Overspill: Shuffling the Deck

In the words of Robert Pacitti, in the introduction to the limited edition SPILL Tarot pack, ‘the tarot stands as viable a means of interpreting the world as any other – including science, philosophy and mathematics – and I defy any sceptic to prove otherwise.’ A Tarot pack is a set of 78 cards most often used, in English speaking countries at least, for the purposes of divination (in France and Italy it’s also used for playing games). The pack is made up of the Major and Minor Arcana, people and things that represent the elements of our world and the characters within it, and Tarot readings are carried out in relation to spiritual enlightenment, psychic communication, and the occult. But, as Robert Pacitti points out, a reading is as much an act of interpretation as one of prediction – the meaning of the cards reflects the reader’s frame of reference as well as her frame of mind. It’s this ability to crystallise thought that gives the cards their power.

In the case of the SPILL pack, the cards’ power is enhanced by the symbolic resonance of the images, and the way they have been produced. The Major Arcana – character types that include The Fool, The Hermit, The Moon, and everything in-between – are pictures of artists and other contemporary ‘mavericks’ from across the fields of art, academia, cultural activism and beyond. I have just cut the pack in three to reveal Robert Pacitti – Artistic Director of the Pacitti Company and creator, producer and curator of the SPILL Festival (‘Death’); Lois Kiedan – co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (‘Justice’); and Empress Stah – trapeze artist, Neo Cabaret performer and producer (‘The Star’). The pictures were taken by the photographer Manuel Vason, who has devised a unique working method in which he collaborates with his subjects to capture performances made for the camera. As a result, the SPILL Tarot pack does not just help crystallise the thoughts of the person using it; it also goes some way to crystallise the processes of collaboration, challenge and knowledge-sharing inherent in the SPILL Festival itself.

Coming at the start of the pack, The Fool is the journeyman of the Tarot, an innocent and a visionary who may be drawn in any direction by the rest of the cards. As such, the Fool embodies the reader and all her potential. The SPILL Tarot Fool is a figure in mid-air, leaping with abandon against the greying landscape of modern agriculture. A stony, pit-holed path winds through fields of dried out crops; an energy pylon and other industrial buildings line the horizon. As s/he jumps, the androgynous figure of the Fool stretches out of her newspaper costume, and pulls her mouth tight between a grin and a grimace. Above, a small clear moon makes an early appearance before sunset. Behind, a dog looks warily at the strange traveller with her eyes covered and her feet bare.

It’s hard to tell if the Fool is jumping for joy or desperation. She exists in both day and night, in the freedom of outdoors and within the cultivation of industrial agriculture. Suspended in the air, suspended in time and suspended between places, this figure embodies the ‘unbridled primal energy’ of the Fool.

But the card is also a picture of Rajni Shah, whose performance piece Dinner with America, was programmed into the SPILL Festival; and it’s easy to see how, like her performance, this image draws on the potency of symbols that slip in and out of recognition. But the energy of this suspended image – with Shah’s head thrown back and her arms stretching away from her body– must also be down to the eye of the photographer, Manuel Vason, and the synergy of the collaboration. There was also another collaborator in this image – Lucille Acevedo-Jones, a costume designer who works regularly with Shah, and who designed the newspaper dress for this Fool.

Like all the cards of the Major Arcana in this Tarot pack, the Fool is dripping with the residue of multiple and combined professional practices – the traces of as many professional practices, perhaps, as there are knowledge systems touched by Tarot itself. By bringing together this collection of people inside the rich symbolic web of Tarot , the project of the SPILL Tarot pack represents the working methodology behind the festival. As a whole, SPILL 09 was a collaboration between artists, producers, venues and audiences across a wide terrain – large theatres as well as site-specific spaces; performers familiar to London audiences as well as artists and work that was wholly unfamiliar; live art, theatre, performance, explicit bodies, music, dance, and much more. It brought artists to London from all over the world, and it did the same for audiences. As such, it reflected the vision of the Pacitti Company and its Director, Robert Pacitti. But SPILL was also woven from the enthusiasm, interest and sometimes controversy sparked in the minds and conversations of the people who participated by performing, producing or watching the work. Just like Tarot, it offered up glimpses of human experience, with the desire to be read and absorbed into others’ lives.

SPILL: Overspill was an attempt to respond to the energy and achievement of SPILL through writing that respected the form and content of the festival and its processes, and that developed with the festival over time. Together, the seven writers involved (David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt) created 55 pieces of writing. As well as responding to the work as we saw it during the festival, Overspill writers investigated the processes behind the finished product – interviewing artists, visiting rehearsals, and in most cases developing a collaborative process with the artist. We addressed questions to the audience and, within the confines of free blogging software, we tried to experiment with form. There were three days of writing workshops, two peer critiques, a complicated group editing system and ticket schedule, and one all night live writing performance. Like the SPILL Tarot, each individual blog post represents a complex web of professional practices and collaborations; what you’re reading here is the first card in the deck. We hope you will shuffle your own way through, and use this site to crystallise your thoughts in response to the SPILL Festival. Please make comments below, or email opendialogues@gmail.com

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

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

Pieces of America 1: A recipe for collaboration by Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America: A recipe for collaboration

“I’m fascinated by the notion that in this day and age everyone carries a small piece of ‘America’ inside them, a tiny concept or visual reference, often involuntary. And I’m at once repulsed and delighted at just how easily I feel connected with those ideas, which are often linked to capitalist ideals, of freedom, saturation, desire, individuality. So this is a piece about the ideas and images that we call ‘American’ and, for me, about a complicated personal attachment to both the land and ideas of the United States.”

– Rajni Shah-

Reading Rajni Shah’s words above, I found myself instantly drawn to the concepts at the heart of Dinner with America. I was curious about the ‘pieces’ that people might carry within. Are they a burden? Or an unconscious cache? Wedged in the cavities of consciousness, and creeping occasionally to the surface in response to a trigger: a sound, a scent, a vision. The sight of an iconic American face perhaps, captured on a silver screen, or a world stage. The bitter waft of black diner coffee left too long to percolate.

And what about me? Do I carry a piece of America within? Delving into the recesses of my sub-conscious I find not one piece, but numerous shards scattered in disarray. A jigsaw with pieces that will never join up; the image they convey will always be gappy, and tantalisingly incomplete. My childish glee at discovering ‘Swiss Miss’, a sickly hot chocolate complete with ‘just add water’ marshmallows, which would arrive every Christmas, dispatched by faraway American friends. In 1980’s Ireland...that was hot. The tales of starving wretches boarding famine ships bound for Ellis Island, taught at school…a promised land which would both sever them forever from kith and kin, and give them their one desperate chance at survival. Timing the lift to the top of the Twin Towers on a teenage trip to New York - it took almost two minutes, just as the cheery lift attendant had promised. My righteous, impotent fury at the war-mongering of recent times. My desire to travel to the Rocky Mountains with my father one day – a landscape which he has always marvelled at, but never touched.

Dinner with America is an ideological and literal feast. The audience is invited to dine out, not only on sumptuous dates and chocolate, but on the ideals, concepts and contradictions of a vast and complex landmass. This notion intrigued me and led me to wonder how one might go about conceptually ‘digesting’ a country in one sitting. The joke that begins ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ ends with the suggestion ‘in small bite-size chunks’. This would seem like a sensible attitude to employ when attempting to digest a continent. But what would those chunks be comprised of? Where would one harvest the ingredients?

As a writer with SPILL: Overspill I have been given an opportunity to collaborate with Rajni Shah – to engender a conversation and see where a meeting of minds might lead. Exploring how one might gather ingredients for a conceptual gorging on America, we decided that I should ask the audience members of Dinner with America for ideas. To enquire what fragments of America they might lug around inside….

On the first night of Shah’s performance, I set up a little ballot table outside the theatre space. People were generous with their contributions; casting their folded up votes, or humouring me gracefully as I canvassed for their thoughts whilst they queued before entering the venue. A few days later, Rajni Shah too gave me a long list of her ‘pieces’ to add to the pot. Armed with these fragments, I hope to devise a means of combining them; a recipe perhaps for feasting on America in a positive, receptive and palatable fashion. What ‘flavours’ might complement one another? How could they be combined? In what ratio? In what order should they be served?

Patriotism

Yellow Taxis

Kinship

A crush on Obama

Hope

Fear…

Check back here this Sunday to read the recipe...

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

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

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.