I arrived back in the UK yesterday. My body arrived back, in any case, I’m not sure if my mind has quite made it yet, I think it will take some readjusting to get used to being in Europe again.
The Shanghai performance went rather well, there was a good audience, I was a bit more in control of what I was doing and managed to work with the unfamiliarity a bit better, that is to say to transform difficulty into opportunity to show thought in action rather than to appear to be floundering. This can go further still but I am happy to see how the performance has been growing. The post-show discussion was longer than I had expected with many questions about the meaning of this or that. I see how the author is far from dead but on the contrary, alive and well.
At the end of the performance I needed some cash to pay for the tech hire. I had to pay using notes that I had used in the performance, carefully peeling the double sided tape off them before handing them over. I could have sworn I had enough but was slightly short. This was no problem as Tomaz helped cover it till I repaid later that evening. Looking at the video later I now see what happened. A 50 yuan note got stuck to the packaging tape I wrapped around myself during the performance. When everything was over and we were clearing up I never saw the tape or money as someone must have ‘cleared’ it away.
I do now have the dilemma of what currency do I use when performing elsewhere. In Berlin in two weeks, do I use Euro or RMB? This gets to the question of who is the spectator? Am I suggesting we are in China and they are Chinese or am I simply making a performance that is first for overseas Chinese? I will have to decide soon.
