Is this a rhetorical device?

[by Mary Paterson.

1000 words and 102 questions. In response to Being Seen, Being Heard at Chelsea Theatre, 27th November 2011. ]

Is this your body?

Is this a space?

Are we in agreement? Have you heard this before? Did you say something?

Are you reading in silence?

If I repeated the question, would your answer be the same or different?

Can I start with this - who is your community? When you read ‘your community’ did you think I meant the community to which you belong, or the community with whom you are currently engaged?

Is it a project of performance to create communities? To designate, service and evaluate them?

Can I ask again – who is your community? Or, to put it another way – how does it feel to be identified?

How does publicly funded (performance) art ensure it is on the side of the community, and not on the side of education or objectification; of corporations or governments? (Is the side of the community, in your opinion, the better side?)

What is an assembly, and who assembles (it)? How does publicly funded (performance) art ensure it is sustainable? Or, to put it another way – how do you know you are doing the right thing?

Are you allowed to say ‘the right thing’ any more?

Are you allowed to talk about racism if you are white? Are you allowed to talk about marginalisation if you are middle class? Are you allowed to talk about racism and marginalisation if you are middle class, inside a theatre, on a council estate, in Chelsea, on a Sunday? Did you think I had forgotten that knowledge is relative?

Is your community defined by your geography, technology or education? Do you use the same criteria to identify other people?

Do you look like him – the man over there with the Apple Mac and the microphone? Does he look like you? Does he point at you and say, ‘me’? Or does he say ‘we’? Or does he say –not in words, perhaps, but by body language, action or implication - ‘I did not hear you, I am going to answer a different question’?

Is this knowledge, culture, education or the production of another kind of value?

Is this public, private, pedagogic or instrumental? Is this mine, or yours? Is this your idea, and if it is, can I use it? Can I use it without permission? What would you do if I took it without permission, took credit for it, used it for propaganda, invented a word and made an exhibition of myself? Would you join me in sitting round a table and asking questions? Why not?

Is this sustainable? Do you and I share the same sense of humour? If I told you a joke, do you think you would laugh? Have you heard the one about the schoolmaster?

Who owns this event? Who is going to intrepret it? What are you willing to believe in? If I told you that all the colours you are seeing right now have been adjusted for warmth, would you feel a) warm b) chilled or c) like complaining? Who would listen to your complaint? Who do you hope would listen?

Is anyone listening? Have you ever suspected anyone of deliberately eavesdropping on your conversations, and then using the information they hear against you? Is anyone, or has anyone ever, hacked into your mobile phone? Have you ever asked anyone to act as your witness? Have you ever been asked to be a witness, and found the task impossible?

What is the difference between witnessing real life and witnessing an act of performance? What is the difference between being a consumer and being an audience member? What is the difference between being in a room and being in an online network?

Can you formulate an argument without a human in it?

What is your skill? What is your authorial expertise? What is your preferred political position, and do you ever think about changing it, just to see how soft and green it is on the other side? Do you still believe in anything? Do you still believe in something? Do you intend to convey meaning?

Where do you appear?

What is contemporary oral culture? What is the difference between data and statisitcs? How do you represent something that has already happened? Why? Is it interesting or tiresome to know that there is no way to regain the live moment? Is it elitist or democratic to mourn its loss?

Is this clear? Is this clearer?

What do you think it means, that your parents’ body language dances across your hands when you speak? What do you think it means about heritage, culture and class? Who are you networking with? What is close, and what is far? Why aren’t you speaking? Who’s fault is that?

What is the right pace, tone or language? In which situation would you be content to have no power, opinions or speech? Who would you nominate to speak for you? Let me rephrase that – is this democracy?

Is this space?

Is this culture? Is this the production of knowledge? Is this education? Is it friendship, social life, or politics? Is it mine or yours?

Is this space next to, inside, outside, under, over or beside another space? Is the other space your preferred space, or are you happy with this one? Be truthful – would you rather be inside another space, looking out at those of us over here? Would you rather be in a tent, with a placard, making your mark? On a scale of 1 to 10, how dangerous is your body? Or, to put it another way, how much danger are you prepared for?

When was the last time you were surprised? Are you on the side of police, politics, charity or justice? What do you need to read before you will read something new? Do you prefer a place of opposition or a place of security? How long is your memory? Where are you going? If you could start again with language, what would be your first word?

Wendy Houstoun: 50 ACTS – a Partial Response, in time.

By Mary Paterson

"The word, to me, is an active thing.”

“Language has a rhythm."

- Wendy Houstoun, Post-Show Discussion, after Fifty Acts at The Place, London, 15/11/11

http://vimeo.com/25963793

Keeping time. Telling time. Making time. Falling out of time.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

She tells us so, in big, white, capital letters scrolling up the screen, like the epic intro to an adventure film.

She tells us so, sitting in the corner of the stage, sad and steroetyped like an old person, next to black and white dancing showgirls.

Old times, other people’s times, times made poignant with age.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

But all that comes later.

In the beginning, time stops.

Time is dead. It is the end of time.

But all that comes first.

For now there is spinning, there is movement, there are customer surveys.

How did you find your experience of dying? There are jokes.

There is George Osborne, cutting things.

There is a chorus of yesses. There is a chase. There is music. There is poetry.

There is rhythm. There is rhyme, metre, and dance.

There is Act One, followed by Act Two, all the way up to Fifty.

In the middle there is an interval. She re-does things.

She lets the movements of the first Twenty-Nine acts ripple over her body as if they haven’t found their meaning yet.

She pulls the tape out of a cassette to the accompaniment of two women, talking of anticipation.

She reads the cassette tape with her fingers to divine her future.

I see a pension. Oh no, I don’t.

There are jokes.

She smashes some old vinyl records in time to the beat.

Keeping time.

Losing time.

She re-plays the sound of a woman’s voice.

Ok. Cheers, then. Lots of Love.

The woman’s voice fades out of time.

Lots of Love.

The woman’s voice fades out of time and out of ear shot.

Keeping time. Telling time. Making time. Falling out of time.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

Everyone is telling her so.

Everything is telling her so.

Drumroll please.

The invisible person behind the cloak can be heard sobbing.

Would you describe the latter part of your life as: satisfactory; unsatisfactory; neither satisfactory or unsatisfactory?

At the beginning, time stops.

Time is dead. It is the end of time.

At the end there is no ending. She is going to disappear.

At some point, at some time.

At the end, she scratches for an ending.

Perhaps she is clutching on to time.

Inbetween, there is falling, there is equipment, there are risk assessments.

There is the language of the bureaucrat, of passive success and implicit blame.

Do you need training?

There is a chase. There is music. There is poetry.

There is rhythm. There is rhyme, metre, and dance.

Perhaps she will go with a bang.

Perhaps she will go with a rhyme.

Perhaps she will go out with the lights.

Perhaps she will go with a bow.

Perhaps she will fade away.

She bows.

When she bows, we clap.

(We clap loud enough to bring her back.)

Trashing Performance (written by Mary Paterson)

image (c) Owen Parry

You have to call it something.

A small Cuban woman strides across stage in PVC. Metamorphosing from seventeenth century nun to British Bulldog, she bends her knees, juts out her chin and curls her melodic voice into a grumpy snarl. She turns and gives the audience a flash of her back, bare except for a bra worn the wrong way round, and quips: ‘Worth the entrance fee alone.’ [1]

You have to call it something, this self consciously playful two-fingers-up at the establishment, at academia, at gender, at expectations.

A skeletally thin man teeters in high heels and fish net stockings. He lifts his arms at the elbows, like a puppet, and lip synchs to a strong, American, female voice. The strong voice and the frail body mime a story of gender abuse. [2]

You have to call it something, this persistent, resistant caricature of identities and labels played out, for the most part, on women’s bodies, real and imagined.

A figure in a Burkha scuttles into the spotlight and swivels her eyes from side to side. The music starts up - swing music from the 1940s, the golden age of show business. The Burkha moves slightly, as if the woman is dancing. [3]

You have to call it something, because here it is, the performance programme of the second year of ‘Performance Matters’, a three year research collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency.

So you call it trash performance.

Or perhaps, like Scottee, you command the theatre in a glittering jumpsuit and call it ‘light art’ – a mixture of live art and light entertainment. Art that is both enjoyable, he explains, and that ‘has a politic.’

‘We have a hashtag for tonight,’ says the man in the glittering jumpsuit, ‘It’s #bunchofcunts.’ He checks Twitter to find out what people have been saying about the show. It turns out the hashtag has a double life – it’s also used to describe the Conservative Party. [4]

Because if there’s one thing we’re all agreed on, we’re all agreed that this is not trash.

It’s not trash when Marcia Farquhar’s guests stand in a skip at the back of Toynbee Hall, delivering lectures on a subject they would like to trash, or keep from the trash.

Marcia cries into the fading light: ‘Is that nice man from last night back again?’ Luckily, he is. Enthused from a stay at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest camp, he climbs into Marcia’s skip and tells us about his first performative intervention. [5]

It’s not trash when Nao Bustamante recalls the time she went on the Joan Rivers chat show disguised as ‘An Exhibitionist’, and unleashed the term ‘multi-gendered ambicentric individual’ into the world.

Two thirds of the way through a film of talking heads, Nao Bustamante’s lips stop moving in time with her words. A voice says ‘You literally cannot believe what you see,’ and a body speaks something else – silent, unknowable. [6]

image (c) Ben Walters

It’s not trash when Lois Weaver narrates her own autobiography, part drag queen, part university lecturer, in a selective history of political, sexual and artistic awakenings.

A woman peers over the top of her pink rimmed glasses and underneath her dramatic, blonde wig. She picks up a cupcake from a hostess trolley and flings it to the back of the auditorium. [7]

Of course, nobody ever said it was. The ‘Trash’ of ‘Trashing Performance’ is not a pejorative but a verb. The work in this programme trashes an other.

In the bar, audience members are writing the names of their favourite femmes on doilies. [8]

What is the other? You might call it the mainstream: the dominant messages beamed from television, universities or even three year collaborative research programmes.

Five energetic dancers are wearing T-shirts with an old man’s face emblazoned on the front. They finish. We clap. They come back for another bow. And another. There are more curtain calls than there is dancing. We clap. We cheer. The poster behind them screams, ‘Chekhov is not our dad!’ [9]

But no-one wants to give the other a name – there’s no need, because it’s always there, and it’s always shifting.

Vaginal Davis opens her eyes wide and pouts directly into the camera. She loves criticism, she says. She loves being rejected. ‘It means they’ve really been paying attention.’ [10]

Here among friends (we are friends, aren’t we?) and for now, we might call this trash. Trash is the word for good humoured resistance.

1. Carmelita Tropicana at Musing Muses And FeMUSEum Ribbon Cutting (Fri 28 Oct, Toynbee Studios)

2. Nando Messias, at EAT YOUR HEART OUT Presents Performance Doesn't Matter (Wed 26 Oct, Toynbee Studios)

3. Baghdad’s Got Talent, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

4. Scottee, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

5. Marcia Farquhar, Open University (27 – 29 Oct, Outside Toynbee Studios)

6. Nao Bustamante, in THIS IS NOT A DREAM dir. Gavin Butt and Ben Walters (premiere, 27 Oct, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club)

7. Lois Weaver at Musing Muses and FeMUSEum

8. Amy Lamé at Musing Muses and FeMUSEum

9. Figs in Wigs, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

10. Vaginal Davis, in THIS IS NOT A DREAM

1

#dawnchorus - performance 16/10/11

#dawnchorus - tweeting the dawn - will be performed at dawn on Sunday 16th October 2011 (approximately 5:35am to 8am) on Twitter.

Participating writers are: Amber Massie-Bloomfield, Joanna Brown,Tiffany Charrington, Eddy Dreadnought, Sally Labern, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson and Natasha Vicars.

#dawnchorus is conceived by Natasha Vicars and developed in collaboration with Mary Paterson and the writers, as part of the Live Art Development Agency's DIY6 programme. For more information, please email natashavicars@gmail.com, or see us on Twitter.

#dawnchorus

In August and September 2011, Mary Paterson is working with Natasha Vicars to co-ordinate #dawnchorus, part of DIY 8 - a programme of peer to peer workshops for artists working in Live Art, organised by the Live Art Development Agency.

#dawnchorus is an opportunity to collaborate on devising and piloting a live writing work for Twitter.

Deadline for applications: Monday July 25th 2011

Project summary:

Drawing on your existing experience of writing within your art practice you will take part in a collaborative intervention in the 'public forum' of Twitter. In three days of structured workshops, supported by individual exploration and research, you will work with artists/writers from across the country to consider live, digital writing as a communal act and a response to ideas of place.

Extending the metaphor of the 'tweet' the project asks what happens when diverse voices are brought together in defence/celebration of individual territories as a 'dawn chorus' on Twitter.

Participants will develop and reflect on their use of writing particularly in response to place, in both digital and material contexts and explore the social medium Twitter as a new context for live performance.

After piloting, #dawnchorus is intended for further development and there may be opportunities to be part of a further performance/exhibition at the relaunch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail and/or at Bury Street Light Festival.

Dates: 15 - 16 August and 12 September.
Times: 10:30am - 5:30pm
Location: Meetings held in Bury - exact venue TBC.

Application procedure:

Open to artists at all stages of their careers who use text in their work and enjoy the craft of writing, and writers who have some engagement with contemporary art/live art.

Participants also need to have access to a laptop (alternatively an iPhone or equivalent device) and the internet, and be willing to get up very early to see dawn. No previous experience of Twitter needed.

Participants will arrange their own accommodation and travel to Bury, but a contribution towards expenses is available to all participants.

Expressions of interest should be emailed to Natasha Vicars at natashavicars@gmail.com by 25 July. Include a 1-2 page attachment noting where you live and giving a short statement discussing what attracts you to the project, what you hope to gain and how writing features in your practice and an example of your writing of maximum 750 words.

The project organisers will review applications and select a varied group who have writing experience, and a spread of locations in the UK (including Manchester-Bury).

More info here.

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.