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.
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.
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.
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
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