A Brief History of The Past Six or Seven Weeks

On January 28th, I organised a performance oriented event at The Shed, Henrietta Lane. Apart from the fact that it was shut down by the fire safety folks, which was a shame, it was a success. The artists were of great quality, people came and, as far as I'm aware, enjoyed themselves in a lovely space, provided by Eli McBett at The Shed.
The fire folks came before we'd started, after people had started to come and gave us the option of getting out right now or sqeezing the night's performances into an hour.

I guess I pretty much decided, and then persuaded the artists, that the latter would be our course. I think that was worth doing. It was short lived but extremely well documented. Since the artists were encouraged to bring experiments and works in progress to the friendly little public we'd gathered, I know from experience how important it is to see yourself in performance as well as to do it. Sometimes, the mistakes that ring out like gongs in one's head while performing will be almost invisible when looked back on, sometimes vice versa. It's an important learning tool and needs an audience.

Having said that, I really liked all the work. Of course, I would say that - I was the one who decided which artists would be there. Here's a quick cut of the footage I managed to get on my own camera, there is a lot more footage from two other cameras which I'm almost done putting together - I'll start a seperate blog to archive it and write proper reviews. As the word "archive" implies, I don't intend this to be the last The Howl Into The Hole event. The Shed is unable to host events for the moment, but I'm looking for an alternate venue right now.



Big friendly thank yous and many warm handshakes must go to the artists who took part, more of them travelling from outside the county of Dublin than not and who provided, under some considerable strain, both entertaining and thought provoking examples of ephemeral art practice - Alive and unpaid, just off Bolton Street.

The next day, I went to Cork. The Basement Project Space to be exact. Podium #1 to be absolutely precise.



Podium is planned as a monthly platform for the free expression of ideas, curated by Stephanie Hough, one of (I think) six artists with studios attatched to the space.
Stephanie herself performed a piece called Porn From The Podium, reading found texts of extremely explicit content, recording, playing them back and repeating until the repitition made the shocking content seem extremely banal. An effective experiment I thought. We also saw some video clips, apparantly made the day before or something of the same artist dressed in silly wigs, singing hilarious songs in the guise of some sort of worst case senario eurovision song contest winner. I remember there being some sort of over all point with them but all can recall now is how very wierd they were.
There was also a piece called Appliance Ensemble or something, which made snacks for everyone as per intructions sent from the artist. It's in the video too. The piece itself wasn't doling out booze, just smoothies and popcorn, so I stayed away from it.
I believe I was next and read fairly successfully, I think, ...from the works of Icarus Crane - always a worthwhile endeavour. People were pretty positive about it afterward, as I recall.
Colm Madden, another of the artists at the studio, performed a piece, entitled Self Love. It was great! It was mostly pretty conversational, the artist reading intermitent pages from a note book, happening on the main points of the performance he had not completely prepaired and then singing these wonderful songs, somewhere between Bessie Smith and Britney Spears, amid a deceptively ad-hoc environment, including a projection and mirror. I got a lot out of (oh yeah, and some other guy got a really silly hair cut to raise money for the Haitian earthquake victims, which was nice of him) the performances at both events and just in the past few weeks, I've been making real ground in my own work of the past few months.



Here's a random smattering of images from my research since Christmas time.


A lot of what I've been doing has been text and sound based. A little of it appears below. I've been writing a lot and going back and rewriting some of the core passages of performances I've already done. The performance workshop video shown here is the most recent and was pretty much a total failure when it actually came to performing it but, the happy accidents that did occur and the comments of the workshop group have led me, over the past few days to totally rethink the mess of information gathering and experimentation in one very simple narrative, which is written and which I'll try to get filmed in some way over the coming weeks.

One positive thing about trying out the performance is that it reminded me of how I'd learned the performance I was developing this time last year. Video taping and watching and rewatching. Using objects in the recitation of texts seems to be proving useful to me too. I'm not sure if it's something like the sense memory technique used by actors or just that it distracts me from what I'm saying, so I don't fuck it up.








All of this stuff is totally sketchy and a lot of it uses borrowed sounds and images. This week's plan is to draw together imagery from the various texts I've been working on into plastic form (on paper).