It takes everything in me to do it but I have started filling out a new gfa application. It seems rather remote from my experience here and hard to focus upon as it somehow requires a shift of thinking. I am aware of having to shift my thinking and language when completing these forms when I am in the UK but here it seems more remote still. I don’t necessarily have many suggestions for how it should otherwise be, I simply note upon opening one of those Arts Council documents it seems like it comes from a very distant land. Still, I will force myself over the next few days to get into the thick of it as I have deadlines to respect.
I had the last language exchange with Kyky and Elaine last night and I will miss them and the not so Italian restaurant that we meet in. It is actually a cafeteria with a few Italian style pictures on the wall. The music cracks me up if I concentrate upon it too hard so I try to block it out. They either play Italian style classic songs, a sort of light opera, early hits of The Beatles or the cheapest imaginable cover versions of 60’s and 70’s Western pop banged out on a Casio keyboard. Quite often people from other tables come over to listen and comment upon our exchanges, one of the waiters took part a few weeks back too. I’m not so taken by the food and the drinks are very sweet but all the same I will miss this place.
The first press article came out about the performance on Saturday. It was rather positive and the link to it is here:
http://www.common-talk.com/cms/node/12115
I managed to more or less take a day off, the only vaguely taxing activity being a resumption of the language exchanges in the afternoon. Picking up from where I left off was in comparison to working on the performance, quite lightweight and fun. I have in the meantime gained some new vocabulary through working on the performance but these are words fixed within an order and not free to come and go within sentences as they please. I realised when doing this again how I quite missed it and this reaffirmed my feeling that it is something I should continue upon getting back to the UK. Having made it through the most difficult and frustrating period of learning the language it would be a pity to stop now.
Yesterday’s performance went off OK. The rain that had been threatening held off, people came and then I got stuck into it. I managed to perform it without a written Pinyin script in front of me this time. That was a significant advance upon the last performance. I also made the actions more complicated and attempted to slow this side of the piece down so that each decision I made was more visible. I think it went some way towards achieving this but can go further still. The English translation was not so easy to follow because of the wind, accent and Google text so I should look at how much I want it to be followed. I suspect more is the answer to that question so I will have to work that side of the piece more.
I had invited people to make comments after and a few did, many more however simply wanted their photo taken beside me. That is a sort of comment I guess.
Later we went out and saw a Chinese hip hop act in a club. The young Chinese breakdancers spinning on the concrete floor to an appreciative crowd were well worth seeing.
I went to the photographic shop Litu, apparently one of the best in Xiamen, in order to get a print done for the exhibition. They do indeed do a good job, making test prints and perhaps over eagerly offering photoshop services to ‘improve’ the image. In any case, they produced a good print at a very reasonable price. What surprised me however when I was there was the other customers. When my job was printing the next man came along with his files and they were opened on one of the computers by the staff there in the main small front area of the shop. To my surprise they were a set of pornographic images showing a couple engaged in oral sex. I couldn’t make out whether the customer was the man in the image or not, whoever it was was rather obscured in the pictures and in any case, I didn’t want to appear to be gawking.
Now I’m not prudish but I wasn’t expecting to see that out front for everyone to gander at. In a matter of fact way the assistant adjusted the files then sent them to get printed in just the same manner as he had been working on my images. I thought to myself, this would not happen in the UK.
Xiamen is treating me well and I’m head down hammering out the performance. The next will be on Saturday and I expect there to be some development upon the one in Beijing last week.
There was some thing I noticed in Beijing that has been creeping into the work and that is the disconnection from history. It seems to be pretty acute here and so much is it taken fro granted in the UK that it is rarely even noteworthy. Still it remains a condition all the same. Some of the actions are starting to reflect this in oblique ways.
The rewrites have been done and I’m going over the words furiously so that I can speak them without notes in from of me. This will be tough but great if I can do it.
