.Francesco Vezzoli, Right You Are (If You Think You Are), 2007. Photo copyright Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Gagosian Gallery.

Francesco Vezzoli Cosi E (Si Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, October 27th.

If you have to stand in a queue, make sure it’s an interesting one. The queue that snaked around the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum on Saturday night may have been long and dispiriting, but it was also one peppered with celebrities from the worlds of art and showbiz. Programmed to begin at 10pm, Franco Vezzoli’s one-night only adaptation of Luigi Pirandello’s play ‘Right You Are (If You Think You Are)’ did not start till nearly 11. The waiting crowd had to content themselves by watching stars appear and disappear into the museum behind a flash of bulbs.

Pirandello’s 1917 play is a parable about truth. It revolves around the mysterious Signora Ponza whose presence is only described through her relationships with others. Drawing together an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman and Peter Saarsgaard, Vezzoli’s adaptation courted this fragility of truth in relation to the nature of celebrity. In doing so he choreographed the audience as much as he directed the actors and – although I may not have appreciated it at the time – that long queue was a fitting introduction to the themes of his piece.

Inside the museum, the A-List actors sat facing each other at the centre of the rotunda. Some were cast in roles that deliberately contrasted with their appearance or gender – Natalie Portman, for instance, as the straight talking (male) Laudisi, and the adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin as the Mayor – and they were all reading from a script, so that even when the play was at its most dynamic we were reminded that it was a constructed fiction. This had the paradoxical effect of emphasising the historical specificity of Pirandello’s text (it’s setting in early twentieth-century Italy) in order to free the implications of the play. By never allowing the audience to suspend disbelief, in other words, Vezzoli grounded the existential arguments of the play in real experience.

The A-List credentials of the cast also shed an intriguing light on the distinctions between truth, lies and the possibility of knowledge. By using such well known faces – and in particular, the status and renown of Cate Blanchett as Signora Ponza – Vezzoli exploited our own willing complicity in the cult of celebrity. Signora Ponza’s denouement (or anti-denouement, as she does little to clarify the story) could just as well have been a description of Blanchett’s activities on the publicity run for her latest film. In that situation, too, she is a construct of other people's imaginations.

And yet my view of events was heavily coloured by where I was seated. Famous and important people (of a range that included Mary-Kate Olsen, Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman) were seated around the actors on the ground floor, while others vied for their place along the museum’s ramps. My seat was in a separate screening room, which showed pictures from cameras trained on each of the actors’ faces as well as on members of the audience. Signora Ponza/ Cate Blanchett, wearing a veiled costume designed by John Galliano, was perched on an elaborate stool in front of the screen.

Just like the gossiping villagers who cast judgment on Signora Ponza’s identity in Pirandello’s play, then, I was afforded the apparent luxury of being able to see without being judged myself - there were no cameras trained on my seat. I watched the fidgeting and shuffling of high-status audience members, and I saw the watchful expressions of the actors between lines. The frustration I felt in the queue was long behind me, as I revelled in the privilege of the belief that I had a perfect view. In fact, it was the feeling of exclusion in the queue – forced to wait while others were led into the museum –that made this sense of inclusion and knowledge so richly felt.

The programme quotes Pirandello’s desire to stimulate audience members as opposed to please them, and the shuffling discomfort of the queue certainly did nothing to please anyone. But there was no loud rebellion, no chorus of booing like in the early performances by Pirandello’s Futurist contemporaries. In the end, were we all sated by the tantalising glimpse of celebrity? Flattered and cosseted in my prize seat, I certainly was.

Cosi E (Se Vi Pare) / Right You Are (If You Think You Are) was a PERFORMA Commission. Produced by Gagosian Gallery, New York. Co-produced by PERFORMA in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Mary Paterson
Performa Writing Live Fellow

See more reviews by Mary and Rachel Lois on http://07.performa-arts.org/performa_live.php

Image Courtesy of Christer Lundahl
Explode and (Anything) – an Itinerary
Participatory performance by artists: Lundahl & Seitl
Saturday 6 October 2007
Battersea Arts Centre, London

Explode and (Anything) – An Itinerary is one of ten special commissions by Battersea Arts Centre to be part of the sprawling installation performance of Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death. The massive Edgar Allen Poe experience fills every room in the Old Town Hall building, without skimping on detail; lighting, sound and decoration covers every inch. In the rich, atmospheric, Gothic, completely immersive environment, it is hard to believe the experience can be any more extraordinary. And then a figure in a white robe beckons you into a quiet room …

Lundahl & Seitl are very suitable artists to be embedded within Punchdrunk’s epic production. Their work creates eerie sensations of disembodiment through their uniquely designed whole-body experience, an unusually effective paradox. Explode... is uncanny, uncomfortable and provokes disorientation and dislocation of all the senses. While Punchdrunk holds up a guttering Victorian candle flame to three hours worth of terror and mystery, Lundahl and Seitl go one step further and plunge those who dare visit them into utter darkness for fifteen spine-tingling minutes.

The white-robed Lundahl & Seitl performers led us three apprehensive but excited participants into the white room. We took off our shoes, put on white robes and full-face canvas masks. We became sexless, faceless and identical; apart from our heights we were almost interchangeable. Wireless headphones blocked out noise and we stood waiting until a voice crackled in our ears. Take two steps forward. A simple enough instruction that required huge mental effort to execute when all certainty about our surroundings had been removed. The voice said it was watching me and I was to take its hand. A hand grasped mine and pulled me forward. For the next few moments, I moved around the unseen space, alternately repelled by and longing for the safety of this anonymous hand. I was beginning to relinquish all responsibility for myself, a euphoric sensation that was discomforting and enjoyable at the same time.

Explode… certainly knows how to push participants out of comfort zones and into something new and extraordinary. Through direct manipulation of the senses, participants are drawn into a world of strange, destabilising sensations: whose hand is holding mine? Who is speaking to me? Where am I? Am I safe? What is happening? In writing, it seems like the last thing any sane person would want to undergo but in practice it is an exercise of the lesser used senses and how certainties can reassemble themselves into multiple possibilities.

In Explode... Lundahl & Seitl have taken the single, definite set of environmental circumstances and replaced them with multiple imagined ones. With no way of comprehending what is in the immediate environment, every configuration was possible and the boundaries, the hard edges and certainties of space were removed. As I walked and moved with the voice gently instructing me, I imagined every possible sort of space and knew that all of them existed at the same time, somehow. The experience was an unsettling mixture of giddy liberation and dread.

The second part of the performance started when part of our masks were removed and we saw the room through a thin layer of gauze. It was a shock to have all my imagined settings collapse into this singular reality: a white room, small, with the other two audience members standing motionless. The voice told me to walk around the room, so I did. The other figures did too. We could have been reflections in a series of mirrors. I couldn't tell who had held my hand. It was eerie and bizarre. And then it got even stranger.

The voice said it was signalling to me as one of the other figures began to raise its arms. I was asked to raise my right arm. The other figures turned to look at me. It was my turn to be the embodiment of the voice. If we could all be one white-robed figure, we could also all be the voice. The multiple, simultaneous possibilities of what was real and possible crowded my mind – and then any remaining grip I had on a sense of who I was, what I was doing, where I was and how it all came to be was completely shattered.

We three white-robed figures sat in a circle facing each other, still anonymous, still interchangeable due to the gauze over our faces. The voice said it was standing behind me and wanted me to see myself as it saw me. Stand up and take two steps back, I was instructed, so I did. The lights flashed off. The lights flashed on again. Where I had been sitting, there was a figure in a white robe in exactly the same position. It was a performer being me – it was me. I was staring at the back of my own head. I was utterly gobsmacked. The other two figures remained motionless. Then the lights flashed off again, I was led back to the circle and guided into sitting down. When the lights came on again, my mouth was still open in amazement.

Explode... is an experiment for the senses and a challenge to the conceived ideas of self. Every moment in the white robe and mask with the disembodied, anonymous voice removes yet another certainty of space, of reality, of who you are, where you start and where you end. I left feeling free and light, as if I had been liberated from something that had weighed me down for so long, I was no longer aware of it until it was gone. In other hands, the blindfolds, the robes, the headphones and the constant physical touch could feel invasive and aggressive, with the challenges of such an experience occluding any emotional or mental engagement. With Lundahl & Seitl leading the way, being uncertain has never felt safer and Explode... is a thought-provoking, gentle and kindly journey into the unknown, innovative, original and utterly irresistible.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

http://lundahl-seitl.com/

http://www.bac.org.uk

PerformaRachel Lois Clapham, Rebecca May Marston, and Mary Paterson are supported by Live Art UK's Writing From Live Art and are currently Writing Live Fellows at the Performa 07 Biennial. Look out on this site and on http://07.performaarts.org/performa_live.php for reveiws, opinions, interveiws and general behind the scenes reports on New York's Biennial of Visual Art Performance. In addition, Writing Live: Writers Hub, is the education programme devised and led by myself, Rebecca and Mary to develop and support a community of writers who are engaged specifically with elements of new media, time based work and visual art performance.

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WRITING LIVE: WRITERS HUB FEATURED AS PART OF PERFORMA 07, THE SECOND EDITION OF THE BIENNIAL OF NEW VISUAL ART PERFORMANCE TO BE HELD IN NEW YORK CITY OCTOBER 27 – NOVEMBER 20, 2007

Building on the success of NOT FOR SALE, the dynamic education series initiatedin 2004 in anticipation of the first PERFORMA biennial in 2005, PERFORMA is pleased to announce WRITING LIVE.

This peer review forum has been specially designed in support
of a new generation of artists, authors, and critics engaged in discussions around prescient issues in performance and new media, and the related task of writing about art and artists whose work encompasses several disciplines at once.

WRITING LIVE will involve an international group of curators, critics and emerging writers,bringing together a unique mix of different voices in a network of critical writing and debate around PERFORMA 07.

Throughout the biennial writers will participate in WRITING LIVE: WRITERS HUB a rolling program of practical writing workshops kicked off with keynote remarks by RoseLee Goldberg and David Levi Strauss (Tues 30, Oct, 11am – 3pm). Writers Hub will also comprise collective peer review platforms (Tues 13 Nov, 12 – 2pm & Tues 20 Nov, 12 – 2pm) designed with a longer-term aim of sustaining conversations around art writing on contemporary performance. A special session will take place at Freemans Restaurant (Nov 9, 1 - 3pm) to coincide with 'Bring Me The Head of…' a sculpture by Serkan Özkaya co-presented by PERFORMA and Freemans. In addition, writers will contribute to PERFORMA07 Writing Live blog by posting entries of reviews, daily round-ups, behind the scenes previews, opinion and interviews with
biennial artists and curators.

See the Writing Live blog at: http://07.performaarts.org/performa_live.php

WRITING LIVE is directed by RoseLee Goldberg and Defne Ayas, and coordinated by
PERFORMA 07 Writing Live Fellows Rachel Lois Clapham, Rebecca May Marston and
Mary Paterson. WRITING LIVE has been planned in collaboration with the SVA Graduate Art Criticism and Writing Programme with in-part sponsorship by Arts Council England.

Clapham Junction

An Audience of One by 'Ladder to the Moon Laboratory'
Sunday 21 October 2007
Clapham Junction Area
London

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his sad news on the street corner over tinned mushroom soup. And we were devastated. If there’s one thing An Audience of One did well, it made us empathise like no other theatre production. We lived the lives of the Hart family. We had to: we were playing them.

Cast members Caroline Garland and Oliver Langdon performed an extraordinary feat in this piece of street theatre. The entire performance was devised and rehearsed on the actual streets around Clapham Junction in nine chilly days; they played main characters Barry and Rose flawlessly, effortlessly involving the audience as themselves or in character. Audience members were one by one assigned a Hart family character and were incorporated into the drama as it unfolded, moving around the streets with props and prompts to learn more about our characters.

Our group’s aunt Maggy was particularly in character, constantly needing a drink. 16 year-old Luke was played with slightly less gusto, due to his tiny baby (not scripted). This was also incorporated into the performance and references were made to Luke's "school project" whenever the baby needed a pause in the action. We were all so drawn in to the Hart family's unravelling, that we happily charged around the back streets of Clapham Junction playing our parts regardless of our acting abilities – the Ladder to the Moon Laboratory accommodated how little or how much we participated and yet still presented a complex, hard-hitting drama about three generations of a family facing hard times. It was like a live action Mike Leigh movie: improvisational, tense and realistic.

Unlike the companys' Moonwalking in Chinatown, in which the Soho streets became magical and mythical; removed from the reality of Soho at night, in An Audience of One we were grounded firmly in the grubbiness of South-West London on Sunday afternoon. Though we were asked to imagine that the eight of us were all members of the Hart family, we were not asked to imagine there was anything romantic or mystical about our surroundings. By placing us each in individual shop doorways at the start, making us hang around awkwardly, the performance was saying "You are here. You are really here. And it can be hard." Being uprooted, disbanded, displaced and made homeless was explored with the most immersive empathy possible. The ghastly silence at the end as the soup sat uneaten was as real as any "difficult" family dinner we have all experienced. An Audience of One will continue to be developed and will be presented again soon. This is real street theatre, on the streets, about the streets and unforgettable.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

This review, as well a review of'Moonwalking in Chinatown'
is posted on http://londonist.com

http://www.laddertothemoon.co.uk/

http://www.anaudienceofone.co.uk/

A Live Art Take-Away MicrowaveGreat Eastern Hotel
14th September 2007

The theme of Live Art UK’s Annual Networking event was ‘audiences’. Fifty programmers, critics and curators – all interested in promoting Live Art and supporting Live Art UK - were gathered together to discuss, as our event notes put it, “the various and rich approaches to audience made possible through Live Art.”

As a group, the attendees made up a fairly specific audience themselves – or so the helpful staff at the Great Eastern Hotel led us to believe. They spotted us individually as we entered the foyer (or even, in my case, as I was walking down the street) and led us into the plush surroundings of a first floor conference room. This was our base for the morning’s speeches – from John Wyver, head of production company Illuminations, and Helen Marriage, co-founder of Artichoke and instrumental in bringing the Salisbury Festival to a world stage - as well as a performance lecture from (nobleandsilver). In the afternoon, we held break-out discussions that were interrupted by a performance of Yara El Sherbini’s pub quiz.

The day was a mixture of industry advice and refreshing reminders of what Live Art UK is there to promote – the work itself. John Wyver began by flagging up his ambivalence towards audience size and the capacity for communication. On one hand, he is disappointed that ‘network media’ has reduced audience share and forced traditional broadcasters to retreat to the middle ground – an arts series like the 1990s Tx would be ‘inconceivable nowadays’. On the other, although the audience for Illuminations’ DVD Series, ‘The Eye’ is small, it is also enthusiastic, measurable (as opposed to countable) and capable of giving feedback.

Helen Marriage also stressed the advantages of knowing your audience. She recommends identifying your audience and finding out the ways they communicate – be it through the Daily Telegraph or the Church of England. When she programmed the performance artist Bobby Baker to appear in the Bishop of Salisbury’s kitchen, she didn’t just provide a suitably domestic interior for Baker’s work - she also gave local residents the chance to look inside the Bishop’s kitchen. (It turns out they also loved the show.) This tactic is not confined to local audiences. On a much larger scale, the lack of pre-publicity for Royal de Luxe’s Sultan’s Elephant, a magnificent animatronic performance that took over Central London last year, meant that viewers ‘discovered’ the show, and spread the news through texts, pictures and word of mouth.

But while Wyver and Marriage talked about the ways in which audiences can be enticed (or otherwise) through how work is shown, it was left to (nobleandsilver) to ask what an audience ‘takes away’ from a Live Art event. In their case it was a microwave, for one lucky audience member, as well as the chance of a lift home in their new initiative ‘Drive Art UK’.(nobleandsilver)’s lecture was a reminder of the artwork all these endeavours are there to promote, and it was also a parody of some of the ways that audience development is pursued within the art industry. One audience member was given an audio guide, another was asked to contribute his home to the continuation of this lecture the following day; (nobleandsilver) showed a compilation video of some of their work – it included them interviewing their grandmothers, and footage of a man ejaculating over a radio – and an animation of the day’s event that characterised the attendees as angry sponges. Their lecture answered the kinds of questions often posed in the quest for audience development (what is the work? who is the audience? how will they benefit?) and their ludicrous answers examined the value of the questions themselves.

Yara El Sherbini’s pub quiz also made the assembled audience examine their motives. Her questions – interspersed with the kind of trivia you’d find in any pub quiz – asked this group of artworld insiders to think about the ways in which cultural diversity is addressed in the arts. And there was nowhere to hide – El Sherbini provided limited, multiple choice answers which meant that everyone was implicated in the contradictions, hypocrisies and injustices she identified in ‘cultural diversity’.

So where did this leave Live Art UK? The messages were not clear – should we be courting large audiences through traditional media, or celebrating the dynamics of communication with a small group of people? Should we cater to an audience or challenge them? And if institutional policy is inherently flawed anyway, what’s the point in trying? All these contradictions surfaced in the afternoon’s break-out sessions, in which groups were asked to design a publication that addressed audiences and Live Art. Suggestions ranged from commissioning a supplement in The Guardian to creating a ‘living newspaper’ through word of mouth; content was drawn from the politics of the artwork to the experience of watching other members of an audience. The suggestions varied, in fact, just as much as Live Art does. Used to describe a wide range of practice, Live Art is always a problematic term, and the day proved that even a group of people connected through their affiliation with Live Art UK can’t agree on what it means.

This inherent diversity in Live Art practice was elided slightly by the commitment of the guests at the event – we were all happy to watch an animation of a piece of meat, followed by a DVD of a giant puppet in Trafalgar Square, and accept them both as successful examples of Live Art. But the speakers and discussion showed that this variation is not always understood by audiences. It may be difficult to describe what a piece of work ‘is’ but, as Marriage pointed out, you need to be able to tell people why they should see it.

There seems to be no way around identifying both the artwork and its potential audience – although that does not mean that there can’t be multiple definitions for both. As Bryan Biggs, director of the Bluecoat in Liverpool, suggested in his closing speech, if anywhere can be a site for art, then anywhere can be a site for an art audience. Likewise, if Live Art covers a variety of work, then its audiences will be just as various and diverse.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more details on the artists and companies mentioned in Live Art UK’s Annual Networking Event check the links below. Links to all the Live Art UK partner organisations can be found on the left hand side of this site.

http://www.yaraelsherbini.com/
http://www.nobleandsilver.com/
http://www.artichoke.uk.com/index.htm
http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/

Experimentica

Theron Schmidt has been invited to be writer in residence at Experimentica 07 at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff. This seventh year of the live and time-based art festival features Cardiff-based and UK artists including Mr & Mrs Clark, Helena Hunter, Tom Marshman, Karl Price, and André Stitt; as well as international artists Rosie Dennis (Australia), Joost Niewenburg (Netherlands), and Atmen and Jeong Guem-Hyung (South Korea).

Read daily posts from the festival at experimentica07.blogspot.com, 17-21 October.

Courtesy Vinespace
‘Zero Hour'
A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’

11 October 2007
12 midday until 9pm (performance between 5.30 and 8.30)
VINEspace
Vyner Street
London

Last Thursday I had a one-night stand with Japanese artist Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki. It was a wonderfully slow and strange physical encounter that lasted for several hours, throughout which I could hear - and feel - the pounding of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s excited and over exerted heartbeat impacting upon my body. De Dun, De Dun, De Dun. The physical strain, the knee trembling, the impact of his heartbeat, all this was flesh and real and yet Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki and I never actually touched. And we didn’t actually have sex. ‘A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’ was the fourth in the series of VINEspace's ‘A One night Stand With…’A one-night-only temporary exhibition that shows work of a transient nature, including exploratory projects, performances and installations which occupy the gallery for one night, and are gone the next morning.

‘One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’ coincided with ‘Time Out First Thursday’, London’s monthly late night gallery opening, and the crowd of inebriated gallery goers on Vyner Street was the perfect setting for a furtive fumble, or one-night fling, with Live Art. The fumble in question, Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s One Night Stand, was entitled ‘Zero Hour’ and was installed in Vinespace’s street-side project space. It involved the artist, dressed in silver body-suit, goggles and face mask (also silver), spray painting (silver) lines onto a clear glass pane to the amplified tune of his own heartbeat.

It doesn’t sound much like actual sex but there is real physical and emotional intimacy in this work, the artist lays bare what is private, interior and quite literally inside; ie his heart. And it’s the drama of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s heartbeat that is at stake. Each beat reverberates around the space connecting the body of artist with that of the audience, holding them in its visceral, compelling and slightly morbid rhythm; the tense fast paced highs, the relaxed slow thumps, and the irregular or missed beats that create a pause and serve as real life or death cliffhangers. The rhythm of the heartbeat is also fatal. It lulls listeners into anticipating or yearning for the break - or crisis- in the heartbeats’ performance, proving the point that one-night stands really can be hazardous to your health. The beating of the artists’ heart also serves as a keen reminder of time, both of the duration of the performance and the amount of time, or beats, left before death.

Zero Hour: it is faintly apocalyptic, like a bodily version of ground zero, but Zero Hour doesn’t simply refer to death. The Zero Hour in question refers to the end point or the Nth degree of progressive linear time that the temporal elements of this performance all work against or toward. The spray paint on the glass pane eventually turns into a reflective mirror that obscures Heart Beat Drawing Sasaki from view. This mirror stage is itself Zero Hour, with every stroke that is painted - in tandem with every heartbeat - performing the artists’ gradual disappearance. In turn, the Zero Hour of the artists’ disappearance is simultaneously both the purpose and process of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s performance; this Zero Hour, is what makes his performance possible and the end point at which he will eventually arrive. In pitching itself firmly toward its own disappearance, its own Zero Hour, A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki becomes paradoxically and maniacally live. I haven’t experienced anothers’ body quite so intimately or physically in public - or had so much of a good time doing it - whilst being fully clothed for some time. Messages about safe sex aside, I recommend everyone have ‘A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

The Next in the One Night Stand series is 'A One Night Stand With Larisa Blazic' in which video artist Larisa Blazic presents ‘Wake Up Whitney’ a giant projection on the facade of the Victory Pub opposite the gallery.

See http://www.vinespace.net/about.asp for more details.

STILL: Photograph by Lucy Cash
STILL

Anna Krzystek with Lucy Cash (video installation) and Tom Murray (sound)
9 October 2007
Tonybee Studios, London

There’s a Viking Line ship which is so large, that as it navigates its way through Helsinki harbour, its movement is actually imperceptible. Only by watching it over time can you convince yourself that it is in fact moving. For movement artist Anna Krzystek and filmmaker Lucy Cash, this mobile stillness was one of the inspirations behind STILL, a collaboration between Krzystek, Cash, and sound artist Tom Murray. The resulting piece is a finely tuned juxtaposition of live performance, carefully arranged space, and film and audio in a compositional whole which is a both mesmerising and exhausting exploration of stillness and tension.

Set in an austere white room with ordinary fluorescent lights, STILL asks to be read with the careful attention required of installation work, each element in the room considered both as itself and as part of a composition. TV screens are arranged throughout the space, neither programmatically nor randomly arranged but each just perceptibly in relation to each other. A chair is placed so that it all but touches the room’s other exit, statically signalling the dynamic potential of the closed door. As each TV screen cycles through its own slow pan of another sparse room, Krzystek’s presence in the room becomes less that of a performer before an audience and more a part of a landscape. And Murray carefully adjusts a sequence of electronic tones and pulses, manually attenuating his soundscape to complement this landscape.

Over the 45 minute duration of the performance, the various elements of this composition are combined to explore and activate unseen lines of connection in the room. Our focus is naturally drawn to the performer, but Krzystek uses both her body and her gaze to give this focus away, her head moving mechanically like a panning camera to create diagonals through the space. She moves with choreographed rigour, at one point on a seemingly endless loop through flexed dance positions, at another making a single leg movement for what seems like forever. Meanwhile, Murray’s soundscore finds resonances throughout the small space, at times even causing the walls to vibrate. The filmed images, revealing glimpses of other Krzysteks moving through another room at another time, connect the relations within this room to a more general idea of room. And, as props begin to appear in the films – a phone, a radio, photographs, a cluster of chairs – there’s a sense of infinite but untold narrative attached to each object. Who might phone? Whose gaze is reflected in the photographs? What drama is foretold by this roomful of chairs? Even the image of an ordinary electric wall socket seems charged with potential energy.

STILL is divided into five movements, and the shifts between them are discernible. But when Krzystek reveals in post-show discussion that these movements are each exactly nine minutes, it’s a surprise. It doesn’t feel like it, as the experience of time changes radically throughout the movements. Though nothing ever actually ‘happens’, there are nonetheless quite dramatic shifts in pace and tone, as when the screens start blinking between images in the third movement, or in the excruciatingly slow fourth movement in which the most active element in the room is the fidgeting audience. In this way, the piece explores not only the latent dynamism of a mostly unchanging space, but also the ways in which we can experience identical durational periods in vastly different ways.

In her programme notes, Krzystek describes STILL as existing ‘on a fine line between performance and installation’. As installation, it meticulously overlays live performance, arranged objects, and recorded media with a compositional sensitivity that is far too rare. As a performance, though, it raises more questions than it answers. Unlike an ordinary installation, STILL has an audience which has been summoned at a particular time into a room in which the doors are closed, and this audience is a strange entity with which to share the carefully composed space. In fact, it feels as if the audience is in a slightly separate space: we can mentally enter the space created for us and become engrossed in its logic, but we can also retire from it, as indicated by the fidgeting in the fourth movement. In conversation afterward, Krzystek states her interest in this phenomenon, describing the way in which she is aware of herself as spectator when viewing work in a gallery, but loses awareness of her own body when in the theatre. STILL begins to explore these tensions, particularly in the final movement in which Krzystek makes direct eye contact with audience members. But I think the challenge of how to incorporate the presence and dynamic of an audience into this work’s manipulation of time and space remains an intriguing question which the work only begins to explore. Krzystek describes STILL as part of an ongoing study (the first of which was her piece TEST), and I very much look forward to more.

Written by Theron Schmidt

www.annakrzystek.com

www.lucycash.com [website under development]

A Disappearing Number, By Complicite

5 September 2007 - 6 October 2007

Barbican Theatre

Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney
Devised by the Company
Original music by Nitin Sawhney
Design by Michael Levine

Co-produced by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival, Ruhrfestspiele, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth

On April 14th 1913 Srinivasa Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge after a long journey from India. A former postal clerk, he spent the next five years working closely with the mathematics professor G.H. Hardy, who had invited Ramanujan on the strength of some theorems he sent through the post. Thus began what Complicite call, “the most mysterious and romantic mathematical collaboration of all time.”

Or did this collaboration begin with the first letter Hardy received? Or when Ramanujan, a Brahmin, sought permission to go overseas? Did it begin when he first began asking questions? When Hardy was playing Real Tennis? Or when the S.S. Nevada left port in Madras? Where or whenever it began, ‘A Disappearing Number’ draws inspiration from Ramanujan’s time in Cambridge like water from a well, exploring its implications for mathematics, creativity, spirituality and – most of all – the continuity of time, space and emotions. In doing so, it travels between Europe and India, the First World War and the present day, the burden of proof and the possibilities of string theory. It weaves between themes and stories, and eventually weaves them all together. By the time this mesmeric performance draws to a close, it’s impossible to say whether anything has a beginning or an end.

And yet ‘A Disappearing Number’ starts with quite a different approach. The play opens with a mathemetician explaining some concepts, as if the theatre is a lecture hall and we are her students. Then an actor comes along and dramatically disolves the fourth wall – he pushes the set around, adjusts his colleague’s microphone, tells us that he’s an actor and that none of this is real – apart from the maths, that is. As a theatrical device, this is even more clever than it might seem at first. It dynamically engages the audience and introduces us to the malleability of the set. By drawing us in as collaborators in this fiction (instead of spectators), it harnesses our imaginations to create and populate complex scene changes. But just as the actor acknowledges the artifice of the theatrical endeavour (and builds our trust), he tells us that the ‘Maths is real.’ He reveals one trick, in other words, to pull off a bigger one. In one sleight of hand, we are both initiated into the fabric of the play and convinced of the strength of its message.

This initiation is important because ‘A Disappearing Number’ does not have a clear direction. It meanders between times, concepts and stories, presenting fragments of visual and aural experience whose significance is not immediately clear. At times, it can be frustrating when the drama pauses on a piece of action that’s hard to understand. At others, it’s disconcerting to find a thread disappear just when its meaning starts to come into focus. Instead of building like a linear series – like the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 that were drawn on a board at the beginning of the show – ‘A Disappearing Number’ fills out like the circles of chalk that are poured on stage, or like the inter-continuity of numbers that comes to light as the play progresses. Just as there is no gap between numbers, so there are no gaps in or between the stories told. The device of the opening scene gives this anti-linear continuity the time to develop – it wins our trust and buys our patience to wait for patterns to emerge.

When these patterns do emerge, it is almost imperceptibly. They evolve through words, sounds, images and movements that are layered together in a continuous stream. So although we see Ramanujan die at the beginning of the play as well as at the end, this circularity becomes clear somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, the play’s themes don’t aspire to be universal. The tragic love story between an enthusiastic lecturer and her ambitious husband is not a cliché, but a moving and sombre relationship between two people who appear very real. And what could be a hackneyed distinction between a ‘spiritual’ East and a ‘rational’ West is given credibility by its weight in real relationships. When the overall ‘pattern’ of the piece makes itself clear it is not as a solution, but a reconciliation of individual truths.

Complicite is one of Europe’s best known theatre companies. Its name is synonymous with experimental theatre and it has been influential in terms of movement and visual display, as much as anything else. So there is a tendency to arrive at A Disappearing Number and expect to be blown away. But don’t expect results without giving something in return. This play requires effort and engagement, and (for some at least), an initial leap of faith that – yes – mathematics can be a beautiful and delicate skeleton for art.

Drawing from Ramanujan and Hardy’s collaboration like a well, A Disappearing Number never quite gets to the bottom of how their relationship worked. Likewise, India is a country skirted around – visited or left behind, but never explained or lived in. And the relationship between two lovers is only revealed through their desire for closeness, not the closeness itself. In fact, A Disappearing Number does just that on its audience – it disappears. What is left instead of plot resolution, is the loud, enduring resonance of memory, creativity and belief.

Written by Mary Paterson

www.complicite.org

‘Exposed’ by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens is part of ‘Love Art Lab’
Chelsea Theatre, London
Saturday 22nd September 2007

You might have heard of Annie Sprinkle as the former porn star and sex-worker turned performance artist, whose piece ‘Public Cervix Announcement’ invited audience members to look inside her vagina. You might also have heard of Elizabeth Stephens, a multimedia artist and academic who has been making work about women’s sexuality for over a decade. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. In ‘Exposed’ Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens aren’t here to talk to you about their work, their egos, their politics. Sure, it might come up along the way, but what’s really being exposed here is their mutual affection for each other and their explicit desire to “make the world a more fun, sexy, tolerant, well-educated, love-filled place”.

‘Exposed’ is part of ‘Love Art Lab’, a seven-year performance piece devised by the two artists, that includes visual art, theatre, performance, interventions, filmmaking, lectures, printed matter and activism. The structure of Love Art Lab is born out of a spirit of generosity and collaboration – artist Linda M. Montano invited other artists to use her seven year theme. Sprinkle and Stephens have incorporated the seven chakras into the Love Art Lab schema, which means that 2007, with ‘Exposed’ in its third year, is the year of the yellow chakra – signifiying courage and power.

Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens tell us about their relationship – including the story of how they met, the story of how they got (and continue to get) married, the story of how they tried to get pregnant. The two women talk over each other, meandering in and out of the same narrative, occasionally waiting for the other to hurry up or remember her cue. Their stage presence together is affectionate and affecting, and told in this way their stories add up to more than just anecdotes. They are a record and manifestation of Sprinkle and Stephens’ life together.

This means that there are bad bits as well as good. Annie’s breast cancer elicits one of the only non-spoken parts of the show. The cancer comes as a horrific surprise to the audience, who until now have been able to revel in the joyousness of Annie and Elizabeth’s relationship. But the illness also makes clear quite how apparent - and infectious - their love for each other has become.

Aside from the cancer, the joyful tone of the performance means that when politics does crop up, it’s in the nicest possible way. There’s an open debate about marriage when Annie and Elizabeth describe how they decided to get hitched. They invite discussion with the audience, hear everyone out and hand round a list of reasons about why marriage is a bad idea. Then they quietly give their reasons, and get on with the show. It’s an inclusive and respectful example of the artists’ dictum to spread love around, and it seems – like everything in this show – to be completely natural.

The catalyst for making ‘Love Art Lab’ was the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. These particular wars hang behind ‘Exposed’, making the performance an act of defiance against war and everything it stands for. But it is referenced obliquely by familiar footage of US troops in a desert, which emphasies the fact that ‘Exposed’ is an indirect reaction to violence and destruction. Critics may say this makes it harmless at best, and evasive at worst. But I defy even the most hardened cynics to spend an hour and a half in these artists’ company and not come out with their hearts melted. Perhaps this is a throwback to an idealistic, seventies kind of activism, but it feels genuine and efffective nonetheless. Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens ask us all to, ‘spread a little love’, and by the time you leave the theatre you’ll be urging others to do the same.

Written by Mary Paterson

http://www.loveartlab.org/
http://www.anniesprinkle.org/
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/stephens/