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Showing posts with label emma louvelle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emma louvelle. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
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The sign on the wall read "Performances may contain traces of nudity, violence, strobe effects, limited visibility and bodily fluids." My kinda night! Nestled underground in the cellars of the the old Bermondsey biscuit factory, Trispace Gallery is a friendly, snug space with the pleasant bonus of having a charming, chubby pug waddling happily around it. That would turn out to be the cutest thing about an evening that descended into freaky-deaky weirdness pretty damn fast. Maybe best not to read this article at work.
IMPURITANS is the 2nd LAUNCH⇪PAD event, organised by the lovely people at CLUSTER BOMB [collective]. It's a performance art showcase and flitting around the room are faces both familiar and new, but all determined to kick back against accepted morality and modes of thinking. What happened was a weirdly erotic cocktail, all winking arseholes, convulsive thrashing and dirt-eating.
Things started charmingly enough, with a couple of songs by Silvereley Allen. With just a keyboard and her voice, she took us through a few of her own numbers and TV on the Radio cover. It was decent enough stuff, and Allen's intricate keyboard skills certainly set the crowd all a-flicker. Her Easier Said Than Done was an obvious highlight, with some neat polyrhythms at play that look tricky as hell to pull off.
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| Silvereley Allen |
Things took a step towards the extreme from here, with Andre Verissimo leading us into a dimly-lit space at the back and giving us Gut Twilight. Cloaked in darkness and clad in a fetching aquamarine skirt he instructed us to scream as loud as we could. We did. Following this he lay down on the floor and pulled up his skirt to reveal that he'd stuck a doll's head on his cock and balls, which he angled around the room as if it was looking at us. Then he jabbed a hypodermic needle into his cock and engaged in a bit of the old winking arsehole routine at the audience, before wrapping things up with a light bit of harmonica-scored shadow play.
It's a testament to the audience they took being stared at by the triple-eyed dolls head/anus hybrid entirely in stride. As for me, while I could appreciate the bizarro genderfucked birth imagery at play in having a baby's head appear from a man's genitalia, all I could think was that I was experiencing a John Waters film in real time (in particular the famous 'singing asshole' scene from Pink Flamingos). Applying concrete meaning to a sight like this is missing the point a bit, what's best to grip onto is the sensations you feel staring at a sight like this; shock, disgust, confusion and the growing urge to giggle.
Following this was You are Drunk Frozen Snowflake; by Emma Louvelle. After having written a message on a large piece of paper she leapt into a wild dance. Her movements are obviously carefully choreographed, yet they look like her muscles are being involuntarily jerked by a sadistic puppetmaster - like on-stage electro-convulsive therapy. She's all jabbing elbows, whip-crack neck movements and fierce kicks, a grimly determined expression on her face. It's so intense that it crosses into intimidation - and being a tiny bit scared that she's going to shoot this aggression out into the audience is an interesting sensation.
Simmering under all this were two durational performances by Robert John Foster and Skew Wiff. Foster spent the entire night standing motionless in the corner with a lampshade on his head. Credit where credit's due - doing this for three hours takes a hell of a lot of patience and physical effort. It was interesting how quickly I began treating him as furniture rather than a person. I was happily having chats with friends right next to him, constantly forgetting that there was a real person underneath.
Skew Wiff's performance TOI (Tale of the Invisible) appeared to be some kind of night-long cathartic expunging of the artist's psychological trauma. At various times he was dipping his head in a bucket of murky water, discordantly playing an accordion or simply catatonically crouching naked in the corner. I noticed he'd written "I peed on the floor" on the wall, so I suppose he did that too at some point. Though it looked interesting enough, this regression into a primal state of madness stuff isn't really my kettle of fish - always reminding a bit of Brian from Spaced. Still, this sort of thing works nicely enough as a durational performance, and when you're waiting in between the other acts it's nice to pop over and see what he's up to: "Oh, he's writhing in agony while covered in black goo. Neat."
I initially figured Matt Goodsmith's Tertiary was hitting another of my performance art turnoffs, namely being extremely boring on purpose. With two chairs on stage, he and another artist moved between them in patterns, moving between sitting and standing next to each other. Hyper-conceptual pattern-based repetition drives me up the wall, but thankfully things evolved pretty quickly towards something more interesting. They established two games with simple rules and invited the crowd to participate. Very quickly, the crowd worked out ways to bend these rules, and little systems and movements sprang up from some very simple building blocks. There was some nice adversarial confrontation between artist and audience here - each trying to outwit the other.
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| Andre Verissimo |
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| Emma Louvelle |
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| Robert John Foster |
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| Skew Wiff |
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| Matt Goodmith |
Next on was Jasmine Pytelová with Love Your Mother - which took the form of an intense magical ritual. She took the stage in a red dress, a red and white cross drawn on her face and feathers in her hair.. Ripping the dress off revealed that the red line carried on down her torso, over her belly and all the way to her left foot. Naked she slowly ground herself into a pile of soil at her feet, the room quickly filling with a warm, earthy smell. She rubbed it all over her body, even eating some of it. The sight of her staring out at us, blackened soil-stained lips was crazy powerful - giving me a good old-fashioned case of the cold shivers.
It perhaps goes without saying that this ecosexual communion was powerfully and primally erotic. As she writhed atop the dirt, pressing it into herself, the boundaries between human and environment being broken down piece by piece until they were one. The frank sexuality, pagan imagery and ecological bent of the piece hearkened back to sixties hippie performance artists, who were themselves referencing rituals from around the world, a continuity stretching back through ages. So it's appropriate that Pytelová concluded by wrapping a string around the audience's necks and connecting that to a small plant she'd planted in the mound, thus linking us all in one big sexy circle of life - our atavistic desire to spread our genes desire literally to mud, bacteria and foliage.
I thought it was dead good.
Rounding out the evening was Annamaria Pinaka and Jennifer Picken's drag king reworking of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round. Despite the three red-dress wearing dancers at the rear pulling 60s doo-wop shapes, the tone is pretty damn far from glamorous. These personae the kind of smelly men you get stuck in line next to at the Post Office - all bad breath, deeply questionable personal hygiene and stained clothing. With underpants bulging and lascivious expressions on their faces they slowly dance like a clinically depressed uncle at a wedding, revolving like they don't give a fuck. It's a creepshow sight, and the perfect capper to a fascinating night.
My other option for the evening was to watch a film in which Helen Mirren opens a curryhouse in Paris. Looks like I made the right call.
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| Jasmine Pytelova |
I thought it was dead good.
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| Annamaria Pinaka & Jennifer Picken |
My other option for the evening was to watch a film in which Helen Mirren opens a curryhouse in Paris. Looks like I made the right call.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
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New lands, new spaces and new ambitions: ]performancespace[, cosily burrowed like a hermit crab into a warehouse near the Hackney Wick canal has upped sticks and moved to nearby Fish Island. Their new building, squirreled away within a maze of drab Victorian brickwork and sarcastic pop-inflected graffiti, feels like a rabbithole away from the frantic outside world. The decor here is so new you can smell the paint drying, the cushions unsullied by the crease of human backsides and the walls a pristine, virginal white. But they wouldn't be pristine for long!
Saturday was the inaugural event at this new location; the building freshly stocked with the fashionably dressed, the interestingly haircutted and the artistically open-minded. Waiting in the wings was a swarm of artists ready to unleash an embarrassment of performance art that would baptise this place with paint, spices, charcoal, makeup, minerals and marbles.
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| Sarah Zaltash |
Setting the tone for the night was Sara Zaltash, with a durational performance that lasted most of the night. Sat on the floor she recited a mantra while drawing a neverending charcoal circle around herself. Round and round she went, the circle getting thicker and more defined as she used more and more charcoal. In retrospect these marks outlined the themes we'd be seeing tonight; transforming the space into a canvas. There's something faintly magical about the idea of sitting within a self-made circle, the lines acting as a protective barrier against the outside world. For me this protection extends outwards; the walls of the gallery allowing the artists to safely explore concepts; the water surrounding Fish Island creating a bubble of artistic expression - we can even go so far as to say that Goldsmith's circles recall the M25 - a protective loop around London itself.
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| Marita Fox |
Marita Fox was up next. Dressed all in black with circular black shades on she moved with a wiry insectoid grace. With Kafka hanging gently in the air she writhed like a pupae in a bubble wrap chrysalis. Emerging from within she unfolded her limbs and with a sudden thump, elbow-dropped a cardboard box. Within was more bubble-wrap, cotton wool - and deep within that two white hands. She cradled these with her own black gloved hands, showing them to us with a look of incomprehension etched upon her face. Visually it was striking as hell, Fox mixing theatricality with the kind of style you'd usually expect to see staring out of a photoshoot from a mid 90s issue of Skin Two.
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| Zoya Sardashti |
Zoya Sardashti was on next, dancing to a projection of graffiti. The picture was of an emaciated, skull-like Statue of Liberty, and she danced an kind of aggressive, strutting semaphore at it. With a mean look on her face she stomped back and forth in front of the projection, daring it to respond. As she marched she kept a fixed, fierce look on her face, often making eye contact with the audience, implicating us within the work and subtly asking us which side of this conflict we're on. It looked cathartic and personal: an opportunity for her to work out her frustrations with a symbol of the unblinking might of cultural imperialism.
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| Charlotte Law |
Soon after was Charlotte Law with a brief (yet memorable) performance. Nearly naked, she picked up a handful of ochre (I later found out this was a combination of iron ore and olive oil) and rubbed it all over her body. Then she smooshed herself against the clean gallery pillars, using her body as a human potato printer and leaving a reddish-brown imperfect silhouette. Job complete she left, leaving us staring at the handprints and impressions she'd left behind. Once again we see the gallery undergoing some kind of weird blessing; the minerals Law slapped on inextricably melded with the sterile walls of the gallery. I'm a big fan of brevity, generally preferring the tightly focussed statement to the meandering and freeform, so I liked this. Within the space of a few quick actions Law created three striking images; first her own body covered in the ore, then her communing with the pillar; then finally the pillar on its own - pregnant with her presence.
Luisa Amorim's performance marked a bit of a change of pace. Miming to a backing track (of her own voice I think), she asked the crowd to perform various tasks while standing in a big tub of blue paint. Perhaps it was the young girl running around in front of Amorim, but there was an air of children's TV about this. The clear diction and friendly presence was simultaneously friendly and authoritative, and getting us involved in the various tasks she laid out kept everyone engaged. Throughout people around us unexpectedly piped up, having been given cue cards in advance - dragging us into her light, eccentrically creative and pleasant world.
Performance art generally concentrates on stimulating our eyes and ears, though the immediate aspect of the medium easily allows for all of our senses to come into play. With that in mind I always enjoy work that gets taste, touch and, in this performance, smell involved. Nicolina Stylianou's performance involved her mixing various spices with water and spitting that into a jug. I'm no spice expert, but I think I could detect the smell of cumin and cinnamon. When she left there were smears of spices mixed with water on the floor, laid out in mixtures like paint on an easel and a tangy whiff hanging in the air.
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| Tim Bromage |
After this we switched gears to Tim Bromage. Dressed in a smart suit he launched straight into a solemn poem about the story of Icarus. My heart sank a bit; "oh well, you can't win them all". But then with perfect comic timing he broke out of his reverie and flipped things around; raising his eyebrows and remarking candidly that this was all a bit too serious. En masse, we exhaled in a burst of relieved laughter. But it was what came next that was truly interesting. Picking up a banjo he began to play, but stopped mid-way through having, (as he put it) "lost it". Again he tried and again he stopped. And again. The crowd grew anxious. Tim seems like such a nice guy that we all wanted him to succeed - and then it struck me that this collective will for him to succeed might have been the whole point of the exercise.
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| Charlotte Hailey-Watts |
Next up was Charlotte Hailey-Watts with an audio piece. With butcher's grass lain on the floor, the scratchy sound of the inner loop of a Tears for Fears record infinitely brushing away, a backing track from a laptop playing and a mic in her hand she slowly constructed a sonic soundscape. The bit I found the most interesting was how she positioned herself within all this. Supplicated on a rectangular mat Hailey-Watts looked as if she was engaged in Salat - the Islamic prayer. It created a interesting frisson between her free-form, outsider style rubbing up against a thousand years of concrete institutionalism. At the conclusion of the performance she lay down and went to sleep on the mat, creating an oasis of calm. This dead stop was apparently the cue for another performer to begin, but for me it worked as a much needed meditative break.
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| Emma Louvelle |
Entering the final stretch was Emma Louvelle's dance piece, set to Madonna and a musician I didn't recognise (if anyone knows please comment, it was a nice song!). Louvelle frolicked within symbols of mainstream femininity: makeup, body hair removal, cuddly toys and pop music; transforming mundanity and fluffy stereotypes into a viciously sharp weapon. Lit from behind like a detective conducting an interrogation she ran a razor over her legs and smeared rouge over her face, ending up as a shamanic, over-the-top caricature of what a woman 'should' be.
After that was Christian Patracchini, who rolled a series of silver-spray painted marbles against a wall. After the vicious energy of what had just come before this felt a little too austere for my liking. Sure you can get a dab of kinetic enjoyment from the clickety-clack of the marbles bumping into each other and the randomness of their interactions was at least pretty interesting to look at, but it seemed oddly subdued compared to what had comed before. We were heading towards the end of the night now, so this sudden drop in momentum was a bit disappointing. That said, towards the end he started hurling the marbles at the wall so hard that they pinged back towards the us at high velocity. That's the kind of stuff I enjoy: particularly watching members of the audience quietly yelping in surprise as they took a high velocity marble to the shin.
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| Ram Samocha & Gerald Royston Curtis |
The final performance was a joint work between Ram Samocha and Gerald Royston Curtis. They popped up two black and white sheets of paper on the wall and began to draw on them with huge, exaggerated motions. I think Gerald was writing 'zapamiętać' in overlaid letters on his (Polish for 'memorise') while Ram was running through a numeric sequence. As the drawings became more built up the meanings collapsed into a tangled pile of loops and lines, something compounded when they switched sides and began to draw on each other's work. Consciously or not, these pictures summed up many of the marks we'd already seen made that night; the loops of Sara Zaltash, the smeared iron ore of Charlotte Law, the dust in the air the spice of Nicolina Stylianou and the painted footprints of Luisa Amorim.
At the end of the night the gallery felt properly inaugurated, the space now inhabited by the same spirit of playful adventurousness that characterised everything I enjoyed about the old warehouse. I'm already looking forward to the next time I'm there!
(apologies for anyone's performance I didn't cover - I had to pop out for a bit and I think I missed at least one. Let me know if I've gotten anyone's name wrong.)
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