WRITING (the) SPACE

Wild Pansy Press Project Space
4 May - 19 May 2011 (Mon-Thurs 10-6, Fri 10-4)
Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

‘If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.’ Extract, Projective Verse, 1950.

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’.

WRITING (the) SPACE presses down on and around this unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice - in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms. WRITING (the) SPACE is conceived as a period of action research within the Wild Pansy Press Project Space.

For WRITING (the) SPACE, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a new iteration of their ongoing collaborative project Re –, which essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This iteration of the project addresses the emergent grammar of Re-, exploring the spatial and physical possibilities of writing. Extracted fragments from earlier conversations rub against mute utterances of a finger diagramming, nails pink; a spoken text of dislocated phrases; partial scores awaiting activation; punctuation, the space of breath. Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) is open to the public from 4 - 19 May, 10-6pm Mon-Thurs and 10-4 Fri).

WRITING (the) SPACE Event, 19 May 09.30am – 8pm

Drawing together the practices of diverse artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

09.30-6pm: > OPEN > < OLSON > < OPEN <.
A laboratory exploring practice based examples of Olson’s OPEN text. Presenting: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray, Claire Hind and Mary Paterson. Audience space is limited so booking is essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?
Dinner, drink, conversation and live performance by Giles Bailey on the last day of the exhibition as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. All welcome but booking essential, click on In a word... to book online.

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WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…

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In a word... is a research programme profiling an ecology of radical writing practice in, around and from Yorkshire. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/in-a-word/

Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. www.opendialogues.com

New Work Yorkshire is a proactive, engaged and mutually supportive collection of individuals who aim to develop a vibrant and diverse New Work sector in Yorkshire.

Wild Pansy Press is an art collective, a small publishing outfit affiliated with Leeds University Fine Art and a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content. wildpansypress.com

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Images

1 The Company of Men" by Charles Olson, typewritten manuscript with handwritten notations, September 13, 1957, from the Charles Olson Research Collection.

2 Re- (Unfixed) Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, 2010. Courtesy the artists.

MEMORY EXCHANGE at 'SHE SAID ...', 10 - 13 March 2011

by Mary Paterson

MEMORY EXCHANGE is part of 'She Said ..', a group show of text based works at The Outside World Gallery, London E2. Curator CA Halpin says, 'This show is about what she said, how she said it and the influence that those words had.'

MEMORY EXCHANGE invites visitors to donate a memory and receive a new one in return. It's an experiment in shared ownership and collective wisdom.

The show runs from 10th- 13th March, and the private view is Thurs 10th March 6.30-8.30pm. Please join me for a glass of wine - and to exchange memories.

MEMORY EXCHANGE was first developed for VerySmallKitchen's Writer's Tent in Wandle Park, London in May 2010, and has also been shown at The Department of MicroPoetics at the AC Institute, New York and Writing/ Exhibition/ Publication at Pigeon Wing, London (both curated by VerySmallKitchen).

'She Said ...' is part of WISE WORDS by alternative arts, celebrating women writers, artists and performers. See the full festival programme: http://www.alternativearts.co.uk/wisewords

The Outside World Gallery, 44 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP

http://www.the-outside-world.co.uk/

Reflections on Access All Areas

Written by Mary Paterson

Access All Areas took place on Fri 4th & Sat 5th March 2011. It was, "a two-day public programme reflecting the ways in which the practices of artists who work with Live Art have engaged with, represented, and problematised issues of disability in innovative and radical ways."

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/RRR/access_all_areas.html

Somebody asked me, "What do you think?"

What do I think? I think that so many of the Symposium presentations begin with a summary of other people’s judgements, it’s difficult to articulate my own response. Difficult, that is, without thinking about the violence of other people's perspectives.

Luke Pell and Caroline Bowden read out reviews that sneer at disabled dancers. Mat Fraser (appearing on video) is knocked senseless by casual comments: ‘I could never have sex with a handicapped man'; ‘it’s so good for my children, having you as a disabled friend.’ Bobby Baker gives everyone in the audience a slice of lemon and asks us to suck – the face you pull at the taste of something bitter is exactly the same, she says, as the faces she sees on other people when she tells them about her experience of disability.

Who are we?

The first time I watch Noemi Lakmeair’s ‘Undress/ Redress’ (a durational piece, commissioned for 'Access All Areas') I watch from behind. She is inside a room built inside the gallery. On either side, two large, glass-less windows let the audience gaze in. Lakmaeir is sitting on a chair wearing smart clothes, and looking straight out. Periodically, a man (Jordan McKenzie) wearing an old fashioned suit walks into the room, locks the door and undresses this woman, silently and seriously. Then he dresses her again, in a second set of identical clothes, and carries her to a chair in the corner.

Lakmaeir’s shivering, fragile body. McKenzie’s placid, controlled movements. The concentrated faces and shifting weight of other audience members, who I can see through the viewing pane on the other side of the room.

Catherine Long speaks at the panel called ‘My Body Did Everything I Asked It’. She starts speaking about a woman she has met, with striking blue eyes and no left arm. This other woman is her, and the stories Long reads out are the fictionalised voices of other characters. This means that, inside her own narrative, she is a character as well.

Who are we?

It’s uncomfortable to watch Noemi Lakmaier, but she makes it that way. It’s not the viewing (more people watch on CCTV video monitors in the entrance to the gallery than at the viewing panes), but the publicness of the viewing. The participation on someone else’s terms. The complicity that comes from being there. The fact that Lakmaier’s body shakes between an individual and a type: artist, woman, disabled, white, young. The fact that the ritual of undressing comes to stand for the stripping back of power that circulates around a body, and an identity.

It’s uncomfortable to watch Martin O’Brien, too. In his durational piece ‘Mucus Factory’ (also commissioned for Access All Areas) O’Brien performs the medical routines meted out on his body, transposing the medical gaze to an aesthetic one. Mucus mixed with glitter. Physiotherapy massage as a percussive routine. He mostly performs alone, but at one point a woman stands up and starts to massage his chest with him.

I think of the word ‘care.’ Not in the medical sense but in the casual sense: ‘Take care.’ Look after yourself. Because our bodies do not contain us. We are connected.

Who are you?

‘I’m sick of motherfucking health and motherfucking safety!’ ‘I’m sick of disabled artists getting their penises out and saying it’s radical!’ ‘I’m sick of being seen as sick!’ The Disabled Avant-Garde pull these ‘sick notes’ out of a hat and provoke the audience with them. Some people are riled. ‘We were in character,’ Aaron Williamson explains, ‘as the Avant-Garde.’

Kim Noble shows a video of himself (apparently) spying on his neighbour and a recording of his neighbour having sex. He shows a wall chart of this obsessive behaviour. He takes some Viagra, ‘in case this presentation goes really well.’ Nobody asks him if he is in character.

What do you see?

Is it easier to confront physical disability than mental illness? Perhaps, but what you can see is only ever part of the story. Sean Burn brings along a case of nuts. Nutcase. He rolls four marbles on a plate. Don’t lose your marbles.

Inbetween the last two sessions, I get into a heated conversation with a colleague about the work of Maria Oshodi and Extant. Oshodi is visually impaired. She creates cross-disciplinary, multi-media, immersive installations that explore the nature of perception, knowledge and experience. Oshodi's work is not about managing other people’s perspectives, but exploring her own.

Rita Marcarlo: advised not to induce an epileptic fit in public, in case it sets a bad example. Pete Edwards: asked if it was really his choice for his creative enabler to undress him. Jenny Sealey: saying she always has an audience in her BSL interpreters.

Who’s side are you on?

Sometimes, I find myself laughing along with Kim Noble. At other times, his persona is threatening, divisive, unpleasant. Who am I being when I laugh with (or at, or for) Kim Noble? Who am I agreeing with? And which of Noble’s personas is a persona anyway?

In a break I say, ‘As a general rule, I think “Them and Us” is a bad way of looking at things.’ ‘Yes,’ says a stranger who has overheard, ‘but you need an “Us and Us.”

It reminds me of something Bobby Baker said right at the beginning: a funder held a meeting for people seen as ‘culturally diverse’ which means, as Baker said, ‘people who are “odd”, all clumped together.’ She was arguing for a better understanding of cultural diversity – as an asset, and not a label.

What do you think?

What do I think? I don't know. But I have some thoughts to end (or to begin) with. 'We' is a shifting category. Not the same is not the same as different. Bodies labelled as ‘authentic’ are also contained.

Inside Performance Volume 24. no.1 2011

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Volume 24. no.1 of Dance Theatre Journal comes out of the short festival of screen dance ‘What if...’ at Siobhan Davies Dance, London, April 2010. The texts in this special issue, guest edited by Lucy Cash and Theron Schmidt, all circle around central themes of the festival; documentation, choreography or how to ‘write’ performance. The texts in the magazine are by ten writers who were present at the festival, and who were charged with writing the What if... performances. And me.

For Inside Performance Vol. 24 No.1 I acted as first reader of the then unpublished magazine. I selected phrases from the respective contributor’s pages and compiled them onto one page. The result is a new text in the form of an assemblage that reflects on performance writing, writing performance and the performance of writing.

The text acts as a weird coda, or postscript, one that points first and foremost to the content in this particular issue. Indeed, the reader can trace back each phrase to its place of origin through an adjacent index if they wish. In doing this, the reader would re-(W)read the magazine 'out of sequence' from its published numerical page progression. However, I imagine this index to be purely latent, an indication of place, as it is difficult to imagine any reader - however avid- tracing laboriously through page and line numbers to locate a certain phrase in situ. [i] It could also be read more widely as an exercise that WORKS the writing of performance / performance of writing, and as such could be repeated in any publication or place.

Being first reader of the material and extracting from it in this way was a deeply circular exercise - making a text about performance writing from a series of texts about writing performance from a performance festival. In this, it was also satisfying; the writerly equivalent of spring cleaning – paying close, perhaps exorbitant, attention to punctuation and small sentences in dusty corners. As a process, it was one of refining, distilling or WORKING text through a series of sorting, copying and pasting gestures [ii].

In retaining the format of the original phrases in their transposition to the back page, their formatting becomes erstwhile. And when assembled together the individual phrases seem loosed from their original place and meaning; a sense of site-specificity is implied. An attempt to run against the grain of FLAT PACK writing. Conversely, the text can be read from beginning to end as a whole. And although primarily disjointed, at times the extracted phrases collide with one another to make a narrative all their own.

Structural only to a degree, there is no discernible pattern, particular linguistic bent or blanket treatment of the phrases, no rules that I have devised for the assembly. In many cases, I transposed the text somewhat arbitrarily. In others, a different sense of purpose- although no less purposeful- of unfolding or sense-making prevailed. In this re-sequencing are physical, dense and diacritical gestures that imply a warp and weft; a movement of text, of the reader and of the writing itself.

Click here to buy Dance Theatre Journal

INSIDE PERFORMANCE is a serialised writing project developed by Rachel Lois Clapham for Dance Theatre Journal. Taking the form of a regular newspaper or magazine ‘column’ INSIDE PERFORMANCE is a periodic journey into the practice of writing from or as performance.

Previous columns here and here

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[i] However, this kind of keen readership is what I imagined when creating the piece. It is why I worked meticulously on correctly pinpointing each line and page number throughout the various edits of the magazine. This latent referentiality, then, should be considered critical. This occasional nature of how people might (not) read this text is also linked to the desire to look, rather than read, that it generates.

[ii] How is this different from creating, or writing? In fact, each chosen phrase was re-typed by myself into the assemblage, and so re-written. HOW does this matter?

ACCESS ALL AREAS: Live Art and Disability, 4 & 5 March 2011

by Mary Paterson

This weekend the Live Art Development Agency is producing a programme of art, debate and action linked to disability, identity and artistic practice. I will be going along as an interested audience member, as a writer, and as a producer.

The programme features a performance by Noemi Lakmaier and a contribution from Maria Oshodi. I am working with Noemi Lakmaier over the next few months while she carries out two new pieces of work: 'Undress/ Redress' for Access All Areas, and a commission for ArtsAdmin. We have been discussing her work (amongst other things) in a series of lengthy intrerviews/ conversations, which will result in an in-depth text later this year (see this post). I also have a vested interest in Extant, where Maria Oshodi is the Artistic Director. I've been working as a manager and producer with Extant for the last two and a half years, helping to produce shows like The Question (an experiment in immersive, tactile and audio theatre using haptic technology).

But mostly I will be going along as a member of the audience, hoping to think through some ideas that have been spinning through my mind about, inclusion and exclusion, societies and individuals ...

>> How does live art work as a strategy in relation to identity? And for whom?

>> What (dis)advantages does the context of 'disability arts' confer on artists' work?

>> What common threads can be drawn between/ through/ across mental illness and physical disability?

>> What role do access workers or 'creative enablers' (to use Pete Edwards' term) play in the making process?

See also my review of Sean Burn as part of 'Louder than Bombs' at the Stanley Picker Gallery last year.

Details below:

Image: Noemi Lakmaier 'Undress/ Redress' (c) Noemi Lakmaier

Live Art is truly the avant-garde forum for Disability Art and at the forefront of Disability Art practice, thinking and theory.
Dr Paul Darke (DASh)

The Live Art Development Agency presents a two-day public programme reflecting the ways in which the practices of artists who work with Live Art have engaged with, represented, and problematicised issues of disability in innovative and radical ways.

Friday 4 March from 19.00 & Saturday 5 March from 12.00/ Club Row Gallery, Rochelle School, London, E2 7ES

Image: Martin O'Brien 'Mucus Factory' (c) Martin O'Brien

- Mucus Factory, a durational performance-installation by Martin O’Brien. A Live Art Development Agency commission.

(4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00)

- Undress/Redress, a durational performance-installation by Noemi Lakmaier. A Live Art Development Agency commission.
(4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00)

- Robots Destroy the Tower of Babble!, a new performance by The Disabled Avant-Garde. With screenings of earlier DAG works (4 March from 19.00)

- A landmark symposium with Tonny A, Jon Adams, Bobby Baker, Caroline Bowditch, Sean Burn, The Disabled Avant-Garde (Aaron Williamson & Katherine Araniello), Pete Edwards, Mat Fraser (on film), Tony Heaton, Raimund Hoghe (on film), Brian Lobel, Catherine Long, Rita Marcalo, Tomislav Medak, Kim Noble, Maria Oshodi, Luke Pell, Jenny Sealy, and Rajni Shah. (5 March, 13.00 to 19.00).

- Screenings of influential performance documentation and works for camera by Katherine Araniello, Back To Back Theatre, Bobby Baker, Mary Duffy, Pete Edwards, Extant, Mat Fraser, Raimund Hoghe, David Hoyle, Alan McLean & Tony Mustoe, Aine Phillips, Juliet Robson, and Aaron Williamson. (4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00).

- A bibliotheque of key books and DVDs (4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00).

- Plus - Jon Adams’ Dysarticulate 2 (Saturday 5 March, from 12.00, Club Row Gallery surrounds) and Rita Marcalo’s She’s Lost Control (Thursday 3 March at 19.00 and 21.00pm at Rich Mix).
Full Access All Areas programme, venue, booking and access details can be found here.

Tickets available online through the Events Shelf on Unbound & on the phone +44 (0)207 033 0275

Access All Areas is part of Restock, Rethink, Reflect, a series of Live Art Development Agency initiatives for, and about, artists who are exploring issues of identity politics and cultural diversity in innovative and radical ways.

Access All Areas is financially assisted by Arts Council England, with additional support from Tower Hamlets Council and British Council, Croatia.

Liveartwork Editions: Performance Saga

Performance Saga and Liveartwork have released DVD documentation of the Performance Saga Festivals (Switzerland, 2008 and 2009).

The DVDs also include some of the writing from the Open Dialogues: Performance Saga projects (see here and here).

Image: Esther Ferrer performing at Performance Saga Festival in Lausanne, 2009. Image (c) Performance Saga

About Performance Saga:

Performance Saga transmits and updates the history of performance art and promotes a dialogue between generations. The project includes the conception and commissioning of performance pieces, the publication of video interviews with women pioneers of performance art and the organisation of events.

Performance Saga is a project by the artist Andrea Saemann and the art historian Katrin Grögel, both based in Basel, Switzerland. Three Performance Saga Festivals were held in 2008/2009. The DVDs feature work from both performance pioneers and emerging artists who were featured in the festivals.

About the DVDs

This 4 disk DVD set contains video documentation from 28 separate performances that were presented during the Performance Saga series of festivals that took place in Bern (Dec. 2008), Lausanne (Feb. 2009) and Basel (April 2009), Switzerland.

The DVDs contain over six hours of video documentation including new performance works from some of the leading figures in international performance art. The artists featured are: Alison Knowles (US) & Die Maulwerker (DE), Carolee Schneemann (US), Kate McIntosh (BE/NZ), Irene Loughlin (CA) & Jorge de Leon (GT), Gaspard Buma (CH), Peter Vittali (CH), Wagner-Feigl-Forschung (AT/DE), Martha Rosler (US), Muda Mathis (CH), Annie M. Sprinkle & Elizabeth M. Stephens (US), Sands Murray-Wassink & Robin Wassink-Murray (NL), Tania Bruguera (US/CU), Robin Deacon (UK), Katia Bassanini (CH/US), Stuart Brisley (UK), Monika Günther & Ruedi Schill (CH/DE), Markus Gössi (CH), Simone Rüssli (ES/CH), MIRZLEKID (CH), Andrea Saemann (CH), Esther Ferrer (FR), Hina Strüver (CH), Lena Eriksson (CH) & Varsha Nair (IN/TH). Most of the individual videos are between 10 and 15 minutes in duration.

Each disk also includes additional background information, contact details for each artist and texts from the writing workshops conducted by Open Dialogues in conjunction with the festivals. Curated by Katrin Grögel and Andrea Saemann, Basel DVD production by Christopher Hewitt / liveartwork Total duration of DVD set: approx. 360 minutes Audio: English/French/German with English/German subtitles For full details and to order the DVDs see: www.liveartwork.com/editions/full_saga.htm

Review: Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue

Photo: Oliver Rudkin - Ivana Muller, '60 Minutes of Opportunism', performance, 2010.

Inbetween Time Festival, Various Locations, Bristol, 2 - 5 December 2010

'What Next for the Body?' Arnolfini, 1 December 2010 - 6 February 2011

Ivana Muller: '60 Minutes of Opportunism', Wickham Theatre, 3 December 2010

Silvia Rimat: 'Imagine Me To Be There', Wickham Theatre, 4 December 2010

Jordan McKenzie: 'Holding My Breath', Arnolfini, 5 December 2010

This article was originally published in AN Magazine www.an.co.uk. Written by Mary Paterson

In 37 Cuerpos by Teresa Margolles (part of the exhibition 'What Next for the Body?'), a single, bare thread divides the largest room in the gallery. Up close, you realise that it's not one thread, but many short ones knotted together. Each strand is fragile, frayed and dirty, like scraps of leather.

These are actually thirty-seven pieces of surgical thread, used to sew up the bodies of thirty-seven victims of violent death. As a gruesome relic the work fails to represent the lives of the victims, just as it failed to bring them back to life. But its weakness is what makes its physical presence so compelling. The thread divides the room in two as if on the brink of life and death, and represents the mysterious truth of our bodies - that they house life, but do not contain it.

'What Next for the Body?' is an exhibition about the body dissolving, breaking or breaking down. It sat at the centre of the Inbetween Time Festival, a four-day programme of 'live art and intrigue' taking place in art venues and public spaces across Bristol. It was also the name of one of the festival's curatorial strands; the other, 'D:Stable,' promised works that "thoroughly reject the conventions of theatre". These two rich and familiar problems created a dense programme that also suggested another recurring theme - the place of live, embodied presence in the modern world.

In 60 Minutes of Opportunism the choreographer Ivana Muller explores the relationship between her body, her identity and her persona. She is live onstage throughout, but her voice is heard in a sound recording played into the auditorium. This divides Muller in two: the person from the image, her past self (who made the recording) from the woman who is standing here now. Muller 'the image' slides between a collection of visual stereotypes - traveller, dancer, suicide bomber - the potency of each cliche as disturbing as the fluency of the movement. Meanwhile, her voice is beset with glitches and background noise that remind the audience that it's stuck in the past.

This dislocation is eerily familiar. It draws me into a type of looking that is baited by visual presence, and contextualised by words untethered in space or time. In other words, it's exactly like browsing the Internet, or flicking through channels on the TV.

Sylvia Rimat's Imagine Me To Be There brings the theatre show even closer to the computer. Rimat is alone on stage - cross-legged on the floor, eyes glued to her laptop. She begins to type and words appear on the screen behind her.

'Silence.'

The skill of Rimat's performance lies in the way she marries the magic of the theatre with the fantasies of the virtual. When she writes about the lights fading in the auditorium, they really do. Of course, we know she doesn't control them - but the device is clever enough to suspend the audience's disbelief. Which means that when Rimat writes about wearing a bear suit, we're inclined to indulge that fantasy as well. And when she writes directions for the audience, we happily play along.

At a Curator's panel on 4th December, an audience member suggested that video streaming and online technologies should replace live events. Given the obvious debt these two performances have with digital modes of representation, it's hard to disagree. Both are in fact about performing - Muller begins by telling us she was asked to make a performance in which she appears on stage, and Rimat's show is effectively a deconstruction of theatre. But their relationships to more proverbial and accessible forms of representation beg the question: why does theatre (with or without its conventions) matter?

I found an answer by returning to the disappearance of things. In Holding My Breath, the third in a trilogy of performances by Jordan McKenzie, the artist stands in a small room with cupped hands, holding the attention of eight or ten strangers who watch water drip through his fingers. We match each other's breathing, listen to the rustle of each other's clothes and feel the concentration thread through McKenzie's body.

This is the meaning of shared presence - its fragility. Value (to paraphrase the writer Eva Hoffman) is scarcity measured in time. Just as the threads in 37 Cuerpos resonate with what they cannot represent, so the time we strangers have together describes the distance between us, and the times we won't share.

This precarious and temporal balance between the known and the unknown is also the space Muller uses to dissect contemporary modes of looking, instead of just recycling them. When she says she is going to do something 'dangerous' - and starts smoking - it really is dangerous because it affects the precious and finite bodies of everyone that is looking. Similarly, when Rimat gives the audience a knife, she is not streaming a relationship with strangers, nor representing it. She's testing it out.

Perhaps it's telling, however, that McKenzie is dressed in 1930s costume - suit, waistcoat, waxed moustache. This cherished affirmation is emphatically old fashioned - as if being 'live' is no longer part of daily life, but a relic of the past.