Performance Installation
26 - 28 July 2007
The Albany, Deptford, London

‘Headlines’ is an intense theatrical experience; it is also in tents. The director and actors get up early, collect the day's newspapers then pick a story for that day's performances. After devising four completely new performance pieces by lunchtime, the actors go to their individual, specially designed, hand-sewn tents dotted around the venue and await their audience. Audiences are given photocopies of that day's news article and it is quite an experience to stumble in and out of these tents, clutching the 'pure' form of the story with the programme notes on the other side while absorbing the Ampersand actors' interpretation of it. Only one audience member is allowed in each tent at a time; there are four tents and each performance lasts four minutes. It's the newest, freshest, most topical theatre possible.

The one-to-one experience varies from tent to tent; the news item about a documentary broadcasting the death of an Alzheimer's sufferer inspired four very intense performances that was emotionally devastating in one tent, morbidly but gently comic in the next, openly challenging in the one after and affectionate, uplifting in the last. It was tempting to run from the first, stay for a drink and a chat in the second, put up a fight in the third and go in for a hug in the fourth. That all this can be experienced in the minimum running time of 16 minutes is an extraordinary achievement.

The intimacy of the one-to-one experience is matched in intensity by the immediacy of the subject at hand, and it is exciting to know that each day, each performance and each encounter will be unique and unrepeatable. Not every news item chosen will inspire four consistently great performances; there is also the risk of being ill-informed or insensitive in handling the news, especially in the condensed devising time. The unpredictability of audiences going one-to-one with the actors is another potential risk – the tents are scattered widely, it is deeply intimate to step inside on one's own, no one outside knows what is happening. It is testimony to the company that their commitment to both process and performance is strong enough to get on with it and take the risks as they come.

The opportunity to be provoked in four different ways is Headlines' ultimate aim: while there is no pressure to attend all four tents, audiences would find it silly not to do so as each tent inevitably contradicts, challenges or complements the others. The emphasis, in the exercise and the final product, is to get the full story. The headlines can't say it all.

http://www.ampersandmedia.co.uk/Ampersand2.php

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

An Evening Hosted By Elaine Kordys & Bob Levene
at Arnolfini, Bristol
08 / 07 / 07

‘Bring a record, tape or CD. It can be anything… music, sound, spoken word …something you have seen live or something you would love to see. Talk about it, perform it, or have it performed for you. How would you evoke those lost live moments? Alternatively, you can come and simply listen over a glass of wine and some hula hoops. The evening is dedicated to all things live and lost’. Arnolfini

Ah, nibbles. Where would the art event be without free nibbles? The lure of the maize-based snack, the siren call of the twiglet. I’m sure you could do a rigorous (and vaguely scientific) survey of gallery-goers’ fluctuating reactions to art based upon whether you served up marinated olives, hula hoops or those weird sweet chilli shapes you can sometimes pick up at M&S. I mean, myself, I know I’m a whore for anything carbohydrate-based; but even if it was the opening of seventeen great lost works by Picasso I’d probably slouch off mumbling grumpily if you only handed me a breadstick.

Of course, there’s also the alcohol; the free booze that pumps at the schmoozing gland, allowing you to unashamedly badger Sir Nicholas Serota about whatever it is he’s currently not doing for the art world. But truth be told, more often that not I associate the free glass of plonk with standing stock still in some gallery or what have you, listening to some director or other waffle orn and orn about “investing” in this and the “value” of that, clutching the stem of the wine glass with ever-tightening fingers and wondering when the hell I can get back to the serious business of ploughing through the snacks.

The Darkside is a semi-social, semi-curated event hosted by Theatre Bristol, Arnolfini and the Spaghetti Club (the latter an itinerant, eclectic bunch of live artists specialising in “anything goes” events of this kind.) A diverse crowd of artists and art-interested types mills about a completely black studio studded with comfy sofas, table lamps and – yes! – a variety of nibbles. The open nature of the evening extends to most people not really knowing what is due to happen; but naturally the promise of some nice olives and maybe even a wee cake draws them in, of course it does.

As it turns out, the potentially peripheral work, ‘Recorded Live’, proves a major distraction from the general banter, socialising, and eating of crisps; a small sound studio is assembled in an adjoining room and attendees are invited to introduce the playback of tracks that mean something personal to them, be it a song, a field recording, a random noise, anything that speaks of a moment past, otherwise irretrievable. This is then fed to a PA in the main room and as the voices come and go, people stop yakking or munching on the macadamia nuts, keen to hear the next story. Sometimes funny, sometimes poetic, maybe an introduction to someone’s pet project or maybe just a feeling, these tales are sparked by recordings of monastery bells, deathpunk bands, traffic noise, an open-air samba band rehearsal, the Ramones and U2. Each proves a talking point and as a result I end up chatting to people about campanology, microphones, samba, Ron Athey, translations of Dante’s Inferno and the links between live art and stand-up comedy, all the while munching on these sort of cheese stick things that taste worryingly as if they’ve been double deep-fried in copious amounts of vegetable oil and will probably make my heart stop beating in approximately three day’s time.

Yeah, you can find out a lot about people from their choice of nibbles. Are you a bombay mix or an assorted salted nuts? I can tell you from first-hand experience that Alan Yentob, for instance, likes a handful of prawn cocktail Skips. No joke. In the play ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, Samuel Beckett has his protagonist listening to the musings of his lost youth on a collection of reel-to-reel spools whilst munching on bananas: just bananas, you’ll note, not garnishing the mood with kettle chips or scampi flavoured fries or some shit like that.

There’s the element of the obsessive in those routines of Krapp’s, carefully numbering tapes, everything annotated and in its correct drawer, even logging the amount of fruit consumed daily. But in contrast what we have at Recorded Live is scattershot extracts from the ill-kept personal archives of random folk, lifted from unalphabeticised CD collections, from badly recorded tapes gathering dust in the attic; one of the offerings is a gritty little impromptu mp3 captured on a mobile phone. The low background hum of nostalgia is present throughout, like the hiss on a cassette. When the last track has been played, the wine drunk and only a few scattered little poppadom things left on the table, I’m surprised to find that it’s still light outside.

Written by Tim Atack

The Darkside is a series of regular social events, hosted in Arnolfini’s Dark Studio by different artists in collaboration with Associate Artists ‘The Spaghetti Club’. It’s a chance to meet, talk and be part of a number of special events which will include The Performance Re-Enactment Society, The Anthony Roberts All-Stars and the z-lab disco hour. For more information about the Darkside project go to Financially supported by Arts Council England. In partnership with Arnolfini. www.darksidelive.co.uk

Elaine Kordys is an artist who makes installation and performance, she lives and works in Glasgow and is one of The Spaghetti Club.

Bob Levene is an artist and programmer, she lives and works in Hull.www.boblevene.co.uk or www.resoundprojects.org

Programme Notes: Case studies for locating experimental theatre.
Eds. Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine

Contributions by: Lyn Gardner, Tim Etchells, Neil Bartlett, Stella Hall, John McGrath, Alan Rivett, Mark Borkowski, Rose Fenton, Brian Logan, Lucy Neal, Keith Khan, Simon Casson, Louise Jeffreys, Judith Knight, and Toni Racklin.

Live Art Development Agency, 2007, 108 pages, 16 black and white photographs, 12cm x 16.5cm. ISBN: 0954604040.

All the contributors to Programme Notes agree on one thing – now is a great time for independent theatre. Experimental, challenging, investigative and just plain different work has started to creep into our mainstream venues (think Duckie selling out at the Barbican) and attract huge audiences (do we need to mention the Sultan’s Elephant?). This book is a collection of case studies, essays and interviews with some of the people who aided that change, and it’s both a thrilling glimpse of practices that helped usher in the new, and a useful springboard for future strategies.

If there’s a recurring theme, it’s audience development. In fact, Neil Bartlett describes it as the only thing that sets ‘experimental’ theatre apart from its ‘conventional’ counterparts. John E McGrath, Artistic Director of Contact Manchester, reminds us that what we think of as mainstream theatre services its own niche, and its audience is always a minority – be it a well established one. The diverse practices hinted at here, in contrast, see engaging new audiences as integral to their work.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they go about it in the same way. While Keith Khan (co-founder of motiroti) develops work to attract new audiences, Alan Rivett (Artistic Director of Warwick Arts Centre) develops audiences to support the work. McGrath reaches out into his local community, while Stella Hall (currently the Creative Director of the Newcastle Gateshead initiative) builds local traits into the way she produces each event.

These differences in approach naturally reflect the differences between what each practitioner is trying to do (and explain why audience development is the only recurring theme). They also serve as a useful reminder that the term ‘experimental’ should not be prescriptive. Largely seen as a reaction against something, ‘experimental theatre’ becomes dangerous when it builds its own walls. Bartlett describes how he fought hard, in his ten year tenure at the Lyric Hammersmith, not just to break down the barriers surrounding work that called itself ‘conventional’, but also to smash the devices used by ‘experimental’ theatre to barricade itself in.

Happily, Programme Notes does not succumb to the temptation to define its own niche. The histories, policies and strategies outlined here don’t assert a single direction for practitioners of the future, so much as describe an attitude - of collaboration, audience development and accessibility – in which practitioners of the past and present have been able to thrive. ‘That’s all that anyone wanted, after all,’ writes Tim Etchells, the Artistic Director of Forced Entertainment, ‘that the door be open and left that way.’

At times, Programme Notes reads like a roll call of the great and the good of the British independent theatre scene. But when its contributors quote and reference each other, they not only demonstrate a working practice of respect and collaboration, but also a relatively small field of support. While it’s tempting for the case-studies to read smoothly, now that their writers are so well established, hindsight hasn’t ironed out how hard it was, or what parts luck and misfortune played along the way. ‘Please note’, Bartlett writes of his achievements at the Lyric, ‘that this took years, was a bloody struggle and caused great trouble at the box office …’

Neither do the histories of past successes stop this being a book that has its sites set very much on the future. There are warning bells – about funding, about latent conservatism, and about the risks inherent in this kind of practice – but this is a forward thinking and hopeful book. It brims with respect for the audience, building to a consensus that given access and choice, people will continue to embrace independent theatre practice. It also respects the diversity of the practices contained under the umbrella terms ‘independent’ or ‘experimental’ and doesn’t patronise its readership by prescribing a one-size-fits-all arts policy. The contributors’ passion and inclusiveness springs from every page, so that although aimed at professionals, this will make a fascinating read for anyone.

Written by Mary Paterson

Programme Notes can be ordered through Unbound:
http://thisisunbound.co.uk/