I don’t know how it happened, but nothing went wrong yesterday. Nothing broke, no-one was late, nothing got lost. After all the months of planning it would have almost been an anticlimax had the performance not caused ACTUAL DELIGHT.
It caused delight to me, and, to more of my delight, I think it caused delight to other people too. People smiled and double-took and laughed and a bunch of passing men retraced their steps and burst into song. Other people didn’t notice there was anything odd happening, others looked up and didn’t react, one or two people skidded under the sight line of the cameras and tried to avoid it altogether. The aeroplanes, the road drills, the slow boat reflected in the window panes, the trains on the bridge and the sirens on the opposite bank – they all carried on as though nothing was happening.
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Yesterday’s performance on the South Bank is something I’ve been planning for some time, and I’ve been talking about it with Anthony Weeden for the past few weeks. Anthony is the conductor who was performing, and his job was to observe everything around him and conduct it like an orchestra. As I wrote here on Tuesday, it’s an impossible task if you take it literally: the conductor authors the movements of the environment while the environment authors the movements of the conductor.
The quality of the task’s impossibility is something we worked through together in conversation and largely, for me, during the rehearsal for a concert he was conducting. By piecing together correlations in our respective disciplines we gradually distinguished what would and would not be practically and musically appropriate.
I left Anthony at his podium to check the cameras back down on the riverbank, and when I next looked up he’d become a conductor. It had begun. The speculative private gestures he’d been testing out while we were talking had become the real thing. And in the same move, everything present silently shifted into synchronicities of themselves, more often than not (to begin with at least) quite unaware that they were being choreographed from above.
There’s lots more to think about here, and many possibilities for restagings and developments. I’ve invited Anthony back for an event at SE8 gallery in May, though we’re aware that it will be a very different work in a designated art space.
I’ll try to upload a short video of this first performance in the next week or so.