Ringside
by Mem Morrison
In the faded grandeur of Shoreditch Town Hall, now available as a wedding venue, Mem Morrison’s Ringside traces through fragments of past weddings in a kind of ghost-dance with heritage and tradition. Eighty audience members sit around a large U-shaped table, each listening to music and monologues through individual headsets, while Morrison and 18 volunteers, all women, perform as host and hostesses in the middle of the space.
Welcomed like a guest as much as like an audience member, I experience myself drifting through a strange blend of the real and the symbolic in which each becomes caught up in the other. There’s a spectacular parade of plates, glasses, and place-settings – but they’re just simple drawings printed on cardboard boxes. The women make sham dresses and veils out of thin plastic bags – but then they coax some of us onto the floor for a dance that is awkward as only reality can be. Archival wedding films, genuine but of another time, are juxtaposed with a live feed of the present assembly, who are not real guests but who are really here. New stories are superimposed over old photographs, and the mediation of the entire event through headphones makes the whole thing slightly out of sync with itself.
This blend suits Morrison’s subject: the nature of the wedding celebration is itself such a confusion of the real and the symbolic. The dominance of the colour white, the order of events, the carefully chosen costumes, the public display of it all, and of course the weighty consequences of a few spoken words … these symbolic elements all gesture toward a reality which is so significant that it needs elaborate codes to contain it. But these codifications also naturalise social roles and expectations, producing them as natural and unavailable for interrogation. Ringside examines some of the more obvious and suspect of these codes – the bizarre persistence of rituals based on the rupture of the virgin bride’s hymen – but also some of the less obvious ones, such as the distinctions between childhood and adulthood and the compulsive demand for generational continuity.
Another social form which blends the real and the symbolic is the cliché: those supposedly fictional generalisations which in reality end up becoming self-fulfilling. When performance engages with cliché there is often the danger of reproducing it such that the performance itself becomes clichéd, and Ringside walks this line. I felt uncomfortable with the way the form of the piece often rested uncritically upon tropes of performance participation, or the evocation, with which the piece ends, of the too familiar image of the marriage-phobic male. But there are moments, achieved through the delicate care of Morrison’s writing, or in the way his movement and dancing put his own body on the line, in which form and content become much more fluid, and the real and the symbolic become intermingled, undistinguishable, and unconstrained by tradition. This spillage, perhaps, is what performance can do.
Theron is a writer and performer. http://www.newworknetwork.org.uk/theron
Shoreditch Town Hall
3 & 4 April 2009 (8pm)
What a venue!
The grand surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall are the backdrop for a night of weighty expectations in Mem Morrison’s Ringside (a SPILL Commission). In the vaulted hallway, I am transformed from an audience member into a wedding guest with a red carnation, an ivory programme that requests the pleasure of my company, and the invitation to mingle.
Look at the cornicing! The stucco! The paintwork!
Just like a real wedding, the guests exchange nervous grins, offer stilted conversation, and try to imagine our place in the unfolding events. When we are led into the magnificent hall itself, we are photographed in the roles of wedding characters – the bride, the groom, and also an awkward neice, a jealous sister – and seated at a large horseshoe table. The table means we all have a front row seat, but it also means the guests can watch each other. And we do, with the special public permission of people at a wedding, as opposed to the individualised formality of audience members at the theatre.
What do you do?
The performance is hinged on this relationship between public and private, spinning round the convergence of public duty and private desire. Guests are given headphones, through which we hear Morrison’s interpretation of events as a12 year old boy attending his first family wedding. It’s a heady affair – a Turkish-Cypriot reception rich with cultural tradition. And tradition, here, is another word for community, another word for obligation, another word for knowing what will happen next. Ringside is both a remembered wedding and an imagined one – it is all the weddings Morrison has been to, and also their culmination in the wedding he is yet to have.
Morrison conjures up a wedding in this private stage, enclosed by the table and the expectations of his guests. He acts out a series of ritualised images and relationships – building the wedding cake, filming the reception, presenting himself to potential brides. Meanwhile, his thoughts are delivered, as if they are secrets, to each guest through the headphones. Broken ocassionally by the public soundscape of speeches and songs, this stream of confidences is what lets the guests know what is going on. But it is also what undercuts the innevitability of the wedding tradition, a message of passionate confusion from a reluctant protagonist.
It’s your turn next.
Morrison’s past and future ceremonies unfold with the half-remembered, half-recognsied innevitability of a culture you’re born into. There is a future waiting for Mem and his yet-to-be-chosen bride. It’s a future all of us guests are building, complicit in the routines and regulations of this imagined scene. Yet, party to both his family’s expectations and Morrison’s private fears, we fall in and out of the compelling rhythm of tradition, just as Morrison falls in and out of the rhythms of Turkish dance. By the end of the performance Morrison is trussed in a red ribbon pinned with money. It’s his turn next, he says, speaking in public (without the headphones) on his private stage. Has Morrison accepted his fate – to become a family man, a respectable man, to find a sweet smelling woman who understands the cut of his suit? Or has his fate caught up with him, winding ever tighter in the opulent binds of expensive fabric and other people’s public concern?
Mary Paterson
Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com
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