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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

(w)hole story by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Void Story

Soho Theatre

20-25 April 2009

The last few audience members are squeezed onto the benches of Soho Theatre studio. It is warm and stuffy, but a buzz of anticipation permeates the thick air above the steeply raked auditorium. A Forced Entertainment performance is about to start: I am expecting that once the steward has ripped my ticket and I have chosen my place and I have sat down and I have taken off my coat and placed my bag under the seat, once the houselights have (maybe) gone down (or at least dimmed a little bit) and once the performers are on stage and the audience quietens… I am expecting that theatrical conventions will be challenged, form will be played with, and that this performance will stimulate some thoughts about my – our – relationship to what’s going on down there below. And maybe more.

The rules of Void Story are clear soon after the performers have entered and taken their seats. As Mary Paterson describes, the four of them are tools, props, components in the telling of this story. They perform the function of sound: the voices of the protagonists, Kim and Jackson, are spoken into microphones by two performers at individual desks on one side of the stage, a lamp and a script next to each of their mics. Effects are created live or triggered from a soundboard on the long desk behind which the other two sit, on the opposite side of the stage. They speak the voices of subsidiary characters into more microphones, adjusting settings on two Mac laptops. A screen fills the gap behind the two pairs, onto which high contrast monochrome collages are projected; rough cut-and-paste snapshots of a desolate and threatening landscape through which a man and woman journey – the image version of Jackson and Kim – posed photos of two new faces, not the performers speaking in front of us. It’s all laid out for us to see, production methods stripped bare, each dislocated ingredient needing our imagination, our effort, our presence, to come together into a whole. The performance is two dimensional and we are the third dimension.

It will continue like this. A string of terrible events are inflicted on Kim and Jackson by the narrative, but they carry on across this harsh landscape, with no grand purpose and no final destination. They receive a visitor, who shoots Kim in the stomach. They receive intrusive phonecalls. They are stung by bees, they swim through shit, they climb over a tower of decomposing waste. They are chased by an open-jawed bear and a pack of angry dogs. We carry on filling in the grim void, just as Jackson, eyes closed, led by Kim, can still imagine the human entrails scattered along their path, at which Kim recoils.

Despite the horrible content of the narrative, this framing of catastrophe seems safe – everything is settled from early on – the concept is there, so we just need to apply our imaginative glue and join Kim and Jackson for ‘a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture’, as Tim Etchells’ programme note suggests. The violence and misfortunes that the characters suffer bring to mind a horror or disaster film, their ability to brush themselves off and continue after deadly injuries, a cartoon. No-one will really get hurt here, the good guys will survive till the end - it’s all just a bit of light entertainment, right? It’s not real.

But the general effect is far from calming. The sound is almost unbearably loud: at times I feel like I am being pinned to the back of my seat by the force of it. In imagining all these nasty events, and in battling against the volume of noise, and in the heat of the space, this experience is often uncomfortably challenging. It doesn’t allow the quick fix spectacular escapism on offer in Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow. Maybe it comes closer to the gritty warning of Children of Men, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But it is still safe, it is darkly comic. It is apparent that this formula will not change and the narrative will reach no climax… rather we will continue uneasily trawling along a desperate grey plateau with its protagonists. After a while they encounter a sinister child on a bleak estate and she asks for some help with her balloon, it is stuck in a nearby tree. No-one else can help as they sleep during the day and work at night: “Our schedules don’t overlap much.” Kim and Jackson deliberate over whether –

There is whispering in the row behind me.

A young woman is slumped on the shoulder of the woman next to her, eyes shut, the people around are fanning her face.

She has probably fainted. Turn back to the stage

– Jackson is high up in the tree, “Jackson, be careful”. The balloon is shot by a –

but the whispering gets louder,

a man stands by the young woman. “Can you hear me? I’m a first aid officer. Can you hear me?”

To the panicked woman at the girl’s side: “Was she with anyone?”

“I’m her mother.”

Her name is repeated several times. “I’m the first aid officer, can you hear me?

…Has she eaten anything today?”

Glance back at the screen for a second – Jackson and the sinister girl and Kim are on the move, they are – then back up to the woman. Someone comes down from the back bench onto the stage, it is Tim Etchells. The performers’ voices halt, the houselights are brought up. “I’m very sorry, but we’re going to have to stop the show. There’s a medical problem.” He looks up at the young woman.

Everyone turns and looks.

A steward: “Is there anyone with any medical experience here? Is there a doctor in the house tonight?”

No response. Someone says, “She needs to be put in the recovery position.”

Everyone continues to look at the young woman and her mother in the middle of the seating bank. Her skin is grey.

The first aid officer calls an ambulance: “yes, she’s breathing but she’s not conscious.”

We stare.

No-one does anything.

This moment lasts a long time.

We stare.

A steward asks us to all to take a break outside the studio. We slowly filter out, dazed. We wait.

I think: So, is Void Story a disaster performance? It has presented us with a post-apocalyptic landscape, but the usual constraints of realism don’t apply. With a dream-like logic the protagonists have reacted to each crisis without ever considering the bigger picture (without the ‘sop of psychology’ as Tim Etchells writes): just like this show’s detailed attention to each individual component, and its intentional neglect of a complete, finished end product. We have been presented with a flat pack performance.

We’re thanked for our patience, and told the show will continue.

We wait.

I think: The performance has so far been deliberately out of sync with itself. Aside from the incongruities between aural and visual representation, and the strangely narrow outlook of the protagonists, the images have had warped perspectives within themselves because they are haphazardly thrown together from the elements of other compositions.

We’re told that the paramedics have arrived, that the performance will be started as soon as possible.

We wait.

I think: The performers’ style has been brilliantly underplayed and deadpan, always ensuring we’ve been aware that they are “just acting”, just reading from the script, just doing their job. They have been playing at being these characters, reminiscent of children doing the voices of their toys, or parents reading out picturebook speech bubbles to pacify at bedtime.

We are told that the young woman is looking a lot better now that she has received some medical attention, and that the show will be restarting soon.

We filter back into the studio, staring at the ominous empty space where the girl and her mother were.

Tim Etchells thanks us all for waiting, and tells us that the young woman is fine now and has been taken home. They’re going to rewind a bit:

– “Help me!” cries the sinister girl on the bleak estate. “Please help me!”, words spoken into a microphone that stretches Terry O’Connor’s voice into a high-pitched squeal. Jackson says, “This is one of those dilemmas that really tests one’s strength of character.” The audience laughs. “Do you run or do you help?” More laughter. “I’d say run…”

The performance continues through to the abrupt unconcluded end that sees Kim and Jackson in a final moment of inaction. But that scary intermission has changed the nature of the experience. Our expectations are blasted and nothing feels quite so safe anymore, now that we’ve been reminded that anything is possible, that unexpected eventualities can occur anytime, anywhere. And also it feels doubly safe, because nothing else unplanned will happen now, the chances of two emergencies in one show are very slim. Something shocking and demanding and real intruded into the set rules of representation, and we didn’t know how to respond. The light responsibility of creating a piece of theatre together immediately switched to the shared weighty onus of how to handle this unforeseen occurrence.

The spectacle of this episode was defined by our inaction – by our handling of it as something to be observed rather than acted upon – just as the final image of the performance shows Kim and Jackson giving up on reacting and trying out just doing nothing. Whilst we knew clearly how to play the game that the show proposed, this situation was uncertain, unguided, unknown. There were some attempts towards protocol, but it was clear to all that the possible directions were out of our remit, we couldn’t control them, and so we did nothing. We were helpless and redundant. Having re-entered, there is now a new definition of ‘uneasy’ attached to this space, and the loudness and disjunction of the performance have become comforting solid certainties. We watch the rest of the show, happy to be able to achieve something together, something that elegantly falls within the realms of our comfort zone, stretching us only as far as we choose to go. It’s in our hands again now.

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

Not Waiting by Mary Paterson

Intermission

Soho Theatre

22-24 April 2009

Intermission. The middle. The in-between. The time when you have a drink in the bar, or the performer in Pacitti Company’s Intermission drinks beer in the middle of the stage. Thinking time, when something has ended and before something else has begun. Intermission. When the world is still going on around you.

At the start of Pacitti Company’s show, Sheila Ghelani – the only performer onstage throughout – unveils nine cloaked figures. Like furniture stored under dustsheets, these figures have been waiting quietly, while the audience fills the auditorium. Ghelani reveals them to be nine microphones, each bearing a label: ‘Fiction’, ‘Glossary’, ‘Fact’, ‘False Starts.’ She moves between the mics, talking straight to the audience with the confidence of a practised speaker, the determination of someone with something to say.

At first it is obvious what these different mics stand for. At ‘Glossary’, Ghelani reads out a litany of terms to describe immigration; at ‘High Horse’ she describes a set of reasons why ‘they’ shouldn’t come ‘here’; at ‘Fact’ she tells us about the emigration and immigration of the swallow. The mics are different sides to an argument, different means of expression – even if they’re different means that could be used by the same person. But before long, this clarity of purpose is dissolved. Ghelani’s subjects become more personal – sex, death, love, ambition – and she stands at ‘High Horse’ wondering why things have turned out for her the way they have. ‘…And I feed myself,’ she says, ‘I mean, that’s not the done thing, is it? In this day and age – for a woman to feed herself.’

At these moments, the simple set-up on stage stops being a device for communication and becomes a very urgent means of understanding the complexities of another mind. The mics, with their neat labels, might stand for different points of view, but Ghelani (and it does feel like Ghelani, a real person and not a character performed, who is confronting us on stage) won’t be divided up and packaged neatly. She needs all these mics and more; she needs to stand at them and amid them; she has an opinion and also something further, something in-between.

When she is not speaking with soft determination into the microphone, Ghelani fixes the audience with an electric stare and dances towards us. She flicks her wrists in flamenco, or shakes her hips to the punch-line of a joke, and all the time her eyes are fixed on us, fixating us with the sharp sting of another person appearing in full. The thrill of Intermission is in the shocking vitality of this person on stage: the complexity of her thoughts and the richness of the way she moves. When she tackles death Ghelani walks to the microphone called ‘Fact’ and falls silent. This vital, full person – Stops. It is an apt metaphor for the unknowable-ness of death. For the audience watching, for a short, shivering moment, it also enacts the loss and terror that death brings. It’s a relief when Ghelani returns to us, smiling a knowing smile, full of life and energy once again.

This energy is sustained, in part, by a continuous soundtrack that ripens Ghelani’s conversational language. Sometimes a musical accompaniment, sometimes famous words uttered by famous people, and once, most memorably, the looped, rhythmic sound of someone weeping, the soundtrack both drives Ghelani’s speech forwards and snags the words back again. The rhythm acts as imperative and remainder, providing a continuous flow that connects the work to itself, as well as an atmospheric counter-reading of Ghelani’s thoughts. When she talks about love, for example, it is to the jaunty sound of a marching band, an incongruous mix that emphasises the banality of the list of sexual positions she recites. But this incongruity also emphasises the importance of Ghelani’s description of a single lover’s glance. The music drives the rhythm of the list only to dilute its sexual content - and, therefore, the latent eroticism of a woman reciting it on stage – which emboldens, instead, the eroticism of something far more personal.

In fact, Intermission is made up entirely of ‘something far more personal’. Pacitti Company’s in-between time is not a waiting room for life, it’s the very stuff of life itself. It is the thoughts and opinions that don’t have a department to fit into. It’s the mess that spills into a human being. And what can you do with all this information? The final, iconic scene poses a question about what it means to understand another person in full. Do you see her energy burning bright, or do you watch her energy burn away?

Mary Paterson is a writer and producer, and Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.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

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Mamoru Iriguchi - Pregnant?!

by Alex Eisenberg