Image Credit: 'Office Party Xmas 2007', Featuring Amanda Hadingue with audience members. Photo by Steff Langley

Office Party Xmas 2007
Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez
12 – 29 December 2007
The Pit, Barbican

See http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=6068&pg=766 for details.

Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.

The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.

This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.

It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (aka Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.

These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the rest of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.

And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.

Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desperation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.

Mary Paterson

The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007
La Pocha Nostra
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/11/07

The last time I got a severe case of the shivers during a live art show was thanks to Goat Island’s ‘When will the September roses bloom / last night was only a comedy’. In it, whilst the bland, treacly tones of James Taylor oozed from the PA, Litó Walkey stood still on one leg for a good seven or eight minutes. One song ended, another one began (as if the sound op had dozed off, leaving the whole CD playing unintentionally) and Walkey simply stood centre stage, one leg raised, in a crepuscular half-light.

I’m no particular fan of James Taylor (or indeed of standing on one leg for any length of time) but after about three minutes into ‘When will the September roses bloom....’ I suddenly realised I was shaking. At first I thought it was in sympathy with the performer, or maybe even because of the cold, but I quickly discounted these theories and yet still couldn’t stop myself wobbling… and that wasn’t particularly good news as I was behind a camcorder at the time, filming the performance. Despite everything, despite the formality of Goat Island’s house style, despite the fact that the immediacy of the event was being filtered through a viewfinder before it hit me, I was being consumed by something unnameable and shaking like a leaf.

I mention this because it happened again during La Pocha Nostra’s The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007, in a similarly unquantifiable way. Rajni Shah had been parading spider-like up and down the fashion show runway for some time, naked but for a black choker, with an animal snarl and dark arterial blood smeared across her face. Slowly, quietly, Sarah Jane Norman – similarly unclothed except for various thin black trusses dissecting her body and a rubber mask of what looked like Condoleezza Rice over her head – made her presence known at the opposite end of the catwalk. I can’t even remember what was playing on the soundtrack at the time because by then the entire experience had battered me into a helpless submission. 90 minutes of noise, fury and fashion, culminating in La Pocha Nostra and their associate artists making me vibrate with the heartbeat regularity of a quartz crystal… and by means that couldn’t have been more different from Goat Island’s.

Days later, details of New Barbarians are still repeating upon me like snatches of a half remembered dream, sneaking up, unexpected and often unwelcome, triggered by some innocuous element of my daily life. BAM! There’s Alex Bradley, hauling himself the length of the catwalk by means of the connecting spars of two lighting clamps, the metal props attached to his wrists, instruments of torture, clunking painfully into the wood of the runway. BAM! Roza Ilgen, her form entirely covered in human hair, short-arsed, sporting breasts and a beard like some long lost evolutionary byroad: Captain Caveman, Morlock, Bigfoot, arms splayed out, a perverse Christ, the audience cheering her enthusiastically. WHOOSH! The sound of a mad Mexican woman jabbering away down a telephone line, unintelligible, distorted, insane. BOOM! BANG! Guillermo Goméz-Peña suddenly breaking into a native American chant, all the while pouting ridiculously like Derek Zoolander. GO!

Presented in the mode of a fashion show, New Barbarians keeps all the rituals, bluster and bombast of such events intact. The audience have been told to “dress for the catwalk” and most have obliged. There’s a foyer preview, free drinks, a rat pack of photographers (all uniformly name-badged “PAPARAZZI SCUM”) and once we are led inside the auditorium there’s VIP seating at the runway’s edge, a hammering soundtrack, plus Folake Shoga’s disjointed and deliberately mashed-up films projected onto a screen above the throng – cutting rapidly and queasily between ethno-geographic documentaries, rehearsal footage, adverts, military recruitment films and middle east news stories. There’s the obligatory show manager hustling models to and from the stage with a constant air of unflappable yet pissed-off efficiency. Goméz-Peña, founder member of La Pocha Nostra, holds court on a platform opposite the runway, freezing the noisy proceedings regularly in order to deliver verbose treatises in a patchwork of languages, physically inhabiting a space somewhere between a Hopi tribal chief and Klaus Lagerfeld. His consort is a snappily-suited female announcer who gives voice to the catwalk at random, speaking over the soundtrack in measured sing-song tones, offering performers for sale, encouraging the audience towards acts of rebellion or cultural vandalism. It is relentless, and total. It also has that single most important clash of textures prevalent in the world of fashion: the constant, repeated intertwining of the profound and the utterly meaningless, holding the event together like warp and weft. There’s the all-pervading sense that what we’re witnessing is the creators throwing a huge amount of stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks. It’s exuberant, funny, unapologetic… and occasionally feels as if it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

La Pocha Nostra have spent much of the last fifteen years conjuring up and making flesh this world of border and hybrid cultures, building a creative lab where cultural phenomena undergo a type of rapid, barely controlled fission. The forms (it doesn’t feel right to call them ‘outfits,’ somehow) on the runway tonight are the gene-spliced bastard children of the communications satellite and the nightclub, bearing the family traits of hip-hop, sado-masochism, youTube and airport terminals, cheap handguns, DVD boxsets, protest marches and internet porn, speaking cross-Phillipino-Icelandic with a Brazillian / lowland Scottish accent, listening to klezmer-grindcore on their iPods and spending their holidays on the fucking moon.

As they tour the world, Goméz-Peña and a crew of three or four permanent cohorts ‘collect’ associates, throwing further spices into their melting pot. The diverse bodies are all artists, all complicit, all having made themselves beautiful in their own eyes, no doubt via some mediation on the part of their hosts. As a result of this diversity it’s unsurprising that many fascinating socio-political concerns are manifest in each model parading back and forth before us: power play appears to be a fundamental building block of their interactions; gender is not so much bent as blended, a thick chromosomal soup; and the models borrow ‘clothes’ from every religion and religious impetus that crawls beneath the sun. BAM! Harminder Singh Judge, gas-masked and with the multiple arms of a Hindu deity, strapped to a crucifix CRACK, THWACK a Nike swoosh on a stiletto-heeled terrorist’s hijab BANG! Jiva Parthipan performing an exuberant, grinning Kath kali dance with a handgun stuffed into his crotch.

The crossbreed cyber-sexual rebellion of New Barbarians might sound disconcerting, but it’s not what gave me the shakes. It wasn’t even the implication that somewhere beneath the fashion show there was a bubbling bloodbath of righteous violence. What I was watching, after all, was a distillation of a million things, people and places that already exist, active, actual, accessible either physically or technologically, far from alien or inhuman in any conceivable way. The danger wasn’t in the shapes, nodes and ideas.

I certainly wasn’t shaking with indignation, as I loved the damn thing: feeling oddly, happily at home. I’ve heard since the show that some people actually found New Barbarians offensive, but it’s completely inconceivable to me why. I can’t understand how anyone could be offended by such a vivid celebration of the possibilities of human synthesis. Sure, there was plenty of perverted religious imagery; much nudity (some of it in the areas euphemistically and uselessly described as ‘graphic’); and little, if any, explanation of what you were seeing and why it was there – only a sly announcement before the catwalk burst to life that the audience shouldn’t take all they saw “entirely seriously.”

But still, what’s offensive about that? La Pocha Nostra’s magpie tendencies are wonderfully indiscriminate, irreverent in equal measure towards male, female, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, left, right, rich, poor. Basically, if you’re human, you’re fair game. To me, being offended by New Barbarians is about as logical as being offended by Rio De Janeiro, Singapore or Los Angeles – all of them by no means short of culture clashes, bastardized religions, ridiculously beautiful people and plenty of senseless violence.

And maybe that explains why I was shaking. It was like an overdose. Perhaps if you can picture the entirety of Singapore, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, New York, Paris, Milan… imagine every last inch of them crammed into a hypodermic and injected forcibly straight into the base of your spinal column. An instant download of more dirt, glitz and mixed messages than you could possibly handle.

Tim Atack

www.pochanostra.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

Don’t Leave Me This Way
Franko B
Arnolfini, Bristol
14/12/2007

You will, of course, be very familiar with sleepdogs, even though you might not know their name (unsurprising, given that I just made it up.) Sleepdogs are the whorls of colour and light that you see on the inside of your eyelids as you slumber. They’re the residual retinal images that, later in the night, will flower into full-grown dreams.

Franko B’s Don’t Leave Me This Way begins by presenting the artist as a sleepdog. His voluptuous, naked form sits unmoving in the darkness, illuminated so subtly and with such a barely perceptible inconstancy that you could easily consider his presence a trick of the mind. Kamal Ackarie’s mercurial lighting design only gradually filters in the details of Franko’s many tattoos, the dome of his head, his width and girth. For quite some time the artist’s face - and any expression he may be wearing - are never fully revealed.

It’s not as if there’s any great mystery as to how Franko B appears amongst us: before the show, the audience has filed into the Arnolfini auditorium and has parked itself on raked seating, chatting, before a raised plinth upon which a nondescript chair is positioned. It’s pretty obvious that once the houselights dim and we’re plunged into near-total darkness, Franko has ascended to his seat and is waiting, whilst the hammering, stuttering squalls of a post-industrial electronic soundtrack bounces threateningly from speaker to speaker around us. The noise is disjointed, mechanical, repetitive but random, like a gargantuan malfunctioning robot repeatedly and unsuccessfully bolting itself together. For me, the tangible unease comes not from the sheer volume of this noise, or the optical trickery alone, but the fact that it seems to play with our location – there’s an unspoken danger to theatrical spaces, so much buzzing and barely controlled electricity, so many suspended lights, the threat of sudden heat, shock and collapse all around… and the brutal, unforgiving soundtrack seems to emphasise the raw power around you, generating a palpable techno-claustrophobia. Combine this with the sensation that Franko B’s presence feels a bit like a mental glitch, a naughtiness of the cortex, and you’re tempted to blink repeatedly, in a vain attempt to re-set your surroundings to something a bit more comfortable.

Then lightning strikes.

Unheralded and intense, a massive burst of white light floods the audience, and is gone. My eyes water instantly. Another burst, then a dual burst, and finally, a wash of overpowering light holds over us for about 10 seconds. Franko B is lit completely and profoundly, but you can only look at him by adopting one of several strategies – squinting, angling your head oddly, or raising a hand to your eyes. With my neck bent as though I’m an incredibly tall man in a very low-ceilinged room, I try to look at Franko. Tears are streaming down my face. From what I can tell, he seems to be smiling. But then we’re plunged into darkness one last time, and there’s another morphing, sleepdog-pass of dark blue light over the artist’s familiar figure before the houselights rise to reveal an empty chair.

Franko B is perhaps best known for the blood-based practice that has dominated his live work for the past 15 years. In I Miss You, for instance, he falteringly paraded the length of a long, thin, strip of canvas whilst bleeding constantly from wounds in his arms. Many audience members have testified to the sensation that through simple actions like these – which ostensibly seem lonely, artful, maybe even shocking – Franko has “taken them by the hand” and guided them through the difficulties and differences of his practice with the gentle touch of a friend or lover. Despite his shift in practice away from bloodletting performances (you can imagine anyone getting tired of having to sign contracts which stipulate you guarantee to “bleed as part of the performance,” and “from both arms”, otherwise your fee is forfeit) Franko B’s work is still wonderfully, beautifully unapologetic about its brash sentimentalities: it’s about Franko, it’s about you, it’s about letting go, it’s about loving, dying, needing, wanting. The pop song titles say as much.

Most Hollywood movies would kill to be able to tap into the hopes and fears of its audience with the simplest of abstract images, but somehow Franko B manages to do just that. So Don’t Leave Me This Way will be about many things to many people… but for me it was about dying. It was Franko holding your hand as you fade, fighting inside but doomed, sinking into oblivion, into the mystery. How did it achieve that? I don’t know for sure. No, let me re-phrase that: I quite simply haven’t a clue. Read the first few paragraphs above, it’s all there. That’s what Franko B did, moment by moment, as best I can describe it. Where precisely the circuit connected, and how the hell the light went on? That’s another matter.

Tim Atack

www.dontleavemethisway.net
www.franko-b.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/07/2007

Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus is a curious mix of an event in which an audience of musicians, new music lovers, live art and experimental film enthusiasts - plus a sizeable gaggle of ornithologists - gather to witness an attempt at recreating the chirps and warbles of the Northumbrian countryside using human vocal talents.

Bioacoustic expert Geoff Sample (and was ever a sound recordist so magnificently named?) knows his birds. He knows whether you’re listening to a robin, or a blackbird doing an impersonation of a robin. He knows the difference between any given number of avian songs, even identifying vocal tics that distinguish one specific chiffchaff from another. Apparently birds have regional dialect: “It’s like the difference between Sunderland where they’ll say makkem and takkem, and Newcastle, where it’s maek ‘em and taek ‘em,” he burbles, happily.

Sample is collaborator, principle aide and - by the looks of things - something of a guru to Marcus Coates, the originator of Dawn Chorus and an artist concerned for many years with the natural world and its array of alien sensory experiences. His work juxtaposes human characteristics against the behaviours and traits of other species, a notable example being the film Out Of Season which plonks a lone Chelsea supporter in the midst of a leafy bucolic landscape, belting out terrace chants in an incongruous display of bravado that is, at the same time, completely in keeping with the territorial aspects of the birdsong chittering about him.

Coates’ ongoing fascination with the dynamics and resonances of birdsong has led to him and Sample recording 576 hours of the stuff, hiding microphones in trees, under bushes and between rocks in Bamburgh, Northumberland so as to accurately isolate the many voices that mass in the hours around dawn. And subsequently, this evening at Arnolfini - part performance lecture, part conversation, part film screening – has at its heart a fascinating musical exercise in which a small choir of homo sapiens is assembled to perform a ‘live’ dawn chorus; reciting selected recordings from Coates and Sample’s archive which have been pitched down to the human vocal scale. A video made of their performance is then sped up digitally to mimic the incredible dexterities of bird voice.

In presentation as well as content it’s a fascinating example of the merging of science and art as well as the two disciplines’ occasional clash of principle. Coates often draws complex metaphors from the raw facts of the natural world whilst Sample advises caution to anyone appropriating tricky concepts of neuroscience and animal behaviour for creative ends; such as idly speculating upon why, exactly, birds bother to sing in the first place. He reveals that in one species ovaries only form in the female if they are subjected to song from their male counterparts. “So the song has an actual biological purpose?” asks Coates, and with a tiny grimace Samples’ face says: “Contentious.”

The actual choral performance itself is the highlight. After a short laptop-based demonstration of how birdsong - when undercranked by a factor of about 16 – can become whalesong or the sound of children in a playground, several vocalists take to the stage and, listening carefully to playback through individual headphones, croon out the slowed-down tones of greenfinches, goldfinches, wrens and swallows. The differences in avian identities when placed in a very human context are remarkably apparent: some birds are minimalist, repetitive, their ranges falling within a set scale. The opposite extreme is represented by species such as the Blackcup (performed as part of Coates’ film installation by singer-songwriter Rasha Shaheen) its grandstanding tune a dazzling marathon of microtones resonant of the New Complexity, an avant garde cadenza amongst the trees. Meanwhile, the machine gun chirps of the Wren - performed by Meena Reetoraz-Yeomans - if transposed to the human metabolism would require diaphragm muscles with the speed and impact of a pneumatic drill. Ben Owen, making like a Swallow, has perhaps the widest demand in tonal range, requiring him to squeeze out some gutteral croaks redolent of a hungover Tom Waits one second before sighing gently in the upper registers like Stina Nordenstam the next.

Over 15 minutes a specific arrangement unfolds, with great care taken to reproduce the precise interactions of particular species. It turns out that the authentic dawn chorus has what amounts to a loose score, with certain birds making way for others, duetting, waiting their turn in a semi-improvisatory arrangement. The final result is compressed into less than a minute of footage, so fast we get to see it three times, with the performers taking on some physical tics and mannerisms weirdly evocative of their feathered avatars. It’s oddly affecting, disconcerting and extremely funny, all in one high-speed flash.

Tim Atack

Marcus Coates is an artist and filmmaker exhibiting nationally and internationally. An extract from Dawn Chorus can be seen at http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html

Geoff Sample: http://www.wildsong.co.uk/

National Review of Live Art
Tramway, Glasgow
9 February 2007

For Flagrante Delicto the artist Claire refuses to use her surname and by this employs a deliberate strategy of anonymity. Claire’s anonymity is re-enforced in various texts accompanying the performance- in booklets, business cards and programme information - so much so that it becomes an important point for me: Why am I being deliberately led as reader, as audience member, to read this anonymity as significant in this artist’s practice? I am confused, firstly by the first name which belies the desired anonymity; 'Claire' is a western Judo-Christian woman’s name. And secondly, because denial of Claire’s surname is evidently strategic on her part; Claire feels the holding back of her surname is important to the content of her performance. As a result of this, I imagine what Claire’s surname could be, and in what way it would be distracting from Flagrante Delicto? Moreover, I wonder about what reasons –political, criminal, protective, familial - there might be for concealing a surname?

Once inside the darkened performance space my first glance of Flagrante Delicto confirms that Claire is white and, from the outside at least, she is a natural or biological woman. The work itself consists of Claire, dressed in black with black leather fingerless gloves and shaved head, moving in between four wooden doors and slamming each one firmly behind her. Isolating the action of a door slamming from its everyday context - be it the result of an angry domestic argument or a rushed exit – and repeating it in the pared down performance style reminiscent of Alan Kapprow’s 1960’s Happenings, highlights the ritual aspect of such ordinary gestures and in doing so makes them strange. In addition, each slam of the doors is a violent and irregular interruption that is impossible for the audience to anticipate or prepare for.

But, as a member of the audience my thoughts - however broken by the disturbing slamming sounds -are brought back to how ‘queering’ the action of a slamming door might be significant in relation to Claire’s desire for anonymity, or significant to the work as a whole? Flagrante Delicto brings together Claire’s attempt at anonymity - including her written statements and the attempt to strip down her (female) identity via her shaved head and sturdy all black clothing. The work also highlights the slamming of doors as ritualistic, loaded and performative of sonic and bodily violence. In addition, meaning is also lent to the piece via the translation of the Latin phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ (while [the crime] is blazing); also a common English euphemism for being ‘caught in the act’ of a (flagrant) sexual encounter.

These distinct elements of identity, anonymity and violence are visually combined, and so clearly at stake, in Flagrante Delicto . However, the interpretation of sexual (mis)adventure is only immediately available to audience members with an understanding of the Latin phrase and the English euphemism that it relates to. Moreover, far from banal, the visual signifiers that signpost meaning in Flagrante Delicto act in defiance of Claire’s attempt at anonymity. Instead, the visual clues are brimming with specific, culturally loaded and potentially misleading information; Claire’s shaven headed look, masculine clothes and black leather fingerless gloves remind me of an overtly LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender ) 1980’s ‘scene’ look. A clear link can also be made from the leather gloves, the physical strain of slamming the doors and the violence of the slam itself (which is oddly reminiscent of a loud whip-crack) to sexual violence and Sadomasochism.

The sum of what these disparate parts combine into wasn’t enough for me to establish meaning upon my visit to Flagrante Delicto , nor were the individual elements tempting enough for me to want to stay for the works entire two hour duration. What Flagrante Delicto does add up to is a Live Art performance in the making, one that needs more careful choreography with regards to content and scripting of accompanying text material in order to be better pieced together and so stand up to critical scrutiny. To this end, re-considering the visual elements of the performance, re-drafting an accessible artists’ statement and having a translation of the phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ available in the performance space, or clearly printed in the written material, would have been a real bonus.

Rachel Lois clapham

Image Credit: Pablo Bronstein, Balletto Neoclassico, 2007. Dancers from Teatro Nuovo, Torino. Courtesy Galleria Franco Noero

Pablo Bronstein 'Plaza Minuet'
Plaza Minuet was performed in four parts in New York on November 7

Part 1, 2 – 2.30pm Winter Gardens, World Financial Center
Part 2, 3 – 3.30pm 80 Pine Street
Part 3, 4 - 4.30pm One New York Plaza
Part 4, 5 - 5.30pm 60 Wall Street

Apart from the turquoise-leotard wearing dancers who perform in them, each of the spaces chosen by Pablo Bronstein for his Plaza Minuet have one thing in common. These grand halls in New York’s wealthy financial district are all ‘privately owned public spaces’: areas designated for public use and maintained by private companies. When Bronstein’s dancers bound into each venue, mark a cross on the floor and move in slow unison between Ballet positions, they are simply exercising their public right to be there. So what makes them look so strange?

Firstly, the dancers’ costumes deliberately jar with their surroundings. Their bright, figure-hugging leotards clash with the décor and the dark suits worn by those who work nearby. Secondly, the dancers’ movements look out of place. These splendid lobbies, with their marble pillars, palm trees and ambient lighting, are used as spaces to walk through, not perform in. Even the vast atrium of 60 Wall Street (owned by Deutsche Bank), in which people play chess on tables and chairs at the sides of the hall, functions mainly as a thoroughfare on the way to the subway.

These public spaces have been carefully designed by their private owners with particular uses in mind. But by marking out their own area in the middle of each venue, as well as marking themselves as visually different, the dancers in Plaza Minuet ignore both the architectural imperatives of the buildings’ design and the social implications of other people’s willingness to abide by them. In 60 Wall Street, for example, the trees and pillars are not just grand but they also compel people forward, narrowing pathways and suggesting direction. The dancers cut across these pathways and the commuters using them, to disrupt the flow of movement.

Put simply, the dancers don’t behave like you’re supposed to – they don’t behave in the way these spaces expect. As well as looking strange, this misbehaviour exposes the rules the rest of us follow. But it’s more than mere resistance to authority that makes the Plaza Minuet dancers stand out – it’s competition to it. The artist, Pablo Bronstein, and a choreographer, Hilary Nanney, instruct the dancers when to change position, and they correct individuals when they make a mistake. In this way, the dancers in Plaza Minuet do not simply disobey the silent rules of their architectural surroundings, but they submit to an alternative authority – the bodily discipline of Ballet, as embodied by Bronstein and Nanney.

Brought together physically, the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space expose the ideological implications of each other. The comparison between the two is illuminating, because both types of authority compete on the same terms. Both Ballet and the architecture of public space adopt a strong visual code (turquoise leotards/ marble pillars); both expect silent complicity from their subjects (no rewards for success, only punishment –for example, looking strange – for failure); and both seek to incorporate individuals into a compliant group (with no reward, conformity must be an end in itself.) It’s also illuminating because these terms normally remain hidden – naturalisation, in fact, is another tactic the two types of authority share. While the beautiful illusion of Ballet is maintained by its disavowal of physical hardship, the awesome spell of Wall Street’s architecture is preserved by the myth of the easy accumulation of wealth.

In this way, Plaza Minuet enacts a competition between the authority of Ballet and the authority of the architecture of public space, and makes them both visible in the process. But, just as the ‘lie’ of capitalism is not weakened, according to Marx, by its exposure, this explication of institutional authority is far from critical of its subject. Opening up the machinations of Ballet and of the architecture of public space, Plaza Minuet questions the institutions’ claims to natural authority; but it also suggests that authority itself is inescapable – the only way to notice one set of rules is to succumb to the other.

In fact, it’s this interest in rules as a principle – rather than what they stand for – that finally marks the dancers in Plaza Minuet as strange. Even though Ballet is exposed as a form of bodily control, the dancers choose to conform to its strictures. This choice to comply goes against the pervasive individualism of twenty-first century Euro-American culture. Indeed, it goes against the capitalistic individualism on which Wall Street’s wealth is built, at the same time as it questions the veracity of that myth by exposing the architectural authority that supports it. In this way, Plaza Minuet uses a dance derived from Renaissance-era court practise to reach behind our understanding of the individual, and question the sovereignty of the twenty-first century subject.

Mary Paterson

Image credit: He Yunchang, ' Mahjong, 2007'. Photographer Paula Court. Courtesy: Courtesy of the artist and PERFORMA.

Interview between Performa Writing Live Fellow, Rachel Lois Clapham and artist He Yun Chang, dated 14 November 2007.

Beijing-based artist He Yun Chang is arguably the leading performance artist presently working in China. Over the last eleven years, he has created a series of unique and discrete solo performances in which he has placed exceptional physical demands upon himself both in terms of his strength and endurance. For PERFORMA07, He Yun Chang devised a unique version of Mahjong, based on the ancient but popular Chinese game, but using over 100 mahjong ‘tiles’ made from large cement bricks. The artist played this game in New York's Washington
Square Park for four hours with various audience members.

Rachel Lois Clapham (RLC) How did Mahjong 2007 come about?

He Yun Chang (HYC) I thought of the idea 2-3 years ago but my gallery, Chambers Fine Art, set it up with Performa for 2007. People usually play Mahjong recreationally but I wanted to subvert it, turn it into something else and make it physically oppressive. My version of the game is quite cruel, that's what the heavy bricks are about. Also I like the idea of playing it for a long time in the hot sun or in middle of winter, like here in New York. Someone told me that Korean soldiers are made to play a similar model of the game, with very large bricks as part of their torture in prison but that's not necessarily the most important thing in Mahjong 2007. What's important is playing the game with the audience, rather than the game itself. Previous performances have been dangerous, solitary or censored, whereas in Mahjong it was important that I was able to have the audience in the space with me in, and interact with them. My relationship with the audience in Mahjong is also quite friendly - unlike the wrestling game I played in 'One and One Hundred, 2001' where the relationship with the audience was definitely tense, antagonistic. People really wanted to hurt me and to win! In Mahjong the process of playing, the time we spend playing it, is much more important than winning the game.

RLC Why do Mahjong in Washington Square?

HYC Because it's a public space; some people go ice skating, some people eat a meal there, I chose to play my version of Mahjong. It could have been anywhere public really. I was ideally looking for somewhere a bit warmer!

RLC You wanted to be warmer. You also ended the performance 45 minutes early (at 6.15). Does this mean perseverance or physical endurance are less important to you in Mahjong than in other previous works?

HYC Physical endurance is still a factor, its' just that there were logistical problems with Mahjong. I ended the work early because it was cold and raining but more so because several of the people could not play the game properly, which really affected the piece. The police also came part way through Mahjong and made me put my clothes on, which also interrupted the performance. The nakedness was important. I have always performed naked so I was naked whilst playing Mahjong- for continuity- but I also think nudity makes the performance more pure, with less distractions. Being exposed to the elements when naked was also a way of increasing the magnitude of what was happening in Mahjong, it made the game a starker contrast to the wet and the cold.

RLC Do you consider Mahjong a success, even though you were interrupted by the police and stopped early because it was cold and raining?

HYC Yes. It is a success because I completed the performance. I carried it out. It is out of my control whether the police stop the work; they have guns and I don't! Carrying out my work in the face of those elements does have a connected interaction with those chance elements. But they are also forces that are out of my control and so not central to the work's success.

RLC Is Mahjong a new side to your work, a softer side, in which you testing your physical and mental limits is less important?

HYC It's true that I often pitch my body and my individual will in contrast to external forces ( harsh weather, strong water, poured concrete) or chance elements, like being interrupted by the police, that is important in my work. But in some pieces I vary the concept and lessen that element. Often, like in Mahjong, the process itself is as important as fighting against those forces, whether they are outside (natural, instigated by others ) or from within myself (my own endurance against my own body or will). In that way, the process and act of completion, following through with the act of performance, expressing it physically with the audience is key, in spite of any logistical, natural or chance factors that may stop or hinder the work in some way.

RLC How would you feel if a someone walked through the park, saw the game, and didn't realise Mahjong 2007 was a performance or something original?

HYC I wouldn't mind at all, that would be wonderful! My work is very ordinary looking. I always use the simplest materials in order to create the largest imaginary space. Even with simple, everyday gestures and materials you can make work of a great magnitude and get the essence of something important. Also, it wouldn't matter to me if some people thought what I was doing wasn't art, or was pointless. In my 9 month tour of the UK in 2006, 'Touring Great Britain with Rock,' I often had only two or three people watching me and sometimes in China I don't have any audience at all, so I don't necessarily think about who will witness or understand the work. My feeling is that if some people pass by Mahjong and don't understand what they see, give them 100 days and they can have a think about it.

RLC Is it true that your work gets more interrupted here in the US, than in China?

HYC I have never actually been 'caught' doing a performance in China, but have been arrested in the US a few times. My work is under the radar of the authorities in China because of the locations and spaces I perform in; often in private enclosed gallery spaces or outside in the remote countryside. But there are big differences too: my performance work is not so easy to do in China because nudity is not allowed, that's why I waited to do Mahjong here in New York. Chinese audiences don't have the general level of understanding about art, or the same generosity or openness to understand or interact with different things as art. For instance, a lot of people in China still don't consider what I do art. On the other hand, there is more financial support and artistic, institutional, frameworks outside China for artists doing performance. That doesn't mean performance doesn't happen in China. There are spaces in which you can perform, and perform nude, but for big projects like 'Touring Great Britain with Rock' 2006, it is much more conceivable outside China.

RLC Pitching your individual will or mental limits against that of your own physical body- do you see that separation of those two elements, a separation of self, as political in your work?

HYC For most people intellect and body operate in tandem, but sometimes the intellect is superior. Under normal conditions we are used to what the body and intellect can do together, but under extreme situations sometimes the body takes over to do amazing things as well. I feel that China is a very complex society, one in which it is important to use your body and your intellect so you can stop and face its reality. Highlighting the body in this way, as separate, is also important because, historically, Chinese people have not endowed the physical body with value, rather they have valued the spirit of the Chinese people, as a collective. Contemporary China is much more individual in its thinking, so it's a pull between the two. By putting pressure on an idea about myself (my intellect) and my own body I can make it into something much larger.

RLC Do you foresee a time when political, body-based or nude performances will be shown alongside other contemporary visual art forms in china?

HYC Not in the short term, no.

RLC What has been the most lasting effect of your performance work to date-mentally, physically or emotionally?

HYC It is my health that has suffered the most because my body has been in danger so many times. In Buffalo 2005, as part of the exhibition 'The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art,' I did a performance where I stood in the Niagara waterfall and the police came, they were worried and took me straight to hospital. The doctor told me my kidneys had failed because my body was so cold from being submerged in the freezing water. In general I am also getting increasingly grumpy and short tempered. Despite all this I think the most valuable contribution I can make is to use my body to express ideas and give other people imagination. That is more important than my health. I have also derived much pleasure and enjoyment from my performances over the years.

RLC What project are you planning next?

HYC I'm planning to do something for 2008 in China that involves my mother and will be three months long. It's going to be great. I can't do it in the UK or the US as the insurance costs will be too high. I can't say anymore about it, all will be revealed in due course.

RLC Is there anything you want to ask me?

HYC Can you make Performa happen earlier in the year next time, so it's not so cold? October and November are too cold in New York.

RLC I'll do my best?!

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Image credit: Carlos Amorales, Spider Web Stage (negative), 2006-2007. Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York/Paris.

This interview was held in New York, 15 November 2007 between Rachel Lois Clapham, a UK writer with Writing From Live Art and Carlos Amorales, an artist based in Mexico.

Carlos Amorales’ Spider Galaxy is a 400-piece sculpture resembling a spider’s web that is the site for an ongoing performance by a lone dancer, accompanied by a subsonic sound composition by Julien Lede transmitted through the sculpture itself. Spider Galaxy adds to Amorales’ oeuvre of ritualistic performance projects and animations, including Amorales vs. Amorales, which involved professional wrestlers and was exhibited at the Tate Modern in London and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, amongst other venues.

Rachel Lois Clapham (RLC): Can you tell me what happened in your studio with regards to Spider Galaxy?

Carlos Amorales (CA): In my practice I build structures for other people to work in, like the record label I set up ‘Nuevos Ricos’, then I invite other people such as bands, artists and graphic designers, to be involved in that structure. It’s the same in my studio. I collaborate with three of four people at any one time. Various people do graphic design, draw, research software or write. Together we build an archive of digital images which I use in different ways. Working in this way means I can create the conditions for something to happen within the limits of my own practise. Spider Galaxy really illustrates that way of working, that collaborative process that happens in my studio. I literally constructed a stage and asked a dancer (Galia Eibenschutz), musician (Julien Lede) and choreographer (Eri Eibenschutz) to develop their work on it.

RLC: What currently binds all these different ways of working?

CA: Thematically, it is Fantasy - whether it is inherited fantasy, myth or the cliché of Fantasy - how it operates; how we rationalise it or don’t. Essentially I want to unpick how we relate to the cliché of Fantasy in its own specific language. That is why the digital archive is very important. It contains all these different pictorial elements, tools to make a fantasy story. My other main concern is analysing the process of doing artistic work. That’s why I work across many different formats and within various institutions - both within the art-world (in galleries and museums) and outside it (in Wrestling or the music industry). I like to test the ways in which I can work within those different environments and how the specific audiences’ interact. I do see all these things as part of my practice but at the same time, with the record label Nuevos Ricos, it’s not like I’m declaring it ‘art’.

RLC: What is the significance of the dancers’ costume in Spider Galaxy?

CA: The bird shape for the costume comes from my archive. It is the combination of an image of a bird mixed with the pattern of a spider web and the grid-like structure of a Samurai Warriors’ armour. I wanted to abstract the costume, to make it more open as an image, and if I had used a spider as reference point it would be too obvious.

RLC: Why have Spider Galaxy in the atrium at 590 Madison? - was it the fact that there are trees and real birds inside that space?

CA: The birds flying inside the space was a pure coincidence. The most important thing was to find a mixture of public and private space. I wanted Spider Galaxy to occupy a space that wasn’t specialised like a Theatre or a gallery, but that wasn’t directly on the street. The key element of public space is to creating a spectacle that is not overly theatrical; where the work is not so much about creating a show for people to turn up, be seated and laugh at. Having Spider Galaxy in the atrium public plaza area meant that some people travelled directly to see it and the passing public might enjoy it, but then again they might not look at or even notice it. I like that mix. It also means that people can stumble upon the work without meaning to.

RLC: What is the significance of the sound in Spider Galaxy?

CA: For many years the musician Julien Lede and I have been collaborating, he is a part of Nuevos Ricos. The sound he made for Spider Galaxy was quite simple, with really low bass and really high pitched sound at opposite ends of the sound spectrum. There was no rhythm in the sound so that the dancer could move independently, according to her own natural or bodily logic, that way her moves might look stranger. The sound was also designed to match the physicality of the space; the spider web has a built-in seated space for the audience as well as the dancer. This highlights the audience’s physical interaction with the work, it brings them in. The vibration the audience feels moving through them heightens the fact that they are implicated in the work. The bass moving through the stage is also an analogy of the movements that a spider uses to track food on its web.

RLC: I looked away when the dancer was coming onto the stage. When I looked back all I saw was an inhuman looking bird form perched on the side of the stage; it was very still, moving only when it was breathing. It looked really unfamiliar and was quite a disturbing moment. The thing that came to mind was the Uncanny. In what way does this aspect of primal fear operate in your work?

CA: I think you were really lucky. The fact that you looked away and suddenly something had appeared like that is an important moment in the piece for me. I’m jealous of that experience because I know the story from the beginning, but that’s a moment I really like: when you don’t know if the dancer is an object or a human or what is about to happen. For me, Spider Galaxy has a lot of tension and the idea was to really slow that moment of anticipation and unfamiliarity down, to prolong it so the audience would have to wait a long time to realise what it was, before Galia starts dancing. That’s another way in which Spider Galaxy plays with the audience’s expectations of being ‘entertained’.

I would say a notion of the uncanny: attraction and at the same time repulsion, is very important to my work and is built into the aesthetics. Beauty can have this dual element, it can be attractive yet really scare people. Aztec art is beautiful but it has that same air of strangeness, I think because we know so little about it, yet the images are quite commonplace. It’s important to me not to make anything nightmarish or gothic though, that would be reduce the work to the level of gimmick. Instead what I want is to try to work with the spaces I can’t grab. I try to find something in beauty. The Uncanny is perhaps not a psychological narrative in my work, rather it is built into its material form. It is a way to perceive the graphic forms I use.

RLC: How do you think of Spider Galaxy when there is no dancer?

CA: I displayed the spider web stage itself, with no dancers, as an installation ‘Spider Web Negative’ in Milton Keynes Gallery in 2006. So the work does have an important function in the atrium space without the dancer. There are deliberately no signs to say you cannot touch or climb on the spider web when there is no-one there, whether they are staff, dancer or audience; it is a stage ready for anyone who wants to interact with it. Sometimes people do step on it or play with it, which is important. In that sense the installation, the empty spiders’ web, has an element of performance waiting to happen. It’s also an invitation to perform, which can be quite alienating or frightening because you’re not sure how you are implicated, or what you might be expected to do. With this invitation to perform Spider Galaxy is passive yet equally quite aggressive.

RLC: Perhaps for the people who stand on the empty spider web stage their uncertainty is ‘When is the spider going to come and eat me’?

CA: Or ‘Am I the spider?’...

RLC: Spider Galaxy is a Performa Commission. Performa Commissions usually represent a shift of some kind in an artist’s practise with regard to working live. You have worked live before, why do you feel you were commissioned by Performa?

CA: I stopped doing live performance after the wrestling and Devil Dance projects about 5 years ago so Spider Galaxy does represent a shift for me, quite a big one, as it is my first live work since I quit performance. It was a big step for me to come away from that kind of work but I wanted to change something in my practise at that point. Spider Galaxy is very different from what I have done before. I really wanted to depart from previous work, which was much more entertaining and ‘popular’, the audience knew exactly how to react to it. Of course, there are similarities in Spider Galaxy; the idea of the stage remains the same as in the wrestling or Devil Dance. But other aspects are totally in another direction. Spider Galaxy is against the idea of entertaining. It is slow, more demanding of its audience and not so immediately translatable. The design of the work, a certain graphic Bauhaus feel, is also more developed. It’s that deliberate shift of direction and the fact that the previous performances were made in my late twenties, whereas Spider Galaxy comes at a time when I am in my late 30’s, which makes this work feel more mature.

RLC: If Spider Galaxy represents a change in your relationship to live performance, does this mean you will begin to make live work again?

CA: I don’t know. Performance is such a burden. When you make studio work you are in a private space. The moment you exhibit or show someone the work is of course public, but when you finish it, it stays finished and static. In my current exhibition ‘Black Cloud’ at Yvonne Lambert Gallery - I installed the work, then I left it and only return every now and again to check on it or fix the odd bit. I can release myself away from the work. The problem with performance is you carry it everywhere in your daily life, and it’s so intense. Even though I no longer perform in my work myself – I am only directing or behind the scenes in Spider Galaxy - the tension is still huge. I don’t think I could cope with making it regularly as the main outlet of my expression.

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Image: Long March 'Avant Garde' 2007, Courtesy: Long March

Long March projects for Performa 2007 included; Nov 7-10: Long March- Xu Zhen, In Just a Blink of an Eye (2007), Nov 10 - Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm Is Slowly Approaching (2007), Nov 11: Long March- Avant-Garde (2007), Nov 14: Long March- Zhao Gang, Harlem School of New Social Realism (initiated by Gang Zhao, organized by Long March Project) (2007).

The Long March, also called ‘The Great March of the Red Army,’ 1934-1936 was a defining moment in Chinese history when soldiers and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) including intellectuals and artists made a radically political move into the Chinese countryside; marching 8000 miles from Jiangxi to Sichuan via Guizhou over some of the country’s most remote and harshest terrain, in protest against the hierarchy of Chinese aristocratic rule and Literate society. Although the military project of the Long March failed, by engaging with, and harnessing the power of, the country’s rural majority and setting a new revolutionary agenda, The Long March heralded the onset of Modern Communist China and paved the way for Mao Zedongs’ influential twenty seven year reign as leader of The People’s Republic of China.

Miming the same collective structure, revolutionary spirit and educational remit of the 1934 Long March, The Long March Collective, founded in 2002 by curator Lu Jie, explores a distinctly Chinese notion of Avant-Garde arts practice; one that does not have to look outside China to articulate an idea of revolution or artistic change and goes beyond the oft quoted 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre as starting point for politically motivated contemporary art in China. The collective itself has 20 staff, over 300 Long Marchers and its activity includes International Biennials and Triennials, as well as a 20 step curatorial programme and Ghizou-based ‘curatorial summit’ camps. The Long March collective is also geographically embedded at the site of the original Long March; every year a group of Long Marchers – including both international and Chinese artists, curators and theorists - take to the countryside, walking together as a communal piece of live art from Jiangxi to Sichuan whilst marching in the physical and historical footsteps of their Red Army comrades. Along the route Long Marchers work with rural communities to collect research, create exhibitions, host workshops and keep the Long March spirit of avant-garde revolution and notion of ‘art for the people’ alive.

The Long March Collective might use the rhetoric and strategy of a manifesto’d military political party but they don’t want simply to become the latest Red Army faction to make the Long March across China. Rather, they want to use the revolutionary impact of the Long March as case study to explore the validity of contemporary art in relation to the public whilst interrogating the possibility of a contemporary art practise in China that is autonomous from Chinese state rule. With this, the Long March collective have its sights set firmly on the future of art whilst literally maintaining a foot-hold in China’s political past.

It is on this openly interrogative note that the Long March collective contributed to the PERFORMA 07 programme, playing host to a variety of live works. Long Marcher and international conceptual artist Xu Zhen exhibited In Just a Blink of an Eye at the James Cohen Gallery. It was a deceptively simple show in which Zhen made an ephemeral, live and – paradoxically – monumental sculpture out of the suspended bodies of two real-life Chinese migrant workers. The precarious free-fall position in which the two were suspended was an effective metaphor not only for the liminal status and uncertain future of the two Chinese migrants, but of the status and future of China itself.

Artist Qui Zhijie took a more militant approach in order to convey his message. His frenetic The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching was a Chinese Dragon Dance performance with traditional music and two important contemporary twists; the troop, including Zhijie, the dancers, musicians and the dragon itself all wore Chinese camouflage combats from head to foot, and the dragon chased, not a pearl, but a camouflaged fighter plane. The troop whipped up a crowd of followers in Columbus Park, danced through the streets of Chinatown and later stormed New York’s Asian Art Fair. By overtly re-asserting Chinese (military) identity in the polished and rather non-descript ‘Asian’ art fair Zhijie’s message was clear; the Chinese are coming.

Lu Jie, Qiu Zhijie and German artist Long Marcher Ingo Gunthe were slightly less fervent but no less openly subversive when they hosted Avant-Garde; a Long March workshop at the China Institute that introduced the Long March collective, explained its social remit and openly grappled with some important questions of how and why to go beyond ideology to initiate an Avant-Garde art movement in China. We were also given a glimpse into a certain Chinese mindset by Gunthe and Zhijie, who explained that the traditional Chinese notion of time is non-dialectic due to a lack of Greek philosophical and Hegelian influence, therefore historical progression and going -or looking- backwards are inextricably bound together in a way necessarily and radically different from Western philosophical thinking. This theory was then put into practice with a 100-strong line of workshop participants who completed a three hour backwards march from the China Institute down a busy 5th Avenue, through the Lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, ending at Times Square. By facing backwards whilst moving forwards the 100 ‘Backward Long Marchers’ performed the complex Chinese contemporary relationship to history that Gunthe and Zhijie had articulated. Moreover, by physically embodying this specific sort of Chinese backwardness Avant-Garde made it easier to conceive of the Long March Collective’s relationship to the historical Long March and to understand exactly how they (and now us) were attempting to create a new future past for Chinese contemporary art.

History was also at stake in the final Long March project ‘The Harlem School of New Social Realism.’ The school was initiated by artist and some-time Long Marcher Zhao Gang and took the form of an amplified open-air group discussion between various artists, theorists and critics of African and Chinese descent in Harlem’s Adam Powell Clayton Junior Plaza; a location at the heart of Black America named after the first African American Congressman that has played host to many political protests over the years. The question as to why African Americans should be involved in the Long March were- to my ears at least- left un-asked. However, heated debate about what form Harlem’s New School of Social Realism should take floated over the cold afternoon to the mixed interest of locals; some of whom were obviously more concerned with where their next hot meal was coming from.

The lack of understanding, or interest, displayed by certain members of the Harlem public is exactly what is at stake in The Long March’s Harlem School of New Social Realism; ie why is contemporary art not valid to these people, and if it isn't then how can it - or should it - it serve them better? This was the genuine spirit of enquiry demonstrated in all the PERFORMA Long March projects and it is a reminder that its work isn’t just for art’s sake; it anticipates real, public and social results. Combined, the work of the Long March Collective is also living proof that the Chinese are not only coming; they have of course already arrived. And with them comes the clear message that contemporary performance, be it from China or not, is still an important critical mediator for the political.

Rachel Lois Clapham