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.

POST 21: La Nausee: refugee arts; youth theatre

Whilst Alice Underground  unsettle one's compass and Love Bombs and Apples' explorations invert cultural  presumptions, Let Us In by A-Level drama students at Corelli College turn intercultural expectations inside-out in a different way. 

London's Migration Museum Project--which, tellingly, after 3 years still does not have a 'home'--produced this event at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, comprised of 3 performances made by 3 different groups of students, who each sagely fielded questions from the audience following their respective showings.  In the performance I saw, five young women (Ruth, Ayo, Khadija, Isatou and Elvine)  of African, Caribbean or sub-continental origin, presented a tale spun out of refugee stories, placed before, during or after migration.

c. Migration Museum Project

The performance piece delivered poignant tales with wry humour and a sophisticated understanding of crafting for the stage. Fuelled by an impassioned drive to tell their own and their ancestors’ stories, they perform with sass, skill and aplomb, representing refugees on a long boat journey;  the Caribbean mother with very little English seeking work as a nanny; themselves as schoolchildren frustrated by the limited 'African history' classes repeated year after year. They also slip back in time and portray black slaves and white southern belles, white teachers amongst black girls condescending to the class. Their performances alternately represent and subvert the position of immigrants trying to 'fit in'. Each has a singing voice and stage presence to die for. They are aware they live in a country safe to tell these tales, and sacrifices people made to afford them the dream of a career on stage.


Meanwhile, Counterpointsarts and Platforma—refugee and intercultural arts network hubs— produced dis/placed, a week-long exhibition and 'Learning Labs' event, in the basement of  the old Shoreditch Town Hall. The basement's peeling walls are an appropriate setting for films, photographs and performances taken or centred in refugee camps, or on the lives of refugees settled away from their homelands.

http://counterpointsarts.org.uk/event/displaced/

Platforma runs a biannual conference, the next being in November 2015.

http://www.platforma.org.uk/pf_events/platforma-conference/

This year it comprises two events; the first is a free event which aims to 'explore new collaborations and networking between English and international artists' [Nov 4]; followed by a Conference from Nov 5-6 with an aim to 'bring together artists in all disciplines, organisations and academe with an interest in the arts by, about and with refugees.'

See more at: http://www.platforma.org.uk/pf_events/platforma-conference/#sthash.pJpPJiuF.dpuf


c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 19: The perfect circle: the social fabric of the times.

On the subject of the circle:

I remember that my father, who would be 101 if he were alive now, had been able to draw a perfect circle freehand.  It was part of his art school training in Budapest.

So it was a surprise to visit the Black Mountain School (California) exhibition currently on at the Staatliche Museen (SMB) in Berlin. The exhibition as a whole focusses on the historical period when the Californian school invited many artists over from Germany following the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus.

A short film shows  Josef Albers slowly rotating a large disc in his hand. His mesmerised students trace circles and ovoids in the air.

(You can view the footage here: 

http://albersfoundation.org/teaching/josef-albers/introduction/)

Of course, Albers' most famous works focus on the purity  of the circle and the square. My father was a neo-classicist: the circle never became his subject-matter; the human form retained supremacy in his work.

But I did a double take whilst reading one of Albers' philosophical treatises: this was the reflection, the tone, the discourse I sometimes read in my fathers' notes. With a jolt I suddenly realise he could have been a student of Albers for a short time in Germany just prior to 1933. But like a duster on a blackboard, he had erased that part of his life—in fact, of most of his experiences before the war and his stint at the Russian front--from what he brought to conversation. Except for the story about the perfect circle, which he always executed to perfection.

Berlin has wide streets and  a slower pace than London. My friends Heather and Graham live in a commune, a hangover from the squats of the 1980s, which eventually received government assistance for maintenance. There are still original squatters who live there.

Following dinner, Heather and Graham asked if I'd like to go to the "Bowlo". They took me here, beneath a small bar near Reicherstrasse:

photo: Graham Anderson

Photo: Heather Boyer

Two strikes in one.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

Post 18: Toro Toro Toro

Israel Galvan, Akram Khan. c. Jean Louis Fernandez

Torobaka, by Akram Khan and Israel Galvan, Sadler's Wells, June  2015.


So, from rabbits and caterpillars to cows and bulls.

Torobaka, by Akram Khan and Israel Galvan.  A duel, a duet, becoming a sextet, a trio, and then also solo dance.

There is the exquisite technique we expect from Khan's collaborations--the wit, the surprises, the playfulness--but there is the deeper examination of what makes men, men, and what makes men dance. From the agon contest/fight of the flamenco--Galvan "brings a knife to the stage"--to the earth shimmering and sylllabic splintering of Khan's kathak tradition, these dancers meet in an arena where their respective traditions play up and out to each other.  The Toro is the bull and the Vaca is the cow. Both embrace both qualities, even laughing at themselves, sometimes one mimicking the other. Several times they even gag each others' mouths. But they also give over--to the need in Flamenco to command the stage, and the ability in Kathak to make a temple offering of the dancer to the gods.

The stage is also given over to the musicians: a diverse quartet of David Azurza, BC Manjunath, Bobote and Christine Leboutte, with Bobote also taking the stage for a short but exemplary traditional flamenco solo, which is meet with deep approval from a knowing audience.  Ola!

Galvan states that he, from his more aggressive practice, learnt and absorbed something from Khan's more 'relaxed and peaceful' process, whereas Khan admits the collaboration brought out his 'warrior'. Intriguingly, this dance amongst equals  did not equate to sharing equal stage time, with Galvan's solos running to many more minutes. But then, the evening 'gives over' more than once--to the singers, to Bobote, to the space. In the end, Michael Hull's  huge black chandelier ring--straight from the dining hall of a Spanish castle--descends to mark and complete the temenos, crowning, containing and completing the whole. For indeed the arena of the bullfight and of the Kathak ritual are both marked  by the  ancient symbol of an agon, the arena, and the circle of birthing new form.

Not everyone has been happy: two Indian women, restless from the beginning, leave within the first half-hour, whispering, ‘where‘s the Kathak?” Presumably, they are missing the pure cultural code they long to see preserved.  But Khan and Gavan’s engagement is not one at the cost of the other, nor of the traditions which both nourish and provoke them and each other.  

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 17: Undergrounds and Overgrounds: performance, labyrinths and scale.

I think of the Tube as a poem by Edward Lear.
15 lines for 15 cats.  15 cats for 15 maps. 15 maps tracing the whole of underground London. 

But mind the gaps.

And then of course there are the Overgrounds, particularly useful when Tube drivers strike. And the bus routes--26 of them. Buses, lines and cats. A cat's cradle of maps. Incidentally, dogs ride the transport regularly. Bakerloo. No, that is not true. The dog-owners are very careful. But it is intriguing to see little tails disappearing up the escalators.

Maps and lines meeting us, and each other, taking us home. Like flags of different nations.
Victoria, Picadilly, Jubilee, each a little country of its own.

And then there is Waterloo,  "the UK’s largest and busiest railway station, covering an area of nearly 100,000m2 and handling over 95 million passengers a year" ( http://www.laingorourke.com/engineering-the-future/digital-engineering/eej/history-advanced-at-london-waterloo.aspx#sthash.EavzFk0q.dpuf). 


Beneath its overground and even its underground, there is a deeper level of Vaults which, at various historical periods, have 'done time' as an emergency mortuary, as air raid shelters, and more recently as performance-spaces for the avant-garde. They are now owned by a private consortium, The Vaults.org, ready to transform their cylindrical grunge into a swish cinema, night-club and bars, with a Festival launch early 2016 (http://www.the-vaults.org/#!about/c10fk).

Meanwhile, theatre group Les Enfants Terribles transform the labyrinth into Alice Underground. We are lead by the White Rabbit--or the Ace of Hearts, how to choose? –into various curtained areas tunnels, channels, and dorms for story-telling in the half-light of this underworld.  

The scruffy walls are part of the story. A den of old books, baubles and mirrors suddenly begins to whisper, Alice appears and disappears in the glass of cupboard doors.  This is a memory room of heavens we can't remember, piled high with too much to piece together.

Often, one group passes another in the passageway, or we see a card or rabbit appear and disappear in the middle distance. Sometimes, in one cave-like space, being inveigled to eat a stolen tart,  we hear shrieks,  whispers, or music from another.  And then there is the clatter of trains overhead, emphasising the otherworldliness of this space, as if we are folded in the leaves of an old book, falling apart with it, becoming a leaf in the familiar story—that is, the story about society, families, and expectations, is it not? 

                       Mark Sanderson as the White Rabbit, Grace Carter  as the March Hare and 

                      Hayden Wood as the Mad Hatter.  Photo: Jane Hobson

                        

The dinner party is a delight; the Longest Table Ever Seen (Mssrs Piano, Rogers and Shuttleworth take note : sometimes length is superior to height), seating at least 40, set with relics from past performances (err…is that a squashed tart I see, amongst puddles of old tea??), with occasional squirts of tea from within the table and along it. The genius of water. Its amber puddles give the scene a certain seedy gleam.  

Aboveground, the Grater roasts people walking beneath, along its concourse, amplifying the sun’s great rays and turning ground level into a furnace. “Middle Earth” above -ground, while we sip tea below.

The Caterpillar is an articulated puppet, manned by two puppeteers, and it is fat and huge. The use of puppetry very nicely draws together the relationship between chaos and order, reality and imaginings, truth and blame, and between human and animal, which is perhaps a realisation made clearer in performance as opposed to reading a book. For the Rabbit is huge, as is the caterpillar, and I've' already mentioned the scale of the dinner table. Only the tarts, the interval bar and the chairs we sit on are to scale.  Although essentially light in touch, there is nonetheless a dirtiness in this production that I appreciate, and I think Artaud--who objected to the primness he perceived in Carroll--would have approved. 

c. Z Soboslay 2015.

POST 16: Austerity and Abundance--and the forward march of time

In the wake of the Tory Government announcement of ‘austerity measures’, the London arts community quakes.  Now there is a precedent in Australia, with George Brandis’ particular version of rendering artists’ lives even more austere by siphoning arts moneys into a self-managed fund (see: “Coalition Arts Slush Fund”—the $104.8 million heisted from the Australia Council to fund the new “National Programme for Excellence in the Arts” http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue127/11963).  Some wag asks Brandis to agree to a quarter of his personal income being taken away and ’managed’ by someone else. 

A precedent in law or policy is unfortunately like the flutter of a butterfly: it spreads out from the shudder where it begins. Once such a policy is out in the world, it's hard to dis-appear. What can halt the forward and cross-continental march of this narrative?  Kindness, generosity, respect, compassion, sustainability, and useful employment –for artists and whoever else, and what they contribute to culture--are too thin in that storyline.

ELDERS, AGING, AND CONTIGUITY.

Kindness, care, and relatedness is key to a future which has to face what to ‘do’ with an ageing population. Entelechy, in their work with Elders, asks key questions central to most people’s lives: What makes life meaningful? How can I contribute?—questions which are strange to think of having a cut-off point at age 65.

Accompanying the ‘forward march of time’ (our brains just keep growing, did you know?),  some parts become more frail. So do we focus on the frailty, or the resilience? The brightness, or the decay? Colin talks of  ‘curved space time', which seems to indicate that linear time does not exist. It is a partial consolation and mental reprieve for those experiencing the 91 years in their bones. 

Later, at the airport for a trip to the Continent, I wonder at the grace of people who  have to wait. As I, too, wait in a wheelchair, due to a temporary ailment, I see all the others who are used to waiting, for hours, without information about when they will be moved or tended to.  As if they do not need to be spoken to.  

I am aware that for every one sitting here, there are hundreds and thousands who also wait. So, too, with marches, where those present represent the multitude of others who could not come. I look here at the pram and think there was probably a woman who wants her voice counted, but is busy giving birth at home...

"Anti-Austerity" March, Bank, London, June 2015.

If appearances can ever be trusted, there is wealth still here in Britain, and we are marching through the marble heart of it. ‘Everyman’ ‘everywoman’ and ‘everybaby’, perhaps marching for themselves,  but also representing all the other everypersons who worry about the rent, education, and enough food on the table.  

The march makes it on to Channel 4, which is notorious for avoiding such events. Notorious, indeed, for every so often plying tricks of the trade such as reversing film footage, turning the assault of a civilian by police into an attack by civilians (see http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/ipcc-will-not-investigate-orgreave-police-action-during-miners-strike). But here, the Beebs  broadcasts the aerial shot of some 200,000 who came  from as far away as Wales. Railway workers, nurses, teachers, the Greens, and vegans who distribute pamphlets proclaiming their diet will solve all the problems of the world. Bless them. Abundance in their austerity.

A few pipers and drummers by the side, cheering.

A group of Hare Krishna followers in their saffron robes, adding colour, chants and bells.



                                                                            With thanks to Rebecca Swift and Julia Honess.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.