Well, after many weeks of admin, Dot and I have finally submitted our funding applications for the big live art project we've been planning. Its working title is Live East, mainly because it is supposed to be difficult to pronounce (is it 'live' as in reside or 'live' as in not dead?), but also because it looks at first glance like a generic tourist initiative, which will be helpful in the design of our event maps. These will be distributed next to other leaflets advertising attractions like dinosaur parks and craft centres, hopefully being picked up by a non-art audience and providing an unusual alternative guide to spaces in the area. We've got Norwich Arts Centre and Colchester Arts Centre on board, kindly offering us the use of the venues for launch and closing events, with site specific work in other locations in between. Now we sit back and wait to hear from the funders…
I say sit back, but in reality we are still hard at work. There is another afternoon of live performances at Norwich Arts Centre on Sunday 22nd March, 2.30-4pm, which we are recruiting for, and there'll be another push for new o/o/o members in the near future.
Dot and I performed our piece "Species of Spaces" at the Late Shift (SCVA) last night. We both thought it went really well, and discussed how neither of us had ever had a repeatable 'performance' before. It seems we still find the subject matter and approach in the piece sufficiently interesting to apply it to new locations and create fresh versions. This one was very different to the under-the-stage NAC one, because the room was very white and clean, and it had a wonderful semi-opaque wall of glass screening the storage area from the rest of the room. We crawled around behind the glass, and the shadows cast by our torches lit up the wall with silhouettes. It emphasized the micro/macro play on scale that runs throughout the piece. I am certain there will be a 'next time', and I'm excited about the possibilities of spaces it could explore.
Last Saturday we successfully hosted an informal platform event at Norwich Arts Centre. It was an opportunity for some of our collective to try out performances to a small audience, and then discuss the outcomes afterwards.
Rebecca Wigmore opened, with a spoken piece about cellulite, followed by Michael Ridge experimenting with pressing his face against contact-miked glass, and then Dot and I did a new version of our piece. It's now called 'Species of Spaces' due to the slightly creature-like properties the objects acquire. For this version we explored the space under the NAC stage, crawling through girders and emerging, dust covered, in front of the audience.
We had a good audience (at least 20, which was brilliant considering we hadn't advertised it as a public event), and 5 stayed for the feedback discussion afterwards. I think all the artists found this a very useful exercise, and it is one we will be repeating in the near future.
In the meantime, Dot and I are performing at The Late Shift at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, on Wednesday 17th December 5-8pm, so come along if you are in Norwich.
It's been a while since my last post, but that's not to say Dot and I haven't been busy. We've been planning our strategy for keeping other/other/other going and creating opportunities for the artists to make new work and discuss projects; so far this has resulted in a funding bid which we had to withdraw because the venue closed down, a total rethink, an imminent call for proposals, and plans for a new bid in the next two months. Fingers crossed. Our last o/o/o meeting was very fruitful, and clearly becoming a good forum. We're doing an informal performance and feedback event on the 6th December to test out ideas. Here's a photo of some wonderful Ekow Eshun t-shirts that Dot made for our last meeting. Could be a new uniform…
Section Four of Four:
Vicki Weitz (Weitz & Muller) arrived in the afternoon with her family. Her sons were very eager to join in with the various activities, particularly with Michael's electronics, so we turned the second half of the afternoon into an impromptu workshop. I taught them how to generate sounds from a broken speaker cone they had found, and Michael gave a brief circuit bending/contact mic demonstration, which resulted in one of them giving a short sound performance to the rest of us. I like the fact that the event was flexible in its positioning of audience and artist; when visitors arrived it reconfigured the activity and the focus of work, so that we were being visitor-specific as well as site-specific. I think the original objective of ‘opening up the process of making live/durational art’ was achieved.
Michael’s work was perhaps the most durational of all the work there. He seemed to be constantly performing/experimenting , which given the preoccupation with noise in his work is quite a hard thing to be able to sustain. Likewise, he managed to respond to other performers throughout the weekend, creating dialogues with smaller sounds, and providing a ‘dynamic range’ for the space.
John had produced five or six loops by the end of the second day, which were gradually taped up on the wall around him. He said he felt that a lot of the time he was “battling with technology”, but that he enjoyed working on a series of sounds for a continuous period.
As people started clearing away and going home I decided to do a final sound piece using my parabolic microphone, focused on Dot’s bell (a small bell attached to a helium balloon which had been drifting around the space all weekend like a ghost cat). It amplified the tinkling, but also the scuffles and movement of people packing up, and is captured in a loop.
Michael and Dot took great pleasure in bursting all the balloons, which is captured on video. Final photos were taken of the Documentation Wall (it had grown immensely over the two days). As we were just about ready to leave the clouds opened and an enormous thunderstorm threatened to flood the room. I was left thinking about how different the project might have been if we had had the thudding of heavy rain all weekend…
