Gareth K Vile weighs the future of live art and New Territories.
Now that the National Review of Live Art has been retired – and a few cities are staking claims to replace it with tentative forays into a Spring Festival of Performance – New Territories is evolving its format. Into The New, Cabaret Futura, Cinematic Space and Via Nova (a more Live Art version of Via Negativa, who wowed me last year by staging imaginary deaths of four artists) represent the loose, almost cabaret association of different approaches to performance, covering a wide variety of approaches and techniques. Yet while the NRLA was marked by its diversity, reflecting Nikki Millican’s eclectic programming, many of these have a much tighter focus.
Cabaret Futura is a revival by Richard Strange of an event from Live Art’s post-punk return in the early 1980s: a DaDa inspired, sprawling evening of surrealism and comedy. An early invitation to a comfortable bed, where I was entertained by tales of erotic failure was followed by a clown reading philosophy, while the custard pies rained upon his body. A tribute to Beckett’s tape and tragedy monologue, a visit to the shrine of the holy air-stewardess, an uncomfortable study of the relationship between the white geek and black music: thematic connections are abandoned for a series of idiosyncratic displays, united only by a willingness to study the possibilities of juxtaposition and absurdity. It also reveals one of the dangers of Live Art: it can appear to be superficial unless the audience is willing to consider it in depth. For example, I couldn’t see the point of the clown reading Descartes rather than Plato, until I wrote a pompous sentence questioning the text. Then I realised that the essential theme, of trying to define what ensures the individual’s sense of self, was beautifully undermined by the clown’s attempt to maintain dignity in the face of the pies and foam. When he concluded with a more passionate analysis of the post-capitalist collapse, the frailty of human identity, besieged by advertising, dishonest politics and the decay of any belief or foundation, the custard-pie covered comedian became a piteous icon of modernity: laughable, but sad.
Like Black Market International’s nine hour slot, Cabaret Futura is more a sophisticated study of performance, a textbook of ideas for artists and the results of almost academic investigation than coherent drama: the splendid Via Negativa’s nine hour special had the same sense of artists trying to find ideas and sharing them within the theatre space. Unlike, say, Jack Webb’s dance, this is not work easily appreciated.
Very often, New Territories serves as a survey of the outer reaches of performance, an essential text-book for performers. Sometimes, the works are best appreciated by other performers, such as the recent Black Market International marathon. They suggest routes and proceeds, pursuing intense and personal preoccupations without concern for the audience. This is a hallmark of Live Art: uncompromising, determined, expecting the viewer to work as hard as the artists.
RSS