Pashing and Growing Old.

I spoke with Daniel Santangeli after seeing his theatre show Room 328 at the Melbourne Fringe, as I was particularly interested in the participatory nature of the work. Although this was the first time we met, we ended up having a good yarn about River Phoenix and pashing audience members.

LT:  Lets get this out of the way, what do you think of the term live art?

D.S…Pretentious isn’t the word but it is over academic and very exclusive…

LT: Interesting, I get exclusive, only tiny amount of people know of that term., it comes from the UK after a push for body art in the 90s, but here In Australia I think we are trying to use it as a term for practice that sits in between artforms, it may have a liveness to it but could also be a site specific installation that is not very performative…. No one wants to set limits  for what it is and it isn’t. But I think this work is often criticised as not being academic enough…or serious enough… just very playful, so it is interesting you say academic.

D.S: Well in Brisbane, it feels academic

L.T: You have the exist crew down there?

D.S: Yep, it was interesting… I went to the festival and some works missed the mark with the audience, they mostly just ignored them… I think what you say in terms of playful interaction is good, it’s what it has to be.

L.T: So…how did you come to make the kind of work you make?

D.S: Well I went through that thing we all go through which is …theatre is so boring. A little angsty moment….. then you go off and make something that brakes every single rule you can think of. I came across a book called ‘The Mind and the Cave’. It’s about what made humans go into the caves and start doing cave painting… This author is saying we needed to make art because we needed to begin to manipulate our own reality at that time in our existence where we didn’t really know what the difference between what  a dream and real life was…. Crawling into the cave meant we could take symbols and actually manipulate and have a sense of control over them, we were able to make our reality malleable. This is present in room 328, (Dans most recent show) a sense of coming into a space of signs and symbols getting thrown at the audience, and they can grapple with them in any way that they want.  The interactivity also came about by accident, because we were given a gallery instead of a theatre space. So suddenly the audience were walking around.

L.T: How did this expand to a work like DJ While You Sleep?

D.S: In DJ While You Sleep the audience came in and slept overnight and DJs played a 60 beats a minute set throughout the night- it was about recognising sleep as a state of consciousness and making art for it. So it’s that consciousness thing again.

L.T: How did it go down?

D.S: Really good, people slept, so I can say “people slept through my show”. Sleeping…It’s a private thing… so  within this big public event it is interesting,  kind of a bit like skinny dipping?

L.T: How did you find the audience participation went in room 328?

D.S: You don’t have to do a lot, just make an offer, people can go wild with it. The discovery we had was that audience are 90% of the show. The shows that worked the least well were probably when the performers thought their performance was amazing, but the audience was not so involved.

L.T: What processes do you use to to develop these participatory elements?

D.S: What we did was get test audiences, but never enough…it is so hard through so much guess work. We had a rule which was don’t do anything unless you have permission from the audience member to do it… which we upheld strictly like “Can I pick you up” or  “Would you like a shot of tequila”.. but then we learnt how to play with it. At the end Skye (A performer) tries to make out with an audience member.  And then we considered permission was if you charm your way into a situation… through body language…. Getting into their bubble, and that is kind of a permission in itself.

L.T: Is it?

D.S: If you are going to let them get this close to your face then you are kind of saying go all the way… With kissing audience members they would always say no if we asked, but if it happened it really worked out… 

L.T: Does he do it to males and females?

D.S He is meant to, but it is mainly females, only one has pushed him away. It’s a whole journey of giving lot of little yesses, not like walking into a café and doing it.

L.T Ha, yes I guess I am familiar with pashing audience member in these performative environments.

D.S: How did you go?

L.T: It was a choice… they are asked twice if they wanted to, it was up to them how they wanted to take it, it could be quite intimate or ‘fake’ and theatrical… people seem to get lost in the journey and let down their guard and give themselves permission to perform. We constantly ask ourselves these questions around agency, invasiveness and permissions as ours involves touching people blindfolded by video screens who are essentially disempowered. So I think it is about being honest- always giving people the option to leave. I was always unsure of the correct way to feel provocative whilst being safe and respectful. But you always get a range of responses from complete commitment and transformation to disengagment, so you can’t expect a singular response, that is the first mistake you could make.

D.S: What is the line of being too confronting?

L.T: I think that is where testing is so important, for us it is also on your own thresholds, the line we personally wouldn’t like to be crossed. And as we are different people (a five person collaboration) the medium of those responses, so look at it in your own shoes.  Also getting feedback from a test audience who are not just your friends who are always your own age and who think similarly to you.

D.S: ‘Our own personal line we wouldn’t want to be crossed’, that is good.

L.T: It’s funny because sometimes I find artists to be the most dull audience- they try to read to much into it rather than recognise it as experiential.

Do you collaborate with people who aren’t actors?

Yes visual artists like Eric Bridgeman.

I love Eric, he is amazing, and quite wild.

He worked on a past show, he was onstage the whole time, moving projectors around and doing his own thing. Yes, its funny visual arts and the theatre world are aiming in the same direction but…can totally hate each other. There is the idea that the ghost of theatre is somewhere there along the line…. there is the expectation you will be ‘good’  – which is why we do the physical theatre stuff at the end of the show, the audience are bringing the ghost with them, so we say – here you go, have it.

How to you prepare, as the director,  do you make alot of decisions before or does it all come out in the development?

It all comes out in development. It’s a lot of tasks, like go out and get six things… or what are six things River Phoenix would have said before he dies.

I love River Phoenix.

Me too!

I had a huge crush on him when I was 12. So where do you think the initial ideas from Room 328 came from?

Lots of different places, but I think a fear of growing old, I had a 21 yr old crisis…. Also at the time my dad was quite sick so I think it was that fear of growing old. What happened to Dad is there again my new work, because he died from cancer and this new work is about the natural world and how we are terrified by it and long for it at the same time and it is essentially the natural world that took my fathers life.

Interesting…My mother died  of cancer when I was that age too, it certainly gives you this new perspective,  while it can give you this a uncertaintiy of what you are doing with your own life, it gives you a much broader sense of what is important and what is and isn’t worth getting stressed out about… when it comes down to it what we are doing is just art?

I totally agree, I mean I still get stressed out, but you realise that its not that important really.

How old are you ?

25 so not very old

Yeah, don’t worry about growing old!

yeah!

So whats next?

Working on a kickstart project for Next Wave, finding some funding, working with established artist Brian Lucas and moving to Melbourne!

Excellent.

www.danielsantangeli.com

Exist-ence 2011

I am here for two days, it is hot and sticky, a hailstorm thrashed the Brisbane at about 6pm and there is a Live Art/Performance Art/Action Art Festival at the Powerhouse.

Malcolm Whittaker and Georgie Meagher

Malcolm and Georgie created a thought experiment. They opened up my imaginative brain space and enabled me to transform, even with all of the loudness and music that was happening in the venue (somehow it added to the experience).

I found Malcolm and Georgie’s patter was endearing,  sometimes mathematical, sometimes Dr Seuss-ical but always expanding (or contracting). When I finally was birthed out of their mapping exercise I found myself alert to the possibility of the incidental;

- I thought about Schrodinger’s cat
- I walked past a bride and groom
- I could see through the doorway was a past viewer with a map on their head which in itself became a live art work
- Someone asked – why does that woman have a piece of paper over her face? I thought maybe the question is why not? or why don’t you have one over your face?

I took these photos like a naive fool;

To be able to alter you somehow is what art is made for. To do it in 4 minutes with a cardboard box, and elevator and a map is a gift. Thankyou.

Teatro Deluxe

I often forget the beauty of telematic performance. Streaming a work live from Italy, Teatro Deluxe’s slow moving ‘Greetings from Coney Island’ was supported by the strangeness of the buffered audio of the silent room. The small podium in which the performer sat on was part sex club/part carnival. A bizarre interlude but engaging nonetheless.

Jamie McMurry

Live Art/Performance Art should be a challenge. A challenge to existing structures and politics. Jamie McMurry’s work inside the space of the turbine room was urgent and unrestrained but it wasn’t until he put on a white suit strapped a bucket and chair leg to him and hopped/crawled outside that it became revolutionary. As he went past the upmarket riverside restaurant packed with well-to-do patrons, the bucket dragging and his face smeared with paint from previous actions it was clear this sort of interruption was not part of the norm.

Then on the bank of the Brisbane River he let off an orange smoke flare and then another. Then with two more flame flares he tripped them and walked into the water.  As he finally submerged the flares kept firing creating an eerie lamplight under the waters surface, the sound of the flare muffled by the river. The balcony of the restaurant were bemused, someone came up to me and said “oh I thought someone had topped themselves”, a member of the small audience group thought he might be taken by a shark, as I was leaving I passed two Powerhouse security men on their way to see what had happened.

If this was the coup de theatre of his piece, where it started in the Turbine Room felt like static activity, as if each moment was being mapped and recorded. Each action needing a moment to solidify and the symbology to settle.

One particularly moving moment in which he retrieved the letters from a bucket of black liquid that spelled out the word indigenous and then squirted red paint along the word. Later he showed a drawn picture of a Native American in the candlelight to everyone, our indigenous people in Australia are often forgotten, but the US original peoples seem even further removed from political debate or even part of any discourse of the national story.

If McMurry’s white suited ‘Devil you don’t know’ is the white majority then his flame evoked the statue of liberty.  But as he waded into the Brisbane river, the image became less about liberty and more about a signal for help.

With Occupy Wall Street protests happening in an international day of action culminating yesterday, the flares and the dousing of the flames created a potent reminder of the fire of action and the inevitability of inaction.

Oh yes and I got this pinned to me – which at the time I was quite happy about, but in retrospect coming first in the world that McMurry created perhaps is not something to be excited about.

Clare Dyson

Having been around Melbourne for a while now and hung out at Performance Space as well I have become aware of the intimate exchange type performance – that is really about being one-on-one (or in the case of a POST show I saw once three-on-one).

There is a festival in the UK that deals only with this type of work now, and indeed back in 2004 when Marcus Westbury (who was at the time Next Wave Festival Director) proposed smaller and smaller shows to create more of a realistic economy of scale around art there were lots of work like this. His argument was why try and make a theatre show for a 200 seat audience when it is more realistic to make something for 10 people at a time or even one person?

There used to be a trepidation about these sorts of shows for me, as I can be very shy at times…however I no longer feel too nervous about them as I feel like the nature of a one-on-one is that the other person will feel as vulnerable as I will. Maybe that is a trust I am giving to the unknown?

In any case, I hadn’t read anything about Clare’s show, I knew that she is a well respected member of Brisbane’s dance community, but that’s all.

Before you get to her you travel through 3 stations which prep you for the point where you will be alone with her in a small room. The specifics I won’t go into as it will give it away for future iterations of the work.

But broadly the work spoke of secrets, truth and lies. The secret that Clare gave away to me was so charming, and I felt such kinship with her for it as I too share the same problem.

For me also the work spoke about being seen or not being seen and about who we tell things to and why.

I felt comfortable with Clare, there was a disarming nature about the dance that she presented and a general warmth that came from her. And I felt like her candid nature in discussing very private things was very open and honest.

But as in all of these sorts of engagements there is a level of deceit that is happening – yes you are Clare, but you are also performing a show and it feels like I am being manipulated, but gently manipulated – even willingly so.

In the end what I was left with was a sadness from the work. that what had transpired was not the intimate exchange that I had believed I was undertaking. I wasn’t disappointed at all with the work – I felt it was well conceived and achieved by a very skilled and confident person and maker.  The sadness I felt was that the one-on-one-ness had been fractured somehow.

http://existenceperformanceart.wordpress.com/

Martyn Coutts

exist-ence 2011 program launched

Melody Woodnutt

Hi Melody, welcome to lala,

Thanks lala!

Tell me about the Neo-intimacy pod you made earlier this year?

Well, it was a piece for Exist-ence Performance Art Festival in Brisbane in Jan 2010.  I wanted to create a kind of surreal installation and improv performance looking at the evolution of intimacy and how we connect.  A red telephone booth was positioned like it had crashed into and destroyed a bedroom on the street.  The bed was broken around this red British phone booth. The work was performed on the bitumen road outside of the gallery, and I worked as much intimacy into the performance as I could. I wanted to connect to people in this streetside Neo-Intimacy Pod using methods of modern communication.  For the 2 hour durational performance I didn’t get off the phone, skype, email, facebook, myspace, twitter, or a home-made tin-can-on-a-string-phone.  I began inside the phone booth, shut away from the audience and communicating with relative privacy over skype with a friend, then moved out of the booth to check my emails or facebook and chat online, I then switched to my mobile phone and spoke to someone else.  While I was communicating, I was moving and performing actions with sand or papers or simultaneously destroying my own sphere of privacy by writing what was said upon the telephone booth for all to see.   I used metal rings around my feet to walk outside the installation, they made the most amazing sound that I hadn’t counted on, but they connected me back to the Intimacy Pod if I walked across the road or sat next to people on the footpath.  Mostly the work was improvised.  I just provided myself with the installation and some conceptually aligned tools and left the performance to intuition and spontaneity.  I think my favourite part was when I left the technological devices and spoke to someone face to face right at the end through a tin-can on a string, by this stage I had reduced my privacy down to my undies.  Some real emotions and connection happened and I just spoke and spilled things in the middle of the street.  I later spoke to a guy who had come to Exist-ence and was surprised to hear when he first turned the corner he was confronted with these emotions, he just wanted to stop me, pack it all down and put me inside the gallery where I would be safe.

I also had a soundscape for people to listen to through headphones that was a part of the installation, it was a recorded message from about a year prior, it was of a recorded voicemail that my friend had left on her ex’s phone overseas, she was so drunk and her message was so uncensored and real and full of emotion and so adorable.  It really was this miniature intimate pod she’d created with a machine.

Also when I think of a ‘Pod’ I think of any environment that is defined by people or physical boundaries determining that space. Almost like the phrase ‘in our own bubbles’.  For Neo-Intimacy Pod I was seeing the way that new mobile technologies had redefined or blurred our modern concept of intimacy and the spaces we use to connect intimately to other people.  Our pods of intimacy prior to mobile phones and mobile communication devices were primarily in the bedroom, in our homes, or in enclosed private spaces and mostly just face to face or on the phone, You can see even through the gradual redesign of telephone booths that our society is now more open and public when communicating a private intimate connection.
And so it was Matt Locke’s research that coined ‘TIZ’; Temporary Intimate Zones, and he describes it as  “…the real space of human encounters enabled by networks…” , I thought this was a great visual image, you know to find a ‘Real Space’ constructed in the street; a tangible reality of an intangible connection that is so ephemeral.  Our intimate behaviour has adapted to this oxymoron of public intimate zones, like in elevators, trains, streets and really anywhere in an urban environment we’re merging more, our lives and the way we connect is morphing and evolving.

And how did the online and mobile communications work with the piece?
Well they were the foundations of the work and used simply as mobile devices as anyone on the street would use them.  I had my laptop with wireless prepaid internet connected and my mobile phone constantly used.  I invited people to be contacted during the work, some I knew very well and others not so well and some were overseas… I like the idea of geographically neutral; where distance is just eliminated through these mediums, and technology can do this to an extent.

And was Exist-ence a follow on from Zane Trow and Rebecca Cunningham’s Exist in 08?

Yes!  Exist in 08 was fantastic! And I think very valuable to Brisbane and live art practice in Australia. Rebecca has been championing the way forward with Exist.  There’s plans for another Exist festival in the future that’s really exciting.  This last installment of Exist-ence in January was beautiful and a little more under the radar than Exist in 08, it was scheduled for 2 days, but it kicked on with some last minute extra additions for a 3rd.

Does much of this type of work happen in Brisbane? and has it grown out of another scene of has it been brought by some practitioners?
Brisbane, despite it’s sunshine, is pretty industrious.  There’s a lot of experimental works going on and some really fearless artists are ploughing the scene.  However as far as regular live art in Brisbane goes, it’s hard to find off the bat, I think of some artists I know and I guess it’s emergent from more theatrical or visual art scenes.  It’s where I see experiments with live elements really being explored.  But I think there may be some performance artists out there who haven’t come from another scene first, I just don’t think I know of too many right now.
That said though, I’m still a green bean newbie as far as the development of Brisbane arts, I just moved to Brisbane from overseas 3 years ago and it took me around 6 months to get my shit together, sort my life out, ditch the debt collectors, and then get back into the arts and take my own practice seriously after that. I don’t think I can speak of the scene before I got there or how it’s evolved with any kind of authority, I’m still discovering too.  But Brisbane has a really enthusiastic and supportive dynamic, and people like Rebecca Cunningham and Zane Trow who have brought it to us from overseas and artists who are bringing it to us with their own creative work are pivotal.  Michael Mayhew said it best over some beers though; that these curators need more artist support.  I think generally I’m needing to be more pro-active as an artist in developing this culture.

How do you see this type of work in relation to the works you make that are sculpture or painting works?
Neo-Intimacy Pod was a progression.  My ideas just progressed, paintings just don’t cut it for me now.  I still paint, but I can’t express the more experiential ideas my work has taken by doing painting.  I’m so much more enamoured with creating experience or immersion or actions or space for people to feel their surroundings.  So the progression went from painting to sculptural installation and then to immersive and sensory installation and live art.  I know that installation still holds a place in my work, because it can involve other people and affect them and their environments. But a live or performative element and the presence of the body can bring an immediacy or humanity to ideas and to audiences.  I guess if we’re talking about Neo-Intimacy Pod, the installation itself was moved after the performance on the opening night and stood inside the gallery as it’s own entity, but as a durational performative work, performance was really just something that was essential to the work and to the way I had to communicate that idea.  There really was no other way I could do it but as a durational performance. I think that visually, I’ll always be interested in the environment of the work or the imagery it projects, which is why installation or context or site-specifics or spatial immersion will play a role in live works I do.

And you have just been on a big travel session including a residency in Iceland, a trip to Gibraltar, Spain etc, is this normal for you or was this something spurred by work or restlessness?
Oh yep, this is very normal! I started traveling on my own 10 years ago, and it became an addictive habit.  Since then I think the longest I stayed in one place was 3 years before skipping the country again.  However this is the first trip I’ve actually traveled for artistic reasons.

How does it reflect on Australia for you?
I guess Australia is safe and a relief for me.  After traveling and living in so many places,which I love, it’s taken a while for me to really appreciate what we have there.  I think Australia is somewhere that is still developing it’s culture and we really have a say in it’s future and what kind of place it will be.  Some countries, you may be born into a culture and way of life that has been existent for thousands of years, yet being born in Australia we are brought into a place where we are still developing our ideals, our culture, our laws and our people.  I guess having seen a lot of cultures, I understand every one of them is developing in their own way, but we have this historically fucked up and bittersweet gift of starting from the beginning.  And what we create is entirely up to us now.

And what is next for you?
Oooooh, I’m leaving Gibraltar for Denmark to hang out with the Snuff Puppets, then Berlin and Amsterdam, hoping to get a photocopier into a field, try some phantasmagoria out, immerse myself in the Melbourne Fringe, and exist a bit more in 2010.  I’ll be back in Australia for a short stint for a couple of gigs, then New York and back to the residency in Iceland.  I seriously can’t get enough of that indie underdog Nordic country.

Thanks Melody!
Cheers lala!  Love your work!
x

Melody Woodnutt is a hybrid visual artist working across painting, sculpture and live art. She is from Brisbane but is currently on sabbatical from an artist residency in Iceland.