These last few days have been spent in The People Show Studios in Bethnal Green integrating lights and sound into the performance. It has been quite focussed work that has become quite precise, today being our last day to decide upon the length of sound fades, the order of light and action cues and suchlike.
I purchased a large plastic table cloth from a Turkish store where they sold it by the metre. It has a shiny lilac flower patter on it and, when three 4-metre long strips are taped together it becomes a stage. We were thinking at first of purchasing a white dance floor but our flower stage is MUCH cheaper and more fun. It is not so sober and clean a look but this performance will never be one of those ones. When light hits the flowers, it is reflected very well in different directions so the performance has a bright look to it.
The sound has been taking a turn for the ‘everyday’ and I have found myself searching youtube for Chinese pop songs I remember from Xiamen. It being Spring Festival time that I was there, many of the songs I recall most were festive songs associated with that time of year. Whilst one of the ‘supermarket hits’ still evades me I have found most of those I am looking for and I was surprised when listening to them how evocative they were. I had to put that aside somewhat however and choose the songs which also had the electronic feel that the performance wants. These, James Dunn, my sound composer then edited, altered, layered with other sounds to create a series of soundscapes one for each chapter of the performance. Some of it sounds like a video game and other parts like a supermarket. I have to say he’s done a good job at creating a China of the imagination.
Gong Xi Gong Xi song
The performance went rather well despite it being somewhat chaotic in places. That in fact was its character: a rather clumsy beast that took over the space. The addition of the subtitling was quite OK though I will have to now streamline this side of the work and make it more smooth. There is time for that. For now the major discovery was that the piece can work with just me performing it and the words appearing behind me. It remains a fiendishly difficult piece on account of the volume of Chinese I have to speak but that is also a defining characteristic of it and something people will remember.
I have been making the documentation of the work in the form of a score and completed that today. It is quite tricky to find the most appropriate way to record the work as I want to only record the salient details. Deciding what those are, such as what sort of stool to use, is tricky. When I am looking for a stool I know intuitively when I find one I can work with. I could even stop and list all the stool qualities I search for. I have to ask however if the type of stool that I desire is the type of stool necessary for the giving of this performance. The objects I use tend to have a set of personal connotations which I find aid my work. If someone else were approaching the show as a performer these connotations would simply seem eccentric and may in fact prohibit them from finding the objects that met their desires. I have to therefore ask if I am describing how I go about doing the performance or how I would pass the work onto somebody else. I have leant towards describing my own criteria rather than abstracting the work on this occasion as it is a rather personal work that I cannot imagine anyone else performing.
I never quite had the time to fully acclimatise to the UK as I have been in Berlin these last few days preparing for tonight’s performance. That said, Germany seems very similar to the UK from the Chinese point of view. What has surprised me was when doing the bilingual translation of the Chinese text I will speak the German and English look so similar. I sort of knew they were related but when it comes down to some of the words being identical it is too much. It seemed to take a long time to make the powerpoint subtitling text but it is done and that gives me one more thing to worry about during the performance: cueing the subtitles.
The space and programme is rather good, it is a gallery cum museum space and a dedicated programme of performances. I think I may have changed too much of the performance but it seems like Grimmuseum is a space to experiment so if I can’t do that here then I won’t do it anywhere.
Sometimes there simply don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to be able to do half of what you want. This whole week has been somewhat full of days like that. Upon getting back to the UK I have overwhelmed with administrative work. I expected nothing less yet the expectation of tedium in no way transforms tedium into something else. It remains precisely what it is. It must however be done and I have probably cleared enough of it out the way now in order to return to a creative mindset.
Maybe I exaggerate when I say it is all formalities, I did make re-writes to the text which I got back in Chinese last night and which I will now start to learn. I have six days to put this into my head before I perform next Thursday in Berlin so with some effort it might just stick.
I should say something more about the Toulou trip before it slips my mind. The coach journey of three hours the initial stage for our guide’s commentary. He began by asking if any of us were visitor’s to Xiamen. Upon discovering some he jokingly gave the tip of there being four things you have to do in Xiamen when visiting: eating, drinking, going to the casino and visiting prostitutes. Although said in jest his list must have corresponded to many a visitor’s itinerary for a stereotypical visitor to say, Portsmouth, would surely not arrive at such a cocktail. He went on to tell us the actual local specialities which included one I have tried and lived to regret: sea worm skin served in set jelly.
Some distance inland we made a stop. While it was ostensively a toilet and refreshment break, the place we found ourselves deposited at was a warehouse selling Fujian products. It had been arranged so that the visitors snakes their way through the shelves of products, a slalom so barefaced and absolute that I had to laugh when making my way through. Arranged in this vert specific way, this not so large industrial unit required a good 15 minutes to pass through as it was in effect a tunnel: once you enter there is only one way to the exit. In the end I bought some dried sweet potato then piled onto the bus along with my new companions and set off for the Tulous.
Arriving at the Tulou Visitor Centre we were had lunch that was a part of the package. My table was slow to get started with the food and quite uncommunicative in general. I was surprised at this. I did get talking to a Dutch/Chinese man from Rotterdam who was having a hard time because he was ethnically Chinese but spoke no Mandarin and very little Cantonese. Having seen how Chinese migrants often hold onto their language and culture more than people from elsewhere, he may have encountered some surprise and frustration when people in China realised he was more Dutch than Chinese in everything save the colour of his skin.
After lunch we divided into two groups and drove off in search of Tulous which I learnt are also called ‘earth castles’. We were shown inside and they are quite unusual constructions: large round buildings on several floors with a central courtyard. That space now seemed to be given over to tourism. Several coach parties seemed to be descending upon the toulous at once and there were competing guides. On sale were model toulous, dried products, tea, hats, paintings, crafts and tourist nik-naks like bottle openers with a toulou on the handle or a toulou in a snow bubble inspite of the distinct lack of snow in Southern Fujian. The upper floors were private but a woman persistently tried to entice us up saying there were very beautiful things to see for just 5rmb. I wondered what this could have been as by the way she was talking you would have thought she was going to present her daughter. Finally however I declined the upper floors of that toulou.
This set what was to become an increasingly familiar pattern: walk to the toulou, get some information from the guide, 20 minutes to hang about and buy things then onto the next one. The pattern was however broken later that afternoon by some traditional folk arts: a song and a puppet show. The heat had really gotten up by then, added to which the girl who was singing was amplified so loud that I was blasted all the way to the back wall to protect my ears and find a little shade. It could hardly be called pleasant even though she did have a sweet voice and some talent. The puppet show was more difficult to follow and five minutes into it my tour group headed off in search of the next toulou. That must have been a tough public to play to.
