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.

Seating Available

Testing… a new idea I’m calling ‘Everything Happens Here’. Experiments for a project initiated by Rules and Regs for an event on June 14th at Loughborough University, hosted by RADAR. Filmed by Britt Hatzius. After that B and I will be travelling in France and Italy and hope to produce more, in the same vein, for a show in Paris at The Window 41.

The audience are positioned here along the pavement, looking that way. In the road there are demonstrators, asleep. They’re surrounded by bankers in sharp suits and sharp shooters in riot gear. No-one’s moving, and there’s no sound at all except the wind overhead, going that way. At a certain moment all the bankers and snipers start smoking: cigarettes, cigars and pipes. The smoke is taken that way by the wind, and sets off the fire alarm in the station. That’s the only sound we hear. The demonstrators all roll over and continue sleeping on their other sides.

Lost in Austin

A lot happening. This from Texas – mighty hot – where Sam, Joji and I are launching the finalised version of GuruGuru in Austin, for the amazing Fusebox Festival who commissioned the piece. The changes we’ve made have been much to do with gearing up the pace with a kind of pile-up style, quickfire dialogue which is really quite exhilerating to watch – we’ve sat in on a few test runs, but otherwise it’s quite frustrating, amusingly, to have to shut the door on a group of people experiencing the thing alone in the room. It’s interesting to think about how this piece might branch out at some point to include an outside audience. We’re not ruling anything out just yet.

I even thought yesterday about an experience I had 2 years ago at the ancient, wooden ‘Cyclone’ rollercoaster at Coney Island. When you get off, you find a photo of yourself, inevitably screaming in near free-fall, which you can buy and take home (on paper, T-shirts, mugs…). Thinking about a version of this for GuruGuru, minus the money-grabbing…

We have a Pontiac. We find ourselves driving around a lot, taking wrong turns on the highway, listening to hip hop on a radio station called Shade XL or something…

There’s so much I want to write about. Or rather, stuff i feel I should try and deal with. Like for example how much I loathed the Castellucci work at Spill Festival back in London. Try and straighten that out. Or how insane some of the language is in the papers these days, “suboptimal outcomes“, etc. Or perhaps I should try and cope with the idea of a pandemic on the doorstep here (already in Europe apparently). But I’m going to skip all that for now and just post this amazing video of Mos Def celebrating MF Doom’s lyrics.

Thanks to Joji for finding that.
Mos Def’s line from over 10 years ago still lingers… i radiate the place like an upright bass – he still does. And Doom’s new album is great. More rhymin….

Andersson’s TV gaze

 

In Roy Anderssons’s painfully funny ‘Songs from the Second Floor‘ there are a few moments when the characters glance at the camera. It comes as a surprise, but not the kind demanding attention, not the kind saying ‘look i’m breaking the rules, i’m surprising you’. You could almost miss it. It’s a gaze of weakness, not strength… until now i’ve only known this kind of ’surprise’ as an act of strength beyond naturalism, a summoning of courage by the one daring to stare at the spectators, but here it’s different. The first of these moments was so slight I thought I was imagining it, the frail man (who, earlier, had been almost sawed in half by an inept magician) struggling to his seat. 

The next follows straight on from this, and seemed like the kind of resigned glance we throw at a TV.  It made me wonder about the one before, so I went back, and it seemed likely the man was looking at a TV there too. I knew that face, i’ve walked into a restaurant feeling like that.

Tired eyes glad for an absorbing focus, something at last which won’t reflect attention or demand response. This is a guilty, exhausted, lost gaze, yearning for a break from pain, stress, humiliation – something I’ve rarely ever seen properly captured on film. I wonder about what it means for ‘us’ to be situated as this TV, for the characters to be looking to us for relief. What is it that we see at these moments? The men in question are old enough to remember life without TV. The year is 2000. Here we are. 

 

where he wasn’t anymore

Lift-off at midday, Tokyo. Touchdown London, 3pm. Somewhere in the middle, an eleven-hour flight. The shock of long-distance travel somehow lessened by a. the non-place of alcohol and movies, and b. not being in any case very awake or aware of Tokyo this morning. So the banality of a Picadilly line trip from one end to the other (as i type) pretends to be just that, rather than one half of an impossibly long day stretched over two mentally incompatible places. No, I was awake this morning, just not that present and instead looking over my mind’s-shoulder, back into the blur of some dream involving an ecstatic reunion with a younger Dad, his bright eyes delighted to see me, his polo jumper well-fitting, welcoming. 

Britt sent me the above photo by Thomas Wrede from his mischievously named show ‘Real Landscapes’ (currently at Wagner + Partner, Berlin) – several pages more of this great series here.

3 weeks in the lands without…

Temporary 3 week stasis here on ‘Likely Collapse’ due to eventful non-internet activities in Tokyo. I feel like Lemmy Caution in Les Pays Extérieures. Hope to resume in 10 days or so.

Don’t sleep on the Guru

We’re on an all-nighter at Sam’s finishing off GuruGuru before tomorrow’s first ever try-out. Half one in the morning now, Joji is flat out with the animation, passing stuff to Sam as he’s making it, Sam slotting things into the sound edit bit by bit. There’s not much I can do except fuel them with very strong Turkish tea and (for Sam) liquorice allsorts. We have about 8 hours, schedule’s like this -

Video finished, Sam does 2hrs of sound work – 9am
Render, author – 11am
Set up at Shunt- 3pm
Run through – 5pm
First slot – 6.30pm

Joji occasionally asking for an opinion on the latest, usually resulting in the three of us losing control for a while to torturous bouts of laughter.

*
Anyone in London wanting to see some very early trials, details at Shunt. Arrive early and sign up for a slot. 6.30 – 10.30 Thurs and Friday, 7.30 – 11.30 on Saturday (except the 9.30 slot, taken). The show is an hour long and is for 5 people at a time. Full info on GuruGuru here