Like you're looking at a dancer in some cursory form of possession, ghosting temporarily between crucifictions, fashion poses, burlesque hangings, sex moves and semi-obscene gryations, beckonings, crowd-tauntings, whiplash car-crash jerks, yells, rabble rousings, self-abuses, fragments of bar-fights, air guitar and fist-swinging street confrontations all played thru some kind of almost comically hyped-up full-on rocker lens. Or you're looking at an exuberant grotesque, part-clown part-reptile - death-denying or death taunting and in any case, somehow in a state of avoidance concerning the fact that this body  is 60, the face like an astonished and jubilant skull that has just watched its own reconstruction thru surgery.

Lean like a 20 year old, skinny like a cartoon stick man, all ribs, bare bones and muscle. At the same time tho he is nonetheless and evidently decaying; the tanned skin not-taut, the walk awkward, the teeth too vivid/unreal. He sings, yelps and shifts from catwalk-posturing to gym-honed show-boating, giving off an air of the borderline psychotic and then somehow just looking funny again. Possessed of apparently boundless nihilism, boundless joy, boundless testosterone-arrogance, revelling in the gaze of around 1,000 people but at the same time demeaned and degraded, self-demeaning, self-degraded. What you're looking at, mouth open, jaw dropped, is a body surrounded by, at the very centre of, in the absolute eye, and the eventual cause of the wall, storm and rush of brilliant noise that fills the room. A body that crackles with its own internal electricity, burns bright in its own private logic, burns so very very bright in fact that it seems as tho it might be determined to burn out. It's a body that by simple virtue of being here is already celebrating its own survival, rushing and flickering with its own continued vivacity and velocity, delighting in its capacity to perform, provoke and please. But what it returns to, most often and with most glee, again and again, is its ability to conjure, or to conjure with, its own destruction.

You can lose yourself in what is happening. And it's hard not to be amazed.

I guess what struck me most was how much the event hung between a very well calculated rock-gig dramaturgy (precise, concise, absurdly effective) and the simple fact of Iggy inside it - a presence as simply synpatic, muscular, and electrical as it might be human. The event then as this meeting between some very good planning/theatre and something quite other, quite beyond, something bordering on the shamanic.

Linked to this is the fact that you cant very well see what you're watching 'just for the gig' - that watching this 90 minutes you're also always at the same time feeling the weight of the life behind it; the 40 plus years of this behaviour, theatricalised excess and genuine self abuse. You're watching the life in fact, through the window of the show; the fact of his survival to this point, the history (real and imagined) that's marked and contained in his presence. Like time wells up, is dragged up tangibly inside the auditorium, shimmers and flickers, made present at exactly the same moment that it is denied.

Article/interview with Sophie Calle in The Guardian, talking about her show in Venice, and about the death of her mother who she nursed through the last month of her life. The piece says she'd heard that dying people often take their last breaths and slip way in the two minutes when their relatives leave the room.

'"It became almost an obsession. I wanted to be there when she died. I didn't want to miss her last word, her last smile. As I knew I had to shut my eyes to sleep, because the agony was very long, there were a risk I might not be there. I put a camera there, thinking if she gave a last jump or start, a last word, at least I'd have it on film."'

This led to another fixation. "The obsession of always having a tape in the camera, changing the tape every hour, was so great that instead of counting the minutes left to my mother, I counted the minutes left on each tape."

I like this exhaustive aspect to Sophie's work - something we tried to honour in the performance we made based on her project Exquisite Pain. Also reminded, for some reason, of Perec's dedication to W, or a Memoir of Childhood - a book that explores the lives of his own parents. The dedication is something like: "If I write them, they will be my children too.."

From London. Meltdown tonight. 

I mentioned earlier that the Forced Entertainment performance First Night hadn't mellowed much since we made it in 2001. Proof of this in a short Village Voice blog item on the piece following the recent Toynbee presentations, which says cheerily:

"Rarely has the actor/audience relationship seemed so strained, so nasty, so desperate and parasitic."

Thing is, this is a good review, by Alexis Soloski whose "ludicrously high expectations of the company.. Weren't remotely disappointed". Looking forward to the bad reactions!

I also mentioned elsewhere that everything (at least in performance/art documentation) will probably end up on YouTube sooner or later. Ironically only days later I've come across a short edit of one of my own pieces - the performance That Night Follows Day which I made this year with Victoria. Not quite sure how this clip/edit ended up where it is, or quite what levels of permission were involved but I'm not starting the lawsuits just yet. In fact here's a link. It gives a pretty good sense idea of the performance. The kids are so focused, even in close-up, they look really great.

Over at The Guardian the very boring theatre critic Michael Billington started a 'debate' about who is the best  director in the UK. I'm not mentioned in his entirely predictable text but I do scrape a nomination by jonaverage in the comments. Thanks jon. Check the comments for more interesting names and thoughts including one person flagging of the work of 80's devising companies like Impact, Rational and Lumiere & Son. 

A busy week ahead. Bloody Mess in Meltdown on Tuesday. Then Thursday I'm in Amsterdam for this.

Three years ago, maybe four. We were in Munich on the final leg of the work-in-progress for Bloody Mess. The last weeks of rehearsals are always a kind of delirium - no sleep, a general sense of chaos and panic. Mentally you've long been painted-into-a-corner that's largely of your own making - caught in a set of constructed logics, dilemmas, associations and energies which seem tangible, real, absolute but which are of course pretty much arbitrary; product of the meeting between you, the material, the place you're all in and the time you've spent on the project. It's in this corner - part trap, part creative scaffolding - that you make your last few moves, discoveries, breakthroughs.

Thrilling and weird to think that those decisions - made in discussions, in improvisations - will be things that you probably live with for years as a piece continues to tour. The fact that there, trying to make Bloody Mess, on that particular day, in that strange rehearsal room in Munich, she moved there and he did that and she said that providing a score that you'll see re-enacted hundreds of times.

*

Starting work in Sheffield in 1984-6, our semi-derelict factory rehearsal space was the floor below the flat that Jarvis lived in and for the longest time people used to say that Pulp and Forced Entertainment were the best kept artistic-secrets working in Sheffield. That’s changed a bit now, but the Meltdown gig does seem to close some kind of circle.

And, in any case, as one friend wrote to me:

> appearing on a line-up with Iggy Pop and Motorhead -
> I guess you can cross that ambition off the list now.

Bloody Mess is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London at 7.45 on Tuesday 19th June as part of Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown.