Spill: Overspill: mary kate connolly

Showing posts with label mary kate connolly. Show all posts

Pieces of America 2 - by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America 2

A very sideways look at the experience of performing and attending Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America in real and conceptual space…

co-authored by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

The following is a template designed for the consumption and digestion of splinters of cultural reference…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

A cavernous dining hall envelopes you. Upon entering, you cast aside fear and difference, strike up friendship, and explore common ground. A vast Honduran mahogany dining table inhabits the centre in isolated splendour. The linen is embellished in sparse Lutheran hand with the words ‘Pride, Hope, Kinship, Drive’. You are here with others. No one feels left out or passed over.

I am waiting, sheathed in plastic. Blind. A sweat in the palm, a loss of balance, a careful slow movement of the lashes. How many of them are there? What do they look like? Are they smiling or frowning or talking? Do they think they are making eye contact with me? Have they sat down? Do they feel welcome?

Whilst milling around the vast table and reaching out to one another, you are presented with the starter of the evening: the Optimistic Amuse Bouche. This is designed to whet the palate, and purge the body of negative expectation and prejudice. It is light, fizzy with promise, and lasts only for a moment on the tongue before dissolving.

250 grams of the ice of the Delaware and the grit of the people crossing it
50 grams of the majesty of untouched landscapes
5 grams of the sheer size and volume of all things American
Shake vigorously till all ice crushed and blended with other ingredients – serve in a shot glass…

The game is on. I am in the space with you. Solo voices of U.S. citizens punctuate this quiet part of the evening. I have met them all, can picture their faces and surroundings – each now reinhabits that place and time we shared two years ago. Most have moved on to new cities, lives, and some to a new realm of being. We are dining with the dead, the angry, the ungracious and the hopeful.

Guests are called to table, and invited to share in fellowship and the spoils of a beguiling landmass. Presently, a vast melting pot arrives.

You tentatively devour the space we share. It is most probably not what you expected. I try to alleviate our frustrations by seducing you. Waves of success and exhaustion wash over us. I am blonde and blue-eyed. You are staring at me. I look into your eyes but my sadness and anger and eagerness make you shy.

Main Course: Promising Stew

Base ingredient: The power of the American identity, and the endurance of the souls and hearts and bosoms of the American people.

Place in a large pot with 250grams of Patriotism. Heat till scalding.
Temper with the Songs of the South, the Validation of the Individual and the Fear of the Other.
Leave to simmer, until a myriad of histories and distant cultures dragged to the shores in famine and slave ships, have all been absorbed into the mix, peppering it with the flavours of far off lands.
Finish and mature the dish with healthy dollops of the captains of industry, the soaring bricks and mortar of shiny sky-scrapers, the chic New England style of Boston and Cape Cod, the airy art spaces of New York, the balm of Californian breezes.

I am trying to hold this space. Voices crowd in. I am singing. You have travelled into the cradles and fields of your minds. I am still trying to hold the space. Though of course, of course, this is an impossible task. You have left and some come back. This space is one of coming and going.

Side-dish 1:

Forebear’s Bread

A simple unleavened bread – coarse and sometimes hard to digest, it is formed from the sparse sensibilities of Lutheran and Calvinist settlers, cooked by the steam of growth, and transformed into a hard-working, conservative outlook, impeccably mannered, friendly, and a touch distant.

There is nothing other than being with you in the room. All our trajectories collapse into one pointed moment. You are with me now. One last song. We have come full circle.

Side-dish 2:

Moulded Faith Rice

A sticky sweet rice, made from varying individual grains, moulded together to form a wholesome, loving solid which places the family at the centre of life, which places immense faith in a benign god, which places trust in other people, and which places emphasis on striving ahead as one.

I have made an attempt, that is all. As I shed the layers of this shiny blonde outfit, you watch from the darkness. I have no idea who you are any more. I look at you and there is pity and engagement in the space between us, but I could not say exactly where it sits. I take a practical approach to undressing. Now your thoughts cram the darkness. It is comforting. You witness my body as a shared landmark. I make my escape.

Side-dish 3:

Fun and Frolics Fondue

A frothy, synthetically-chewy dip. This contains the lure of consumerism, the whiff of fast food, the playful yellow beacons of taxis on Broadway, the gushing emotion of sitcoms and movies, the stars in the eyes of waitresses working the graveyard shift in a Hollywood diner, the preacher touting for souls outside the Elvis chapel in Vegas, and the endearing twang of ‘American-English’.

My numb feet cross the space, blundering between you and the crumbs of mulch. We find ourselves in different locations. I have left it behind. The burial of something. Preparation for a harvest. Cleaning.

Side dish 4:

Troubled Gravy

A bitter sauce which should neither be avoided, nor allowed to subsume the other flavours of the meal. Ingredients include the power and status accredited to violence, the despair of the sick unable to afford healthcare, the segregation and division of race, colour and creed, the elevation of image, and the furtherance of one nation above all others.

We watch a movie together. You pretend not to notice that I am by your side. I am afraid that at this point you are looking for the end. Some of you leave the space. I wish you would stay. But of course this is part of the deal between us. You come and go. We stay. It is almost time for the feast.

Dessert 1:

The first is Traditional Apple Pie with lashings of white peaks of cream. Warm and homely, it looks to a safe and prosperous past, a security and assurance that values were intact, that the future was golden and that America would prevail.

Oranges, Mandarins, Bananas, Apples, Dates, Pears, Plums, Dried Apricots, Chocolate, Chrysanthemums, Amaretti. How ridiculous. We consider making the world kinder.

Dessert 2:

The second is Mississippi Mud Pie. This dessert should be served cold. It is an intriguing, yet not overly sweet dish, formed by the power of hope, now muddied with change and the fear of disappointment. It looks unflinchingly forward to an uncertain future.

It is painfully awkward to find our way into this space of conversation. I come from a different trajectory into this feast. But having negotiated our differences, we sometimes fall into an entirely surprising conversation for a moment.

The lethargy of post-feasting cloaks you in warmth. Conversation wafts and thins with the rising steam of bitter black coffee…it is time to leave. Shyness tinges departures with awkwardness as new found fellowships forged amid the clamour, are met with chill night air. Smiles and connections linger, stored for a future time, a future feast…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, producer and curator. www.rajnishah.com

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

The Porcelain Project: a (mis)communication across objects and space

With Grace Ellen Barkey

Initiated by Mary Kate Connolly and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

The Porcelain Project

Barbican, Silk Street Theatre

14, 15 April 2009

Grace Ellen Barkey and Eleanor Hadley Kershaw take a seat at a table outside the Waterside Café, Barbican. The fountain on the other side of the patio is gushing and people at other tables chatter happily over coffee in the afternoon sunshine. Eleanor places a tape recorder on the table between her fizzy water and Grace’s tea. They start to discuss Spill: Overspill and The Porcelain Project. The conversation quickly turns to the story of the performance’s evolution.

Grace: I work quite intuitively. I don’t really think beforehand, “what does it mean?”. I consider it more like when a painter paints. Just go [she makes a hand gesture to suggest throwing] with the paint and the white thing. You have all your luggage with you, all your knowledge and your life and your dreams and you just go for something…

I always tell the story that Lot, my partner in crime, and me, we were having a bit of time off… and we decided to do something small. Lot was a ceramicist, but she hadn’t practiced for years and years and I don’t know why but she started to study it again. I am a very big fan of porcelain, I just love to touch it, and in a flea market I always go to the cups. I have a whole collection of the most fragile cups, the more fragile the better. I think we [envisioned] a picture of a Louis XIV-style room - a room full of porcelain - and we said to each other, let’s do something with it.

For me, theatre is a puppet theatre, in the sense of the absurdity and the grotesque nature of a puppet play; [where there might be] a kind of strange repeating, like “children did you see…”, and then something pops up there [she makes a hand gesture like a hand-puppet popping up]. I said to Lot, let’s make a puppetry of porcelain, but really recognisable things like cups. So Lot started to make all the pottery. [We built] a little temple; on this platform there were porcelain things standing and hanging, and we would pull on wires and all these [pieces of porcelain] would move. For example, there’s this snake of cups moving [she makes a hand gesture to suggest a rolling wave]. It’s just like a dream of little objects moving. We still show it sometimes in museums, this little manipulation of the porcelain, it takes like 10 minutes. So that’s how it started…

And when it was my turn to do a big production, at first we had another idea for a setting, but because we had so much porcelain we said, “we have spent so much time already with this porcelain, so let’s just throw it on the big stage and see what happens…” And that’s how it grew.

Eleanor: Is the relationship between the audience and the porcelain the same in the installation and in the performance?

Grace: It’s completely different. The trembling table that you see on stage is also in the installation. When it starts the people come in and they see all this porcelain falling and they can come much closer, they can express their curiosity differently. They go and look at the table and try to figure out “why does it tremble?” and “how does the porcelain fall?”. They are already completely into it before we even start the manipulation. And during the manipulation they come very close, very very close. It’s very light. And the porcelain has a quality, it’s very tender, it is beautiful. The music of it is tender.

In the show, we have this poetry of the porcelain in the temple, but I also wanted to show another side of it. It’s more absurd when a body carries the porcelain. When you have a porcelain nose you’re immediately a clownesque person. These objects become a part of the body but at the same time they are more like an aggressive outburst of the body. You want to touch another body but because of the porcelain it’s an impossibility: I wanted to play with this impossibility.

Eleanor: One of the things that we noted in the performance is that the porcelain is not porous, there’s no way of getting through it. It feels like it’s getting between these bodies. We wondered whether you see the porcelain as something completely exterior; external to the body? Or do you see it as a representation of something more internal?

Grace: Of course, it’s not only an external thing. When you make theatre you are instantly telling something, in some way, even if the performance is abstract. You have the space, you have the time, you have the whole aspect of theatre: you are telling a story. What I try to do together with the dancers and Lot, is to create something new.

To trigger fantasy, to show that you can come up with something that doesn’t exist yet. The material and what I try to say grow together in relation to each other; it is something that I completely trust. It will tell a story whether you want it to or not - it is there. I sometimes say it’s kind of a meditation. To create something, you just have to go into it and try to open yourself to all the possibilities. And of course I have limited time with the dancers, I don’t have years and years. So I have to begin with an idea and very soon they start to understand, and come into my meditation too. We are working together, and this whole new world grows.

Eleanor: The porcelain seems to almost create a language of its own – how would you describe this language? Would it be very formal and ornate, or sketchy and in note form, or something else entirely?

Grace: I’m not so good in words, I really think in images. If it is a language it is a physical one, and of course there’s the sound that the porcelain makes. This is almost like a presence for me. The porcelain as an image is very present and I am always surprised to hear it. It’s such a beautiful gift of the porcelain to make sound.

Eleanor: As much as I enjoyed the performance I also found it quite unsettling, specifically when thinking about the colonial connotations of the porcelain…

Grace: My work is really about the absurd and the grotesque: the poetry of the theatre, the mythical figures that represent the good and the bad. The mythical figure becomes human, and the human figure fails. It is always disturbing and always funny to see human people trying to communicate and failing. And along with the porcelain, the mythical figures and the kings are an excuse to trigger something; to do something else with time, with material, to play, to invent. So the kings were a fascination because it’s such a terrific question – what is it to be a king? It’s a shame that there are no good kings any more. A good king should be on the square every Sunday and… dance for the people [laughs]… And why do all these kings go so crazy? To go so far in their rituals and to get so caught up with this absurd life they’re living.

Eleanor: This really came across in the performance – they’re so overindulgent and decadent that their world just falls apart and becomes chaotic…

Grace: And at the same time it’s a fairytale, the king and the princess and the frog.

Eleanor: And in creating the show you were “playing” and you see theatre as puppetry. As an audience member, you get the sense that these beings on stage are almost like children, in the way that they’re teasing each other. They often look at us for our approval; they’re playing to us. I felt very implicated; that they might not be doing that if I wasn’t watching. And when the movement becomes disturbing and sexual, I felt responsible for this descent into chaos. It’s a very interesting relationship that the performers establish with the audience by continuously looking back to us.

Grace: It’s a weird choice to make: are we going to look or not? And that’s why we put what we call “soldiers” [line of tall vases] at the front of the stage, so that they can’t come out, so that they can’t escape. So that we ask the audience just to look and say “what the fuck are they doing?!” It’s important to feel an energy that’s completely useless, because that’s what we are. You would look down from there [gestures to sky] at us and at how we fight each other, and how this one is for this god, and that one is for that god, and the people on the other planets would say “what the fuck are they doing?!”.

Eleanor: So you’re putting the audience in the position of looking in from the outside, from “outer space”.

At the end of the performance one of the vases broke. It was very shocking, and it brought back the idea that the porcelain is so fragile. We wondered whether that moment was intentional?

Grace: No. But every performance something breaks. We don’t know when and we don’t know why. It can be that something tinkles too hard, or somebody stumbles over something or several things, three or four things.

Eleanor: It really is unpredictable – as life is.

Has something ever broken in a way that has made it difficult for the performance to continue?

Grace: Well if something breaks there is a broom and Misha, in character, can come and clean it up.

Grace and Eleanor continue their discussion while finishing their drinks. They shake hands and smile. Eleanor exits through the café. Grace exits across the patio. A waitress enters from the café door and clears Grace’s teacup and Eleanor’s water bottle onto a tray, then exits.

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

Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer focusing on performance and live art, currently based between Brussels, London and Bristol.ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com

National Platform - Day One - 18th April 2009

National Theatre Studio

18 April 2009

Over two days, the SPILL National Platform presented 20 performance works by emerging artists, selected from almost 300 applications. The works reflected an incredibly diverse range of forms and themes: durational and installation work, engagements with the conventions of theatre, interactive provocations, and autobiographical narrative.

As writers, we knew we would be unable to respond in detail to all of the work, but we also wanted to avoid imposing any selective criteria, even a random one, on which work was covered. We decided in advance of the Platform that we would impose a constraint on our responses. This would provide a structure for giving equal space to each of the performances and would make the most of our limited time. We decided that we would respond to each of the works, and we would limit our response to the space of a 3x5 index card.

We like the idea that each of the identical cards seems analogous to the opportunity offered to the emerging artists: a blank slot, to be filled individually, but unavoidably to be experienced side-by-side with the rest of the programme, as part of an assembly or collection of material.

Although for the most part we have prepared our cards after the event, there’s also something about this format that reflects the experience of writing: taking notes in the dark, collecting fragments and impressions and responses. Trying to capture not just the event on stage but our internal journeys. Thinking always, at every moment, even before the moment has finished, about how to translate into words the transient and complex experience.

These cards are only scraps, only partial and inadequate records of the events of the weekend, but we hope something of the extraordinary and boundless diversity of work is reflected by these responses. Perhaps they can stand as the beginning of a discussion – please add your own comments below.

Theron Schmidt

Please click on each image to view larger.

Please Note: You made need to zoom out/in using your browser to view the image in a suitable size.

Mamoru Iriguchi - Pregnant?!

by Alex Eisenberg