Richard and I are in the UK, and our London visit overlaps with the opening of the 2014 LIFT Festival, newly resurrected after a long hiatus by genius Artistic Director Mark Ball. Most of the shows open after we leave town, but we did manage to catch two intriguing immersive shows yesterday.
The first, in the afternoon, took place at the Royal Academy of Arts, off Piccadilly Street. Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl are a trans-disciplinary collective based between the UK and Sweden who focus on site-specific perceptual experiences; they have adapted their show Symphony of a Missing Room: archive of the forgotten and remembered (first conceived in 2009) for the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition, the world's longest running open submission art show (it debuted in 1769 and has been held every summer since). Ahead of the show's public opening next week, but with the 1,262 artworks selected for viewing already hung and installed, a band of eight LIFT patrons is invited into the main galleries, where we are initially given a chance to contemplate the canvases and photographs and video works and sculptures filling nearly every available inch of wall and floor space. However, the artwork on display is not really at the core of this piece, which mainly eschews the visual sense in favour of the acoustic and the haptic. To this end, we are provided with headphones and fitted with a pair of opaque goggles; as a guide takes us gently by the hand, the lilting voice in our ears asks us to imagine all that we cannot see--to in effect build with our mind's eye our own salon des refuses. And it is hardly a coincidence that our tour ends in a back room stacked with artworks that did not make it into the Summer Exhibition. A kind of interior version of Projet In Situ's Do You See What I Mean? (which played the 2013 PuSh Festival), this unique work offers a whole new perspective (quite literally) on a landmark London building I only thought I knew.
In the evening, our friend Cathy joined us in an abandoned parking lot on the Southbank to take in Frauke Requardt and David Rosenberg's dance-theatre piece The Roof. Once again audience members are each given a pair of headphones before being ushered into a built structure resembling a pen or Roman arena. Around the perimeter a 360 degree replica skyline has been built, one that just happens to incorporate a mini proscenium stage and a radio broadcast booth. From the latter a Penelope-like figure spins discs and introduces us to our hero, Player 611, who emerges in a red jumpsuit from a hatch on the opposite side of the rooftop and invites us into his body just as he is about to make the first of several perilous circuits around the perimeter. Along the way, he battles several monsters, a series of baton-twirling sirens, successive couriers, and his mother. At several points he is also rescued from imminent danger by another player who may be his doppelganger or his romantic rival, depending on one's view of each's relationship to the mysterious female disc jockey. At several points in the hour-long performance--usually at the end of one of our hero's circuits--we are invited to direct our attention to a sequence of choreographed tableaux that unfold on the tiny proscenium stage, and that together offer a comic gloss on what we have just seen, complete with disco-dancing bunnies. A surreal and thoroughly entertaining work, The Roof combines the physical vocabulary of parkour with the symbology of video games, Homeric myth, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle to create a performance one is unlikley to forget--or see in the West End--anytime soon.
P.
Showing posts with label Projet in situ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Projet in situ. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Saturday, January 26, 2013
PuSh 2013: Do You See What I Mean?
Yesterday at the PuSh Festival I went on a blindfolded tour that awakened in me an extraordinary new sensory experience of my city--and my body.
Do You See What I Mean?, the brainchild of Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, of France's Projet in situ, begins at the Access Gallery on Georgia Street, just east of Main. After checking in at the box office, you are greeted by Martial, who explains a bit about the concept of the piece, before placing a blind fold around your eyes and introducing you to your guide. In my case, I was paired with Mariana, and while over the course of the next 2.5 hours we chatted only briefly about ourselves and our lives (neither of us being big talkers), we nevertheless experienced what I am certain was for both of us an incredibly intimate social and physical exchange. In my case, not only did this involve placing my life literally in Marianna's hands, but, in taking hold of her right elbow and beginning to walk alongside her, shifting the whole kinespheric axis of my body in her direction.
The experience was uncanny and disorienting and exhilarating all at once, as guided only by Marianna's voice and the pace of her movements and subtle shifts in direction was I able to do what under any other circumstances I automatically take for granted: walk. And what a walk: so immersive, so sensual, so loud! Take away the visual sense, and suddenly you realize just how noisy your city is: car horns and engines accelerating; music from storefronts; the click-click-click of heels on sidewalks; shouted greetings. The snippets of overheard conversation provided an audio track all their own as I assembled different bits of information--and different languages--into a running narrative.
Then there was the heightened haptic sense: the texture of the sidewalk or road underneath my feet; the warmth of the sun on my face; always the nubbly fabric of Mariana's sweater at my fingertips. In a thrift shop I'd like to say was still somewhere in Chinatown (although I can't be sure) I was delighted to discover in my felt explorations of the wares a horse's stirrup: so unexpected amid all of the coats and leather goods and knick-knacks, and such a joyful surprise for that. This was the first of several stops that Mariana and I made on our journey: a pastry shop where I got to taste an orange-blossom macaroon; an apartment where our host Stephen gave me a motorcycle helmet to hold and told us the story of his ill-fated purchase of a vintage Vespa; an indoor-outdoor pool where Jimmy, himself non-sighted, tested my sense of smell and touch; and finally what I would discover later (once my blindfold had been removed) was the Roundhouse Community Centre, where I got to dance in the dark with Ziyian Kwan as I discovered new centres of gravity I never knew I had.
As I said to Martin afterwards, the whole experience was one of the most stimulating and emotional of my life. I'm still processing all the feelings (physical and affective) it produced. But one thing I know for sure: even if I never see Mariana again, I have some other sense that a part of her will always remain beside me.
P.
Do You See What I Mean?, the brainchild of Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon, of France's Projet in situ, begins at the Access Gallery on Georgia Street, just east of Main. After checking in at the box office, you are greeted by Martial, who explains a bit about the concept of the piece, before placing a blind fold around your eyes and introducing you to your guide. In my case, I was paired with Mariana, and while over the course of the next 2.5 hours we chatted only briefly about ourselves and our lives (neither of us being big talkers), we nevertheless experienced what I am certain was for both of us an incredibly intimate social and physical exchange. In my case, not only did this involve placing my life literally in Marianna's hands, but, in taking hold of her right elbow and beginning to walk alongside her, shifting the whole kinespheric axis of my body in her direction.
The experience was uncanny and disorienting and exhilarating all at once, as guided only by Marianna's voice and the pace of her movements and subtle shifts in direction was I able to do what under any other circumstances I automatically take for granted: walk. And what a walk: so immersive, so sensual, so loud! Take away the visual sense, and suddenly you realize just how noisy your city is: car horns and engines accelerating; music from storefronts; the click-click-click of heels on sidewalks; shouted greetings. The snippets of overheard conversation provided an audio track all their own as I assembled different bits of information--and different languages--into a running narrative.
Then there was the heightened haptic sense: the texture of the sidewalk or road underneath my feet; the warmth of the sun on my face; always the nubbly fabric of Mariana's sweater at my fingertips. In a thrift shop I'd like to say was still somewhere in Chinatown (although I can't be sure) I was delighted to discover in my felt explorations of the wares a horse's stirrup: so unexpected amid all of the coats and leather goods and knick-knacks, and such a joyful surprise for that. This was the first of several stops that Mariana and I made on our journey: a pastry shop where I got to taste an orange-blossom macaroon; an apartment where our host Stephen gave me a motorcycle helmet to hold and told us the story of his ill-fated purchase of a vintage Vespa; an indoor-outdoor pool where Jimmy, himself non-sighted, tested my sense of smell and touch; and finally what I would discover later (once my blindfold had been removed) was the Roundhouse Community Centre, where I got to dance in the dark with Ziyian Kwan as I discovered new centres of gravity I never knew I had.
As I said to Martin afterwards, the whole experience was one of the most stimulating and emotional of my life. I'm still processing all the feelings (physical and affective) it produced. But one thing I know for sure: even if I never see Mariana again, I have some other sense that a part of her will always remain beside me.
P.
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