A Southside History of the World

I think that Gob Squad sound pretty cool. They only did one piece in Tramway- the big party in a tent piece Say It Like You Mean It. There is a video of the performance on-line: it looks like a disco with occasional outbursts of obscure ritual.

Apparently, it is set at the end of the world, and the six actors are stuck in a forest with limited resources, trying to decide what to do next. There is a beautifully concise description of the show in their archives. It was probably written to explain the idea to promoters.

Say It Like You Mean It creates a make-believe environment in a tent set deep in an imaginary forest. Gob Squad announce the end of the world and ask the remaining survivors to build a new future out of sellotape and cardboard. Protective clothing, new schools, a transport system and the internet are made. Gob Squad make rousing speeches throughout the evening and people are invited to ‘let go’ in order to be 'in the moment'. Some people make guns, while others make an incubator for a baby which will be born imminently. At the same time, participants are invited to step out and view the situation from outside the marquee through special eyeholes while listening to a commentary on the event. Finally a commemorative ceremony is held to celebrate the first day of the new world. The evening is re-played back to them from the start in digital images.

Sellotape and cardboard- for a company based in Germany, they can be very Blue Peter. All of the classic features of avant-garde theatre are present: the audience gets involved, the company’s name sounds a bit punk, the atmosphere is somewhere between threatening and celebratory and multi-media is alleged. They would go on to tackle reality television, but it looks as if they were already exploring some sort of reality theatre back in 2001.

The press release is delightful.

“Say It Like You Mean It builds on the twentieth century live art tradition of the Happening from Dada, the artists of Fluxus, Richard Schenechner and Hermann Nietsch (sic), but it also draws on wider cultural forms like the party or the family reunion.”

I love the combination of innocence- the party- and academic justifications: together they sound like a six year old birthday girl suddenly busting out a series of epistemological meditations. And so much Live Art is in that mood- child-like, charming but sincere and demanding.

The release goes on to admit that they are being deliberately childlike. The piece can never hope to really achieve its aim- to persuade the eighty audience members to come up with a plan for a new society in under two hours. What they are interested in, however, is how far they can go. They claim that they’d gently mock religion and politics, and thereby ‘wipe the slate clean’.

More than this, though, it seems that Say It repositioned the performers as facilitators. The audience gets to make up their own new song- out of bits of remembered pop songs- build the first building (from a B and Q kit) and eat the first meal. It’s a bit like a playgroup for adults. The final picture of the group creates a false nostalgia for an event that is totally artificial.

I wonder. I wonder how I would have enjoyed it. As an introvert, I hate it when the performers ask me to shout at them. This time, they’d want me to act like I was having fun at the end of the world.

Tramway 1998: the programme came as small as a suit jacket’s pocket and proclaimed in beige, in brackets, HIT AND RUN. A small brown photograph of a travel-case was the only other clue.

This season ran from 23 January until the 28 March. Mysterious: these were the days before the National Review of Live Art had settled in the stables and spaces, so the programme was mostly generated in-house. There was the usual mixture: GSA staged a fashion show, plenty of dance, plus a few real pearls- a double bill from Third Angel and an exhibition of Ulay/Abramovitch. Primary inspection of the bill suggests no reason for the title.

The programme didn’t give any clues. The first entry describes the Ulay/Abramovic exhibition. Along the bottom of the page it warned about male and female nudity. Next to that, they thanked the sponsors.

This is one of the first exhibitions that I heard about (didn’t see- I was in Stoke at the time, dreaming of another life) that took my breath away. It was really important. True, it was only a series of images from their collaborations- they had split up, both artistically and emotionally a decade earlier- but Ulay and Abramovic remain two critically important performers. By herself, Abramovic has a body of work that has helped to define Live Art. Nudity, the threat of death, the breakdown of the boundary between performer and artist: she did it all. When she teamed up with Ulay, she made their relationship an extended artwork- even down to the spectacular break-up on the Great Wall of China.

I was lucky enough to stumble upon an interview with Ulay from about the time of their last work together: they were about to walk across China from opposite ends and meet in the middle, kiss and depart. Apart from Ulay’s surprising defence of modernism- he accused post-modernism of disrespecting the past- the most striking feature was Ulay’s desire to expunge the emotions from this piece. He was acting like it was just another project when, as the video footage shows, it was a gruelling personal adventure that exposed his deepest anxieties and feeings.

Anyway, it is debatable whether this show was part of the Hit and Run concept: it was way cool and all, but the next pages introduce the Hit and Run “skirmish”.

“Tramway undertakes a skirmish into the world of British performance theatre and plans to ambush you with a few surprises.”

I don’t really wish to get into the language too much, apart from noting that the old hit and run theme is a military metaphor, not the car-crash one, continued here with ‘skirmish’ and ‘ambush’. But check out this phrase: “performance theatre’. In two words, I sense the whole awkwardness that these works have defining themselves. Performance Theatre must be tautological somewhere, surely?

“Gearing up for another year on the sharp end of the cutting edge, Tramway takes no prisoners and makes no excuses for the roller coaster ride of the senses it has in store for you. You’ll find Tramway a complex and intriguing mix of visual and live art, with crossovers and coups at every turn. Expect the unexpected and still be surprised at what you find.”

I am not sure, however, that the language is entirely inclusive enough: take no prisoners? The sharp end of the cutting edge? Hell, I’m in.

First act up is Becky Edmunds. I am hoping to talk to her quite soon, so I am not going to say anything about this piece just yet. Later on, Third Angel- and I am calling them this week.