Talking in Leeds tomorrow with Kate Valk and Andrew Quick. Kate is one of the most extraordinary performers, a stalwart of the New York theatre makers The Wooster Group. I've met her a few times here and there and seen her perform often over the years but Im really looking forward to talking with her and Andrew. It's going to be a great event. First time I saw Kate on-stage was 22 years ago, hard to believe, in The Wooster's L.S.D: Just The High Points alongside the amazing Ron Vawter. A lot of water under the bridge since then but it's still very vivid to me, that first encounter with the Wooster's approach - clipped and in some ways clinical performance style and a high-speed mix of materials, live and on video. What spoke to me most (in that piece and in later ones) is that the tricks of it, especially from performers Ron, and Kate and Nancy Reilly always created space, opened doors - all surface and all depth at the same time. Can't wait. Here's a link to a short fragment I pulled from an interview with Kate a while back, and here's what I wrote after seeing her, Scott Shepherd and the rest of the group in the Wooster's recent Hamlet. The panel Working Together is at WYP's Courtyard Theatre, Leeds, Saturday 1 March 2008 at 2.30. More details and tickets here. In the evening (tonight and tomorrow) in the same place there are what may be final UK performances of my piece with Forced Entertainment, Bloody Mess. Next stop for that is Bogata in a week or so! Tour dates here.
Andrew'sThe Wooster Group Work Bookwhich was published by Routledge late last year is also well worth checking out - a scrapbook collection come archive of documents, rehearsal logs, texts, long interviews and photographs that show the process and aesthetic of the group's work incredibly well. It was designed by old friend Lewis Nicholson, who did my own Certain Fragments and much of Forced Entertainment's early publicity materials.
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A very nice blog The Leila Texts pointed out to me last night by Vlatka and comprising an on-going collection of SMS/texts from many different senders, arriving at someone's phone mistakenly, thanks to a technical glitch. I like this one:
Leila sheryn will pick u up after school do not take the bus i will see u in the parking lot i will have your things call me as soon as u get this message
Accounts of this undercover operation and the related convictions this week were the by-now usual mix of outward-bound bonding exercises for wanna-be terrorists in Hampshire, combat skills and camaraderie honed during cut-price Paintball long-weekends. The last part of the article though, about the initial arrests, came over especially cryptic, blunt and vivid.
Surveillance transcripts recorded the moment when armed officers raided the private dining room shortly before midnight on August 31 2006, shouting: "Sit down. Hands on the table, please. Everything will be explained to you."
Seemed like the kind of moment that conspiracy theorists or zen monks might dream of - when the secret/reality police burst into the room at random and explain everything.
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Meanwhile a friend in the midst of emotional dramas wrote:
i couldn't do anything yesterday except wait for him to arrive. i didn't know that a person can just sit there and wait for hours. just watch the clock. creepy
Tim 21:56
i thought he was dead tho.
but its good tht he s not
vlatka 21:56
dead???? 21:56
hes like your age
Tim 21:56
plenty of dead people are my age
vlatka 21:56
why did you think he was dead?
21:56
(you joking?)
Tim 21:57
i guess i thought he was dead for the 'reason' that people in the world start to think that certain celebrities are or are not alive or dead...
there is not realy a 'why' that I can think of
what i don't get is that he is texting her from a combat situation and she doesn't reply to his texts. i mean if he was my boyfriend I would be glued to the computer. I'm not bothered really cos the important thing is that she cares for him. I would say something but i guess it is just her nature, to be like that.
And another, also via Vlatka, this from the aging philosophical Georgian classical pianist/taxi-driver (think Soviet rather than Deep South) that took her out to JFK last week. Stuck in traffic, at the end of a long monologue, describing the trials/tribulations of his family, immigration/exile and poverty economic situation, the whole thing punctuated by bursts of his daughter playing piano on a tape in the in-car stereo ("how i play is nothing she has fingers like rubber.. they would not let her come here to join me, she is a separate person they say") he confides in her:
Now we only wait life. this is not yet life that we have. we only wait life.
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