Yearly Archives: 2009

In the morning I hear firecrackers and late in the evening too. It puzzles me as I don’t know of any festivals going on at the moment. I asked my composer friend why people are setting of firecrackers and he explained that in the villages people set off firecrackers to celebrate the completion of various stages of construction: the foundations, the walls, the roof. Each stage is also an opportunity to invite the neighbours to a celebratory meal. So in this culture, each house is also an exercise in community building. A wall can bring people together as well as separate them.

The frequency of the firecrackers in this small village suggests that the building boom hasn’t stopped here.

I’ve just arrived in Beijing and am holding jet lag at bay with the western food I bought en route from the airport. I’m installed in one of the Bei Gao Studios (BG3) that are run by the Red Gate Gallery.

The studios are in Fei Jia Cun, a village not far from the airport, beyond the 5th Ring of the city – that means far out from the centre. It’s a quiet place full of artists’ studios and galleries like the Imagine Gallery that’s directly opposite my space. I’m still figuring out how the whole artists’ compound scenario meshes with the local village and its inevitable building projects undertaken by men in flip flops and slip on loafers.

My studio is dusty and grungy and yet exciting precisely because it isn’t pristine. There is plenty of floor space to work in, lots of random bits of furniture and the detritus of past residents to make possible the construction of an imaginative architecture within the space. The floor is concrete so it will demand a particular kind of response if I’m to survive physically but these restrictions are also stimuli.

What will I do?

Want to suggest something?

Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who has been mapping how different political affiliations are the products of very different ethical systems. This article caught my attention because I’ve been aware that my interest in bodies and buildings is a that the relationship between them is a metaphor for the negotiation between individuals and the systems (groups, institutions, families, nations) with which they interact.

Following research in India, Haidt

realized that “the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability, which is very important in the absence of good central governance. But if the goal is creativity, scientific insight and artistic achievement, these traditional societies pretty well squelch it. Modern liberalism, with its support for self-expression, is much more effective. I really saw the yin-yang.”

While Haidt is a liberal, he doesn’t think the solution is that everyone should adopt his worldview

“I see liberalism and conservatism as opposing principles that work well when in balance,” he says, noting that authority needs to be both upheld (as conservatives insist) and challenged (as liberals maintain). “It’s a basic design principle: You get better responsiveness if you have two systems pushing against each other. As individuals, we are very bad at finding the flaws in our own arguments. We all have a distorted perception of reality.”

So while I usually make work that speaks for the individual making his or her own niche in relation to the structure, I know a structure needs to exist for the individual to make their relation to it.

As Haidt says

Look at the way the word ‘wall’ is used in liberal discourse. It’s almost always related to the idea that we have to knock them down.
“Well, if we knock down all the walls, we’re sitting out in the rain and cold! We need some structure.”

I arrived in Skerries yesterday to see what our installation of twelve Tattered Outlaws films look like. From the Skerries tower you can see the Martello Tower on Shenick’s Island, so I’m reminded straight away that however solitary each tower seems, it is an echo of another tower. It is part of a family that share a structural DNA, however the vagaries of history may have shaped its members in different ways.

We’ve persuaded the council to clean out the layers of bird droppings from the tower but it’s still a rough environment with scaffolding supporting the rotting ceiling and floor.

Dan has been working with Pickle to install the screens, stairs and viewing platform so that when I arrive, I can climb from the gloom of the ground floor to the viewing platform and be dazzled by the unexpected brightness of screens. Dan has designed such an elegant and simple construction that the screens seem to grow out of the damp floor like high-tech mushrooms. That’s a good thing.

It was wonderful to be able to show the work to a variety of people today: for many the excitement of the project lies in the opportunity to be inside the towers and to see what the other towers look like. It occurred to be that the towers are a bit like the areas subconscious – a repository of stories with not quite understood associations, present but mysterious. Reading the towers as an unconscious helps me make sense of the place of the dancing bodies on the towers. I think the movement can communicate the less rational associations of the towers, their strangeness and the permission they, as outlaw buildings, give people to shelter the outlaw aspects of their consciousness.

We’ve had to dismantle the installation now to protect the screens from damp and damage until July when the exhibition opens properly. There are still jobs to do, as Dan’s list suggests, but we know it can work.

Tonight, after the curtain calls, a child splashed in the water onstage, near where the barking dogs were chained, by the mangled car where the Andy Warhol lookalike had finished the show, the blood where the white horse shifted nervously, the puddles where the cast has slit each others throats in decorous fall and rise – all between giant framing quotation marks. She picked up the basketball and I wondered what to make of it.

Match made an impact in Vancouver it seems. The Vancouver Sun picked it out as a ‘perfect example’ of the programme’s ‘arty sport films or sporty art film’.

There was something illicit about seeing such intimate physical contact between two men in a competitive setting.

Meanwhile in Holyoke, on the other side of the American continent, Matthew and I performed the live version of the piece, part of an evening of Irish work called Irish Cream, which despite its title was a selection of interesting contemporary dance from Ireland. As well as Match, the programme included Rex Levitates’ ‘Shared material on dying‘ and Legitimate Bodies’ ‘Hanging in there’.

I wondered what these aesthetically, stylistically and conceptually different pieces might communicate about contemporary Irishness, particularly as they were gathered under a title that suggests sickly inebriation or a tiger toe-tapping extravaganza. When we introduced the work to a group of school children in an afterschool club, the common theme that emerged was conflict: Match’s gladatorial combat, Shared Material’s subtle violence, and Hanging in there’s post-conflict resolution strategies. I feel a particular kinship too to the reticence of Liz’s piece: its suggested violence is restrained and all the more shocking for its emergence from the fluid movement style that characterises much of her work.

Holyoke itself was a strange place. Birthplace of volleyball, host of the second largest St Patrick’s Day festival in the US, it was one of the first planned industrial towns. Its industries are mostly gone now, leaving a lot of empty factory buildings and a downtown that is bleak and populated by working class Puerto Ricans. The gigantic mall across the road from our Holiday Inn has sucked much of the life from the city centre it seems.

There are plans to use the arts as a vehicle for regenerating the downtown. The Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts who invited us are planning to reopen a big theatre there. I saw all of the warehouse space by the canals and thought what wonderful artists’ spaces they could make.

But I did wonder what we were doing jetting in and out of the city. I worried that we weren’t making a meaningful engagement with the place, didn’t have time to understand the context in which we were performing. Matthew reminds me that these brief introductions can be the start of unexpectedly fruitful relationships and I’m sure that’s the case – but I’d prefer to give more thought to helping those long term relations form.

PS

I found this bog entry which suggested that there was more going on behind the scenes at MIFA than we realised at the time

I’ve been at home for over a month and thinking about what it would be like to make more work here. I’ve started to think about being Artist in Residence in Waltham Forest, by which I mean, I’ve been starting to look at the Borough in which I live and see the stories and ideas that its people and places convey. Part of the reason for thinking about Waltham Forest in this way is to decrease the necessity for me to travel so much. And it’s a good time to reflect on the possibilities here as the borough has the focus of Olympic development turned on it.

Meanwhile, the Council is developing a new arts strategy that should give some focus and may provide some resources for the arts in the borough. I’ve been trying to identify potential rehearsal spaces in Walthamstow (keeping wealth in the borough is how the council could think about it) but so far unsuccessfully. So Hackney’s economy will profit from my work.

Out of this thinking about what could be done in Waltham Forest, an idea emerged. Some people mentioned the empty Woolworth’s sites in the borough and I thought what fun it would be to programme an evening of performance events from Waltham Forest under the title of Pick’n’Mix. With choreographers like Kim Brandstrup and Tom Dale in the borough it could be an eclectic mix – and Matthew Bourne grew up here (and appropriately, I was a Liquorice Allsort in his version of the Nutcracker).

I’m chasing permission to use the Woolworths and wondering how to make it work, but I’m excited that we could make it happen and that the empty space could be full of unexpected dance and performance.

This month, as part of the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver, Match is being shown in an art installation/film festival called ContainR (because the installation is made of shipping containers). The theme is the relation between dance and sport on film.

When I watch rugby and soccer on TV now (usually when I’m at the gym, let’s be honest), I’m struck by how varied, dynamic and quite beautiful the camera work is in the live broadcasts. The drama of the physicality is enhanced by a very cinematic (particularly action-movie) portfolio of camera angles that shift from close up to epic wide shot in a flash.

The Guardian and the BBC have run pieces on how artists are reusing the shops that have been closed in the recession. It seems to work primarily for visual arts projects but I’m sure there’s potential here for performing arts too.

What heartens me is not only the artistic appropriation of the failed commercial space but the positive reporting of it. It suggests that there’s a space for artistic projects that make delightful the dreary, that rescue, in some way, the spaces that are at risk.

A small cheer and loud encouragement.

I spent a few days in Paris this week at the invitation of Le Centre Culturel Irlandais. There’s the possibility of bringing Niche there but the question is where exactly. The Centre is beautifully situated, just behind the Pantheon, with a courtyard space in which Rex Levitates has already shown work. However, I’m not sure that Niche would be best presented in that environment.

I considered heading for the suburbs but instead I set off for the 10th arrondissement, a multicultural district that includes the Gare du Nord, and which has been the focus of regeneration in the past few years. As soon as I got out of Stalingrad metro I felt I was in Niche territory:

I was heading for a new venue called 104, a former Municipal Funeral Service factory where offices, stables, a registry office, workshops, a canteen, a hairdresser’s, a polisher, accommodation for staff on call, warehouses for poles and curtains, all coexisted in a huge classically designed space. It never had any dead bodies on site though. It’s being restored as a place where artists work in residence for the specific purpose of making their process porous to their public. It’s a turbo charged, highly resourced (for how long?) embodiment of what I’ve wanted to do with the Residency in Dublin but didn’t quite manage. Maybe 104 will let me try again?

Below, by the way is a picture of the ramp for the carriages or hearses to drive up from the stables below.

Nearby, the Jardin d’Eole is such a new green space that it doesn’t appear on Google Maps yet except in the pictures posted there. It’s got an obvious performance space with steps for an audience to sit on and the backdrop of construction to borrow. Maybe, maybe…

Walking from Rue d’Aubervilliers along the canal I found the very Berlin-like Usine Ephemere. Very cool, urban, graffitied but no obvious space for Niche…

Space is not a problem around the Bibliotheque Nationale. Its vast decking would be easy to perform on and could do with appropriating to some human scale activity. At the moment, people seem to scurry across the vast open space like insects. But it was cold and maybe it’s a vast sun deck and party zone in the summer. Maybe?

I photographed Notre Dame because I was in Paris, it was sunny and the building is beautiful. But now I remember it was the architecture the Hunchback negotiated as his home, his Niche in an inhospitable and uncomprehending social environment.

There’s a blog on the Guardian website that gives some background on the art scene in Paris, whether it has an ‘underground’ and what relationship there is between centre and periphery there. The debate in the comments is quite animated.