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/

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

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