wfla's blog

We Need to Talk About Live Art

wfla — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 11:11:34 +0000

Sparking Debate. Stimulating Conversation. Supporting Artists. Taking Live Art Seriously.

'We Need to Talk about Live Art' is a daily flash publication, by Writing From Live Art writers Tim Atack, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt, that was printed daily and distributed at the Tramway Arts Centre, Glasgow during the National Review of Live Art(NRLA) 6- 10 February 2008.

We Need to Talk about Live Art responded to the work seen at NRLA. We were not affiliated with the National Review of Live Art. The project was conceived of to start conversations with NRLA artists, audiences and readers and support the work shown. Comments cards were also made available for audience responses and feedback during the course of the festival, which were then integrated with the daily NRLA publication.

The writing is enclosed in its original flash publishing format and the PDF's represent the quick turnaround of the writing, complete with the occasional typo. You can download the PDF's from the links below. A selection of this writing is also published in print and online in RealTime Magazine 84 April-May 08,2008.

'We Need to Talk About Live Art was a writer-led initiative with support from Live Art UK, the national network of Live Art promoters.

If you have any comments or queries about the writing please make a comment here on the Writing from Live Art website, thankyou. Thanks to everyone who made NRLA 08 and We Need to Talk About Live Art an enjoyable experience.

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Sunday, 10 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Saturday, 9 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Friday, 8 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Thursday, 7 February 2008[1]

'); --> Read this doc on Scribd: We Need to Talk about Live Art - Wednesday, 6 Feb 2008[1]

Look what you could have won

wfla — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:12:08 +0000

Image credit: Susannah Hewlett, 'It's Not You'. Courtesy the artist.

Susannah Hewlett
It’s Not You
Arnolfini, Bristol 17/02/08

Time was, a man knew where he stood, especially on national television. Your role was plain, your moment defined. No one was under any illusions how it would play out. If you were Joe or Jane public, the man-in-the-street, the girl-next-door, and you found yourself on TV… well, you’d be famous for approximately ten to fifteen minutes and within that time there were rules that everyone knew, and you’d either win or lose.

Game shows, most likely, that’s where it would happen. Talk shows were home to the properly famous; but it was game shows for the random punter, hoisted up by the scruff of the neck and plonked beneath the studio lights, left there for just about the right length of time to memorise items on a conveyer belt, or to guess how much the toaster was worth. The star of the show? The smiling host, of course, and don’t forget it. Closely followed by YOU. And if not actually you, then a person could always imagine themselves up there. Naming that tune. Whatsing that line. Here was the original arena for everyday fame, tea-time fame, hello mum fame, innocent and fun; and when you left the studio the cameras didn’t up sticks and follow after. They didn’t miraculously multiply with every hastening step down the high street. They didn’t park outside your house at night and call your name.

Times change, though, innit? Back in the day, you’d be playing for cars, holidays, fridge freezers and cold hard cash – it used to be about the money, dammit. Now it’s all about the spotlight… and the money is just assumed to follow on.

Susannah Hewlett takes this notable shift in popular culture as a springboard for her live art work It’s Not You, riffing on themes from the cheesier, fluffier era of TV light entertainment when primetime was about the permanent grin rather than the permanent fear of dismissal. In the concourses and stairwells of Arnolfini, a troupe of consummate performers silently act out random moments from an invisible game show, all sequins and high heels, blue suits and orange skins. They drift from space to space, taking the unheard applause and glitzy bonhomie with them, appearing amongst families dining in the café bar, bursting unannounced into the bookshop. Gallery-goers emerge from an exhibition to be confronted by an immaculately coiffed hostess presenting a pillar to them as if it were a sun lounger or a microwave, her face frozen in a wide rictus grin, disconcertingly dead-eyed. Meanwhile, in the building’s elevator: the lift doors open and a gentleman of Dale Winton hue stands blocking your exit, statue-still, arms flung wide in the familiar pose that proclaims “Hey, you guys! The fun we’re going to have right here!” and he doesn’t move. You wonder whether to get out of the lift or not.

Over two days these showbiz throwbacks traverse the building, ‘presenting’ anything that moves to unheard oohs and aahs, and also an awful lot that doesn’t… signs, books, leaflets, doorways, baby buggies, tables, walls, and, in one bizarre instance, a gentleman’s crotch. Lipsticked ladies recline on the reception desk as erstwhile Arnolfini staff attempt to ignore them. Depending on where and how precisely you stumble across these glamorous weirdos, their static poses provoke very different reactions, despite a basic uniformity of content: the two suited hosts side by side on a balcony, proffering a “Step into the light!” hand to the punters below sparks up images of Gilbert and George, living sculptures; a hostess in a ridiculous wig, leaning over to grin mindlessly at the doorjamb to Arnolfini’s archive room, appears remarkably like a woman mid-collapse, on the cusp of insanity; another hostess gesturing towards thin air in the dead centre of the bar area. Amidst diners and scrapping kids, she seems to me like an alien, freshly descended from the stars and making a heroic but fundamentally misinformed attempt to blend in.

The repetition and brain-dead glee of it all is, of course, funny. It’s sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, in fact. But there’s also something else present. Maybe because we know these particular clichés to be dead or dying, maybe because we know what eventually became of them in the overall evolution of the game show, there is a tangible sense of unease to the whole exercise, sometimes even an undercurrent of menace. A sense that the professed inclusivity of these gestures is, and always was, bullshit… leading you up a blind alley… preparing you for an era when bad-mouthing and ramped-up false drama openly form the backbone of primetime TV, when a racist insult or a full-blown public breakdown fill more airtime and column inches than a Brucie Bonus ever could. In It’s Not You, we’re looking at ghosts. Echoes from an era when you were met with a smile and a twirl, when the audience were rooting for you, when everyone was said to have done “very well,” even if they had fucked up royally.

At least, that’s what I carry away with me when, their work done, the performers pull off their wigs and stilettos, washing away the blusher and tan. I’m sure the broad strokes of a work based upon such familiar popular territory will mean many things to many people, and wonder whether Susannah Hewlett is concerned that any particular message or concern is communicated. It seems that, refreshingly, she’s happy for the experience simply to be engaging and funny. “I really believe that if it’s funny, it doesn’t mean the work isn’t conceptually strong,” she says. “You know when people say, ‘I like to add a bit of humour into my work?’ I’m not ‘adding’ anything! It’s just there. That’s what I’m interested in.”

I suggest that whilst audiences often can’t help grinning back at Hewlett’s performers in their showbiz tableaux, there’s still something sinister at work. She nods. “Something funny, becoming nauseating. That’s the TV I like, as well… Chris Morris, for instance, stuff that might make you feel a bit sick. All these things in popular culture, I’m completely drawn to them: the familiarity, but the frustration of it. Say I really fancy a bit of Saturday night telly, that’s all I want, but it sickens you, and you’re shouting at the TV, you can’t bear it, but it’s comforting. I genuinely enjoy the darkness of that.”

It certainly seems as though Hewlett has put some serious research into the generic techniques of light entertainment, both ancient and modern: the title It’s Not You is inspired by the long, drawn-out moments preceding an eviction or dismissal in more recent game shows, the slow-motion fall of the guillotine. Hewlett has been watching lots of Dancing on Ice or Big Brother and counting these critical pauses. “It’s normally 12 seconds,” she says. “So, Strictly Come Dancing: the couple will be shown in the spotlight and their names are announced, ‘JULIE AND MICHAEL…’” [pauses for 12 seconds] “‘IT’S NOT YOU.’ And the spotlight goes out.”

I suggest these moments sometimes resemble a form of torture, citing the example of brother / sister duo Same Difference on the last series of The X Factor: during the cavernous, doom-laden pauses leading up to the voting off, contestant Sarah Smith looked as though she was being electrocuted, spasms of fear racking her body, mouth clenched shut but twitching uncontrollably. It was a moment she had to endure every week, for almost two months. “They [the TV producers] know exactly what they’re doing,” says Hewlett. “Building the tension… the lighting, the sound, the slightly too-high chair…”

There are also undercurrents of torture to another element of It’s Not You, in which Arnolfini’s auditorium is filled with the solemn tick-tock of a musical ‘countdown’ which never ends, and a single black swivel chair is spotlit in the dead centre of the space. Areas of the seating rake are randomly, briefly, illuminated. It turns a vague mock-up of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire studio into something redolent of the horrendous techniques used to ‘break’ prisoners in Guantanamo bay; incessant noise, isolation, a big empty room with unpredictable shifting lights. Here, though, the volume of the music is pretty moderate and I wonder about the effect it would have were it pumped out at the decibel level of a basement nightclub: Overpowering. Unavoidable. Painful.

Other aspects to the work one might stumble across include a busker outside Arnolfini’s main entrance, rattling through theme songs like Snookering You Tonight; a cheesy jingle schmoozing from the tannoy which announces the venue’s current programme à la Leslie Crowther; and a series of images which use actors to depict varying states of pre-dismissal nerves, spliced into the display units behind Arnolfini’s reception desk and run as screensavers in its archive room.

But, to be honest, it’s the production line of showbiz poses that grabs and holds my attention. Within these simple, superficial actions alone there’s enough to contemplate, enough to surprise. This might be because not only do the performers have an ‘on’ state, they have an ‘off’ as well, a neutral smiles-gone shoulders-down blankness in between the grandstanding. As they journey from place to place the men squeak their teeth, pat back their hair; the women check their heels or adjust their cleavages. The backstage mode before the roar of the crowd begins is, of course, another cliché in itself… watch pretty much any film from the last 20 years which features a game show host character, and you’ll see him behaving like a bastard in the wings before blossoming into the life and soul of the party once the camera settles on him – sure, we know that. In It’s Not You, though, that on-camera moment comes suddenly, unexpectedly, almost violently. One hostess switches her grin on and it’s like being hit by a bus. A host clicks his fingers and suddenly an entire roomful of glammed-up ghosts is beaming directly at you. Equally, the Arnolfini foyer can be populated by performers switching in and out of la-la-land at random, bored in the foreground, happy to see you in the distance. And it goes on, and on, and on, inexorably… like watching a player piano at work, each passing dot in the service of something mechanical, something bigger, something that probably isn’t equipped to explain itself: your entertainment. Your escape. Your fun.

Glamour model and author Katie Price, AKA Jordan, visits Cribbs Causeway mall in North Bristol. She’s signing copies of her new book, Andy Warhol-style. A conveyor belt of star-struck norms wends its way around the shopping complex, and regional news programme Points West is there to ask of them: why do they love Jordan so? “She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her,” says one kid. “Yeah,” enthuses another, “She don’t care.” It’s a recurring theme amongst the assembled teenagers. In their eyes, Jordan is a celebrity because she doesn’t give a monkey’s.

I’m not, to put it bluntly, sure that they’re entirely correct in their assessment. But it’s fascinating that amidst a modern entertainment culture obsessed with dramatising acts of public approval, Jordan’s fans rate her apathy so highly. Maybe they’re just in teenage denial, fighting against what they know to be true: that of course celebrities care what other people think, that no-one wants to be voted off first, that raw popularity is now considered the biggest prize of them all. It’s much more likely that what their heroes hope for more than anything else is that constant round of applause, following them everywhere they go.

Written by Tim Atack

Those songs, those bloody, bloody songs

wfla — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:59:05 +0000

Image: Uninvited Guests, 'Love Letters'. Courtesy the artists

Uninvited Guests
Love Letters
Tramway, Glasgow, 09/02/08

This first one is dedicated to Uninvited Guests. It’s been a long hard road, and I ought to confess it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. Your systematic use of mediated or found text. The considered performance style you had, with its strange amplifications, intensities pitching like a boat in a storm. My unreasonable suspicion of anything that laid out its stall so simply and openly in the way that you did. Offline was the first time we met, remember? Happy days. Your show about love on the internet, a lover’s stroll which ambled along to a soundtrack of schmaltz played by the cheapest general MIDI sounds you could find. And I couldn’t ‘get in’. I couldn’t engage. It wasn’t going to happen on the first date. But I spent longer with you – literally, in the durational version of that same project, and I was happier. It seemed more human, more vulnerable, and that made me think that maybe there could be something between us: if I let my guard down, and if you did the same.

So here we are then, many shows, many years later, and it’s the second time I’ve seen Love Letters. The first time was funny, beautiful… the second time, magical. Such a simple idea: trap a whole bunch of people in a room full of other people’s song dedications, with all the images, memories, stories, hopes, dreams and regrets that come spilling from the music. Because unlike dedications of the type heard daily from the radio station of your choice, these cannot be switched off – you can’t be doing the washing up, you can’t answer the phone. The audience form part of the process, witness to each announcement, be it a shout out to a friend or a eulogy for the dear departed.

So here we are then, and it’s about music, and about how the most saccharine piece of crap translates into the most evocative of symphonies for someone. So here we are, and it’s about standing up for the song you believe in, not being ashamed by it or what it says. So here we are, and Richard Dufty has begun shouting at the top of his lungs as Kate Bush’s The Hounds Of Love thumps from the speakers, shouting about missing you so much, and missing you so much, missing you so much, his voice rasping and cracking under the strain. The audience member next to me is suddenly in floods of tears, uncontrollable, patting her clothes for a handkerchief she can’t find. I know it’s the first time she’s seen this show, so I know it’s not just me. I know it’s not just because I’ve grown up with you, Uninvited Guests, just because I’ve become accustomed to your wily ways. Because along the way I’m sure we’ve both changed.

So this is a thankyou. And as for the song I’d like to dedicate to you? Well, I thought it appropriate that it should be a cover version. And probably my favourite cover version in the world is “Women of the World” by Jim O’Rourke, from Ivor Cutler’s original. It’s deceptively simple, repetitive… but it gets there, and it gets to you. In the end.

Women of the world, take over
Cos if you don’t the world will come to an end
And it won’t take long

This next one is dedicated to the audience. Go, team. Some of you I didn’t get to see around much; but as we were sat at two long tables, wedding / seminar / board meeting style, a good half of you I was able to watch intermittently throughout the show. The mottled burnt orange wall behind you, glitterball reflections twinkling in your green / blue / black eyes: god, you guys were beautiful. I’d particularly like to mention the good-looking bloke with the cheeky smile with whom, a few minutes into the show, I was asked to lock eyes for the length of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face as sung by Johnny Cash. Sorry, mate: I’ve seen the show before. I knew it was coming. I was well prepared. You seemed a little more fazed.

As I set my face into something that I hoped was approaching the approachable (as opposed to what I fear it was; a pervy smirk) everyone around us was doing the same, gazing into the eyes of the person opposite. Some found it easier than others. Little bursts of laughter interrupted Johnny Cash to my left and right, like birds sounding off in a dark forest.

Our hosts knew what they were doing. The rules of engagement were laid out clearly: we, fair audience, were fair game. Later on, we’d be asked to scramble around the perimeter of the space after one of the performers in a playground kiss-chase (which some of us did suddenly, and unexpectedly.) We’d be asked to stand as if the dedication were ours, even when it wasn’t, representing a stranger’s memories. We’d be told “If this song means something to you, feel free to stand up at any time.” It was “Heroes” by David Bowie, and I jumped to my feet as if prompted by a pistol shot. Yep, that was me. We were plied with alcohol and party poppers; we were asked to throw flowers onto two lovers as they rolled about between the tables; we were asked to slow-dance at the end of the show. But mostly, we were asked to listen.

I wonder which dedication struck you the hardest? For me, it was Lady In Red. What a song! Chris de Burgh’s whiny, sexless vocals. The dying robotic twitch of its drum machine. The dull mush of its faux-string synthesisers, the useless twunk of its rubber-band guitar. All in all, an appalling piece of simpering bullshit, almost apocalyptic in its awfulness: but it was dedicated to someone’s Grandmother, and the accompanying homily ended with the words “Every day without her in the world is the less for her absence,” and suddenly… how could I have hated this song so much? How could I when somehow, somewhere, it channelled a sentiment like that? And what’s more, I knew the way the show had been compiled: this was a dedication by one of my fellow viewers, present, somewhere, in the room. Sorry, whoever you are. Are we still friends?

Presenting these pop vagaries requires no small amount of subtlety. Theatrical tricks can’t get in the way. The performances by Jess Hoffmann and Richard Dufty were remarkable in this respect; for the much of the opening five minutes of the show, they simply sat behind their apple macs, at opposite heads of the table, mixing love songs at each other in a sort of DJ tennis, saying absolutely nothing and letting the music tell its many tales. Their faces were quietly mischievous, flirting, each track a chat-up line. “Yeah!” shouted Dufty as the guitar solo in I Believe In A Thing Called Love kicked in. He ramped up the volume. Hoffmann looked at him with the quiet tolerance of a lover, a patience many years in the making. Later, the songs shifted, a romance gone awry. Love Will Tear Us Apart. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.

So, comrade audience, our own story… well, it’s done. It was a one-night stand, I see that, in retrospect. And as for my dedication? In the spirit of songs which may mean one thing to you and another to me, I’m going to chose a track by that most marmite of vocalists, the love-her-or-hate-her Björk. And a remix, to boot: the Plaid mix of All Is Full Of Love, new chords snaking about Björk’s original melody, messing with its DNA.

You’ll have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the direction
You are staring at

Bit of a curveball, this last one. But bear with me.
This is to the man who I first remember speaking of those sweet, meaningless songs, wafting up the stairway. The bittersweet melody lilting from the scratchy gramophone. This is to the man who gave those cadence-like memories their own, unique dramatic shape. To the man I think of as I leave Love Letters, as I recall the line from The Singing Detective, spoken by his character Phillip Marlowe: “Those songs. Those bloody, bloody songs.”

I’d like to dedicate Eyes by Alex Glasgow to Dennis Potter. Eyes, a piece of music I discovered when morosely leafing through my departed grandfather’s record collection. “Take whatever you want,” my Grandma had said, in her usual brusque Yorkshire way. “I’m not likely to listen to any of it.”
And Alex Glasgow’s strange warbling voice over a bed of keening strings lifted my spirit, and made me twice as sad, all at once. A bit like Love Letters, truth be told: it spoke of the persistence of memory, and of the fading light… both of how terrible and beautiful it can be.

Eyes look kindly on me
Eyes of thine look kindly on me
Thine eyes
Mine eyes
Tell me no lies and look kindly on me

Written by Tim Atack

Book Review. Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle

wfla — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:29:16 +0000

Image courtesy of Afterall Books.

Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle by Catherine Wood, Published by Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins College, October 2007

The Mind is a Muscle is the latest in the One Work publication series by Afterall Books. Each book in the series is an in-depth look, by one author, at a single artwork that has shaped the landscape of contemporary art as we know it today. For Catherine Wood, Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern, Yvonne Rainer’s performance of ‘The Mind is a Muscle’ at the Anderson Theatre, New York on 11, 14 and 15 April 1968, is one such work.

The Mind is a Muscle is a multipart performance for 7 dancers who perform a routine of pared-down, ordinary or ‘everyday’ gestures on stage; the work also includes choreographed periods of silence, film and text. Fittingly for a whole book dedicated to one 95 minute performance, Wood’s analysis of The Mind is Muscle is detailed, specific and thorough. Importantly, Wood focuses on one particular performance of The Mind is a Muscle - 11, 14, and 15 April 1968- deliberately setting it apart from the many other instances of the same work. In this, Wood sets the specific socio-political, art historical and physical scene for the April 1968 version of The Mind is a Muscle - a scene set in the context of a 1960’s affluent America, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights protests and an exploding art scene but also inextricably linked to Rainer’s mental state, her health, her friends at the Judson Church and her own (stable) financial situation. In setting this specific scene in all its minutiae, Wood provides a close focus for her reader whilst giving weight to the idea that each performance, both of The Mind is a Muscle and of performance in general, has its own unique temporality; that even if repeated, performance is never the same twice.

For the main part Wood uses choreography scripts, documentary photographs, prop lists and evocative descriptions as well as a myriad of theoreticians, including Plato, Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Nicolas Bourriaud, Emile Durkheim and David Graeber, to explore the groundbreaking achievements of The Mind is a Muscle with regards to notions of ‘work’, minimalism, audience, and gestural image making. The result is advanced and interesting enough for those already familiar with Ranier’s work but also accessible enough to provide an in-depth introduction to those who need it. However, it is the new model of art that Wood proposes in The Mind is a Muscle, particularly its relation to audience, that is the most intriguing aspect of the book. Wood encourages us to ‘picture The Mind is a Muscle as a live event...a ritual configuration of bodies, positions and actions within the multiplicity of bodies, positions and actions found among the 18 million inhabitants of New York City at that time.’ Our continuing, embodied and live relation to The Mind is a Muscle, both to the book and the performance itself, is important for Wood because she posits that the real innovation and impact of The Mind is a Muscle is located in the works’ specific living, dynamic and relational tension between materiality and idea. For Wood, The Mind is a Muscle is the first artwork to perform the ephemeral as fact, and to conceive of the event as transmitting culture and knowledge, an event in which meaning is generated collectively.

The underlying critical problem with Wood’s One Work treatise on The Mind is a Muscle (1968), is that it adds to the growing library of ‘works that have made the difference’ in the One Work series such as Bas Jan Aders’ In Search of the Miraculous (1975), Marc Camille Chaimowiczs’ Celebration? Realife (1972) and Joan Jonas’s I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) (1976). With her contribution Wood further solidifies the presumption – clearly evident in the One Work series- that Europe and the US in the 1960’s and 70’s is the pivotal moment for contemporary performance related practice, moreover for contemporary art. Although such canonisation is inevitable with any publication that focuses on one work, it should be recognised that 1960’s Europe and the US is hotly contested as the birthplace of visual art performance. Wood’s recourse to this all-too-familiar 1960’s US moment is a missed opportunity - for Wood, for contemporary art, for the One Work Series - to correct this mid twentieth century euro-American art historical bias and forsakes the importance of more recent, 21st Century, performance related work. More emphasis on how The Mind is a Muscle influences today’s’ contemporary art, i.e. the art of the current century , along with more practical art examples, would have gone someway to setting the record straight.

Despite the predictability of Wood’s choice of One Work, The Mind is a Muscle has plenty to offer. Picking just one contemporary art work that has significantly shaped culture, and writing a wholly focussed and impassioned book-length treatise on it, is a rare and beautiful thing to see in print and as such represents an exciting prospect for any contemporary art enthusiast. The excitement isn’t just in learning more about the author through their choice of artwork or reading about the far reaching social, political and artistic consequences of that work. More than anything else, the One Work series begs an intriguing question ‘Can you think of one contemporary art work that has transformed the way we look at the world, and if so, what is that One Work?’

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

Joe Moran ‘My Father’s Grace’

wfla — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:22:58 +0000

Image: Joe Moran's My Father's Grace, courtesy of Dance Art.

Joe Moran ‘My Father’s Grace’
Wilkinson Gallery
London 8th / 9th January 2008

My Father’s Grace was devised and performed by Joe Moran and represented the finale of Dance Art, a short season of dance co-produced by Intimate Contenders and Falling Wide in London gallery spaces from October 07 – January 08. The piece consisted of Moran himself dancing a 40 minute solo in the empty ground floor gallery of Wilkinson Gallery to an audience of approximately 30 people.

As a performance My Father’s Grace was stark in its gestures and appearance. Moran wore basic, casual red training clothes, used no props and only the basic gallery lighting. He also kept all dance moves down to only the most necessary. The soundscape for the work was also minimal, including separate sections of electronic pulses, natural sounds and one light folksy tune. Despite this starkness Moran’s choreography was varied throughout; long periods of lying deathly still were combined with primeval style writhings on the floor interspersed with flowing movements that ended abruptly with strangely closed, strangulated gestures. His was indeed a skilled, knowledgeable body performing highly emotional, personal feelings of death, mourning, mental anguish and joy. However, how Moran’s movements related to the audience, or to the visual art context of Wilkinson Gallery, is not clear.

Dance Art’s aim is to explore dance’s interface with the visual arts, to celebrate the porosity of dance as a genre, and so it is a shame that My Father’s Grace did not grey the boundaries of visual art and dance or utilise the context of Wilkinson Gallery more overtly. This lack of address is also unfortunate on a critical level. With no specific narrative or formal elements tying the work to the gallery context it is easy to believe that the presence of My Father’s Grace amongst the bare walls of Wilkinson Gallery is convenient or circumstantial; it presents dance as something simply akin to a curatorial and financial 'gallery filler' in between periods of exhibition de-installation or commercial shows.

The lack of acknowledgement of the visual art context is also unfortunate because Moran’s approach to mark making as physical gesture, including his stated desire to show ‘instinctive meanings inherent in the moving body’ in order to explore ‘natural intimacies between performer and audience’ suffers when seen within a contemporary visual art perspective. In contrast to contemporary dance or interdisciplinary works that thrive in occupying the shared territory of dance and visual arts - by choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roi and artists Pablo Bronstein and Kelly Nipper- Moran’s insistence upon meaning as embodied, and therefore primal (original, basic and simple), together with its unmediated translation to the audience, comes across as problematic and indebted to a removed and purist twentieth century narrative of formal modernism; of autonomy, abstraction, material meaning and form. With this approach My Father’s Grace enacts Moran’s body-in-performance as a modernist art object; as inherently meaningful - and intellectually and economically ‘valuable’ - in and by its formal materiality. Moran’s performance then - contrary to his desire to explore ‘natural intimacies’ between dancer and audience- highlights the interaction between audience and performer as heavily mediated, unnatural and hierarchical, by setting itself up as an art object that is distant, removed and insistent upon its autonomy. In this sense Moran’s performance compounds the (mistaken) belief that the body, its gestures, skill and abstraction can only be worshipped from afar, or translated by experts.

Despite these underlying critical failures there were moments of joy in My Father’s Grace. By alternately turning the gallery lights off and on in the first section Moran created a pitch black ‘off stage’ facility that enabled an ‘invisible dance,’ in which the sounds of Moran’s bare feet brushing the gallery floor were the only evidence as to his movements. Although I think it unlikely that this basic light show was a deliberate witty reference to Martin Creed’s famed conceptual Work No. 227 ‘The Lights Going On and Off’ (2000) it was none-the-less effective in highlighting the performativity of unseen or invisible dance movements. This invisibility, combined with the long moments of lying down in stillness, neatly challenged the expectations of an audience who had paid £12 each to see Moran’s choreography.

Another highlight of the evening was ‘In Land’ (2006) a video shown alongside My Father’s Grace in the Wilkinson Gallery lobby. It depicted two people linked together whilst rolling slowly and laboriously over a grassy landscape. Despite the necessarily removed or surface interaction implied by the video monitor, the sheer materiality of the two bodies and the physical exertion involved in rolling over the grassy mounds was clearly at stake in this work and beautifully at odds with the effortless nature of the depicted pastoral scene. In contrast to My Father’s Grace, In Land used the natural landscape in which it was filmed to enact recognisable mark making and meaning in physical gesture. And so on the night it was with In Land - a work that celebrated the embedded, unskilled, less-seen and unglamorous aspects of physical performance; the lumpen physicality and weight of the body and the strenuous effects of gravity upon it that are vital in order to make movement, be it dance movement or not - that Moran proved dance can speak a distinctly twenty first century visual arts language.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

My Father’s Grace (2007) was devised and performed by Joe Moran. Technical Manager: Rachel Shipp, Visual Projection taken from the work of Alexander Sokurov. Soundscape and music by Chris Watson and Sufjan Stevens

In Land (2006) was directed by Joe Moran, filmed by Jane Barnwell and Robert Napoletani, danced by Florence Peak and Kirstie Richardson and edited by Ultan Molloy.

http://www.fallingwide.com/
http://www.intimatecontenders.com/

‘Too close for comfort?’

wfla — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:28:16 +0000

Image Credit: 'Office Party Xmas 2007', Featuring Amanda Hadingue with audience members. Photo by Steff Langley

Office Party Xmas 2007
Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez
12 – 29 December 2007
The Pit, Barbican

See http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=6068&pg=766 for details.

Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.

The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.

This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.

It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (aka Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.

These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the rest of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.

And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.

Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desperation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.

Mary Paterson

‘Bloods on the Catwalk’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:12:17 +0000

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

‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:03:13 +0000

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

‘How to unwind a wren’

wfla — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:50:11 +0000

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/

CLAIRE 'Flagrante Delicto'

wfla — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 22:08:16 +0000

National Review of Live Art
Tramway, Glasgow
9 February 2007

For Flagrante Delicto the artist Claire refuses to use her surname and by this employs a deliberate strategy of anonymity. Claire’s anonymity is re-enforced in various texts accompanying the performance- in booklets, business cards and programme information - so much so that it becomes an important point for me: Why am I being deliberately led as reader, as audience member, to read this anonymity as significant in this artist’s practice? I am confused, firstly by the first name which belies the desired anonymity; 'Claire' is a western Judo-Christian woman’s name. And secondly, because denial of Claire’s surname is evidently strategic on her part; Claire feels the holding back of her surname is important to the content of her performance. As a result of this, I imagine what Claire’s surname could be, and in what way it would be distracting from Flagrante Delicto? Moreover, I wonder about what reasons –political, criminal, protective, familial - there might be for concealing a surname?

Once inside the darkened performance space my first glance of Flagrante Delicto confirms that Claire is white and, from the outside at least, she is a natural or biological woman. The work itself consists of Claire, dressed in black with black leather fingerless gloves and shaved head, moving in between four wooden doors and slamming each one firmly behind her. Isolating the action of a door slamming from its everyday context - be it the result of an angry domestic argument or a rushed exit – and repeating it in the pared down performance style reminiscent of Alan Kapprow’s 1960’s Happenings, highlights the ritual aspect of such ordinary gestures and in doing so makes them strange. In addition, each slam of the doors is a violent and irregular interruption that is impossible for the audience to anticipate or prepare for.

But, as a member of the audience my thoughts - however broken by the disturbing slamming sounds -are brought back to how ‘queering’ the action of a slamming door might be significant in relation to Claire’s desire for anonymity, or significant to the work as a whole? Flagrante Delicto brings together Claire’s attempt at anonymity - including her written statements and the attempt to strip down her (female) identity via her shaved head and sturdy all black clothing. The work also highlights the slamming of doors as ritualistic, loaded and performative of sonic and bodily violence. In addition, meaning is also lent to the piece via the translation of the Latin phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ (while [the crime] is blazing); also a common English euphemism for being ‘caught in the act’ of a (flagrant) sexual encounter.

These distinct elements of identity, anonymity and violence are visually combined, and so clearly at stake, in Flagrante Delicto . However, the interpretation of sexual (mis)adventure is only immediately available to audience members with an understanding of the Latin phrase and the English euphemism that it relates to. Moreover, far from banal, the visual signifiers that signpost meaning in Flagrante Delicto act in defiance of Claire’s attempt at anonymity. Instead, the visual clues are brimming with specific, culturally loaded and potentially misleading information; Claire’s shaven headed look, masculine clothes and black leather fingerless gloves remind me of an overtly LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender ) 1980’s ‘scene’ look. A clear link can also be made from the leather gloves, the physical strain of slamming the doors and the violence of the slam itself (which is oddly reminiscent of a loud whip-crack) to sexual violence and Sadomasochism.

The sum of what these disparate parts combine into wasn’t enough for me to establish meaning upon my visit to Flagrante Delicto , nor were the individual elements tempting enough for me to want to stay for the works entire two hour duration. What Flagrante Delicto does add up to is a Live Art performance in the making, one that needs more careful choreography with regards to content and scripting of accompanying text material in order to be better pieced together and so stand up to critical scrutiny. To this end, re-considering the visual elements of the performance, re-drafting an accessible artists’ statement and having a translation of the phrase ‘In Flagrante Delicto ‘ available in the performance space, or clearly printed in the written material, would have been a real bonus.

Rachel Lois clapham