Overspill: Shuffling the Deck

In the words of Robert Pacitti, in the introduction to the limited edition SPILL Tarot pack, ‘the tarot stands as viable a means of interpreting the world as any other – including science, philosophy and mathematics – and I defy any sceptic to prove otherwise.’ A Tarot pack is a set of 78 cards most often used, in English speaking countries at least, for the purposes of divination (in France and Italy it’s also used for playing games). The pack is made up of the Major and Minor Arcana, people and things that represent the elements of our world and the characters within it, and Tarot readings are carried out in relation to spiritual enlightenment, psychic communication, and the occult. But, as Robert Pacitti points out, a reading is as much an act of interpretation as one of prediction – the meaning of the cards reflects the reader’s frame of reference as well as her frame of mind. It’s this ability to crystallise thought that gives the cards their power.

In the case of the SPILL pack, the cards’ power is enhanced by the symbolic resonance of the images, and the way they have been produced. The Major Arcana – character types that include The Fool, The Hermit, The Moon, and everything in-between – are pictures of artists and other contemporary ‘mavericks’ from across the fields of art, academia, cultural activism and beyond. I have just cut the pack in three to reveal Robert Pacitti – Artistic Director of the Pacitti Company and creator, producer and curator of the SPILL Festival (‘Death’); Lois Kiedan – co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (‘Justice’); and Empress Stah – trapeze artist, Neo Cabaret performer and producer (‘The Star’). The pictures were taken by the photographer Manuel Vason, who has devised a unique working method in which he collaborates with his subjects to capture performances made for the camera. As a result, the SPILL Tarot pack does not just help crystallise the thoughts of the person using it; it also goes some way to crystallise the processes of collaboration, challenge and knowledge-sharing inherent in the SPILL Festival itself.

Coming at the start of the pack, The Fool is the journeyman of the Tarot, an innocent and a visionary who may be drawn in any direction by the rest of the cards. As such, the Fool embodies the reader and all her potential. The SPILL Tarot Fool is a figure in mid-air, leaping with abandon against the greying landscape of modern agriculture. A stony, pit-holed path winds through fields of dried out crops; an energy pylon and other industrial buildings line the horizon. As s/he jumps, the androgynous figure of the Fool stretches out of her newspaper costume, and pulls her mouth tight between a grin and a grimace. Above, a small clear moon makes an early appearance before sunset. Behind, a dog looks warily at the strange traveller with her eyes covered and her feet bare.

It’s hard to tell if the Fool is jumping for joy or desperation. She exists in both day and night, in the freedom of outdoors and within the cultivation of industrial agriculture. Suspended in the air, suspended in time and suspended between places, this figure embodies the ‘unbridled primal energy’ of the Fool.

But the card is also a picture of Rajni Shah, whose performance piece Dinner with America, was programmed into the SPILL Festival; and it’s easy to see how, like her performance, this image draws on the potency of symbols that slip in and out of recognition. But the energy of this suspended image – with Shah’s head thrown back and her arms stretching away from her body– must also be down to the eye of the photographer, Manuel Vason, and the synergy of the collaboration. There was also another collaborator in this image – Lucille Acevedo-Jones, a costume designer who works regularly with Shah, and who designed the newspaper dress for this Fool.

Like all the cards of the Major Arcana in this Tarot pack, the Fool is dripping with the residue of multiple and combined professional practices – the traces of as many professional practices, perhaps, as there are knowledge systems touched by Tarot itself. By bringing together this collection of people inside the rich symbolic web of Tarot , the project of the SPILL Tarot pack represents the working methodology behind the festival. As a whole, SPILL 09 was a collaboration between artists, producers, venues and audiences across a wide terrain – large theatres as well as site-specific spaces; performers familiar to London audiences as well as artists and work that was wholly unfamiliar; live art, theatre, performance, explicit bodies, music, dance, and much more. It brought artists to London from all over the world, and it did the same for audiences. As such, it reflected the vision of the Pacitti Company and its Director, Robert Pacitti. But SPILL was also woven from the enthusiasm, interest and sometimes controversy sparked in the minds and conversations of the people who participated by performing, producing or watching the work. Just like Tarot, it offered up glimpses of human experience, with the desire to be read and absorbed into others’ lives.

SPILL: Overspill was an attempt to respond to the energy and achievement of SPILL through writing that respected the form and content of the festival and its processes, and that developed with the festival over time. Together, the seven writers involved (David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt) created 55 pieces of writing. As well as responding to the work as we saw it during the festival, Overspill writers investigated the processes behind the finished product – interviewing artists, visiting rehearsals, and in most cases developing a collaborative process with the artist. We addressed questions to the audience and, within the confines of free blogging software, we tried to experiment with form. There were three days of writing workshops, two peer critiques, a complicated group editing system and ticket schedule, and one all night live writing performance. Like the SPILL Tarot, each individual blog post represents a complex web of professional practices and collaborations; what you’re reading here is the first card in the deck. We hope you will shuffle your own way through, and use this site to crystallise your thoughts in response to the SPILL Festival. Please make comments below, or email opendialogues@gmail.com

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

Pieces of America 2 - by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America 2

A very sideways look at the experience of performing and attending Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America in real and conceptual space…

co-authored by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

The following is a template designed for the consumption and digestion of splinters of cultural reference…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

A cavernous dining hall envelopes you. Upon entering, you cast aside fear and difference, strike up friendship, and explore common ground. A vast Honduran mahogany dining table inhabits the centre in isolated splendour. The linen is embellished in sparse Lutheran hand with the words ‘Pride, Hope, Kinship, Drive’. You are here with others. No one feels left out or passed over.

I am waiting, sheathed in plastic. Blind. A sweat in the palm, a loss of balance, a careful slow movement of the lashes. How many of them are there? What do they look like? Are they smiling or frowning or talking? Do they think they are making eye contact with me? Have they sat down? Do they feel welcome?

Whilst milling around the vast table and reaching out to one another, you are presented with the starter of the evening: the Optimistic Amuse Bouche. This is designed to whet the palate, and purge the body of negative expectation and prejudice. It is light, fizzy with promise, and lasts only for a moment on the tongue before dissolving.

• 250 grams of the ice of the Delaware and the grit of the people crossing it
• 50 grams of the majesty of untouched landscapes
• 5 grams of the sheer size and volume of all things American
• Shake vigorously till all ice crushed and blended with other ingredients – serve in a shot glass…

The game is on. I am in the space with you. Solo voices of U.S. citizens punctuate this quiet part of the evening. I have met them all, can picture their faces and surroundings – each now reinhabits that place and time we shared two years ago. Most have moved on to new cities, lives, and some to a new realm of being. We are dining with the dead, the angry, the ungracious and the hopeful.

Guests are called to table, and invited to share in fellowship and the spoils of a beguiling landmass. Presently, a vast melting pot arrives.

You tentatively devour the space we share. It is most probably not what you expected. I try to alleviate our frustrations by seducing you. Waves of success and exhaustion wash over us. I am blonde and blue-eyed. You are staring at me. I look into your eyes but my sadness and anger and eagerness make you shy.

Main Course: Promising Stew

Base ingredient: The power of the American identity, and the endurance of the souls and hearts and bosoms of the American people.

• Place in a large pot with 250grams of Patriotism. Heat till scalding.
• Temper with the Songs of the South, the Validation of the Individual and the Fear of the Other.
• Leave to simmer, until a myriad of histories and distant cultures dragged to the shores in famine and slave ships, have all been absorbed into the mix, peppering it with the flavours of far off lands.
• Finish and mature the dish with healthy dollops of the captains of industry, the soaring bricks and mortar of shiny sky-scrapers, the chic New England style of Boston and Cape Cod, the airy art spaces of New York, the balm of Californian breezes.

I am trying to hold this space. Voices crowd in. I am singing. You have travelled into the cradles and fields of your minds. I am still trying to hold the space. Though of course, of course, this is an impossible task. You have left and some come back. This space is one of coming and going.

Side-dish 1:

Forebear’s Bread

A simple unleavened bread – coarse and sometimes hard to digest, it is formed from the sparse sensibilities of Lutheran and Calvinist settlers, cooked by the steam of growth, and transformed into a hard-working, conservative outlook, impeccably mannered, friendly, and a touch distant.

There is nothing other than being with you in the room. All our trajectories collapse into one pointed moment. You are with me now. One last song. We have come full circle.

Side-dish 2:

Moulded Faith Rice

A sticky sweet rice, made from varying individual grains, moulded together to form a wholesome, loving solid which places the family at the centre of life, which places immense faith in a benign god, which places trust in other people, and which places emphasis on striving ahead as one.

I have made an attempt, that is all. As I shed the layers of this shiny blonde outfit, you watch from the darkness. I have no idea who you are any more. I look at you and there is pity and engagement in the space between us, but I could not say exactly where it sits. I take a practical approach to undressing. Now your thoughts cram the darkness. It is comforting. You witness my body as a shared landmark. I make my escape.

Side-dish 3:

Fun and Frolics Fondue

A frothy, synthetically-chewy dip. This contains the lure of consumerism, the whiff of fast food, the playful yellow beacons of taxis on Broadway, the gushing emotion of sitcoms and movies, the stars in the eyes of waitresses working the graveyard shift in a Hollywood diner, the preacher touting for souls outside the Elvis chapel in Vegas, and the endearing twang of ‘American-English’.

My numb feet cross the space, blundering between you and the crumbs of mulch. We find ourselves in different locations. I have left it behind. The burial of something. Preparation for a harvest. Cleaning.

Side dish 4:

Troubled Gravy

A bitter sauce which should neither be avoided, nor allowed to subsume the other flavours of the meal. Ingredients include the power and status accredited to violence, the despair of the sick unable to afford healthcare, the segregation and division of race, colour and creed, the elevation of image, and the furtherance of one nation above all others.

We watch a movie together. You pretend not to notice that I am by your side. I am afraid that at this point you are looking for the end. Some of you leave the space. I wish you would stay. But of course this is part of the deal between us. You come and go. We stay. It is almost time for the feast.

Dessert 1:

The first is Traditional Apple Pie with lashings of white peaks of cream. Warm and homely, it looks to a safe and prosperous past, a security and assurance that values were intact, that the future was golden and that America would prevail.

Oranges, Mandarins, Bananas, Apples, Dates, Pears, Plums, Dried Apricots, Chocolate, Chrysanthemums, Amaretti. How ridiculous. We consider making the world kinder.

Dessert 2:

The second is Mississippi Mud Pie. This dessert should be served cold. It is an intriguing, yet not overly sweet dish, formed by the power of hope, now muddied with change and the fear of disappointment. It looks unflinchingly forward to an uncertain future.

It is painfully awkward to find our way into this space of conversation. I come from a different trajectory into this feast. But having negotiated our differences, we sometimes fall into an entirely surprising conversation for a moment.

The lethargy of post-feasting cloaks you in warmth. Conversation wafts and thins with the rising steam of bitter black coffee…it is time to leave. Shyness tinges departures with awkwardness as new found fellowships forged amid the clamour, are met with chill night air. Smiles and connections linger, stored for a future time, a future feast…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, producer and curator. www.rajnishah.com

Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer on performance and live art based in London

Elevated Exhibitionism

I Feel Love!

George Chakravarthi

Soho Square

It was midday on Saturday 25th and I was walking through Soho Square Gardens on the way to an Overspill writers meeting when I first encountered George (a.k.a. exhibitionist and aspiring porn-star Johnny Shekontai). George, or rather Johnny, was wearing lace up boots, a delicate shiny cape draped across his shoulders, tight go-go outfit complete with tiny tight shorts and a skimpy top. It was cold and not a particularly great day to dance to Donna Summers’ infamous 1977 dance tune ‘I Feel Love’ for 8 hours on top of an 8ft high mock-stone plinth. But that’s what Johnny was going to do. And stood by the plinth, with cigarette dangling from his mouth, tight shorts, caped shoulders and various SPILL assistants fussing around him, he looked like a camp middleweight boxer about to enter the ring and undergo a gruelling bout.

Of course he was. But Johnny’s 13 rounds were not with a fellow greased-up sports professional trying to knock the crap out of him. It was with us, the public. He was disco dancing up there for our titillation, our delight. And his performance would be gruelling. Cold at first, later tired, sweaty and hungry. We would go about our busy day. Meanwhile, he would be there, still dancing, vulnerable to passers-by, their stares, their questioning looks. The question was would Johnny ‘feel love’ as Donna insisted she did, and would it last the whole 8 hours? Moreover, would we feel love for Johnny?

I Feeeeel Looo- ooo- ooo- ve. ...I Feeeel Loo- ooo- ooo- oo- ve

It’s 2pm. Donna is singing the same phrase laconically over and over again, her voice full of desire – for the song, for a lover, for any one of us here listening now. The drum beat and slight melody always pushing towards climax but never quite getting there; it’s a looped, tantric disco sex act of a song that leaves us excitedly on the edge – of dancing, of sex, of all those sweaty nights in clubs when you definitely did feel love, or something close to it. The music is infectious. I fight the urge to jump up and share the plinth with Johnny and relive my own go-go nostalgia of the 1990’s Manchester club scene. No, perhaps not sharing. The scene back then was quite competitive; what I really want to do is knock Johnny off the plinth and have the stage to myself. To feel love from strangers, if only for a moment.

Meanwhile, Johnny stares abstractly out into the middle distance whilst he bops around. He slips in and out of his groove. At times, his movements are energised, as if the mood has suddenly taken him or he has just noticed a camera trained on him and is showcasing his best moves. At others he looks bored and fatigued, as if he is trying to drum up enough energy to simply carry on. Passers-by stare, some dance around the plinth, clap and take photographs. Others munch sandwiches – oblivious- sat on the balding grass of the gardens. The temperature drops. It gets wet and grey. And Johnny dances on.

I Feeeeel Looo- ooo- ooo- ve. ...I Feeeel Loo- ooo- ooo- oo- ve

At 4pm the music is still pumping but Johnny is gone from the plinth. Is this supposed to happen? Has some over excited fan had him away? Or is he on a toilet break, gone for food? My mind wonders to thoughts of Johnny queued up at the Starbucks round the corner on Oxford Street, cuddling a latté in his silvery cape. I imagine him to be chagrined at the lack of green room or personalised trailer.

Minus Johnny, the plinth is no longer a fun podium for Johnny’s exhibitionist escapades, or a makeshift 8ft disco; it has a serious, formal air of a public sculpture. It looks lumpen, monolithic and uncannily like the base of the military, valedictory and male historical statues just round the corner in Trafalgar Square. I Feeeeel Looo- ooo- ooo- ve. ...I Feeeel Loo- ooo- ooo- oo- ve bounces rhythmically off its cold surface.

The spectre of dancing Johnny haunts the empty plinth and this latency roots me to the spot. I stand and wait, longing for him to return and reclaim his rightful, slightly sad, gay, hedonistic, black, go-go dancing place in history, in society, in Soho Square. But he doesn’t come back before I have to leave. The pathos of Johnny Shekontai - his dancing marathon, his aspirational porn star show name and elevated exhibitionism - are monumentalised in the now empty, hollow plinth.

Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues

Fickle Cheese and Performance, by David Berridge

"The Modes of Al-Ikseer"

Harminder Singh Judge,

Shunt Vaults 13th & 14th April

There’s no telling what might turn up in some corner of Shunt Vaults, the huge network of railway arches that comprised the venue for the Triple Bill. After the woman painted in gold, and the man urinating whilst stood in a bucket playing the saxophone, there was a bit of standing around on Triple Bill night, before heading off to another dark corner, where Harminder Singh Judge rounded off the evening stood in a lake of slowly curdling milk.

Judge was in the middle of the lake of milk, slowly rotating on a small round wooden disc. Around his waist was a girdle of neon writing. For maybe forty-five minutes he slowly rotated, churning-tubes dangling from his body into the milk, drone-music blaring, the durational hook for the audience of slowly making out the sentence of neon words as he turned.

It was absorbing, if demanding stuff at the end of a long evening. Judge had a serious, focussed look throughout and there was a definite, challenging sense from the off that this was it for the duration. How long does it take to make cheese I wondered? I had no idea. Were we here in Shunt until this sloppy lake became a hard cheddar-like mass? It seemed unlikely. But duration is tricky to relate to necessity - on the second night the show was shortened, I heard, by twenty minutes.

At the end of an evening of intense, focussed performances I was finding it hard to concentrate. But maybe that was the point of such a performance. One’s mind wandered and drifted and when and if it returned there was Judge, another twenty degrees on, the sentence a few letters closer to revelation, if you hadn’t forgotten what the bit before had said and needed to wait for the whole thing to come round again, like me.

I’m being deliberately a bit flippant about this. There was a serious and challenging presence to this work, an engagement with rituals and Hindu traditions I knew nothing about, but which also were well aware of the slightly ludicrous situation in which they found themselves, both SPILL and Shunt Vaults and performance art more broadly. This isn’t my flippancy alone I’m talking about here - it’s how the piece worked the flippancy into both its seriousness and its wannabee cheese.

So somewhere in Shunt there was the Hindu myth of Churning the Milky Ocean, where Mount Mandaranchai was the dasher (churning tool) and Vasuki, King of serpents, was the churning rope (thankyou Wikipedia). If Singh’s body formed one layer of commentary on this source, there was another accretion in store. Two figures in white appeared at the lakeside, barefoot, wearing drums. They stood calm and posed, although around them stewards were busy spreading out blue hand towels, ready for drying their milky feet when they re-emerged.

I was struggling - whilst watching and again, now, whilst writing - to find another vocabulary for this - that acknowledged the specific types of drums and clothing. But I didn’t have the words. Then it happened. Revelation! Transcendence! Well, actually, no, or, rather, yes, if transcendence relates to a sudden soundtrack shift into Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, the two white robed guys playing along on their drums. It was a dramatic shift, hugely energising. The man next to me was mouthing along happily; feet were tapped; time became more familiar again. It was up to Judge to maintain the continuity, keeping the same mental focus, rotating, churning, same as ever, absorbing Dave et al into his concentration.

As well as enormous well-being, it was curious to think what happened in this shift towards Basildon’s finest. Partly, it was, after Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams feature documentary The Posters Come From The Walls, further assertion of Depeche Mode’s art-world renaissance. It was an assertion of connections across cultures and styles, the continuities and the differences. It also functioned as the eventual punch line to a long and drawn out joke, as, too, a sense of the age of the 1980’s as the great Thatcherite age of cheese production. I imagined the same performance crashing into a Stock, Aitken and Waterman track.

All well and good, but still no cheese. It was curdling more the second night, apparently, and I should have known better than to expect actual full scale dairy production from performance art. The performance ended with Harminder still the same as ever in the middle of the lake.

Feeling a bit of a Peeping Tom, I hung around to see how he made it out, the mundane after the ritual. I won’t tell you. There was no need to do this, really, other than a kind of backstage nosiness. His performance had itself explored this kind of interconnection, whilst avoiding any of the pitfall binaries such as on-stage and off, west and east, process and product, milk and cheese.

Notes on Listen My Secret Fetish

Richard Haynes is an award winning clarinet player working across performance, improvisation and composition. For SPILL Richard presented Listen, My Secret Fetish, an experimental contemporary music performance that explores sexual fetish in four parts: Part 1, Breath Control by David Young; Part 2, Interference by Richard Barrett; Part 3, The Sadness of Detail by Chris Dench; Part 4, Press Release by David Lang.

Rachel Lois’ review of Listen, My Secret Fetish is here. Below are excerpts from a conversation Richard and Rachel Lois had about the work:

.......................................................................

RLC: Can you comment about how the four parts in Listen My Secret Fetish were different for you, musically?

RH: Each of the scenes explored different musical territory and therefore my mental and physical relationship to each work was, had to be, carefully controlled. This was perhaps the biggest challenge in the show: 'resetting' my approach for each work during the performance. Each composition presented particular technical challenges, as well as completely different moods that had to be immediately engaged and maintained throughout the work. Extreme rates of change, as well as sustained control of tension over long periods of time are some of the greater challenges that face performers.

RLC: What significance do the different costumes have for you in the work?

RH: I'm quite attached to the total image of each of the scenes in 'Listen my Secret Fetish', as the costumes carry the weight of my extra-musical imaginings resulting from playing the pieces. As a classical musician, one appears in concert gear most of the time (for men, a combination of black, white or tastefully coloured clothes, often, not to out-weigh the presence of the music). My hope would be that a costume, for a musician, can deeply affect the performance of a work; and for an audience member, that it can deeply affect the interpretation of the composition. The costumes in Listen….represent, in a way, some of what I value in the works: innocence, vulnerability, violence, strength, fragility as well as suggestions of the religious, the animal, the masculine, the pre-pubescent, and the organic.

RLC: What is the breathing technique you use in Breath Control and where does it come from?

RH: Circular breathing is employed perhaps most famously by the indigenous peoples of Australia, however this practice is just as prominent in music from Asia and the Middle East. It is a technique that has appeared prescriptively in classical music composition within the last fifty years; before this time it was almost certainly used out of necessity by classical musicians to realise uneconomically written scores (writing a note whose duration is longer than a single breath would allow is certainly not the mistake of the composer: the work of the musician is to realise how to adequately execute the passage, with or without breathing circularly).

RLC: What is fetishistic about the performance Breath Control for you?

RH: This work suggests to me a scene in which a sexualised act could be played out. It places the visual object of the school boy and the urine of the boy in a position to be wanted; just as it displays one's physical prowess (it has to be said, circular breathing and urinating at the same time is not easy).

RLC: Can you tell me about the role the four scores play in your performance?

RH: Breath Control uses a graphic score; for this performance it was a linear watercolour painting by the composer to suggest the colour of the sound, hung from the lighting rig. Each 'sentence' of the music is one minute long and I observe a timer to help me proceed through the work. Interference is a maniacally notated work, often with two or three systems at a time for the voice (much more than a clarinettist has to normally deal with); contrabass clarinet and pedal bass drum. At the time of writing, I'm not interested in memorising this piece, however I think the image of the naked shadow turning pages definitely has something quasi-fanatical about it; like a ruler preaching to his people or a strange sermon from some kind of extremist priest. The Sadness of Detail is also deftly notated. However I enjoyed greatly the task of committing this work to memory. It is sincerely a pleasure to play 'off by heart' and I hope to do it like that many more times. Press Release is also a long 10 page score, I reduced it using graph paper and my own kind of symbol-system to prompt the various rhythms and pitch sets.

RLC: Are you equally interested in the body of the instrument as fetish object, or is the pleasure all in the playing?

RH: My thoughts on that are more connected with the fact being musician; there is a certain amount of object worship that takes place, an advanced respect and understanding of your equipment. Some musicians are certainly obsessed with their instruments bordering on fetishism; that is something that I'm growing towards, rather than away from.

RLC: Can you say a bit about the powerful, visceral effect playing has on you?

RH: I really don't know where to begin. A musician develops such a close relationship to every (particularly solo) piece that she or he plays. It must be like this, as the musician has to bring to the stage the thousands of details that exist in the music, which really can only be achieved through decades of training. I suppose I would have to add to that, that witnessing this coming-together of performative elements (breath, musculature, movement, wood, metal, gut, glass etc.) is something just as captivating as the resulting sound itself; indeed it is pieces like Interference that do to some level attempt to emphasise the transitions between various techniques and overtly separated physical layers.

The music performed in 'Listen...' is incredibly emotional, it's no surprise that the music should be at times incomprehensible as the myriad manifestations of fetish-influenced sexual practice are often just as baffling.

RLC: I was really struck by the sound the different instruments made, almost a sounding of the body of the instrument itself instead of the music that it might typically produce. Like the sound of your breath running through open keys, instead of playing its particular note. It felt like the non-notes being played with equal emphasis. Can you comment on this?

RH: I love this grey area: where does music stop and noise start? Indeed the term 'music' today is extremely broad and there is plenty of it out there that is made out of what we would commonly call 'noise'. This grey area argument is also a result of the proliferation of highly produced music AND conservative classical music training, whereby many if not all natural non-notated sounds of the instrument are practiced out of the technique of a musician or forcibly removed from the recording by way of brilliant technology. Contemporary music composition often attempts to access this transitional space, but often it's just a reality of live performance. In terms of the works performed in 'Listen...' it comes down to what the composer has instructed me to do with my instruments, and what decisions I made during the process of learning the music.

RLC: There were bits in The Sadness of Detail where I felt the instrument was being deliberately pushed, to somehow play beyond its (and your) normal limits or capacity, whether to do with breath, or the instrument whining or squeaking at the end of sequences. Can you comment on this?

RH: The Sadness of Detail is a beautiful piece of music, it is however very strenuous to perform live, and from memory. It is certainly the piece on the programme least designed to test the limits of the instrument, although it does employ the full range of the clarinet; glissandi (sliding from one pitch to another), quarter tones and eighth-tones (quarter or eighth the length of a normal tone), and a dynamic range from ppppp (quieter sub-tones) to fffff (really, really loud). During the final sections of the piece, the composer asks for the sound to become increasingly tired, even distorted. If the sound did break at any point before this, it was more due to exhaustion and the costume (tightly wrapped cling-wrap).

RLC: I am interested in how your body in the performance can be conceived as porous to the music and take on certain aspects of your instruments. Do you have any thoughts on this?

RH: Playing each of the various clarinets gives one an incredibly different physical feeling, this affects my performance greatly in that I have to 'behave' differently in order to get the instruments to do what I want them to do. Any kind of physical gesture will affect the sound and sometimes, hopefully often, this can be used to advantage the performance, give it a certain edge. In that way 'Listen...' is a good show of this aspect of instrumental playing, in that each piece has a starkly different physical character, and I use my body in correspondingly different ways.

The sound of the instrument (conceptually, not actually) begins in the body, we think of breathing to the stomach, as this expands the lowest regions of the lungs. When this happens, the reflex diaphragm muscle pushes the air out, so in a way we're constantly playing against, but with this muscle. The air blown into the clarinet creates a vacuum on one side of the cane reed, one that it attempts to fill by moving towards it, resulting in the reed continuously vibrating as long as there is air moving past it. Therefore, (technical aspects aside) the body is a vehicle of breath, indirectly of the sound of the clarinet. The body itself becomes 'audible' through the megaphone of the clarinet.

RLC: Listening to you play in Listen..., I was asking myself what constitutes music? What are your personal thoughts on what constitutes music?

RH: In my opinion, music is both organised and non-organised sound. Therefore one could say music is as much a method or psychology of listening, as a type of sound or a type of sonic result. I find the attitude of audience members purporting to know what music 'is' or 'should be', as much as I don't walk around saying what I think architecture 'should be' or what performance art 'is'. The music performed during 'Listen...' was therefore a lot more 'musical' (behaving in a way most people would expect music to behave: exhibiting melody, harmony, rhythm, structure etc.) say, than perhaps what one might hear at a noise event, or some of the more ground-breaking works of the twentieth century (Poeme Symphonique by György Ligeti comes to mind). There are many kinds of music I enjoy listening to on a regular basis: a forest, a construction site, a beach, people. All of which became part of the soundscape in 'Listen...'). This is sound, some might say, but the method of listening can make it music: recognising relationships between sounds, identifying pauses in the sound as structural boundaries, knitting together partial sentences uttered by passers-by as a kind of libretto for an urban opera... the list goes on. There's a reason why people should be quiet while listening to music: to afford other listeners the chance to undergo this process undisturbed.

RLC: Who are the composers you admire or who influence you?

RH: There are great number of composers I admire in the United Kingdom: Roger Redgate, Christopher Fox, Liza Lim, Michael Finnissy, Harrison Birtwistle. Greater Europe: Enno Poppe, Michael Jarrell, Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas, Bernhard Gander, Mauricio Kagel. Oceania: John Rodgers, James Gardner, Michael Norris, Robert Dahm North America: Michael Gordon, Elliot Carter, Aaron Cassidy, John Adams. To name a few...!

Richard is currently studying for a PhD at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia while living with his partner in Switzerland. He holds a Soloist Diploma (High Distinction) from the University of Arts Berne and a Bachelor of Music (Advanced Performance) from Griffith University, Australia. http://web.me.com/richardehaynes

Small Talk 05 - Void Story by Alex Eisenberg

Void Story by Forced Entertainment

Soho Theatre

24^th April 2009

7.32pm – 7.37pm

Unreserved Seating:

Fourth Row – Seat 7/8/9 - (A)

Fourth Row – Seat 8/9/10 - (P)

On Stage – Usher (U)

You can read an introduction to Small Talk here.

______________________________________

7.32pm

A: Hello…How are you?

P: Are you supposed to sit here?…no…

A: Sorry?

P: Are you sitting with him?

A: No…

P: Oh okay…Sorry I thought you were with him.

A: Oh…I thought you were together!

P: Oh no…[ALL LAUGH]

A: No…I’m on my own actually.

P: Oh okay…

[PAUSE]

A: I’m a bit puffed out!

P: Yeah I just ran here as well.

A: Okay…

So what do you reckon it's going to be like?

P: Probably quite slow…

A: Why do you say that?

P: Cos they often…they can do that sometimes…be very slow…Have you seen stuff before?

A: Yeah I have.

P: But you know…I like it so…

A: You like slow?

P: I don’t mind…well…I kind of like a bit of both…the text is often good so…they can get away with it.

A: So you’ve seen quite a lot of their work before have you?

P: I’ve been seeing them for a long time…yeah…yeah…

A: Got any favourites?

P: ‘Dirty Work’…that’s quite a long time ago. ‘Speak Bitterness’…that’s a while back umm…I like their earlier stuff better actually.

A: Okay…so you’ve been a long time follower and it's 25 years in the making.

P: But I mean…I saw some of that on video…yeah…’Dirty Work’ I saw live…yeah…I did a workshop thing…like a residency with them in ninety-nine…ten years ago now…which was good but…

[LOUD]

U: Hi guys, welcome to Soho Theatre!

If I could just ask you all just to scooch along just a tiny tiny bit…In front of all of you is a number on the back of the chairs in front of you…if you all look at a number and all sit behind one that would be perfect. Because then we can get 14 people to every row…cos we’re completely sold out. Thanks a lot!

A: That was funny! …It is quite squashed in here isn’t it?

P: I think they always have to do this…and they do this speech…

A: They’re used to it…she seemed quite practiced.

Oh right…we’re getting into seat 9 and 10 here.

P: That’s right [LAUGH]

A: It's amazing how much room there is when we all…

P: Yeah…you see everyone wants to give themselves a bit more personal space.

A: Well also these seats, you know they’re quite…

P: Rigid?

A: Rigid…yeah [ALL LAUGH]

[PAUSE]

A: So have you been to anything else in Spill?

P: No I haven’t…I haven’t had a chance…I’m just going to see this and the other one tonight and that’s it…that’s all I’ve been able to…I would have liked to have seen some of the stuff last week but…

A: Oh you are seeing the show after?

P: Yeah.

A: That’s good.

[PAUSE]

A: So…are you involved in the arts at all?

P: Not really any more no…I look after my son now.

A: Oh wow!

P: Yeah!

A: How old is he?

P: He’s two.

A: Lovely…that’s your full time work is it?!

P: I used to do a bit…just marketing stuff…but I have to look after him now.

A: But you didn’t want to bring him along tonight though?!

P: I don’t think I could handle it!

A: Really! Is he a bit of a…

P: Well he’s in bed now.

A: Yeah.

P: He’s normally in bed about seven, seven-thirty. It's how it is with that age.

A: It would be good to go to bed at seven-thirty…

P: I go to bed about nine-thirty…[LAUGH]

A: Oh really! You’re an early sleeper?

P: Well I have to because he gets up at half six…otherwise I…I like my sleep so…you know…

A: That’s being a mum, isn’t it?

P: It's like…going to bed at eleven feels like a late night. Like, I watch a movie and I’m like…wooo ‘late night’. [LAUGH]

Gone are the days of drunken craziness!…Well I still do that occasionally but…you know…

A: Well I suppose you sort of succumb to the schedule of your child…
P: Yeah…they take over…

A: Yeah…It's interesting that…I’m not in that sort of schedule I’ll be honest with you!

P: It's funny…it does take over…I wasn’t before and now… you’re like…wow it's a very different thing!

[PAUSE]

A: I’ve been wondering what it's like to sit up there on those stools.

P: Probably not good.

A: It seems to be going quiet now…

7.37pm

VOID STORY

22.21pm

To find out about Alex's Small Talk click here: Small Talk by Alex Eisenberg

Below are links to the other conversations that I have had:

Small Talk 01 - Inferno

Small Talk 02 - That Night Follows Day

Small Talk 03 - Purgatorio

Small Talk 04 - Saving the World

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival. alex@presentattempt.co.uk

(w)hole story by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Void Story

Soho Theatre

20-25 April 2009

The last few audience members are squeezed onto the benches of Soho Theatre studio. It is warm and stuffy, but a buzz of anticipation permeates the thick air above the steeply raked auditorium. A Forced Entertainment performance is about to start: I am expecting that once the steward has ripped my ticket and I have chosen my place and I have sat down and I have taken off my coat and placed my bag under the seat, once the houselights have (maybe) gone down (or at least dimmed a little bit) and once the performers are on stage and the audience quietens… I am expecting that theatrical conventions will be challenged, form will be played with, and that this performance will stimulate some thoughts about my – our – relationship to what’s going on down there below. And maybe more.

The rules of Void Story are clear soon after the performers have entered and taken their seats. As Mary Paterson describes, the four of them are tools, props, components in the telling of this story. They perform the function of sound: the voices of the protagonists, Kim and Jackson, are spoken into microphones by two performers at individual desks on one side of the stage, a lamp and a script next to each of their mics. Effects are created live or triggered from a soundboard on the long desk behind which the other two sit, on the opposite side of the stage. They speak the voices of subsidiary characters into more microphones, adjusting settings on two Mac laptops. A screen fills the gap behind the two pairs, onto which high contrast monochrome collages are projected; rough cut-and-paste snapshots of a desolate and threatening landscape through which a man and woman journey – the image version of Jackson and Kim – posed photos of two new faces, not the performers speaking in front of us. It’s all laid out for us to see, production methods stripped bare, each dislocated ingredient needing our imagination, our effort, our presence, to come together into a whole. The performance is two dimensional and we are the third dimension.

It will continue like this. A string of terrible events are inflicted on Kim and Jackson by the narrative, but they carry on across this harsh landscape, with no grand purpose and no final destination. They receive a visitor, who shoots Kim in the stomach. They receive intrusive phonecalls. They are stung by bees, they swim through shit, they climb over a tower of decomposing waste. They are chased by an open-jawed bear and a pack of angry dogs. We carry on filling in the grim void, just as Jackson, eyes closed, led by Kim, can still imagine the human entrails scattered along their path, at which Kim recoils.

Despite the horrible content of the narrative, this framing of catastrophe seems safe – everything is settled from early on – the concept is there, so we just need to apply our imaginative glue and join Kim and Jackson for ‘a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture’, as Tim Etchells’ programme note suggests. The violence and misfortunes that the characters suffer bring to mind a horror or disaster film, their ability to brush themselves off and continue after deadly injuries, a cartoon. No-one will really get hurt here, the good guys will survive till the end - it’s all just a bit of light entertainment, right? It’s not real.

But the general effect is far from calming. The sound is almost unbearably loud: at times I feel like I am being pinned to the back of my seat by the force of it. In imagining all these nasty events, and in battling against the volume of noise, and in the heat of the space, this experience is often uncomfortably challenging. It doesn’t allow the quick fix spectacular escapism on offer in Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow. Maybe it comes closer to the gritty warning of Children of Men, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But it is still safe, it is darkly comic. It is apparent that this formula will not change and the narrative will reach no climax… rather we will continue uneasily trawling along a desperate grey plateau with its protagonists. After a while they encounter a sinister child on a bleak estate and she asks for some help with her balloon, it is stuck in a nearby tree. No-one else can help as they sleep during the day and work at night: “Our schedules don’t overlap much.” Kim and Jackson deliberate over whether –

There is whispering in the row behind me.

A young woman is slumped on the shoulder of the woman next to her, eyes shut, the people around are fanning her face.

She has probably fainted. Turn back to the stage

– Jackson is high up in the tree, “Jackson, be careful”. The balloon is shot by a –

but the whispering gets louder,

a man stands by the young woman. “Can you hear me? I’m a first aid officer. Can you hear me?”

To the panicked woman at the girl’s side: “Was she with anyone?”

“I’m her mother.”

Her name is repeated several times. “I’m the first aid officer, can you hear me?

…Has she eaten anything today?”

Glance back at the screen for a second – Jackson and the sinister girl and Kim are on the move, they are – then back up to the woman. Someone comes down from the back bench onto the stage, it is Tim Etchells. The performers’ voices halt, the houselights are brought up. “I’m very sorry, but we’re going to have to stop the show. There’s a medical problem.” He looks up at the young woman.

Everyone turns and looks.

A steward: “Is there anyone with any medical experience here? Is there a doctor in the house tonight?”

No response. Someone says, “She needs to be put in the recovery position.”

Everyone continues to look at the young woman and her mother in the middle of the seating bank. Her skin is grey.

The first aid officer calls an ambulance: “yes, she’s breathing but she’s not conscious.”

We stare.

No-one does anything.

This moment lasts a long time.

We stare.

A steward asks us to all to take a break outside the studio. We slowly filter out, dazed. We wait.

I think: So, is Void Story a disaster performance? It has presented us with a post-apocalyptic landscape, but the usual constraints of realism don’t apply. With a dream-like logic the protagonists have reacted to each crisis without ever considering the bigger picture (without the ‘sop of psychology’ as Tim Etchells writes): just like this show’s detailed attention to each individual component, and its intentional neglect of a complete, finished end product. We have been presented with a flat pack performance.

We’re thanked for our patience, and told the show will continue.

We wait.

I think: The performance has so far been deliberately out of sync with itself. Aside from the incongruities between aural and visual representation, and the strangely narrow outlook of the protagonists, the images have had warped perspectives within themselves because they are haphazardly thrown together from the elements of other compositions.

We’re told that the paramedics have arrived, that the performance will be started as soon as possible.

We wait.

I think: The performers’ style has been brilliantly underplayed and deadpan, always ensuring we’ve been aware that they are “just acting”, just reading from the script, just doing their job. They have been playing at being these characters, reminiscent of children doing the voices of their toys, or parents reading out picturebook speech bubbles to pacify at bedtime.

We are told that the young woman is looking a lot better now that she has received some medical attention, and that the show will be restarting soon.

We filter back into the studio, staring at the ominous empty space where the girl and her mother were.

Tim Etchells thanks us all for waiting, and tells us that the young woman is fine now and has been taken home. They’re going to rewind a bit:

– “Help me!” cries the sinister girl on the bleak estate. “Please help me!”, words spoken into a microphone that stretches Terry O’Connor’s voice into a high-pitched squeal. Jackson says, “This is one of those dilemmas that really tests one’s strength of character.” The audience laughs. “Do you run or do you help?” More laughter. “I’d say run…”

The performance continues through to the abrupt unconcluded end that sees Kim and Jackson in a final moment of inaction. But that scary intermission has changed the nature of the experience. Our expectations are blasted and nothing feels quite so safe anymore, now that we’ve been reminded that anything is possible, that unexpected eventualities can occur anytime, anywhere. And also it feels doubly safe, because nothing else unplanned will happen now, the chances of two emergencies in one show are very slim. Something shocking and demanding and real intruded into the set rules of representation, and we didn’t know how to respond. The light responsibility of creating a piece of theatre together immediately switched to the shared weighty onus of how to handle this unforeseen occurrence.

The spectacle of this episode was defined by our inaction – by our handling of it as something to be observed rather than acted upon – just as the final image of the performance shows Kim and Jackson giving up on reacting and trying out just doing nothing. Whilst we knew clearly how to play the game that the show proposed, this situation was uncertain, unguided, unknown. There were some attempts towards protocol, but it was clear to all that the possible directions were out of our remit, we couldn’t control them, and so we did nothing. We were helpless and redundant. Having re-entered, there is now a new definition of ‘uneasy’ attached to this space, and the loudness and disjunction of the performance have become comforting solid certainties. We watch the rest of the show, happy to be able to achieve something together, something that elegantly falls within the realms of our comfort zone, stretching us only as far as we choose to go. It’s in our hands again now.

Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer focusing on performance and live art, currently based between Brussels, London and Bristol. ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com

Fetishized Encounters with a Clarinettist: Rachel Lois Clapham

Listen, My Secret Fetish

Richard Haynes

Shunt Vaults

Listen, My Secret Fetish is a hybrid live art club act cum queer concert recital that explores contemporary music and sexual fetish in four distinct parts.

Part 1. David Young’s Breath Control for clarinet, water sports, and 44-gallon drum. Richard enters the first of four platforms in a schoolboy uniform, including small shorts with the front unzipped. He proceeds to play the clarinet in close variations on a single note using a circular breathing technique; replenishing breath by breathing in through the nose but continuing to sound the note by blowing through the mouth using the air stored in the cheeks. Occasionally he dips the nose of the instrument into a 44 gallon water tank. Still playing, he stands in a bucket and unceremoniously wets himself, urine trickling down his legs, a dark patch slowly growing over the shorts. The fetish seems to be one of desire, boyhood and urination. A paradoxical sexual fantasy of childhood accidental pant-wetting deftly enabled mid recital by Richard’s prowess as an adult performer.

Part 2. Richard Barrett’s Interference for contrabass clarinetist. This sees Richard don an elaborate headdress and stand behind a perspex screen revealing his lower half, which is naked save for a cock ring. The voice performance in Interference ranges from high falsetto squeaks to extreme bass grunts, finished with contrabass clarinet flourishes. The presence of a cock ring and stage waterproofing could be a worrying prelude to more watersports but no urinating ensues. The fetish is one of voyeurism and the transgendered body or voice; the male genitals contrasting with the typically feminine range of high notes Richard produces.

Part 3. For Chris Dench’s The Sadness of Detail for clarinet and operating table Richard emerges with a wreath on his head, wearing small underpants and a few strategically placed leaves. His body is wrapped tightly in cling-film. His movements on the table resemble an imp or lusty Pan-like character. The performance is virtuosic, and the clarinet sound is often distorted at the end of the phrasing due to the constriction of Richard’s breathing. The fetish is of purity, the naturalness of youth and innocence set against oncoming acts of bondage and asphyxiation.

Part 4. David Lang's composition Press Release for leather and bass clarinet is more identifiably jazz-like and the playing involves a lot of tongue slapping and vigorous sounding of the bass clarinet’s keys instead of the musical notes they play. Whilst playing, Richard enacts a queer Bob the Builder fetish in tiny blue shorts, boots and yellow hard hat, climbing arse first up a wooden ladder.

In-between these parts, the lights are lowered and Richard’s recorded voice, mixed with the sounds of wind blowing and wood cutting, reveal the intimate pleasures of playing music. ‘It feels like desperation - when the body is at its limits, it feels like the rush of caffeine, it feels like throbbing, or being erect.’ These interludes are moments of pillow talk; of sexual confessions shared between lovers in between climactic performances. In them, my mind wonders to Richard backstage, hastily shedding the previous costume - and fetish - and preparing for the next performance. I find I want to see him in these private, half dressed moments and fear I am developing my own voyeuristic fascination, or fetish, for him as a performer.

Incomprehensibility definitely plays a part in Listen..., which stands out as bizarre and different even in the context of the experimental work at SPILL. This difference is one of context and audience for his avant-garde work, of which Richards says, "Musically I have a great interest in contemporary music, but I realise most people don't. Every man and his dog aren't going to come and hear me do a recital of left-of-centre music. I want to rouse concert goers.” But incomprehensibility is also critically important, “it's no surprise that the music [in Listen...] should be at times incomprehensible as the myriad manifestations of fetish-influenced sexual practice are often just as baffling”.

The music in Listen... is at the very edges of understanding. There are no previous styles or traditions being ‘riffed’ with, no travesty being made. It is music of the 21st century; without history, its own sealed and virtuosic fetish. Each piece is rhythmically irrational, it sounds like improvisation or extreme loose-association but is in fact a tightly crafted composition. Three of the compositions already existed. But one came out of a unique performer/composer collaboration in which Richard gave David Young the basic ‘instrumentation’ or four part score of clarinet, urine, 44-gallon drum and amplification, and David went away and composed Breath Control. The collaboration and the resulting performed composition gives a glimpse into the perverse rigors of the contemporary music world. Richard’s four part instructional score of ‘clarinet, urine, 44-gallon drum and amplification’ remains a tantalising call to others to develop their own fetishized encounters with urine and clarinettists.

Listen… is also broaching relatively unexplored ground in terms of musical performance related fetish: both the attributing of inanimate objects with mystical qualities, and the sexualizing of objects or body parts not traditionally seen as sexual.

The clarinet itself is endowed with both transcendental and sexual qualities. In The Sadness of Detail the instrument is involved in a sexual act, it becomes the body of a lover being manipulated by Richard’s practised hands; a body made to scream in a display of dexterous and asphyxiating sexual performance. The bass clarinet in Press Release plays into a camp porn aesthetic; nubile construction worker in small shorts, hard hat and worker boots, wielding large, manly tool. The otherwise inert instrument becomes a phallic appendage whose power and implied use is sexually potent.

Fetish also seeps across the different physical forms in Listen... with breath enacting a subtle transfer of erotics. Breath sounds the body of the instrument and is then sexualised on its return into Richard’s body-in-performance. Breath becomes the vehicle through which Richard’s body is highlighted as porous, and the medium with which he practices the sexualised transgression of instrumental, bodily and musical limits. His circular breathing troubles his body’s natural flow by simultaneously breathing in and out, producing and consuming breath at the same time. The regularity of things in and out of the body is further unsettled by simultaneously urinating; performing on demand (and on stage) what is normally a natural, private evacuation. The flow of oxygen into the body – or rather the lack of it – is further fetishized by the sexual practice of asphyxia.

After the performance finishes I wander, feeling baffled but (a)roused, into the toilets. The Eau de Shunt pervades the multi-sex set-up; cubicles big enough for two, graffitti’d walls, dubious puddles on the floor emitting a strong stench of wee. Richard is at the central washbasin, washing his hands, presumably having cleaned himself of his urine. I introduce myself. As we shake hands, he looks into my eyes and crushes my fingers in a vice-like grip. His precious, highly trained musician’s hands with their long, smooth fingers know the infinitesimal subtleties of pressure. This is a truly talented man who can sound a body in a myriad of ways. Stood there, in urine, in Richard’s experienced and dexterous hands, I realise my own secret fetish is complete. The score for Listen, My Secret Fetish is performed once more.

Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues

Becoming a child or a lamb? By Alex Eisenberg

La Nourrice (come drink from me my darling)

by Samantha Sweeting
Part of Visions of Excess

Shunt Vaults

12 April 2009

Photo: Richard Andersen

Exploring Shunt Vaults during Visions of Excess, I round a corner where there is this small arch - not enough room to stand up in. It makes you crouch and so you get smaller (or shrink). It feels like a safe place, antithetical to the expanse of the rest of the vaults, a haven or a womb. Outside the arch is a video showing a woman bent over on all fours with her breasts out whilst a small lamb attempts to suckle on them. There is an obvious moment of confusion but also intrigue – how does the lamb know to suckle on this woman’s nipples? Is it real (breast) milk? Is there any milk at all or is this just some form of stimulation for the woman? But most of all, I wonder how it feels, not only for the woman but also for the lamb. And already, I know I want to find out – how does this feel?

Inside the arch is Samantha Sweeting, wearing a virginal white dress (‘her performance gear’). It’s almost a nightdress, but also a farm girls’ dress (she is ready for action). The setting of the brick arch begins to evoke a sense of fantasy; it is dreamy, dimly lit and calm. Samantha is sitting on a milking stool, smiling and gentle. There is raw sheep’s wool on the floor, perhaps there was also a spinning wheel in the corner? I can’t be sure…as I was there less to observe or watch the ‘scene’ but rather to place myself firmly within it, to become part of it and, by default, to become the work (and the lamb), with Samantha.

My mother breastfed me for a relatively long time. I can remember breastfeeding. I can remember suckling on my mother’s nipple. I can remember this as comfort. I can remember this as warmth. I can remember this care. I can remember this love.

Thanks Mum.

And now, 25 years old, a gay man, I sit on the floor, getting ready to suckle (again).

BUT

How to sit?

How to suckle?

How to be in this space?

There is not much conversation. Samantha asks me to make myself comfortable but I already am – the wool is soft and her knee provides a gentle rest for my head. She strokes my hair. She is wearing some sort of mechanical breastfeeding system (I think it’s called a nursing system) though I barley notice what is in fact this prosthetic extension to her chest, since a sense of regression is already present. She reveals one breast and, of course, even though I thought I didn’t, I know what to do:

The first moment I notice that there is no sign of milk. (I am not sure how much to expect). The man-made mechanics of the nursing system rupture the moment as she has to adjust the flow rate of the milk. Breastfeeding is a delicate business and the conditions have to be right.

Then, this memory creeps in about how it tasted back then - like orange juice or chocolate milk or whatever flavour you want it to be? This milk is apparently almond flavour – only the faintest hint though – this milky almond flavour. Then, this quick idea about the size of her nipple and the subsequent comparison to my mother’s nipple. There is a difference – I think? Perhaps it has something to do with my grown mouth but there is the idea, at least, of a different size. And in some small way I am yearning for that original size. Through this active and intimate engagement with Samantha’s body and particularly her nipple, I am I am finding myself almost unavoidably going back to what I know, to what I knew – it seems almost innate. The act itself sets the stakes high by being so intimate, by making a physical connection and thereby inducing an undeniable presence in the audience of one – in this case me. The suckling goes on for a while, but I end too early. I end before I allow myself to regress too deep into memories of childhood, memories of nipples and all that that entails. The process of becoming a child (or a lamb) only lasts for as long as I allow it to - for as long as I suckle. I am in control here. I leave the arch and emerge.

There is a small break before the next person goes in.

Stood there, outside the arch, the act of suckling appears to me to be evocative, generous and beautiful, however as I leave its disappearance yields a further journey, since it is in the comparison between the memory of being a child and being present during the suckling event itself, that La Nourrice... operates. This comparison can only happen afterwards, as there is little room to process whilst suckling. So, walking away from the arch, I compare the potentially erotic act of suckling on a women’s nipple with a situation that evokes the purity and innocence of childhood - breastfeeding. I compare the innocence of the lamb with the idea of bestiality and amidst all of this I find Oedipal echoes unsettling me, as I compare me now, to me then and all in relation to a mother figure/Samantha. I ask again, how does it feel?

As I look back to see the next person going into the arch, the work continues to expose itself and in the process it exposes me. Only now does La Nourrice... begin to raise its ethics. I am left with the burden of having placed myself in this situation in the first place, of having made the decision to play, to take part in this ‘out of the ordinary’ act. How does it feel? Now, rather than some sort of fantasy journey motivated by curiosity, into childhood or into my relationship with my mother, the work evokes feelings of embarrassment, trauma even. A small but complex interplay is present between my complicity in the act of suckling and the politics of engagement with this work. I find myself asking questions about the objectification of women, the notion of motherhood and my own relationship to all of this. This is lingering work, which doesn’t and cannot ever entirely satisfy. I continue to ask myself - how does it feel?

Thanks Sam…

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival. alex@presentattempt.co.uk

Mind The Gap - Robin Deacon’s Prototypes by Rachel Lois Clapham

Prototypes

Soho Theatre

16-18 April 2009

Robert Deacon: Good evening ladies and gentleman. For this evening’s performance of Prototypes, I have been commissioned by my son.

Robin Deacon: That’s me

Robert Deacon: To play the part of ….

Robin Deacon: [whispering audibly in Robert’s ear] third person omniscient narrator.

Robert Deacon: Third person omniscient narrator.

[Cue Robert on the Xylophone]

And so Robin and his dad, Robert, open the performance of Prototypes with a short turn on the xylophone and an air of formal ceremony.

Prototypes is a show that uses a working model railway as stage for a subtle play on autobiography, documentation and the passing of time. The model in question is a makeshift MDF section of British Rail track that is visible from the upper window in the former home of Robin’s Aunty Monica, in 5 Martin Court, Southall. This window was the one in which Robin stood as a child in his school holidays. Where he watched the Class 253 trains in intercity livery pass by. It is where he thinks he may have developed a love of railways and trains – even model ones - and where the fascinations with timetables started.

Robin re-enacts that childhood scene with his model - which includes a hastily blacked-up plastic figurine (representing Robin), stood in front of the cut-out cardboard window of 5 Martin Court watching the model trains. Throughout the performance, he also presents video footage from the original view upon which the prototype is based; we see First Great Western train services rumble past the window of 5 Martin Court, the actual flat from which his Aunty Monica has long since gone. When the trains are gone, the video records the empty, grey and wet stretch of Southall.

Robin wears a pair of dark running shorts and white T-shirt with the word OPERATOR on the back. As ‘operator’ he spends the first part of Prototypes sitting at a makeshift audio-visual desk at the back of the stage, hidden behind equipment, happily engrossed in twiddling various knobs and widgets relating to the model trains and the on screen video footage. At other times, he runs around the railway’s trestle tables an awkward, high legged canter, frantically assembling and disassembling the trains. Robin’s operational role on stage troubles the notion of utility versus its excess: performance. It poses the question, is it possible to merely operate or facilitate without performing? So too Robin’s operator ‘costume’ is functional, a workers uniform or a non-costume, but on stage this very functionality goes beyond appearance, it is seen to appear as performance. These paradoxical acts of erasure provide a glimpse into just how Prototypes - and in general how performance, as opposed to theatre - is complexly embroiled in function and reality. And although it is quite possible that Robin’s awkward run could be nothing to do with ‘performance’ at all, and more to do with Robin’s level of physical fitness, I suspect some camping is going on here too.

In contrast to all this (non)performance and train related chaos is Robert who, as third person omniscient narrator- or first person impersonator as he sometimes referred to by Robin- speaks the story of Prototypes with a wry, reserved demeanour that bears an uncanny resemblance to Robins’ own understated, satirical persona.

The story Robert tells is one of prototypes themselves - of equivalence, scale, representation and archetypal base form. These things are looked upon through the lens of the model railway, its language, politics and aesthetics. We are taken into the world of the model railway convention, where modellers – the vast majority of whom are white, British, retired enthusiasts - showcase in-depth miniature scenes. The models are strange amalgams; soil collected from the original geographic location, upon which mini lighthouses, railway sheds or outhouses are brought together to create an approximation, a picture postcard of quintessential Englishness. They are fictional but equivalent representations of a certain place and time. Specific re-enactments of an idealised version of the English countryside circa 1950’s; a sparsely populated (with white people) land of green and plenty. The prototype that emerges from all these models is troublingly utopian. Prototypes delves into these miniature aesthetics; a world in which 0.5 mm makes a difference, where aged, conservative model makers attempt (unwittingly or otherwise) to simulate a purity of experience, youth and Englishness, and scale things down in an attempt to exercise control over an increasingly uncertain world. Prototypes articulates railway models and their makers as unable to be apolitical, and their endeavours politically loaded. Megalomania and outmoded modernist tendencies concealed in the form of a harmless British past time.

Robin’s attempt to place himself (as mixed race, as young man, as artist) in this world - both in the fantasy English landscape of the models, and the world of the typical model railway convention goer – in his re-enactment inevitably fail. But it is the attempt or the acting out of the re-enactment that is critical. It is both political statement and recompense then, that Robin’s own model of Southall is very British in an everyday, post industrial way. His is a very different sort of English prototype: one that embodies the fact that quite often ‘nothing happens’, both in life and on railways, one that takes account of local immigration, (Robin’s) mixed British heritage as well as the wet grey reality of Southall.

A similar aesthetics of failure is also being re-enacted in Robin’s attempt, mid way through the performance, to simulate the timetabled operations of the 8.59 Network South East service running through Southall on 17 April 1990. It was an impersonation that was doomed from the start. The vigorous piston movements of his arms, his precise buffering gestures and grinding noises aptly demonstrated the infidelity of representation and the inbuilt failure of re-enactment; it will never copy exactly. But Robin’s actions show how re-enactment, in its enthusiastic and imprecise nature, goes beyond off the shelf or pre-fabricated representations or presets - replica trains, crafted figurines, tiny signal boxes - to create something that is more holistic, sympathetic and perhaps more akin to the original event, or prototype.

This gap between reality and re-enactment is a recurring motif in Prototypes. At one point, Robin starts the miniature train on its journey past the model no. 5 Martin Court. By the time the train rattles precariously past the prototype window, Robin has (just about) managed to clamber back over the set to stand centre stage in front of the video screen, upon which is a magnified live stream of Robin’s on stage Southall prototype. In that carefully choreographed (and nearly missed) moment we watch Robin, his back to us, watching his prototyped plastic self on screen watch the model train. It is a heady mix. One in which Robin views himself through the video projection of his own prototyped past. And we see the dialectical tension between being and self-identification played out through the different forms – body, prototype, video and documentary. First person impersonator, Robert, acts as mediator; he speaks Robin’s scripted words as his own. He blackens his (white) face and dons an acrylic afro wig. It is Robert as narrator through which identity is performed as dislocated, fragmented and performative in Prototypes, in short re-enacted, not authentic, essential and whole.

Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues.

Not Waiting by Mary Paterson

Intermission

Soho Theatre

22-24 April 2009

Intermission. The middle. The in-between. The time when you have a drink in the bar, or the performer in Pacitti Company’s Intermission drinks beer in the middle of the stage. Thinking time, when something has ended and before something else has begun. Intermission. When the world is still going on around you.

At the start of Pacitti Company’s show, Sheila Ghelani – the only performer onstage throughout – unveils nine cloaked figures. Like furniture stored under dustsheets, these figures have been waiting quietly, while the audience fills the auditorium. Ghelani reveals them to be nine microphones, each bearing a label: ‘Fiction’, ‘Glossary’, ‘Fact’, ‘False Starts.’ She moves between the mics, talking straight to the audience with the confidence of a practised speaker, the determination of someone with something to say.

At first it is obvious what these different mics stand for. At ‘Glossary’, Ghelani reads out a litany of terms to describe immigration; at ‘High Horse’ she describes a set of reasons why ‘they’ shouldn’t come ‘here’; at ‘Fact’ she tells us about the emigration and immigration of the swallow. The mics are different sides to an argument, different means of expression – even if they’re different means that could be used by the same person. But before long, this clarity of purpose is dissolved. Ghelani’s subjects become more personal – sex, death, love, ambition – and she stands at ‘High Horse’ wondering why things have turned out for her the way they have. ‘…And I feed myself,’ she says, ‘I mean, that’s not the done thing, is it? In this day and age – for a woman to feed herself.’

At these moments, the simple set-up on stage stops being a device for communication and becomes a very urgent means of understanding the complexities of another mind. The mics, with their neat labels, might stand for different points of view, but Ghelani (and it does feel like Ghelani, a real person and not a character performed, who is confronting us on stage) won’t be divided up and packaged neatly. She needs all these mics and more; she needs to stand at them and amid them; she has an opinion and also something further, something in-between.

When she is not speaking with soft determination into the microphone, Ghelani fixes the audience with an electric stare and dances towards us. She flicks her wrists in flamenco, or shakes her hips to the punch-line of a joke, and all the time her eyes are fixed on us, fixating us with the sharp sting of another person appearing in full. The thrill of Intermission is in the shocking vitality of this person on stage: the complexity of her thoughts and the richness of the way she moves. When she tackles death Ghelani walks to the microphone called ‘Fact’ and falls silent. This vital, full person – Stops. It is an apt metaphor for the unknowable-ness of death. For the audience watching, for a short, shivering moment, it also enacts the loss and terror that death brings. It’s a relief when Ghelani returns to us, smiling a knowing smile, full of life and energy once again.

This energy is sustained, in part, by a continuous soundtrack that ripens Ghelani’s conversational language. Sometimes a musical accompaniment, sometimes famous words uttered by famous people, and once, most memorably, the looped, rhythmic sound of someone weeping, the soundtrack both drives Ghelani’s speech forwards and snags the words back again. The rhythm acts as imperative and remainder, providing a continuous flow that connects the work to itself, as well as an atmospheric counter-reading of Ghelani’s thoughts. When she talks about love, for example, it is to the jaunty sound of a marching band, an incongruous mix that emphasises the banality of the list of sexual positions she recites. But this incongruity also emphasises the importance of Ghelani’s description of a single lover’s glance. The music drives the rhythm of the list only to dilute its sexual content - and, therefore, the latent eroticism of a woman reciting it on stage – which emboldens, instead, the eroticism of something far more personal.

In fact, Intermission is made up entirely of ‘something far more personal’. Pacitti Company’s in-between time is not a waiting room for life, it’s the very stuff of life itself. It is the thoughts and opinions that don’t have a department to fit into. It’s the mess that spills into a human being. And what can you do with all this information? The final, iconic scene poses a question about what it means to understand another person in full. Do you see her energy burning bright, or do you watch her energy burn away?

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

The Porcelain Project: a (mis)communication across objects and space

With Grace Ellen Barkey

Initiated by Mary Kate Connolly and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

The Porcelain Project

Barbican, Silk Street Theatre

14, 15 April 2009

Grace Ellen Barkey and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw take a seat at a table outside the Waterside Café, Barbican. The fountain on the other side of the patio is gushing and people at other tables chatter happily over coffee in the afternoon sunshine. Eleanor places a tape recorder on the table between her fizzy water and Grace’s tea. They start to discuss Spill: Overspill and The Porcelain Project. The conversation quickly turns to the story of the performance’s evolution.

Grace: I work quite intuitively. I don’t really think beforehand, “what does it mean?”. I consider it more like when a painter paints. Just go [she makes a hand gesture to suggest throwing] with the paint and the white thing. You have all your luggage with you, all your knowledge and your life and your dreams and you just go for something…

I always tell the story that Lot, my partner in crime, and me, we were having a bit of time off… and we decided to do something small. Lot was a ceramicist, but she hadn’t practiced for years and years and I don’t know why but she started to study it again. I am a very big fan of porcelain, I just love to touch it, and in a flea market I always go to the cups. I have a whole collection of the most fragile cups, the more fragile the better. I think we [envisioned] a picture of a Louis XIV-style room - a room full of porcelain - and we said to each other, let’s do something with it.

For me, theatre is a puppet theatre, in the sense of the absurdity and the grotesque nature of a puppet play; [where there might be] a kind of strange repeating, like “children did you see…”, and then something pops up there [she makes a hand gesture like a hand-puppet popping up]. I said to Lot, let’s make a puppetry of porcelain, but really recognisable things like cups. So Lot started to make all the pottery. [We built] a little temple; on this platform there were porcelain things standing and hanging, and we would pull on wires and all these [pieces of porcelain] would move. For example, there’s this snake of cups moving [she makes a hand gesture to suggest a rolling wave]. It’s just like a dream of little objects moving. We still show it sometimes in museums, this little manipulation of the porcelain, it takes like 10 minutes. So that’s how it started…

And when it was my turn to do a big production, at first we had another idea for a setting, but because we had so much porcelain we said, “we have spent so much time already with this porcelain, so let’s just throw it on the big stage and see what happens…” And that’s how it grew.

Eleanor: Is the relationship between the audience and the porcelain the same in the installation and in the performance?

Grace: It’s completely different. The trembling table that you see on stage is also in the installation. When it starts the people come in and they see all this porcelain falling and they can come much closer, they can express their curiosity differently. They go and look at the table and try to figure out “why does it tremble?” and “how does the porcelain fall?”. They are already completely into it before we even start the manipulation. And during the manipulation they come very close, very very close. It’s very light. And the porcelain has a quality, it’s very tender, it is beautiful. The music of it is tender.

In the show, we have this poetry of the porcelain in the temple, but I also wanted to show another side of it. It’s more absurd when a body carries the porcelain. When you have a porcelain nose you’re immediately a clownesque person. These objects become a part of the body but at the same time they are more like an aggressive outburst of the body. You want to touch another body but because of the porcelain it’s an impossibility: I wanted to play with this impossibility.

Eleanor: One of the things that we noted in the performance is that the porcelain is not porous, there’s no way of getting through it. It feels like it’s getting between these bodies. We wondered whether you see the porcelain as something completely exterior; external to the body? Or do you see it as a representation of something more internal?

Grace: Of course, it’s not only an external thing. When you make theatre you are instantly telling something, in some way, even if the performance is abstract. You have the space, you have the time, you have the whole aspect of theatre: you are telling a story. What I try to do together with the dancers and Lot, is to create something new.

To trigger fantasy, to show that you can come up with something that doesn’t exist yet. The material and what I try to say grow together in relation to each other; it is something that I completely trust. It will tell a story whether you want it to or not - it is there. I sometimes say it’s kind of a meditation. To create something, you just have to go into it and try to open yourself to all the possibilities. And of course I have limited time with the dancers, I don’t have years and years. So I have to begin with an idea and very soon they start to understand, and come into my meditation too. We are working together, and this whole new world grows.

Eleanor: The porcelain seems to almost create a language of its own – how would you describe this language? Would it be very formal and ornate, or sketchy and in note form, or something else entirely?

Grace: I’m not so good in words, I really think in images. If it is a language it is a physical one, and of course there’s the sound that the porcelain makes. This is almost like a presence for me. The porcelain as an image is very present and I am always surprised to hear it. It’s such a beautiful gift of the porcelain to make sound.

Eleanor: As much as I enjoyed the performance I also found it quite unsettling, specifically when thinking about the colonial connotations of the porcelain…

Grace: My work is really about the absurd and the grotesque: the poetry of the theatre, the mythical figures that represent the good and the bad. The mythical figure becomes human, and the human figure fails. It is always disturbing and always funny to see human people trying to communicate and failing. And along with the porcelain, the mythical figures and the kings are an excuse to trigger something; to do something else with time, with material, to play, to invent. So the kings were a fascination because it’s such a terrific question – what is it to be a king? It’s a shame that there are no good kings any more. A good king should be on the square every Sunday and… dance for the people [laughs]… And why do all these kings go so crazy? To go so far in their rituals and to get so caught up with this absurd life they’re living.

Eleanor: This really came across in the performance – they’re so overindulgent and decadent that their world just falls apart and becomes chaotic…

Grace: And at the same time it’s a fairytale, the king and the princess and the frog.

Eleanor: And in creating the show you were “playing” and you see theatre as puppetry. As an audience member, you get the sense that these beings on stage are almost like children, in the way that they’re teasing each other. They often look at us for our approval; they’re playing to us. I felt very implicated; that they might not be doing that if I wasn’t watching. And when the movement becomes disturbing and sexual, I felt responsible for this descent into chaos. It’s a very interesting relationship that the performers establish with the audience by continuously looking back to us.

Grace: It’s a weird choice to make: are we going to look or not? And that’s why we put what we call “soldiers” [line of tall vases] at the front of the stage, so that they can’t come out, so that they can’t escape. So that we ask the audience just to look and say “what the fuck are they doing?!” It’s important to feel an energy that’s completely useless, because that’s what we are. You would look down from there [gestures to sky] at us and at how we fight each other, and how this one is for this god, and that one is for that god, and the people on the other planets would say “what the fuck are they doing?!”.

Eleanor: So you’re putting the audience in the position of looking in from the outside, from “outer space”.

At the end of the performance one of the vases broke. It was very shocking, and it brought back the idea that the porcelain is so fragile. We wondered whether that moment was intentional?

Grace: No. But every performance something breaks. We don’t know when and we don’t know why. It can be that something tinkles too hard, or somebody stumbles over something or several things, three or four things.

Eleanor: It really is unpredictable – as life is.

Has something ever broken in a way that has made it difficult for the performance to continue?

Grace: Well if something breaks there is a broom and Misha, in character, can come and clean it up.

Grace and Eleanor continue their discussion while finishing their drinks. They shake hands and smile. Eleanor exits through the café. Grace exits across the patio. A waitress enters from the café door and clears Grace’s teacup and Eleanor’s water bottle onto a tray, then exits.

Mary Kate is a freelance writer on performance and live art, based in London.

Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer focusing on performance and live art, currently based between Brussels, London and Bristol.ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com

Small talk 04 - Saving the World by Alex Eisenberg

Saving the World by Gob Squad

Greenwich Dance Agency

10^th April 2009

3.09pm – 3.17pm

Unreserved Seating:

Third Row – Seat 1 - (A)

Third Row – Seat 2 - (L)

Third Row – Seat 3 - (C)

You can read an introduction to Small Talk here.

________________________________________________

3.09pm

A: Hello

L: Hiya…

A: How are you?

L: I’m okay, you?

A: I’m alright…had to wolf down a sandwich just before I came in…I came a bit late…I’ve made it.

So what do you think it's going to be like?

L: I’ve got no idea? What about you?

A: Well…I think there are going to be a fair few projections…it looks like…

L: Seven screens…

Have you seen anything by them before?

A: No…have you?

L: Yeah we went to see something last year called ‘Kitchen’.

A: Oh right…how was that?

L: Amazing, amazing!

A: Oh really…

L: Yeah…it was kind of…it was at the Soho Theatre and it was kind of…the stage was a screen but they were filming everything behind the screen and projecting it live and it ended up with members of the audience going behind the screen and participating, and my partner, she went to it twice and actually performed in it once.

A: Oh wow…

L: Cos she was dragged off…by the company. And you know, it was great…very funny…very interesting ideas!

A: Great…

L: And we were totally blown away by them so that’s why we came today.

A: Have you been to any other things in the festival?

L: We went to see Inferno last week and C went to Purgatory as well…yeah, I liked Inferno but the people I was with didn’t like it that much…what about you?

A: I’ve seen things yeah…

L: Any recommendations?

A: Well…everything’s only on for a couple of days.

Hello J…!!

J: Hello Al…you alright?

A: Yeah good…

J: Busy working?

A: Busy…yep…yep…busy working…

J: Saw you talking to them out there…apparently Berlin, Germany…it's the place to be!

A: It's the place to be…this is what I have said…

L: Generally or….

J: And you can live for a fiver for a year!

A: Fifty – you can live for fifty quid a week…

J: Fifty quid a year!

L: Fifty quid a decade!

J: Live on cheese and sausage…

A: Not cheese…!

L: Fifty quid – how would you live?

A: You’d get a nice little flat…you can get…food…bratwurst…

J: You may even get a ‘driver’ for that much…in Berlin, it really is…it's the answer!

[LAUGH]

L: Fantastic…

J: They don’t ask you how you are spending the public’s money…

L: It's the way it should be…

J: It's basically elevated to a social concern, in that a healthy mind is something that should be part of public spending.

L: Yeah…

J: Whereas over here we’ve got the Olympics – so it's healthy body.

L: Slightly bigger bill as well, probably.

J: Yeah…well obesity is more of a hot topic…we’re the third most obese or second most obese after Germany.

L: It's all that bratwurst…they get it so cheap!

A: What do you think of this then J?

J: Absolute gold…I mean those projectors…I could just watch them for a while.

[LAUGH]

L: Yeah…it will probably be a disappointment when they actually turn on…won’t it…it’ll ruin it…

J: Yup…turning on will turn you off!...

[PAUSE]

Right, I am going to my seat now.

L: Enjoy the show…

A: See you….

A: Its not that busy is it?

L: No…no…cos they are doing two evenings…when is it? Last night and tonight?

A: Yeah…so I think there’s one on tonight…

L: It's a weird time for people to come in the afternoon on a Friday.

A: It is Good Friday though.

L: This is true…and we made a day trip of it…we came from North London…

A: Me too…

L: Day trip to Greenwich. We got the bus here.

A: I drove…but I had to stop in Tower Hill, so a sort of two-leg journey.

L: Well we were up at Kings Cross, and we thought, we could get on the tube…

A: You took the bus all the way here?

L: We got two buses, one to Peckham and one to here…it only took…less than an hour.

A: That’s pretty good actually…

L: And it's not often we get down to Greenwich.

A: I’ve been here a few times but hardly.

L: This place is amazing…is this quite a well known sort of dance place…?

A: Yeah…

L: Is it a school or a…?

A: Yeah it's space and support for artists.

L: So where do you live in North London?

A: Near Golders Green at the moment.

L: Yeah…we live in Holloway.

A: I drove through there this morning.

L: Holloway Road looking glorious on the bank holiday morning.

A: Quite empty…which is good for the drivers.

L: Yeah…everywhere was very quiet today…it's one of the quietest days of the year I reckon.

A: You know I didn’t even realise it was actually a Bank Holiday today.

L: You notice it when you get out though…on the streets.

A: You do…it's definitely quiet.

L: Yeah…I think the only place that’s busy today is Greenwich. [LAUGH]

A: What…cos we’re here!

L: Yeah…us…amongst others.

A: Slightly tricky seats, aren’t they? Mine’s got a bit of a dip.

L: They remind me a bit of school seats.

A: Yeah…very stackable.

L: Yeah…good for stacking – not for sitting.

A: Not the best! [LAUGH]

L: So I’m wondering if any people are going to appear?

A: Yeah, me too.

L: Or if it's just going to be….screens?

[PAUSE]

How many are there in the company?

A: About four or five I think.

L: Some from Nottingham?

A: And from Germany…they are a mixture of Germany and England.

You know…I’ve got…hayfever’s coming at this time of the year you see…so I’ve got quite an itchy eye.

L: You taken anything for it?

A: Usually, but I keep forgetting to go and buy them.

L: Hmmmm….I’ve had hayfever for many, many years and I tried last year…

A: The injection?

L: No…just to not take anything…

A: Right…

L: And it was kind of okay, once I got used to it…more comfortable…I think I did last year……C, did I not take anything for hayfever last year? Did I completely stop?...And it kind of worked didn’t it…?

C: I thought you had something for your eyes.

A: Yeah…I have the eyes coming now…

C: Reddy eyes?

A: Yeah…

L: Not much you can do when the eyes come…you’ve got to take a tablet really. You can’t just hope they are going to go away.

A: Every time before I see a show…I sit here and I start scratching my eyes!

L: Wow….

A: I know…

L: That’s quite early…because I think I get it a bit later…it depends on different kinds of pollen…doesn’t it…

C: Do you know what yours is? Is it grass or trees or…?

A: I don’t know specifically…but I do get it quite badly…so I ought to know.

L: Hmmmm…mine’s kind of grassy isn’t it….and then trees…and probably flowers as well…in fact it’s everything!

A: It's pollen! [ALL LAUGH]

L: It's pollen!

A: But…where is the pollen in grass?

L: Ummm…some grass will have little seeds…won’t it? Is there pollen in there?

A: I don’t know? There’s hay…?

C: What about flowers, no…?

A: Cos they say hay and hayfever…?

L: Yeah….hmmmm…

A: Oh…I think it's going a bit more quite now…

3.17pm

SAVING THE WORLD

4.36pm

______________________________________

To find out about Alex's Small Talk click here: Small Talk by Alex Eisenberg

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival. alex@presentattempt.co.uk

Ecology up the money tree: Pacitti Company's A Forest by David Berridge

A Forest

Conceived and directed by Robert Pacitti

Co-devised and performed by Richard Eton, Sheila Ghelani and Robert Pacitti

The Pit, Barbican

7-9 April

There’s been little about nature in the shows at this years SPILL. Or, at least, not much about the non-, other- or more-than human bits of it, if one excludes the dogs and horses of Castellucci. So, feeling a bit eco-starved, I felt somewhat expectant waiting outside the Barbican’s Pit to see a show called A Forest.

Actually, A Forest, too, had little in the way of nature, if by that I meant pastoral landscapes, lush vegetation, living animals, or just lots of green. For their hour long show Pacitti Company had modified the Pit into a small space in which a circle of chairs surrounded an island of 2p pieces. If the shape suggested an island biogeography, with all the uniqueness and variability Darwin found so exciting on the Galapagos Islands, then its bronze mass suggested geography had become money slightly quicker than money had become landscape.

A man lying on the coins. I can’t remember if he was naked at the beginning of the show, but he was naked at the end, and in the beginning, if he wasn’t, he acted as if he wished he was. He writhed on the coins, kissing and licking them. At the end of the show a bare tree was arranged above his naked body, both trapping and growing out of his body like some mutant rib-cage extension. No leaves, though, or not until two other performers had pinned a show-off, greedy foliage of fifty pound notes to its branches.

In-between these two scenes, A Forest sought to construct its own biogeography, defined by how body, nature, and money were all a part of some slightly traumatic ecosystem of desire. Central to this eco-restoration endeavor was a man stood at a microphone telling stories. The details haven’t stayed with me, and maybe that was the point. If the style and tone of his narratives reminded me of folk stories, he had a relish for details that stood out from and even abolished the narrative, proposing instead an immediate, visceral value. A man threading his eyes with red thread, for example, or sticking pins in his heart.

Over on the other side of coin island was its ring-mistress. On entering the Pit all of the audience were handed two pence pieces, before finding bald dolls on their seats. The woman came round with a money box, and everyone placed their coins inside. That seemed the end of the matter, but then the woman was back to show the audience, not the money box but both her breasts. Later she came round with a tray on which was a pair of pigs trotters. Were these the principle raw materials on which this economy-ecology depends? Later still, she collected the bald dolls, covering them in coins, both burial and blessing.

Her relationship to the man in the middle was more hands-on. Not that the man didn’t have actions to perform under his own volition. At one point he ran around the circle of coins, like a lurcher running and running until it just collapses. But ultimately his movements were determined by the woman, who tied antlers to his back. Or she ran back and forth over the coins, jumping over his naked body. Such actions summed up the tone of their relationship and the piece as a whole: caught in a tension between conscious and unconscious; autonomy and projection; flow of narrative against the fixed, iconographic image.

The naked man with the antlers on his back captured a lot of these tensions. As an image was it a mythical creation, or product of performance’s capitalist need for ever new product diversification, or both? Similarly, A Forest used storytelling to see if its conservative forms and agendas could be applicable to a more political, Queer agenda. Or does the poetic power of such stories always overwhelm the political interests of a particular teller and time? Pacitti Company hopes for the former, but tentatively, and A Forest was a laboratory for such a hope.

Take the coins themselves and how they were lit. Sometimes they were isolated in the space: a warm light gave them a semi-magical bronze-becoming-gold aura. Other times the light was more flat and the coins were part of the broader environment. Not totally ordinary, of course, because it was an enormous very non-everyday number of 2p pieces. If we can’t make stories our own, or insert them into our own political and performance agendas, we can at least work back and forth between their magic and their almost-everydayness, and see what, if anything, happens.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

Telling the telling of a tale by Mary Paterson

Void Story

by Forced Entertainment

Soho Theatre

21- 25 April

The set for Void Story, Forced Entertainment’s latest show, is made up of two small desks, one large desk and four chairs. There are four lamps – one to illuminate the desk space of each actor – four scripts, and four microphones. On the long desk, there are two Apple Mac laptops and a mixing desk with a complex system of dials and wires. At the back of the stage is a screen, onto which are projected a series of static, collaged images in black and white that correspond to the story. The story is being told by the four actors at the utilitarian desks, reading their scripts, and speaking into their microphones.

In other words, Void Story looks like the making of a radio play. The actors perform for an aural, and not a visual, effect – the mixing deck provides background noise and other distortions, and they also use more old fashioned techniques like rustling a crisp packet to make a phone line crack up. The images onscreen look like black and white photos that have been cut and pasted, then photocopied together. The result is a collection of flat, studio poses (woman and man standing, woman and man looking surprised, woman and man lying on floor) inside a series of banal, disjointed landscapes (tower next to tree next to lamppost) which make no attempt at perspective or verisimilitude. Rather than illustrate the story being told – a twisting tale of two protagonists caught in a hostile, post-apocalyptic world – these collages approximate elements of it. Just like listening to a play on the radio, then, the real pictures are conjured in the audience’s minds.

But the presence of these almost-illustrations, as well as the physical presence of the actors and equipment onstage, means that the viewer cannot simply drift into an imagined landscape of her own. Seeing the constituent parts means you can never quite suspend your disbelief and surrender to the fictional whole. That child you hear is actually the voice of a grown woman, distorted through an orange microphone and a glowing computer; that robot is the voice of a middle aged man. Both product and production, Void Story dissects the body of the play like a living autopsy. It’s not just the inanimate objects that make up the ‘equipment’ in this show; I should also have listed the voices of two women and two men, not anchored to their bodies but practically deployed wherever they come in useful.

In fact, voices, images, plot devices and other pieces of equipment are used and re-used throughout the play, as if they are interchangeable tools fit for any purpose. Photographs that show a woman and man scream, for example, are used later in the play to represent them dance. In the context of theatre, of course, the word for this is 'prop': an incidental, almost abritrary object that carries no value of its own.  Void Story uses props as props –as tools to point towards an act of storytelling, rather than elements subsumed into a story.

And what of the story itself? The protagonists, Kim and Jackson, are chased, attacked, victimised, cheated and conned by people acting in inexplicable ways. They are pushed from event to event, journeying to unknown places and meeting a cast of strangers. In other words, it is every story ever told, every fairytale ever uttered, every dream you’ve ever had. It is Everyman and Everywoman, in Everywhere, affected by everything. As such, the story is both the bare skeletons of a tale and the full body of an epic. On one hand it is a series of unlikely things happening to two people you don’t know; but on the other it is a universal story of people dealing with adversity, of humanity in the face of fear. There is so much left unsaid that the story never reaches a narrative arc. Instead, it begins with a bang and ends only when the protagonists fail to react to the world around them. And this ending, too, is unresolved – like a computer game, the characters could just have faded away to start once again at the beginning.

In Void Story, then, even the plot is a prop – one of a collection of instruments that can sustain the whole. But if everything is a tool, what can the greater whole be?  Instead of a whole there is a hole, a void, at the the heart of this story. What is left is the process of story-telling and story-watching itself. Beneath the thick and delicious syrup of fiction, lies an equally warm and spicy blend – the desire for fiction to take place. It is made in the affectionate looks between actors as they wait for each other’s cues. It is the cocked heads of the audience as they follow the actor’s leads. It is also the naïve collages that bear so obviously the mark of a human hand. Unlike pictures made in Photoshop, for example, the smudges and imperfections of these images trace their own means of production. In the same way, by exposing the aural ‘tricks’ of a radio play, Void Story does not simply tell a tale, but also tells the telling of the tale.

Sitting in the packed auditorium of Soho Theatre, it felt like the play was a balloon that the audience and the actors were bouncing in the air between them. Perhaps it wouldn’t matter if the balloon fell to the ground – we can always pick it up and start again. But first, let’s enjoy the game of keeping it afloat, of making the play together.

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues

Impossible Tolerance by Mary Paterson

Orgy of Tolerance

Jan Fabre

Royal Festival Hall

15 and 16 April.

In a world where everything is tolerated, how do you know what it means? If we agree that taste is relative, then what’s the point discussing taste at all? If consumerism doesn’t have a moral or ethical cloak – you don’t need to consume for any other reason – then why will having things make you happy?

In a world like this, mightn’t the journey of life just as well be a round of competitive masturbation – an exercise in ostentatious self pleasuring, the rivalry of which stops it being pleasurable at all?

If there is no moral compass, in other words, the drive for personal fulfilment has no context, and no prize.

Welcome, to the Orgy of Tolerance.

Jan Fabre’s production really does begin with a round of competitive masturbation, in which two men and two women try to orgasm to the vicious encouragement of a team of military coaches. It is the woman who loses, lying shivering and unfulfilled at the front of the stage, who introduces the rest of the show - she is ‘very excited’ [to welcome us to the show] she tells us, although she is crying with the frustration of not being able to come. Unable to amuse herself like the other contestants, this loser sets the scene for an indictment of contemporary culture, consumerism and the liberals who pretend they don’t take part.

In a collection of scenes that dissolve into each other like photos in a digital picture frame, Orgy of Tolerance tweaks the small things in otherwise recognisable scenarios. A group of people takes an exercise class – to exercise money. Three pregnant women give birth – to supermarket goods. The result is a grotesque image of modern values, obsessed with the inexplicable pursuit of inexplicable things. In one scene a woman has sex with a sofa, with the help of two leering and excited men. It is hard to think of an object that is less erotic, less able to resemble a human, less an object of desire than a sofa. And yet here in the UK, furniture giant DFS is having its famous sale again every weekend, so there must be something attractive about spending hundreds of pounds on a leather three-seater.

This complacency of desire in Fabre’s play is neither a solution to unhappiness, nor a useful tonic for it. Early on, Jesus makes an entrance. Bearing his cross on the way to dying for man’s sins, he is immediately spotted and styled by a camp fashion director, and his cross is removed. Instead of relieving Jesus of his burden, however, this propels him to spend the rest of the play wandering on and off stage, balancing an imaginary cross like a deluded circus performer. Later, couples wander on stage and start to pick out parts of the set to buy for their living rooms, but they can’t get their fix from consumerism alone: they also need a good snorting of cocaine to help them on their way. And what of the men who are fellated by silent, stiletto-wearing slaves as they discuss their ‘trophies’ from human hunts? Nodding sagely at each other’s racist jokes, they slide imperceptibly into barking madness – one of them sticks his rifle up his arse and yelps like a rabid dog.

The irony of Orgy of Tolerance is that one of the ways it fulfils its title by trying to be as offensive as possible. At one stage all the actors line up and shout ‘Fuck You!’ at every social group imaginable. Personally, the moment I got offended was when a woman wearing a Klu Klux Klan outfit started moonwalking to the sound of The Beatles' 'Come Together'. What was this collection of cultural references doing together in a visual trick? And when did it become ok to impersonate the KKK?

The point, of course, is that it’s not ok. It is also not ok to turn the famous images of torture at Abu Ghraib into jokes for an audience to smirk at in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It is by being so relentlessly offensive that Fabre hopes to make his point – moral relativism can only go so far; you need to have a sense of right and wrong before anything can make sense at all. An Orgy of Tolerance, the play suggests, is a degraded and putrid place, where meaning is squeezed out of the vacuum packaging of consumer goods. Tolerance, paradoxically, is only feasible if the rest of the world is tolerable. The problem the play sets itself is: how do you make this point without simulating the Orgy?

Mary Paterson is Co-director of Open Dialogues mary@opendialogues.com

National Platform - Day One - 18th April 2009

National Theatre Studio

18 April 2009

Over two days, the SPILL National Platform presented 20 performance works by emerging artists, selected from almost 300 applications. The works reflected an incredibly diverse range of forms and themes: durational and installation work, engagements with the conventions of theatre, interactive provocations, and autobiographical narrative.

As writers, we knew we would be unable to respond in detail to all of the work, but we also wanted to avoid imposing any selective criteria, even a random one, on which work was covered. We decided in advance of the Platform that we would impose a constraint on our responses. This would provide a structure for giving equal space to each of the performances and would make the most of our limited time. We decided that we would respond to each of the works, and we would limit our response to the space of a 3x5 index card.

We like the idea that each of the identical cards seems analogous to the opportunity offered to the emerging artists: a blank slot, to be filled individually, but unavoidably to be experienced side-by-side with the rest of the programme, as part of an assembly or collection of material.

Although for the most part we have prepared our cards after the event, there’s also something about this format that reflects the experience of writing: taking notes in the dark, collecting fragments and impressions and responses. Trying to capture not just the event on stage but our internal journeys. Thinking always, at every moment, even before the moment has finished, about how to translate into words the transient and complex experience.

These cards are only scraps, only partial and inadequate records of the events of the weekend, but we hope something of the extraordinary and boundless diversity of work is reflected by these responses. Perhaps they can stand as the beginning of a discussion – please add your own comments below.

Theron Schmidt

Please click on each image to view larger.

Please Note: You made need to zoom out/in using your browser to view the image in a suitable size.

Mamoru Iriguchi - Pregnant?!

by Alex Eisenberg

Madeleine Trigg - Sutre

by Mary Paterson

Elyssa Livergant - A Kiss From the Last Red Squirrel

by Mary Kate Connolly

Neil Trefor Hughes

Minimalist Music for Young People

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Claire Adams -Photopollution

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Catalina Garces - Identi-ffy

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Mitch and Parry

I Host You, Now Tonight, Let Me Show You How

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to Mitch and Parry here.

Amanda Couch - Dust Passing

by Mary Paterson

Other, Other, Other

Long Winded in Five Parts

by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Nathan Walker - Bad Bad

by Mary Kate Connolly

To read cards from day two click here.

The writers participating were Mary Kate Connolly, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.

National Platform - Day Two - 19 April 2009

National Theatre Studio

19 April 2009

Over two days, the SPILL National Platform presented 20 performance works by emerging artists, selected from almost 300 applications. The works reflected an incredibly diverse range of forms and themes: durational and installation work, engagements with the conventions of theatre, interactive provocations, and autobiographical narrative.

As writers, we knew we would be unable to respond in detail to all of the work, but we also wanted to avoid imposing any selective criteria, even a random one, on which work was covered. We decided in advance of the Platform that we would impose a constraint on our responses. This would provide a structure for giving equal space to each of the performances and would make the most of our limited time. We decided that we would respond to each of the works, and we would limit our response to the space of a 3x5 index card.

We like the idea that each of the identical cards seems analogous to the opportunity offered to the emerging artists: a blank slot, to be filled individually, but unavoidably to be experienced side-by-side with the rest of the programme, as part of an assembly or collection of material.

Although for the most part we have prepared our cards after the event, there’s also something about this format that reflects the experience of writing: taking notes in the dark, collecting fragments and impressions and responses. Trying to capture not just the event on stage but our internal journeys. Thinking always, at every moment, even before the moment has finished, about how to translate into words the transient and complex experience.

These cards are only scraps, only partial and inadequate records of the events of the weekend, but we hope something of the extraordinary and boundless diversity of work is reflected by these responses. Perhaps they can stand as the beginning of a discussion – please add your own comments below.

Theron Schmidt

Please click on each image to view larger.

Note: You made need to zoom out/in using your browser to view the image in a suitable size.

Victoria Pratt - Chasing Next Door's Cat

by Mary Paterson

Sohail Khan - Stress Positioning

by Rachel Lois Clapham

Simon Bowes - Kings of England

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Silvia Rimat - Being Here While Not Being Here

by Theron Schmidt

Rasp Thorne - Blinded Descention

by Rachel Lois Clapham

Nicola Conibere - Count One

by Mary Paterson

Simone Kenyon and Neil Callaghan

To Begin Where I Am...Mokado

by Alex Eisenberg

Alex continues his response to this work here.

Sara Popowa - Stick Piece

by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Natasha Davis - Rupture

by Mary Paterson

Taylan Hallici - Introduction to floodlondon

by Mary Kate Connolly

To read cards from day one click here.

The writers participating were Mary Kate Connolly, Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt.