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Showing posts with label marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marx. Show all posts
Monday, March 18, 2013
Monday, March 18, 2013
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Urgh, another epic, 3D, CGI laden adaptation of a public domain fairytale? Is there anyone that’s even a big fan of Jack and the Beanstalk anyway? I’m not even sure I remember it that well; kid buys magic beans, beanstalk grows something something giants. Also, the buzz from across the Atlantic was that this was going to be one of the year’s notorious flops - 2013’s equivalent of John Carter. Sitting in the boomingly enormous SuperScreen at the o2 on Saturday morning nursing a faint hangover I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about what was to come.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Saturday, June 23, 2012
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LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art) is a tricky thing to pin down in a number of ways. It's a series of performance art events that take place outside a row of garages at the back of a block of flats in Bethnal Green. I don't really have the necessary critical framework to be able to tell whether the performance art pieces are succeeding or failing, so I find it quite hard to review and analyse at times. It's hard to tell at times whether the audience is supposed to be laughing, or if this is annoying the performance artist and ruining the mood of their set. Semi-guerilla abstract art like this runs the constant risk of toppling over into navel-gazing "aren't we clever" reflexive cynicism.
Satirising East London art 'happenings' has become almost cliche, and I think the organisers recognise the danger of self-parody, so the atmosphere around LUPA is relaxed, informal and quite unpretentious. There is a bin with ice and beer in it, and a small bar being run from the boot of a car serving drinks. Everyone's friendly, and it seems at pains to be as inclusive as abstract performance art taking place behind some flats can possibly be.
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| Kate Mahony (with cool personalised van) |
The first performer was Kate Mahony. Her piece consisted of loading cardboard boxes into a van. That's pretty much it. She was wearing a paint-spattered boiler suit, and opened the titular lock-up, which was full of cardboard boxes, some marked with the numbers of different LUPA events. There were maybe 100 boxes in the garage, and we watched as she loaded every one into the van. The simple repetition, and the punchline (her driving away in the van with the driver without a word) we could see coming a mile away, and she got quite a bit of laughter from the audience for her sheer audacity in making us sit through this. I half wondered if this is a sort of audience-mocking "you'll sit through anything" Godard type point. I also wondered if this was some complicated crowd psychology Zimbardo/Milgram style test. Would anyone step up from the mass of people to help her with her task - is this a condemnation of the audience that we are standing there taking a certain sadistic pleasure in watching her work. Is she laughing at us, or are we laughing at her? A slightly more literal interpretation is that as this is the last LUPA event until September it might be a symbolic packing up for the summer and driving away. But then in this case surely it'd be the last performance rather than the first?
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| Colm Clarke |
Up next was Colm Clarke with a visual demonstration of Marx's theory of value commodity. The value of a commodity, according to Marxist theory (and bear in mind this is me flying by the seat of my pants political sciencewise) is the combination of different types of value that it has, labour value, exchange value and use/utility value. Clarke demonstrated this theory by buying 10 cans of Red Bull from a nearby newsagent, before pouring them into a dirty bucket. He thus demonstrated how physical cash, which is entirely exchange value can be converted into Red Bull, which has labour value, use value and exchange value and finally how merely changing the container in which the the drink is in strips it of all value and turns it into a noxious substance to be actively avoided. I think that's the basics of it anyway. It was an effective demonstration of the theory, but presented in this way it felt a little too much like a classroom demonstration to be totally effective as a piece of performance art.
What was more interesting about it was the effect that the performance had on its surroundings, particular in buying the Red Bull. One thing that LUPA does very well is transform the area around it into a kind of liminal space, where the boundaries between performer vs audience, audience vs general public and performance space vs public space break down. One thing I've noticed at the LUPA events I've been to is that you generally get very confused people watching from the periphery trying to work out what's going on, and why this large group of people are standing around a garage applauding. In Clarke's piece, the straightforward act of buying the Red Bull sucked the shop, it's employees and the people inside the shop into an art space that I'm pretty sure they weren't expecting. I suspect most people's reaction is "who are those group of weirdos?!", but some reaction is better than nothing. Recontextualising humdrum activities as art is something that I generally enjoy anyway.
The end of Clarke's performance was notable in two ways. Once he'd filled his bucket with Red Bull he began to swing it around his head. Possibly this was leading to a moment of blinding clarity in a demonstration of Marxist theory but we will never know as the bucket handle broke, sending 10 cans of Red Bull flying through the air towards some poor LUPA attendees. Fortunately no-one got drenched in the sticky, sugary stuff. I imagine no matter how chilled out you are, getting soaked in Red Bull might put a bit of a downer on your night. It was certainly a dramatic end though.
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| Whoops. |
In between Clarke and the final act, Jordan McKenzie stood up to make a short announcement and while he was doing so a woman walked furiously up behind him, smashed a wine bottle over his head and walked away. The crowd was in shock. I had always assumed that the local residents were tolerant of this sort of thing happening, but apparently they've got more seri.. oh wait, it was just another performance art piece! The wine bottle was a sugar, stage bottle! I'm not sure that this had that much artistic meaning behind other than giving the crowd a nice surprise and keeping us on our toes. It was a good shock though, and nicely set up the final act.
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| Aaron Williamson |
Aaron Williamson's act was the most physically daring. He was dressed all in black, and climbed over the roofs of the garages while holding a big white sheaf, a hunting knife precariously poised on a long pole, and two planks. The performance concluded with him 'skiing' (or rather shuffling on home-made skiis) down the roof and jumping off onto a pouffe that broke his fall. Watching this felt like you were watching a live version of one of those Youtube videos where someone badly hurts themselves. There were so many possible things that could have gone wrong, the knife could have fallen on his head, he could have fallen backwards off the roof, he could have fallen through the roof, he could have missed the pouffe, or tripped and smashed his face on the concrete. The very nature of LUPA seems to imply that there aren't going to be that many safety checks done in advance, so watching this made everyone very nervous and there were a few gasps when, for example, the knife slipped off the pole. Maybe it was just an illusion of danger rather the real thing, but it was a damn realistic illusion.
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| Note the large knife held over his head. |
Walking along the roofs of the garages was just another way in which LUPA recontextualises its downbeat, concrete pre-fab surroundings into a performance art space, and I think this is a pretty noble goal. While London can be an astoundingly beautiful city, there are also miles and miles of drab concrete misery, and it's nice to something colourful, imaginative and artistic reclaiming a corner of it, if only for an hour every month.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
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Back to the Hackney Empire for more from the Isango Emsemble. Despite not really being able to understand what the plot of La boheme was I had a pretty good time. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a bit more up my street though, and I was familiar with the book. Nonetheless, this time I took no chances, and read through the programme before it started. This also allowed me to find out just what was going on in La boheme. In retrospect, I should have bought a programme last week.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a musical based on the 1914 book by Robert Tressell. The book is a classic of socialist literature, with the action set in the South of England and showing how the working class of the town are exploited by their employers. This musical version is set in South Africa during apartheid. The central characters are employed as painters and as the plot develops, we witness the effects of capitalist theory on the working class. This version, with an entirely South African cast also looks at the effects of colonialism and racism. Setting the events in South Africa is not an arbitrary decision, Robert Tressell was an Irishman who at one point lived and worked in Cape Town and Johannesburg. It was here that he became involved with trade unions, and with the socialist philosophies that fill his book.
The staging here is quite similar to that of La boheme, with the gently forward sloping stage, and with minimal set. The set is bathed in earth tones, complementing the characters shabby clothes. When there is bright colour on stage it tends to stand out. In the first act giant green letters are slowly painted blue over the course of the act, and they seem to glow bright in the light. At the start of the second act, the male characters don their ' minstrel stage wear', red and white polka-dotted evening coats and white trilbys. The bright costumes seem to make their everyday wear seem even more dowdy.
In La boheme, the instrumentation was entirely African, in this production there is no orchestra, and very little instrumentation. The voices of the performers, nearly always singing in harmony more than fill the room. The fact that most of the songs only work when all of the performers are acting as one also works thematically. There are very few parts in the room where the workers sing alone. Their 'bosses' however are placed in isolated areas of the stage and sing alone. As before, the singing was exemplary. Admittedly, I don't really have the critical framework to decide whether someone is singing brilliantly or just extremely competently, but each performer injected the personality of their character into the songs.
Now that I have a programme, I can pick out individuals to praise. In both Isango productions I've seen, Mhlekazi Mosiea has been the standout performer. He's played the leads in both, and manages to show deep inner anger coupled with an innocent fragility. As the callous and money-grubbing superintendant, Noluthando Bogwana is also a stand out. She stalks around the stage in a floor length coat, striking strange angular poses and looking somewhat terrifying with her widened eyes. There is a particular fun scene where, pretending to have a close relationship with the workers she attempts to conduct them in a choir. Almost every weird pose she finds is hilarious. As she contorts the sound of the choir shifts and warps to match her motions, it's something I've never seen before on stage, and must be pretty damn complicated to rehearse.
One scene in particular stands out above the rest. It's when our hero, Nkosi Songo explains just how the workers are being bamboozled and exploited by capitalism. He playacts the role of a factory owner, using slices of bread as the raw materials of the land. He puts his friends in the position of working for him, making the bread into sandwiches and paying them for their work. Then when they've finished making sandwiches, he asks what they're going to eat. They pay back their wages, and get a single sandwich. They are left with nothing, and the boss's wealth increases at their expense. The cycle is infinite and the workers are essentially trapped at a near-poverty level. It's a neat demonstration of Marx's theory of surplus value. I've tried to read Capital, and despite my best efforts found it somewhat impenetrable, so the fact that this staged version is able to quickly, efficiently and convincingly illustrate one of the pillars of his economic theory is a credit to both Tressell and the production.
I enjoyed this much more than La boheme. The songs, production and the politics were much more to my tastes than the opera I saw last week. I'd like to see the third of their shows, Aesop's Fables before they finish just to complete the set. In popular culture it's uncommon to see something that so unashamedly advocates socialist values, so I consider this a rare treat.
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