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Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Friday, November 9, 2018
Friday, November 9, 2018
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Reviewed by David James
Rating:
Picture this: I'm sat in the front row of a theatre with four women sat on chairs in front of me. The set is a gigantic piece of curved plastic with no horizon. To an ambient electronica soundtrack, the women simultaneously recite a poem at various speeds and tones, resulting in an overlapping chorus that sounded like "we are the shattering the shimmering this is the shimmering we are the shattered this is the shattering shimmering this is a shattering place..." and so on. This is Sue MacLaine's vessel - and it's hypnotic.
I felt like I was coming up on psychedelics, especially as sitting in the front row seemed to encourage the performers to periodically lock eyes with me - a lazer gaze that was in danger of burning right through my skull. I kinda wobbled on my seat and felt a bit light-headed. t was cool - but what the hell does it mean?
Well, the show bills itself as being about the "radiance of survival", which sounds nice but doesn't exactly clarify things. Clearing things up a bit is that the performance is bookended with a description of the medieval practice of the Anchoress, in which a woman would be walled up inside a church where she would remain for the rest of her life. She'd be fed through holes in the wall, dispense spiritual and personal advice, contemplate the nature of God and, in a pretty metal twist, dig her own grave. Cool.
MacLaine stages the contemporary interpretation of this, with the four performers (Tess Agus, Angela Clerkin, Kailing Fu and Karlina Grace Paseda). They present a spectrum of modern femininity, are walled off from one another (by circles drawn on the stage) and deliver a litany for today. This adds up to a chaotic catalogue of modern life, an avalanche of nouns and verbs about finance, sex, politics, tech and a tonne of other stuff.
It's an almost unbearable avalanche of information, neatly simulating 'worry-fatigue'. There is so much shit going on in the world right now that it's difficult to keep track: you expend your energies campaigning for the NHS just as you worry at the USA's rapid slide to white nationalism while climate change keeps you up at night. Then you watch a TV show about plastic pollution in the oceans - which you'd forgotten about as it had been swallowed up the constant doom-laden cavalcade of bad news. And shit! I should really do more about fixed odds betting terminals...
It's an almost unbearable avalanche of information, neatly simulating 'worry-fatigue'. There is so much shit going on in the world right now that it's difficult to keep track: you expend your energies campaigning for the NHS just as you worry at the USA's rapid slide to white nationalism while climate change keeps you up at night. Then you watch a TV show about plastic pollution in the oceans - which you'd forgotten about as it had been swallowed up the constant doom-laden cavalcade of bad news. And shit! I should really do more about fixed odds betting terminals...
It's too much for one person to handle - you would go nuts if you tried. vessel suggests an alternative, or as writer/director Sue MacLaine puts it: “I would argue that choosing to withdraw and being in silence is a political act. Trying to serve from an internalised place is as valuable as external shouting."
A 'withdrawal' from the depressing realities of life is pretty seductive. After all, what can one person do in the face of a burning, miserable hellworld? Why not just, y'know, pretend that it isn't happening and take some me-time?
But it is awfully convenient to say that doing nothing is a political act and that internalised protest is "as valuable" as doing literally anything to kick back against a culture gone rotten. It leaves the thrust of the show as an off-putting cry for more solipsism in the midst of a planet being ruined by those exact impulses. To put it bluntly: if you conclude that your political action is withdrawal and silence then you are a coward.
Thing is, vessel obviously doesn't agree with that because it's a piece of theatre being loudly performed in public - the opposite of withdrawal and silence. It results in a weirdly conceived show that's a bit like a dog endlessly chasing its own tail.
Perhaps the best indication of its confused priorities is the way the show romanticises the situation of an Anchoress. vessel envisages them as venerated symbols of femininity in a community, their cell functioning as a symbolic womb from which a true understanding of reality can spring from within their isolation. The reality was a medieval peasant with mental problems bricked into a wall - not the best model with which to approach the modern world!
vessel is a fine piece of writing, an aesthetic marvel and a great performance - but it's a call to inactivity. And that's the last thing we need right now.
vessel is at the Battersea Arts Centre until 24 November. Tickets here.
vessel is a fine piece of writing, an aesthetic marvel and a great performance - but it's a call to inactivity. And that's the last thing we need right now.
vessel is at the Battersea Arts Centre until 24 November. Tickets here.
Friday, October 5, 2018
Friday, October 5, 2018
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Reviewed by David James
Rating:
At some point in 2015 we unwittingly entered Hellworld. Now it feels like the planet is spinning off its axis, each glance over the headlines cranking up that churning feeling in your belly that we might be fucked. Sober scientists explain that we're way beyond the point of no return to ecological armageddon, politicians seem to be getting both dumber and uglier, and the large numbers seem happy to retreat into dosed solipsism.
But not everyone. Apples and Snakes, a poetry and spoken word performance organisation, is culminating their 35-year celebrations with Rallying Cry, an ambitious piece of theatre that tries its damnedest to give audiences a kick up the arse.
Set in Battersea Arts Centre (impressively rising from the ashes after the 2015 fire) the audience is divided into various groups of protesters (campaigners, slacktivists, lobbyists etc) and each group follows a marshall around the building, encountering performers in various rooms before gathering together for a big finale in the old council chamber.
There's an impressive list of poets on the programme, but time constraints mean we'll only get to see a selection of them. First on the schedule was dub poet Roger Robinson, who delivered a righteously angry diatribe against the racist killing of a black child by a white gang, asking us to stand up and protest this. Robinson has a magnetic stage presence - and though his rage is tinged with sadness and fatigue, it's no less visceral for it. At one point this extends to the audience - an offhanded comment that should become a politicians draws laughs, only for him to indignantly ask why that is so funny.
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| Roger Robinson |
Towards the end of the performance, he begins to act out the murder, making his own percussive sound effects into a microphone as he mimes the beating - showing us the kicks that broke the boy's jaw and the thrusts of the knife that killed him. It's capped off by a desperately sad moment where he imagines the final thoughts of the victim as he feels his blood seep down onto the pavement. We don't have to imagine this for too long, as it's concluded by dripping red fluid onto a projector, creating a gradually spreading crimson Rorschach behind him.
It was one hell of a performance - worth the price of a ticket alone. Oakley Flanagan's piece, delivered to his own illuminated reflection in a backstage dressing room, is an interesting rumination on identity and the various roles society demands he occupy. But while the piece is entertainingly and charismatically delivered it obfuscates meaning behind flights of literary fancy. There is real pathos and anger here, but it's dressed in so many fabulous layers of wordplay that you only catch glimpses of it.
More effective is Peter deGraft-Johnson in the Council Chamber Dressing Room, who achieves a surprising amount with silence. Beginning with an exuberant performance as a DJ he pauses, removes his headphones and stands in silence. For long moments we just hear the hum of the air conditioning and experience the awkwardness of having nothing to say. He eventually explains that silence is a weapon and can be terrifying when deployed in the right way - a useful perspective in a night that shows how effective words can be.
Antonia Jade King begins immediately afterwards with a lengthy bit of clowning around an over-extended microphone stand. This didn't do much for me, but the actual poem that came afterwards was brill. She speaks about participating in a Women's March and critiquing the casual way whiteness is considered 'normal' at it. It's a neat take-down of Instagram liberalism, with the best moment her indignantly asking why all the vaginas on the placards have to be pink.
After a beautiful performance of The Internationale by Abdul Shyllon, Heidi Vogel, Marcina Arnold and Geniyo, we're moved into to the Council Chamber for the climax. This consists of a beautifully written, delivered and photographed video by Lemn Sissay - the highlight of which is him pointing out that everything around us originated in someone's imagination: the poetry, the music, the roads we travelled here on, the reconstructed Battersea Arts Centre - even the very words we use.
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| Antonia Jade King |
The concept behind this was later described to me as a 'state of the nation' - and this continues in Zena Edwards performance delivered from an upstairs balcony. Looking a little like Eva Peron, she delivers an upbeat piece about the importance of small acts of kindness. This does get a bit inspirational-postery with its commandments to smile at strangers and ask old people how their day was... but what the hell, I'm in a good mood now and this goes down really easy. They're followed by a live band, Tree House Fire, but it's getting late and I have to cycle back to East London.
Aside from the excellent poetry, I'm in awe of the clockwork precision of the night. Ferrying this many people around a building in synchronisation with each other to various performances (all of which must be precisely timed) is one hell of an ambitious undertaking. This experience, combined with the building being interesting in its own right, makes for a great framework: the performances as jewels beautifully set in a crown of competent and intelligent organising.
My only criticism is that knowing there are twelve performers and only getting to see three of them on a single ticket (and for that matter, not being able to choose who you get to see) means that it's impossible to experience everything the night has to offer. That I deeply wanted to do this probably tells you all you need to know about how much I enjoyed it.
Though the world might be fucked beyond saving, it's cheering to know there are pockets of warmth, creativity and talent like this nestled within it. The poster shows a woman waving a sign reading "We Are Better Than This!". I don't know that humanity as a whole is better than how we're currently behaving, but after Rallying Cry, I feel like we can at least imagine a better tomorrow. And as Sissay explained, imagining is the first step to making it reality.
Rallying Cry is at the Battersea Arts Centre from 4-6 October, 19:00 and 20:30 shows. Tickets here.
Saturday, July 19, 2014
Saturday, July 19, 2014
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"This is David. He's a journalist. He's going to write about us". A roomful of eyes turned to me as I sheepishly waved hello. The speaker was David William Parry, Heathen Priest of the Goddess Nerthus, poet, critic, dramaturge, academic - kind of a big cheese in the Pagan community. Ruddy-faced and tweed-clad he fixed me with an authoritative stare that unmistakably read "don't write anything nasty, or else".
I began to wonder just what the hell I'd signed up for. Underneath a sex shop on Goodge Street lies Русский мир, a book shop, restaurant and repository for all things Russian. Inside are a motley gathering of Britain's heathens, heretics and pagans; collectively gathered under the umbrella of 'Theo-Humanist Arts'. They describe themselves as "promoting the cause of radical religious Arts across the globe. We celebrate our shared humanity, while aiming to grasp spiritual truth".
Sounds reasonable enough. The centre of the night was poet Darren Storer, reading from his new book The Recusant Who Never Recanted, an epic collection of poetry that probes the author's beliefs and the hypocritical society that surrounds him. Storer is an incredibly interesting man; a self described powerful psychic prone to dramatic visions and who frequently lapses into trance states while writing, emerging to find pages of text he has no memory of writing. In appropriately reverent tones he explains that he could be channelling Edgar Allen Poe, or even The Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley.
Storer's poetry seeks to make followers of those that experience it, joining him in an epic voyage through a world populated by those antagonistic to him, whose reactions range from incomprehension to aggression. He bats questions away from Christians who interrogate him as to whether he's a Satanist, "I have older friends" he archly replies. As he recites he leans on a cane, grimacing every few lines as he worked his way through a fat bushel of papers.
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| Darren Storer |
At about 40 minutes long this is a one hell of a reading, often feeling as if he's guiding us down the rabbit hole. There's the odd overly forced rhyme and a blizzard of purple prose, but it all hangs together. As Storer spins out his poem it occurs to me that the very act of reading it might be some form of magickal incantation in and of itself. I glance over his wife's Sarah Tiger's paintings hung on the wall next to me - clawed hands reaching through sigils and spiralling pentagrams.
My life keeps intersecting with the occult in all sorts of weird ways. Last year, just after having been invited by the Warberg Institute to examine his personal papers I literally stumbled across the Crowleyian history book Sword of Wisdom by Ithell Colquhoun, which someone had, for some reason, left lying on a Notting Hill pavement. Just a couple of days ago I was enjoyably picking my way through the Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK exhibition in the British Library. I turn a corner and find the staring eyes and hairless pate of Crowley bearing down on me, hearing an audio recording of the man himself tinnily chanting down through the years.
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| Sarah Tiger and one of her paintings. |
I don't buy into the mysterious forces that Crowley claimed to have grasped, but I do respect the man for leading one of the most interesting lives I've ever read about. I'm also fascinated with the history of Occult Britain, which I like to read as a mutant reflection of very British preoccupations for ceremony, tradition and class. But it's one thing to sit around writing about this. It's quite another to be sat in a small, hot room full of people that really sincerely believe.
Looking around I wonder who these people are, what they do and where they go at night. Chatting outside later I learn that they consider themselves a family - members are husbands and wives, godfathers to each other's children and so on. To be honest the word 'family' in this context makes Charlie Manson (that other famous beast of the 20th Century) spring unbidden to mind. I feel guilty making the association, especially as everyone here appears nice and polite enough. That said, I still felt a little bit like Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man.
Adding to my nerviness is knowing the unfortunate tendency of some strands of Paganism to trip over into far right views. Hanging out with Satanist Nazis is the last thing I want to do on a sunny Friday evening, so I find myself desperately hoping that I don't spot any old NF tattooes in this pleasantly diabolical crowd. Thankfully everything feels relatively apolitical - perhaps I've just read a bit too much about the vagaries of Norwegian Black Metal and their predilection for Norse mythology.
I love discovering what's going on in the hidden places of London, sniffing out interesting subcultures and meeting the kinds of people you only hear faint whispers of. In that regard I had a hell of an interesting time - though not knowing anything about theo-humanism or this particular brand of Paganism left me afloat in a deep, murky, unfamiliar sea. As I cycled home my head spun trying to think of some way to conclude my thoughts on the night. Then I stopped off at a supermarket to buy some dinner.
Oh shiiiiiiiit!
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
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My word how the other half live... Somewhere between Shoreditch and Notting Hill there's a invisible meniscus that separates two worlds. One on side the filthy, mouse-infested, damp-ridden leaky hovels of the East and on the other the magnificent, high-ceilinged, airy, art-stuffed townhouses of the West. No prizes for guessing which of these I spend my nights in. I hate turning green with materialist jealousy, but my eyes goggled out of my head as I took in the lovely decor, the paintings and sculptures littering the walls and floor and, most impressively as far as I'm concerned, the bulging floor to ceiling bookcases. A restful Valhalla for London bohemians if I've ever seen one.
But I wasn't here to moon over a beautiful house, this is Silvia Ziranek's afternoon. I'm not even going to pretend to be impartial: literally every single time I've ever seen her she's been doing something fascinating, whether it be a performance or simply being slightly abrasive in a dangerously intelligent way. She's someone you have to be on your toes around: to carry on a proper non-small talk conversation is a little like heading into a sword fight. You've got to be on your toes or you'll lose a limb.
Every performance of Silvia's I've seen has been accompanied by carefully enunciated and precisely delivered narration, her words chosen not only for their meaning but also for the way they roll off the tongue, punctuate her actions and play off each other. This afternoon was all about words; a self-described "lively" reading of her new ebook Wall Works. The book collects writings between 1976 and 2011 concerning the intersection of the human body and architecture, probing the many ways in which a person can be a place or vice versa.
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| Silvia Ziranek |
With sparkly silver heels adding a few inches to her height, a long orange dress covering her from ankle to neck and a sprinkle of pink in her hair she cut the figure of a day-glo priest. This was, after all, a Sunday and with rows of chairs gathered before her and an attentive hushed audience the front room took on a bit of a churchy tone. I suspect that deep down inside our atheist hearts some basic part of us still craves a Sunday sermon and now that God is dead we scrabble for something to fill the gap. Adding to the quasi-religious atmosphere was the donning of numerous aprons, echoing of the byzantine fabric folds of Catholic robes. These aprons tied the whole thing together as one performance, cocooning her in patterns, colours and the smudgy distortion of feminine cliches that seems to be the common ground in what I've seen.
I think my favourite reading was Chez E (She Said), a piece that amply demonstrates Silvia's style of wordplay. Check out this extract:
"SO HERE I AM, IN THE CONVENTIONS OF SEEMS TO BE, A LUCKY SAVAGE AS FAR AS I KNOW. AND THIS . . . IS MY JUNGLE, RAVAGED BY THE ATTENTION TO INTENTION, AT THE MERCY OF DÉCOR. THERE IS PROOF OF HOPE IN THE PROVISION OF SEATING. VISUAL EMOTION ACQUIRES A SIGNIFICANT POSITION IN THE PRESENCE OF SIMPLE ECONOMIES - SAVE ON STYLE WITH FUNCTIONAL GUILE: A ROOM WITH A DOOR IS A DOUBLY ATTRACTIVE FEATURE."
It reads like the Burroughsian cut-up of an interior decoration glossy: tossing away catchy buzzphrases and clever rhymes. I love the punchy lyrical style - casually delivered slogans that you can picture festooned over the placards of some situationist architectural protest.
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| A lot of aprons |
It's striking how differently you perceive these works in text and when you hear them. Simply reading them allows you to consider them as a whole, to draw connections between the whole piece. But for my money they really come alive as part of a performance, the carefully judged glottal stops, pauses and martial gesticulations (not to mention the neon quilt of Silvia herself) give them a warped authority that causes you to stiffen your back and pay attention.
I always enjoy when an unexpected element of chaos enters proceedings. That afternoon this unpredictable element was provided by a friendly black cat that wound its way through the crowd. Hungry for attention it lept into laps and obliviously made its way to the front of the room, trying its best to upstage Silvia with feline egotism. The upshot of its presence was that it briefly made Silvia into a kind of comedy straightwoman. But this cat only underlined what was already there: a vital sweetening element of humour in her asides and comic timing. After all, there's few things more excruciating than a humourless poet taking themselves very very seriously.
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| Aldo Ziranek |
Breaking up the two halves of the performance was a bit of experimental guitar music by Aldo Ziranek, Silvia's son. Ordinarily you'd dread this sort of thing, no matter how clear-headed a person is they're usually blind to the shortcomings of their children. But even before he started you could basically tell that Aldo was going to be, at minimum, good. With a mop of blonde hair, fluorescent trainers and coloured rags dangling from his guitar he certainly looked the rockstar part at least. He's actually a pretty damn amazing guitarist, launching straight into a psychedelic Hendrixy noodle, his feet clattering over effects pedals bending and pitchshifting the sounds. Sitting on a clear winter's day in a posh Holland Park house, some of the cream of London's art scene sipping tea attentively is an odd venue for experimental psych rock, but somehow it all hung together.
As Sunday afternoons go it was one of the more pleasant I've had a while. As London experiences go, sitting in a fancy, welcoming house sipping tea and eating home-made cakes, the smell of a roast dinner gently suffusing the room, quietly drinking in the book collection and bric a brac scattered all over the place is a small slice of peculiarly British heaven. For all that though it's Silvia's poems: all very much alive, kicking and fiercely intelligent that put the sparkle in the Sunday sunset.
You can get the (very good and also cheap) ebook here for £4.50.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
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Kill Your Darlings is 'Beat Generation: The College Years'. The year is 1943 and our protagonist is a young Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), about to venture out from a home in turmoil and broaden his horizons in New York City. Quickly he becomes entangled in Greenwich village bohemia, his guide the angelic libertine Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan). Soon he's introduced to William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston), forming a tight, intellectual foursome with designs on the literary world. The story charts their growth as the seed of their future work is planted; the secret origins of Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac.
This is a film with pretensions towards intellectual discourse, characters dispensing bitesize bits of Rimbaud, referencing Shelley and having high-falutin' benezedrine fuelled chats about Yeats. For all this though, the skeleton of the film is, by and large, your traditional college film. So there's a crusty old dean who needs some of the starch taken out of his stuffed shirt, the nerds versus preppy jocks and know-it-all-know-nothing arrogant Professors who are about to get blown away by our gang's funky fresh literary stylings.
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| Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan) |
Radcliffe nicely sells the building confidence within Allen Ginsberg as he slowly realises that he doesn't just think he's a great poet - he might actually be one. The evolution of Ginsberg from buttoned-up neurotic to freewheeling experimentalist is perfectly pitched, and it's quietly touching to see Ginsberg's talent blossom as he interacts with Burroughs and Kerouac, the three men influencing each other, impressing each other and developing a rare artistic brotherhood.
One problem is that exactly what they're creating is rather fuzzy. The events of the film are more about laying the foundations of what would become these men's artistic philosophy rather than actually exploring what their ideas entail. This means we get scenes where the men excitedly define their 'new vision' literary movement, but what on earth that means is frustratingly vague. Kill Your Darlings is even light on actual work by the men; we get just a short, early poem from Ginsberg and the odd tidbit from the others.
To be fair I wasn't exactly bored at any point during the run-time, though that's only because director John Krokidas can't seem to decide on what tone he's going for, the solution he comes up with to throw much as he can at the screen and hope something will work. So the film spins wildly from apparent pastiches of Dead Poet's Society, to an experimental drug trip scene, stylistic tricks like reversing the audio for a second and playing back - even taking a short sojourn into Baz Luhrmann/Sofia Coppola territory with a heist soundtracked by TV On The Radio's 2005 hit Wolf Like Me. Finally, (and disappointingly) the film settles down into a curiously dispassionate melodrama.
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| Ginsberg Senior and Junior - a slightly distracting David Cross. |
Kill Your Darlings is an odd goose; there's brief moments where the film starts crackling with passion and dynamism, interactions that are a credit to these talented young actors. The drug-addled montage that leads to the destruction of a book collection is exhilarating to watch; the thrust of blade into book creating a beautiful, cut-up chaos, an image that encapsulates much the film. Also deeply memorable is a moment where the virginal Ginsberg is getting a blowjob from a librarian, while Carr stands silently behind him, burning a lusty laserbeam gaze right at him as he comes. All this stuff is glitteringly good, yet the odd disconnected bit of genius can't carry a story that turns out to be disappointingly conventional.
It's this narrative conventionality that ultimately tips the film into the category of noble failure. We're instantly sympathetic to their philosophy, disgusted at the literary straitjackets their college tutors are fastening Ginsberg and Carr into - instinctively agreeing that forcing strict grammatical structure upon poetry is literary fascism - that the unfettered expression of true inner-self with no heed to rules and regulations is the recipe for true poetic beauty. We feel all this watching, then we realise we're right now watching a by-the-numbers period piece. Suddenly it all feels a bit staid and listless.
Allen Ginsberg's Howl was an atomic bomb of literature, the poem evoking image and atmosphere unlike anything else people had heard. Though not written until a decade after the events of the film, these experiences should be informing the man who'll sit down in front of a typewriter and write this:
★★
Kill Your Darlings is on general release from December 6th
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| William Burroughs (Ben Foster) |
"who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom. who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness"To put it mildly, the apocalyptic vision of Howl and the reality Kill Your Darlings presents don't seem to have a great amount in common with each other. To be fair to Krokidas, perhaps capturing the Beat Generation on film is impossible; both 2012's On the Road and 2010's Howl similarly lacked the high-voltage spark that sizzles inside the writing. Kill Your Darlings is far from a bad film, but it's a limited one - making an iconic time feel mundane and dragging glowing, talented genius into boring old reality.
★★
Kill Your Darlings is on general release from December 6th
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