Art Marathon Part 2 - Antony Gormley - Blind Light - The Hayward

To the Hayward for the Antony Gormley exhibition...

The first room is dominated by Space Station, a huge structure. It looks like a weird space city, but like almost everything in the exhibition, it was modelled on his body, then processed, in this case into perforated metal blocks. It explores the relationship between man, the space occupied by a body and the environment in which the body lives, and this lies at the heart of the exhibition and the related sculptures, which line the skyline around the Hayward for miles around.

Blind Light is the cloud within a box. The feeling as you enter the glass box is like walking into a pitch black room, where the darkness is so heavy as to be physically oppressive, visceral, material, only in negative, for here it is “pitch whiteness” that envelopes you. It is not just a mist, it is a solid. You can’t even see your feet.

self portrait inside Blind Light

In the oppressive whiteness, I became acutely aware of how much debris floats on the surface of my eyes, little spots and wisps like tiny cotton fragments. The air is saturated with moisture; you are encased in a clinging cool wetness. You don’t want to be in here for too long.

Upstairs is a room of Matrices and Expansions which I really liked. They look at first like delicate exploded fragments, filigree structures of delicate rods. As you look more closely, some of the rods are darker and, when viewed from different angles, body form emerge, often hanging upside down, suspended within the structures. They make me think of computer modelling, DNA, space age pods, string theory, and exploded consciousness.

Lining the walls are a series of Quads, collections of four photographs, which share or comment on the others in the batch. In one set, a lone Gormley statue on a beach is echoed by three farmers standing in a field, the horizon of the field echoed in a landscape devoid of people or statues. In another, a v shaped valley shares perspective with a square tunnel, and the V of a building crane.

I cue for ages to get into Hatch, a perforated box. Only two are allowed in at any time. Hollow rectangular rods of different lengths puncture the room seemingly randomly; tiny squares of light hover at the end of the rods. Viewed up close, the effect is kaleidoscopic. The catalgue talks of endoscopy

Throughout the gallery, Gormley body forms lie, hang, and squeeze themselves into corners.

From the terraces, you get a great view of the Gormleys staring at you from the surrounding rooftops.

Art Marathon Part 1 – Camden Arts Centre

It had never meant to be an art marathon. It just turned out that way!

I started at the Camden Arts Centre who were showing two artists.

Mathew Buckingham’s work comprised three pieces of video art based on biographies of people who had lived in three different centuries. It was unforgivably dull. A handful of serious-looking and pretty (always a dangerous combination) girls were sat on the floor staring intently at the screens.

It was David Thorpe’s work that I had come to see but I was disappointed. In a large room a screen of wood and dark coloured glass had been erected. Inside the room within the room were three science fiction-y stars, with five or so botanical drawings hung on the screen. I have a thing for botanical drawings, and those of Thorpe’s that I had come across before looked impressive, but somehow in this setting they looked diminished and uninteresting. I suppose the thing here was the interaction between the organic and the artificial, particularly the star shaped objects (part space satellite, part deep underwater creature) and the more alien looking of the plant drawings, but overall it seemed to me to lack any real depth.

Then on to the most important part of the trip, the coffee shop, which Time Out reckons is the “best coffee in London”. I enjoyed my coffee, but it was a bit odd – perhaps another interaction between the organic and the artificial - it managed to taste both good and strong and bitter, and to be a little bit watery, all at the same time. My coffee cheesecake (another odd combination) worked really well, probably the best juxtaposition of the day. No doubt the Latte Days will visit one day soon and give us the official verdict.

I really liked the CAC – from the outside it looks like one of those mansion blocks that litter this part of Finchley Road, but inside the vibe is great, classic gallery stuff, light and airy, clean white walls, parquet flooring, with a steel and glass extension housing the coffee shop and leading to a nice little garden area which I hope to enjoy later in the summer once the rains subside. Lets hope they find some art worthy of the environment.

Lost Ladies of Folk - QEH

I was in two minds whether or not to go to this event, but in the end took a gamble based on the provenance of the people behind it. Part of Jarvis Cocker’s Meltdown Festival (or Jarvis Downer’s Cockmelt as I prefer to call it), the gig was put together by Andy Votel, one of the movers behind last year’s terrific Jean Claude Vannier / Serge Gainsbourg gig, and a man who through his labels B Music and Finders Keepers has proved himself to be a remarkable picker upper of unconsidered weird rarities of the 60s and 70s, and the music was arranged by Sean O’Hagan, who arranged the music for the equally terrific Tropicalia gig last year, and appeared here with his band The High Llamas, supplemented by strings and sitar.



The Lost Ladies were Susan Christie, Wendy Flower, and Bonnie Dobson, and the gig began with three young British folk singers (bearded ladies as B Music likes to call them), Emma Trikka, Cate Le Bon and Jane Weaver. All 6 singers had remarkable pure clear honey-toned voices, which worked wonderfully with the warm and bouncy sounds of the High Llamas. Generally the feel and spirit was 1969, mostly folk pop Americana, with occasional moments of funk, psychedelica and country. Not quite my sort of thing, but really very pleasurable, and free from of the self satisfied matronly whimsy of other folkies of that era (eg Vashti Bunyan).

Wild Cursive – Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan

If the British Library left me in need of some textual healing, luckily I did not have long to wait, for I was straight down to Saddlers Wells for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan.

Wild Cursive is the last of a trilogy of works inspired by Chinese calligraphy and in particular the focused energy of the brushstrokes and the way that the calligraphers “dance” during writing. The programme tells how the dancers were asked to improvise by facing blown-up images of calligraphy, and how they absorbed the energy, or Chi, of the writer, and imitated the linear “route” of ink, full of lyrical flows and strong punctuations, with rich variations in energy.

For Wild Cursive, choreographic ideas were taken from Kuang Chao, “wild calligraphy,” considered the pinnacle in Chinese cursive aesthetics and which frees characters from any set form and exposes the spiritual state of the writer in its expressive abstraction.

Even writing this now, I am struck immediately with how much more interesting an approach this is to calligraphy and the act of writing and the spiritual value of text than anything in Sacred, which barely touched on these aspects.

On stage, large banners of rice paper drop down from above. The paper is richly textured. Ink is dripped onto the paper from hidden pipes above, and during the performance, the ink meanders down the paper. The lighting design plays with the effects; for example when back lit patterns embossed on the paper emerge which were otherwise hidden. Sometimes the lighting gives a golden mystical glow to the paper and the ink.





But it is the dancing that is the start of the show. What originally attracted me was the fact that much of the movement is derived from Tai Chi Tao Yin and Chi Kung. As I am now in my 6th month of Tai Chi practice, I was able to appreciate just how incredibly difficult the movements were, and how unbelievably graceful and fluid the dancing was. Generally the scenes comprised between one and three dancers performing a series of linked but subtly different movements. The articulation was astonishing – some dancers seemed able to move separately each toe and finger at the same time. A cartwheel was performed with such grace that the dancer appeared to float above the stage.

The sound design was also fantastic: as well as the deep breaths and occasional yelps from the dancers, the theatre was filled with ambient sounds - the hum of cicadas, gusts of wind, waves breaking on a pebbled beach, dripping water, rainfall, foghorns and temple bells. And the Japanese chap behind me sniffing profusely.

For the finale, the full company of about 20 crept onstage in a tightly packed seething mass, slowly separating out to fill the stage. The cumulative effect of their movements made my brain feel like it was being stretched, like rubber, gentle gaps opening up, solid melting into liquid, splitting and folding on itself.


As the dancers magically disintegrated, a powerful flow of ink down one of the rice paper banners generated three thick feathery fronds whilst a pool of black ink formed on the stage.

The curtain descended with a solitary dancer sinking lower and lower to the floor until finally defeated by the curtain.

Mesmerising, meditative, and utterly brilliant.

Sacred - The British Library

One of the most extraordinary exhibitions that I ever went to was “The Writer in the Garden” at the British Library a couple of years ago. Although roughly chronological, it did not really have an overarching narrative or theme, but instead allowed ideas to ping around the room. It started with depictions of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and managed to take in, amongst many other things, the Song of Songs, the Pearl and Chaucer, landscaping in Jane Austen (where a character’s opinion on gardening was used as a window into their soul), the Romantics (Keats’ garden obviously, and Wordsworth, but also an original manuscript of Kubla Khan), recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson and various Bloomsbury types, Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, automata, field recordings of gardens, midnight/secret gardens, Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness etc etc. It was so exciting and stimulating. I was there for hours, and in the end had to be forcibly ejaculated by the security guard.

Digging out my notes on that exhibition (which finished “that exhibition was FUCKING AWESOME – it felt like it was curated by my sub-conscious"), I see that afterwards I went to the BL’s semi-permanent exhibition of religious artefacts, and still in an excited state, noted that they had 10th century Torah scrolls, various Jewish artefacts from the 14th to 16th centuries, and a touchscreen display of the so-called Golden Hagadah of Barcelona circa 1320.

Those religious artefacts and others from Christianity and Islam have now been collated into a new exhibition at the BL, titled “Sacred.” And what a disappointing exhibition it is. It is everything that The Writer in the Garden was not: bland, flat, dull. The clue is in the tagline “discover what we share.” There’s that dreadful flat tone of voice again. This from the exhibition guide: “Religion is one of the main aspects of life by which we define ourselves, and from which we derive our sense of community. In the 2001 UK Census, 76.8% of people said that they had a religious faith”. I’ve commented on this voice before – patronizing, simplistic flat. Any excitement, any vibrancy, any passion, any violence, is brushed under the carpet and trodden down. Note that terrible word “community”. Note that meaningless statistic, and bear in mind that the 2001 census was the one where there was a huge underground campaign for people to declare their religion as “Jedi”.

There was much talk in the exhibition of “diversity” but, of course, none of difference or conflict. In the spirit of diversity, I largely focussed on the Jewish objects and took little interest in the Christian and Muslim objects. The highlight for any reader of this blog would have been a 13th Century copy of Moses Maimonides’ Guide For The Perplexed.

I would also have liked to learn more about micrography but the exhibition gave almost no consideration to the aesthetics or practice of calligraphy,

This was a stuffy, uncomfortable exhibition – the essence of three religions reduced to just a lot of book at low level behind glass, with explanatory notes even lower down.

God was barely mentioned.

Despite the BL’s best attempts to gloss over the nastier aspects of eg Christian anti-semitism, or violent factionism in Islam, little hints crept through – a Christian object depicted the Jew as blindfolded because of his refusal to accept Christ; a section on the Sunni/Shia split notes the almost immediate murder of Shia figures by Sunnis.

It is odd, because (for all that it ignores the class of civilisations) in some ways this exhibition perfectly captures life in Britain at the end of the Blair government – what Sukhdev Sandhu, in his review of the (hype surrounding the) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer film calls a culture of “coercive banality”. The language of government speak. The closed-eyed attempt to ignore the reality of religious conflict. The flattening of all experiences, so that they are all equal and all bland and all meaningless – just stuff behind glass cases in a museum. He is so right about that notion of “coercive”. At the end of the exhibition is a screen on which you are asked to give your thoughts, which (once vetted of course!) flash up around you. Time after time, messages appear along the lines of “wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone realised how much they had in common”. This exhibition is an exercise in brainwashing. You come along, are battered into submission by banality, and then prove what good little boys and girls you are by parroting dull sentiments back into the system, where they will be used to brainwash other people.

This, for the record, was my entry, which I doubt you will be seeing up on the screen:

“Although people keep trying to persuade me of the powers of the British Library, nonetheless I have increasingly difficulty in believing that such a body actually exists.”

CocoRosie at the Bloomsbury Ballroom

Lying in bed after the gig, I was in a dilemma. I was in such a good place, so happy and buzzy, that I didn’t want to go to sleep. On the other hand, I knew that to sleep would be to dream and in dreams I would find myself back in CocoRosieLand.

What a tremendous show this was – a perfect marriage of artist, crowd and venue. In reverse order, the Bloomsbury Ballroom is a recently restored and very plush Art Deco Ballroom in the heart of Bloomsbury, and it just had a great vibe from the moment you went in (albeit that the heavy handed bouncers did their best to spoil it). The crowd were, to a woman, beloved fans, so there were none of the strafes one tends to find at bigger venues, the ones who don’t seem to know why they are there, get horribly drunk and heckle and talk and generally spoil it for everyone else. As with the legendary Scala gig a few years back, there was a lot a love of love in the room, and the volume of noise was quite something.

As for the sisters, they have benefited from almost constant touring since I saw them a few months ago, and the smaller stage suited them. Some of the weaker numbers from the new album have been dropped since earlier in the year.

Both sported tears and rubies drawn onto their faces, and Bianca had drawn on her tradition Victorian-style moustache.


Sierra wore men’s long john’s and rubber wellies with the feet ripped off.





















Bianca wore a hat and veil, with very very low rise jeans over big pants.




















I was to be found very near the front, gazing up lovingly.

Despite this being the 4th time I have seen them live, they remain as elusive, enigmatic and contradictory as ever. Their act is playful but they maintain an air of seriousness. They come across best in smaller and more intimate venues, but engage little with the audience, yet they invite people up onto the stage until the bouncers intervene, and they are visibly moved by the warmth of the feeling in the room. And what a Bitches Brew they stir up: crotch-grabbing hip hop macho posturing is lesbianically appropriated; toy instruments, eurthymy, opera, harp, piano, imaginary trumpet and beatboxing all go into the pot, but it is not gratuitous, it works. And unlike many artists hovering around what is sometimes referred to as the freak folk scene, they have always avoided whimsy and exude cool



You can start to see CocoRosie as a knowing art project, but then they sing songs about their bastard father breaking up the marriage to their mother, and about the death of their brother. They often wear masks but you feel the songs come from the heart, the disguises allowing them to be more honest.

They seem to be channelling some shamanic, ancient and deep wisdom, but at the same time play with any patronising misconceptions that might lead one to connect this with their part Native American lineage. They are sexy and sexualised but sexually ambiguous. Woe betide anyone who tries to put them into any preconceived box.

After the show Bianca is standing opposite me as I buy my t shirt. She is covered in a film of sweat and with the intensity of the performance. There is nothing I can find to say to her, nothing worth saying. Perhaps I have might have if it had been Sierra, she seems warmer and more open, Bianca is sterner and (I imagine) more pricklish. But that’s the things. Who knows? It is inconceivable to imagine them not being CocoRosie. The documentaries and interviews on the web give the impression that they wake, inspect their hair to see if the fairies have been cutting off their locks in the night again, paint on the tears, pick up some instruments, summon a ghost or two, and start singing, and that they stay like that until bedtime. And I would hate to think that it might not be so.

Ticket trouble

There is a specific frustration caused by organisational inefficiency. Its just part of the basket of psychological ailments perched wobblingly on the end of the bicycle that is modern life, deflated tyres and all.

Tickets don’t arrive in the post. Have they been nicked again by a quickfingered postie at the sorting office? Or not sent? Wrongly addressed? Computer error? Not printed yet? Sitting on someone’s desk?

So I ring the ticket office but a soft voiced girl shows complete indifference. She says that tickets are not normally sent out until a week before the event. I know this to be untrue, having just checked my collection of tickets for this venue, which covers the next 18 months, all tickets having been received by me within days of making the booking. She says that she cannot check if the tickets have been posted. She tells me to ring customer services, that they can tell me. But customer services turns out to be a recorded message telling me to ring the ticket office for tickets enquiries, or if I am ringing about access, to contact the security officer at the stage door. I shall leave the security officer until nearer the time.

There is of course nothing remarkable about such encounters. They just swim up to the shore and beach themselves in front of you, sapping your time and energy.

I reply to the sender of the e mail which confirmed my booking, but that bounces, as I knew it would. The website only offers me someone called “webeditor” so I e mail him or her, in the hope that at least I can make them waste some of their time, if only in forwarding my e mail to someone else within the organisation, someone who will probably also be the wrong person, or who will forget about it, or will try and steal my identity, or will be so inundated with all sorts of e mails that they will not realise that mine is sitting there waiting for their attention.

So I shall visit the ticket office in person, and affecting frailty, shall beg and wheeze until I achieve some resolution.

In such situations I find it best to adopt the persona of Alan Bennett: a sense of being out of one’s time and permanently baffled and befuddled normally does the trick.

Maurizio Pollini - Barbican

Time to dust off that kimono again…





As I saunter down to the Barbican for the first in a series of piano recitals I shall be attending over the coming months…

It started the night I went there for the Icelandic Peer Gynt production and was struck by the excitement in the audience waiting to go and see a recital by Evgeny Kissin. I want some of that excitement.

So last night was Maurizio Pollini playing Chopin and Liszt. The Chopin half was a little flat and dull to be honest, listless you might say, but things picked up with the Liszt, especially the last tune, a sonata in B minor. There then followed a series of encores but of course I can’t tell you what they actually were, although I overheard someone mentioning Debussy. Anyway this was definitely a concert that got better as it went on, partly because the numbers were more melodic, and partly for me at any rate because mental tiredness brought with it a certain relaxation and mellowness which allowed the music to wash over me .

But what really struck me was the audience. Albeit less excited than for Kissin, two things stood out:

First was the sense of joy people emitted as they left the Hall. These were smiley happy people and they hadn’t need pills to get like that. “Oh it was wonderful” gushed strangely attractive girls all around me. This contrasted with the dowdy smelly too cool to actually enjoy themselves crowds at the gigs I normally go to.

And second was diversity. I read recently about how the English Lit school syllabus is now geared towards “equal opportunities to such an extent that there is not one English or Welsh poet in a prescribed list of poetry" so pupils are studying Carol Ann Duffy (whoever the hell she is) rather than Milton. The myth is that somehow this represents diversity and inclusiveness. But looking around the Barbican, at an event which one might have expected to represent the pinnacle of elitist conservative western high culture, gave lie to the myth. On every level – age, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, eccentricity of nasal discharge, this was a more varied and diverse audience than at any other event I have been to. And a happier one too.

One only hopes that one day this crowd might rise up and sweep away all the bullshit and nannyism that infects this sceptred isle.

Funny that

So the Sunday Telegraph felt unable to print an article in the travel section by Stephen Berkoff about a visit to Tel Aviv without initiating a discussion about whether or not one should be boycotting Israel. It asked for contributions to its website.

So I submitted my comment, namely that it was a stupid question and wasn’t it odd that they didn’t feel it necessary to initiate that sort of discussion when writing about Russia, China etc etc. Funny that, I said.

They didn’t post my comment.

Funny that.

Murcof - Luminaire

Murcof sits in front of a black curtain, staring at a black laptop. He wears black, and has black hair and a thick black goatee. This leaves only the rest of his face to look at during his performance, and it is a face that remains passive, barely moving. He might as well be made of wax.

He builds a fiercely static set, tonally very pure. What beats there are, when they come, have punch and bite, but the rhythms are languid. For the finale, a note builds like the largest church organ conceivable, a nothing, but an overpowering nothing, the audience struggling not to bow down before the new pagan gods of the sine wave.

His set lasts only 45 minutes, but it has eternity within its grasp.

Batik Dance Company – Sadler’s Wells

“So if I understand this correctly, my choice for this Saturday night is between a “Jewish Facebook party” in Hampstead, and 7 Japanese lovelies dancing in their skimpies in a work about masturbation and saphic love?”

Sadler’s Wells it was then, for the Batik Dance Company’s performance of “Shoku” led by dancer and choreographer Ikuyo Kuroda. It proved to be a very physical piece, pushing the dancer’s bodies to the very limits. It seemed to be drawing connection between the physical exertions of dance and of sex, arms flailing, bodies crashing to the floor time and time again. Shoes and torches were big themes, carrying and lighting the dancers, but also doubling as sex toys, constantly disappearing and reappearing in the dancers big frilly pants. On occasion, Ikuyo Kuroda dribbled spittle onto the floor or herself. Red hooded capes became bondage strappings or face masks.





Powerful and elusive, violently sexual and possibly sexually violent, it was, all in all, a great way to spend a hot muggy evening in sub-tropical London. Maybe the Facebook party was like that too?

logo / no logo

A little while back, I failed to go in time to an exhibition of the designs created by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Now recognised as design classics, Aicher’s work achieved two remarkable goals.

First, in view of the historical resonances of holding the games in Munich, he ensured that the athletes portrayed were free from any identifiable nationalistic characteristics – ie they were free of ego, jingoism, and in some ways time.

Secondly he created a simple design system based on the minimal graphic detail necessary to convey meaning. He invented those little stick people you see everywhere, from toilets to pedestrian crossings to biscuits. .

Get that. He invented them. That’s what I call a legacy.

Contrast of course the disastrous 2012 logo unveiled this week. Normally when the press get all uppity about a piece of art it is a sure sign that the plebeian populist masses are flaunting their ignorance, but not this time. The contrast with Aicher’s work couldn’t be more dramatic. The 2012 logo is cluttered, messy, full of ego. Like a bad dancing dad at a bar mitzvah disco, it tries to be cool and hip and misses by an embarrassing margin. Graffiti art my arse. Somebody said in the paper (but I wish I had thought of it) that it was a broken and fragmented symbol for a broken and fragmented city.

Looking at the 2012 website just now, I was drawn to a section headed “watch a film and find out about the new brand.” (note the Toby Litt style plain English). The film starts with a fat greasy woman walking into a garden shed with an old cardboard box of rubbish. Really, I kid you not. Then she says, in that kind of plain speaking voice that actors in government infomercials use to indicate that they are real and honest people: “I don’t think I’m proud of anything in particular”. Fuck off then I shouted at my monitor as I turned the film off.

Yeah well the way its going, 2012 is going to be something else not to be proud of. Remind me to get out of the city before then.

Equus

So I toddled off to see Equus. I hovered reluctantly outside as the muggy sky cleared to sunshine, feeling achy from the gym and just generally not in the mood. I feared this was one theatre trip too many, and had bad memories of reading the play in my youth. Should I try to flog my ticket?

I am therefore happy to report that it was a triumph: gripping, well acted and staged and stimulating. Perhaps the psychology underpinning the play has dated: after the unlocking of the DNA code the psychometer has swung very much from nurture to nature; but the themes of the play seemed very much contemporary: pain, religion, parenting, passion, what it means to be sane, what it means to be alive.

As I was leaving the theatre, there was a party of German girls, I’d guess early twenties, chatting away loudly in German (as is their wont) and the only comprehensible word I could make out was “sexy”. Yeah, it was, in a funny kind of way. I think because it was so intense. Richard Griffiths of course was magnificent, a real presence, maybe a tad hammy, but generally low key yet powerful. Daniel Radcliffe was fine too, but you don’t want to know about his acting do you! Well hold your horses for a sec.

Its funny how certain ideas or themes gett into the ether; here are just some of the resonances between this play and others I have reported to you on recently:

1. Mental illness as a device for exploring social issues – although Equus was written in the early 1970s, it had many thematic similarities with the more recent The Wonderful World of Dissocia, particularly the notion of what sort of a cure it is that removes the passion and energy from the patient.

2. Nudity – you’ve got to say, Daniel Radcliffe has balls, remarkably big ones I can tell you. If you ask me, he needs to take a trip round the corner from the theatre into the hinterland of Soho and get himself porned up and release some of the tension – I remember on a group trip to Israel somebody ending up having to go to hospital with ball bag pain cause of the MSB – it had come to a head, so to speak, when he went in the Dead Sea and something in the salty water triggered the pain. Talking of which, I’ve got a new porn queen heroine – she’s called Naomi, is Israeli, proud to be Jewish, the daughter of a rabbi, and very, very, very and I mean very very, filthy. Anyway enough of Harry Potter’s goblets, back to nudity sui generis. Faust, Platinov, Panthesillyarse, Michael Clark last year, everyone is getting their kit off (and I have high hopes for the piece of dance theatre I’m going to this weekend). No wonder Mademoiselle La Latte Days goes to the theatre so much. But what does it tell us. A desire for the theatre to strip away all external matter to expose the raw psychology of the characters? A desperate measure to get the punters in (£50 a ticket Equus cost me)? A restatement of western liberal ideals in the face of attack from fundamentalist religion?

3. Wild horses. Coriolanus went for pantomime style horses ie two men under a rug, but incredibly realistic so that I actually thought for a moment they were real. Equus (as in the original 1970s production I’m told) went for dancer-type actors wearing cage like horse-head masks and mini-stilts with horse shoes underneath. In the climax of the first half, little Harry Potter rides on one and the stage revolves faster and faster, with powerful kinetic force, a brilliant abstract impression of speed and power.

So that’s it for the theatre for the moment. Nowt much on that appeals until September, but don’t worry, there will be plenty of other things to tell you about.

misc

did you misc me?

just back from mcr - have posted some piccies of this ever changing city over at digitalis; what strikes me more than ever is the overlaying of the victorian and the modern - i like this kind of overlaying - very fourth world

on my trip to a garden centre in Bury, i was rather taken aback to see a display of toy Gollywogs:

Now I have fond memories of collecting tokens from the back of jam jars for little pin badges of gollies in various occupations - spaceman golly, cowboy golly etc, maybe even doctors lawyers politicans too. I also remember the point at which Robertson's finally conceded that such images were no longer appropriate. I know that there is a taste for all things grotty 70s (Life on Mars, Made in England etc) but isn't this taking it all a bit far? What next - a revival of "Mind your Language" ?

Eager readers will have noticed my ever expanding list of links - I think this is an important part of my role as educator and facilitator. Can I particularly recommend the ever thought provoking City of Sound, and the work of my new electronic chum, a digital artist called One Eye.

Three Sisters

Three Sisters? Sorry mate. I fort you said Seven Sisters. Why didntya say sumat?

Well I thought we were going a funny way, but you know, you’re the expert and cabbies tend to get a bit iffy if you query their choice of route.

Anyway, after much russian about, the central(ised) line being down, I got to the Barbican for Cheek by Jowl’s Russian Company’s performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, in Russian, with English surtitles.

The first half was very good. Well lit, superbly acted, and, despite the language barrier, you could appreciate the flow of the words. The set was bare, just a couple of hanging screens, and some furniture, which seemed fresh to me after the visual extravagance of recent outings. Overall there was a rightness and balance to it.

Things deteriorated in the third act. The effective stage area narrowed and the speaking volume dropped. The intended effect was to draw us in and give us a more intimate glimpse into the life of the characters, but the opposite was achieved. You couldn’t keep your eyes on the surtitles and the action at the same time. Someone behind me developed whistling nasals, the noise more irritating for the quietness on stage. The noise irritations around me threatened to snowball as the audience became restless. The pacing seemed awry.

The fourth and final act was better; stage area expanded and volume increased, and I was able to reconnect again with the characters. Needless to say the denouement with the crushing of the hopes and ambitions of those who dare to dream was deeply moving.

Overall I’d say good but not great, although I think some of the pacing problems are inherent in the text. The production gave life to the play and brought out its themes and recurring patterns well. The bare stage signposted how much of the action and how many characters appear only offstage, a kind of writerly metaphor wherein the artist, like the sisters, can never fully realise his ambition.

By the way, the programme, at £3, was absolutely dreadful. It was joint for this production and Cheek by Jowl’s English Co’s Cymbeline, and was full of short, trite attempts to compare the two plays, with frequent use of the word “perhaps” indicating that whoever wrote this tripe was not at all convinced of their argument. More like Cheek by Jowell.

VOLTA

The arrival of a new Björk album is always a moment of great excitement in my house, especially when the limited edition version with DVD surround sound mix comes as beautifully packaged as Volta does.

Who knows – maybe one day I will actually get round to listening to it?

Alvar Aalto

SO what’s a boy to do on a wet Bank Holiday Monday? Instead of dismantling my Corby trouser press, I took myself off (after a vicious beasting by my personal trainer) to the Barbican for the Alvar Aalto exhibition. Alto was one of the leading architects of the 20th century, although not a name I had come across previously. The exhibition focussed on several key buildings, plus his furniture, light fittings and door knobs. It seems he was particularly well known for the shape and construction of his stools.

One of the buzz words at the moment is neuroplasticity (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity?dm_i=113838564) or, as the Nintendo generation know it, Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. Well Doc Grebson prescribes a different (bad) medicine, which is getting out there, learning knew things, learning to see properly again. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about architecture but what I got out of the exhibition was some heightened perception of the nature of architecture – Aalto’s achievements, so it seemed to me, were about introducing organic shapes, bringing natural light into buildings, and bridging the urban with the natural world.

I particularly liked his Villa Mairea which encapsulated his belief that a building should have different moods in different parts, just as a play has different acts or a symphony different movements. For example, the forest outside the villa was mirrored inside by the different spacing of banisters and columns.

I took this awareness back into the lovely concrete forms of the Barbican: as the weather changed during the day from overcast to bright sunshine, so new views and vistas opened up, which despite the many hours I have spent in the Barbican, were new to me.

Alto was also (one of or the) first to bend pieces of wood into chairs in that Scandinavian style – he noted that a chair was about the meeting of the horizontal and the vertical. Unfortunately, like almost every other designer, he failed to notice it was also about posture and support. I enjoyed watching several Japanese visitors wincing as they tried out one of his classic designs. Earlier in the day, I had found myself not enjoying a particularly hard stool.

All in all, a pleasant afternoon finished off with a nice cup of coffee and some cake.

The Gormleys are coming

The Gormleys are coming.




Figures are appearing across the rooftops of central London.

They stand proud, but inert. Guardian angels, or sinister aliens?

The epicentre is the Heywood Gallery.







These are the Gormleys.

I confidently predict that they will become the craze of this early summer. Virtual Gormleys will spring up all over the internet, as people try to record the location of each Gormley, and to photograph each Gormley from each possible angle. Accidents will happen because Londoners are wandering around, dazed, their eyes fixed on the skyline.

On one level, the installation by Antony Gormley of tens, if not hundreds, of statues of himself naked is a grotesque act of egotism, the apotheosis of our “look at me” culture.

Someone has already tried to steel the Gormley on Waterloo Bridge.



We will all fall under the spell of the Gormleys. Gormley has the knack of producing bold, simple art which somehow captures the imagination of the great British public. They say the Angel of the North is Britain’s best loved piece of public art.

The Gormleys make the living statues of Gilbert and George seem dead. The Gormleys make you rediscover things you’ve stopped seeing – architecture, the skyline, the colours of the sky, the play of shadows on a wall.


They are our defense against the coming Terracotta Army



We will all learn to love the Gormleys.

The Gormleys are coming.


there are more gormleys over at my sister site, grebson:digitalis

Attempts on her Life

Attempts on her Life

I am back in the National, and we are back in the world of experimental theatre. We have a text, by Martin Crimp, which is divided into sections to be spoken by different (unspecified) actors, but thereafter everything is up for the director (here Katie Mitchell) and the Company to decide, such as who says what, and what the staging is to be.

And the staging is certainly all busy busy. Busy busy bees. Sometimes the whole cast recite lines in the theatrical equivalent of a first person plural narrator, sometimes smaller groups. Some of it is sung / played. For the most part, the performance is filmed and projected, with some manipulation. The effect is of a collection of pastiches, of cheesy pop videos, of news, of funny foreign daytime tv, of Newsnight Review. The trouble with this is that it’s all been done before, and much better, by programmes such as The Day Today, and the Fast Show, programmes which managed to combine biting satire with prophetic vision of the way consumerist / pop / contemporary life was / is going. Here it all seemed a bit lame, and despite all the busy busyness, rather dull. People all around me were stifling yawns, or taking sharp irritable intakes of nasally breath.

Further more, the staging removed any effectiveness in the text – lines were barked in a single, flat register, devoid of emotion or variation, reducing it (and the text itself does this at stages too) to just a list of random words.

The text itself seemed all a bit clever clever to me – as characters discussed the meaning of experimental art, all viewpoints were presented to try and head off and delegitimise any audience viewpoint – you think this is pretentious – well we’ve already admitted to that possibility and shown the counter-arguments so that’s your simplistic reaction undermined! What the text fails to recognise was the possibility that an audience might find it all, well, a bit tedious.

So what is it about? The difficulty of art, mostly, how elusive it is to try and portray a realistic psychology of a character, how any characterisation is necessarily artificial, unsatisfactory, simplistic, and dependent on artificial plot mechanics. In part because of the limitations of the tools of art, in part because an individual’s personality is a fragmentary, contradictory, ever changing entity.

The text’s solution is to produce fragmented discourses by multiple narrators – we may be seeing a dozen short dialogues about various women called Anne, or it may be a that these are aspects of the same person. The “Attempts” are those of the artist to capture the Annes, and also refers to several of the Annes attempts to commit suicide.

Fair enough, but I think you’ll find the The Wonderful World of Dissocia dealt with these matters in a much more satisfactory way. And I find myself keeping going back to what that play’s author, Anthony Neilson, said in the playtext (isn’t that a kind of bra?) about experimental theatre: “the danger is that work of this type can easily become impenetrable. I will never believe its right to send an audience out feeling confused and stupid. It’s a needless failure of communication…”
I also found myself thinking back to Alan Bennett’s “talking heads”, a master class in how a character can speak about one thing whilst revealing more and more about themselves, warts, contradictions and all.

Before the play, I went to see an exhibition of work by Philippe Parreno at the lovely Haunch of Venison gallery off Bond Street. Entitled “What do you believe your eyes or my words” the centrepiece was a video piece of an antique automaton writing out the title of the show. The doll’s hand shook, its eyes moved in macabre fashion. The sounds of the gears churning and clicking filled the space. I loved it, but mainly because of my interest in the sinister world of automata. Other pieces were a little flat: four flickering pencil drawings, each one tenth of a stop start animation piece – the drawings are changed each day, so it is very slow animation; a room filled with black helium balloons in the shape of speech bubbles; a picture of the artist giving a lecture to some penguins. The gallery blurb was interesting – “in a series of open-ended propositions, he challenges the viewer to interrogate all that is placed before them”. ‘Scuse me, I tend to interrogate all that is placed before me anyway, and much that is not. “The artist is sceptical of constructed narratives with their claim to authoritative experience, preferring to deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, and to entertain a panoply of perspectives, each as unreliable as the next.” Really? Well Mr Perrano, there’s this play you might want to go see…

Parreno's balloons

GREBSON:DIGITALIS

RGGFTP IS DELIGHTED TO INVITE YOU TO THE OPENING OF ROBIN GREBSON'S BRAND NEW DIGITAL ART GALLERY.

THE ADDRESS IS http://grebson-digitalis.blogspot.com/

DRESS CODE: BLAZERS / KIMONOS

Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes: 10 Days on Earth

This was a curate’s egg of a performance, albeit a polka dot curate’s egg which hatched before our eyes to reveal a little duck so cute as to make Orville look like the Elephant Man / Duck. This was the Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes and their latest performance, 10 Days on Earth. It was the story of a “simple” middle aged shoeshine man called Darrel who lives with his elderly mother in a creepy grand wood panelled mansion, and the 10 days he spends without realising that she has “gone to sleep in the ground”. It is intercut with the tale of Honeydog and Little Burp (the aforementioned duckling) which the Mother used to read to Darrel as a boy and which the grown Darrel is still obsessed with. Other characters include a foul mouthed tramp who thinks he is God and a ‘Salvation Army’ type lady. This was high camp gothic Americana lubricated with schmaltz.





Burkett towers over the wooden cabinet stage, not just reciting the lines, but living them; the puppets mirror his movements, or maybe he mirrors theirs; he animates by them sheer force of psychic will. In the cold light of day it is easy to quibble about the manipulative sentimentality of the plot, but what Burkett achieves, and this is the wholly grail of almost all art from the Romantic period onwards, is to allow the audience to rediscover the inner child, the wonder of discovery and amazement, to find oneself with one’s chin hanging down and tongue lolling out in delight. Burkett himself comes across like a man who has never forgotten what it was like to play with dolls as a boy; his manic dialogue threatens at times to drift out of control, or to get stuck going round the same roundabout for a while whilst his brain searches for the right exit. It is a bravura performance, intense, crazy, obsessive-compulsive, and at times astonishing. And any show which features a pigeon turning into a hot air balloon in a flash of magic is alright by me.

Coriolanus

He he he – he said anus

By the way whatever did happen to Beavis and Butthead?

Anyway down to the matter at hand, which is, in the first instance, how to dress properly for the theatre. These people have the right idea (behind the lady with the fat arse):

He – in crisp shirt and smart blazer. She - in kimono, full obi sash, white ankle socks, and delicate slippers.

Obviously he could equally be sensible attired in kimono, sash etc.

Ah yes I was at the Barbican (along with many ladies of the Japanese diaspora, the majority of whom were splendidly turned out in extremely expensive designer clothing) for The Ninagawa Company’s production of Coriolanus. Three and a half hours of a Shakespeare play I am not familiar with, in Japanese, with (very fast) English surtitles (well strictly speaking side titles (note to self: must stop using so many brackets)). Bliss

As one would expect the stage was spectacular, dominated by monumental stone steps with a series of sliding screens at the top. Behind the shimmering metallic curtain lay…another curtain, which was mirrored, reflecting the audience back upon itself, and which would turn see-through depending on the lighting.

all the world's a stage - taken at half time
The play, set in Rome, was staged as a Samurai drama, which worked really well, not just because of the several battle scenes (which used most of the 40 plus cast with some great sword fighting action) but also because Coriolanus’ fatal flaw is his holding himself to an unrealistic idea of “nobility” (those Samurai were nothing if not beholden to codes of conduct).

In many ways this was a straight telling of the story; the costumes and stage-set worked with rather than re-wrote the original. Whether it was because I had to watch the play with one and a half eyes on the side titles, or, as I suspect, was much to do with the nature of the play, I couldn’t get that emotionally involved with the drama.

Coriolanus is a man who loves his mum, superbly played by Kayoko Shiraishi who stole the show in the climactic finale as she begs Coriolanus to desist from destroying Rome. Her acting was full of the precision and nuances of Noh theatre, with deliberate positioning of head, neck, hand and body.

Other highlights included a couple of excellent horses – initially so lifelike that I thought they were real, and the scene where Menenius, snubbed by Coriolanus, covers himself in his black cloak and slides down the stairs, as liquid as any of the spirits in Spirited Away.

All that was left was for the tumultuous final fight to the death, and a spectacular spray of blood as gory as any manga, and everyone toddled off to the tube happy.

The jasmine plant

Of all the strange impulse purchases, a jasmine plant! They were ill equipped to wrap it in the shop – a brown paper bag and some wrapping looped over the top and stapled to the bag was the best that they could do.

I managed to get the seat on the bus by the gantry area for wheelchairs and luggage or for just packing more people in.

The heady scent of jasmine filled the lower deck.

My plant was in constant peril as people crushed in. At times I sat with one arm high around the plant, the other on the bar in front of my seat. A schoolboy with a packed rucksack swung around towards me, but my defensive position allowed me to swat him away.

An elderly woman with dyed red-brown hair scraped back into a pony tale kept looking around, nose in the air, sniffing. Then I overheard her asking someone where we were. I was disappointed that she was sniffing for traces of our location rather than for the origin of the sensual scent emanating from my plant. I was ready to discuss my plant with her.

Even the woman I was sat next to showed no interest in my plant. Every five minutes or so she would flick her ‘phone open and listen into it, waiting for a message than never came.

I watched a feathery collection of spores (dandelion?) float over my left shoulder from behind me and swim in the stale-breathy currents around near where I sat. My hands being occupied, I was helpless; all I could do was to try and blow the spores away. They caught a drift towards a woman standing by the door and settled on the dark blue of her coat. They soon took flight again, gliding back towards the plant, before changing their mind and coming to a rest on the other sleeve of the blue coat.

Back home, I picked away at the staples and peeled off the wrapping, before leaning over and bringing the plant out of the brown paper bag. I placed it in a sheltered spot and took a deep breath of its dizzying, intoxicating perfume, drawing the scented air down through my lungs, into my midriff, and then down into my feet, into the very earth beneath me.

Delicate Jasmine petals
On a crowded bus
My arm protects you

The Wonderful World of Dissocia

Currently playing at the Royal Court, the Wonderful World of Dissocia really is a wonderful piece of theatre. It is a game of two halves. In the first, we see Lisa Jones (played by Christine Entwhisle) descend into psychosis, her inner mind made physical on stage, as she visits the land of Dissocia – it is a world of floor to ceiling carpet, a barrage of colour and noise and craziness – like Alice in Wonderland with sex and drugs says writer and director Anthony Neilson perhaps a little hopefully. The second part is very different, with Lisa drugged up and confined to hospital – the stage is shrunk in all directions, the colour scheme all white, the action slow, sketches of near nothingness, flickering in and out. This is as much a realisation of Lisa’s internal world as the first act. Particularly effective are the heightened sounds: of footsteps along the hospital corridor; of Lisa’s pills rattling in a little plastic cup. We learn that the psychogenic fugue state of the first act was the result of Lisa choosing not to take her medication. At the end, colour returns to the stage to leave us “in little doubt” (says the programme) that Lisa will return to Dissocia.

The bloke behind me found everything in the first act incredibly and irritatingly hilarious – he would laugh loudly and pompously for much longer than was necessary, often drowning out the actor’s next line. For me, the skill of the play was that for all the madcap fun of the first half, there was always a reminder of something perhaps sinister, certainly disturbing – it was all a bit too frenetic. Conversely, many in the audience grew restless and fidgety in the second act, but I found there to be a quiet, formalistic, minimalist beauty to the staging.

Nielson’s play veers close to a number of potential pitfalls – that it might glamorise or patronise mental illness, or that it might revert to cliché and dogma in questioning the treatment of the mentally ill and the behaviour of others to them. These are skilfully negotiated, not by avoiding them but by allowing complexity into the play – for example there is warmth and humanity to the hospital scenes despite the dramatisation of Lisa’s sense-deadening medication.

The genius to this play was that it was sufficiently open to allow one to extrapolate its themes to the wider question of the modern malaise – mental fracturedness as metaphor for societal brokenness – the boredom of everyday life that causes so many to seek their own kingdoms of Dissocia in the form of binges of drink and drugs and sexual debauchery. It exposes and manipulates an audience weaned on trite mock-surrealist comedy that finds hilarity in meaningless random associations, where mad and crazy are terms of endearment, an audience in need of constant sensation and stimulation, that have lost the ability to sit quietly and to concentrate on quiet things, that have lost the ability to think.

Chernobyl: the amazing truth. Did a UFO save half of Europe from nuclear disaster?

"Chernobyl: the amazing truth. Did a UFO save half of Europe from nuclear disaster?"

So says an e mail from my friends the Inner Potential Centre in Fulham advertising a talk by Richard Lawrence on the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster,"which many believe would have been far worse were it not for direct intervention by a UFO. Incredible though it may sound, this fact is supported by information released by the Russian newspaper Pravda, which revealed that hundreds of people witnessed a UFO over the faulty reactor on the very day of the accident. Richard will be talking about why he believes extraterrestrial intelligences saved Europe from what could have been unprecedented devastation, focusing on the information revealed through his remarkable spiritual teacher Dr George King, who claimed contact with beings from other worlds for over forty years."

I can't remember who it was who said that when the media put things in the form of a question (the "not the nine o clock news" book famously did this with the strapline "Is the Shah Really Dead?" on its cover) the answer, 9 times out of 10, is no.

The Secret Public

I was too young, fat, Mancunian, Jewish and heterosexual to have gone to the legendary nightclub Taboo, and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten past the bitchy doormen in the M&S slacks which counted for leisurewear in my schooldays, but the interesting thing for me is that I should have wanted to go – this, I thought, was what grown up life should be about – decadent, creative, bohemian, full of strange and wonderful people doing strange and wonderful things, a world of clubbing and clothes, piercings and tattoos, women with bobs and men with boobs. It felt like something important was happening, and 20 years on it still feels like something important did happen.

Last Days of the British Underground 1978 – 1988, an exhibition at the ICA, features all the usual and welcome suspects – including Michael Clark, Derek Jarman, Trojan, Charles Atlas, Gilbert And George, Mark E Smith and the Fall, Bodymap et al – a filigree spider's web of an artistic community where ideas, media, bodily fluids and artistic endeavours were freely swapped. And towering over and above all others remains the great mass of flesh that was Leigh Bowery.

What was going on was as much about lifestyle as art, lifestyle as performance, performance as art, and consequently the exhibition does not so much show much art (there being in truth little such art to show) but rather recordings of the art that was made – for example a film of Leigh Bowery’s performances at the d’Offay Gallery in 1988, in which Bowery does what he would have done anyway on a night out on the old town, namely wear outrageous clothes and pose and preen, gestures turned into art by sheer force of personality and will.

In another room sit rows of tvs (televisions not transvestites) showing films made at the time, the highlight being Charles Atlas’s film of Michael Clark and Company – “Because We Must” - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc2iY_SdAos&mode=related&search – a reminder of how exuberant and exciting Clark’s work was at this time, full of cheek and energy, sexy but strange, dark and sometimes menacing.

The exhibition programme suggests that this was the last group of artists to remain genuinely underground before the rise of the “consumer environment” and the “flattening of subcultural manifestations” but, albeit in an unintended way, these artists were the fathers of the modern condition – their concerns – fashion, lifestyle, style, individualism, narcism, live for the moment for tomorrow we die (which many did of course) – evolved into the concerns of the modern day consumer world – designer became brand became hundreds of people queuing round the block and fighting to get into Primark, men in skirts and make-up evolved into the billion pound men’s cosmetics industry, clubbing begat acid house begat mass uniformity of music and behaviour, decadence spread into the easy sex and drugs culture that exists in so much of Britain today (but sadly not Finchley). But one should not ignore the extraordinary conflagration of talent and originality that made this set of people so unique and this exhibition such an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

And it should not be forgotten that those who survived continue to make interesting work - Charles Atlas features regularly on this weblog, Michael Clark is in year 3 of his residency at the Barbican, and people are raving about the Fall’s current album.

Pictures of Taboo taken from http://www.geocities.com/bellkahn/menuleighbowery.html

CocoRosie

Adventures in CocoRosieland

Ahh and so it came to pass that the long awaited weekend finally arrived when the Casady sisters (Sierra and Bianca) would once again inveigle my mind body and spirit with readings from their latest dousing of the sacred feminine collective unconsciousness.

First a new album of kindertotenlieder, called The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. Building on (Sierra’s spin off project) the Metallic Falcons’ Desert Donuts album (one of last year’s finest), The Adventures of… has a more open, outdoor texture, reflecting the psychogeography of its conception - a boat in the arctic circle, a farm in the south of France. The sound is less cluttered, and although there are some background colourings of animal noises and children’s toy instruments, they are used more sparingly than on previous albums. The dominating element is Sierra’s voice, which ranges from macabre operatics to pure tone angelic loveliness.

As Sierra says in Useless Magazine (because life is longer than you think) “I’ve used my voice to connect with the community around me to kind of feel out in which ways and with whom I’ve been connected in past lives and what is my karmic situation now.”

My karmic situation was in constant peril at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire for the sisters’ only UK appearance. The Bush was crowded, visibility was poor, but the sound was excellent. Fittingly the photos I took had a somewhat ghostly appearance, given that the sisters current talk is of “graveyard disco” and “Victorian hip-hop”. Sierra seemed to be summoning spirits direct from a Victorian table turning séance with Arthur Conan Doyle, whilst Bianca, in boyish military uniform with sexy slip underneath, teased the lust boys and girls at the front.

The highlights as always were “By your side”, the mystery happy dance-y song we now know to be called “Japan”, and the unbearably sexy cover of Kevin Lyttle’s Soca classic “Turn me on”. Every CocoRosie gig is different, and this one, in the spirit of the album, felt more acoustic, more classical, more spacious, more cerebral maybe and less purely emotional.

But whichever CocoRosie incarnate appear, it is always wonderful.

Much CocoRosie on youtube but there's a 6 part documentary starting at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjRZmpLs5EY&mode=related&search= and a lovely turn me on at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2hoP9CllbI

Jeppe Hein

My trip to the Barbican was not a complete write-off as it gave me another chance to see Jeppe Hein’s installation in the Curve Gallery. It is a fascinating piece. Entering the gallery triggers the movement of a large white ball, which commences a journey of wonderment around the space. Lifted by a pulley mechanism, the ball rolls along an overhead walkway which starts to twist and turn; at the far end of the gallery it rolls down a spiral path before its return journey. The return leg is where the magic happens – at one point the ball rolls along a see saw, which drops to stop the ball, before gravity takes over; elsewhere speed and vicious spin are injected so that the ball stops and rolls back up the ramp until gravity again takes over. The ball ends up back in a queue at the start.

Whilst I wasn’t convinced that the slides at the Tate really were “art”, I am equally convinced that this is. It’s my blog and I can be as subjective as I like, and if you don’t like it I can always take my ball home with me. Why I think its art is because of the mental stimulation of the piece. Whilst I watched the progress of my ball, the following went through my head.

Construction / engineering – what a remarkable mechanism this is, as intricate and balanced as any sculpture, and beautiful to watch.

Narrative – the ball’s journey had tension, drama, a sense of time and place, well paced, with twists and turns to keep you interested.

Sound – there was the clanking of the pulleys, the whirring of the ball when the centrifugal forces were applied, the restful clicking as the ball came to a rest nestling against the previous ball.

Fascination – the experience grew rather than diminished with a second viewing.

Go see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJmXw0pnOmU

Francoise Berlanger – Penthesilea - Barbican

Hmmm.

This was a dreadful piece of experimental theatre; self indulgent and showing contempt for the audience.

As we enter the theatre, the stage is swathed in dry ice, and ominous processed electronic drones fill the air. With the audience still taking their seats and the houselights up, a naked woman with a bow (but no arrow) roams the stage, occasionally confronting the audience. The naked woman is Francoise Berlanger and this is essentially a one woman show, backed by the two laptop musicians, and some paintings above the stage by Berlanger’s brother Marcel.

At some point the lights dim, the naked woman dons a black tuxedo jacket and rather nice long frilly black dress, and does her best to make the text completely incomprehensible. Randomly, words are screeched, squealed or shouted, in an array of weird accents. She particularly enjoys saying the word “horse” over and over again. A large section is in the German of the Von Kleist text that the performance is based on. All the while the electronic drones try their hardest to drown out the words.

All of this was quite deliberate, as became clear in the after-show talk. Berlanger said she was more interested in exploring how the words sounded than what the text meant. The talk was chaired by Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for the Guardian. Yes said Lyn it was almost as if it didn’t matter if you couldn’t follow the text. Well it did matter, because there was noting else going on on stage to tell the story. Lyn purred how the production seemed to be an all out assault on the audience, which it was – all around me people were suffering from the dry ice, menacing drones, and Berlanger’s incomprehensible howling. Lyn seemed to think this was a good thing. But it wasn’t. It was neither interesting nor original, nor did it in any way relate to the content of the play, which from what I can make out revolved around love and loss and killing what you most hold dear (by eating them apparently, from what Berlanger said, not that there was any evidence of this on stage).

Penthesilea is part of the Spill festival of experimental theatre, live art and performance. It is organised by director Robert Pacitti, frustrated at the lack of opportunities to stage experimental theatre in the capital. Yes well that is a moot point. Look at some of the things I have been to of late – Faust, Platonov, Yabbok, Doo Cot – all experimental, all good.

Lets compare with some of the other events at Spill (quotes being from the Spill brochure): Eve Bonneau “uses the body as live matter in constant transformation…with its flux/reflux of interior rhythms” – meaning she crawls about naked on the floor illuminating her body with a single lightbulb; Hancock and Kelly’s Tattoo during which Traci Kelly continues “to have the length of her back tattooed in a pattern drawn from the wallpaper of [collaborator] Richard Hancock’s childhood home”; Untitled (Syncope) where Kira O’Reilly “employs…biomedical and biotechnical practices to consider the body as material, site and metaphor in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations” meaning she cuts herself on stage with a scalpel.

One word sums this up for me. Why. Why do it? Why go and watch it? And look at what is really going on. In these types of shows it is always women, never men, who find themselves parading naked and self harming – this is little more than cerebral lapdancing for students of Gender or Queer Studies.

That’s why you can’t get bookings Mr Pacitti, because these types of performance are not only terribly clichéd almost to the point of self-parody (and there is nothing contemporary or new about them even if the surface trappings of electronica or digital media are new) but because, when boiled down to it, they are not very good, and because to mask their not being very good, the performers go out of their way to alienate the audience. Contrast the wonder that was Faust (and every bit as experimental, by the way) which was all about the audience, bringing the audience into the show, with what Berlanger said about wanting to work in a very open space, so that it was very easy for the audience to leave if they wanted to.

Remind me again what the emperor's new clothes looked like.


The Spill website is at http://www.spillfestival.com/ and their blog is http://www.spilloverspill.blogspot.com/

the red death is coming

http://www.thereddeathiscoming.com/

I can barely wait.

contrary to what they say - tickets are already on sale to those who are on the national theatre or punchdrunk mailing list.

got mine.

Do they know it's Pesach?

Ah yes, another Pesach is upon is, and not just an excuse for me to dig out the picture of that stick of horseraddish Mother Grebson got last year, but also a time when traditionally many sungs are sung, including adaptations of well know tunes from the host culture. So here is my humble pascal offering...

It's Pesachtime,

there's no need to be afraid

At Pesachtime,

we let in crackers and we banish bread

And in our world of plastic

cutlery and cloths

Throw your arms around the world

at Pesachtime

But say a brocha,

pray for the other ones

At Pesachtime it's hard,

Cos it aint much fun

There's a world of constipation,

and it's a world of dread and pain

Where the only movement flowing

has the bitter sting of chrain

And all you ever wonder

Is will I crap again?

Well tonight thank God because

He'll help you poo.

And there won't be bread in Golders Green this Pesachtime

The greatest gift they'll get this year is cheese (Oooh)

But how much bloody cheese

Is it possible to fress?

Do they know it's Pesachtime at all?

Here's to you raise a glass for Elijah

Here's to you with your painful itchy bum

Do they know it's Pesachtime at all?

Feed them Matzo

Feed them Matzo

Feed them Matzo

Let them know it's Pesachtime again

Feed them Matzo

Let them know it's Pesachtime again

[then segue into…]

We are the Jews

We are the Children…

Where Am I?

Of course I might have been psychogenetically transmogrified onto a David Lynch movie, or spent just too long wrestling with the devil in Faust, but I am in fact, at Selfridges, in their amusing little display to mark the opening of the V&A's Surrealism exhibition.

Faust Part II

Sometimes it pays to be just a little bit obsessive-compulsive. I rumbled that returns were appearing occasionally on the National Theatre website, and after much hitting of refresh I scored another trip to Hell.

The second part of Goethe’s Faust is very different to the first – would my second trip to Wapping be so different? Well, in some ways, yes, and it was remarkable how many different scenes, or angles, I kept discovering – even after close to 6 hours inside this world I was finding new rooms and characters – but what the second visit shared with the first was the same extraordinary intensity. After two visits in three days, I felt like something had snapped in my brain, and I’m still not entirely sure I’ve recovered.

Early on in visit number two I found myself in a small room, alone with a woman knitting fishing nets. I was used to being close to, and yet invisible to, the actors, but, very slowly, she turned her face towards me, and started to tell me about the little boy who went to the moon. I think at some point she locked the door. The little boy didn’t like the moon so he went to the sun. Without seeming to, by some psychology trickery, she choreographed me into the position where I was backing up against a little built-in bench, which she pushed me down onto, and pinned me down. When the little boy got to the sun he yearned to go back to the earth. She took my mask off, and was holding my face. But the little boy realised the earth was just an upturned plant-pot. The woman said that when she first saw me she thought I was that little boy. She must have felt through my clothes how hard my heart was beating. Disempowered by the removal of my mask I could just about muster the neurological signals necessary to shake my head. Speaking was out of the question. She pulled out a little wooden box and opened it. She kissed me my face, and rubbed lavender oil around my mouth. She gave me a sweet, and begged me to be careful, then took my hand and led me out of the room. I wanted to thank her but was still unable to speak.

At various points later in the evening, as Mephistopheles and his dark witches brought chaos and terror, I would catch the smell of lavender and remember her plea.

Whatever game plan I may have had for the evening was out of the window, and, freed from worrying about catching the main scenes (as I had seen them first time around around) I was able to go with the flow a lot more. Sometimes I was minded of the scene in The Truman Show when Truman is sailing his boat and crashes into the horizon coloured wall- I felt I was close to the edges of the world but could never quite break out.

I found myself shadowing Gretchen (Sarah Labigne) for part of the evening and found in her performance real emotional depth in her transformation from innocent playful girl to the heartbreaking scene in the pine forests where her brother dies, and she inflicts an abortion on herself by running repeatedly into a wall. Such is the suspension of disbelief that it actually entered my head that I wanted to, that I should, stop her. You don’t get that sitting rattling your bangles behind the “fourth wall”.

Other memorable sequences included a terrific scene in the cinema where Mephistopheles and a flame haired girl were dancing in between the seats and the people trying to watch a Touch of Evil on the screen – legs, popcorn, hair, everything was flying, before the couple burst through a door I hadn’t noticed before and I realised that I had seen the end of this scene from a different angle. Another lovely moment was when I was having a crafty sip of water on the stairs and one of the “witches” came by and gave me a sneaky, ambiguous smile. I followed her (as you do) into a wonderful scene in a dingy bar where she danced along the bar top before lip synching Lynch style to a fifties heartbreaker, on a little stage, her face starkly lit. All the while one of the male actors was crying in the corner. As I watched him, he transformed from one character into another – all he seemed to do was remove his wig, yet his whole physiognomy and posture changed.

Behind the bar was the devil’s parlour chamber, where the original wager over Faust’s soul was made – red velvet curtains, a stuffed fox, a locked safe, and on the table, like a children’s game, was a floor plan with little figurines for each of the major characters. Such amazing attention to detail.

Oh yeah, and I got chased out of the beauty parlour by an angry beautician but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Anyway it's definitely finished now.

Would I have gone back again if I could have? You bet!