I've written a short text for Humus 3, a book on the 30 years of the Kaaitheater, about the extraordinary duets by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion - Both Sitting Duet, Quiet Dance, and Speaking Dance. The complete text, titled Brecht might have liked it, is below (and continues after 'read more'). An edited version of it will be in the book, which comes out in September.
Kind of similar-looking but for sure not identical, semi-bald blokes in identical or nearly identical clothes are sat on chairs right next to each other and doing things. Mainly it’s movement broken by stillness – a lot of hand and arm action, some of it recognisable as versions of everyday gestures, the rest of it more abstract or more dance-like. There also seems to be some interest in sound; the noise that comes when the slapping palm of a hand makes contact with a knee, or the sudden exhalation of breath when they both slump forward in a posture of exaggerated rest.
In the next piece they lose the chairs and move around instead, sometimes together, more often alone. They are pacing paths back and forth, walking circles repeatedly. With these paths and circles they make sounds; a long ‘aghhhhh’ or ‘aaaahhhhh’ for instance, which although done without noticeable emotion still invokes a notion of falling, dread or non-specific fear. Sometimes, moving down there on the black floor of the stage, they look like claymation – simple-figure-humans with a comically (or tragically) small vocabulary of action and sound. They are creatures living within a limit, two men caught in some skeletal scenario, an encounter whose pieces have been disordered, dislodged from continuity and causality.
In the final of the works they go back to the chairs and make yet more sounds – speak words and sing even. The words run simultaneously - going with and through each other, side by side, over and under, point and counterpoint. The words are mostly describing movement; movement that could possibly be dance or could possibly be something else. Run. Run. Run. Stop. Run. Run. Run. Stop is all I can immediately remember. It’s fast, vivid exhilarating.
All of it messes with your sense of what’s simple and what’s complicated. Mostly it starts at a place you’d call simple, very simple, but then they pattern it zealously; repeating, overlaying, looping the sequences, moving in and out of phase with each other and altering the time so that what maybe began as something you could teach to eight year olds, ends up more like Bach. A lot of maths, a lot of counting. Strangely virtuoso, for all its insistent aura of banality.
Vlatka sent me a great clip from YouTube in which John Cage performs a composition called Water Walk on some 1950's gameshow. As part of a very showbiz intro that Cage deals with really well, there's a big joke from the presenter concerning the various items that Cage will use to make the music, including a bathtub, a duck call, five radios, a vase of flowers, a pitcher, a soda-syphon etc and a grand piano. He asks Cage if he minds that some people in the audience might
laugh when they listen to the piece and Cage says 'No, that's OK, I think laughter is
preferable to tears'.
The music when it comes is great and his performance - deadpan, stopwatch in hand but somehow still relaxed - just amazing.
The UK Premiere of That Night Follows Day is this Friday and Saturday (18th and 19th May), in Birmingham as part of the Fierce Festival. I'm really looking forward to that. The piece is a collaboration between myself and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, and has a cast of seventeen children, between the ages of eight and fourteen. The set is by Richard Lowdon (Forced Entertainment) and the lights are designed by Nigel Edwards who has worked with my colleagues and I at Forced Ents for a very long time. The pictures here are by Phile Deprez.
Someone wrote a very nice blog entry following the first performances in Brussels the week before last. You can read it here.
You tell jokes to us.
You grade us. You tell us that we’ve worked hard, or that we have to work harder.
You save our drawings.
You say that Rome was not built in a day.
You say that silence is golden, that silence is important.
You sit by the bed.
You stand in the doorway.
You wait in the car.
You wait outside.
You teach us to swim.
You read to us about things that happened in a very far off, very distant galaxy.
You watch us when you think we aren’t looking.
You look at us with expressions that we can’t exactly read or properly recognise.
The whole tour list for 2007 is down below, where it says 'Read more...'. There are already more dates planned for 2008, and I'll try to add these here soon.
For more information about Victoria check out their website.
I’ve done a few very short stories now for this project by artist
Barbara Campbell. It's an on-going work in which she’s web-casting short
text-based performances each night for 1001 consecutive nights. She’s reached number 693 at this point – nearly two years work.
Each nights performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone who is
logged on to her website at the appointed time - sunset where she
happens to be. 100’s of different writers and artists have contributed
to her project – each writing a story (or stories) for her to perform.
The seed for each story in the project is a prompt word or phrase
selected by Barbara from journalists’ reports covering events in the
Middle East. She renders these prompts in watercolour and posts them on
her website. Participants then write a story using that day’s prompt as
inspiration. This is the one I did yesterday - a rather bleak tale, from the already bleak prompt line 'generally unsmiling' and these are the ones I did before, here, here and here. These other stories are also pretty bleak so you can see that I'm consistent.
There’s something quite exhilarating about the process of writing for the project – depending on
how your time-zone synchs with the one Barbara happens to be in you get
more or less time to write, and you get the prompt at different times
of day/night. The previous one I did (from the prompt 'wanted to get a good look') I was in the UK while Barbara
was in Australia. So I think I got the prompt at about 9pm and had to
complete the writing before I went to bed. The other contributions I
did were when I was in New York and Barbara (I think) was in Europe, so
I was getting the prompt mid-afternoon and having to turn the writing
around by midnight or so. For someone that travels so much it seems I get quickly confused by timezones.
I really like working against the clock as a writer and also on 1001
Nights Cast really enjoyed the fact of having to deal with some random
stimulus. Barbara always lets you know where the quotes she chooses
have come from but I never look at the larger news stories that she’s drawn
on until after I’ve finished the writing. There’s something about the
prompt – always a super-brief fragment - that’s very inspiring to work
with, a level of incompletion that’s highly generative.
There are also some really great stories at 1001 Nights Cast
from other people I know – from the writer/academic Adrian Heathfield,
the director Peter Petralia, performer
Cathy Naden (Forced Entertainment) and from the science fiction writer
M. John Harrison - as well as loads more by people that I don't know.
My friend Sara Bailles just did a story there too. You can search for
these other stories, and check out how to contribute to the project at http://1001.net.au
RSS feed
The UK Premiere of 
I’ve done a few very short stories now for this project by artist
Barbara Campbell. It's an on-going work in which she’s web-casting short
text-based performances each night for 1001 consecutive nights. She’s reached number 693 at this point – nearly two years work.
There’s something quite exhilarating about the process of writing for the project – depending on
how your time-zone synchs with the one Barbara happens to be in you get
more or less time to write, and you get the prompt at different times
of day/night. The previous one I did (from the prompt 'wanted to get a good look') I was in the UK while Barbara
was in Australia. So I think I got the prompt at about 9pm and had to
complete the writing before I went to bed. The other contributions I
did were when I was in New York and Barbara (I think) was in Europe, so
I was getting the prompt mid-afternoon and having to turn the writing
around by midnight or so. For someone that travels so much it seems I get quickly confused by timezones.