Catching Up: Part Two

(Written last Friday night)

I'm on a train now, back to London after spending the evening in Brighton watching my friend Marion perform in a piece she also wrote and directed (this is starting to sound like some awful travelogue. I have a banging headache, it;s late and I want to go to bed, so what better time to work on the blog? None better time.

So...another major thing that has happened recently was the SPILL Festival for which I was a volunteer throughout. Despite the sometimes tedious experiences it entailed (volunteers always get the lamest jobs) I met lots of cool people (fellow volunteers, mainly, but also a few of the artists and the Pacitti Company team who are thoroughly nice chaps) and got to see the shows I helped in for free, which was a major plus as I have approximately zero money at the moment.

I haven't quite honed my reviewing skills so I won't go into each show in depth, but as you may expect from festivals it was a decidedly mixed bag; some highlights (That Night Follows Day and Orgy of Tolerance for me, even though some people seem to hate hate hate the latter), some that are so-so (Void Story and Porcelain Project), and some I thought were duds (sorry Aftermaths: A Tear in the Meat of Vision, you might get 3 stars from Lyn Gardner but certainly not from me).

And, being the sort of person I am, its the duds that I find myself thinking of the most, that have stayed with me, also because now that I am an "emerging artist" I find myself facing an uphill struggle of trying to find platforms and funding for my own work. I may not have liked Aftermaths (I thought it was repetitive, and found its use of horror genre aesthetics ridiculous rather than disturbing) but at least I could recognise an element of artistry in it, a structure, and a visual/textual language that the artist had created and obviously thought about. An effort was put into it. The last piece from the festival I saw, however - I Feel Love! - felt like it had been slapped together at the last minute, the theatrical equivalent of a first year Uni student stocking up on red bull and coffee and writing a few hours before it's due in (I'm sure it wasn't, but still, that's how it seemed).

Taking as its inspiration the dance marathons held in America in the 1920s and 30s, it featured the artist, on a podium, in Soho Square, half naked, shuffling his feet (calling it dancing would be too much of a stretch) to an endless loop of Donna Summer's I feel Love. For six hours. Now, this may have just worked if the artist had made any effort whatsoever to engage with the task at hand or the audience in any way. But nothing. A bit of online research tells me the artist was performing in character, an exhibistionist pron star character. No sign of that. He looked compeltely bored, like he wanted to be somewhere else, like he was thinking about whether or not he forgot to turn the heating off before leaving the house, or what he might like for dinner that night.

Perhaps he was having a bad day, and it was all meant to pan out differently, I don't know. But if you give me (as an audience member) nothing, what right have you to ask for anything in return?

And it's this that bothers me about a lot of shows I see. It's nhot enough to just have an idea and then that's it; not enough to say 'I like dance marathons so I'm going to have one on my own for people to watch', or 'drama is essentially play so let's everyone have a game of musical chairs' (I'm thinking back to the scratch night here), or 'lets describe a non-existent performance, just listing things about it, and then the audience can just imagine it ' (I'm looking at YOU, Forced Entertainment). You then have to do something with that idea, develop it, play with it, challenge it, emerse yourself completely in it and explore what else you can do with it.

It's like: 'Yeah...and?'

I strongly belivee in the death of the author, in challenging and provoking audiences to actively respond to a piece and even help create it, through their presence, during the live moment of performance itself, authoring it for themselves. But I think there is an implicit relationship of trust between performer or artist and audience, a mutual exchange and investment in the piece - the audience can become active only if the artist has compelled them to do so through creating something that sparks the imagination and interest, something that the artist also cares about deeply and passionately.

I feel bad now, dissing other people's work. I'm not perfect myself - I think The Failure Project could be improved in this regard, and hopefully one day I'll get the chance to show an hour-long version of the piece and really delve into my ideas and questions in a more complex way. But I am trying.