Fickle Cheese and Performance, by David Berridge

"The Modes of Al-Ikseer"

Harminder Singh Judge,

Shunt Vaults 13th & 14th April

There’s no telling what might turn up in some corner of Shunt Vaults, the huge network of railway arches that comprised the venue for the Triple Bill. After the woman painted in gold, and the man urinating whilst stood in a bucket playing the saxophone, there was a bit of standing around on Triple Bill night, before heading off to another dark corner, where Harminder Singh Judge rounded off the evening stood in a lake of slowly curdling milk.

Judge was in the middle of the lake of milk, slowly rotating on a small round wooden disc. Around his waist was a girdle of neon writing. For maybe forty-five minutes he slowly rotated, churning-tubes dangling from his body into the milk, drone-music blaring, the durational hook for the audience of slowly making out the sentence of neon words as he turned.

It was absorbing, if demanding stuff at the end of a long evening. Judge had a serious, focussed look throughout and there was a definite, challenging sense from the off that this was it for the duration. How long does it take to make cheese I wondered? I had no idea. Were we here in Shunt until this sloppy lake became a hard cheddar-like mass? It seemed unlikely. But duration is tricky to relate to necessity - on the second night the show was shortened, I heard, by twenty minutes.

At the end of an evening of intense, focussed performances I was finding it hard to concentrate. But maybe that was the point of such a performance. One’s mind wandered and drifted and when and if it returned there was Judge, another twenty degrees on, the sentence a few letters closer to revelation, if you hadn’t forgotten what the bit before had said and needed to wait for the whole thing to come round again, like me.

I’m being deliberately a bit flippant about this. There was a serious and challenging presence to this work, an engagement with rituals and Hindu traditions I knew nothing about, but which also were well aware of the slightly ludicrous situation in which they found themselves, both SPILL and Shunt Vaults and performance art more broadly. This isn’t my flippancy alone I’m talking about here - it’s how the piece worked the flippancy into both its seriousness and its wannabee cheese.

So somewhere in Shunt there was the Hindu myth of Churning the Milky Ocean, where Mount Mandaranchai was the dasher (churning tool) and Vasuki, King of serpents, was the churning rope (thankyou Wikipedia). If Singh’s body formed one layer of commentary on this source, there was another accretion in store. Two figures in white appeared at the lakeside, barefoot, wearing drums. They stood calm and posed, although around them stewards were busy spreading out blue hand towels, ready for drying their milky feet when they re-emerged.

I was struggling - whilst watching and again, now, whilst writing - to find another vocabulary for this - that acknowledged the specific types of drums and clothing. But I didn’t have the words. Then it happened. Revelation! Transcendence! Well, actually, no, or, rather, yes, if transcendence relates to a sudden soundtrack shift into Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, the two white robed guys playing along on their drums. It was a dramatic shift, hugely energising. The man next to me was mouthing along happily; feet were tapped; time became more familiar again. It was up to Judge to maintain the continuity, keeping the same mental focus, rotating, churning, same as ever, absorbing Dave et al into his concentration.

As well as enormous well-being, it was curious to think what happened in this shift towards Basildon’s finest. Partly, it was, after Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams feature documentary The Posters Come From The Walls, further assertion of Depeche Mode’s art-world renaissance. It was an assertion of connections across cultures and styles, the continuities and the differences. It also functioned as the eventual punch line to a long and drawn out joke, as, too, a sense of the age of the 1980’s as the great Thatcherite age of cheese production. I imagined the same performance crashing into a Stock, Aitken and Waterman track.

All well and good, but still no cheese. It was curdling more the second night, apparently, and I should have known better than to expect actual full scale dairy production from performance art. The performance ended with Harminder still the same as ever in the middle of the lake.

Feeling a bit of a Peeping Tom, I hung around to see how he made it out, the mundane after the ritual. I won’t tell you. There was no need to do this, really, other than a kind of backstage nosiness. His performance had itself explored this kind of interconnection, whilst avoiding any of the pitfall binaries such as on-stage and off, west and east, process and product, milk and cheese.

Ecology up the money tree: Pacitti Company's A Forest by David Berridge

A Forest

Conceived and directed by Robert Pacitti

Co-devised and performed by Richard Eton, Sheila Ghelani and Robert Pacitti

The Pit, Barbican

7-9 April

There’s been little about nature in the shows at this years SPILL. Or, at least, not much about the non-, other- or more-than human bits of it, if one excludes the dogs and horses of Castellucci. So, feeling a bit eco-starved, I felt somewhat expectant waiting outside the Barbican’s Pit to see a show called A Forest.

Actually, A Forest, too, had little in the way of nature, if by that I meant pastoral landscapes, lush vegetation, living animals, or just lots of green. For their hour long show Pacitti Company had modified the Pit into a small space in which a circle of chairs surrounded an island of 2p pieces. If the shape suggested an island biogeography, with all the uniqueness and variability Darwin found so exciting on the Galapagos Islands, then its bronze mass suggested geography had become money slightly quicker than money had become landscape.

A man lying on the coins. I can’t remember if he was naked at the beginning of the show, but he was naked at the end, and in the beginning, if he wasn’t, he acted as if he wished he was. He writhed on the coins, kissing and licking them. At the end of the show a bare tree was arranged above his naked body, both trapping and growing out of his body like some mutant rib-cage extension. No leaves, though, or not until two other performers had pinned a show-off, greedy foliage of fifty pound notes to its branches.

In-between these two scenes, A Forest sought to construct its own biogeography, defined by how body, nature, and money were all a part of some slightly traumatic ecosystem of desire. Central to this eco-restoration endeavor was a man stood at a microphone telling stories. The details haven’t stayed with me, and maybe that was the point. If the style and tone of his narratives reminded me of folk stories, he had a relish for details that stood out from and even abolished the narrative, proposing instead an immediate, visceral value. A man threading his eyes with red thread, for example, or sticking pins in his heart.

Over on the other side of coin island was its ring-mistress. On entering the Pit all of the audience were handed two pence pieces, before finding bald dolls on their seats. The woman came round with a money box, and everyone placed their coins inside. That seemed the end of the matter, but then the woman was back to show the audience, not the money box but both her breasts. Later she came round with a tray on which was a pair of pigs trotters. Were these the principle raw materials on which this economy-ecology depends? Later still, she collected the bald dolls, covering them in coins, both burial and blessing.

Her relationship to the man in the middle was more hands-on. Not that the man didn’t have actions to perform under his own volition. At one point he ran around the circle of coins, like a lurcher running and running until it just collapses. But ultimately his movements were determined by the woman, who tied antlers to his back. Or she ran back and forth over the coins, jumping over his naked body. Such actions summed up the tone of their relationship and the piece as a whole: caught in a tension between conscious and unconscious; autonomy and projection; flow of narrative against the fixed, iconographic image.

The naked man with the antlers on his back captured a lot of these tensions. As an image was it a mythical creation, or product of performance’s capitalist need for ever new product diversification, or both? Similarly, A Forest used storytelling to see if its conservative forms and agendas could be applicable to a more political, Queer agenda. Or does the poetic power of such stories always overwhelm the political interests of a particular teller and time? Pacitti Company hopes for the former, but tentatively, and A Forest was a laboratory for such a hope.

Take the coins themselves and how they were lit. Sometimes they were isolated in the space: a warm light gave them a semi-magical bronze-becoming-gold aura. Other times the light was more flat and the coins were part of the broader environment. Not totally ordinary, of course, because it was an enormous very non-everyday number of 2p pieces. If we can’t make stories our own, or insert them into our own political and performance agendas, we can at least work back and forth between their magic and their almost-everydayness, and see what, if anything, happens.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

PLEASE DRESS IN BLACK BEFORE READING THIS POST by David Berridge

Aftermaths: A Tear in the Meat of Vision

Laban Theatre,

13-14 and 17-18 April.

This performance began before it began, which felt appropriate for a show beginning with the end. The end, that is, as something you have to dress up for, with Bardsley encountered first via video screen, putting on a wig, false teeth, make up; or the end as words on four large screens that say The End, which, like many of the individual components of this show, are also invocations, more force fields than straightforward linguistic signifiers, conjuring this post- pre- world into existence.

Start again. In the beginning - and before the beginning that was the end - was the festival website. This fulfilled more than the usual functions. It invited the audience to dress entirely in black (which maybe 25 of the 30 or so people had followed on the night I went) and to bring a small black object no bigger than 4cm in diameter with which they wished to part. These instructions create a sense of expectation, a demand that in attending the show we are expected to take on some measure of responsibility, whatever that might mean.

All of which had a contradictory relation to what I actually experienced. In the backstage space of the Laban centre, a catwalk formed the shape of a cross, whilst four high video screens surrounded the audience to create an arena within which a confrontation could take place. Dressed in black, gold teeth, using crutches, Bardsley struggled up onto the cat walk - shaman, priest, salesman and figure of death, trailing behind her a flotilla of black balloons. Slowly, she lost her physical disabilities, shedding the crutches to become a skilled vocal-physical athlete of this church of death and rhetoric.

What follows in the hour long performance could be seen as distinct sections, each composed of a particular configuration of Bardsley’s intense persona, the haunting pulse-led electro-acoustic soundtrack, and the video projections. So one section involves Bardsley citing a litany of words that also appears near simultaneously on the four screens, marking out a territory in which theories of apocalypse, religion and the current economic situation are all connected. Phrases such as “Black Market” link these areas via playful punning. The speaking and visual manifesting of “Profit” and “Prophet” seem a key into the piece, creating a gap between word and sound the show often inhabits.

Other sections involve Bardsley’s body being covered in what looked like dayglo kneepads, which Bardsley thrusts at various audience members asking them to “feel her disease” (she gets angry if no one lays a hand on them, her voice barking them into cooperation). Or she opens a suitcase containing black paper airoplanes, whose airy lightness becomes like bones or teeth. Or she holds a swinging hypnotist’s pendulum in front of selected audience members, but seems more to induce palpitations in herself. Are the audience, themselves appearing at moments on the screens, just projections of her imagination? A ghostly negative image of The Book of Revelations seems to offer some and no answers.

I’ve jumbled up all the different sections here, partly because that’s how the piece has stayed in my mind. I was also struck, in discussions with Bardsley, about her method which involves a gathering of various elements, placing them in a visual paper score, and only in the last few days before a performance rehearsing in any conventional sense, to physically enact, choreograph and develop the show. So the actual performance is a place of working out how different elements will work, testing them, changing them as the show develops and in relationship to different audiences.

This explains the questing tone of the piece, and also the dialectical relation to the instructions and descriptions on the web site. For all the force and theatricality of Bardsley’s performance, I didn’t, for example, find it immersive and overwhelming. Or, rather, the elements of the show that overwhelmed - Bardsley’s extended vocal techniques, say, or the sense of the importance of the audience’s presence - were balanced with a Brechtian distance and alienation, that also juxtaposed archaic and contemporary, genders and voices. The carnival barker aspects of Bardsley’s persona, too, invites a reading based on more old fashioned notions of theatricality, showmanship, and circus.

This replacement of immersion with a more removed criticality was evident, too, in the working through of those invitations to the audience. Personally, the wearing of black primarily highlighted the act of preparing for and traveling to the show, not to mention the slightly more than usual black-clad crowd in the foyer beforehand. Whilst waiting I was handed a small plastic bag for my black object. I got to place it into an usher’s hat shortly after the performance began, and it appeared on a board in the foyer. As forms of participation, both seemed to widen and diversify the web of ideas, rather than enhance a sense of ritual immersion during the performance itself.

Finally, the performance offers us a fashion show of dis-ease as four figures climb up onto the stage to parade before us, evoking the four horseman of the apocalypse. One is pregnant, a breathing pipe between swollen belly and bandaged mouth; another a body sprouting black grapes. All, in various ways, wrapped, mutated, not so much clothed as fabric-cyborgs, flesh re-invented in the image of the preceding performance’s words and gestures.

When they hobble off, the performance ends and the plagues take their place in an installation of surreal and fetishistic furniture, where they stand or sit for us to stare at on our way out.

Bardsley is outside in the foyer, too, urging us to pledge £66.06 to buy the board to which all our black objects have been affixed. No one had, and I suspect no one ever does, but Bardsley was still audible as I headed down the Laban ramp, an incongruous element amongst Laban’s Herzog and de Meuron designed interiors, still offering a beginning after the end, or an end that was a beginning, or both, or none.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

That Night Follows Day: Uncertain Pedagogies Out of Performance by David Berridge

That Night Follows Day

by Victoria and Tim Etchells

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre

One of the slightly perturbing elements of Victoria’s That Night Follows Day is its similarities to a Forced Entertainment show. Perhaps normally that wouldn’t matter. We’d accept a certain stylistic similarity - in the ensemble playing style, the use of text, and the performers’ frank audience facing demeanor - via Tim Etchells (artistic director of Forced Entertainment and writer of That Night Follows Day). But, as far as That Night Follows Day is concerned, I am drawn to ask questions about this stylistic similarity because Etchells’ collaborators are all aged between 8 and 14.

This creates a curious doubleness in a show as aware of its constructed and artificial qualities as any ‘grown up’ Forced Entertainment piece. It plays with its fiction and its reality both, with a script not adverse to examining its own premises even as it seems to function as a child to adult telling-it-how-it-is. On the night I saw the show, I felt as if the audience responded more to this second function, with parents audibly chuckling at some revelation of adult behaviour because “I also said (or did) that.” Such audience responses confirmed the script as truth-telling, ignoring or absorbing its self-critical aspects.

Lurking behind all this is the theme of agency, and how much the children are active, empowered explorers of their own lives, and how much they are props in a theatrical work-out. Let’s assume the former (ignoring such complications as how the show was originally performed by a completely different set of children). Then, the connections to Force Entertainment become not a matter of Etchells’ own stylistic influences, but a broader proposition: a certain style of devised, collaborative theatre is not just a way of theatre making, it is a form of radical pedagogy.

This is not, of course, an insight I am deriving from this piece alone. The sense that the techniques and practices of performance art overlap with radical educational theorists such as Paulo Friere and Ivan Illich has been proposed by theorists including Charles Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, who then look to apply such techniques in the classroom. Their arguments take different forms, but I will focus here on their entwined use of performance and collage, because these terms seem particularly relevant to how the text of That Night Follows Day is functioning:

“Collage enables us to experience everyday life in such a way that its disparate and idiosyncratic fragments resist coalescing into a unifying whole... Instead of a totalizing body of knowledge, the composition of collage consists of a heterogeneous field of coexisting and contesting images and ideas. Its cognitive dissociation provides the perspectival multiplicity necessary for critical engagement. Dialectical tension occurs within the silent, in-between spaces of collage as its fragments, its signifying images and ideas interact and oppose one another. Such complexity and contradiction represent the substance of creative cognition and cultural transformation”.

Part of That Night Follows Day’s strangeness is how the children’s “disparate and idiosyncratic fragments” - the litany of sentences beginning “You tell us...” - become unified by a monolithic, sentimental sense of childhood.

For example, the elements that are most evocative of Forced Entertainment - the use and style of text; the frank, audience facing demeanor - become containers that these child performers can fill, like a constraint or restriction. This frame makes several things possible: it negotiates between the children’s “authenticity” and the demands of a professional performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (and elsewhere around the world where the show has toured). It also attempts to enable the sentiment prompted by a group of children onstage to be countered with a distanced, critical and question-raising nonchalance.

But it is impossible to tell from the performance itself whether what we are seeing is the children’s agency or their manipulation by Etchells and Victoria. In such a space of uncertainty, the adaptation of Forced Entertainment’s techniques becomes ventriloquism. Only the children themselves, in their lives beyond the performance itself, know which is which. To think otherwise is to add a nostalgia of performance to a nostalgia of childhood.

SOURCE

Charles R.Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics and Visual Culture (State University of New York Press, Albany, 2008), 63-4.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

Gob Squad Meet Dominique Gonzalez-Forester or Film as Theatre by David Berridge

Saving the World

By Gob Squad

Greenwich Dance Agency

9-10 April

If Gob Squad had filmed their piece Saving the World a few months earlier, then, amongst the passers-by on the South Bank, they might have encountered Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, off to Tate Modern to install her Turbine Hall installation. It would have been an intriguing encounter, for Saving the World and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s recently closed TH.2058 seem to be in conversation with one another, both through themes of archiving, saving, addressing and imagining the future, and in the boundaries they observe, re-draw and disregard between film, installation, and performance.

TH.2058 was an installation of beds, books, films, and other peoples sculptures, evoking a future when the Tate Modern turbine hall becomes a combined archive and air raid shelter. Saving the World sees Gob Squad spend a day on the South Bank, video recording passers by to create an archive of contemporary existence for some unspecified future date. Both pieces have at their core an accumulation and a saving. Both place themselves at the centre of London’s diversity but are haunted by an experience, intuition, anticipation or memory of some ecological or other catastrophe. Both see the artist as a kind of fiction writer, scoring scenarios to be acted out: by sitting on the beds in the Turbine Hall and reading, or by asking passers-by for their thoughts on sex, nothingness, and the soul.

All this, no doubt, reflects different artists filtering the world around them with a somewhat shared sensibility, training and professionalism. As these processes manifest in the pieces themselves, Gob Squad foregrounds the newspapers and encounters of the world; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster foregrounds a certain art history, an accumulation within her installation of certain art historical precursors (including several previous Turbine Hall installations). It’s curious, then, that both end up in a similar place, suggesting art is the real news, and articulating this through a fluid sense of medium becoming theatrical.

For both Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Gob Squad this focusses on a sense of film. Film re-defined, partly as an event, partly as something not confined to the screen: in Saving the World people literally talk to the screen and, more theatrically, come out of and go into the screen. Entering the Greenwich Dance Agency to see the piece last week, film seemed to be becoming installation, but then revealed itself, somewhat cheekily, as theatre. One consequence of this is that the consciousness and materiality of the video itself becomes more a shared property of the whole experience than something just involving the projected image.

Aside from the different economies and professional networks of artists working in galleries (like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) or performance festivals (like Gob Squad), this is also a debate about live presence, moving beyond a sense of mediated and unmediated to a more variegated sense of liveness and place. Gob Squad’s search for interviewees on the South Bank, for example, is partly a search for those open to having part of their identity mediated (via the group’s video cameras) in ways beyond their control and that they might never see. Viewing Gob Squad and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster together foregrounds how, for all the ways this is a response to globalisation, media culture, non-place and instantaneous data transfer - it’s also a working through of an artistic lineage with a particular sense of the possibility of the moving image.

A longer essay than this, for example, might use Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s library of films screening in TH.2058 as a partial viewing companion for Saving the World. This wouldn’t create a set of easy parallels. But, to pick only a few of the more famous examples, I think the suggestiveness of viewing Gob Squad in the light of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, or Chris Marker’s La Jetée, or Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad, are immediately apparent.

Actually, without checking I’m not sure TH.2058 did include the Resnais film but it certainly enters into the dialogue, as does Warhol’s Screen Tests, literally re-created in the Gob Squad’s Kitchen and becoming a research methodology in Saving the World, where groups of passers-by stare silent and still into Gob Squad’s cameras. Gonzalez-Foerster doesn’t include Warhol in her loop of films but the aesthetics of the Screen Tests can certainly be related to TH.2058’s ideal of audience participation: a figure sat on the beds, as absorbed in a book as Warhol’s subjects were in the 16mm camera before them.

Relations of film and theatre is a vast topic that could be traced in essays by, amongst many others, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag. Here, I want to highlight such dialogues manifesting as uncertainty, but in different ways. TH.2058 seemed always there, its films on a loop, but then the installation closed and it vanished. Gob Squad’s subjects are saved for DVD-posterity, but confined to the show’s limited (and for now completed) performance times. For both artists, film promises capturing and archiving, then delivers a richer, more substantial offering of the intangible and disappearing.

Not that these pieces are at all grim or po-faced about the apocalyptic scenarios they propose, for either London or the possibilities of film. Gob Squad’s attitude to such issues is summed up in the closing party-scenes of Saving the World where they cavort in bear-clown costumes made of multiple soft toys. It reminded me of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster‘s artists’ talk at Tate Modern in March which covered the Starr Auditorium lectern in gold tinsel and had a DJ play Latin Jazz records, before ending the evening with the lights suddenly out and a soundscape of tropical rain.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen. moremilkyvette@gmail.com

A Moveable Feast by David Berridge

Dinner with America

by Rajni Shah

Laban Theatre, 6-7 April 2009.

“How do problems in space resolve themselves in the symbolic order?” asks Nato Thompson in the April-May issue of Bookforum. He continues: “How do skirmishes in the symbolic order resolve themselves in space?”

Thompson is part of a round table on “Experimental Geography,” but his questions are highly appropriate to Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America. Shah’s performance attempts to approach the physical, conceptual and historical geographies we might want to identify as “America,” then seeks to map, explore and tweak them through a single body; taut, minimal but imagistic scenography; the duration of a performance time close to three hours.

It’s a difficult tension to embody: America’s physical configurations paling alongside its symbolic spread, the paradox of its vast military spending and its still pervasive connotations of freedom. Here translating that into performance requires a delicacy. Audience members enter in small groups, going through the Laban theatre into the hangar-like backstage space behind. A text projected on the floor makes clear the rules: we are welcome to move around the space, enter and leave as we wish. Our clothing is tagged as we enter by having a stars and stripe wrapped boiled sweet stapled to it.

Shah is covered in white gowns and headdress, and over the duration slowly sheds her bridal clothes to reveal, piece by piece, face and body. Blonde haired to start, with plastic looking skin as if a fifth-cyborg, she is ageless and aged mix of the Statue of Liberty, Buffy and a teenage cheerleader, who, for maybe two hours, makes repeated attempts to sing Amazing Grace. The voice is tentative, then strong, quavering then trying vibrato. Different postures, too. An arm is raised, opening a door into some iconographic turbulence. Black Power salute? Statue of Liberty? Madonna in concert?

It’s a duration that asks itself and us: can a voice, a body, a limited array of gestures articulate and carry a symbolic history? Certainly, and also certainly not. As Shah sings and sings, two handmaidens in white orchestrate the space around her. Their actions are specific and purposeful, illusive and ultimately pointless. Sweeping piles of wood chips, arranging neon strip lights in different configurations on the floor. Sometimes the ensuing shapes seem to have acquired meaning and the audience - sitting, standing, laying down throughout the space - stand en masse and moves forwards to look.

At one such group moment strip lights form a rectangular, wood-chip filled configuration around the singing Shah. I’m expecting the stars and stripes, or perhaps some physical representation of the North American continent. It is a haunting shape, but eludes easy connotation. Even as we all try and figure out what it is, the restless handmaidens are dismantling, constructing something new, caught between building and erasing. Visually striking as it is, this mythical America is not about iconic spectacle, but about how myth is tested and enacted with continual actions, bodies, voices, and songs.

Then Shah slowly sheds her eyelashes, wig, clothes and mask, to stand naked on the stage, much shorter now, brown-skinned, shaved head. It’s a Wizard of Oz moment, an awareness of the disjunction between a myth and its components, bursting out of the form itself. In the afterglow of the previous two hours, there is no sense of the naked body as outside of the constructed myth. Perhaps it is the “real body” that is mythical here.

Finally, handmaidens make the neon lights into a screen for projection, burying it beneath wood chips. Words are projected telling us “THE FEAST IS COMING.” Small envelopes are handed out - mine contains a card asking me to discuss a situation when I had been deprived of my freedom. Trays of fruit and chocolate are placed before us. Shah and the handmaidens are smiling now, encouraging the audience to eat and talk.

We were, it seemed, supposed to discuss the cards, but I didn’t. Perhaps the show’s success is an awkward embarrassment at this moment, highlighting the gap between emotional immersion and intellectual critique. Or maybe I was just being unsociable. Still, the dates were delicious, and it made me wonder what these different stages of the evening represented.

Partly, as we stood around and chatted, it was about having moved through a ritualistic encounter with a myth, returning to our own situation. It was a statement that an alternative mythology is possible, based on chocolate, fruit, conversation and a greater degree of informality, participation, and indirection. It was about going deeper into the myth itself to reveal its pleasures. All America and all part of its - and this performances - feast.

David Berridge writes and edits the blogzine More Milk Yvette: A Journal of the Broken Screen at www.moremilkyvette.blogspot.com

moremilkyvette@gmail.com

David Berridge

I am a writer based in East London, working through written texts, publications, events, research and discussion. I edit More Milk Yvette : A Journal of the Broken Screen, a blogzine focussed on artists’ film and video and art writing.

Recently published articles include a study of connections between Fluxus Scores and Ecology for the RSA Art & Ecology Magazine, which also sort to explore a contemporary score-based writing practice.

Related to this, for the SPILL:OVERSPILL introductory weekend I did a presentation on how criticism can become a form of performance notation. I’m interested to see how this unfolds as one part of my response to SPILL. You Have No Idea What’s Down There: A Fantasia for the Cavern Cinema, a recent project along these lines, is online here as part of the soanyway.org project.

My current research include a series of interviews with, amongst others, Ben Rivers , Johanna Billing , Anouk de Clercq , CS Leigh , Juneau Projects , Hans Ulrich Obrist (on interviewing), and Clare Gasson . I have curated web-projects by, amongst others, Sarah Jacobs, Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber , and Rosa Barba , often interested in the boundaries between film projection, the live event, and the particularities of showing work online. Check out the More Milk Yvette site for these and other projects.

As well as SPILL: OVERSPILL I am involved with several collaborative (art-) writing projects including FREE PRESS (Plan 9, Bristol), and am also working with Open Dialogues on the CRITICAL COMMUNITIES project. I'm curating a symposium of current curatorial and creative responses to Warhol's 16mm film work, to be held in London in September.

David

moremilkyvette@gmail.com