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.
The first performance here in Beijing went OK. I now know that there is a performance there, which is quite a relief but I also see how much more I will have to do. This is going to be a very complex piece if it is to rise to the challenges that it proposes. On the first level however I was happy that I managed to hold it together in Chinese, that was the challenge for Thursday. Now, looking back at it I see how what I did had many similarities to the first performances of previous works of mine: rough, semi improvised and working with the space and people present. That is fine for a first performance, for a try out but now the serious work begins on the surface of the performance. I see how the actions need to modify one another rather than erase one another as they presently do to a greater extent. This erasure creates repetition rather than evolution which what I want to achieve. I also see how there are many missed opportunities in the text-action interaction which I will have to do something about. There will have to be some re-writing and some alteration to the actions but only as much as I will be able to incorporate in time for the next performance, a week today in Xiamen.
Here in Beijing I am staying at the Yoyo hotel and I met over breakfast a golf-course designer named Ron from North Dakota. I now know more about constructing golf courses in China than ever imagined I would ever get to know.
I saw a concert of Irish musicians last night in a rather formal concert hall. It was odd for me to observe a culture I am familiar with from bars in Kentish Town and Kilburn presented on a large stage in China as world music. Of course something is lost in this relocation but I also saw how it represents far more than it did previously. They become the face of Ireland and polish up their act to make it presentable on the large stage. This made me wonder if it was possible to present almost anything on a large stage if you find the right way to package and stage it. I had to think of early Fluxus concerts in Germany which were, on occasion, presented in proper concert halls and wonder if such a framing were possible today. I think there are some limitations but I also think that there are more possibilities than I generally assume there are. When things travel a distance they often end up in more formal spaces out of the necessities of production so I should perhaps try to see if there are ways to imagine making these crossovers more successfully as I tend to resist them at present as I have nothing to do with such spaces in the UK.
Today I will do some work on the performance then head out to an opening of a friend’s exhibition at C-Space in the Cao Changdi art district.
The last day or two have been spent doing mostly the same as the previous days: forcing a Chinese text into my head. I have had help from my translator Sophie who has also been adjusting the text so that it works from an action point of view, and from my language partner Charlotte.
I did have time to make the English translation which will be read by a friend He Fan in Beijing during the performance. It is a Chinglish translation and I rather like the way it robs any semblance of subtlety from the original text which I speak. It offers such advice as:
Air France do not fly!
On the subject of them I have heard back from their customer service department and they have rejected my claim though curiously did not mention the fact that they had earlier accepted it. I don’t know what that means. Anyway I’m now going on the offensive starting with the performance tomorrow and stepping it up with a TV interview the following day. I know for a fact that it will cost them a lot more money to hold their current line than it would to just refund me so it will be interesting to see if they take a pragmatic line and refund me or whether they will stick to their script. In either case I now win as this is good material to work with and if they do pay me back then I both get my money and a way of rounding off that part of the performance. If they don’t I can enjoy the David and Goliath situation as that plays into the performance rather well too.
I’m now in Xiamen airport ready to fly to Beijing. I have plenty of extra clothing as I see it is still around 0 degrees at night. I have become spoilt and will be returning to familiar climes.
