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

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

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