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/

mem morrison leftoversPerformance installation
Dino's Grill, Commercial Road
Sunday 24 June
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season 2007

The binding properties of bacon grease have never been better emphasised than in Mem Morrison's ‘Leftovers’. This performance is about cafes, performed in cafes, with cafe food for everybody. It is intimate, cosy; a cooked breakfast at 6pm, sitting elbow to elbow, bound together by sausage, bacon, eggs and beans. Leftovers is Morrison's autobiographical performance about growing up in a Muslim, Turkish Cypriot family running the Sunderland Cafe in South East London. It's a journey through a childhood filled with food paraphernalia, language barriers and a strong sense of not quite fitting in; it is also an act of remembrance for an immigrant community's efforts to settle in a strange country.

A performance about cafes presented in a genuine cafe immediately brings audiences into Morrison's world, just by taking a seat at a formica table under fluorescent lights. Recorded interviews with Turkish Cypriot cafe owners play as cooked breakfasts are served; the clatter of cutlery on china mingles with evocative stories of Anglicised nicknames, misspelt menus, the pressures of family business - “never work with your wife!” - and friction between ebullient Turkish diners and meek English regulars.

After the plates are cleared, Morrison performs his monologue, walking between tables, distributing Turkish delight and specially printed napkins. Anecdotes about being a novelty Englishman in Cyprus but erroneously a 'Paki' at school are interspersed with observations: he ate shepherds pie and custard during the day, kebabs and Hallumi in the evening. He longed to be blonde and blue-eyed in an Aryan log cabin featured on a biscuit tin. A few interjections in Turkish, some traditional music and dancing invite laughs from Turkish audience members; baffled non-Turkish audiences are reminded they can only look in from the outside on these experiences, no matter how sympathetic they may be.

What we eat and with whom we eat define who we are, so tucking into a full English breakfast immediately labels us as someone who can accept the English love of baked beans, for example. We love them or we learn to love them as part of 'Englishness'. Equally important in Morrison's performance is choosing who to feed, and what we are willing to feed them. It's a tough but defining dilemma for a Muslim cafe owner committing to a business based on bacon. As one woman said on the voice recording: ‘This is our last chance to fit in,' it was generally agreed in Leftovers that these cafe owners fitted in the best way they knew how: Turkish people show love by feeding people. This cafe story, served hot at the table, is a love story, for a culture, a history, a way of life unique and now fading.

Leftovers will be performed in Hackney, Thursday 12 July at the Kingsland Cafe, Kingsland Road and again at the Edinburgh Festival 2007, and has been performed in independent cafes around the country. However, the pool of non-chain, family-run cafes are running out. Catch this piece of unique theatre while you still can; it's the most satisfying full 'English' breakfast available.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles with contributions from Charlotte Pedersen.

This review also appears on www.londonist.com.

For more information on Mem Morrison see
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/artist.php?id=50

Date: 6th June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season

Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? Dirty Work tells a tale of heroes and villains, of brave protagonists and innocent victims. Its backdrop is the great events of the twentieth century and the misunderstandings of a suburban kitchen. It includes mass suicides and accidental murders, characters from Shakespeare and plot twists from Eastenders. Its mood is funny, predictable, surprising and grave; it takes place in houses, cities, across the sky, and throughout the universe. And all this, in Toynbee Hall’s 250 seat theatre.

Dirty Work manages to be all these things because it doesn’t have to depict them on stage. In fact, the set is bare, and the ‘play’ is conjured up by two actors sitting near the footlights, describing each event through stage directions. Freed from the physical restraints of representation, they paint a vast landscape of possibility – from planes writing in the sky to gifts the size of an atom. The result is a montage of potential, a triumph of imagination over representation.

It’s not just the actors who let their imaginations run wild, of course. Here, as in all other types of performance, it’s the audience members who construct the drama, and the actors who supply the cutting pattern. The ‘play’ – all five acts of it – does not take place on stage, but somewhere between them, the actors who describe, and us, the audience that imagines. When, early on, the actors describe the reaction of an hysterical audience, it’s clearly not us – the audience in the here and now. Instead, in a moment of vivid dramatic collusion, we must generate a secondary audience together. Forced to replicate ourselves from the outside, the present audience is swung out of the auditorium and into the director’s chair - the effect is almost physical.

But unlike a conventional play – with a set, dialogue and characters – the pattern here is sketchy. It’s outlined in clichés so that, like a cold-reading from a psychic, its suggestions can be absorbed easily. Hollywood blockbusters roll into urban myths, which stand alongside soap opera dramatics, which tumble into popular sci-fi. And, because the action is outlined and not displayed, the experience of watching is turned from one of collective imagining or recognition, into one of individualised creation. Audience members don’t react to a moment together – laughing at a slapstick routine, for example – but snatch the suggestion of that moment away, and work on it themselves. One viewer laughed so loudly at unlikely moments I thought she had been planted there to drive home this very point.

And yet there is an undulating rhythm to Dirty Work that draws the audience inexorably and collectively along. Rolling gently from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to an accident with a toaster, the narrative is both familiar and surprising enough to herd us all together. In other words, while the points of reference themselves – Hollywood, Eastenders, popular Shakespeare - feel like performative clichés, the ways they are sewn together are much more surprising. And, in fact, even these clichés represent a kind of shared experience. They might be easy to recognise, but the scenarios Dirty Work invokes are highly specific. It’s a testament to the prevalence of a particular kind of populist sci-fi, for example, that a robot-dog-superhero can slip smoothly into the narrative.

By citing so many performance genres, Dirty Work sets itself up as their child – if not their heir. Like any rebellious child, it uses its parents’ language to attack their authority – splicing between different types of performance to explode the autonomy they each pretend. But also like a rebellious child, its limits are set by its parents’ horizons. Dirty Work can only draw on the banks of meaning that other performances have left behind. The life of the play exists somewhere between these two conflicts: between the possibility of knowledge, and the limits of imagination; between the navigation of the actors, and the ownership of the audience. Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? No, but in its mixture of guidance and cultural norms, it feels like a very enjoyable collaboration.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more info see http://www.forcedentertainment.com/

Or

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/?event=136&date=2007-06#136

16th June 2007
Toynbee Hall Court Room

Part of Artsadmin’s Summer Season

While the argument rages about the relative merits of MySpace and Facebook, Chris Goode wants to draw your attention to another internet community. The Hippo World guestbook (http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/intro.htm) is a message board for those who visit the site, which describes itself as ‘devoted to all fans, fanciers, and aficionados of Hippopotamus amphibius’. Like other internet communities, this one attracts users from all walks of life, who discuss a range of subjects sometimes – but not always – connected to hippopotamuses. Goode’s sixty minute performance is a reading of some of these posts, which he recites verbatim.

Chris Goode’s introduction primes us for the narrative arc of the messages. Arranged as if in three acts, with short musical interludes, the opening tone is one of enthusiastic appreciation (“I wish that people could have hippos as pets!”), which moves into conflict (“I hate hippos and I hate you”), and ends with that sure sign of a website’s demise – uncontrolled spam. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the way communities are built, cherished and destroyed as a whole. The ultimate objet trouvee, then, the Hippo World guestbook stands for how societies find and lose their meaning.

Except it’s not quite as simple as that. Obviously, there is no set pattern to the way people communicate, or if there is, it’s not reflected in this site. While Goode’s performance certainly has a beginning and an end, there is little to define the middle of his promised story. Messages from people who are hippo fans sit alongside messages from people who are not hippo fans, and the exchanges occasionally descend into childish conflict (“I hate hippos … They suck! They suck!”), homophobic taunts (“Hippos are gays and all who like hippos are gays and lesbians”) and complete irrelevance. In fact, rather than documenting the rise and fall of a vibrant community, Hippo World guestbook is at its most interesting when it becomes clear how tangential it is to the lives of its contributors. The user called ‘Big Heart Hippo’, for instance, leaves the group with a revealing entry: “I used to check up on the message board frequently, but now I don’t. My parents told me my e-mail might be traced and the bad language was getting on my nerves. Oh well.” It is not the story of the site that becomes interesting, but the hinted at stories of its visitors away from the screen.

Here in the dark of Toynbee Hall’s woodlined Court Room, reading from a lectern under spotlight, however, Chris Goode displaces these tangential posts and treats them like the weighty missives they were never meant to be. He earnestly recites acronyms and spelling mistakes, and adheres to the web convention – as he points out – that capitals means shouting. While Goode has culled messages to fit the sixty minute time frame, he has tried to be representative of the mood as a whole, and reads out the chosen messages in full. If the posts have been transferred in time and place, he would argue, they have not been transferred in authorship. This kind of editing would be condescending, he says – either in the presumption that he could ‘correct’ the posts, or that he should accentuate their eccentricities.

And yet there is definitely something anachronistic about his reading of these messages. For those of us who did not grow up with the internet and texting, it still seems strange that written communication can be this casual. But the – mainly teenage – users of the Hippo World site clearly thought of their messages that way. Perhaps it is this age difference between the people Goode quotes and the people he performs to that makes the humour seem slightly cruel. Lol, gtg and other text speak are easy targets for the well educated, urban folk at Toynbee Hall. There is little danger, either, of us falling into the trap of becoming naturalised to the racist and homophobic undertones of some of the messages. They are written in a language that people over a certain (young) age neither use nor accept, but it is one that any internet user will recognise. Perhaps Hippo World guestbook raises an interesting point about the tolerance for these statements on the net, but it doesn’t foster any link between its audience and the people who wrote the posts. This distance does not threaten to change anyone’s minds.

On the other hand, perhaps Goode’s show is a fitting way to continue the site. The posts’ displacement into this setting works in tandem with their intended irreverence, and not against it. And the downright silliness of Goode’s endeavour is a light hearted match for the way the site sits on the edges of its contributors’ lives.

Despite the undeniable presence of Chris Goode’s own authorship, there is enough that feels communal about Hippo World guestbook to save it from being arch or ironic. Not only does Goode read the messages of an internet community, he also depends on the audience’s communal understanding of this phenomenon for humour and effect. He takes the normally solitary pursuit of surfing the net and drags it into a shared environment, replacing the online community with an embodied one. Whether you feel he does this with affection or, at times, a little too much cruelty, probably depends on your own relationship with the web.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more info on Chris Goode see
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/project.php?id=171

or

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/associate-artist.php?id=32

Laughing Hole: Photographer Marco del Curto29 June 5pm - 11pm
Durational Performance
Part of the Artsadmin summer Season

Written and directed by La Ribot
Performed by Marie-Caroline Hominal, La Ribot, Delphine Rosay
Sound Design and Performance Clive Jenkins

For more info see http://www.laribot.com/

'Over six hours a series of lone performers enter a space strewn with cardboard panels and, in the grips of constant laughter, tape them to the walls. On each are scrawled handwritten phrases or words, ranging from the ambivalent to the personal to the political. As they are assembled they create haunting and strange associations'. Artsadmin 2007

Pre-lude

4.30pm It’s June and I still have tights on. So I’m hot. I’ve just eaten a quick sandwich dinner on the tube from work. Rushed my emails to get away early, then got ‘caught’ in the corridor on my way out the office. Another 30 minutes. Now I’m late and sweaty, having run for every bus. Undigested sandwich lodged uncomfortably in throat. Mustn’t miss the start. Focus on getting there on time.

Enter

5.15 pm I arrive, on time but under prepared. All I have is a memory of La Ribot’s photograph from ‘Live: Art and Performance’ (eds. Adrian Heathfield, 2004) lodged in my brain. And one stuck sandwich. Nothing else. It’s too late to read the programme information. I slink in down the side of the studio. Hope no-one notices me. Everyone does.

And Pause…

9.30pm The laughing is still there. Laughing, not as a backdrop but as main player. A constant sea-tide of feminine chuckles, bubbles and tinkles that rise and fall. Crashing waves, crescendos of guffaws and low ebbs of breathy giggles and sighs. I don’t know when it started. Perhaps it has always been here; laughter that stayed on long after the joke ended. But this laughter is not welcome. Not funny. It is laughter that is physically, mentally out of sync. Out of step, out of time.

Excerpt

7.00pm La Ribot holds up one piece of cardboard. ‘Still Funny’ This gets a laugh from the audience.

Cut (Back to the future)

10.20pm The physical remains of laughter cling on to their hosts in flushed cheeks and empty grimaces. Hair all over the place. Chests rise and fall. Women on their backs, housecoats parted, casually showing coloured knickers. The last dregs of laughter gently lap, washing over all three women in post hysterical paroxysm. All at sea, and spent.

Begin Again

To re-cap. La Ribot and two other women performers. Over six hours of them in coloured housecoats and flip-flops. Falling about. Laughing, both recorded and live. Bits of cardboard on the floor, two words on each.

Drunk Mum

War Bay

Phone Home

Still Laughing

Shit Hole

W-hole Break

7.00pm Another laughter surge. A big one this time. High pitched female hysteria. Hysteria. The diagnosis: Women with symptoms of faintness, nervousness, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a ‘tendency to cause trouble’. The treatment: Manual stimulation of female genitals leading to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ or orgasm. This is about women, their unreliable and porous bodies: wombs, mouths and other dark holes.

Cut

5.45pm Still laughing but not yet funny. Very unfunny in fact. Mad and obscene. It sometimes sounds like crying. In between the laughing or crying, the beginning and the end, relationships grow. The women perform their laughter as body to body; a contagious one to one infection from one audience member to the next. It works: try staring into the red-sweaty laughing face of another, and not laugh. Try doing anything, apart from laugh, whilst laughing. Laughter claims it’s own body, it’s own time.

Repeat

5.15pm All I have is a memory of La Ribot’s photograph from ‘Live: Art and Performance’ (eds. Adrian Heathfield, 2004) lodged in my brain. And one stuck sandwich. Nothing else.

Cut

8.45pm I can smell my own feet in these trainers.

Smelly Feet

Numb Arse

Red Wine

At Home

Interlude

9.00pm A duration. Time to think backwards and forwards, to dip in and out of the present, in and out of this Laughing Hole. Into the future that is now, compressed into the present, into the text. Meanwhile, thoughts nip in and out. Poignant and revealing, meaningless and boring. Time enough for La Ribot to dip in and out of herself, in and out of Laughing Hole: time for her to get a drink of water, open the studio door, smile at the technicians. All the while laughing.

Post-script

Let’s write this future laughter into now

End

Repeat

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

Helen Paris

One-to-one performance
24 June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season

Four scenes of longing, and turning to technology for comfort. A beautiful voice, lit up on stage, all of our eyes fixed on her – except I’m standing in her shadow, an empty stage, an empty auditorium. The promise of televisuals, our antics recorded in chrome, our voices everywhere through the air … but of course none of it is free. Someone’s behind the camera, someone’s flipping the switch, someone’s topping you up. The electric heart, whirring on its axis, replaceable with a mechanical watch – and my finger still tingles from touching it directly. The doorframe, the mirror, behind each threshold might be the hope of our longing. And when I at last see your face, it’s a trick of the light, the faint smell of burning but there’s glass between us, and you’ve arrived just to say goodbye.

The idea of the one-to-one performance seems to hold the promise of escaping from the trickery of ordinary theatre, of establishing a real and direct connection between performer and spectator. Helen Paris’s Vena Amoris does the opposite: it immerses the spectator in exactly that theatrical trickery, that vantage from which the mechanism behind the illusion is revealed; and it defers and obscures the direct contact for which it nonetheless yearns. But in this itinerant experience, a complex relationship between the magical and the practical is developed, and the illusory becomes all the more compelling for having its workings exposed.

The piece begins with a call on my mobile phone while I’m waiting outside. It’s Paris, telling me she’s going to stay on the phone with me, and inviting me to enter the theatre. The theatre is empty, with a chair lit up in the middle of the stage. She asks me to sit in the chair. When I do, the house lights go down, the stage lights blind my view of the auditorium, Doris Day starts singing “Make Someone Happy”, and Paris starts talking about the danger of theatre. Not the moral or emotional danger, but the physical danger – the risk of fire from the gaslight of pre-electric theatres, the reservoir of water that used to hang over the stage, invisible to the audience but always at the edge of the actors’ awareness, and the symbol of comfort that is the fire curtain.

Following Paris’s instructions, I am led through the levels of Toynbee Hall, up its stairs, inside a fire cupboard, and at one point into a room actually called the Fire Room. I watch a film which Paris tells me was made by Thomas Edison, while she describes to me – over my mobile phone – Edison’s rival Nikola Tesla’s dream of free wireless energy. Alone in a room with a whirring Van de Graaff generator, I am asked to turn off my phone and then feel the generator’s electric charge with the third finger of my left hand, the finger that Paris tells me the Egyptians believed was connected directly to the heart. A beautiful woman opens a door to reveal her twin on the other side, and at the journey’s end I sit before my own reflection in a dressing room mirror ringed with incandescent bulbs. And in a brief glimpse there is a moment of contact, but with little more than Paris’s shadow.

What am I to make of all this illusion, of this strange odyssey through the stuff of sideshow trickery (the Edison film is a kind of burlesque gag; the Van de Graaff generator is what makes people’s hair stand on end in the funshow)? What is the danger of falling in love with an illusion? Does it hurt anyone to believe that the singer is singing just for me? That the sound of your voice on the phone is the same as being with you? Does it mean any less if my heart is racing just because it’s electric, after all, and there’s an external current running through it?

This piece is a moving and intelligent reflection on these questions, a journey through a world which is helplessly romantic and heartbreakingly earnest. The connections between us are fragile enough (as I found out after my phone gave out briefly); it’s no wonder we fall in love with the technology that connects us, even long after we’re gone.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Helen Paris is co-artistic director of Curious

http://www.placelessness.com/

Yara El Sherbini

27 June 2007
Arts Bar and Café, Toynbee Studios
Part of Artsadmin Summer Season

Question: why is a pub quiz Art? Answer: Because the quiz mistress says it is, and the quiz mistress is always right. This is how sometime stand-up comedienne and live art artist Yara El-Sherbini holds fort in ‘Pub Quiz’ at Toynbee Studios’ Arts Bar and Café. And true to both El-Sherbini’s comedic roots and her live art practise the questions and answers in Pub Quiz are variously open to interpretation, politically astute and extremely funny both in, and because of, their deviousness.

For example Round 6 Question 2 “Jean Charles de Menezes was shot and killed when mistaken for a 'suicide bomber'. On news reports shocked passengers on the tube carriage stated the Brazilian man was 'Asian, definitely Asian'. Does this suggest that A. All brown people look the same B. There are people in the world who believe Brazil is part of Asia”. Round 6 Question 5. “As a team, how many times in the past 2 years, have you refrained from criticizing an artwork because you were afraid that you were being culturally insensitive? A. Once, B. More than Once, C. Never”

Crucially, El-Sherbini herself is also ‘at risk’ within these questions, but not only with regards to her own ethnicity. Pub Quiz ruthlessly subjects itself, and on this occasion it's Artsadmin sponsors, to its own brand of comedy: Round 2 Question 2: “In a recently advertised position at Artsadmin for a culturally diverse curator scheme an Australian citizen of Moroccan and Scandinavian decent was informed she could not apply. Was this due to A. Her being under qualified B. Her not being from the specific ethnic diversities they where helping promote. C. Artsadmin gave it to someone internal, but had to advertise the post” *

It follows that any points given for answering such ultimately unknowable questions are awarded according to the internal logic of the quiz mistress. Due to El-Sherbini’s (un) wise judgement our team somewhat unfairly missed out on pole position, but we did win a prize for the best team name ‘I’m Just Going for a Wee…’ The winning team - beating us by one point – were made up mostly of Artsadmin staff and were awarded their winning point on the dubious ability to spell Artsadmin team member, Manick Govinda’s 'real' name: not, we the losers felt, Pub Quiz’s finest moment.

But despite all the fun, Pub Quiz is deceptive. Underneath its jollity lies the serious strategy of much socially engaged art practice: that of locating the subject of the work at the very site of its political or conceptual operation. Art as social engagement mimes the form, content and structure of that which it inhabits in order to trouble the presumptions and function of that system; in doing so it activates the concerns of the art work ‘from within’. El-Sherbini, in taking her art about positive action BME policies, racial politics and identity in today’s multicultural Britain to a pub, infiltrates the very nucleus of British culture that has traditionally harboured heterosexual white working class resistance to the actual subject of her work. In short, El-Sherbini’s seemingly innocuous Pub Quiz culturally masks the artist’s true satirical and political intent, thus giving the work a potent criticality that is best located in the unsuspecting pub regular.

However, this potency is somewhat lost in Toynbee Studios Arts Bar and Café. The venue is not a pub and El-Sherbini’s liberal Artsadmin audience are all too aware of the tongue-in-cheek artistic aping of the pub quiz format. We are already primed to have our assumptions about British Pakistanis and Indians – not to be confused with Muslims - unpicked. More importantly, no-body here would want to question the quiz mistress, her art or her politics. As such, the Art Bar and Café context acts as a critical muffler for Pub Quiz, transforming what would have been a true critical encounter in a pub into something more like a sideshow to the real event. This is not to take away from the work’s impact in other national venues. My hope is that Pub Quiz will forever be linked to the anecdote (thanks Tim) of the perplexed pub quiz enthusiasts in Bristol who complained about the quiz mistresses’ supremely subjective reign over the answers and were duly offered a full refund. Whether or not the disappointed quizzers took the refund isn’t clear but it proves that, when staged right, the particular clashing of cultures in Pub Quiz can be an enjoyable, but moreover challenging, experience.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

‘Correct’ answers to the questions are: Round 6 Question 2, B. Round 6 question 5, A 1 point B 0 points C minus 1 point. Round 2 Question 2, B. Manick Govinda’s real name is Comerasamy

See http://www.yaraelsherbini.com