Adam JamesOk , so a bit of a delay in getting something up here after our first meeting. Perhaps it was so seismic it needed a week to ferment on. Anyway, Andrew and I met last week to talk through strategies and methodologies of our research period. We kicked off by basically scrutinizing
the original proposal and attempting to exhume the essence of what it was that we were really looking at/for?
First off I'm going to say just a little bit about how we ended up working together. In a nutshell, David Gothard put us in contact with each other about a year ago. Andrew had just finished at Laban and David knew
I was looking to work with someone coming from a 'movement' background. I saw Andrews
Quasi piece and it was pretty much a done deal for me. I contacted Andrew, we met and realised we needed to work together on something at some point soon. Shortly after this initial meeting I roped Andrew in helping me out on
The Booger Dance project which I was about to shoot. In the end this turned out to be less of a collaboration and more about helping me get something done, which was fine, better than fine great in fact.
None the less, the seeds were sewn and we both agreed that should the opportunity arise we would collaborate on a project. As luck should have it I fortunately stumbled across PAL-LABs movement and meaning award and decided to put pen to paper and wrote a proposal which would give Andrew and I the space to develop ideas together and overlap practices.
Well, part of the reason I am writing this at all is that we were successful in our application! Needless to say we were both over the moon and set about planning world domination, through movement.
I'm a great believer in following what life drops on your lap, I don't believe in fate per say, but do believe that life often has a great way of illuminating the path you should follow. In this instance, a curator friend of mine Ali Macgilp, with whom I have shown a couple of times invited me to perform in the Red Light District Amsterdam in January at a show of new British performance art called
'Climb Like a Cucumber Fall Like an Aubergine'.
In the past my performances, in particular with Ali have tended to be solo pieces in which I adopt a series of persona's based on appropriated characters from either the gallery area or my neighborhood and use them to explore the notional modern day witch. These pieces have tended to be roaming, and often for long durations with costume changes taking place during the performance, and aspects of the audience or environment feeding back into the work as it develops.
My interest in odd characters, gestures and masquerade has led me to have somewhat of a voyeuristic relationship with some of societies outsiders, ones based in and around South East London, Peckham and Camberwell in particular.
So when I was asked to come and do something similar in response to Amsterdam's Red Light District I jumped at the chance.
However, rather than re-stage something old, or retread familiar ground I wanted to try something new. Normally the process of developing my performances happens almost via osmosis over a period of time spent in a particular area. This show was to be no exception as I had been offered the fantastic opportunity of living in the galleries artist annex for a week leading up to the show.
I asked if Andrew might like to collaborate with me on this, with the offer of us both staying in Amsterdam for free, with free flights, for a week. I was happy to get a yes.
As it turned out we spend the best part of the week in the space in heated discussions, often frantically scribing plans, diagrams, thoughts, questions and points of friction on huge sheets of newsprint.
Perhaps I was overly anxious, I know now I needn't have been, but having seen Andrew perform/dance/move I think its fair to say I felt a little intimidated. With a mere suggestion of a word Andrew waltzes off into a series of graceful improvisations sailing through the air like a wisp of air on a poetic breeze.
Whereas I on the other hand seem totally reliant on a plethora of props and crutches to get me through my clunky misshaped performances. Donning a dodgy false nose, shoddy wig, squeezed into badly fitting heels with a fistful of scribbled quotes on bits of paper I awkwardly shuffle through my performances like a drunken red-cut on a Butlins come down.
This was going to be an interesting performance.
After a week of agreeing to disagree on many things, and being in shared wonder at our insightful genius overlapping inspirations it came to the penultimate day of our stay. With a performance looming the following night I set off to do what I know best. Charity shop. When in doubt buy bags of misshapen smelly clothing and let them do some of the work for you. At least that's what has always worked in the past for me. Perhaps its the way that unwanted clothes seems so soaked in tragic humanity that I am always drawn to them? I don't really know. But when attempting to exhume something hidden that lives between the cracks of an area, flea markets and thrift stores seem to me at least, to be goldmines of character and inspiration.
So, laden down with a pile of unwanted smelly, synthetic bad clothes Andrew and I returned to the gallery.
The plan, ah yes. Well we did have one, perhaps I have said this all back to front.
After being initially asked to perform at the show by Ali, I recalled the last time I was in Amsterdam. The thing that struck me, apart from the overwhelming reek of skunk was not the strippers in the Red Light District, but the people trying or in many cases trying not to look at the strippers.
It was a place of looking I decided. A place of looking where one shouldn't perhaps, but a place full of enticing eye candy, depending on your outlook.
Initially my plan had been to spend a week there studying the way people moved and behaved when walking past the women in the windows. There was something of a micro performance every-time someone would walk past the throbbing red lit windows. For some voyeurs the world around seemed to disappear altogether and I remember being struck by the single minded lecherous stare of drunk/stoned/high men leaning up against windows oblivious to any kind of passers by.
It was the body language that I found myself interested in, again not of the subject of the gaze, but of the men themselves. More often than not the passer by of a red lit window would approach the glowing alley at a normal pace, before slowing down akin to passing a car crash, looking but not wanting to appear to stare. For to stare too long might mean the invite of an exchange distasteful for some, too expensive for others or simply inconvenient for the rest.
As a male of the heterosexual allegiance I wont lie by saying the strippers were not beautiful in many cases, they were. Perhaps its my English nature, but whenever I walked past the ladies and cast a glace, I too would slow down, but eye contact would always be too much for me and I would speed away, embarrassed at myself and the sexual slow-time I had just entered.
It felt as if making work in direct response to all of this would be too much, too loaded.
Over the week spent in the space Andrew and I mapped out parallels between this experience of looking and voyeuristic exchanges.
We decided there were synchronicities
between the art/gallery space and the red lit sex windows. There was something about a diplomatic exchange that interested us, and something about the confrontational nature of being scrutinized by person after person after person that we felt could be translated into something performative.
And so, VLO was born.
'Vlo' is Dutch for Flea, which Andrew came up with as the title for the piece. As you will see it seemed appropriate for the slightly parasitic nature of the piece and also referred nicely to where our costumes essentially came from.
The decision was made that we too would scrutinize, interrogate and use the flow of people into the gallery to take from. Using a camera and live feed video camera we would assist each other in deconstructing not only the people that came into the gallery, but also the sense of space between people, around people, the awkward atmosphere ever prevalent in the build up to a night of performance and from this create a visual score which we would both interpret as an improvised performance for the audience.
We were looking to find something hidden, glances, body language, whispers, tensions and from these create a reflexive performance which fed back on itself. Essentially we were appropriating any and everything that came into the gallery space during the night.
We decided early on, that our roles would be to help each other reach a shared goal.
The cameras would act as super interrogators if you like. As I moved around the space, with the camera tracking someones walk along the floor, the live feed was projected onto a gallery wall which Andrew transcribed from. We were trying to capture the impossible. In some ways it was a performance about failure, not in a prescribed 'failure' sense, but in the sense that it was a sisyphean task. It would be impossible to capture everything, but it was possible to annotate/draw/transcribe the things which seemed most pertinent to us both in relation to my initial loose proposal which aimed to explore 'outsiders'.
We set some simple rules. The main one being that the performance would be ready when our large piece of paper was full. Once and only once it was full we would have a score, albeit chaotic, and from this we would attempt to distil something which we would perform without any kind of rehearsal in front of people. Scared? I was.
In a hark back to my own work, I had made sure there was a clothes rail in our 'lab' space which it kind of became, with us acting like mad scientists attempting to piece together the Frankenstein's monster of performance. The clothes we had picked up previously would be our palette. With scissors, card, wigs and lots of thinking on our feet we cobbled together two costumes which were in part amalgamations of facades present within the space.
As our large piece of paper finally filled up with our improv performance score, so our costumes too came to shape.
Our moment arose, it was time.
The final act of the night, Adam James and Andrew Graham, performing VLO, for the first time. And as we discussed after, eternally the first time.
I wont go into the details, but it was scary as hell.
Not knowing how or when something is going to end is ok on your own, but when there's two of you, that's tricky.
In short the performance was a fluid piece in which Andrew used a mapping of sorts to inform his improv and I used Andrews movements as a map of sorts for my improv.
There was a real tension between us that was both terrifying and quite amazing.
Time seemed to slow down to treacle, my heart beat like a drum, the near silence was punctured by my panting and Andrews feet cutting into the sharp gallery floor.
It ended awkwardly. Stooped over, echoing each other like an ape and a swan I whispered
"how do we end it?"
"lets pick up the score and exit stage right (or something like that)" Andrew whispered back.
We picked up our large sheet of paper and left the spotlit floor. Walking round to the right, then behind the audience, we became increasingly aware that the audience was waiting to see what happened next. We ended up back facing the wall of our lab, with the audience having turned 180 degrees and now right behind our back, silently watching.
'What do we do now Andrew? There still there, they think were still performing?"
"Lets carry on, lets bow, lets do another one?" Andrew said encouragingly.
"Lets leave the gallery right now, our bedroom door is just there, lets just leave"
"No"
"Yes! (whispered)"
"No"
"YES!"
"ok..."
We left, not looking over our shoulder we calmly walked the 10 yards to our annex door and disappeared behind it.
Silence.
More silence.
2 mins later. I pry open the door just a crack, and peep through. The audience is still there, waiting. Close the door. Shower, get changed, 15mins later its all over.
So, that just about brings us up to now and our first proper get together since Amsterdam which will be mine and Andrews next post.
Andrew Graham After this wonderful introduction by Mr James, I feel I could give a little follow-up on what has been done during our reunion back in London and what it has triggered for me. Welcome at the Master Shipwright’s house. Agenda for the day : Catch up, hot coffee, a few hours of intelligent bullshitting, mapping a dream and setting-up a blog. One of our new traditions is to start our days with a few hours conversing and stripping the matters we are dealing with. So, we pinned down different aspects of Vlo, which either were aimed or came out intuitively.
In fact, we made a fool of ourselves! It was quite clear, we had set-up a series of tasks that could only do so.
Through this journey, I wondered: ‘As artists, what the … are we doing ?’
Vlo seems to have nailed our interests in ‘what we can do’ and ‘what we would like to do’.
This could be called an initiative to exhaust our skills. Vlo felt like a process of tautological realisation. In fact, we focused on the way we would approach, utilise and revisit these skills.
That said, I can’t count how many times I repeat myself in talking about certain things with my friends. But I always have the same drive to re-talk again about them. I find more interest when I have been working on them for such a long time. There is a need to be more creative or re-creative, in order to feel and understand my matters other ways. I feel particularly touched by this syndrome of reproduction and otherness. Indeed, there’s nothing more ridiculous than repeating one same joke for the sake of repetition. I guess it’s the same thing with a performance…
A child-like will
It was quite clear that we were looking to create something new. But where do we start from?
This ambition for novelty seems to recurrently stress a need to start way further than where we already are. So, let’s start from what we know and assume that we are creative creatures.
We decided to execute this will with a certain roughness, as if this conversation with a friend. It felt like one of these conversations: when you can’t listen to the person in front of you, and can only look at them executing it. What if, conversing was just an excuse to meet?
What if, the gallery and theatre space were simply excuses to meet?
What do we expect from each other in a gallery performance?
How can we prove our will for a special/other moment in this performance moment?
How can we relief ourselves from a pressure to decontextualise ? why not just do it ? In fact, the matter wasn’t to find solutions to relief the pain of decontextualisation. I guess, we aren’t psychologists. In this way, I felt like Adam proposed to directly act it. And Vlo was!
Vlo, the Prophete
The only thing that felt quite clear is that we wanted to have another look on the gallery space, on each other and us. Tracing our own expectations was the opportunity to win a ticket to another holly land to reflect. It felt like a chance to fly away in a space for composition, to open-up the imaginary, and to activate the hormone for utopia; almost like a massage of the ‘art’ box in our human brains.
Dyslexic methods
In the afternoon, I proposed Adam to workshop an exercise I developed with my colleagues from the Body of a Diplomat. We called it the dream maps. I felt it strongly related with the methods utilised to workshop and discuss the work at W139, in Amsterdam. Roughly, this workshop consists in staging a dream we had previously made. One would describe and place his dream on stage, whilst the watchers would draw a map of the dream on paper.
In a second part, the watcher would ask descriptive questions about the dream to which the dreamer would answer.
To finish, the dreamer would reproduce his description of dream, once again, whilst the watchers would continue to map the dream. Once finished, the dreamer would collect the maps from the watchers. From these, the he would score a master plan for a future performance.
Dream Map: Body of a Diplomat
These dream-maps had brought-up some questions about a certain trajectory from experience to the realisation. It kind of made language look a bit radical. We focused our matter on the activity of decontextualising (or on having a break from the world). Taking it from a dream seemed to trigger some kind of romance and psychoanalytical facade, which were unnecessary for our work… Nevertheless, pretty !
This facade was unnecessarily useful to facilitate a focus on the ways we create. In some ways, it would be giving away all the elements of a performance whilst making sure it could allow us to continue working on our concerns with some kind of diplomatic tact.
Cyber-artists
We finished this day by creating Vloism. It seemed like a fantastic solution to create a place that would hold Adam and I together. Where we could report at any point and cyber-rehearse. I believe we are both taking on individual researches, which systematically start and come back to PAL, as if a home for editing and for sorting out our wonders. Vloism is a chance to collect material and keep translating our ideas and thoughts. It is a chance to be thrown back to ourselves with a shameless proposal to discuss and review.
Vloism was chosen to name our party in the political world of movement. It praises for you to be tolerant and curious about our research. Welcome and good night.
.JPG)
