- Venue
- Artsadmin
- Location
Durational Performance as part of the Artsadmin summer Season
Written and directed by La Ribot
Performed by Marie-Caroline Hominal, La Ribot, Delphine Rosay
Sound Design and Performance Clive Jenkins
For more info see http://www.laribot.com/
'Over six hours a series of lone performers enter a space strewn with cardboard panels and, in the grips of constant laughter, tape them to the walls. On each are scrawled handwritten phrases or words, ranging from the ambivalent to the personal to the political. As they are assembled they create haunting and strange associations'. Artsadmin 2007
Pre-lude
4.30pm It's June and I still have tights on. So I'm hot. I've just eaten a quick sandwich dinner on the tube from work. Rushed my emails to get away early, then got ‘caught' in the corridor on my way out the office. Another 30 minutes. Now I'm late and sweaty, having run for every bus. Undigested sandwich lodged uncomfortably in throat. Mustn't miss the start. Focus on getting there on time.
Enter
5.15 pm I arrive, on time but under prepared. All I have is a memory of La Ribot's photograph from ‘Live: Art and Performance' (eds. Adrian Heathfield, 2004) lodged in my brain. And one stuck sandwich. Nothing else. It's too late to read the programme information. I slink in down the side of the studio. Hope no-one notices me. Everyone does.
And Pause…
9.30pm The laughing is still there. Laughing, not as a backdrop but as main player. A constant sea-tide of feminine chuckles, bubbles and tinkles that rise and fall. Crashing waves, crescendos of guffaws and low ebbs of breathy giggles and sighs. I don't know when it started. Perhaps it has always been here; laughter that stayed on long after the joke ended. But this laughter is not welcome. Not funny. It is laughter that is physically, mentally out of sync. Out of step, out of time.
Excerpt
7.00pm La Ribot holds up one piece of cardboard. ‘Still Funny' This gets a laugh from the audience.
Cut (Back to the future)
10.20pm The physical remains of laughter cling on to their hosts in flushed cheeks and empty grimaces. Hair all over the place. Chests rise and fall. Women on their backs, housecoats parted, casually showing coloured knickers. The last dregs of laughter gently lap, washing over all three women in post hysterical paroxysm. All at sea, and spent.
Begin Again
To re-cap. La Ribot and two other women performers. Over six hours of them in coloured housecoats and flip-flops. Falling about. Laughing, both recorded and live. Bits of cardboard on the floor, two words on each.
Drunk Mum
War Bay
Phone Home
Still Laughing
Shit Hole
W-hole Break
7.00pm Another laughter surge. A big one this time. High pitched female hysteria. Hysteria. The diagnosis: Women with symptoms of faintness, nervousness, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and a ‘tendency to cause trouble'. The treatment: Manual stimulation of female genitals leading to ‘hysterical paroxysm' or orgasm. This is about women, their unreliable and porous bodies: wombs, mouths and other dark holes.
Cut
5.45pm Still laughing but not yet funny. Very unfunny in fact. Mad and obscene. It sometimes sounds like crying. In between the laughing or crying, the beginning and the end, relationships grow. The women perform their laughter as body to body; a contagious one to one infection from one audience member to the next. It works: try staring into the red-sweaty laughing face of another, and not laugh. Try doing anything, apart from laugh, whilst laughing. Laughter claims it's own body, it's own time.
Repeat
5.15pm All I have is a memory of La Ribot's photograph from ‘Live: Art and Performance' (eds. Adrian Heathfield, 2004) lodged in my brain. And one stuck sandwich. Nothing else.
Cut
8.45pm I can smell my own feet in these trainers.
Smelly Feet
Numb Arse
Red Wine
At Home
Interlude
9.00pm A duration. Time to think backwards and forwards, to dip in and out of the present, in and out of this Laughing Hole. Into the future that is now, compressed into the present, into the text. Meanwhile, thoughts nip in and out. Poignant and revealing, meaningless and boring. Time enough for La Ribot to dip in and out of herself, in and out of Laughing Hole: time for her to get a drink of water, open the studio door, smile at the technicians. All the while laughing.
Post-script
Let's write this future laughter into now
End
Repeat
