So many images have passed through my head in the past few weeks. As a narrative it goes something like this… a trip to Venice to the Biennale after I moaned to someone that it was far to expensive to get to Venice then they told me how to do it cheaply. The artwork and the city seemed sometimes at odds with each other and other times inseparable. There was the trip to Charleville to the 4-yearly festival of Marionettes where the best and worst of puppetry were played out on a vast scale. Now there is Paris, a city where I spent lots of time in the 1990s and today seems different yet all so familiar. The cultural shift, the massive compression of people in small spaces, the layers of histories (both mine and the city). Each of these places seem like a parallel dimension, entirely consuming when you are there and yet so much of it washes off like dust from your skin the moment you are gone. I will need to be back at home in my studio again to realise which seeds of ideas will find fertile soil in my mind and those which will not.
This was a market stall on the street in Venice, incidentally not far from the NZ pavilion of Francis Uprichard. It was late one night and N and I were in a bar drinking either Rose or Red wine (for some reason our poor Italian pronunciation meant it was a little bit of a mystery which we received) when on the street a stall selling the usual tourist paraphernalia was packing up for the night. A bright tungsten light was hanging in the middle of his stall and the objects he had hanging from the roof were dancing about on the church wall just behind him. There was something about the severity of the light that made the shadows seem all the more poetic. The man working away at taking down his stall didn’t show any interest in the shadows, they were like dancing clowns mocking his hard work. The stall itself was a beautiful design, it packed up to something about the size of a large chest of drawers.
Then there was the shadow work of ?? – in the Arsenal pavilion who is apparently is a great collector of things (in fact there were several exhibitions that featured collections of things –like the Finnish fire engine collection). This shadow show was a lot more conscious of it’s apparent effect on the wall nearby, but the charm of it was the simple brutality of the fixtures that made the shadows. They were very simple objects stuck or wired onto a turning plate then stuck in front of a light made from an old coffee tin. Almost all of the work in the Arsenal Pavilion made a conscious effort to expose the mechanism or the technology of the artwork. It struck me that so much theatre I watch fails to expose the technology, opting instead to present a kind of ‘magic’ where the image or the words have been crafted without the audiences knowing. I wonder whether this is a distrust that the audience will understand the craft being presented. When you present an audience an idea where buried under the craft I think a contemporary audience feels alienated or tricked. An advertising sign will never reveal the wiring that makes the light work because they wish to manipulate our reading of the object. The moment we see the wiring beneath the coca-cola sign we are reminded that this is a construct or a device to communicate and to consider the device as much as the ‘message’. Is theatre naïve, or simply less self assured. Commercialism in any discipline creates this obsession for craft, you only have to look at Hollywood to be reminded of the banality of craft over content.
Here’s another piece where the device (of film in this case) is pulled out to be entirely visible to the audience and where the device becomes the object itself. The film projected on the wall opposite reflected the mechanical brutality and poetry of this object.
This is a strange one, I didn’t really understand it despite reading about it before I went to the exhibition. It was shadow puppets videoed and playing out a kind of orgy scene (apparently inspired by the Marat Sade though surely our contemporary references of internet pornography are more immediate). The movement was very strange and the cuts deliberately harsh, I wanted to like it but just felt unsettled. The second half of it were these coloured shapes moving, which seemed to make more sense to me because they were abstracted so strongly. I think I need to read more.
And here is a piece I only got a glance at because we were running out of time. It is a projection where the narrow depth image reads more like a detailed silhouette, in order to create an equality between the different characters speaking. It was a very beautiful effect, using I suppose a diffusing fabric to throw anything not hard up against the cloth out of focus.
This is some graffiti in the toilets, after the conceptual strength of all the pieces I’d seen that morning, this piece seemed so relevant to the environment, to the material and to the activity of me going to the toilet, not to mention the history of toilet graffiti art. “Oh my god” said N, “everything is an installation, everything is an installation!”
Ok here is something that I know there are reference points I need to follow up, yet it was still a very strong piece. The sign on the bench says please take off your shoes before you enter and play with the objects. I can only presume that the objects were being damaged through mishandling so they were keeping people out because the whole piece was inviting you into a surreal land of symbols. Each symbol complete in itself (this is where I need to do some research because I am sure I have seen these objects in Jungian paintings). So the invitation to arrange the objects in this weirdly exaggerated perspective ‘stage’ was surely an invitation to create a narrative of your own. I suppose we do this in our minds when we look at objects but there is quite another implication when you put yourself into that space also. I loved the scale and relationship between object, symbol, architecture and dream logic. It was a playful world that seemed limitless in possibility. There was a false perspective door at the back but once you walk around the back of the object you can see that it is just a slit with a door painted on, again the mechanism is allowed to have the same importance at the crafted illusion.
What I think I mean is that illusion is a throw-away treasure. Unless we really do believe in leprechauns we are being treated like idiots to watch little people running around the tree. I want to see the strings manipulating them, I want to see who and why someone is wanting us to believe in leprechauns in the first place.
So that seems like a pretty good lead-in to the festival of Marionettes in Charleville-Mezieres in the north of France, and to anyone who thought puppet theatre might be a dying art, I can tell you there were 50,000 punters who put that theory to rest.
This is the kind of thing I expected to be referenced but not actually see, so it was nice to be confronted by this very traditional Punch and Judy type performance going on the middle of the town square. Somewhere deep in my childhood past I have memories of this kind of puppet show, I remember it being very dead and feeling frustrated with what I was watching compared to the enthusiastic-voiced character speaking all the way through. This show was exactly that, kind of fascinatingly banal. The layers of artifice and illusion is quite impressive, a large set with heavy curtains, a large PA, a dozen puppets all dressed up in period frocks. But the illusion was utterly dead still. Why? Because we live in a world where materiality is acknowledged constantly in everyday life, so to watch something like this where you are expected to turn your brain (and your senses) off in order to believe in the illusion is like taking an Atheist along to Sunday School and hope he’ll like the nice stories. It just seems incomplete.
This is N and I on the streets of Charleville creating a shadow show of our own in the sunlight.
Here is a show from Chicago by a company called Redmoon. I was excited to see this work because the set was a large toy theatre operated by 4 actors, AND their show was in English – a rare pleasure. The machine itself was truly incredible, the level of research was impressive, the scale of it, the reference to toy theatre and to epic stage design and most certainly the technical level of old school theatre machinery. But the sum total was honestly horrible horrible horrible. When I think about why I dislike Walt Disney cartoon films of sleeping beauty or Cinderella so much, I realise that so much is stated that there is often no room for the imagination to engage it’s own idiosyncratic version of what is going on. The more information that we are bombarded with, the thicker the layers of sentimental music or cutesy personalities, the less resonance the objects or symbols or materials have in themselves. There was so so many devices and machines that I felt like the creator didn’t trust me the audience to have an imagination of my own. What’s more, the whole thing was filmed by a live camera and played on a screen just above the toy stage so that… umm, I dunno, so I could see it bigger I suppose. In reality it just competed with the images happening live.
At the end of the show (god it was a relief – the story was some moralistic tale about a little BUURRED – that’s bird with a thick American accent), the actors invited the audience to come and have a look at the bits and pieces. What a terrible idea! It was like the actors taking off their underwear and showing us how much they were sweating! We had seen everything already, so we got to see everything again up close and touch it. Well, that’s a bit hypocritical cos I was happy to see the rope mechanisms inside the theatre. Ah well, it sorted out a lot of things I was thinking about making a great model theatre, so thanks Redmoon for that.
Next one was a great production, by a Belgian group called Theatre Taptoe. This production has been touring for 5 years I believe so the performances were really beautiful, but the essence of it was a great concept and a great dialogue between poetic illusion and skilfully acknowledged object manipulation. The premise was great. This place is the council meeting rooms of the city council (Marie) for Charleville and the room is utterly 19th century in materials and design. The actors are playing the family of the house where we the audience have been invited as guests to see their rendition of the toy-theatre production of Genevieve. We are guided into the room one by one and announced to the rest of the audience, the family introduce themselves and begin the performance with all the sincerity and historical accuracy of the era. By announcing us into the room, “Ladies and Gentlemen, a guest from the Comedy Francaise de Paris, Monsueir Stephen Bain” we are being acknowledged as understanding the artifice and asked to participate into it at the same time. We are immediately complicit.
The toy theatre sits on top of the piano, which is played by the woman of the house, while her fiancé and father play the glory roles and the servant plays everyone else, including armies of thousands, maids, ministers, and various buffoons. They operate the figures standing at tables either side of the piano and speak into the theatre and to the audience present at the same time. We enter this silly artifice because we are constantly reminded and acknowledged of it. The show was beautiful, very funny but also very visually rich and managed to create a real poetry. It was great to come away from the festival having seen a true gem.
