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.."
"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.
Been looking at the most recent issue Christopher Hewitt's liveartwork DVD
which features video documentation from contemporary live art and
performance art. Issue Five has great material from Gary Stevens,
Stuart Brisley and Goat Island.
Another
good place to look for fragmentary Live Art remains these days seems to
be YouTube. I guess everything will be there before too long, at least
in more low-res/ stuttering form. I wrote here about a great John Cage clip
involving a performance on a 50's game show. More recently came across
three very smart and short videos by Swiss artist Raymond Signer, two
of them simple and funny interventions in landscape culled from a film
by Peter Liechti. You can see them here, here and here.
"Signer has been making his "temporary sculptures"--actions that
he documents with film and video since the 1970s. These events, which
can involve anything from amplified snoring to small rockets, are
usually short-lived, often funny and always cathartic..."
The rest of this article on Signer from Art in America by Gregory Volk here.
Visiting the hospital for blood tests. At a junction in the
corridor which somehow the flourescent lights don't seem to reach, the
lit up PEPSI drinks vending machine bears a handwritten sign that
reads:
OUT OF ORDER
SMELLS OF BURNING
*
A friend writes, describing a recent open-air gig/performance:
Sweaty. Hopelessly messy, I couldn't even recognise some of the
songs till we were well into them, strange feeling of ploughing on with
singing through the noise on trust that somewhere, somehow it can be
heard. We got good reactions.
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I also mentioned 
Three years ago, maybe four. We were in Munich on the final leg of the work-in-progress for 
Another
good place to look for fragmentary Live Art remains these days seems to
be YouTube. I guess everything will be there before too long, at least
in more low-res/ stuttering form. I wrote