mem morrison leftoversPerformance installation
Dino's Grill, Commercial Road
Sunday 24 June
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season 2007

The binding properties of bacon grease have never been better emphasised than in Mem Morrison's ‘Leftovers’. This performance is about cafes, performed in cafes, with cafe food for everybody. It is intimate, cosy; a cooked breakfast at 6pm, sitting elbow to elbow, bound together by sausage, bacon, eggs and beans. Leftovers is Morrison's autobiographical performance about growing up in a Muslim, Turkish Cypriot family running the Sunderland Cafe in South East London. It's a journey through a childhood filled with food paraphernalia, language barriers and a strong sense of not quite fitting in; it is also an act of remembrance for an immigrant community's efforts to settle in a strange country.

A performance about cafes presented in a genuine cafe immediately brings audiences into Morrison's world, just by taking a seat at a formica table under fluorescent lights. Recorded interviews with Turkish Cypriot cafe owners play as cooked breakfasts are served; the clatter of cutlery on china mingles with evocative stories of Anglicised nicknames, misspelt menus, the pressures of family business - “never work with your wife!” - and friction between ebullient Turkish diners and meek English regulars.

After the plates are cleared, Morrison performs his monologue, walking between tables, distributing Turkish delight and specially printed napkins. Anecdotes about being a novelty Englishman in Cyprus but erroneously a 'Paki' at school are interspersed with observations: he ate shepherds pie and custard during the day, kebabs and Hallumi in the evening. He longed to be blonde and blue-eyed in an Aryan log cabin featured on a biscuit tin. A few interjections in Turkish, some traditional music and dancing invite laughs from Turkish audience members; baffled non-Turkish audiences are reminded they can only look in from the outside on these experiences, no matter how sympathetic they may be.

What we eat and with whom we eat define who we are, so tucking into a full English breakfast immediately labels us as someone who can accept the English love of baked beans, for example. We love them or we learn to love them as part of 'Englishness'. Equally important in Morrison's performance is choosing who to feed, and what we are willing to feed them. It's a tough but defining dilemma for a Muslim cafe owner committing to a business based on bacon. As one woman said on the voice recording: ‘This is our last chance to fit in,' it was generally agreed in Leftovers that these cafe owners fitted in the best way they knew how: Turkish people show love by feeding people. This cafe story, served hot at the table, is a love story, for a culture, a history, a way of life unique and now fading.

Leftovers will be performed in Hackney, Thursday 12 July at the Kingsland Cafe, Kingsland Road and again at the Edinburgh Festival 2007, and has been performed in independent cafes around the country. However, the pool of non-chain, family-run cafes are running out. Catch this piece of unique theatre while you still can; it's the most satisfying full 'English' breakfast available.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles with contributions from Charlotte Pedersen.

This review also appears on www.londonist.com.

For more information on Mem Morrison see
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/artist.php?id=50

Date: 6th June 2007
Toynbee Studios
Part of the Artsadmin Summer Season

Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? Dirty Work tells a tale of heroes and villains, of brave protagonists and innocent victims. Its backdrop is the great events of the twentieth century and the misunderstandings of a suburban kitchen. It includes mass suicides and accidental murders, characters from Shakespeare and plot twists from Eastenders. Its mood is funny, predictable, surprising and grave; it takes place in houses, cities, across the sky, and throughout the universe. And all this, in Toynbee Hall’s 250 seat theatre.

Dirty Work manages to be all these things because it doesn’t have to depict them on stage. In fact, the set is bare, and the ‘play’ is conjured up by two actors sitting near the footlights, describing each event through stage directions. Freed from the physical restraints of representation, they paint a vast landscape of possibility – from planes writing in the sky to gifts the size of an atom. The result is a montage of potential, a triumph of imagination over representation.

It’s not just the actors who let their imaginations run wild, of course. Here, as in all other types of performance, it’s the audience members who construct the drama, and the actors who supply the cutting pattern. The ‘play’ – all five acts of it – does not take place on stage, but somewhere between them, the actors who describe, and us, the audience that imagines. When, early on, the actors describe the reaction of an hysterical audience, it’s clearly not us – the audience in the here and now. Instead, in a moment of vivid dramatic collusion, we must generate a secondary audience together. Forced to replicate ourselves from the outside, the present audience is swung out of the auditorium and into the director’s chair - the effect is almost physical.

But unlike a conventional play – with a set, dialogue and characters – the pattern here is sketchy. It’s outlined in clichés so that, like a cold-reading from a psychic, its suggestions can be absorbed easily. Hollywood blockbusters roll into urban myths, which stand alongside soap opera dramatics, which tumble into popular sci-fi. And, because the action is outlined and not displayed, the experience of watching is turned from one of collective imagining or recognition, into one of individualised creation. Audience members don’t react to a moment together – laughing at a slapstick routine, for example – but snatch the suggestion of that moment away, and work on it themselves. One viewer laughed so loudly at unlikely moments I thought she had been planted there to drive home this very point.

And yet there is an undulating rhythm to Dirty Work that draws the audience inexorably and collectively along. Rolling gently from the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to an accident with a toaster, the narrative is both familiar and surprising enough to herd us all together. In other words, while the points of reference themselves – Hollywood, Eastenders, popular Shakespeare - feel like performative clichés, the ways they are sewn together are much more surprising. And, in fact, even these clichés represent a kind of shared experience. They might be easy to recognise, but the scenarios Dirty Work invokes are highly specific. It’s a testament to the prevalence of a particular kind of populist sci-fi, for example, that a robot-dog-superhero can slip smoothly into the narrative.

By citing so many performance genres, Dirty Work sets itself up as their child – if not their heir. Like any rebellious child, it uses its parents’ language to attack their authority – splicing between different types of performance to explode the autonomy they each pretend. But also like a rebellious child, its limits are set by its parents’ horizons. Dirty Work can only draw on the banks of meaning that other performances have left behind. The life of the play exists somewhere between these two conflicts: between the possibility of knowledge, and the limits of imagination; between the navigation of the actors, and the ownership of the audience. Is this the Greatest Story Every Told? No, but in its mixture of guidance and cultural norms, it feels like a very enjoyable collaboration.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more info see http://www.forcedentertainment.com/

Or

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/?event=136&date=2007-06#136

16th June 2007
Toynbee Hall Court Room

Part of Artsadmin’s Summer Season

While the argument rages about the relative merits of MySpace and Facebook, Chris Goode wants to draw your attention to another internet community. The Hippo World guestbook (http://members.aol.com/HippoPage/intro.htm) is a message board for those who visit the site, which describes itself as ‘devoted to all fans, fanciers, and aficionados of Hippopotamus amphibius’. Like other internet communities, this one attracts users from all walks of life, who discuss a range of subjects sometimes – but not always – connected to hippopotamuses. Goode’s sixty minute performance is a reading of some of these posts, which he recites verbatim.

Chris Goode’s introduction primes us for the narrative arc of the messages. Arranged as if in three acts, with short musical interludes, the opening tone is one of enthusiastic appreciation (“I wish that people could have hippos as pets!”), which moves into conflict (“I hate hippos and I hate you”), and ends with that sure sign of a website’s demise – uncontrolled spam. Perhaps this is a metaphor for the way communities are built, cherished and destroyed as a whole. The ultimate objet trouvee, then, the Hippo World guestbook stands for how societies find and lose their meaning.

Except it’s not quite as simple as that. Obviously, there is no set pattern to the way people communicate, or if there is, it’s not reflected in this site. While Goode’s performance certainly has a beginning and an end, there is little to define the middle of his promised story. Messages from people who are hippo fans sit alongside messages from people who are not hippo fans, and the exchanges occasionally descend into childish conflict (“I hate hippos … They suck! They suck!”), homophobic taunts (“Hippos are gays and all who like hippos are gays and lesbians”) and complete irrelevance. In fact, rather than documenting the rise and fall of a vibrant community, Hippo World guestbook is at its most interesting when it becomes clear how tangential it is to the lives of its contributors. The user called ‘Big Heart Hippo’, for instance, leaves the group with a revealing entry: “I used to check up on the message board frequently, but now I don’t. My parents told me my e-mail might be traced and the bad language was getting on my nerves. Oh well.” It is not the story of the site that becomes interesting, but the hinted at stories of its visitors away from the screen.

Here in the dark of Toynbee Hall’s woodlined Court Room, reading from a lectern under spotlight, however, Chris Goode displaces these tangential posts and treats them like the weighty missives they were never meant to be. He earnestly recites acronyms and spelling mistakes, and adheres to the web convention – as he points out – that capitals means shouting. While Goode has culled messages to fit the sixty minute time frame, he has tried to be representative of the mood as a whole, and reads out the chosen messages in full. If the posts have been transferred in time and place, he would argue, they have not been transferred in authorship. This kind of editing would be condescending, he says – either in the presumption that he could ‘correct’ the posts, or that he should accentuate their eccentricities.

And yet there is definitely something anachronistic about his reading of these messages. For those of us who did not grow up with the internet and texting, it still seems strange that written communication can be this casual. But the – mainly teenage – users of the Hippo World site clearly thought of their messages that way. Perhaps it is this age difference between the people Goode quotes and the people he performs to that makes the humour seem slightly cruel. Lol, gtg and other text speak are easy targets for the well educated, urban folk at Toynbee Hall. There is little danger, either, of us falling into the trap of becoming naturalised to the racist and homophobic undertones of some of the messages. They are written in a language that people over a certain (young) age neither use nor accept, but it is one that any internet user will recognise. Perhaps Hippo World guestbook raises an interesting point about the tolerance for these statements on the net, but it doesn’t foster any link between its audience and the people who wrote the posts. This distance does not threaten to change anyone’s minds.

On the other hand, perhaps Goode’s show is a fitting way to continue the site. The posts’ displacement into this setting works in tandem with their intended irreverence, and not against it. And the downright silliness of Goode’s endeavour is a light hearted match for the way the site sits on the edges of its contributors’ lives.

Despite the undeniable presence of Chris Goode’s own authorship, there is enough that feels communal about Hippo World guestbook to save it from being arch or ironic. Not only does Goode read the messages of an internet community, he also depends on the audience’s communal understanding of this phenomenon for humour and effect. He takes the normally solitary pursuit of surfing the net and drags it into a shared environment, replacing the online community with an embodied one. Whether you feel he does this with affection or, at times, a little too much cruelty, probably depends on your own relationship with the web.

Written by Mary Paterson

For more info on Chris Goode see
http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/project.php?id=171

or

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/projects/associate-artist.php?id=32