Some more press has emerged, this time an article on the performance in Berlin that was part of Extension Series. Posted below.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=566960695…
And another piece written about the show in Brighton:
http://louisehalvardsson.blogspot.com/2011/05/chin…
What a relief it is to have some writing about the work that comes from a position of wanting to be engaged and writing about the experience of viewing it. This makes a perfect antidote to the national press who are quite simply nowhere.
I was in Amsterdam a few days ago performing another piece of mine and whilst there had a get together with Irina and Gerrit Jan, two of my fellow artists at CEAC and Bram a researcher I also met in Xiamen doing an exchange at the University. It was quite funny at first seeing this little group I know from the other side of the world, assembled in front of me in The Melkweg for my show. Very quickly however, once we got talking outside, it seemed perfectly natural that we should be together as a group.
I think the bonds that I made as an artist in residence in China are rather deep and go beyond being merely a professional acquaintance of the other artists. Over the course of time we got to see one another in many situations and states, some quite unusual like having our feet pummelled in a ‘massage’, for example. This diversity gave us a chance to see how the artist and person connect in each of us. I think that in general we are usually more selective in the presentation of self when at home and divide different aspects of our lives to different people and places. That, combined with knowing what we are doing at home on a whole other level, gives a more polished finish.
I have to say I miss the collective dinners I was a part of in Xiamen. Having something of a Groucho Marx feel about groups, this is an unusual sentiment from me. Still, I rarely experienced those dinners to be exclusive groups but rather regular exchanges that were fluid in the group composition and changeable in location but almost always marked by tasty new surprises and one crazy story after another of everyday life in China.
Yesterday I performed The Customer in a windswept park in South London. To add to the atmosphere there was a brief but heavy shower 30 minutes before I was due to start. And when I saw windswept I really mean it, the forecast said that it was 20mph standard with gusts up to 42mph. Unsurprisingly the public was not great in numbers. The park-wide arts event, organised by Wandsworth Council, could potentially have been a very pleasant afternoon but as it was, it was a case of putting a brave face on it and soldiering through. Why is it that I have this sort of luck when performing outdoors? First Xiamen was unseasonably cold and gray, Portsmouth was damp and cool and now London inclement.
The one very positive thing to emerge from yesterday’s performance however was working with a new person (Jeremy) in the translator role and now having a second very competent person to call upon. He corrected my Chinese mistakes in a nice way which added something to the event. This inclines me believe that I should try to work with a live translator when performing in a theatre type space sometime. The subtitles are effective and they work as a strategy albeit a rather ‘cool’ one but there is also a good quality to the live voice. Hopefully I will find the opportunity.
I recently restarted language exchanges as I realise that if I do not continue with these I will slowly forget how to pronounce the script and it will become empty sounds. Besides, having got my foot in the door of the language, I want to now go further. That said, I will start work on a new project in mid-June so I will have to go easy on it.
I am just back from a weekend in Brighton performing the Customer in the Artist’s Open House Festival with the assistance of Permanent Gallery. The performance took place in Spiral Charity Shop a warm and cluttered old fashioned charity shop. I was nervous at first about the space but it tuned out to work rather well. I was aided by Suni La who took the role of translator delivering the Chniglish text to the audience. This she did well finding a nice balance between being present and not like a robotic voice and at the same time not inflecting the text too much one way or another so as to allow the computer generated language constructions to stand for themselves.
The space was small and on the Saturday evening overflowing to the point we had to turn people away. I brought small plastic stools and had everyone sit low on these. These were the type I found in China and which are rare but not impossible to find here. It worked very well as it reduced all the sightline problems that usually come with having a group of people sitting on chairs with no raised performing area in front of them or rake in the seating. They even looked slightly cute.
A significant part of the audience spoke some Mandarin as there was a Chinese teacher there and her adult pupils. This made for a good concentration and afterwards during the talk for many questions on language and translation, indeed the talk went on for at least an hour. This was in fact one of the best UK audiences I have had yet and this further convinces me that in the UK at least, it is a performance that works better within an art context than within a theatrical frame. Many of my pieces manage to adapt to both but the difference here between the two has been so marked that I will not stress myself about theatres and instead concentrate upon now presenting it further in an art and language context. Elsewhere it is another story.
Today: budgets. It has been a nitty gritty receipt filing sort of day.
I did however also get out to Wandsworth Park and was shown around the site looking at potential locations for the performance in two week’s time. Site visits are important events, the significance of which can sometimes get clouded in discussions of a practical sort only. I am glad I had a chance therefore to see this park twice, once alone and once in the company of Justine the arts officer and a fellow artist. I had looked at first for spaces that contained some of the ideas of the performance but found that the one I had in mind was already spoken for. Upon settling upon a simpler but more beautiful space that would at least ensure a public, I later discovered that it too had been taken. I am now in a quite unremarkable part of the park. Hopefully that may make it a receptive location. Looking up as I was leaving I did notice one thing about the site that was rather interesting: planes. It seems as if the flight path to Heathrow passes above this part of South West London and planes will be a regular feature of skies above the park. I suspect that I will find these helpful in grounding the performance in the here and now.
I have also been looking at some pictures I took from a site visit to Brighton a few days ago. I will be performing The Customer opposite Permanent Gallery in Spiral Charity Shop. There are a number of ways to use the space but I’m leaning towards one and thinking how to adapt the performance to it.
Yesterday we had a performance of The Customer (as it is now becoming known to me in short form) on the Guildhall Square, Portsmouth. It was touch and go whether it would or would not happen at all but the forecasted heavy rain failed to materialise. Looking back on it now I think I can safely say it was one of the odder performances I have done with this material in the sense of it being pleasantly incongruous.
I was joined by both Boris and James who had recently worked with me on the indoor performance, and I was also joined by Hannah, one of my Chinese language partners who ended up in a performance art piece for the first time in her life. Boris and James essentially stood on the outside looking semi official in their yellow day-glo waistcoats, a nod to the excessive H&S regulations I had to negotiate in order to use the space. Hannah however was quite firmly inside the performance acting as my English interpreter. Although she has no background in the arts she does work as a simultaneous interpreter and was able to draw upon that experience and deliver the garbled Googled text to the public rather well.
One of the things that was amusing to observe was the look of surprise on the faces of the several Chinese students who happened to be crossing the square when they heard amplified Mandarin and then saw me as its source and what’s more me doing not so normal things.
I am starting to realise that this work occupies a rather special niche in the sense that it can be a bit too Chinese for general British tastes and a bit too Western performance art for general Chinese tastes. I had an interesting conversation the other night with a mainland Chinese woman and her friend a non Mandarin speaking British Chinese man. She said she had the greatest access to the work as she could understand me speaking Mandarin. While her ability to understand my utterances is true I also see that the broader language of the performance in terms of its genre is also a language with its conventions and references and familiarity with this also gives access to the performance. What’s more the scrambled texts have been tweaked between two language software sites so as to produce a poetic text that, at least to my ear, works in English. I had the feeling that operating between a number of languages, as it does, it is a piece that attempts to keep everybody at a little bit of a distance and play with this mixture of understanding and not understanding the work. The form of it requires of the spectator going outside of ones zone of familiarity and competency. In this way I suppose it reproduces the dislocating experience China had upon me rather than communicating it within a familiar convention.
