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June 13th, 2009
June 11th, 2009
 | 10:41 am - things that have influenced me 1
From 1960 onwards we used to have Independence Day celebrations and every year the whole boarding school would go and watch at Liberty Stadium, because all various villages from up and down the country would put on a show. And there would be awards. I say villages. Cultural societies would present a show, and in practice this meant a group from a village, possibly supported by infrastructure from a local college, would stage a traditional dance. There'd be a big procession of all the groups round the track to start with, just like the Olympics, and you could buy photographs afterwards. ( Read more... )
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April 8th, 2009
 | 11:32 am - let me esplayne: no, let me sum up 3
H commented, during our feedback meeting, ( Read more... )
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 | 11:20 am - WIN1!11
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 | I am:Samuel R. "Chip" Delany Few have had such broad commercial success with aggressively experimental prose techniques. |
Which science fiction writer are you?
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November 10th, 2008
 | 12:58 pm - let me esplayne: no, let me sum up 2
The transaction
Since in this discipline there aren't any rules and anything goes - I mean the discipline, or indisciplines, if you want to be cute about it, of live art/performance/new theatre etc - it is hard to come up with anything new. Anything one may think of doing in the course of a performance, however outre or outrageous, has probably been done before by some dude in Russia in 1917.
( Read more... )
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November 8th, 2008
| 10:39 am - let me esplayne: no, let me sum up
after-performance-thoughts
It's odd to have made something and not have something to show for it. No artefact: no video, no picture, no portable object. What the performance is, is completely bound to the live moment. I had a hold of this as knowledge but not as realisation. This keeps coming up in discussions of performance, and I have heard it talked about time and time again - what does the art consist of, and how is the document related to the art; and what is it that is produced by the interplay of the performance and its documentation? And its history, and by the way it exists in memory?
Making the work, what was new to me was when a physical gesture was developing. I knew when it wasn't developing: D's comment "You're not in the zone" was true for a lot of the time. As it happens I know what 'the zone' feels like when making a concrete work of art: you keep stepping back to look at it, no thoughts in your head but your eyes wide open; anyone who happens to come across you at this time can't help walking round and round, looking; there aren't any words and you don't know what's going to happen next but you do know exactly what to do; and when you walk home afterwards people greet you in the street (I like that bit.)
But this, the physical gesture - you can't see what you're doing and you have no idea what effect it will have on an audience. ( Read more... )
The intra-cultural gesture
( Read more... )
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October 30th, 2008
| 11:38 pm - Marcia Farquhar, Arnolfini 25 October
Black & White and Red All Over
I'm not sure if it is that I'm jaundiced and paranoid - not a sunny person - but Marcia Farquhar's Black & White and Red All Over left me blinking and taken aback.
It started harmlessly enough. We came into the auditorium and lounged about on the floor mostly, though there was a row of chairs at the back for the more formally inclined - I mean for people who prefer to be comfortable. Marcia Farquhar pottered on in an old black coat with a big fur collar, a black dress, leggings and bare feet. With the large black suitcase full of her props in the middle of the room, she slightly made you think of a very posh bag lady.
Across the three sides of the auditorium, behind her and to the sides, sheets of fabric in the shape of life-size chains of paper dollies were strung against the walls. They were pegged to washing line. Red to her right, black to her left and white behind her. (Da duh dum! The three colours of mythic significance!) These hangings were the dresses - each chain of five was cut in such a way that it could be worn by five people, each person slotting themselves into one of the headless paper-dolly shapes. They would poke their heads through at the neckline, and they would be joined together by fabric at the arms (they could hold hands with each other within the continuous sleeves) and at the hems. Two young women, the artist's daughters, stood at the edges of the performance space in the gaps between the dresses.
( Read more... )
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| 09:38 am - ldp end project stuff
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From an email to Traci - reflection on how I got here
I am not theory-led at all, the work I do stems directly from experience. I got interested in working with the body (or with presence) as a consequence of working in digital arts, which is swimming in ideas of disembodiment and virtuality - but it's kind of quite obvious how much the physical world determines what happens in virtual space when the physical world you inhabit isn't validated by majority consensus. So I got interested in what additions to meaning happen when the body carrying meaning is specifically my own - older Black woman, parent, ordinary ordinary life and concerns. I remember at the time being very interested in Donna Haraway and the idea of 'modest witness' as a construction of so-called scientific objectivity - what it grew from and the unexpected long-term consequences. So the construction of a witness, or an agent - someone whose word counted and the grounds on which it counted - that became interesting to me, and at the very start of beginning to make live work, I had kind of an idea of what I was working on as 'The Old-Fashioned Body'.
( Read more... )
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October 17th, 2008
| 12:21 pm - post-colonialism questionnaire
[with regard to the questionnaire]The question that interests me most is ‘Do you feel political correctness has turned into a form of oppression?’ ( Read more... )
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 | 10:37 am - you say inauthentic, I say contemporary
Enjoyed reading Stuart Jeffries' interview with new Booker prize winner Aravind Adiga in the Guardian yesterday. Selected nuggets:
' "Friends who came to India would always say to me it was a surprise that there was so little crime and that made me wonder why." Balram supplies an answer: servitude. "A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9% - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude," ' and I can't help surmising that Nigeria is so - I was going to say socially turbulent but I actually mean dangerous - unruly...because it just doesn't have the centuries-old, engrained, conquest-enforced stability of a hieratic class structure. Which...well, good.
But this struck home:
' "If you're rude to your mother in India, it's a crime as bad as stealing would be here. But the family ties get broken or at least stretched when anonymous, un-Indian cities like Bangalore draw people from the villages. These really are the new tensions of India, but Indians don't think about them. The middle- classes, especially, think of themselves still as victims of colonial rule. But there is no point any more in someone like me thinking of myself as a victim of you [Adiga has cast me, not for the first time, as a colonial oppressor]. India and China are too powerful to be controlled by the west any more.
"We've got to get beyond that as Indians and take responsibility for what is holding us back." What is holding India back? "The corruption, lack of health services for the poor and the presumption that the family is always the repository of good." '( Read more... )
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September 24th, 2008
| 12:39 pm - Three Impressions
1.
On our way in, our flight came in late to CDG and we missed our connection, so had to spend the night in the most basic possible hotel - good food though. The next morning we were to fly to Schipol and thence Lagos. And by the way, Schipol to CDG is like the Garden of Earthly Delights to Breughel's vision of hell...something to do with the concept of customer service not yet having been translated into French.( Read more... )
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| 12:11 pm - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 13
15th September
The other kid came home from college, sat on the couch and analysed something - some share options I think - in terms of the hyper-inflation of expectations and inevitably dwindling/mismanaged resources and my God! What a relief to hear some sanity. I'd been feeling like a fragile bubble of dissent in a great churning sea of crazy - after all, if the country's not mad than it has to be me.
It's the country.( Read more... )
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| 10:46 am - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 12
14th September
It's fascinating to watch the saga of the mallam with 82 extra (four he's allowed) wives unfold in the daily papers.( Read more... )
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September 21st, 2008
| 05:19 pm - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 11
7th September
on the Friday evening, the kid had decided that the three raucous cooks should stay the night and was trying to chivvy her grandad upstairs before he found out. But since he's pretty well aware of when he's being chivvied that didn't quite work out.
Saturday, party day, a busy day, setting things up, last minute cleaning, people arriving, aunties and husbands and cousins. At half-twelve on the dot I was upstairs when they called me down -
"The priest has arrived!
"And he has brought his choir!"
Well. Being one of the celebrants I had to put my video camera down during Mass. From the inside there is no document, only from the outside. So what can I say?
It. Was. Fabulous.
Pa took Communion; and I cried buckets.
Then we had yummy dinner, sat around talking, in the house and under the trees, the Archbishop turned up and helped Grandad cut the cake, a million photos were taken, the new generator worked marvellously, and then we all went to bed and slept soundly till morning. I'd like to say that even the mosquitos stopped biting but that wouldn't quite be true; but everyone was fed, including the household and their children and their children's friends; and even the friends of the drivers of those who attended the party took food away with them.
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September 19th, 2008
| 08:47 am - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 10
5th September
If I had known my cousin was going to start jumping up and down and clapping and crowing and phoning EVERYBODY to invite them to attend when I told him about the Mass, I'd have had the sense to keep my mouth shut. I haven't got enough guile for this country! ( Read more... )
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| 08:07 am - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 9
4th September
How are you, Imaginary Friend? Yesterday I got to the internet, yay! But the place is full of mosquitos for which I was unprepared, and so today am covered in massive red bumps.
It turns out the question of the Mass is actually very political( Read more... )
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| 07:33 am - Letters To An Imaginary Friend 8 cont.
Pa drew back his whiskers like a cat that has stepped into something it disdains. ( Read more... )
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September 12th, 2008
| 04:00 pm - Letters to an Imaginary Friend 8
3rd September
Oh-oh. Half-past eight in the morning and here comes the priest in a delegation with a catechist and two older ladies, saying "I've been researching where Papa's house is for days!" ( Read more... )
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| 03:15 pm - Letters to An Imaginary Friend 7
2nd September (more)
Imaginary Friend, here is the list for the caterers for the small party that has at present reached the point of considering whether to open up and clean another building on the compound in order to accommodate those staying overnight:
Rice...7x280 N1960 ( Read more... )
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| 03:00 pm - Letters to An Imaginary Friend 6
2nd September
Pa is actually sharper than I am, recalls the thread of things better, follows connections, is more exact. He doesn't switch as quickly as he used - I've noticed, if a slight mental stutter occurs, it's more often in the conceptual switch between languages, and thus between lifestyles.( Read more... )
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