Clapham Junction

An Audience of One by 'Ladder to the Moon Laboratory'
Sunday 21 October 2007
Clapham Junction Area
London

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his sad news on the street corner over tinned mushroom soup. And we were devastated. If there’s one thing An Audience of One did well, it made us empathise like no other theatre production. We lived the lives of the Hart family. We had to: we were playing them.

Cast members Caroline Garland and Oliver Langdon performed an extraordinary feat in this piece of street theatre. The entire performance was devised and rehearsed on the actual streets around Clapham Junction in nine chilly days; they played main characters Barry and Rose flawlessly, effortlessly involving the audience as themselves or in character. Audience members were one by one assigned a Hart family character and were incorporated into the drama as it unfolded, moving around the streets with props and prompts to learn more about our characters.

Our group’s aunt Maggy was particularly in character, constantly needing a drink. 16 year-old Luke was played with slightly less gusto, due to his tiny baby (not scripted). This was also incorporated into the performance and references were made to Luke's "school project" whenever the baby needed a pause in the action. We were all so drawn in to the Hart family's unravelling, that we happily charged around the back streets of Clapham Junction playing our parts regardless of our acting abilities – the Ladder to the Moon Laboratory accommodated how little or how much we participated and yet still presented a complex, hard-hitting drama about three generations of a family facing hard times. It was like a live action Mike Leigh movie: improvisational, tense and realistic.

Unlike the companys' Moonwalking in Chinatown, in which the Soho streets became magical and mythical; removed from the reality of Soho at night, in An Audience of One we were grounded firmly in the grubbiness of South-West London on Sunday afternoon. Though we were asked to imagine that the eight of us were all members of the Hart family, we were not asked to imagine there was anything romantic or mystical about our surroundings. By placing us each in individual shop doorways at the start, making us hang around awkwardly, the performance was saying "You are here. You are really here. And it can be hard." Being uprooted, disbanded, displaced and made homeless was explored with the most immersive empathy possible. The ghastly silence at the end as the soup sat uneaten was as real as any "difficult" family dinner we have all experienced. An Audience of One will continue to be developed and will be presented again soon. This is real street theatre, on the streets, about the streets and unforgettable.

Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles

This review, as well a review of'Moonwalking in Chinatown'
is posted on http://londonist.com

http://www.laddertothemoon.co.uk/

http://www.anaudienceofone.co.uk/

Courtesy Vinespace
‘Zero Hour'
A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’

11 October 2007
12 midday until 9pm (performance between 5.30 and 8.30)
VINEspace
Vyner Street
London

Last Thursday I had a one-night stand with Japanese artist Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki. It was a wonderfully slow and strange physical encounter that lasted for several hours, throughout which I could hear - and feel - the pounding of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s excited and over exerted heartbeat impacting upon my body. De Dun, De Dun, De Dun. The physical strain, the knee trembling, the impact of his heartbeat, all this was flesh and real and yet Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki and I never actually touched. And we didn’t actually have sex. ‘A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’ was the fourth in the series of VINEspace's ‘A One night Stand With…’A one-night-only temporary exhibition that shows work of a transient nature, including exploratory projects, performances and installations which occupy the gallery for one night, and are gone the next morning.

‘One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’ coincided with ‘Time Out First Thursday’, London’s monthly late night gallery opening, and the crowd of inebriated gallery goers on Vyner Street was the perfect setting for a furtive fumble, or one-night fling, with Live Art. The fumble in question, Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s One Night Stand, was entitled ‘Zero Hour’ and was installed in Vinespace’s street-side project space. It involved the artist, dressed in silver body-suit, goggles and face mask (also silver), spray painting (silver) lines onto a clear glass pane to the amplified tune of his own heartbeat.

It doesn’t sound much like actual sex but there is real physical and emotional intimacy in this work, the artist lays bare what is private, interior and quite literally inside; ie his heart. And it’s the drama of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s heartbeat that is at stake. Each beat reverberates around the space connecting the body of artist with that of the audience, holding them in its visceral, compelling and slightly morbid rhythm; the tense fast paced highs, the relaxed slow thumps, and the irregular or missed beats that create a pause and serve as real life or death cliffhangers. The rhythm of the heartbeat is also fatal. It lulls listeners into anticipating or yearning for the break - or crisis- in the heartbeats’ performance, proving the point that one-night stands really can be hazardous to your health. The beating of the artists’ heart also serves as a keen reminder of time, both of the duration of the performance and the amount of time, or beats, left before death.

Zero Hour: it is faintly apocalyptic, like a bodily version of ground zero, but Zero Hour doesn’t simply refer to death. The Zero Hour in question refers to the end point or the Nth degree of progressive linear time that the temporal elements of this performance all work against or toward. The spray paint on the glass pane eventually turns into a reflective mirror that obscures Heart Beat Drawing Sasaki from view. This mirror stage is itself Zero Hour, with every stroke that is painted - in tandem with every heartbeat - performing the artists’ gradual disappearance. In turn, the Zero Hour of the artists’ disappearance is simultaneously both the purpose and process of Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki’s performance; this Zero Hour, is what makes his performance possible and the end point at which he will eventually arrive. In pitching itself firmly toward its own disappearance, its own Zero Hour, A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki becomes paradoxically and maniacally live. I haven’t experienced anothers’ body quite so intimately or physically in public - or had so much of a good time doing it - whilst being fully clothed for some time. Messages about safe sex aside, I recommend everyone have ‘A One Night Stand With Heartbeat Drawing Sasaki.

Written by Rachel Lois Clapham

The Next in the One Night Stand series is 'A One Night Stand With Larisa Blazic' in which video artist Larisa Blazic presents ‘Wake Up Whitney’ a giant projection on the facade of the Victory Pub opposite the gallery.

See http://www.vinespace.net/about.asp for more details.

STILL: Photograph by Lucy Cash
STILL

Anna Krzystek with Lucy Cash (video installation) and Tom Murray (sound)
9 October 2007
Tonybee Studios, London

There’s a Viking Line ship which is so large, that as it navigates its way through Helsinki harbour, its movement is actually imperceptible. Only by watching it over time can you convince yourself that it is in fact moving. For movement artist Anna Krzystek and filmmaker Lucy Cash, this mobile stillness was one of the inspirations behind STILL, a collaboration between Krzystek, Cash, and sound artist Tom Murray. The resulting piece is a finely tuned juxtaposition of live performance, carefully arranged space, and film and audio in a compositional whole which is a both mesmerising and exhausting exploration of stillness and tension.

Set in an austere white room with ordinary fluorescent lights, STILL asks to be read with the careful attention required of installation work, each element in the room considered both as itself and as part of a composition. TV screens are arranged throughout the space, neither programmatically nor randomly arranged but each just perceptibly in relation to each other. A chair is placed so that it all but touches the room’s other exit, statically signalling the dynamic potential of the closed door. As each TV screen cycles through its own slow pan of another sparse room, Krzystek’s presence in the room becomes less that of a performer before an audience and more a part of a landscape. And Murray carefully adjusts a sequence of electronic tones and pulses, manually attenuating his soundscape to complement this landscape.

Over the 45 minute duration of the performance, the various elements of this composition are combined to explore and activate unseen lines of connection in the room. Our focus is naturally drawn to the performer, but Krzystek uses both her body and her gaze to give this focus away, her head moving mechanically like a panning camera to create diagonals through the space. She moves with choreographed rigour, at one point on a seemingly endless loop through flexed dance positions, at another making a single leg movement for what seems like forever. Meanwhile, Murray’s soundscore finds resonances throughout the small space, at times even causing the walls to vibrate. The filmed images, revealing glimpses of other Krzysteks moving through another room at another time, connect the relations within this room to a more general idea of room. And, as props begin to appear in the films – a phone, a radio, photographs, a cluster of chairs – there’s a sense of infinite but untold narrative attached to each object. Who might phone? Whose gaze is reflected in the photographs? What drama is foretold by this roomful of chairs? Even the image of an ordinary electric wall socket seems charged with potential energy.

STILL is divided into five movements, and the shifts between them are discernible. But when Krzystek reveals in post-show discussion that these movements are each exactly nine minutes, it’s a surprise. It doesn’t feel like it, as the experience of time changes radically throughout the movements. Though nothing ever actually ‘happens’, there are nonetheless quite dramatic shifts in pace and tone, as when the screens start blinking between images in the third movement, or in the excruciatingly slow fourth movement in which the most active element in the room is the fidgeting audience. In this way, the piece explores not only the latent dynamism of a mostly unchanging space, but also the ways in which we can experience identical durational periods in vastly different ways.

In her programme notes, Krzystek describes STILL as existing ‘on a fine line between performance and installation’. As installation, it meticulously overlays live performance, arranged objects, and recorded media with a compositional sensitivity that is far too rare. As a performance, though, it raises more questions than it answers. Unlike an ordinary installation, STILL has an audience which has been summoned at a particular time into a room in which the doors are closed, and this audience is a strange entity with which to share the carefully composed space. In fact, it feels as if the audience is in a slightly separate space: we can mentally enter the space created for us and become engrossed in its logic, but we can also retire from it, as indicated by the fidgeting in the fourth movement. In conversation afterward, Krzystek states her interest in this phenomenon, describing the way in which she is aware of herself as spectator when viewing work in a gallery, but loses awareness of her own body when in the theatre. STILL begins to explore these tensions, particularly in the final movement in which Krzystek makes direct eye contact with audience members. But I think the challenge of how to incorporate the presence and dynamic of an audience into this work’s manipulation of time and space remains an intriguing question which the work only begins to explore. Krzystek describes STILL as part of an ongoing study (the first of which was her piece TEST), and I very much look forward to more.

Written by Theron Schmidt

www.annakrzystek.com

www.lucycash.com [website under development]