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.
The UK shows have begun and a new show has emerged out of what was previously there. It is the same material but the look and feel are significantly different, to the point that they carry a new flavour to the work. It is louder, more brashy and rhythmic.
There was a first show in Cambridge that went OK but had some technical hitches and was not so much a pleasure. The shows in London have been more precise and the played to smaller but more concentrated audiences. It is funny how an audience makes a show to such an extent. Last night we had a post-show talk that was very interesting, at least for me, to participate in. People had good questions about the process, about form, about China and about the work’s reception in China. We got some reception here in the UK in the form of a Gardener negative one liner (why is she so rated?) that has that weary welcome back to the UK theatre world feel to it. It may be better to simply avoid that world altogether but for the fact that the show works well presented in that way too, indeed I’ve had a number of people say that it is the strongest work I’ve made yet. So, we continue regardless. Today will be a radio interview for a station whose name evades me but which I suspect will be high on art and low on ads. My sort of people.
We’re filming the show and should have a decent DVD to show for it. This time I’m having someone take care of all of this for me, a video artist named Kate. I’m looking forward to the results and relishing not having to edit anything myself.
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
