Performance
15th June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of Artsadmin Summer Season

Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight, Richard Dedomenici is going to be full of strange information. Some of it will be useful. And some of it will not be useful. And some of it will just be strange.

Sat in a gaffer-tape-and-string mock-up of an airline seat and adjacent windows, Dedomenici rambles through a collection of anecdotes and observations, turning to speak to a camera that relays his big cheeky face onto a hanging screen which faces the audience. As a result the whole piece is literally delivered as an aside - albeit one transformed into an open and intimate monologue to the room. And what an odd room to deliver it in… wood panelled, parquet floored, musty… as if Dedomenici were briefing, say, the Joint Intelligence Committee somewhere in Whitehall. Now there’s something I’d like to see.

Why would I like to see it? Because it would be hilarious. Dedomenici is a mess. He’s a fucking disgrace. Under-rehearsed and forgetful, he’s reading his half formed script from the inside of an airline safety instruction card. Some of the notes don’t even make sense to him (“What? Eh?”) He’s using a recalcitrant remote control to operate / not operate the surrounding technology (“come on, come on, work. Play the clip. Play the clip. Just this once.”) Anecdotes trundle to a halt, having gone nowhere. It’s all in-jokes, gas and filler. He’s crap, and it’s great.
Yeah. You heard me. Great.

“I know some of you paid 12 quid for this, which is appalling, quite frankly,” mutters Dedomenici at one point. “Like I say this is a work in progress. It’s going to be better when I do it properly,” he claims, before pointing out that the eventual staging of the show ‘proper’ and its specific circumstances (in a small flat, to a largely invited audience of British Council reps during the Edinburgh festival) will probably preclude us ever seeing it. What we’re getting is notes for a possible show; a flight plan, a forethought.

What’s the show about? Oh shut up, who cares? Apparently it’s ostensibly something to do with aeroplanes. Dedomenici’s usual preoccupations with the absurdities of modern politics appear to have taken a seat in economy class just for this trip, and instead the journey is largely a personal one, illustrated by stories about school crushes and arguments on holiday. Occasionally the Dedomenici of old, the artist who produced Political Top Trumps or attempted to impose a congestion charge upon pedestrians during the Edinburgh Fringe, makes a brief appearance: he throws us some interesting titbits about depleted uranium being used to weight the wings of 747s, cracks wise about the airline industry being susceptible to three types of strike - lightning, bird and industrial. But the stream of consciousness is what engages, not the thematic unity of the material.

The port window behind Dedomenici relays jittery home videos of past airline flights (oddly affecting in their amateurishness) switching now and then to other archive footage, morphing at one point into the prompt from a karaoke machine so that young Richard can sing along – with no apparent purpose, as per usual. He performs in the mode of stand up comedians such as Stuart Lee or The Iceman (the latter often known to protest “it’s not comedy! It’s art!”) but without the club comic’s basic aim of prompting a constant hilarity. This is something of a relief, in that you are allowed frequent moments of quiet reflection; at one point Dedomenici tells a lovely story about being berated by his ex for leaving a mobile phone on during a flight and feeling, just for a moment, “as if we were back together again.”

It’s this sort of blurring of parameters that live art allows for so well, and the reason why Dedomenici is here before us at Toynbee Studios rather than spouting forth from the Jongleurs or Comedy Store stage. Superjumbo is not necessarily comic, not necessarily politically active, not necessarily even value for money, but there’s still something to be said for the simple skill of being an engaging and instinctive communicator. Even in his pauses for thought, as he reaches for the next cue or tangent, Dedomenici has that skill in spades, allowing the audience to reach for their own cues and tangents. And in that sense I’m pleased to report that he’s still an artist, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Written by Tim Atack

Richard’s website is …. http://www.dedomenici.co.uk/

Gary Stevens 'Ape'

24 June 2007
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season at Toynbee Studios.

Performance written and directed by Gary Stevens. Performed by Amanda Hadingue, Julian Maynard Smith, and Gary Stevens

Two men and a woman talk about Gary Stevens’s Ape:

Did you like the show? The show? The show? Did I like the show? Sho-o-o-ow. The performance. Did you like the performance? The piece. The piece of. The piece of performance. Yes. Yes, I liked the show. I liked the performance. I loved it. I loved the piece. I loved it! Yes! I loved the show! And the actors. The actors? The act-ors. The performers. Yes, I liked the actors. They were so-o-o-o. They were so-o-o-o. They were so… funny. Yes, they were funny. And they must have practiced a lot. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, they must have practiced a lot. Full marks on practice. Full marks? Yes, full. Oh, full. Yes, they were funny. Full marks on funny.

And also sad. Sad? Yes, they were also sad. Yes, I thought they were rather sad. Yes, I too thought they were rather sad. And funny. Yes, funny and sad. Yes, they were rather sad. Oh, very sad. Like, you know, the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers? Yes. The Marx Brothers were sad? Yes, very sad. And also funny. And also brothers. Yes. No. Not really. Not really brothers. No. But full. Full Marx? Yes, they were so. Yes, they were so-o-o-o.

Not sure about the point, though. The point? The idea. What’s the point? Exactly. No. Not exactly. Yes, that’s the idea. Ide-e-a-a. The point. What’s your point? What I’m trying to say. Yes, what you’re trying to say. What I’m trying to say is. The point. It’s this. It’s what? What is what? The point. I’m not sure. No, I’m not sure either. Sure. You got it. I got? You got the idea. Ide-e-e-a-a. That’s the point. I’m not sure. Yes, that’s it. It? This. Yes, I think so. I think this is it. Yes. This is it. Ah. Ahhhh. Ha.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Read more about Gary Stevens: http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...

Read more about Artsadmin Summer season: http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/...

Niko Raes

Performance
8 June 2007
Arnolfini, Bristol

Niko Raes’s performance of Shattered Dreams at the Arnolfini in Bristol accompanied the launch of Manuel Vason’s book Encounters (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2007), a collection of photographs Vason created in collaboration with a wide range of artists working within performance and live art. Shattered Dreams has only been publicly performed a handful of times, in 2001 and 2004, so most people familiar with his work (myself included) would have encountered it through images of it – including those created with Vason. The photographs of Shattered Dreams in Encounters present the image of Raes’s naked and painted body suspended in mid-air to be considered as image. But the live performance is quite a different experience in which, as a spectator, I am inevitably aware of not only the image being presented but also the act of presentation. For me, this live event is an opportunity to question not only the meaning of the images themselves, but also what it means to present these images to a collected audience.

As I enter the theatre, the room is dark. There is ominous music. There are no seats, and everyone is gathering in a circle around Raes’s body crumpled on the floor. His body is naked, covered in white paint, and attached by ropes to a frame suspended from the ceiling. The lights dim even more, the music swells, and the frame from which Raes’s body is suspended is hoisted into the air. Each of his arms is attached to each leg by a rope through a pulley so that, with effort, he can raise one limb by pulling down on another. For about twenty minutes, Raes creates images in mid-air with his contorted, straining body. They become increasingly difficult to create and sustain as his body becomes exhausted. Eventually, he can no longer move; the frame is lowered to the ground where he lies exhausted; the music stops; the audience applauds and leaves; and Raes remains exhausted on the floor in the empty room.

My most basic experience of this piece is of being part of a group of people gathered around the image of a naked, muscular body suspended and twisting in the air, made anonymous and aestheticised by the paint covering the body. For me, there is something disturbing about this experience, not because I find the image of Raes’s body to be disturbing but, quite the opposite, because it is so beautiful. This collective celebration of the beautiful has uncomfortable connotations for me, as it resonates not only with entertainment, athletics, and fashion, but also with fascism, in both its both popular sense (as in body-fascism) and political sense. For me, a culture that celebrates beauty as an end in and of itself is one which is dangerous, violent, intolerant, destructive… so gathering in a room to praise the beauty of a muscular body under stress is for me a suspect cultural practice.

But as Raes’s body tires, I feel as if the suspect beauty of the piece works productively against itself. The piece becomes less and less able to manifest itself, less and less a triumph of the body-as-object. I’m no longer (worryingly) admiring the beauty of the exertion, but instead watching that beauty consume itself. It’s possible to regard this exhausted body, as it is lowered to the floor, as a continuation of the celebration of the body-in-extreme (Christ/sport/pornography). It’s also possible to regard this exhaustion as the cost, undesirable but necessary, which must be paid for the attainment of beauty. But I think the piece asks us to regard it in its entirety, in which the images of beauty which it produces are only part of a longer arc which works both to produce and to undermine that beauty.

In this way, the piece doesn’t end when the music stops and collective applause (somewhat disappointingly) recuperates that collapse into a nameable experience. The arc of the experience includes this applause, as a figure lies unable even to stand, but also includes the room slowly emptying while he is still lying there, and then the room being empty, and him able to stand, and showering, and putting on his clothes, and beginning, with every action he makes in every day, to prepare for the next performance, whether it is weeks or months or years away.

All of this is perhaps implied by the more widely experienced photographs of Raes’s work, but in the live performance these issues become acute. In a reversal of what might be expected, these performances, more seldom experienced than the photographs of them, work as a kind of reflective critique of the images of exertion and beauty.

Written by Theron Schmidt

Niko Raes’s website: http://www.bodyrefuse.be/