Post 28: Free Jazz: "Of course you should"

And so I ask, "Should I go?" and the reply comes, "Of course you should--if only to be taken closer to the  point of saturation where crystals start forming." So I do.

photo by Andy Newcombe

Everything dissolves into an elemental crush where new things are formed. 

Parker/Edwards/Prevost. The only thing you can title such an event.  What else would you call it? The great dissolve? Who would come to that?-- Although that is exactly what we experience. 

Bang! No warm-up. With players of this standard we are straight into the rough cut diamond where the inherent quality of the gem already supersedes most finished product. 

Parker splinters arpeggios like splitting hairs for a cosmic purpose, Edwards, his bow shredded before he even begins, already in orbit. Within minutes his double bass becomes a waterfall, sweat pouring down the strings.  We are here to be reminded of something. Prevost's drums something like a Sioux battle cry. First set finishes with Evans thrumming a flattened seventh beneath Parkers long riff. A generous 40 minutes.


Set 2 begins with an axel grind from contrabass, a beehive thrumming. Sax splinters the sky, before they all take a sigh and unfold into a slow release of dioxides in purple air. What does this mean? As the bees keep thrumming and Prevost's rolling drums force muscle between cymbal clangs, a crevasse opens and the earth shifts, dancing into canyon walls. 

A simple, melodic riff; then bull ants chase the double bass whilst cymbals swat and clash. All the while Parker's sax teases us with songs a paintbrush might sing. Until it all explodes and we know no bird or beast is singing this. Edwards again like a nervous gnat worrying at the strings. The way they give over to each other. Then a subtle plucking, a dolls' house serenade. Airplanes and shuffling stones. Db and drums a pigeon pair. 


Do I pay enough to hear these people? I hardly think so. Two glasses of wine are more expensive than the gig. But hey, I see Edwards come over to a table of friends at the break with a job lot of champagne, ready to pop and pour. And so, the liquor is the diamonds to our listening. All of us, silked and smoothed to listen, to perform the listening that is playing.

Edwards finishes like a lost dowager, sweeping garments through the gardens of Versailles, some sort of anachronistic battle between Marie Antoinette and the beehive. 


It reminds me that generosity might just save the universe. 

Evan Parker/John Edwards/Eddie Prevost Trio, Cafe Oto, London, July 28

https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/evan-parker-john-edwards-eddie-prevost-trio/

c. Z Soboslay 2015.


with thanks to Nick Tsiavos for the prompt 'to go'--and the beautiful 'crystals' image, from which all else flowed...

POST 27: Postman Pat

My children grew up with Postman Pat, riding his red van over gently sloping hills, delivering the daily mail with a bumbling reliability.

Now, there is Parcel Pete:

View in browser   SEND A PARCEL RESOURCES DEPOTS

Congratulations zsuzsanna You’re now a member of the ipostparcels squad! To make sure you stay in tune with the rest of the team, Pete would like to know just a little bit more about you, that way he can do his best to send tailored offers directly to you. Take a few moments and give Pete a helping hand today, and you can enjoy: Personal and Exclusive Discount Codes Pete’s Loyalty Programme Exciting Competitions Free download guides for SME’s

Anyone who has read Post 14: the strange case of the disappearing bus, will know the heavy irony of being sent a 'welcome note' from Parcel Pete. Yep--the courier who disappeared. Or is that, never appeared. iPost didn't want to know a hoot about me that day, but it still likes to welcome you to 'family' after an incredibly distressing 9 hours.

Just like a family?


c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 26: To (en)gender courage: Shubbak

(EN)COURAGE AND (EN)GENDER

More from the Shubbak Festival.

Badke; and When the Arabs used to dance..

When the Arabs Used to Dance; photo: Agathe Poupeney

Four men, in a grid pattern, move like cats licking their own tails. They swivel their hips, pout their lips. Again and again, moving forward,  pouting and provoking, jerking, grating. 

At times the movements are sharp; the shadows on their faces, their faces with 5-o'clock shadows, are dark, heavy, challenging. At other times, some (not all) achieve a serpentine grace. They are women in men's bodies, are they? They are dancing in a way that honours women. So passionate, so beautiful, shirts on, shirts off. Is this an attempt to understand what it is to be woman?

The final 15 minutes broadcasts Hollywood behind them: the pouting belles, the wiggling hips, the ogling men, the American idea of Arab exoticism in the 1960s.  The whole piece changes tone. The dancers exaggerate lustfulness, almost mocking themselves. It becomes high camp; it becomes a different piece. 

Then choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb leaps from the audience to bow with his dancers. His red eyeglasses gleam, his tight shirt brightens the stage. Ah. Would it had not ended like this. Retrospectively, the show becomes an example of high camp. To my mind, it had been much more subtle, beautiful, challenging.

C de la B's Badke is like a street revelry spun on stage, a celebration of a wild folk dance practiced mainly in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Except there are moments of exquisite pain, like a rift in time, opening to isolation, or historical violence. A gay couple court each other--one more aggressive, the other shy: dangerous, an alleyway; too many looking. The performance is as powerful for  its  behind-the-scenes preparations as for the fire it brings to the stage: the ongoing mentoring of young Palestinian dancers by the Belgian C De La B. 

Joy, lust, passion, and pain. 

Meeting-grounds.

Badke: Ballet C de la B. Photo: Danny Willems

text c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 25: Life and art: the enemy within

I am watching Cordon, a reasonable-standard thriller from Belgium, playing on BBC 4.

It works with the scare tactics usual to this genre: a series of rapid deaths occur, a virus is suspected, the Government  identifies ‘patient zero' as an Afghani refugee. A whole region of the city is cordoned off, thousands trapped inside. Central characters have lovers trapped on the inside. A Lord of the Flies situation grows inside the cordon: both the best and worst of people arises.

And then the twist: two local medical researchers seem to have died of the virus before the Afghani came down with any symptoms. By episode 3 of 10 it’s already obvious that the canker was released A) as part of a terrible experiment in social control, B) as self-aggrandisment in the medical and political arena; or C), by not wanting to admit a mistake in protocol has taken place. Any or all are possible. The programme is violent and people are cruel. Some lives are expendable; whilst you can guess whose are not.  By Episode 4, it's not yet quite certain Who's on first, Watt's on second or third in the guilty stakes, but it hardly matters: it's already obvious that the real canker is not the virus arrived from another country, but the enemy within. 

In a way, it doesn’t matter what happens now in Episdoes 9 and 10.  It doesn't matter whether the acting or the script improves or becomes even more predictable. Really, the narrative is about someone playing with our fear of outsiders, the alien, and whether those breeding the canker will ever look at the consequences of their actions.

So what is this moral tale? I guess I will watch Episode 10, but I'm sure to be disapppointed—just as disappointed as when I read of the consistent failure  of logic and compassion for refugees both here and back home.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 24: 'Refugee Tales'

"If ministers are to “start work on plans to identify innovative efficiencies and reforms, delivering the remaining consolidation over the next four years” (Report, 21 July), can we suggest that the Home Office saves substantial costs by ending the inhumane and unjust practice of indefinite detention for immigration purposes? People are locked up, without trial, for an indefinite period, for no more than an administrative convenience. This practice costs the taxpayer £166m a year, £75m of which is spent on locking people up who are then just released into the community."

Suzanne Fletcher

Chair, Liberal Democrats for Seekers of Sanctuary 

The Guardian, Letters

Sunday 26 July 2015 20.07 BST

WALKING

http://refugeetales.org/events/

The Refugee Tales was dreamed up by a consortium of academics and writers, and whilst never  never quite leaving aside that slightly bookish feel, is nonetheless an  example of concerned citizens putting their shoes on and walking for what they believe.

The event followed the actual path of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a nine-day pilgrimage to show  solidarity with Refugees and Detainees. There were stopovers each night along the trail, with readings from authors such as Iain Sinclair and Ali Smith, and concerts playing to appreciative crowds, some of whom marched the whole way from Dover to Crawley,  others who caught trains to single venues.  It is annexed to the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group (GWDG).

TALKING

In Australia, ‘Welcome Dinners’ are a different forum for ordinary citizens to take action in ways that match their need to show they care.

https://www.facebook.com/TheWelcomeDinnerProject?fref=ts

PUBLISHING

"One of the refugees tried to explain to me what life was like in the transit centre after long periods in detention: 'You become domesticated, like an animal inside a cage. You think they are fine. They look normal, they seem healthy but they could not survive in nature, and that is like us now. We become like that. Mentally, we are not fine.'

An ethnic Rohingya refugee told me, 'In Burma, the government shoots us. Here, they kill us mentally.' "

Elaine Pearson, The Guardian, Monday 20 July 2015 06.50 BST

Elaine Pearson is the Australia director at Human Rights Watch. Follow her on Twitter @pearsonelaine

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 23: Faith and Trust.

Company Nacera Belaza, Into the Night.  Shubbak Festival, Sadler's Wells, Thursday 23 July.

ref. Post 22:  So on some level we are left with faith and trust. Faith, that there is something true to be seen and heard. Trust, that the performer is the one to help us do it.

Which is why an experience at Sadler’s Wells last night left me so curious.

Photo: David Balicki

Nacera Belaza was awarded a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2015. Algerian-born, Belaza's eponymous company is based in France and the programme indicates an extensive run of international performances and residencies. She describes her work as a 'quest...to enhance the bond between performer and spectator' and calls her work an exacting discipline focussed on the 'condition of the dancer'. The link to Sufism, and the  trance-like spinning and patternings of her work, begs the question, in what way is this choreography? --as the turning in circles and amplifying patterns-in-the-universe is meditation, not choreography, in Sufic practices.

But per se this is not the focus of this review. 

The Sadlers' Wells and Shubbak (Festival of Arab Culture) audience is antagonistic from the start. The programme indicates 'duration two hours, no interval--latecomers not admitted’ in a way that sounds like a prison sentence, and from what I hear in whispers around me, gets many in the audience off-side.

The extremely dim lighting is very beautiful, but problematic too. A football-stadium type lighting grid emits light at such low level that it is indeed hard to discern the performing bodies at times. More problematic is the imbalance between what that light lets one discerns onstage and the way the same light  picks out audience-members' white shirts like beaming icons. I am lucky the man in front of me seems patient and still, for if he had been as perturbed by the slow unfolding and prolonged repetition of the works as some in the audience, my concentration would have had no chance.

The piece had walkouts aplenty, across the front of the stage, with one woman using the torchlight on her mobile phone to guide her in the dim light;  to tittering groups  deciding to leave only after disrupting the rest of us for more than an hour.  The dancers worked with quietude and discipline--strange twitching creatures in the Les Oiseaux duet, and in La Traversee, the 3 dancers turning like  spirograph.  The sound was a mix of sound installation, neo-Reichian pulse and muted Arabic chant--in itself mesmerising, but failing to tame the disgruntled in the audience.  Ironically, it was just when I felt the work deepen and my body (and that of my white-shirt neighbour) begin to sway—in Sufi and Hindu performance traditions, a sign we had reached ‘the zone’—that the performance abruptly ended. This was surely the work's beginning.  Ironically, the pre-recorded sound score was only 90 minutes, not 2 hours. A mismatch of timings, expectations and perceptions on so many levels.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 22: Arm-waving: performance art.

We need to talk--Matthias Sperling in conversation with Marcus Coates, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadlers' Wells, 24 June.
Florence Peake, performance for Block Universe Performance Art Festival, Somerset House, 15 June.

It's contentious that Matthias Sperling waving his arms in front of a reclaimed stolen painting in a Berlin museum can  'appease the painting’, as he claims. The painting is draped in black cloth--a funereal gesture perhaps to its infamy. One could agree that his actions serve to appease his audience's sense of  historical injustices, but this has nothing to do with how the painting 'feels' or what 'it' needs appeased. Marcus Coates leaps to the word ‘shamanic’, as if arm-waving is a shamanic activity.  Now, I like the arm-waving; I find it intriguing, but I am getting extremely uncomfortable here.  Coates, a film maker whose interventions,  including wearing a horse’s head in Council chambers whilst a Budget was being disclosed, is being very loose with the term.  His work in people's council homes--responding to their questions or statements with handstands in their kitchens or short dances in their living rooms--is a nice and even powerful form of non-verbal interpolation in their day to day lives; but again, the appraisal of these as much beyond a healthy, even helpful and enriching, change in perspective is  unreasonable.

Anthropologist Mercea Eliade asserts that ‘shamans only exist where they are believed in’--a statement troubling at our nerve-endings, which somewhere still have faith--but in the end I believe he is right. Truly shamanic activities call to the invisible (or the ‘concealed’, if you prefer Heidegger to  Alice Bailey), but they do more than puzzle at a thought or stir at air.

My patience breaks its tether once Coates begins to ramble about monkeys and evolution. I say, Let's 

drape a monkey with a cloth, dance in front of it, and see what happens when you have to face that monkey's agency.  Sperling looks intrigued, wants to try it, how can I set that up;  whereas Coates behaves as if caught out.  Well, he looks ‘as if’:  he glares and says not a word.

Much less disingenuous is the performance of Florence Peake in the inaugural London performance art festival,  Block Universe. She wonders at the work of a 'medium' from the early 20th Century. What did the medium do, exactly?  What did she 'channel'?  Peake initially takes clay and moulds it into amorphous yet slightly anthropomorphic forms. One is like a failed phallus, drooping; the other a little more steady, but not by much. They are 'you' and 'me'--our malleable selves.  Over the course of another 40 minutes Peake herself becomes  'clayed', covered with the substance as she engages with the audience, enacts their questions, and comes back to reshape her 'sculptures', without wiping off her hands. Her performance plays on the edge of being maker/creator, the edge between thought and form coming-into-being where 'voices' might be those of angels, gods, or restless souls from 'behind the veil'.  Or they may just be ourselves. Hence, Peake's body 'enacting' someone's stated worry makes no claim for truth, or claim to 'heal', but it does play out an honest exchange with those words passing through her physiology. Peake climbs the walls of the room, articulating the square, squaring the arena, containing the performance, a ritual space that yet asks more questions than it purports to answer.

There is a soft chaos in the room (as maybe, too, there is in the same room where Coates and/or Sperling perform, as opposed to when they talk about performance), a reluctance to bring things to hard edges and a gentle trust in the audience itself that they are negotiating the story with and alongside her.  A trust that  another world, the next folding is opening out anyway, and which Peake helps amplify, like a caretaker or custodian.

Florence Peake. Photo: Sylvain Deleu

Meanwhile,  Marina Abramovic, all the way back in Oz, is having a retrospective in which she claims that ‘no performer can stand in for the audience—the audience have to do it themselves'. In full:

I have made a career as a performance artist for 40 years now and my relationship to the public is changing. It used to be very simple: the public was sitting in the audience and I was performing in front of them. Then, with my performance The Artist is Present, I created a one-to-one experience where the public was watching and only one person was actually experiencing. In 512 Hours, which I did at the Serpentine Galleries in London, the public were actually the ones performing and I just blended in.

In Sydney, for Marina Abramović: In Residence, I will be like a conductor in the exhibition space, but it will be the public who will take the physical and emotional journey. We constantly like to be entertained, to get things from outside. We never take time to get in touch with ourselves… our inner self. My function in this new kind of performance situation is to show you, through the Abramovic Method, what you can do for yourself. I wanted to make this big change because I understood that actually you can’t get any experience by me doing it for you… So I’m completely shifting the paradigm, changing the rules. 

Marina Abramović,   http://kaldorartprojects.org.au

Still telling us what to do and think, Marina. The self-publicity machine rolls on.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.