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Showing posts with label performance art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance art. Show all posts
Friday, May 22, 2026
Friday, May 22, 2026
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Werner Herzog described the jungle as "fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain."
They're words that always come to my mind whenever someone's getting all dewy-eyed over the majesty of nature. It's always tempting to wax poetic about the prettiness of a falling leaf or whatever, but at its base level, nature is a frantic scrabble of organisms trying to kill each other in the hope they're lucky enough to reproduce and toss a fresh generation into this hell.
But what's your part in this cycle if you can't have kids? Do you just lie down in the mud and let yourself rot away? This question is at the heart of Charlotte CHW's currently unfinished On Barren Hill, which I very much enjoyed.
The piece is about her own experiences with infertility and how that affects her "connection to the natural world". That's evident from the moment you step into the performance space, which has a pleasant organic aroma from the small piles of moss on the ground and gathered ferns. It's also obvious before a single word is uttered, courtesy of an eye-catching "living dress" featuring more moss, lichen, and wool, designed to appear as if it's naturally formed itself around the wearer.
What follows is 90 minutes of poetry, dance, and singing - combined into a cohesive ritual. Leaving aside all the subjective analysis stuff for a moment, On Barren Hill is extremely entertaining throughout. Now, performance art doesn't need to be entertaining or even particularly enjoyable - but if you're doing a 90-minute show it really helps if it's both those things.
This is. Frankly, there's probably enough going on in On Barren Hill to fill two shows. I particularly enjoyed the operatic singing as it's a performance element you can't really muddle your way through and hope for the best. That these musical parts are so successful underlines the effort that's gone into making the show a reality. By the time it's over, this effort is extremely visible on the (understandably) perspiring Charlotte, who's clearly thrown everything and the kitchen sink into making this the best show it can be.
My main takeaway from the show was a lingering and unresolved sense of injustice with the natural world. Everything in nature is swarming with reproductive life: from rock pools to forest floors to tree canopies to the inside of a cell. How can it possibly be fair that everything else in nature can be so obscenely and visibly reproducing itself, while some random quirk of biology shuts you out of the party?
Then you start to think of the unbroken chain of life connecting you to your parents, your grandparents, and so on, right back to some protozoic slime glued to the side of an ancient rock billions of years ago. All those millions of genetic links through time, and you left as the unfortunate full stop at the end of a very long run-on sentence.
There's no real upside or silver lining to any of this stuff, you just have to play the hand you've been dealt and try to make some sense of it all. And this is On Barren Hill, which is sprawling, raw, and messy - but these are sprawling, raw, and messy things to try and figure out.
I loved this show in its unfinished form: the rougher edges made the message hit home harder. I'm also curious about where it goes from here!
On Barren Hill (work in progress) is at the Old Net Loft as part of the Brighton Fringe on 23 May 2026. Tickets here.
Photo Credit: Dexter Robinson
Monday, August 7, 2017
Monday, August 7, 2017
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Katy Baird's Workshy made me remember the shittest job I've ever had. I was unemployed, Christmas was just around the corner and quickly needed some money in my pocket. So I turned up at a Whalley Range job agency and said "I need a job. Any job will do. I don't care." The next day I got up at 3am and trudged a couple of miles through freezing winter to clean a branch of Matalan.
It sucked, but in retrospect, those early mornings spent encrusted shit off a Matalan toilet was a useful reminder not to get too high and mighty in life: after all, you're only ever a couple of bad decisions away from grimly plugging away at a clogged bog at 6am.
This kind of reminiscing fuels Workshy, an excellent performance piece in which performer Katy Baird guides us through twenty years of employment. In the opener, she explains that her jobs fall into five categories: food, booze, sex, drugs and offices. What follows is a trek through Burger King kitchens, Wetherspoons pub, Butlins fish n' chip shops, drug dealing, online sex work and, finally, employment in the arts.
Baird seems like a glass-half-full kinda person, so perspective on the service industry is actually pretty positive. There are moans about the soulless and vaguely creepy Burger King training videos staff are forced to watch ("Empathise with your guests" one intones, then over plinky plonky piano music we learn that this customer has breast cancer, or that a woman eating chicken nuggets has just had a miscarriage), but what sticks in her memory was the camaraderie and friendship between staff.
Very quick, she also proves ballsy as fuck, giving us a casual run down on how easy it is to make a tonne of money dealing drugs, complete with tips for sending ket through the post and how to buy MDMA on credit and then upsell it in nightclubs. It turns out that Baird and I went to some of the same nightclubs, so it was a good nostalgia hit to hear her talking about bribing the bouncers at Sankeys Soap in Ancoats to sell pills on the dancefloor.
The sequence is a brilliantly unashamed advert for drug dealing, Baird explaining that the job gets you invited to all the best parties, you make a tonne of friends and (duh) you've got a load of really fun drugs lying around all the time. There's also the neat observation that being the centre of social attention is addictive in and of itself. The point to all this comes in a sharply satirical video that parodies business management courses, filled with language about growing your business and increasing your profit margins. After all, the government wants to encourage private enterprise and small business, but please not by chemically enlightening your friends and family.
Then we get into the sex work, presented with precisely the same matter-of-factness as everything else in the show. I'm not going to spoil what happens here, but fucking hell Baird is committed to this act.
Workshy is exciting and unpredictable - but more than that it's superhumanly honest. There's a tangible aura of reality to the show, coupled with the realisation that the life Katy describes is simply the way things are for the millions of people working low paid jobs in the service industry. Baird puts a silver lining on this cloud, and concluding with a subtle but pointed argument for the benefits of state funded university education. paid for by the state.
There's a whole bunch of great stuff in this show that I'm not talking about because the surprise is half the fun, but I will say there are treats galore in this show that I can guarantee you won't see anywhere else on the Fringe. I can already tell that Workshy is going to be one of my most treasured memories of this festival so please,
SEE THIS SHOW.
SEE THIS SHOW.
Workshy is at Summerhall, Edinburgh Aug 6-8, 10-15, 17-20, 22-27. Tickets here.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Thursday, August 25, 2016
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Something peculiar happened last night in Clapham. From within a well-to-do townhouse came billowing clouds of talc, dusting the street in a thin alabaster layer. If you'd have glanced up, you might have been a naked woman, face whited out, hurling fistfuls of the stuff from an open window. This is The Skeleton House.
With its owner mysteriously absent, the house is in the custody of artists, who are using it as a home, studio, residency, workshop and exhibition space. Considering that performance art tends to take place in industrial warehouses, semi abandoned buildings in odd areas and (occasionally) car parks, it's surreal to step through the door of a typical terraced house and find someone licking the walls with a mirror strapped to their back.
That someone is Natalie Ramus with Site:Requite:Trace. Sadly, these are the last days of The Skeleton House as the owner is returning in early September. In just a few weeks this curious suburban anomaly will revert to type, though Ramus aims to pay tribute to the way the place has cradled the people that've lived and worked within its walls.
To achieve that, she's blindfolded herself, strapped a mirror to her back, wrapped a ribbon umblical cord around her body (trailing off somewhere upstairs) and spent the night licking the walls. It's a strange kind of communion; a performance utterly unconcerned with actually being observed. As we arrive, Ramus is the only person who's begun, so she gathers a little appreciative crowd. Then, as the other performances start up, people filter away. Eventually she's left alone, blindly exploring the house in slow motion with her tongue as the primary sensory organ.
She ends up licking the fireplace, observed by only one person. It's gentle, meditative and quietly respectful, somehow sanctifying the house. Her contributions (and those of the other artists) pile up against the ghosts of the past and future Claphamites to come.
This segues nicely into Sebastian Hau-Walker's Ausculta (Vision Serpents). On heading into the kitchen we're instructed to take a set of wireless headphones, a pillow, an orange and lie down on the floor. Projected onto the ceiling is grainy camcorder footage of Sebastian as a boy, graduating from kindergarten and generally being a rather sweet child. Meanwhile, the adult Sebastian perches like a gargoyle on the kitchen counter, dressed in Clockwork Orange white and a mortarboard.
He then creeps along the kitchen counter, orange clenched between his teeth. As he explores the cupboards he finds VHS tapes (presumably of the projections). As he hums Auld Lang Syne he bashes them against his head and the oven, eventually cracking them open. Then he takes the reels of tape and fixes them to the ceiling, causing them to unspool in a beautiful silvery column, piling up in shimmering heaps on the audience. By the end of the performance he's naked, wearing a tattered black cloak of tape and surrounded by the physical remains of his treasured family memories.
There's a lot of meaning to unpack here, but this is a kickass piece of performance art. In purely visual terms the sight of videotape unfurling in liquid columns from the ceiling is absolutely fascinating to watch. I had the fortune to be sat right below one of them and the sensation of tape piling up on my face and chest was fantastically, awesomely weird.
And what does it all mean? Well, probably only Sebastian knows the full story, but it's certainly autobiographical and deeply personal. It's easy to try and fill in the blanks between the child on screen and the adult bashing a videotape against his skull. Other than the home videos, we hear distorted heartbeats and fuzzy organic soundscapes through the headphones. By the end of we're laying amongst the jumbled, frozen knots of his own history, now just piles of polyethelene.
Unpicking things a little further, Sebastian makes reference to his Mayan heritage in the introduction. Following a bit of post performance Wikipediaing, the serpentine quality of the unspooling tape and Sebastians actions make this a translation of a Mayan bloodletting ritual. This facilitates communication between the past and present - which we see all to viscerally in the distorted, artifacted videoportal projected onto the ceiling. On top of that, by the end he's quite literally cloaked in his own past, the tape echoing feathered ceremonial cloaks that signified the spiritual power of the Shaman.
It was dead good stuff and precisely the kind of performance art I like: sincere, unironic and refreshingly open. Sebastian's personal connection to symbology and use of his own history rendering it devoid of the masturbatory obscurantism that can gum up pieces like this.
Last up were Alicia Radage and Robert Hardaker with S O M E T I M E S W E W E A R A N T L E R S / / S O M E T I M E S W E W E A R H O R N S. This felt like The Wicker Man on diazepam.
Mostly naked apart from a couple of twigs, Robert and Alicia stood facing a bedroom wall. At the centre of the room was a chair sat in a big pile of talcum powder. Dangling from the ceiling was fishing wire festooned with white-painted leaves. In achingly slow motion, the pair navigated towards each other along the wall, eventually coming together in an embrace. Ordinarily this would look sorta sexual, but Robert's cock and balls were bound up in a gaff, leaving him flat and androgynous.
Then Alicia moved to the chair, with Robert sat alongside her. With precise motions she constructed a tall of twine and twigs around his head, leaving him looking like he'd walked out of a Guillermo del Toro movie. When the crown was finished, he began to writhe around, pulling down the dangling leaves with a satisfying *twhip* as the cords gave way. He then stood in front of Alicia and removed the gaff, letting his cock dangle free.
Alicia stared on blankly, then, as Robert kneeled in front of her, she got up and began to toss big heaping fistfuls of talcum powder out of the window into the street - as if the very house had begun to boil. Then, shaking out the sheet on the chair, a blastwave of white enveloped the room. To cap it off they retreated to their rear of the room and gently anointed each other with red wine, concluding the performance.
So what does all that mean? Beats me. But whatever it was, it was extraordinarily beautiful and hypnotic, a mysterious ritual that felt equal parts pagan and fetish, but with a warm undercurrent of affection and a subtle romance to it. It's easy to read Alicia as representing a historical all-femininity, beginning as a powerful matriarch and gradually being transformed into the submissive by the increasingly unbound masculine presence that swirls around her. But then, in the finale we're all coated in the same flesh and working from the same organic baseline, represented by the ashlike powder around them.
It's also startlingly intimate; a performance that all but demanded silence and attention from those concerned. The atmosphere felt a bit like being in church, the kind of instinctive hush that comes over a crowd in the presence of religious superseriousness. Sustaining this over more than hour requires some serious performance chops, not just to maintain this intensity for so long, but the confidence to know that people will be fascinated by it.
Walking out of there I felt like my brain had been in for an MOT. I really should do more writing about performance art - I miss seeing stuff so strange, so open to interpretation, so unconstrained by commercial considerations and so utterly fearless. A hell of a night, and a wonderful way to close out The Skeleton House.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
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Feels like it's been a while since I last sat in a drafty Hackney Wick warehouse watching East London artists at play. Christmas Wishlist, organised by Theatrefullstop, is a smörgåsbord of the arts; encompassing theatre, dance, monologues, comedy, circus acts, poetry and burlesque.
First up is We Play Projects with what is ominously described as an "avant garde musical". That's the kind of phrase that sends a chill through any critic's bones, imagining some impenetrable chunk of po-faced obscurantism. Fortunately, We Play Projects come at this with sense of humour and willingness to get a bit self-deprecating. As two performers lasciviously writhe around one another, while another chants "this must be art", a third annoyedly exclaims that she's not getting paid for any of this, worries about losing her wallet (then finds it) and finally heads to the bar to order a drink and gossip with the bartender. The performance ends with a bit of puking; to their credit I'm not sure whether it was real puke or not.
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| We Play Projects |
Next up is Jessica Andrade, who emerges to the rattlingly 90s tones of the Spice Girls' Spice Up Your Life. This is The Brownie Club, a comedic circus piece about the performer's memories of racism in school. Andrade proves to be impressively chameleonic, the most impressive moment coming as she dons a sari and, for a couple of minutes, plays the stereotypically submissive Asian girl, before lapsing back into her Londony tones.
Following that is the confessional Sex With Your Ex by Ese Ighorae. Raw and ragged, Ighorae snowballs from emotionally bruised to wounded to half-dead, explaining that to her ex she's "Lidl not Sainsburys". Ouch. Things only get darker from there; a performance infused with white-hot fury and miserable regret at those who've taken advantage of her, and worse, at herself for allowing them to.
More dance next with Emi Del Bene, fusing contemporary dance with Bharatanatyam. A likeable stage presence, she endears herself to us the moment she off-handedly remarks about how cold the floor is on her bare feet. To Fabrizio De André's Il sogno di Maria, del Bene expressively twirls and gesticulates, her motions translated into sound by the jingling bells on her feet. De Andre's song is about profane and anarchic readings of Christian religion, so it's appropriate that her dance includes ritual dancing from a different cultures. Perhaps it was a touch too literally choreographed (touching her back when the song mentions vertebrae for example), but given that the majority of the audience won't speak Italian, this is an easy criticism to duck.
Prior to the interval we get a spoken-word monologue from Adam Tyler. The organisers have been asked beforehand to tell us as little as possible about it, but from the first minute or so it's obvious what's going on. Tyler's playing the biblical Judas, out to explain himself and moan that he's become the byword for betrayal. In the delivery I detected more than a whiff of Tony Blair; behaving as if fancy rhetoric can paper over crimes against humanity.
Post interval, the next performer was Cici Noir with a short burlesque performance. To the rolling electric guitars of Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats Noir squirms all over a chair and to slightly muted whoops partially strips. I haven't really got anything against burlesque, but this performance felt out of place amongst the other pieces. The best 'arty' burlesque has some kind of twist, but this was just someone taking off their clothes to MOR soft-rock.
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| Letters to Centre Stage |
Fortunately the next piece marked a definite up-tick in quality. Letters to Centre Stage, set within a Nigerian girls boarding school, consisted of an extended debate over Western reactions to the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. The central character, played by Ese Ighorae, is a London born and raised girl unhappily relocated at the will of her uncle. She attempts to defend her position against the incisive comments of her classmates. Evocatively written and performed, the piece probes at the edges of British quasi-racist apathy to events in Africa, the lingering aftereffects of colonialism and the ineffectiveness of 'feel good' gestures in the face of genuine evil. It was brill - thrumming with the precise kind of electric directness I crave.
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| Dois Stupid Girls |
Next up was Dois Stupid Girls, with a circus themed comedic performance. I think the plot was about a girl wishing for an elf, then the two overcoming their suspicions with each other and becoming fast friends. Considering the generally festive tone of the invitation and venue, the night was up to this point a bit lacking in Christmassyness. Stupidity made up for it, a gentle and heartwarming piece that reminded me a bit of a live-action Pixar short.
The final performance was the balls-out craziness of Ugly Collective, with a "circus sex tragedy". In practice this involved some seriously dangerous looking stunts, involving walking across a broken glass and lying down in it, before charging about the stage with sharpened kitchen knives with reckless abandon. It's a bit scary to see something that looks genuinely dangerous on stage - reaching a height when they attaching carving knives to a woman's feet and encouragie her to wobble across the room like a particularly stabby penguin. The piece was performed with such wilful disregard for health and safety that the person sat next to me evacuated their seat in terror - a ringing endorsement. There were hints of Nietzsche throughout, but frankly I've got no goddamn idea what this was about. Fun to watch though.
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| Ugly Collective |
All in all a pretty damn fine night out. Grab-bags like these may be of variable quality, but common to all was a spirit of adventure and willingness to experiment. Also, I won a bottle of wine in the raffle, so there's a nicely alcoholic cherry on top of the cake.
Monday, October 26, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
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Swaddled in fairy lights, tiara-clad and wound up into roll of fabric; you're not going to mistake anyone else for Silvia Ziranek. She was performing at the Bloomsbury Festival, which marks the International Year of Light 2015, taking 'LIGHT' at its theme.
A little light was desperately needed - this was a rather gloomy day: London squatted under a corpse-coloured sky that couldn't make up its mind whether to properly rain or not. Worse the performance took place inside a big beige tent on the grounds of Mary Ward's house. She was President of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League: who vociferously campaigned against the suffragettes on the basis that: "constitutional, legal, financial, military, and international problems are problems only men can solve" as women have a "disability of sex".
Jeepers, talk about being on the wrong side of history...
Anyway, underneath this oppressive weather, inside an uninspiring tent and within the grounds of a house with unpleasant historical reverberations, Silvia was a bright core of light, giving us a performance that consisted of her miming a poem in semaphore, reciting it, explaining what it all meant and finally performing it again so we can view it through 'new' eyes.
Silvia's approaches language like a topiarist approaches a particularly tangled hedge, pruning and snipping away anything extraneous until some carefully shaped beauty emerges. In her case it's usually clipped and cryptic semi-sentences delivered with perfect enunciation and confidence. The end result is, for example:
"culture couture to some dressy dream / a frock come true / can ask advice on shelving / for a castle zoo / can buy the Mai Tai / as I wordly rhyme in lovement with in sock and in soul / wool wash"
Her language is so dense it all but requires the audience do some mental legwork to get anything from it. I love it: you can sense a core of meaning, but this is poetry as Rorschach test, any insight you glean the product of an invisible collaboration between yourself and Silvia.
That said, it's not for everyone. A couple of times I've taken friends along to these performances and they've ended up largely baffled. So it was with some surprise that she spent much of the performance explaining precisely what her actions and words meant, revealing that the piece was originally intended for the 'Art For Africa' campaign - being originally performed at Sotheby's.
She gradually unravelled her language, pointing out references to Tilda Swinton's "The Maybe", in which she slept inside a glass box in the Serpentine Gallery, castles in which she'd been invited to perform at, references to photographic work and so on. I've always suspected that Silvia quite enjoyed being an enigma, so I was surprised to see her go all Rosetta Stone on us.
Then again, it makes my job a hell of a lot easier when an artist explains precisely what they're up to. Additionally, watching the same performance twice, once without context and once with is genuinely transformative. Some people seem to assume that performance art is playing Emperor's New Clothes; being obscure and difficult to disguise that there's nothing underneath. This piece disproves all that - getting under the skin of a piece and communicating a straightforward (but no less satisfying message).
Aside from the lights sprinkled about her torso, the explanation was the true illumination - lifting Silvia's bonnet and shining a torch on the pistons and gears that thrum away under her lid. A pleasure as always.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Sunday, April 12, 2015
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As I watched a man beat himself over the head with a cymbal, I wondered just what the hell I'm doing here. Most people are probably tucked up on their sofas watching Masterchef or something, while I'm stood in the back room of a pub watching listening to a cacophonous atonal din punctuated by minor acts of mutilation. This, combined with beetle-ish paper scluttings, biorhythmic koto projects, lectures on injection moulding and freakshow prawn-stars (among many other things) comprises Cerebellum, a live art project that straddles London and Hastings.
Packed behind the red curtain of The Stag's Head was an tonne of fascinating art, not just the performances, but self contained exhibits and a plethora of displayed art on the walls. With this much on I can't cover everything - so here's my favourites.
Taking the prize for most cryptic use of materials was Sadie Edginton with room-spanning creative performance. Working with plastic wrap, a roll of paper, charcoal, water and a Styrofoam buoy her dog found on the beach, she explored the idea of 'artist-as-implement'. Dividing the crowd in two she rolled plastic wrap down the middle of the room and sprinkled water on top. Then she affixed a sheet of paper to her back and scuttled across the room, the white paper looking like an insectoid carapace as it unfolded behind her. Following that she worked back and forth, chipping charcoal on the floor, gradually creating a series of smudged black lines across the paper.
It reminded me of a performance of hers that I participated in about a year ago - I was wrapped up in paper and rolling around back and forth on the floor, repetition gradually destroying raw materials. A similar process happened here; the paper becoming torn and ripped, the charcoal ground into dust - even the artist herself getting grimy. I also enjoyed the idea of visually revealing a person's impact on their environment, grooves and erosion that could take years to be revealed happening in the space of a couple of minutes.
Next up was Hysteresis, who are event organiser Charlotte CHW and Jason Williams. The performance began with Charlotte emerging from a paper chrysalis while singing a creepily off-key cover of Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown. As weird as that was, it was nothing compared to what was to come. Taking to the stage, the two began viciously assaulting a variety of instruments and objects. An electric guitar got the worst treatment, emitting steady shrieks of pain as it was brutalised every which way by first Charlotte, and then Jason.
Things got increasingly more demented from then on. A gigantic lump of clay thudded rhythmically into the stage, knobs were twiddled and boxes were beaten. Some kind of gigantic home-made stringed instrument was produced from backstage and first played, then thwomped onto the stage in a clatter of bolts. It was at this point that heads began poking through the curtain, the pub locals wondering what the fuck was making such a din. This was capped off with Charlotte stumbling off stage, a hypnotic daze in her eyes. Jason had some part of a lamp attached to him and was beating his head with a cymbal - leaving a solitary trickle of blood down his face.
Despite all the mayhem, I found this performance quite relaxing. As with Sadie's performance, creation/destruction neatly dovetails into one another. Even as the objects on stage (and the performers) undergo violent transformation, fresh sounds and motions poke through like green shoots. It's also a pleasantly honest performance, both performers quickly transitioning into a reflexive, instinctive processes that're completely ego free. It got a deservedly impressed round of applause.
My favourite of the night was Eleanor Fogg's facial projection performance. Sat in front of a three panelled makeup mirror, she placed a miniature projector on the table and invited the audience onto the stage. To the sounds of what (I'm told was) a warped, time-shifted version of No Doubt's Don't Speak, we shuffled around, looking at the illuminated face in the mirror.
Then her features melted, shifted and rearranged before our eyes. It was an astonishingly effective and hallucinogenic performance: eyebrows becoming bushy, lips plumping to engorged redness, eyes sprouting from the side of her head, a beard morphing out of her cheeks. Using a projector in this fashion is a deceptively simple idea - a concept that must have been done before. But to see it done with such precision and artistry blew my mind.
At the core of the piece is an exploration of identity and gender in the digital age. As we blankly stare into our 'black mirror' screens we can become whoever we want - sultry vixen, bearded philosopher, old man, immature child, violent psychopath - the list of possible personae limited only to our imaginations. Here we see this process visualised; versions of the artist swimming in fluid motion across her face. Beautiful, moving and so damn good.
Those three were my favourites, though it'd be remiss of me not to mention Pulses, Michelle Lewis-King and Sumie Kent's collaboration. After taking pulse readings from six members of the audience (including myself) they were interpreted as beautifully improvised music by Kent. Watching someone so skilful at work is pleasure enough for me, the intense concentration and creative skill a pleasure to watch in a pub backroom.
Similarly enjoyable was Jasmine Lee's prawn performance.This cocktail of maternal/cannibalistic love is precisely as enjoyable as when I saw it at What the Fuck Is Love?" a month or so ago. Samuel Hailey-Watts also gave a masterfully dull slide-based lecture on injection moulding, achieving an almost transcendental level of perfect boredom.
By the time the night was up I knew exactly why I come to nights like this; because they're cool as all hell. Who on earth would want to be slumped over a ready meal, hoovering up crap TV when they could be out watching awesome people do awesome things? Boring people - that's who. And they were in mercifully short supply at Cerebellum.
Cerebellum continues in Hastings with:
12th April Exhibition continues 11am-5pm with an artist’s roundtable at 2pm
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
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Almost a year ago I attended Cerebellum, my friend Charlotte CHW's performance art evening. Now, Cerebellum returns! Split between Hastings and London, I'm sure the place will witness all manner of imaginative, odd, profound and mind-bending examples of cutting edge performance (and other) art. So check it out! I'll be at the Stag's Head tomorrow, 7pm.
Here's the press release:
Cerebellum
2015 Relaunch Press Release
Cerebellum
is Latin for “Little Brain”, the part of the organ responsible
for motor functions, fear and pleasure responses. Cerebellum
is a cross-country live and interdisciplinary not-for-profit arts
platform established in May 2014 by artist and curator Charlotte CHW
in London. Cerebellum is now hosting events and exhibitions in London
and Hastings, provoking dialogue and collaboration between
experimental and innovative practitioners in London and the South
East.
This
April, Cerebellum will re-launch with a week of events in both
locations and an exhibition featuring live art, sound art, film and
video, sculpture, participatory installation, ceramics, spoken word,
live drawing, workshops and more. Some artists will feature in London
and Hastings events presenting the same work at both, others 2
different pieces of work. Certain artists will only appear at one
event. Affordable work will be for sale at both events.
Advance
entry only to the events only includes a limited edition mini-print
by Charlotte CHW to be collected on the night or those unable to
attend are welcome to buy an eticket and have the print posted to
their address for no extra charge.
Programme
and Tickets
London
Hastings
10th
April Live
Event with Performances, screenings, sounds and more plus DJs and
visuals Rock House (2nd
Floor, Art School), 49-51 Cambridge Road, Hastings, 7pm, £3 advance
www.wegottickets.com
11th
April Exhibition continues
11am-5pm with an experimental and collaborative drawing workshop with
Marie-Louise Miller at 2pm
12th
April Exhibition
continues 11am-5pm with an artist’s roundtable at 2pm
Featured
artists (please check sites for location):
Blue
Tapes, Christine Binnie Justyna Burzynska, Charlotte CHW & Maike
Zimmerman Sadie Edginton, Glenn Fitzpatrick, Eleanor Fogg, Sharon
Haward Hysteresis, Jasmine Lee, Michelle Lewis-King & Sumie Kent,
Emma Louvelle, Samuel Reynolds, Ilia Rogatchevski, Eleanor Sparrow,
Layla Tibbe, Samuel Hailey-Watts, Mark Scott-Wood, Sebastian Melmoth
(sound installation) Jason Williams Maike Zimmerman
For
more information see facebook.com/cerebellum_arts or @Cerebellum_arts
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
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Bloody pavement greeted me as I left Peckham Rye station on Saturday afternoon. Moments before I arrived, some guy had his hand chopped off by unknown assailants. Now, with the street festooned with POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, forensic detectives swabbed blood off the concrete. Twenty minutes later everything was back to normal; smiling shoppers wandering down the street, over the rapidly coagulating bloodstains. It was a dislocating experience: I'd come for art, not mutilation.
Tucked away in the shadow of the attractively crumbling Bussey Building, between warehouses that ship goods to sub-Saharan Africa and optimistically affluent pop-up cocktail bars, Bosse & Baum isn't the easiest place to find. I'm helped when, as I'm wandering around, I'm accosted by a silent Romanian-looking woman wearing a leering mask of Nigel Farage.
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| There There (from their website) |
Discombobulated, I was led into a warehouse and into a small tent. Shoved inside, the door was zipped up tight. Within sat a similarly dressed woman, this time wearing a David Cameron mask. She popped some headphones on me, from which burbled a robotic drawl. She then performed a silent palm reading before instructing me to clap my hands like a seal, then ushered me from the tent. My initial reaction? "What the hell was that?!"
Later research revealed this to be There There, performing a piece called Text Home to 78070 (the name taken from the famously crap Home Office campaign of the same name). Jamming together a stereotypical Romanian outfit with the faces of the politicians who'd use their presence for political gain, this work aims to jolt its audience into a new mindset. There's something quietly terrifying about being snatched off the street, shoved somewhere confusing and being given an obtuse lecture, the experience giving the tiniest of tiny tastes of the worst fears of illegal immigrants.
Best of all is the conflation of monstrous, Daily Mail cartoon-ish visual stereotypes of Romanian-as-monster and the actual monsters of Cameron and Farage. Their smugly satisfied faces peering out from patterned headscarves chill the viewer to the bone; eyes like sharks and jaws locked in mock humour. This is my kind of performance; aggressive, ragged and intensely political.
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| Charlotte Law |
After a quick pop out for some dinner, during which I unfortunately missed Ana Mendes' Self Portrait, I returned just in time for Charlotte Law's Ode Action. I'm friends with Charlotte and have attended a number of her performances over the last few years. Judging from what I've seen she's locked in a neverending loop - rigorously reconfiguring and reworking ever more worn materials.
From within a crinkled space blanket emerge what I'm pretty sure are the remnants of a burnt piano. This together with other junkyard ephemera, is placed on bungee cords suspended from the ceiling. Soon a row of gently bobbing Blair-Witch-a-like mobiles is improvised, weird new structures created from trash. Law continues this across the space; new shapes popping up, things being speared on one another or carefully balanced, before collapsing with a wooden clunk.
She's accompanied by another performer, who contributes apparently random barks of noise, before bending over to twiddle with a variety of gadgets, all of which emit ominous sounding voices. By way of reply, Law occasionally vocalises a stream of guttural sounds in a language I either don't recognise, or that's made up. There's a quiet aggressiveness to this that borders in nihilism, as if Law is playing in the ashes of a burnt world. Here form, language and architecture have deteriorated to their base elements, being cut up into jagged and unfamiliar new shapes.
Following that was Justyna Scheuring's Didn't you know that. Scheuring bores holes in the audience with a baleful glare, apparently regarding us with a mixture of contempt and disappointment. Wearing a superhero-styled black body suit and silver top she stands atop a small step and says either "Yes. Yes." or "No. No.". As she does this an assistant activates a smoke machine, sending polite plumes of dry ice into the audience.
Two things can happen after this. If Scheuring says 'Yes', she will find a place to pose in the gallery space, often imitating the body language of action of someone in the audience. If she says 'No', she will find a spot and let out a bloodcurdling scream. She's got a deadpan poker face throughout, the ridiculousness of what we're watching eventually sending rippled giggles around the hushed crowd.
Easy highlights are the held moments when she picks on someone and maliciously eyes them, conducting a clinical dissection with her gaze alone. Next is when she's stalking the room looking for a space to scream. At one point we hear a timid knock on the gallery door. Like a shark scenting blood she makes a beeline for it, and presently we hear her yelling into the Peckham dusk. After this she dons protective pads, thumping herself around on the floor and walls before tottering about in heels with a piece of tinfoil in her mouth.
I have no idea what the hell this means - but I'm guessing this is a catharsis that can only be achieved with the hungry eyes of an audience upon the artist. I hopegenerally doomy presence was an act. If so, it's an impressive one. If it's not I hope that the performance - whatever it meant - helped in some way. Either way it was a pleasantly baffling experience.
A pretty neat evening of performance art in a pretty neat place. And, vicious street amputations aside, a wonderful time was had in Peckham.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
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Well, it's a combination of neurotransmitters, sex hormones and neuropeptides. When you spot an appropriate mate your subconscious zings, activating dopamine pathways in the brain. Vasopressin saturayes the ventral pallidum, as does oxytocin in the nucleus accembens. Meanwhile the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus mediates your attachment behaviour, making you go all gooey eyed as you lock eyes over a crowded dancefloor. This, in combination with a spritz of testosterone and estrogen (and trace amines phenethylamine and tyramine) powers lust. That giddy fluttering in the heart? A neat cocktail of norepinephrine and serotonin, also contributing to your restless and decreased appetite.
Well, that's one way of looking at it anyway. Cushion (pronounced K'Shon) Collective have a few others. Love is the pining of an endangered albatross driven to online dating. Love is the maternal cannibalism of one woman and her prawnchild. Love is the masochistic self-hypnosis of a moth caressing a flame. Et cetera.
Cushion Collective are; Sam Reynolds, Fauve Alice, Jasmine Lee, Scarlett Lassoff, Gerald Curtis, Felix Briant, Hannah Davis, Sophie Wakefield and Jessica McKerlie. I'm familiar with nearly all of these performers, am friends with a couple and have worked closely with at two of them. At last year's Hackney WickED Festival they packed out The Yard Theatre, putting on a show that was by all accounts pretty wonderful. I wish I'd made it, but at the time I was coated in raw egg and thus friend to no-one.
Last night, in the studio theatre of the Camden Roundhouse, the Collective struck again. Using the dual misery/cuteness of Valentine's Day as a kicking off point, the artists explorrf love through cabaret, performance, comedy and music. Our guide was Sam Reynolds, who took the stage to the trashy plastic pop beat of #Selfie. Clad in denim hot pants he cavorted around the stage lasciviously rubbing his selfie stick. It's crude, but as a distillation of 21st century identity masturbation, thrusting a telescopic cock substitute at the audience while taking photos of yourself is hard to beat.
With that we're off, each performer getting two or three quick segments within the show. There weren't any duds, but there were a few performers that stood out for me, memorable moments that stick to the mind like a chewing gum chud on the bottom of a bus seat.
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| From L-R Sophie Wakefield, Jasmine Lee, Gerald Curtis, Felix Briant, Fauve Alice, Sam Reynolds, Scarlett Lassoff, Hannah Davis |
This was a night peppered with fun costumes, twisted mermaids and feather-topped moths. Both were ace (the moth costume in particular), but the one that lodges firmest is Sophie Wakefield's albatross act. The conceit is that the problems of nature's loneliest bird can be solved with online dating. Taking the form of a cheesy infomercial, Wakefield (beaked, feathered and melancholy) mimed loneliness, brief happiness and breakup. It was goofy but unexpectedly touching, the naturally bird-like body language of the artist used to maximum effect.
Performances like this go a long way towards dispelling tired old performance art clichés. Rightly or wrongly, the general perception of performance artists is of pretentious, obscurantist and painfully self-serious metropolitan hipsters. I know bunch of people who fit this description, eagerly seizing any opportunity to vanish up their own arse (which would be a fairly typical performance). With that in mind it's refreshing to see this pomposity pricked by Scarlett Lassoff, with her pitch perfect piss-take of Marina Abramovic.
Lassoff as Abramovic takes us through her marriage 'technique'. Selecting two members of the audience she leads them through satires of famous performances. Wigs are bound together, eye contact is forced and the 'Great Wall of China' meeting is recreated in slow motion. Throughout we're beset by Abramovic-a-like buzzwords, stentorian commands and that holier-than-thou stare as if she's got personal enlightenment solidly locked down. Now, I kinda like Abramovic's work, but boy oh boy does she prove to be a ripe target for a takedown.
My favourite performance of the night was to come almost at the end. Jasmine Lee's strange, intense, scary piece appeared to take inspiration from the surreal end of cinema and photography. Emerging with a piece of paper with a grass design printed upon it, she proceeded to gradually strip back herself. Running fingers through her hair she pulled ragged chunks out and threw them onto the floor, before inviting me to reach up and remove a shiny chemical face peel. The transparent, plasticky surface distorted her face for a moment, stretching it outwards before springing back to recognition.
Then, as she beckoned to the ceiling we noticed a large pink model prawn dangling from a rope. As Lee leapt up to snatch at it, the prawn danced from her fingers. Eventually she retrieved it, cradling it like a mother and baby. It was almost cute, almost. Then she ripped out its wide, passion-fruit eyes and bit into them, crushing seed and pulp around her face.
I have no idea what the hell this meant, but I deeply dug the whole Lynchian Eraserhead mutant baby murder vibe, the creepiness of the giant prawn imagery combining with Lee's natural gravitas to create something next to impossible to pin down. Everything at What the F*ck Is Love was funny, some were funny and touching, but only Jasmine's was funny and touching and magnetic - sucking me in perfect creepy confident vibes.
So a good night. To appreciate performance art it's usually best to remember the maxim that the artist is under no obligation to entertain the audience. Having an enjoyable time during a performance is strictly optional, true success lying in meaning, aesthetic, form and a thousand other intangible factors. But What the F*ck Is Love was all those as well as being hugely entertaining, which made it a super enjoyable night that everyone involved should be pleased with.
What the F*ck Is Love featured several people I know well. Ticket bought by me.
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