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