The eviscerated brownpaper bag carcass of a large McDonalds finds shelter by a low wall, the corpse disassembled in all directions, cold fries scattered like bones, those white plastic containers of dipping sauce that were her eyes, the foil lids peeled back on pools of dark congealing red. It is morning en route to the train station and elsewhere on the pavement a rain of crushed Tic Tacs has fallen, like a strange gift of the early sky.
Later, as the sunlight floods the glass sides of the long covered walkway between terminals, a single bird, incongruous, beautiful, flies its whole indoor length, tracing the same line as the travelator, skimming just below the white steel structure of the ceiling and just above the heads of the few bleary passengers who trundle luggage towards check-in. The bird is a straight line factored with a single undulation, a line drawn in the air, an articulation of pure direction, and opposite from yours.
*
Classic thunderstorm. The sky flickering on and off in great planes of white light. The rain and thunder sound like heavy trucks moving down below in the street. Here in this place, with the high windows and the long curtains/drapes the storm feels as much Dracula as it does real life. You pad to the bathroom after waking around 3am, barefoot, not turning on the lights because you don't want to ruin the scene, and the shapes of your belongings, the furniture and the unfamiliar landscape of the room are picked out in the flashes here and there. The suck and turbulence of the night wind at the partly open window throws the curtains in a maze of strange directions - panicked flapping, wrenching, twisting, inflating like a sail, breathing them in and out, yanking at the rings which bind them to the pole, the water of rain spitting in and out of the edges of the darkened, flashing aperture. When you stand at the window (heading back to the bed) and look down you see the rain sheeting the pavement and the car roofs, even the tall trees below you torque, wrench and knot in the gale, flimsy and helpless.
Starting next week I have a project Thirty-Nine Or So To Do at Tanzquartier Wien as part of their Giving (up) instructions programme which is subtitled 'On precarious instructions for action'. The work - evolved from and remixing my previous SMS project Surrender Control - involves a series of SMS instructions sent to subscribers/participants over the eleven-day duration of the project.
Announcement info:
TIM ETCHELLS (UK). Thirty-Nine Or So To Do.
Thur. 26 May – 5 June. Interactive SMS Project.
Senders and receivers of an SMS text message normally know one another personally; every mobile-phone number saved thus tells the story of a friendship, acquaintance, of trust in advance. In his project Thirty-Nine Or So To Do, Tim Etchells, director of the famous performance group Forced Entertainment, uses this individual aspect of SMS communication on a group of people who are unknown to him. Over a period of 11 days, Etchells sends SMS instructions to various participants – whispers them, as it were, into the ears of strangers. The messages range from simple instructions, such as 'go outside', to complex invitations, such as 'take a risk'. In the field of tension between intimacy and anonymity, a space develops in which our everyday life can be perceived anew in the interplay of the instructions of the game and individual responsibility.Registration from mid April by SMS to mobile phone number +43 664 660 13 13, code word SUBSCRIBE (limited number of participants).
Opening sequence for an Americanised TV show about some guys who are working to politicise the dead.
Bar late at night. Everyone at the table has had too much to drink.
Trouble is the fat guy says, they got so little profile, so little motivation and no organisation whatsoever.
What do you expect? says some newcomer rookie bearing tray full of drinks - the dead have nowhere to live..
Hey, says a jaded looking woman, we don't call them dead round here, we call them Deceased.
Fat Guy: Whatever. Don't mind her, bad day. The next round is on me... Their possessions get dished out to others, their properties get taken away from them..
Plus - (another rookie, this one a Latino) - you even try to get a lawyer, a cop or a social worker to speak to... the deceased and see how fast you get laughed out of the room.
Brunette With Attitude: "NO DOGS. NO DECEASED" I saw that sign.
Fat Guy: On top of that, on top of that even - most of them are confused.
Jaded Woman (laughing): Yeah. Worse than the schizos.
Rookie One: Whaddya mean?
Fat Guy: Most of these guys just don't know how the world works anymore.
Another Fat Guy: I never saw such cluelessness.
Rookie Two (Latino): PLUS the dead are getting shafted day in and day out on issues like intellectual property. It's basic stuff.
Rookie One: Underdogs?
Another Fat Guy: Those suckers make illegals look lucky.
Brunette With Attitude: So hard to get them motivated. And so hard to get them to think about the bigger picture.
Fat Guy: Some Deceased been that way a long time and they still can't see further than the accident or the fact their husband remarried so quick. Try getting them interested in Unionisation? Or a protest march of some kind? Forget about it.
*
Meanwhile, on another note, liking this from Lars Von Trier at a Cannes Press Conference for his horror movie Antichrist.
"I don't have to justify myself. I make films and I enjoy very much
making them. You are all my guests, it's not the other way round. I
work for myself and I do this little film that I'm now kind of fond of
and I haven't done it for you or the audience so I don't feel I owe
anyone an explanation."
Looking forward to seeing Young Jean Lee's performance The Shipment again next week in KunstenFestivaldesArts. I've been meaning for ages to write something about Young Jean. I saw her third piece Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven in Toulouse last year, at least a year after everyone else saw it, since it seemed to play in almost very festival of contemporary theatre I came across - usually a week before we arrived or a week after we left. Dragons.. was a response to the experience and representation of Korean people in America - it was strong, funny and playfully self-conscious. Her new work The Shipment is also about racial stereotypes, racism and representation esp, this time, in respect of African Americans. When I met her last year she was in the middle of a very tough workshopping process on the piece and had already junked one whole version of the it. She's since junked a second version too and the completed show is basically version three. What I find interesting about Young Jean (a Korean-American Shakespeare scholar who quit her research on the West Coast, moved to New York and wanted to make a theatre that didn't really seem to exist) is that in many ways she comes from outside the by-now well known patterns of contemporary devised performance. Her approach seems close to ours at times for sure -her writing and making processes are deeply collaborative, full of discussions, opportunities for interventions by the performers. I can also say that the mode of trying endless mixes, remixes, variations or versions of the material until coming up with something that seems to function also rings a bell from our own laborious processes! (We have a joke in the rehearsals often that our method is to try every bad idea first, slowly eliminating them from our enquries until we get to what's interesting.) Young Jean is also pretty obsessed with the role of the audience and with shifting the relationship between the work and those watching. What's different though is that Young Jean's work often takes place in or around the realm of the dramatic - and in the mix of what she does you're likely to find characters talking to each other, dramatic scenes and stories and at least a hint of the kind of representation that (out where Forced Ents have tended to live at least) you won't see too much of these days. Even a quick glance at Young Jean's work though and you see that it stays far from the zone of realism or well-made-plays. You aware that everything on stage exists inside one or more sets of quotation marks, and any reading you make of what's happening is of necessity an uneasy one - you're required to watch and read and to watch yourself watching and reading, and at the same time to watch the watching and reading of those around you in the auditorium. I saw The Shipment in New York when it opened at the start of the year and I really liked it - it's a brave and refreshing piece, a tight symphony of discomfort. And it's so great to see issues like racial and cultural identity taken on in this headlong, smart, self-conscious way. When you watch Young Jean Lee and her great group of performers get to work in this piece - blurring between stand up, fast forward narrative and sustained ironic/not-ironic drama - you get a hint of what's left inside the theatre machine, and a great reminder that we shouldn't leave politics to the realists.
Hitting Video - prologue video to Young Jean's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven can be seen here. There's a clip from the show here. Long conversation between Young Jean and Philip Bither of the Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis here.
My videos Down Time and Kent Beeson... are in the group show On Joy, Sadness and Desire at SMART Project Space in Amsterdam (Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, NL-1054 PD Amsterdam) along with work by Sebastian Diaz Morales, Mathilde ter Heijne, Mark Titchner, Iona Nemes, Freee and Pia Lindman. It runs until 28 June 2009. Opening times via the gallery website here. Installation shot above by Niels Vis 2009, all rights reserved.
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