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

Summoned to Table: Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America by Mary Kate Connolly

Dinner with America

By Rajni Shah

Laban Theatre, April 6th and 7th

The hymn Amazing Grace, oft associated with the spiritual heart of America’s South, was in fact written by an Englishman, former atheist, and ex-slave trader, John Newton. The Native American Cherokee, during their forced exodus to the West of America known as the Trail of Tears, are thought to have sung it as a hastily performed funeral rite, when proper burials of the dead were not possible. Amazing Grace was popular with soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. Versions have been recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Joan Baez.

Thus when Rajni Shah began first to hum, and then sing the hymn during Dinner with America, the tune resonated not only with her immediate surroundings, but with a host of American presences and absences which the work sought to evoke. A sense of ritual, redolent of a religious rite, permeated Dinner with America. It seemed a meditation not merely on American people or culture, but on America itself as an animate being: vast, perplexing and potentially intangible. Entering the performance space I was struck by the hushed concentration of the onlookers who picked their way through channels of powdery soil which criss-crossed the floor, or crouched in darkened corners to survey the scene. It appeared we were all implicated in this rite – a calling up of stories, ideals and images that we each could muse upon as we wished.

From the four corners of the stage echoed recordings of American voices – young, old, American born, immigrant, affluent, homeless. Speaking with pride, shame, ardour, and disillusionment, they wove a varied and contradictory patchwork of what America meant to them as individuals. And in the centre of this stood the figure of Shah, swathed in a white veil and bathed in light; an icon around which we had gathered to venerate.

After a time Shah emerged to reveal long white gloves, a voluptuous blonde wig, floor length white gown, and a fixed, inanimate white face. The image was beguiling; ‘beautiful’ in a stereotypical sense, yet utterly grotesque and filled with artifice. Ensnared by the spotlights, she stood erect and unmoving, with the static posture of a shop-window mannequin. From time to time she would alter her stance ever so slightly, to disrupt the tableau and set a new one in motion. Hands on waist in a bored gesture of defiance would evolve into a heroic stance with one arm stretched aloft, and back again. And all the while Shah sang that iconic tune, in a catalogue of styles ranging from husky sexiness, to patriotic defiance. The Statue of Liberty, Marilyn Monroe, cosmetically altered features, blonde ambition, beauty, strength, power. All these notions swirled above this perplexing apparition - a provocative embodiment of a geographical and cultural landscape.

In many ways, Dinner with America was a methodical peeling back of the layers of a country. Not in an effort to reach its core necessarily, but more to enjoy and explore the artefacts unearthed, fully in the knowledge that a myriad more always lie beneath. Being aware of Shah’s physicality underneath her white mask enlarged the words of a Mexican man who said he had never known racism until he crossed the border. The desire to peer beneath the glittering exterior of the performed image was equalled by the need to hear his and other stories; realities utterly at odds with the glossy white shell of the USA. This was furthered when Shah seductively slipped off her white gloves and gown to reveal not white, but brown skin, clad in a sequined short dress and gaudy platform boots of red white and blue. The shimmering white layer of strength had been sloughed off to reveal a body that was complex, othered, exoticised, negated and unmissable, all at once.

By this point in the work, the burden of continual singing was beginning to show in Shah’s strained voice, cracking and gasping for breath as she intoned the hymn repeatedly. Her posturing became aggressively sexual, pleading for attention, trying to assert a power and allure, fast slipping away. It felt almost that a scab had been picked off, revealing an ooze and decay often obscured – histories erased, forgotten, erupting now to the surface…

The ultimate and last transformation was performed in silence. Voices had faded away, flashing gaudy lights were now steady and fixed. Slowly Shah removed dress, boots, false eyelashes, and finally, peeled off the latex mask to reveal her own face. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this intimate public act seemed on the one hand humbling and raw, but on another, filled with strength and poise. The final layer: unadorned and vulnerable, but freed from the burden of artifice and expectation.

Completing the sense of ritual in the work, a feast then began, in which everybody was invited to share. Silver platters spilling over with chocolate, fruit and nuts were carried onstage and the previous hush of the audience was broken as people came together to eat, and to chat. A literal ‘Dinner with America’. In this simple action, a final facet of that vast landscape was conjured. One which resonates with the positive sentiments of Amazing Grace. One which whilst occasionally lost amid a quagmire of division and hatred, nonetheless courses defiantly through the conflicted, loving heart of America.

Mary Kate is a freelance writer on performance and live art, based in London.