me, masked
i 'ave caught the plague 
anything can happen
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
the stage after the Shen Wei Dance Arts CompanyLate October Catch-up - Part Two
My bro and sis-in-law and my 7 year old nephew were in town. We went to MADAME TUSSAUDS and the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. Being half term, both were unpleasantly heaving. I remember being underwhelmed by MT’s as a kid and I still feel the same way now, but what a sad indictment of our society this place really is: plastic images of plastic people; when their time is up, melt ‘em down and reform into the latest celebrity. It is the museum of modern living. The Natural History Museum is great for kids, and we managed to sneak into the Dinosaur section the back way, avoiding the hour plus queue.
THE COUTRY WIFE at THE THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET is a tremendous piece of work, acted in a delightfully old fashioned, exclamatory, actorly style which works much better that the naturalistic mumbly style which ruined the National’s go at the Man of Mode. CW is a filthy, wonderful play and they do it justice, albeit going for a revolving doors French farce kind of vibe which buries some of the darker and more cynical elements of the play. And it is really really funny. Acting is superb all round except for the poor dear playing the Country Wife who could not hold her awful Yorkshire accent together, often drifting over to Ireland via a number of European countries.
At the LONDON JEWISH CULTURAL CENTRE I caught the famous 1937 film of DER DYBBUK. Yiddish expressionism anyone? It really surprised me in the imagination of the camera work and the intensity of the on screen world. A silly girl behind kept sniggering at the manneristic acting (lots of hand over eyes and trembling going on), but this was part of its charm.
Finally I caught a band I have loved for a long time now, German electronic tunesmiths LAUB. It was a real thrill to hear the songs played live, and their absurdly talented enigmatic singer, AGF, seemed to really enjoy herself on stage. The gig was put on by THE WIRE, celebrating 25 years of pompous and often incomprehensible, but always essential reading. The main act were MATMOS, who I didn’t enjoy as much as their gig on the South Bank; not as much variety and little sign of the percussive and contemporary classical strains that made that gig so good.
And then there was my second visit to THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It was great fun, but I am still not convinced that it is quite as spectacular or rich as Faust, but it was a great night out. I managed to get into some of the secret rooms - a band and paper puppet show of an obscure Poe story, and an improvised invention of a lost Poe poem in the library. I narrowly missed out on one-on-ones about 4 times, each time the actor or actress selecting someone else. My theory that I would be more likely to be chosen if I was in black tie proved fatally flawed! Then on to RED DEATH LATES, the weekend only after show party during which masked maidens regularly poured strong liquor down my throat from a big old brown bottles, a fortune reader told me I was starting out on a new path as a writer, and to be wary of gossip ( I think they area great band) and a make-up artist painted two bleeding pustular boils on my forehead and announced that indeed I had caught the plague. I was well hammered by the end I can tell you.
Pictures of all this madness will follow… in time
THE COUTRY WIFE at THE THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET is a tremendous piece of work, acted in a delightfully old fashioned, exclamatory, actorly style which works much better that the naturalistic mumbly style which ruined the National’s go at the Man of Mode. CW is a filthy, wonderful play and they do it justice, albeit going for a revolving doors French farce kind of vibe which buries some of the darker and more cynical elements of the play. And it is really really funny. Acting is superb all round except for the poor dear playing the Country Wife who could not hold her awful Yorkshire accent together, often drifting over to Ireland via a number of European countries.
At the LONDON JEWISH CULTURAL CENTRE I caught the famous 1937 film of DER DYBBUK. Yiddish expressionism anyone? It really surprised me in the imagination of the camera work and the intensity of the on screen world. A silly girl behind kept sniggering at the manneristic acting (lots of hand over eyes and trembling going on), but this was part of its charm.
Finally I caught a band I have loved for a long time now, German electronic tunesmiths LAUB. It was a real thrill to hear the songs played live, and their absurdly talented enigmatic singer, AGF, seemed to really enjoy herself on stage. The gig was put on by THE WIRE, celebrating 25 years of pompous and often incomprehensible, but always essential reading. The main act were MATMOS, who I didn’t enjoy as much as their gig on the South Bank; not as much variety and little sign of the percussive and contemporary classical strains that made that gig so good.
And then there was my second visit to THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It was great fun, but I am still not convinced that it is quite as spectacular or rich as Faust, but it was a great night out. I managed to get into some of the secret rooms - a band and paper puppet show of an obscure Poe story, and an improvised invention of a lost Poe poem in the library. I narrowly missed out on one-on-ones about 4 times, each time the actor or actress selecting someone else. My theory that I would be more likely to be chosen if I was in black tie proved fatally flawed! Then on to RED DEATH LATES, the weekend only after show party during which masked maidens regularly poured strong liquor down my throat from a big old brown bottles, a fortune reader told me I was starting out on a new path as a writer, and to be wary of gossip ( I think they area great band) and a make-up artist painted two bleeding pustular boils on my forehead and announced that indeed I had caught the plague. I was well hammered by the end I can tell you.
Pictures of all this madness will follow… in time
Late October Catch-up - Part One
Well what a couple of weeks it’s been – seen and done so much. No time for the usual in depth psycho-cultural analysis!
It all began with CONTROL, Anton Corbijn’s film of the life and death of Ian Curtis. I wasn’t at all a Joy Division fan, nor did I have high hopes for the movie, but it was really good, crucially avoiding making Curtis out to be a tortured genius/martyr/saint. At times hypnotic, and moving, and a film which has stayed with me.
I spent a lot of time at the BRITISH MUSEUM. THE FIRST EMPEROR exhibition is an amazing thing to see, although not quite living up to the politically motivated hype (and how the fuck can they sell Chairman Mao pin badges in the shop?). It told the Emperor’s story well – how he created unified systems of money, language, weights and measures etc to keep his empire together - and despite the lack of numbers of terracotta figures, you got a sense of the scale of the folly of his tomb complex. But the queues and excruciatingly slow snake of people working their way around the exhibition were painful. But much better was my return to the CRAFTING BEAUTY IN MODERN JAPAN exhibition – the pieces seemed even more extraordinary second time around, and they had some lovely new kimonos on display. I also went to a free lecture given by one of the potters on his life and aesthetics. Still at the BM they had a great little room with a display of KOREAN MOON JARS – huge pots of white china made in two separate halves then joined together before firing – only about 1 in 10 pots survive, but those that do have the most extraordinary undulations and bulges around the join.
TUNNG are on the road again promoting their excellent new album, Good Arrows, and played at the 229 Club. They just keep getting better, having developed a richer and more interesting sound since I last saw them You feel they just need to shake their booty a tad more to really fire up the crowd. They finished with a superb cover of Dancing Naked In the Rain.
At the BARBICAN, I went to SEDUCED, ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW. The most damning thing I can say is that, by half way round this overtly serious exhibition of explicit sexual material, I was well and truly bored. The highlight was the last room and had nothing really to do with the exhibition, it was the soundtrack to a Nan Goldin slide show, and was the piece that John Tavener wrote for Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet, a simply stunning piece of modern re-imagined choral music.
Still at the Barbican I saw the SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS COMPANY and a work called Connect Transfer. Some of the dancing was a bit twee for me, a bit birdy hopping like, but most was mesmerising and meditative. Their thing is that the stage was made of canvass, and the dancers dipped their hands or feet in paint, painting the stage as the work progressed. Afterwards the canvas is cut up and sold to the audience. I bought a bit on the basis of the woman on the desk saying that Shen Wei has been commissioned to choreograph the opening of the Beijing Olympics, so the “painting” will hopefully increase in value. Standing around at the end whilst members of the company signed the work, I felt more like a groupie that an art collector.
It all began with CONTROL, Anton Corbijn’s film of the life and death of Ian Curtis. I wasn’t at all a Joy Division fan, nor did I have high hopes for the movie, but it was really good, crucially avoiding making Curtis out to be a tortured genius/martyr/saint. At times hypnotic, and moving, and a film which has stayed with me.
I spent a lot of time at the BRITISH MUSEUM. THE FIRST EMPEROR exhibition is an amazing thing to see, although not quite living up to the politically motivated hype (and how the fuck can they sell Chairman Mao pin badges in the shop?). It told the Emperor’s story well – how he created unified systems of money, language, weights and measures etc to keep his empire together - and despite the lack of numbers of terracotta figures, you got a sense of the scale of the folly of his tomb complex. But the queues and excruciatingly slow snake of people working their way around the exhibition were painful. But much better was my return to the CRAFTING BEAUTY IN MODERN JAPAN exhibition – the pieces seemed even more extraordinary second time around, and they had some lovely new kimonos on display. I also went to a free lecture given by one of the potters on his life and aesthetics. Still at the BM they had a great little room with a display of KOREAN MOON JARS – huge pots of white china made in two separate halves then joined together before firing – only about 1 in 10 pots survive, but those that do have the most extraordinary undulations and bulges around the join.
TUNNG are on the road again promoting their excellent new album, Good Arrows, and played at the 229 Club. They just keep getting better, having developed a richer and more interesting sound since I last saw them You feel they just need to shake their booty a tad more to really fire up the crowd. They finished with a superb cover of Dancing Naked In the Rain.
At the BARBICAN, I went to SEDUCED, ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW. The most damning thing I can say is that, by half way round this overtly serious exhibition of explicit sexual material, I was well and truly bored. The highlight was the last room and had nothing really to do with the exhibition, it was the soundtrack to a Nan Goldin slide show, and was the piece that John Tavener wrote for Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet, a simply stunning piece of modern re-imagined choral music.
Still at the Barbican I saw the SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS COMPANY and a work called Connect Transfer. Some of the dancing was a bit twee for me, a bit birdy hopping like, but most was mesmerising and meditative. Their thing is that the stage was made of canvass, and the dancers dipped their hands or feet in paint, painting the stage as the work progressed. Afterwards the canvas is cut up and sold to the audience. I bought a bit on the basis of the woman on the desk saying that Shen Wei has been commissioned to choreograph the opening of the Beijing Olympics, so the “painting” will hopefully increase in value. Standing around at the end whilst members of the company signed the work, I felt more like a groupie that an art collector.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
The Masque of the Red Death: some further thoughts.
As Kylie would say, I can’t get it out of my head.
On my way up to Waitrose, I found myself ruminating on some of the criticisms and negative comments about the show. Here’s what they are and what I think…
That it is irredeemably middle class, to wit the preponderance of public schoolboys:
I have no problem with reviewing the audience, I do it all the time! My justification is that I am reporting on my experience, and the audience can heighten or dampen my enjoyment, And I suppose if you are a class warrior, the make-up (as opposed to behaviour or glamour or otherwise) of the audience could lead you to have a bad time. But I would observe that last night, there were more black faces in the audience (underneath the white masks of course) than I have seen at any of the theatre I have been to in recent years. And as I have discovered from my exploration of classical music, sometimes the perception of certain kinds of art as elitist turns out to be completely false. The biggest barrier to art is cost, and the tickets are pricy (last night was £30) but in keeping with most major London venues. And even if on the whole it is attracting a middle class audience so what – we who shop at Waitrose are entitled to get excited about stuff!
That it is all sensation, it has no emotional content:
This is partly to do with plot and characterisation (see below), but in the room where the man was beating up his wife, I can tell you I had plenty of emotion, just as I did in the abortion scene in the forest in Faust. Largely it is a sensational sensory experience – that doesn’t diminish it. It also provokes profound mental stimulation. These are enough in my view to mask any emotional deficit.
That it is a themepark experience:
What is it that is pejorative about the term themepark? That it is a plastic experience, corporate, Disneyfied, synthetic, commercialised? Certainly none of that applies here – the depth of the experience, of the detail, is breathtaking. Yes you wander through the space, but you do that in an art gallery.
That there is no narrative:
There is a narrative, but it is one that is received, by each audience member individually, rather than given. It is the journey of the audience through the space. It is the accumulation of experiences. It is not a linear narrative, nor a full one. It is fragmented and frustrating. As such it reflects contemporary life much more closely than the traditional linear narrative. In particular it draws on three strands of (post-post-)modernity
1. The structuralist/post-structuralist/post-modern movement’s explosion of the stability of the building blocks of text, art, and even consciousness.
2. It reflects contemporary experience, such as computer games, the flash zapping of multi-channel TV, t’internet, you tube etc. The lives we lead are increasingly made up of accumulating chunks of information technology, and it is right that art should find itself reflecting this.
3. Art whether consciously or unconsciously is a product of the society and culture in which it is made; a broken and fragmentary art suits our time.
Regular readers will note a recurring theme here, so I wont blather on any more about fragmentation – see A Disappearing Number below, somewhere.
That the actors are slaves:
A weird one this, but yes, they do work bloody hard, and being surrounded by the audience, especially those who go right into personal space, or for whom this experience is a substitute for a visit to a lap-dancing club, must be a challenge, but then many are repeat performers - most were in Faust, and almost all have worked for Punchdrunk before. Working for the most exciting company on the planet in really challenging environment must be a reward in itself.
That it is all hype:
Absolutely not, Faust was a huge word of mouth success, and many of those who fell in love with the show signed up to the mailing list and bought tickets for Masque on spec. Almost all tickets were sold before any reviews, and maybe they were for the most part favourable because that it was the reviewers actually thought, rather than them succumbing to some PR voodoo. In fact there has been very little publicity – none was needed!
Why Punchdrunk when there have been so many great site specific promenade performances before:
I can’t really comment on other companies, but I will say that I will now check out any of the other artists working in this form in the future, so I think everyone will benefit. After reading Cees Noteboom’s excellent novel “Lost Paradise” I really wish I’d caught Deborah Warner’s Angel Project (featured in the book). As to why Punchdrunk, all I can say is because Faust was amazing, it was a perfect storm. It was more than just site-specific or promenade, it was an art installation, it was dance, it was full on sensory experience, it was emotional, it was filmic, it was multi-dimensional, the building afforded a perfect opportunity. And Masque is forming itself in my mind along similar hyperbolic lines.
On my way up to Waitrose, I found myself ruminating on some of the criticisms and negative comments about the show. Here’s what they are and what I think…
That it is irredeemably middle class, to wit the preponderance of public schoolboys:
I have no problem with reviewing the audience, I do it all the time! My justification is that I am reporting on my experience, and the audience can heighten or dampen my enjoyment, And I suppose if you are a class warrior, the make-up (as opposed to behaviour or glamour or otherwise) of the audience could lead you to have a bad time. But I would observe that last night, there were more black faces in the audience (underneath the white masks of course) than I have seen at any of the theatre I have been to in recent years. And as I have discovered from my exploration of classical music, sometimes the perception of certain kinds of art as elitist turns out to be completely false. The biggest barrier to art is cost, and the tickets are pricy (last night was £30) but in keeping with most major London venues. And even if on the whole it is attracting a middle class audience so what – we who shop at Waitrose are entitled to get excited about stuff!
That it is all sensation, it has no emotional content:
This is partly to do with plot and characterisation (see below), but in the room where the man was beating up his wife, I can tell you I had plenty of emotion, just as I did in the abortion scene in the forest in Faust. Largely it is a sensational sensory experience – that doesn’t diminish it. It also provokes profound mental stimulation. These are enough in my view to mask any emotional deficit.
That it is a themepark experience:
What is it that is pejorative about the term themepark? That it is a plastic experience, corporate, Disneyfied, synthetic, commercialised? Certainly none of that applies here – the depth of the experience, of the detail, is breathtaking. Yes you wander through the space, but you do that in an art gallery.
That there is no narrative:
There is a narrative, but it is one that is received, by each audience member individually, rather than given. It is the journey of the audience through the space. It is the accumulation of experiences. It is not a linear narrative, nor a full one. It is fragmented and frustrating. As such it reflects contemporary life much more closely than the traditional linear narrative. In particular it draws on three strands of (post-post-)modernity
1. The structuralist/post-structuralist/post-modern movement’s explosion of the stability of the building blocks of text, art, and even consciousness.
2. It reflects contemporary experience, such as computer games, the flash zapping of multi-channel TV, t’internet, you tube etc. The lives we lead are increasingly made up of accumulating chunks of information technology, and it is right that art should find itself reflecting this.
3. Art whether consciously or unconsciously is a product of the society and culture in which it is made; a broken and fragmentary art suits our time.
Regular readers will note a recurring theme here, so I wont blather on any more about fragmentation – see A Disappearing Number below, somewhere.
That the actors are slaves:
A weird one this, but yes, they do work bloody hard, and being surrounded by the audience, especially those who go right into personal space, or for whom this experience is a substitute for a visit to a lap-dancing club, must be a challenge, but then many are repeat performers - most were in Faust, and almost all have worked for Punchdrunk before. Working for the most exciting company on the planet in really challenging environment must be a reward in itself.
That it is all hype:
Absolutely not, Faust was a huge word of mouth success, and many of those who fell in love with the show signed up to the mailing list and bought tickets for Masque on spec. Almost all tickets were sold before any reviews, and maybe they were for the most part favourable because that it was the reviewers actually thought, rather than them succumbing to some PR voodoo. In fact there has been very little publicity – none was needed!
Why Punchdrunk when there have been so many great site specific promenade performances before:
I can’t really comment on other companies, but I will say that I will now check out any of the other artists working in this form in the future, so I think everyone will benefit. After reading Cees Noteboom’s excellent novel “Lost Paradise” I really wish I’d caught Deborah Warner’s Angel Project (featured in the book). As to why Punchdrunk, all I can say is because Faust was amazing, it was a perfect storm. It was more than just site-specific or promenade, it was an art installation, it was dance, it was full on sensory experience, it was emotional, it was filmic, it was multi-dimensional, the building afforded a perfect opportunity. And Masque is forming itself in my mind along similar hyperbolic lines.
Punchdrunk - The Masque of the Red Death
My first of four (count ‘em) scheduled visits to the Battersea Arts Centre (and you know how nervous I get going south of the river).
It might seem an odd thing to say about a Punchdrunk performance, but this was a remarkably subtle production, by which I mean that its genius crept up on me slowly; only after a bad night’s sleep and by gathering my thoughts for the blog did I come to realise quite what a thing this thing was.
It is not as immediate as Faust, as visceral and thrilling. I didn’t mean to compare it to Faust, but when you enter a Punchdrunk world, you lose any control over your mind and senses (any one who says the experience of Punchdrunk theatre is democratic, that the individual audience member “chooses” what to see, gets it so wrong - one can no-more choose than one can stop one own’s heart from beating or lungs from breathing - all you can do is go with the flow, accept that you have lost control over your own body, brain, senses and all).
So for a lot of the show I was in compare and contrast mode. The show made be do this, by too often not being different enough from Faust – the smell of mothballs, the rumpled beds, the dances in confined spaces, the feather-light whispered dialogue, the shouty dialogue, the meaningful slapping and posturing of rugged bearded men, the imperilled beautiful women, the big set pieces – but without ever managing to be quite as thrilling as Faust – there was nothing here (that I saw) to match the scenes in the Diner, in the end Bar, in the Pine Forest, and in the Basement at Wapping. It also lacked the demonic energy of Faust, and I missed the changes in tempo offered by the mid-show Hop and Mephistopheles' conjuring tricks. There seemed to be a lot of similar scenes – for example at least three man/woman physical theatre/dance erotic/violent routines in tiny bedrooms, a saminess of atmosphere through the piece.
Where The Masque of the Red Death excelled was with scenes which felt completely fresh – the woman playing the piano becoming tormented by a ghostly echo, and the fabulous Palais Royale Music Hall, especially walking through the changing rooms to view the acts from the wings – not just a play within a play but a sense (an illusion) that the play within the play was more real than the play, watching the person manning the curtains flying up into the air to use their weight to pull the rope down, watching the actress pacing nervously and muttering to herself before going on stage, acting not being an actor in other words, a symbol of the swirling realities and psychological inversions to come if you spend too long in here…
Let’s being again at the beginning. I don my mask and think how happy I am to be back in the world of Punchdrunk. It’s like a drug of course, altered states, addictive. I quickly find the outfitter and don my cape. A large man with Victorian moustache whispers in my ear, do I ever wonder why nothing happens when you die? In a small room with framed butterflies on the walls I find a weeping woman – “all is lost" she wails. She is dipping her hand in a bowl of water, her wet hand holds mine and leads me down to a parade of the character up the main staircase. I am alone in a room with a man and wife, petting and stroking alternates with horrific abuse, she is slapped around, made to drink from a bowl like a cat, then hung up from the roof, hanging like a limp rag doll. Thereafter things get blurry. Different rooms, different scenes, a constant sense of imminent sex and violence. Mr Usher seems to be everywhere. Women in peril slink behind doorways. Screaming and anguished cries coming from somewhere unidentifiable.
No stories as such emerge from these fragmented shards, little pieces of Poe, sampled and remixed into something different. Yet something, a theme rather than a narrative, congeals, a consistency of deadly sins, lust and avarice, drinking and gambling and debauchery. The saminess starts to feel less like a weakness and more like something musical, the way classical music uses repeating refrains and sonic motifs, variations, resonances.
And all these doors and rooms and curtained tunnels, following an actress under and through a fireplace into a small curtained area where, for some time, we are all compressed, too close, but not close enough. Something, an idea, starts to niggle away at me. At first I think the whole experience is (metaphorically) sexual, squeezing yourself through these red corridors and into tiny spaces, the whole production reeks of sex. But overnight another idea comes, it stems from that extraordinary experience of being backstage at the Palais Royale, what it reminds me of, what it feels like, is not so much parallel universes, but rather like being able to travel down portals into different people’s minds – it makes me think of the troposphere in Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mr Y” or the portals into John Malkovich’s mind in “Being John Malcovich”. This is an experience about consciousness, about what it feels like to be in someone else’s mind, and of course, what flows from that, is that the overreaching theme is madness. Many of the
Poe stories on which the piece is based depict madness of some sort, but “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" becomes central. We see it in one of the big set pieces, about a dozen cast members around a dinner table, things becoming increasingly strange and out of control. In the Poe story, a narrator visits a lunatic asylum and dines with the doctors. As the story progresses, we learn that they are not the doctors, but the patients, who have revolted and taken over the asylum, the sane made mad and the mad made sane. And this becomes the central metaphor for my experience. It is an insane experience. In everything you see and do, the delicate membrane between sane and insane seems to have torn. Including your own grasp on reality. In the mask, in this atmosphere, your own sense of self dissolves. How else to explain why, in the bar at the Palais Royal, I order a shot of tequila. I never ever drink shots. I might have a tot of whisky at home, but I haven’t had tequila for at least 10 years. As I said at the beginning, any sense of choice is an illusion. You go mad, you are possessed. This is insane.
I go back in a couple of weeks.
It might seem an odd thing to say about a Punchdrunk performance, but this was a remarkably subtle production, by which I mean that its genius crept up on me slowly; only after a bad night’s sleep and by gathering my thoughts for the blog did I come to realise quite what a thing this thing was.
It is not as immediate as Faust, as visceral and thrilling. I didn’t mean to compare it to Faust, but when you enter a Punchdrunk world, you lose any control over your mind and senses (any one who says the experience of Punchdrunk theatre is democratic, that the individual audience member “chooses” what to see, gets it so wrong - one can no-more choose than one can stop one own’s heart from beating or lungs from breathing - all you can do is go with the flow, accept that you have lost control over your own body, brain, senses and all).
So for a lot of the show I was in compare and contrast mode. The show made be do this, by too often not being different enough from Faust – the smell of mothballs, the rumpled beds, the dances in confined spaces, the feather-light whispered dialogue, the shouty dialogue, the meaningful slapping and posturing of rugged bearded men, the imperilled beautiful women, the big set pieces – but without ever managing to be quite as thrilling as Faust – there was nothing here (that I saw) to match the scenes in the Diner, in the end Bar, in the Pine Forest, and in the Basement at Wapping. It also lacked the demonic energy of Faust, and I missed the changes in tempo offered by the mid-show Hop and Mephistopheles' conjuring tricks. There seemed to be a lot of similar scenes – for example at least three man/woman physical theatre/dance erotic/violent routines in tiny bedrooms, a saminess of atmosphere through the piece.
Where The Masque of the Red Death excelled was with scenes which felt completely fresh – the woman playing the piano becoming tormented by a ghostly echo, and the fabulous Palais Royale Music Hall, especially walking through the changing rooms to view the acts from the wings – not just a play within a play but a sense (an illusion) that the play within the play was more real than the play, watching the person manning the curtains flying up into the air to use their weight to pull the rope down, watching the actress pacing nervously and muttering to herself before going on stage, acting not being an actor in other words, a symbol of the swirling realities and psychological inversions to come if you spend too long in here…
Let’s being again at the beginning. I don my mask and think how happy I am to be back in the world of Punchdrunk. It’s like a drug of course, altered states, addictive. I quickly find the outfitter and don my cape. A large man with Victorian moustache whispers in my ear, do I ever wonder why nothing happens when you die? In a small room with framed butterflies on the walls I find a weeping woman – “all is lost" she wails. She is dipping her hand in a bowl of water, her wet hand holds mine and leads me down to a parade of the character up the main staircase. I am alone in a room with a man and wife, petting and stroking alternates with horrific abuse, she is slapped around, made to drink from a bowl like a cat, then hung up from the roof, hanging like a limp rag doll. Thereafter things get blurry. Different rooms, different scenes, a constant sense of imminent sex and violence. Mr Usher seems to be everywhere. Women in peril slink behind doorways. Screaming and anguished cries coming from somewhere unidentifiable.
No stories as such emerge from these fragmented shards, little pieces of Poe, sampled and remixed into something different. Yet something, a theme rather than a narrative, congeals, a consistency of deadly sins, lust and avarice, drinking and gambling and debauchery. The saminess starts to feel less like a weakness and more like something musical, the way classical music uses repeating refrains and sonic motifs, variations, resonances.
And all these doors and rooms and curtained tunnels, following an actress under and through a fireplace into a small curtained area where, for some time, we are all compressed, too close, but not close enough. Something, an idea, starts to niggle away at me. At first I think the whole experience is (metaphorically) sexual, squeezing yourself through these red corridors and into tiny spaces, the whole production reeks of sex. But overnight another idea comes, it stems from that extraordinary experience of being backstage at the Palais Royale, what it reminds me of, what it feels like, is not so much parallel universes, but rather like being able to travel down portals into different people’s minds – it makes me think of the troposphere in Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mr Y” or the portals into John Malkovich’s mind in “Being John Malcovich”. This is an experience about consciousness, about what it feels like to be in someone else’s mind, and of course, what flows from that, is that the overreaching theme is madness. Many of the
Poe stories on which the piece is based depict madness of some sort, but “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" becomes central. We see it in one of the big set pieces, about a dozen cast members around a dinner table, things becoming increasingly strange and out of control. In the Poe story, a narrator visits a lunatic asylum and dines with the doctors. As the story progresses, we learn that they are not the doctors, but the patients, who have revolted and taken over the asylum, the sane made mad and the mad made sane. And this becomes the central metaphor for my experience. It is an insane experience. In everything you see and do, the delicate membrane between sane and insane seems to have torn. Including your own grasp on reality. In the mask, in this atmosphere, your own sense of self dissolves. How else to explain why, in the bar at the Palais Royal, I order a shot of tequila. I never ever drink shots. I might have a tot of whisky at home, but I haven’t had tequila for at least 10 years. As I said at the beginning, any sense of choice is an illusion. You go mad, you are possessed. This is insane.
I go back in a couple of weeks.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Happy Mondays - Brixton Academy - 6/10/07
It is difficult to know what to say about this gig. After all, the Mondays themselves, or what is left of them, which in essence means Shaun and Bez, are riddled with contradiction, enigma and puzzle.
Take Bez. On the credits for Pills Thrills and Bellyaches, after the usual vocals, guitars keyboards etc, is listed “Bez – Bez”. So the Bez that now appears before us, working up the crowd, jigging laterally from one side of the stage to the other like a demented Space Invader, or doing his trademark bent over shuffle, is it the real Bez that was, or is he now just playing Bez, or was he always just playing Bez?
Bez
And Shaun, demented genius. We demand of him that he is permanently fucked. Anything other than a Shaun who is smacked off his skull and incapable of standing, let alone “singing” (or what approximates for it in the Ryder universe) for more than ten minutes, as in the legendary debacles at the height of Madchester, leaves us feeling bereft of the real thing. We want to pay £30 to see a band that are too fucked to play. That they manage to play for close on an hour and a quarter is wrong. That the audience politely observe the no smoking ban is wrong, let alone the almost total absence of the sweet grating smoke of a forest fire of weed.
the ghost of the memory of Shaun Ryder
Yet it doesn’t feel like simulation either, nor pantomime. The band are loud, and get pretty close to the demented concoctions of the classic works. Rowetta is dynamite; her voice has grown more powerful, richer and deeper over the years. Without her the show would descend into farce, she covers for Shaun, she belts her lungs out, and it sounds, for the most, part tuneful, soulful even.
Shaun remains barely there, a black hole in the centre of the stage, dressed in black, with a black hat at a jaunty angle, black shades. Often we only know he’s there because of the shadow he casts over the back lit stage.
Bez plays the Bez as only Bez can, a crazed Figure from the Commedia dell'arte, the Mancunian Marcel Marceu.
Bez as Pierrot
The crowd are full of southerners pretending to be Mancs, civil servants and librarians pretending that they are on E, everyone fancies themselves as some dodgy geezer.
I write a review pretending to be Paul Morley, arch observer of Mancuian inflected pop culture.
What can never be denied or forgotten is that out of all this came something incredible, an album, Pills, Thrill and Bellyaches, of such wonder, of such extraordinary beauty. And ultimately this is a celebration – of how amazing those tunes were, of how amazing it is that Shaun is still alive and now solvent and maybe straight, that Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, that Tony Wilson was actually right about something, namely Shaun’s genius. Shaun's most celebrated line, from Kinky Afro, opens the show, everyone in the crowd singing along: “son, I was thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty”. Thereafter people don’t know and can’t hear, but it doesn’t matter.
Another thing about the Mondays, despite all the obvious associations, with Manchester, with Factory, with flirting with physical, mental, and financial disaster, is that they never played the tortured artist, never blamed anyone, never asked for sympathy, They just accepted what life threw at them and lit another spliff. And another. Maybe it is this attitude, so in contrast to the angular jutting attitude of a Gallagher or a Brown or the manic jerkiness of a Curtis, is why people love them so, why we want them survive, why we celebrate their survival.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Syndromes and a Century
Back to the NFT for Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century. Like Tropical Malady, this is a film in two parts, but the parts to this film are more closely aligned, in a strange way making it much harder to relate the parts than the more distinct halves of Tropical Malady.
Both parts of Syndromes are set in hospitals, with largely the same cast playing the same characters (or at least characters with the same names).
The first half focusses on Dr Toey, her hopeless suitor and her unreciprocated love for an orchid collector who in turn loves another from afar. We first see her interviewing a Dr Nohng for a job. There is a subplot featuring a singing dentist infatuated with a monk who wants to be a DJ. The tone is lighthearted and gentle.
The second half begins in a different hospital, possibly a different time, certainly a different place, maybe a different world. It begins with the same job interview, but thereafter we focus on Dr Nohng and discover his relationship with girlfriend Joy is doomed. The tone is much darker, with Lynchian flourishes and menacing moments of camerawork and offscreen sound.
The NFT notes kindly summarises some of the dualities between the halves: female/male, country/city, natural light/electric light, but this hardly begins to make order of the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between the halves. They are not versions of the same story, and to talk of parallel or alternative realities doesn’t seem to fit either. It is much more complex and elusive than that. There is talk in the first half of past lives, and in the second of future lives, yet the second half seemed to me to suggest not another life but another plane of existence, maybe a spirit world, or something akin to limbo or hell, especially the scenes in the basement of amputees, and grotesque women staring out the camera, and a fantastic swirling thick smoke slowly moving towards an extraction pipe so wonderfully filmed that I thought that I cold smell the acrid smoke.
Which made me wonder whether Buddhists believe in hell, or maybe the film was setting up another duality – eastern vs western. But a quick google seems to show there are Buddhist ideas of heaven and hell, and even (a quote that seems to fit Joe’s worlds very nicely) “the Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself”.
The film ends back in full colour and outdoors with a group aerobic session – I got from this a sense of souls reborn and the joy of living.
Another reading of the film is that in the first half the relationships are ones of delicious(ly) unrequited love; the bridge between the sections has the monk asking the singing dentist to follow him, suggesting a relationship is about to begin, but the monk disappears and we see the dentist alone in his surgery; in the second section the key relationship between Nohng and his girlfriend disintegrates, and there is hint that Dr Toey and her nebbishe suitor are going out for lunch, and a shot of her looking forlornly and desperately at her desk – so perhaps there is a comparison of the exquisiteness, the hopefulness, of love not yet declared vs the hell of dying or loveless relationships. Or maybe it is just a case that Dr Toey in the first half is an optimist and Dr Nohn in the second a pessimist.
These are all ifs and maybes. The wonder of the film (along with some incredibly powerful visual moments) is that its meanings remain outside and beyond the viewer, as though being channelled directly into the viewer’s unconscious, challenging the brain to see patterns but always remaining elusive. As Browning put it “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”
Both parts of Syndromes are set in hospitals, with largely the same cast playing the same characters (or at least characters with the same names).
The first half focusses on Dr Toey, her hopeless suitor and her unreciprocated love for an orchid collector who in turn loves another from afar. We first see her interviewing a Dr Nohng for a job. There is a subplot featuring a singing dentist infatuated with a monk who wants to be a DJ. The tone is lighthearted and gentle.
The second half begins in a different hospital, possibly a different time, certainly a different place, maybe a different world. It begins with the same job interview, but thereafter we focus on Dr Nohng and discover his relationship with girlfriend Joy is doomed. The tone is much darker, with Lynchian flourishes and menacing moments of camerawork and offscreen sound.
The NFT notes kindly summarises some of the dualities between the halves: female/male, country/city, natural light/electric light, but this hardly begins to make order of the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between the halves. They are not versions of the same story, and to talk of parallel or alternative realities doesn’t seem to fit either. It is much more complex and elusive than that. There is talk in the first half of past lives, and in the second of future lives, yet the second half seemed to me to suggest not another life but another plane of existence, maybe a spirit world, or something akin to limbo or hell, especially the scenes in the basement of amputees, and grotesque women staring out the camera, and a fantastic swirling thick smoke slowly moving towards an extraction pipe so wonderfully filmed that I thought that I cold smell the acrid smoke.
Which made me wonder whether Buddhists believe in hell, or maybe the film was setting up another duality – eastern vs western. But a quick google seems to show there are Buddhist ideas of heaven and hell, and even (a quote that seems to fit Joe’s worlds very nicely) “the Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself”.
The film ends back in full colour and outdoors with a group aerobic session – I got from this a sense of souls reborn and the joy of living.
Another reading of the film is that in the first half the relationships are ones of delicious(ly) unrequited love; the bridge between the sections has the monk asking the singing dentist to follow him, suggesting a relationship is about to begin, but the monk disappears and we see the dentist alone in his surgery; in the second section the key relationship between Nohng and his girlfriend disintegrates, and there is hint that Dr Toey and her nebbishe suitor are going out for lunch, and a shot of her looking forlornly and desperately at her desk – so perhaps there is a comparison of the exquisiteness, the hopefulness, of love not yet declared vs the hell of dying or loveless relationships. Or maybe it is just a case that Dr Toey in the first half is an optimist and Dr Nohn in the second a pessimist.
These are all ifs and maybes. The wonder of the film (along with some incredibly powerful visual moments) is that its meanings remain outside and beyond the viewer, as though being channelled directly into the viewer’s unconscious, challenging the brain to see patterns but always remaining elusive. As Browning put it “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”
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