Review published in 'The Theatre Journal' (US Theatre periodical) May 2004

LIVE CULTURE: EX-CENTRIS, 12AM AND LOOKING DOWN, QUIZOOLA & PANORAMIX by Pocha Nostra, Forced Entertainment & La Ribot respectively, Tate Modern, London 27-30 March 2003

'Live Culture,' a four-day symposium with performances and exhibitions, was held at the Tate Modern in London at the end of March 2003. The event brought in theorists, performance makers, artists and writers to talk about performance and included archived film material, photography and durational performance. Tickets for the symposium sold out almost immediately, so this review centers on the performances and shows open to the general public.

'Live Culture' opened with a lecture by the acknowledged performance art expert, RoseLee Goldberg on the evening of the 27th March, as she commented on slides from her own personal archive of photography and film of performance and performance art since the turn of the century. Performance, performance art and theatre have been melding and finding their liminal crossing points since the sixties, yet one aspect remains central to their uniqueness as an art form, their ephremerality. Goldberg made this issue central, and wanted to raise the problematics of that very ephremerality for the gallery, the theorist, and the historian. Just how do you archive, or even curate, performances?
This very question seemed to form the crux of the whole event. The borders between theatre, performance and art have blurred and blended deliciously during the end of the last century. Mounting theatre pieces in an art gallery ensured that this question would be central to the festival. The question was also at the heart of the challenges faced by the curators as these theatre companies are more used to working in spaces more suited to an audience's comfort for durational work.

A diverse audience attended the opening of the exhibition on Friday 28th March, crowding through the galleries in the West Wing on Level Four. The performances that formed the main body of the gallery work were consciously durational work: Forced Entertainment's Quizoola lasted for seven hours, Guillermo Gómez-Peña's Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others)lasted between two and three hours, and La Ribot's Panoramix lasted over four hours. . However, the gallery undermined the durational nature of these works. Gallery staff jangled keys through quiet performances and entered and exited through spaces, causing noise from one performance to bleed into another. The very essence of the gallery as a space to be passed through did not encourage people to stay and watch this durational work, in fact people often melted away as quickly as they would glance at a canvas.

This disregard for duration was perfectly exemplified in the method that tickets were sold for the event. As with all exhibitions at the Tate, you must enter within an hour of the time stamped on your ticket. If you wanted to watch all of Forced Entertainment, but your ticket allowed you to enter one hour from the end of the show (like mine) that was just tough luck. The gallery was staging durational performance without the duration.
Forced Entertainment performed two of their pieces live on the Friday and Saturday, 12am and Looking Down and Quizoola respectively. On the third day they showed video work. La Ribot's Panoramix was repeated during the three-day period, as was La Pocha Nostra's Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others).

Forced Entertainment's 12am and Looking Down is a triumph of the dressing up box and the sign. Frantic performers would rifle through an array of clothing hung on rails around the gallery space, find the 'right' costume, put it on, and choose a sign made from cardboard labeling themselves to the audience. An actress wearing the placard "Rachel-Woman of the Month" strutted around the space looking triumphant. 'Speed Freak' enabled one actor to bounce around in a frenzy; he performed the same behavior holding up the placard entitled 'A famous existentialist'. One performer would sit on a throne in the middle of the space when tired and the others would sometimes hold up signs to refer to that seated actor. The pace was frenetic, funny, emotional, touching as they endlessly invented new identities. However, the staging only allowed for a relatively small audience standing in a line behind which people milled back and forth. Their performance of the beautiful Quizoola on the Saturday, a marathon staging of seven hours with 2000 questions being asked in various turns by three performers made up with clown faces in a circle of light, is an absorbing investigation into what is real and what is not. The questions range from the intimate to the universal. You find yourself trying to work out whether these questions are rehearsed or improvised whether they refer to a made up situation, or a real one that might deeply affects the actor; 'Since I left his mother, do you think my son despises me?' The audience sits on the floor fascinated but gallery assistants pass back and forth, opening doors to the space showing 'Ex-Centris,' and allowing techno music to overpower Forced Entertainment's quieter piece. One clown turns to the other. 'Do you think the people in that room are having a better time than the people in here?'

In La Ribot's piece, a performer dances between abandoned costumes in a gallery room. The dancer assumes the identity and role of each costume, abandoning her own self after dressing in one of a number of fantastic costumes, in a frozen moment of taking on another's identity before she sheds that costume eventually to return to her nude body, before repeating the action with another outfit in the space. However, the gallery gravely underestimated how long each spectator would remain in the space and inevitably the room grew crowded. In particular on the Sunday when I returned to watch the piece with relatives it was extremely busy. On entering, I was told by an attendant that we would all have to step over the other spectators and sit near the performance. My relatives were elderly were unable to clamber over other people to sit on the floor, so on this occasion we were unable to watch this piece, although I had been able to watch La Ribot the day before. Minutes later we saw a rebuffed wheelchair user being turned away. Not only did the Tate place arbitrary time limits on durational performance, the museum effectively denied access to the disabled. Of all the performances, it was perhaps Gómez-Peña and his colleagues in Pocha Nostra that were the most successful in the demands of the gallery space. The room in which 'Ex-Centris' was performed contained a series of small stages, each home to a fetishized Other and replete with the props of that 'character' which were there for the audience to 'read' as artifacts throughout the duration of the weekend, the empty stage was full of props that were waiting to be used.. At the start of the performance, gallery staff led the performers through the corridors and the gallery spaces used for the Live Culture festival, until they arrived at their specific empty stage filled with their relevant props. Having been delivered to their stage, they performed their Other-ness for the audience, creating tableaux and dioramas of "Ethno Cyborgs." This almost was ideal to the idea of curating, as the dioramas that the 'Ethno-Cyborgs' presented were almost like moving paintings, tableaux that could be contained in the same way a canvas is contained within a frame.

As durational pieces, all the performances could be experienced as a portion, or potentially in their entirety. One could listen to Forced Entertainment's questions in 'Quizoola' for five minutes or five hours. However, the beauty of durational work is seeing how all the potentially disparate units flow into a larger theatrical narrative as you experience the whole? The Tate Modern's attempt to curate epheramality--laying down art gallery rules and regulations in which to experience theatre--effectively resisted the duration in durational performance, and denied accessibility, the festival concentrated on the curator ship of this kind of art, and therefore privileged the 'art' in all these works of performance art. It was a potentially thrilling experience that did not live up to expectation. It left this audience member frustrated and saddened that disregard for staging requirements had marred many people's experience of these theatre companies and artists.

SARAH WISHART
London

 

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