The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007
La Pocha Nostra
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/11/07

The last time I got a severe case of the shivers during a live art show was thanks to Goat Island’s ‘When will the September roses bloom / last night was only a comedy’. In it, whilst the bland, treacly tones of James Taylor oozed from the PA, Litó Walkey stood still on one leg for a good seven or eight minutes. One song ended, another one began (as if the sound op had dozed off, leaving the whole CD playing unintentionally) and Walkey simply stood centre stage, one leg raised, in a crepuscular half-light.

I’m no particular fan of James Taylor (or indeed of standing on one leg for any length of time) but after about three minutes into ‘When will the September roses bloom....’ I suddenly realised I was shaking. At first I thought it was in sympathy with the performer, or maybe even because of the cold, but I quickly discounted these theories and yet still couldn’t stop myself wobbling… and that wasn’t particularly good news as I was behind a camcorder at the time, filming the performance. Despite everything, despite the formality of Goat Island’s house style, despite the fact that the immediacy of the event was being filtered through a viewfinder before it hit me, I was being consumed by something unnameable and shaking like a leaf.

I mention this because it happened again during La Pocha Nostra’s The New Barbarians Fall Collection 2007, in a similarly unquantifiable way. Rajni Shah had been parading spider-like up and down the fashion show runway for some time, naked but for a black choker, with an animal snarl and dark arterial blood smeared across her face. Slowly, quietly, Sarah Jane Norman – similarly unclothed except for various thin black trusses dissecting her body and a rubber mask of what looked like Condoleezza Rice over her head – made her presence known at the opposite end of the catwalk. I can’t even remember what was playing on the soundtrack at the time because by then the entire experience had battered me into a helpless submission. 90 minutes of noise, fury and fashion, culminating in La Pocha Nostra and their associate artists making me vibrate with the heartbeat regularity of a quartz crystal… and by means that couldn’t have been more different from Goat Island’s.

Days later, details of New Barbarians are still repeating upon me like snatches of a half remembered dream, sneaking up, unexpected and often unwelcome, triggered by some innocuous element of my daily life. BAM! There’s Alex Bradley, hauling himself the length of the catwalk by means of the connecting spars of two lighting clamps, the metal props attached to his wrists, instruments of torture, clunking painfully into the wood of the runway. BAM! Roza Ilgen, her form entirely covered in human hair, short-arsed, sporting breasts and a beard like some long lost evolutionary byroad: Captain Caveman, Morlock, Bigfoot, arms splayed out, a perverse Christ, the audience cheering her enthusiastically. WHOOSH! The sound of a mad Mexican woman jabbering away down a telephone line, unintelligible, distorted, insane. BOOM! BANG! Guillermo Goméz-Peña suddenly breaking into a native American chant, all the while pouting ridiculously like Derek Zoolander. GO!

Presented in the mode of a fashion show, New Barbarians keeps all the rituals, bluster and bombast of such events intact. The audience have been told to “dress for the catwalk” and most have obliged. There’s a foyer preview, free drinks, a rat pack of photographers (all uniformly name-badged “PAPARAZZI SCUM”) and once we are led inside the auditorium there’s VIP seating at the runway’s edge, a hammering soundtrack, plus Folake Shoga’s disjointed and deliberately mashed-up films projected onto a screen above the throng – cutting rapidly and queasily between ethno-geographic documentaries, rehearsal footage, adverts, military recruitment films and middle east news stories. There’s the obligatory show manager hustling models to and from the stage with a constant air of unflappable yet pissed-off efficiency. Goméz-Peña, founder member of La Pocha Nostra, holds court on a platform opposite the runway, freezing the noisy proceedings regularly in order to deliver verbose treatises in a patchwork of languages, physically inhabiting a space somewhere between a Hopi tribal chief and Klaus Lagerfeld. His consort is a snappily-suited female announcer who gives voice to the catwalk at random, speaking over the soundtrack in measured sing-song tones, offering performers for sale, encouraging the audience towards acts of rebellion or cultural vandalism. It is relentless, and total. It also has that single most important clash of textures prevalent in the world of fashion: the constant, repeated intertwining of the profound and the utterly meaningless, holding the event together like warp and weft. There’s the all-pervading sense that what we’re witnessing is the creators throwing a huge amount of stuff at the wall, and seeing what sticks. It’s exuberant, funny, unapologetic… and occasionally feels as if it’s in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

La Pocha Nostra have spent much of the last fifteen years conjuring up and making flesh this world of border and hybrid cultures, building a creative lab where cultural phenomena undergo a type of rapid, barely controlled fission. The forms (it doesn’t feel right to call them ‘outfits,’ somehow) on the runway tonight are the gene-spliced bastard children of the communications satellite and the nightclub, bearing the family traits of hip-hop, sado-masochism, youTube and airport terminals, cheap handguns, DVD boxsets, protest marches and internet porn, speaking cross-Phillipino-Icelandic with a Brazillian / lowland Scottish accent, listening to klezmer-grindcore on their iPods and spending their holidays on the fucking moon.

As they tour the world, Goméz-Peña and a crew of three or four permanent cohorts ‘collect’ associates, throwing further spices into their melting pot. The diverse bodies are all artists, all complicit, all having made themselves beautiful in their own eyes, no doubt via some mediation on the part of their hosts. As a result of this diversity it’s unsurprising that many fascinating socio-political concerns are manifest in each model parading back and forth before us: power play appears to be a fundamental building block of their interactions; gender is not so much bent as blended, a thick chromosomal soup; and the models borrow ‘clothes’ from every religion and religious impetus that crawls beneath the sun. BAM! Harminder Singh Judge, gas-masked and with the multiple arms of a Hindu deity, strapped to a crucifix CRACK, THWACK a Nike swoosh on a stiletto-heeled terrorist’s hijab BANG! Jiva Parthipan performing an exuberant, grinning Kath kali dance with a handgun stuffed into his crotch.

The crossbreed cyber-sexual rebellion of New Barbarians might sound disconcerting, but it’s not what gave me the shakes. It wasn’t even the implication that somewhere beneath the fashion show there was a bubbling bloodbath of righteous violence. What I was watching, after all, was a distillation of a million things, people and places that already exist, active, actual, accessible either physically or technologically, far from alien or inhuman in any conceivable way. The danger wasn’t in the shapes, nodes and ideas.

I certainly wasn’t shaking with indignation, as I loved the damn thing: feeling oddly, happily at home. I’ve heard since the show that some people actually found New Barbarians offensive, but it’s completely inconceivable to me why. I can’t understand how anyone could be offended by such a vivid celebration of the possibilities of human synthesis. Sure, there was plenty of perverted religious imagery; much nudity (some of it in the areas euphemistically and uselessly described as ‘graphic’); and little, if any, explanation of what you were seeing and why it was there – only a sly announcement before the catwalk burst to life that the audience shouldn’t take all they saw “entirely seriously.”

But still, what’s offensive about that? La Pocha Nostra’s magpie tendencies are wonderfully indiscriminate, irreverent in equal measure towards male, female, Christian, atheist, Buddhist, left, right, rich, poor. Basically, if you’re human, you’re fair game. To me, being offended by New Barbarians is about as logical as being offended by Rio De Janeiro, Singapore or Los Angeles – all of them by no means short of culture clashes, bastardized religions, ridiculously beautiful people and plenty of senseless violence.

And maybe that explains why I was shaking. It was like an overdose. Perhaps if you can picture the entirety of Singapore, Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, New York, Paris, Milan… imagine every last inch of them crammed into a hypodermic and injected forcibly straight into the base of your spinal column. An instant download of more dirt, glitz and mixed messages than you could possibly handle.

Tim Atack

www.pochanostra.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

Don’t Leave Me This Way
Franko B
Arnolfini, Bristol
14/12/2007

You will, of course, be very familiar with sleepdogs, even though you might not know their name (unsurprising, given that I just made it up.) Sleepdogs are the whorls of colour and light that you see on the inside of your eyelids as you slumber. They’re the residual retinal images that, later in the night, will flower into full-grown dreams.

Franko B’s Don’t Leave Me This Way begins by presenting the artist as a sleepdog. His voluptuous, naked form sits unmoving in the darkness, illuminated so subtly and with such a barely perceptible inconstancy that you could easily consider his presence a trick of the mind. Kamal Ackarie’s mercurial lighting design only gradually filters in the details of Franko’s many tattoos, the dome of his head, his width and girth. For quite some time the artist’s face - and any expression he may be wearing - are never fully revealed.

It’s not as if there’s any great mystery as to how Franko B appears amongst us: before the show, the audience has filed into the Arnolfini auditorium and has parked itself on raked seating, chatting, before a raised plinth upon which a nondescript chair is positioned. It’s pretty obvious that once the houselights dim and we’re plunged into near-total darkness, Franko has ascended to his seat and is waiting, whilst the hammering, stuttering squalls of a post-industrial electronic soundtrack bounces threateningly from speaker to speaker around us. The noise is disjointed, mechanical, repetitive but random, like a gargantuan malfunctioning robot repeatedly and unsuccessfully bolting itself together. For me, the tangible unease comes not from the sheer volume of this noise, or the optical trickery alone, but the fact that it seems to play with our location – there’s an unspoken danger to theatrical spaces, so much buzzing and barely controlled electricity, so many suspended lights, the threat of sudden heat, shock and collapse all around… and the brutal, unforgiving soundtrack seems to emphasise the raw power around you, generating a palpable techno-claustrophobia. Combine this with the sensation that Franko B’s presence feels a bit like a mental glitch, a naughtiness of the cortex, and you’re tempted to blink repeatedly, in a vain attempt to re-set your surroundings to something a bit more comfortable.

Then lightning strikes.

Unheralded and intense, a massive burst of white light floods the audience, and is gone. My eyes water instantly. Another burst, then a dual burst, and finally, a wash of overpowering light holds over us for about 10 seconds. Franko B is lit completely and profoundly, but you can only look at him by adopting one of several strategies – squinting, angling your head oddly, or raising a hand to your eyes. With my neck bent as though I’m an incredibly tall man in a very low-ceilinged room, I try to look at Franko. Tears are streaming down my face. From what I can tell, he seems to be smiling. But then we’re plunged into darkness one last time, and there’s another morphing, sleepdog-pass of dark blue light over the artist’s familiar figure before the houselights rise to reveal an empty chair.

Franko B is perhaps best known for the blood-based practice that has dominated his live work for the past 15 years. In I Miss You, for instance, he falteringly paraded the length of a long, thin, strip of canvas whilst bleeding constantly from wounds in his arms. Many audience members have testified to the sensation that through simple actions like these – which ostensibly seem lonely, artful, maybe even shocking – Franko has “taken them by the hand” and guided them through the difficulties and differences of his practice with the gentle touch of a friend or lover. Despite his shift in practice away from bloodletting performances (you can imagine anyone getting tired of having to sign contracts which stipulate you guarantee to “bleed as part of the performance,” and “from both arms”, otherwise your fee is forfeit) Franko B’s work is still wonderfully, beautifully unapologetic about its brash sentimentalities: it’s about Franko, it’s about you, it’s about letting go, it’s about loving, dying, needing, wanting. The pop song titles say as much.

Most Hollywood movies would kill to be able to tap into the hopes and fears of its audience with the simplest of abstract images, but somehow Franko B manages to do just that. So Don’t Leave Me This Way will be about many things to many people… but for me it was about dying. It was Franko holding your hand as you fade, fighting inside but doomed, sinking into oblivion, into the mystery. How did it achieve that? I don’t know for sure. No, let me re-phrase that: I quite simply haven’t a clue. Read the first few paragraphs above, it’s all there. That’s what Franko B did, moment by moment, as best I can describe it. Where precisely the circuit connected, and how the hell the light went on? That’s another matter.

Tim Atack

www.dontleavemethisway.net
www.franko-b.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk

Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/07/2007

Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus is a curious mix of an event in which an audience of musicians, new music lovers, live art and experimental film enthusiasts - plus a sizeable gaggle of ornithologists - gather to witness an attempt at recreating the chirps and warbles of the Northumbrian countryside using human vocal talents.

Bioacoustic expert Geoff Sample (and was ever a sound recordist so magnificently named?) knows his birds. He knows whether you’re listening to a robin, or a blackbird doing an impersonation of a robin. He knows the difference between any given number of avian songs, even identifying vocal tics that distinguish one specific chiffchaff from another. Apparently birds have regional dialect: “It’s like the difference between Sunderland where they’ll say makkem and takkem, and Newcastle, where it’s maek ‘em and taek ‘em,” he burbles, happily.

Sample is collaborator, principle aide and - by the looks of things - something of a guru to Marcus Coates, the originator of Dawn Chorus and an artist concerned for many years with the natural world and its array of alien sensory experiences. His work juxtaposes human characteristics against the behaviours and traits of other species, a notable example being the film Out Of Season which plonks a lone Chelsea supporter in the midst of a leafy bucolic landscape, belting out terrace chants in an incongruous display of bravado that is, at the same time, completely in keeping with the territorial aspects of the birdsong chittering about him.

Coates’ ongoing fascination with the dynamics and resonances of birdsong has led to him and Sample recording 576 hours of the stuff, hiding microphones in trees, under bushes and between rocks in Bamburgh, Northumberland so as to accurately isolate the many voices that mass in the hours around dawn. And subsequently, this evening at Arnolfini - part performance lecture, part conversation, part film screening – has at its heart a fascinating musical exercise in which a small choir of homo sapiens is assembled to perform a ‘live’ dawn chorus; reciting selected recordings from Coates and Sample’s archive which have been pitched down to the human vocal scale. A video made of their performance is then sped up digitally to mimic the incredible dexterities of bird voice.

In presentation as well as content it’s a fascinating example of the merging of science and art as well as the two disciplines’ occasional clash of principle. Coates often draws complex metaphors from the raw facts of the natural world whilst Sample advises caution to anyone appropriating tricky concepts of neuroscience and animal behaviour for creative ends; such as idly speculating upon why, exactly, birds bother to sing in the first place. He reveals that in one species ovaries only form in the female if they are subjected to song from their male counterparts. “So the song has an actual biological purpose?” asks Coates, and with a tiny grimace Samples’ face says: “Contentious.”

The actual choral performance itself is the highlight. After a short laptop-based demonstration of how birdsong - when undercranked by a factor of about 16 – can become whalesong or the sound of children in a playground, several vocalists take to the stage and, listening carefully to playback through individual headphones, croon out the slowed-down tones of greenfinches, goldfinches, wrens and swallows. The differences in avian identities when placed in a very human context are remarkably apparent: some birds are minimalist, repetitive, their ranges falling within a set scale. The opposite extreme is represented by species such as the Blackcup (performed as part of Coates’ film installation by singer-songwriter Rasha Shaheen) its grandstanding tune a dazzling marathon of microtones resonant of the New Complexity, an avant garde cadenza amongst the trees. Meanwhile, the machine gun chirps of the Wren - performed by Meena Reetoraz-Yeomans - if transposed to the human metabolism would require diaphragm muscles with the speed and impact of a pneumatic drill. Ben Owen, making like a Swallow, has perhaps the widest demand in tonal range, requiring him to squeeze out some gutteral croaks redolent of a hungover Tom Waits one second before sighing gently in the upper registers like Stina Nordenstam the next.

Over 15 minutes a specific arrangement unfolds, with great care taken to reproduce the precise interactions of particular species. It turns out that the authentic dawn chorus has what amounts to a loose score, with certain birds making way for others, duetting, waiting their turn in a semi-improvisatory arrangement. The final result is compressed into less than a minute of footage, so fast we get to see it three times, with the performers taking on some physical tics and mannerisms weirdly evocative of their feathered avatars. It’s oddly affecting, disconcerting and extremely funny, all in one high-speed flash.

Tim Atack

Marcus Coates is an artist and filmmaker exhibiting nationally and internationally. An extract from Dawn Chorus can be seen at http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html

Geoff Sample: http://www.wildsong.co.uk/