be expressive…  but i’ve never said that.

but later explained how it’s often necessary to draw a performance from your subject – at this point we were talking about the other piece I saw on my first visit to B.A., ‘Three Philosophers with Moustaches’ which is still one of the most beautiful stage works I’ve ever seen -

V. But in the end it’s good to work – for them. In the end whatever they do they’re ok about doing it. If we come to the limit of what’s possible, it’s clear. Theyr’e not OBLIGED to do anything. With the philsopher’s too  – I mean they don’t have to take their trousers down in that way.

A. Yes what’s going on there??

V. They say do you have marks of arrows on your body? Scars? I needed a moment in the show where we have more body presence. They are so cerebral it’s like they don’t have any body. So first i put them in touch with archery. And i thought it’d be a disaster…

[Occassionally, in this small studio, the three elderly philosophers take it in turns to fire arrows at a target using professional archery equipment]

A. That’s a thing, right from the word go there’s a physicality to the work – from the archery at the beginning, to how they move as we spoke about…

V. That was my job, to take them out of their thinking into some action, to the body, or to relate it all to the body. And then i said well i want to see their flesh. How? So i asked them do you have any marks on your body from wounds? Eguardo said ‘a man bit me here, i have a mark’. The others were surprised, and said , ‘wow, what passion! what happened?’ Turned out it was a fight. Another showed another scar, an operation. And then Alfredo pulled up his shirt and said I HAVE A SCAR IN MY HEART THAT YOU CANNOT SEE, THE WORST KIND. A LOVE SCAR. To show their scars they’ve had to partially take their shirts off. Now, to tuck in their shirts, they undo their pants. That’s the way you do it, it seems! Do you know Coca Sarli – trash movies in Argentina about sexy, kitch woman with big tits etc. From 50’s mostly. So, I told them ‘When you do that, you have to imagine you’re in a Coca Sarli movie, and you’ve just had sex with her – all three of you, one and then the other’. And they laugh at me, I’m always making SEX JOKES because they’re so masculine. They get embarassed and go red, when i talk about sex.

Maria, Vivi’s assistant chipped in at this point

> But whenever Vivi’s not around they’re always very bad, talking sex jokes all the time!

V > Everything you see in 3Phillosophers… has a ‘behind the scenes’ construction to it, ie. ‘imagine you’re doing this’ – ‘. I try to give them this kind of thing SLOWLY because at first they can’t think that way, in a theatrical way, that they’re ‘holding’ something and calling it to their imagination in a way that will take them to other places.

______

So, can we talk about ‘manipulating’ the performance of a subject without that meaning that something is being forced out unnaturally? I love this idea of identifying latent energies which can contribute in some way (as here, tapping something perhaps better left in the dark in order to offset an otherwise over-cerebral world), and introducing the whole idea of theatre, imagination. To make it clear, slowly, that THEY can manipulate the moment, be in charge of something in a way.

I haven’t used the word ‘authentic’. It confuses me a lot. In an email conversation with Tim Etchells the other day, he touched on this (informally / thinking aloud) -

There’s a long conversation to be had about documentary work too i think.. to do with staging the authentic, relying on the authentic as a currency.. which i think can be quite problematic in perf as it is in film/tv… and im really wondering these days if i think the ethics of documentary performance is *better* or easier to negotiate than those of film/tv documentary.. i dont know.. complex stuff to think around. Jerome Bel’s Veronique Doisneau is quite good in dealing with this.. but in more general terms i can wonder how much further this line can go…

(Amazed and very happy to find Veronique Doisneau on youtube – heard so much about it… it’s unspeakably beautiful: grab all four parts here while they’re still up…)

He’s right, there’s a lot more to go into here – I hope we’ll have that conversation. For the moment though, in what may be very reductive ignorance, I’m wondering if the ‘currency’ of authenticity which may be driving interest in this kind of work might in some ways boil down to simple charm. I don’t think it’s over-generous to say that everyone can be charming. It’s like when people are switched to ‘on’ rather than ‘off’ – we sense it immediately, and we don’t get bored of it. And when there are people on stage who we know are no less qualified to be up there than us, exuding an unforced charm and allowing us access to a particular world of which they are ’specialists’ (the word Stefan has always used, which I love), I can’t help feeling the joy of those moments is fairly uncomplicated. It’s just very hard to achieve, and therefore quite rare.

The information in Stefan’s work involves different pieces of knowledge combining to imply things which go beyond a sum of its parts, an elegant, backdoor approach to new understanding which is intensely charming! But I’m left wondering why the performances often end up seeming unmined. Even scientists who spend most of their time hanging out with locusts can be charming, if pushed a little.

As the audience enter ‘Three Philosophers with Moustaches’, the action’s already under way, the men taking turns to fire arrows, precarious and wobbly with the enormous bows, already heavily involved in challenging each other, trying to trip each other up with new angles on old theories.

Ant – I love the way it just … starts… slowly, inperceptibly. There comes a moment when we realise you’ve drawn the curtains [behind the audience, enclosing the studio space], people all have their seats, there’s no more extra sound, and we can start to hear better the conversation. And then in each show that talking stops, and we have the first framing device: seats turning, or finger clicking.

Vivi – and Alfredo – thinking about his finger clicking. So i would say to them – THINKING IS SEXY! you have swing also. You are thinkers and you are sexy, anyway, so come on!! And they laugh – yeah you’re right!!

Unknown river

The twilight wind up the river from the Croatia-Slovenia border.

It gets colder so I turn the heat up in the cabin, as I’m alone, and gaze out.

‘e come uno specchio…’ The river could be mistaken for a lake. Wide, flat expanses of linear crops attempt vanishing points, but it just cuts them off. Built up riverbank layers of concrete. Beyond, some dark hills.

Birds fly over it, beneath it. On the banks, a van with all the doors open. No lights, no-one inside it or anywhere to be seen.

everything reflected in this river. Not even sure it’s a river. Something more man-made perhaps. No, it’s too big.

A little later, a family, standing still looking at the devastation wrought by an army of orange JCB’s. Branches twisted. Man about ten metres away looking at his phone. Child hugging mother, refusing to look. Mother not moving.

And then wide open again.

A deserted factory with its rusty conveyors next to a deserted mansion house. Nearby, a church, its lights on, the only lights for miles around.

A thin trail of smoke gently bends over the river so as to see its reflection. Pumpkins trailing off from the embers, scattered in clumps as though neglected, but actually busy growing.

The triain’s hugging the cliff-side as it gets dark, the oncoming side of the tracks illuminated briefly by light coming from an old couple in their compartment a little further down the wagon. My light stays switched off. The windows are I think a little tinted; surely the world is not like this.

Nothing now except different shades of darkness, black and a kind of deep grey-blue above, seperated by the silhouette of trees. As the train bends round another mountain I notice the rock’s silhouette up there is moving very slowly, which means what i’m seeing is far away, very high above me. Something about this trip which brings me to my core. Like feeling very scared and safe at the same time. Foreign and so close. Big red illuminated letters, PREDILNICA LITIJA. I don’t know.

And now, if you can imagine, a bonfire, dark everywhere and all around, nothing but black and then a roaring bonfire floating in the middle there. Rediscovering Fennesz’s album Field Recordings 1995-2002… on a track called Instrument 3, as here.

Photo actually taken just before new year 2007, somewhere near the French / Swiss border, a similar sense.

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60 seconds / 58 hits / small hope

To be played at the same time:

15 days

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Photos by Sheila Menon

The great Greg McLaren performs / executes his Fifteen Day Deathmatch on the streets of Edinburgh. I’m not sure i’ve quite got my head around everything he’s proposing, but between this and his caravan there should be a lot to chew on. Info.

I’m leaving Berlin for Edinburgh in a couple of days. Despite it being common knowledge that Edinburgh is mostly a nightmare, there’s actually quite a lot to look forward to this year: some of the shows at the British Council showcase are good, and there are two very nice programmes positioning themselves well outside the norm, one at the Forest Fringe (where I’ll be showing GuruGuru) and another at St Stephen’s church, curated by Jackie Wylie of the Arches, Glasgow.

an’-effort.of,theiintelligence

-.  . . ~  ~ ~.   ‘  .-~ ~ . . mean- ~,. ;:: . quite ;a .se’nsitive eat: andlsounds unencumbered. vtith precise ml ::ing;vlere:registered-p~erhai,s;better-by:ime..;than.by most. What was. ~~~, :l.; it then?.Aidefectof:the.understanding perhapsl which only began ~~  to;ilib.rate on:repea~ted :solicitations; or which di~d-vibrate, if you like, ~’. ‘ but,at a lower frequency., or a high.er: :than:that of ratiocination, if [- isucha thing is conceivableiand ,such a thing:;is conceivable, since ~:,. .lcOnceive it. Yes:;the words-lheard;and.heard .distinctly; ~:v::~ ~l;~ ..quite asensitive ear,were heard.a-firstltime;.then: a second, ~. ~ oftenevenathird*.:aspuresounds;freeof.allm. e~aning;andthis ll;~ ~ isprobablyone ofthe reasons.)yhyconversatiori was..unspeakably ~. . painful to me.And the words'l uttered-im yself--and-which must     nearly always have gone with.an'-effort.of,theiintelligence,were     often to me as the buzzing of an insect..A'nd; thisis- perhaps one~ ~ of the reasons rIw as so:untalkatjye. I 'rnean.this,tlrouble;l had in      understanding not only what.others said;tome:~but:also what I      saidtothem.ltistrue-thatinthe~nd-by,dint:Ofpatierice,we:m,kldf       ourselyes understoOd. but understood.ii ith .regard. to }vhat. I ask- you. and to what purpose? . And .to the . noises 'of nature ~too. and       the works of men.

*

With my new phone, experimenting with what sounded like impressive scanning abilities, I snapped a picture of the page I'm on in Beckett's trilogy (Molloy, p50, Calder version)

I had another go, continuing the same section and managing similar serendepities between two kinds of confusion, though slightly less mangled (perhaps i'm getting the hang of it).

*

and o] : : . the works of men; I reacted I think in rny own way and withoui~ . desire of enlightenment- And my ‘eye too; the seeing one. musl -l ~ have been ill-connected with the.spider, for I found it hard tc. . name what was .niirrored there..often quite distindtly. And witho\ri.  going so far ias to say that I saw the world upside down (that woulc    ; . . ‘ have been too easy) it is certain I saw it in a ~way in ordinateb. .  ~ formal. though I, was far from being an aesthete, or an artist. And. ‘ ~ ~ of my~ two eye.s only one functioning more or less correctly, I mis.~ ~ judged the distance separating me.from the other world, and ofter,: ~ ~ l’stretched out my hand for what was far;:beyond:my reach, and~ ~ oftenl knocked against obstacles.scarcely,visibte.on the horizon,~ ~ But I was like that even when ‘I. had my~ two ‘eyes, it seems to mel:  but perhaps’not, for it islong since’ that eraof niy life. and my recol-. ‘ . . lection of it is more than imperfect. . And nowr come .to think of it,   : my attempts at taste and smell were’ s’carcely:morefortunate, I smelt  l ~ and tasted without knowing exactly what,nor,whetheritwas good.~ – . nor whetherit was bad. and seldom twice running the same thing.    i . . I would have been I, think an excellent husband. incapable of. wearying of my wife and’committing. adultery-only from absent-mindedness

Pedro’s Solo Reaction

Going back a bit, as usual…

Pedro Antunes is a Portuguese friend who helped us with Doublethink a few years back, and has been working as a theatre artist in/as BIG ODD. He also works regularly at the BAC and was in the audience during THE BAGWELL IN ME, one of Ann Liv-Young’s recent shows there during the excellent BURST festival, where besides her usual shock tactics she ended up demanding that the BAC producer responsible for the poor audience numbers come on stage and explain themselves. Enter Richard Dufty.

Richard later asked Pedro to write an account of what happened, from his side. I’ll let the text (and P’s great voice through it) speak for itself – in any case the confused whirl of memories, thoughts, and problematic reactions summarize quite well how I came away from her work too (though I saw a different show, SOLO). Pedro explained:

My written English is not very good, as i wrote it straight after the show and a bit more on the day after,

so it’s more like an impulsive reaction in words.

that’s what Richard wanted, so if you don’t understand some of the words please let me know.

but yes, it was very mental and unique

unforgettable and I’m still digesting it, i still have the whole thing coming back to my head.

and i think I’ve change my mind about some of the stuff that I wrote!!

- – - – - – - – -

Ok,

Ann-Liv Young starts to count how many people are seated in the auditorium – and she counts 25.

Then she asks for the capacity of the space, a member of the audience helps her to minus that figure by the total capacity and she calls for the producer of the show and the marketing person:

Richard comes up and his handed in a microphone, (so that his voice can be distorted / manipulated / ridiculous)

Ann-Liv Young (her voice has a low male voice distortion) starts a confrontation / debate / venting her frustration with the venue, accusing the festival lead produce:

She was infuriated and asks all the questions that came up to her mind:

Who da fuck runs this theatre?

Who is the marketing person?

Is this a British thing?

Did you ever receive any performers from the US?

Where do you get your money from – it’s certainly not form the people, as the audience is empty?

This was certainly ‘one of the most incredible experiences’ that if had during this performance, the live and real debate, the washing of ones dirty linemen in public, the sharing of her frustration with the receiving venue, the live and extreme debate, yet all covered / framed and within the performance, amplified and distorted by the microphones, and always filmed, like we were in a cheap American TV live debate:

She wants more; she is putting all her effort to be kicked out of the show, to be pushed on the face by the tech guy (in this case it was Greg), to have the show cancelled by the producer – to have the live programme cut off – and yet, the producer lets it run.

Greg can’t stand it any longer, jumps out of the tech box to defend the BAC Senior Producer and to drag me him out from the inferior and ridiculous position that Ann-liv has given him – this was a very touching act – of a person acting on behalf of other (for real). Greg really stood up for Richard – he felt offended and was very shocked – Greg didn’t care anymore about his role or about is contract or about is job. He just couldn’t stand Ann- Liv telling all that shit to Richard and taking the piss of him and of his ridiculous voice. It was a very brave / pure/ genuine / touching act of altruism and camaraderie. I was with tears in my eyes, during this moment of Ann Liv Young performance!!

It was raw, extreme and strong.

Ann-Liv Young, couldn’t have found an easier target to generate rough and live emotion and extreme forms of behaviour in her performance, but a technician (in this case Greg) – the producers are somehow invisible, they merge into the audience (although Richard Dufty came to give voice to the BAC) and the ‘London’ audience offered resistance – although she tried. The technician is working, it’s easy to be indentified, he is working – somehow performing for the show (as he is always behind the tech box), and they have a professional relationship, even if they don’t know each other – so he was the perfect target.

That was surely one of the most memorable experiences that I had in a theatre (and I’m not being judgemental)… either if you like it or not! you need to accept and recognise that was something unforgetful, not so much because of the content of the show or the porn scenes, but more because of all the harassment, the bulling and swearing at the institutions (in this case the BAC) and to it’s members, and to the commercial / financial / transactional relationship between producer and performer,

quoting Ann-live Young speaking with the audience: ‘do you guys know, how much we have been paid to be here at BAC? They paid us £200!!! I’m only joking, it was £3000’,

She is giving to the producer (in this case Richard Dufty) the role of cheap porn producer (please note that this conversation was done with voice distortion – and Richard had a very feminine voice). This scene becomes a real moment of a producer struggling / trying to deal with the rough / nasty porn actresses that he has contracted / programmed (in this case programmed) for his film (festival) – They really took this backstage porn scenario to an extreme, playing with real emotions and with real fact, but framing it on stage – labelling it as live art.

On this respect, I think that Richard was an amazing producer – because he didn’t interrupt the show at any point (I believe that not many people would be to deal so calmly and with confidence with all the insults!!) and accepted the role that Ann_liv Young gave him ( the porn producer, that was trying abuse them or not pay them properly)

Theses were some of the audience, comments reactions on the night (that I can remember of):

- I came here to see your work and paid for tickets and I don’t care about your issues with the BAC, can you please show us your performance? (Ezara’s mother)

- Ann Liv Young: This is the performance, if you don’t like than leave – the door is there

- Ezara’s Mother: But I want to see the real show, the scenes, the blurb that I’ve read on the brochure!!!

- Ann Liv Young: ok, you want to know the story, so here it goes: ‘once upon a time there was a little girl, and that girl was me. And my mother told me to not hang around with black people, because there was something wrong with them. I know that she was wrong, even being so little…’ and so on.

- A guy that was seated beside Will (producing intern): Ok Ann-Live I got the point, we are all depressed and this is a therapy session, so who is next!!

And then after a while they finally started the performance or in other words ‘they finally started the play – play with each other and with the audience’:

And that was no longer the performance / live art, that was live hardcore porn / fetishism / pip show with some political and racial content (although the nature of the shocking scenes consumed / shadowed / undermined the meaning behind the scenes), I was no longer thinking about slavery, racisms or American politics, but thinking to myself, she is licking a pussy on stage (ok!), she is fucking the other woman (ok!) she is very radical and extreme (ok!) they are filming her (ok!)

Towards the end (after getting used to all the sex and violence) I started to become disappointed with Ann-Liv Young because after all that wildness / bitterness and crescendo, they didn’t even reach the climax / orgasm (and I could see that she had the BALLS to do it), she just showed us that she uses sex in her shows, ok…!!! Coming back to the whole porn film scenario, as a producer paying £3000 for the ‘show’, I would ask for some of the money back – not good enough – if it’s to be a porn, than do it properly!!!!.

I thought the whole thing of the reading dialogue boring!!

Concluding:

Yes, I’ll never forget this moment (not a good memory though!! Very disturbing)

It was a show that generated extreme reactions (during the show and afterwards), made me remember when I was a student taking my Theatre Studies BA in Portugal, when I had to study very famous directors from the 60’ and 70’s like Richard Foreman, and their performances would have enormous impact in the audience and a big part of the audience would leave and deeply hate his shows. And I couldn’t understand how people at the time would hate so much these directors / companies, and how it was possible they are now being part of the programme of studies in universities!!

Ok, Ann-Liv Young can be basic and vulgar on her actions,

And her performance can be full of performance art conventions and basic clichés, but she is very much alive and ‘on your face’

She certainly marks your memory as a spectator and gives you a truly participative / interactive show – even if in a malicious and non-ethical way.

Her show opens a lot of discussion and originates a lot of critical and ethical debates.

I doubt that Greg was ever so emotionally involved in a show during his employment history at BAC

And I’m sure I never wrote such long text about a performance since I’ve started to work at BAC.

Pedro x

Presente Histórico

Lola Arias sent through a video excerpt of her new show MI VIDA DESPUES (My Life After).

It’ll be appearing in places around Europe the rest of this year. Really hope I’ll get to see it, though not sure where. The video’s shot at the Sarmiento in Buenos Aires where it’s just finished a two month run. Vivi Tellas’s long artistic directorship there is ending with it – this is the last of her now 7 year-old Biodrama cycle of theatre works created around living people (usually just one) in Argentina. This commissioning programme was often confused with Vivi’s own, more directly ‘documentary’ style work she prefers to call ‘Archivos‘ (which I mentioned here), the difference being that in her work the subjects are actually live on stage, wheres in the Biodrama they were most often played by actors. Stefan Kaegi (of Rimini Protokol) was the inspiration for Vivi to start staging ‘real people’, and it may have been he who began the confusion as when Vivi invited him over to do a Biodrama, he walked over the road from the theatre into the zoo, and ended up making a show about certain people and their relationship with certain animals.

Apparently it was around that time when Lola and Stefan first met and they’ve since made two live documentary pieces together. I believe Mi Vida Despues is Lola’s first on her own, so it’s exciting to see, even from the video, the kind of theatre i discovered and loved in Buenos Aires combining with her own provocative, lyrical mischief. Above all though, it’s the explosive subject matter and brilliant concept she employs to convey it:

So instead of non-actors re-playing themselves, or actors playing ‘real people’, we have people whose job is normally acting, ‘reconstructing’ their parents: in some ways the only role no-one can ever fully avoid. My head spins when I think of this both contrasting and runnning parallel to the relationship / struggle with a collective past no-one ever wants to see repeating.

As the video makes clear, the cast includes children (and even a grand-child) of the ‘disappeared’ (desaparecidos) as well as the daughter of a former intelligence officer – whose brother turned out to be a kidnapped / adopted child from one of the infamous ESMA detention centres. That the above blurb from Lola’s site makes no mention of the casting detail may indicate how sensitive these matters remain. Apart from some very positive words from Vivi (who is of the generation who somehow lived through all that), I havn’t heard much about how the run went, so i look forward to Stefan and Lola’s wedding party in Berlin this summer where I hope to hear more. (I’m also looking forward to bouncy castles by the Spree…)

Now

image - Rinko Kawauchi

A few things happening now, today, tomorrow and the next day…

Tonight, ArtsAdmin are streaming live from a discussion I’ll be part of about performance making and the internet. You can see it here from 7.30pm, and also chat / make comments in the moment etc. Full info at the same link.

Tomorrow and Thursday (27-28th), the Pete and Joan live portrait, as mentioned below. The audio and directions are up now, here: bring it along on your mp3 players.

Tim Etchell’s brilliant SMS project Thirty-Nine Or So To Do is up and running as from today. I don’t think it’s too late to subscribe > go here for details. I’ll be writing a response to this soon based on what happens when I carry out or fail to obey the instructions. I woke up to ‘Repeat movements from a long time ago’.

Responding to the last post re. Pete and Joan, Tim also sent through a link to the photographer Shizuka Yokomizo who posted residents a note through their doors -

“Dear Stranger, I am an artist working on a photographic project which involves people I do not know…I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening. A camera will be set outside the window on the street. If you do not mind being photographed, please stand in the room and look into the camera through the window for 10 minutes on __-__-__ (date and time)…I will take your picture and then leave…we will remain strangers to each other…If you do not want to get involved, please simply draw your curtains to show your refusal…I really hope to see you from the window. “

Pete & Joan is a first step towards another, bigger project which aims to do something similar to this. Next to the BAC runs a road called THEATRE STREET…

And finally for now, linking to the Japanese photographer subject, my brother Martin and his wife Leonie Purchas are organising a workshop with the amazing Rinko Kawauchi. The workshop’s full now, but they’ve managed to pull a scoop and have organised an evening next door at the wonderful Campbell Works with Rinko in discussion with Martin Parr, next Monday 1st June. Info here.

Looking at the living

Currently working on a live portrait of two retired residents local to the BAC, Pete and Joan Brookes, to be shown next week at the Burst Festival. The piece is essentially what Greg, Gemma and I (in our experiments as The Other People) called a ’sitting’ – mostly static, and a chance to simply look at other human beings up close and without a time limit, something which is fascinatingly rare. They’ll be sat behind their front window, at home. They have a little wall outside which the audience can sit on, listening to a recording i’ll be uploading tomorrow here. Spending time with them has been hugely enjoyable, but things got really interesting the other day when I let them hear the edit I’d made of the recordings so far. With that, I’d focussed a lot on their accounts of dressing up for fancy dress parties and the background to that – family histories, important moments, and the reasons why they love it so much. I had a double headphone adapter and they were both clutching the earpieces, grinning, when I had an idea – I asked them to repeat what they were hearing, and I hit record again while they did. Later on I mixed together the original with parts of the repeated version. Here’s an excerpt – best on headphones.

Since we came up with the idea for a live ’sitting’ it has always had a powerful effect on me. There’s something looping back, like a statue which is alive, but pretending to be inert. Received notions of how to view an artpiece, and the reason for making one at all, turned inside out – especially the portrait, with its traditional promise of immortality through art. When I’m stood in front of a living person in this context, the main thing I feel is a generosity from the subject which demands a reciprocity my eyes hardly know how to give, an openness to being ‘viewed’ amplifying the very fact of them being alive, mortal, vulnerable.

It’s hard to write about this, but an event last year put it all in perspective. My friend Nick Daniel drowned off the coast of Marbella. The reasons for him having ended up living there at all are complicated, but back in late 2006 he helped us with our first project as The Other People, on the Costa del Sol of all places, and became our first subject for a ’sitting’. The frame we chose for him seemed so perfect at the time. There he was sat cross legged, comfortably facing the town where he lived and worked, at peace at last with new friends and the occasional adventure.

It’s hard to think of Nick without laughing – he was so generous and trusting, throwing himself into five Rotozaza projects over as many years, and then this. And so yes of course it’s easy to imagine him still there, knowing that he went down below the horizon which in this photo goes in one ear and out the other. To think of that 20 minutes or so we spent in magic stasis, slowly advancing along the jetty towards what seemed like a man planted from above, by fate, a breathing man. Of how we negotiated the right distance, testing the view from the side, from behind, what we might term too close… not unlike the apes at the beginning of 2001 – really taking nothing for granted, amazed we’d never done it before, and at how different an experience it was from even looking at someone asleep. Nick was awake and alive behind those shades. More here.