Sunday at Arnolfini Four Days: A review in parts
OR
Writing: What a performance
Part 1: Premature Ejaculation. Stage Fright. Sunday 15th
Decaying, sticky fig sex, split open and screaming me down. Shrieks don’t come shrink
wrapped. Claw at the aggressively colourful painting with blind eyes – desperate to bounce
off the snare drum into the antelope tangent clouds [just perved on Rosemary’s page, she’s
riffing on a shoe.] THE FRUIT OF MY LOINS – is that a starter? Phrase makes me queasy, is
it from the Bible? Grim. Rosemary is maybe hyperventilating a little to my left. Something
seedy in the organic - unsavoury sweetness. Yummy mum. Sugar’s violent, there is naught
mild and meek about sickly sweet. Barthes? Carnal cake. Intrusive, abrasive syrupy
headaches. Augustus Gloop drowning in molasses. Perverted sweets. Kids high on ‘E’
numbers. The blue ones are the major baddies if I remember rightly. Colours brash as
sound. Which sense is best – you cannot shut your ears? [Unintelligible crossed out
scribbles] Avoid long words, I cannot spell. Nature with additives. Phallic gourds. Mrs
Stackpoole’s genderless helpless gummy bears, sexualised when she ripped off their heads
with her pervert yellow teeth.
What gobbledegook, Jesus. Standing in at last minute for Open Dialogues, we were set up
at the writer’s station - with some seriously classy paper and a lamp that at first felt studious
but soon interrogatory - kids trying on mama’s high heels. Or rather a performer caught on
stage not knowing the words, wearing someone else’s costume. Edwin Burdis’ The Fruit
Machine: An Opera in Five Parts passed in a fit of sweat and ‘frogspawn thought’ scribbles
(above.) Now I can barely remember the show - the experience of it completely eclipsed by
trying to wretch/wrench sensible words from a panicked, white noise blankness.
Maybe I cannot think in real-time?! When I respond to a piece, I respond to my notes and a
memory. Stepping out from a theatre, perhaps staggered, perhaps permanently changed
without quite knowing it yet, I can rarely mutter much more than ‘that was good’. It takes
form through osmosis. I let it settle. It seeps into my life and everything else I know and
feel. It grows and changes, it takes tangents. Watching something there’s a strange element
of passivity whereas recollecting is a conscious, dynamic process. Turning a mint over on
the tongue releases its freshness: it is in remembering that the colours come out and in our
relationship to performance that its meaning reveals itself. I have to live with it inside of me
for a while.
To respond is to reply, to answer even – how can you formulate a reply to a question when
you’re still listening? Perhaps I’m just a bad multi-tasker. NOTA’s format for capturing the
raw, pure retort excites me. I like the prospect of removing the muddying effect of the
world as well as the interactivity this brings between writer and performer. The capacity for
urgent, undigested proto-thoughts is thrilling - unfettered by the intensified subjectivity and
mental verbosity tangled up in hindsight. However that daft garbage about fruit loins doesn’t
represent a gut reaction – it’s the result of forcing something unfermented into language.
Can a gut reaction be articulated?
It’s almost certainly just me, but my thoughts are simply sludge at this point.… Sexualised
gummy bear anyone?!
Part 2: Fumbling in dark rooms. Thursday 19th
[per·for·mance: a display of exaggerated behaviour or a process involving a great deal of
unnecessary time and effort; a fuss OXFORD DICTIONARY]
When Four Days was four days gone I sat down to write this piece, with a head fogged from
excessive red wine. I spent three frustrating hours attempting to think about Glen Neath’s
Romcom and writing and produce just this (in THREE hours!):
If the whole world’s a stage where’s the rehearsal space? Life’s choca with missed cues and
forgotten lines. Writing in response to art however is deliberate – a polished production –
but wrapped up in its own practises, routines, toils and superstitions just like the art it sets
out to document. Writing can be the place that performance and life bleed into one another,
an extension of the stage and reminder of the world.
I want to write a review that reads like a washing machine cycle, tumbling sludgy,
instinctive reactions up against the deep set affection for a performance that returns to you
in dreams. These potent but amorphous things – the magical bi-products of considered
thinking about the best performances - are almost bodily and intangible. [I say ‘things’
because I’m truly stumped for a better word – I mean something more than emotions and
something less than thoughts.] These things struggle to find a true form in words. In writing
we are performing our struggle to express the unknowable, with verbs as props and
adjectives for costumes.
Kind of corny. A boy sat down opposite me with freckles, intense eyes and a mackintosh
(the unfashionable kind.)* There’s certainly something deliciously intimate about public
libraries, probably mostly inside my head. So… he sits with a crash, I look up and turn
instant beetroot because I cannot hide anything when hung-over to high hell.
He gets a packet of cheap chocolate bourbons and a scruffy notebook from his rucksack and
arranges them with self-aware ceremony. My heart skips a beat, I stare at the blank screen
and type nonsense by way of disguise, stealing glances as he stares out of the window, as
though looking out to sea. He chews his pencil and it couldn’t be more perfect that it’s a
pencil not a worn biro or a fountain pen. Rolls ciggies from the left and absent-mindedly
pulls at his sleeves. My diaries when I go backpacking sound lofty which I hate and try to
avoid… but can’t. This sounds tacky as fuck and I cannot figure out why. Performing
yesterday’s plays – new actors, same lines. Rutting on clichés laid out like minefields.
Anyway…
What is he actually doing? He probably writes three or four pensive sentences in three hours
but I want to read them and want them to change my world. What a performance, doesn’t
he have somewhere better to be? Don’t I have somewhere better to be… like in my bed,
recovering. Better still maybe we should both be in my bed. Who are we acting for, no-one
is watching, except this time I’m watching him – tentatively – and he must know it. Writing
about the arts for me has always come with an element of self-consciousness. I’m aware of
my naivety and I’m forever under-informed and thus over-performing. Labouring. Nothing
worse than over-acting. Recently I’ve started to improvise and celebrate that naivety but
can never get free of performativity. I get carried away with the sound of syntax – pure
vanity prima ballerina. Whirling dervish words dance loose from what I want them to
communicate. CASE IN POINT.
I digress…
The week before a certain Andrew and I exchanged numbers in the very same library after
he bought me coffee, which is revoltingly Richard Curtis and all, except that I had lied
myself into fancying him. Cheap Bourbons on the other hand isn’t playing ball, obtusely
staring out the window. I ask him if he could watch out for my stuff by way of making
conversation and he tells me he is leaving. That’s it. You wouldn’t call it an incident let alone
an encounter and if I hadn’t been trying and failing to think about Romcom and writing, I
probably wouldn’t even remember it. As it is it is I’m here - perhaps trying to stick square
pegs in round whatsits - and it strikes me as bitterly sad.
Because forlorn is a sadder word than distraught. It bruises rather than draws blood.
Because the saddest love stories are those never even start. Because life is the unreported
incidents that don’t make it into grand narratives. Regret is the hardest pain to bear,
stripped of nobility like stubbed toes that sting but don’t sear. The ache of love and life’s
promise disappointed.
*Confession: I invented the freckles and the coat. I only remember his eyes but couldn’t
write that, for fear of sounding cheesy. He has become a character in my performance and
as such, strangely, he belongs to me. In writing him I own him, though he has become
some non-existent someone else and what I’d have liked most was to belong to him.
Jodie Hawkes & Peter Phillips (Search Party). 4 Days: Arnolfini, 2013
Photo: Justin Yockney
In Romcom, two performers enact a relationship directed by instructions received through
headphones with no rehearsal or even awareness of what they are walking into. The staging
(lights, soundtrack, video projections) is controlled through an ipod too. Three machines run
the show, human agency removed and what we experience feels somehow both inevitable
and arbitrary. They crash against one another, blundering through a script which would
seem opaque on paper but becomes extraordinarily fecund, open ended and contradictory.
Waves colliding with the cliffs. I saw three ROMCOM’s, each entirely unique, the stars
aligning at different points, moments getting totally lost and the resonance in certain
pockets being born of total chance - pomegranate pip instants of delightful improvisation
and the potential of language to mean different things in different mouths . Glen Neath sat
with his head in his hands on the edge of his seat with no idea what would unfold from what
he had pre-ordained.
It is an easy and satisfying to associate ROMCOM’s removal of agency with the power of
love – alongside rage, the emotion in which we are the most blind and powerless. More
troubling and touching is the schism that arises between the inexorable and the
unpredictable. When I watched ROMCOM(s) I laughed but in hindsight it makes me sad.
The implied meaninglessness rendered from a loss of control, as though all life was spent
fumbling in a dark room, injuring one another without realising, missing the mark, growing
apart without being able to explain why or when you’ve stopped loving someone. Everything
hinges around infinite, miniscule variables. ROMCOM whispers with regret for
miscommunication and failed expression. Our language is clumsy. We are blunt. Forlorn is a
sadder word than distraught.
Part 3 A hopelessly inconclusive, anti-climactic finale, Sunday 29th.
Writing and documenting are inescapably associated with control, with colonialism, with the
oppressor, with the will asserted in defining and categorising the world. Criticism too carries
the arrogant assertion of understanding and ownership. We are confined within our own
means of expression and the rigid fortresses of language. In committing words to paper we
are making deliberate, decided irrevocable marks. Writing envies the fleetingness of
performance as the visual arts have previously sought to emulate the instant impact of
music.
Contemporary culture has long disregarded an insistence on ‘disciplines’ with all forms
borrowing and bleeding into one another. Why does writing need to remain so static on the
page?
Oh god, I have meandered and waffled for 1,814 words – there should be some punchy
pithy conclusion, or at least a witty closing statement to round us off. I have jammed a load
of half formed, brash statements together, coming no closer to a new way of writing about
performance.
As Forest Fringe’s Paper Stages playfully tousles notions of what a book can mean, NOTA
conversely look for a writing that is alive and of the moment. In knowing that I failed to rise
to the challenge set by their empty writing desk, forcing words and focusing solely on the
temporality element implicit in the task, I asked Mary Paterson about her aspirations for the
project…
“NOTA is a complex and subtle project that has grown out of Open Dialogues' work in
proximity to performance over a number of years. It's a way of responding to the role of
writing and writers - the performance of writing in public, the temporality of writing in
relation to the live event, the promise of note taking, mark making and gesture as a
movement towards writing. It builds on the concept of criticality rather than criticism - on
the idea of a shifting, contingent relationship between writer and subject. For Rachel Lois
and me, NOTA is an experiment and an open question. We are interested in writing that is
porous, that is open to interpretation and speculation, and that does not attempt to replace
or stand in for the live event.”
I’m in love with the idea of porous text. Text that frays at the edges. A review that people
write over the top of – like the lewd scribbles in public loos. Text that reads like a washing
machine cycle, whatever that may come to mean.