The stage is a dip. We're looking down a hill of rich green grass and the performers walk slowly form the bottom at the start of the show, coming up the hill to speak with us, the audience, as one might arrive to a picnic and greet friends who've arrived already and  settled in some nice spot. We can see them coming for a long time. Once they've said hi they turn around and walk back down again. There is some kind of house-structure at the bottom, with plaster peeling on the walls.

Later they are dancing outside the house-structure and after a while I'm making gestures to the performers that certain people should hide or lie down. It seems important that we get a scene with one person alone. On-stage it's the regular crew of Forced Entertainment, with the addition of Franko B who's whole presence is not surprisingly very different than the rest, and who I find myself watching too much. At one point he's watering a tree, the watering can containing some kind metallic glitter. Its great but kind of distracting.

Later still everyone seems to be playing-dead - corpses strewn around on the grass - and a couple of performers, down there at the bottom of the hill are slowly dragging the bodies from off the grassy slope and off-stage. It looks like the scene of a massacre, something almost rural. I guess related to images we saw in the Deutsche Historische Museum last week showing Nazi slaughter of whole Czech villages where they suspected resistance fighters might be based. In the performance there's music playing. Its very moving - the scene with the slow removal of the bodies from the hillside down there at the distance and I know we're onto something - but the music is something vaguely ethnic and lamenting and its too much, too suitable, too cloying somehow. I'm yelling on to the stage and gesturing that they should find something 'more rock, or maybe rap.. something with energy' to counteract the tone. Clipse would be good maybe. Or Patti Smith. It will be moving anyway, I am yelling as people onstage rifle thru CD's to find something else,  we don't need the sad music, lose the music. It will be more moving if the music cuts against the scene.

When I wake I'm still half in the dream, trying to work out if the sight-lines to a descending hill of this sort might make such a setting practical or not.

Georges Perec from Species of Spaces:

Staircases. We don't think enough about staircases.

Nothing was more beautiful, in old houses, than the staircases. Nothing is uglier, colder, more hostile, meaner in today's apartment buildings.

We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?

In London all next week with Forced Entertainment at Artsadmin's Toynbee Studios in the East End, presenting two performances from the back-catalogue. Its pretty fascinating to be going back to these, and a rare chance to catch them again (or for the first time) if anyone's in London. Do come and see.

End of the week is First Night (2001) - a kind of vaudeville gone-wrong, all rigid smiles, failed magic and sequins. Its on the very dark side of funny I guess - a nice reminder of the place we were in before the relatively easy-going attitude of shows like Bloody Mess (2004) and The World In Pictures (2006). Start of the week goes even further back in time to Dirty Work (1998) which is very stripped-down minimal, almost virtual theatre or cinema even, at least in the sense that nothing happens as such, everything is described/summoned in language. I guess this piece has a close relation to some of the things that I've been working with in video - especially the piece Starfucker in which white text titles appear in sequence on a black screen, each line an image involving some Hollywood star in the midst of some unexpected or inexplicable event or scenario.

Tom Cruise on an operating table.
David Soul in drag.
Michelle Pffiefer with her foot raised, just about to place it on a step.

You can read the short programme note I wrote for the re-presentations of First Night and Dirty Work down here. More on the line-up for the Artsadmin season at Toynbee, booking info etc here. Oh yes. Forced Entertainment now has a myspace page. Don't forget to make the group your friend. Everything is apparently internet now.

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Best Tom Waits image of the week:

A violin case lying wide-open, broken-backed filthy and discarded on the pavement and half-filled with rain water, somewhere down the way here on Rheinsburger Strasse.

Late afternoon, once the obligatory downpour is done, we see the Thomas Hirschhorn at Arndt & Partner. A sign on the door says its not suitable for kids but on my quick inspection I miss the images that are *really* unsuitable (colour inkjets of internet pictures showing  grisly corpses, probably in Iraq - faces shot to pieces, entrails wrapped around sticks, limbs hacked off). We're in there already before I realise.

Its a good piece I think - long thick lengths of cardboard constructed 'tree trunk'/ intestine/pipeline making their way thru all the rooms, obstructing ones progress, a series of large fireplaces spew detritus of timber and other stuff all over the floor making progress even harder, books are piled here and there, whilst smashed phones and computer elements (screens, keyboards, mice) are all parcel-taped to the walls here and there and what clear space remains is scrawled all over with marker-pen graffiti in red black and blue. A huge density to the text itself. Slogans, out-of-context words, mad phrases, many repeated so often that they become scrawl or meaningless scribble. Much of it is ersatz-political press-release-ese; phrases that seem to float around the war in Iraq - 'containable situation', 'sustainable democracy scenario' and 'regional interests'.

The rest is less nice talk - more bitter rumour, rant, paranoia and accusation; "Can't get in. Can't get out. Can't get in. Can't get out. Can't get in. Can't get out" it repeats at one place. In another spot who-ever has been writing stuff has given up and simply tried to cross out a wall-mounted clock using spray paint, a big crude black X running right across its face. In yet another there's a scrawled version of the sign you often see in bijou antique shops - 'If You Break It You Pay For It'.

I guess that just about sums it up with Iraq.

M. came out saying 'bleak, bleak, bleak..' but he seemed to get something from it.

S. for his part took one look at the first set of extremely grisly images (taped at intervals along the twisting tree-truck/pipe-line structures) and looked back to me.

"Dad, these pictures are Horrid." he said.

I laughed (trying not to make it worse..). "Yes. They are.. Maybe don't spend too long looking at them.."

"OK" he said and with no sign of trouble, dismissing the pictures with the single word "Horrid" he went back to the game that he'd already invented, playing stepping-stones along the cardboard circles that Hirschhorn has taped at intervals on the floor. Amazing. I found something very resilient, very optimistic in that. Later we read some parts of the text together and talked about it. All fine.

What I liked about the piece is that its hard not to be in it - you are in it in fact, as soon as you step through the door. It surrounds you with itself, with the knots of the situation, with the horror of it, with the discourse around it, with the impossibility to escape and with the literal problem of navigating a space that is extremely barricaded, made difficult to pass through. I'd seen a related piece by Hirschhorn in New York some while ago (a year or more?) and hadn't liked it that much - I think because that one so dwelt (and relied) on the same kind of war-images from Iraq, screaming with a voice invoking their authority and authenticity, but also, in a troubling way, underscoring their redundancy. In this more recent piece (Stand Alone it's called) the reliance on the images is not so great, though they're there in the background, like a serious toothache.  Instead the experience; ugly, disconcerting, rather total and immersive, is as much about space and language, about ones physical presence as a body/thinker/witness through language as it is about some kind of confrontation with 'the truth' or 'the evidence'.

^{The image is one of several of Stand Alone at Hllr's photoset on Flickr. Some rights reserved (see here for info).}