a Long Week

Well it’s been one hell of a week, so much to report.

Jewish Book Week opened on Sunday with barely anything to do with reading, writing or literature in the programme. I think the organisers must have got confused and thought they were programming Limmud, not JBW. Still I had an enjoyable day with sessions on mysticism, Spinoza, and secularity. The highlights as always were the questions from the audience. At the end of the Spinoza lecture, in which we had learnt of his extraordinary achievements in philosophy and his struggles with community and identity, a lady asked if Spinoza had got married and had children. When told he hadn’t, she heckled ‘well he didn’t have much of a life then’. Prof Rachel Elior explained the correlation between different mystical movements and the tragedies that befell the Jewish people – mysticism was the creation of the losers by way of imaginative response to their own tragedy; this hadn’t happened after the Shoah because of the creation of Israel. It was such a shame said an audience member desperately trying to find a question to justify the sound of his own voice that she had POLITICISED the lecture. Err sorry she said she was just stating facts based on her academic research. Anyway we all noticed it was him not her who was trying to politicise things - he faced death by a thousand tuts. Touchy these lefty secular anti-zionists.

Things became even weirder in the evening session with Willow Winston who makes “book art”. I really liked her work and the ideas behind it – kind of variations on pop-ups rich with mathematical and spiritual thinking. For her workshop we were encourage to cut up, mash-up, remix and just generally destroy old books. We were all uncomfortable with the notion, but dealing with our book angst was part of the experiment. I stuck to cutting up my JBW booklet. It was great fun, and a large room of people took to the task with relish and some of the work was really rather impressive.

On Friday I was back at the JBW for more tales of mystical madness from Howard Schwartz, a session which turned into a workshop on storytelling as we all struggled to finish a fragment of story attributed to Reb Nachman of Bratslav. As a writer I was of course fairly hopeless, seeing myself as neither a storyteller (I follow EM Forster on this, oh yes, oh dear, the novel tells a story) nor a performer, but by then I was so far out of my comfort zone not to worry.

It was events at the Arts Depot that brought this odd mental state into being. I would love to know what the thought process is at the Arts Depot. It must be something like – lets put on a festival of physical /visual theatre; we’ll invite some of the most exciting up and coming companies and performers in the land; we’ll get some of the leading theatre companies in London to hold workshops; and we’ll put on some talks as well to give general advice to aspiring performers; and then what we will do is hold the festival midweek, mostly during the day, so that no-one can come, and we won’t bother to actually tell anybody about the festival anyway just to make absolutely sure that the place is all but empty. And with no apparent irony we’ll call the festival “depot untapped”.

So it was that I found myself in a workshop hosted by Sarah Dowling of Punchdrunk; max 15 places, and it was half empty! I had tried to ignore the bit on the programme which said “come prepared to move” but once committed, there was no escape. So it was that I found myself on an intractable projectory leading to myself and a poor lovely lady who had the misfortune to be partnering me preparing and performing a piece of physical theatre in one of the public lifts in the Arts Depot. Thank goodness LaLa Latte Days didn’t walk in that moment. I have to say I just had the best time; the whole experience was really liberating and fun – everyone else in the group was really talented, basically they were other performers taking part in the festival, drama students, or people who go regularly to acting classes, and no-one seemed to mind the fact that I was performing with all the grace of an elephant in the room. I had nothing but admiration for Sarah; not only did she make it such a fun experience, but she had to repeat the workshop again (the second one looked half empty as well) and then get off to Battersea to perform for 3 hours.

That was Wednesday morning. Thursday I found myself in an even emptier workshop hosted by Peter Glanville of the Little Angel Theatre Company, the country’s leading, and probably only regular, venue for puppetry. This wasn’t so much fun somehow, it all seemed a bit too serious, but I learnt a lot about puppetry and was really glad I went.

I caught 3 shows at depot untapped. First was the Levantes Dance Theatre with a piece called Gin & Satsumas, which seemed to be about the terrible boredom of everyday housewife drudgery seen through a prism that verged on the camp / burlesque; there were some lovely images and moments, but overall it was quite a short piece and had the feeling of being the start of something rather than finished product.

Over the two days I grew very fond of the Lost Spectacles, who had been in the Punchdrunk workshop, and their performance, Lost in The Wind, blew me away (no pun intended). This was physical / visual theatre on a large scale, full of imagination and ambition, and was as wonderful as any of the many wonderful things I caught at LIMF last month. A man steps out of his house (always a bad move in these kinds of worlds) into a storm and gets lost, finding himself amongst a very strange ‘family’ who to me felt as though they had been orphaned at an early age in some remote land and had managed the difficult business of not growing up, free from any adult intervention. There was a great sense of play, some wonderful theatrical magic, for example conjuring up a mountain snow storm and an underwater scene from the simplest of materials. And the soundtrack was great. I think this lot could really go places.

Last up and running very late were two puppeteers from Manchester, Mishimou, with a version of The 3 Little Pigs. The puppetry was excellent and again there was just a wonderful vibrancy and sense of imagination. Unfortunately they were plagued by technical difficulties – the lighting kept going wrong, some of the shadow puppetry was out of focus, and ultimately the intercostal animation broke down altogether. My heart really went out to the performers, because, as we told them, what they had done was really good. They managed to limp on to the end of the show, but it was a real shame.

Well if all of this wasn’t enough for one week, I managed to go to a Tea Ceremony at the British Museum held by the London Branch of the Urasenke Foundation, Japan’s leading exponents of Chado, the Way of Tea. I caught a Richard Goode recital at the South Bank - Chopin, with some Bach, Debussy and Mozart. I found it all a bit soporific – I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it didn’t seem very melodic, all a bit kind of difficult to hold any focus on. I thought I was being plagued by a phantom snorer, but it turned out that the heavy guttural wheezing was actually coming from Richard Goode onstage. I went to Ceramic Art 2008, a fantastic selling exhibition at the Royal College of Art with many of the best ceramic artists from Britain and Europe showing. And I went to the most dreadful exhibition at the Hayward – Laughing in a Foreign Language – supposedly about art and humour but which was not in the slightest bit funny, nor was the art interesting in any way. The artists on show could have learnt something from Lost in the Wind about using humour in art. I just about managed to climb up the stairs at the Hayward to the Alexander Rodchenko exhibition, - what I saw of his graphic art / photography / montage work was really good, but I was too knackered to really appreciate it, and hope to go back again.

I’ve got some random photos from the week to stick up when I get a mo.

Over and out.