Tragedy adds poignancy to thought-provoking art
Art This Is Performance Art Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen Mary Brennan
SATURDAY afternoon, sunshine and a cloudless sky. Folk are walking their dogs along the shore at Aberdeen’s beach when two figures quietly appear among them. He (Wladyslaw Kamierczak) and she (Ewa Rbyska) are in matching white shirts, black tuxedos, bow ties – sharply formal in this relaxed environment. They walk, at a steady pace, gaze fixed ahead, trundling suitcases.
They stop, and they stare out to sea for a long, long time ... Most people hurry past, some pause – whip out cameras for a quick snap – but no- one ever approaches them and yet their unlikely presence clearly disrupts the familiar scene, raises questions, perhaps teases thoughts and imaginings in passers-by. Why are the pair here? They’re here because This is Performance Art (TIPA), a weekend of radical provocations hosted by Peacock Visual Arts, curated and produced by Nikki Milican.
So much rich food for thought came together in Peacock’s spaces as well as on the streets of Aberdeen and in the workshops that brought students from Gray’s School of Art into the fold of performance.
Four of them, all-female, became a public installation alongside Sinead O’Donnell, whose own live actions delve into the bone marrow of being: statements and questions about the politics of identity and how it is defined (and often restricted) by gender and body.
O’Donnell doesn’t harangue. Instead she conjures up images that resonate with thoughtful tensions – soft semi-nakedness slipping out from a totally hooded upper torso questioning our perception of her, her status, as she unseeingly negotiates her way round the Peacock Gallery. Her (fully clothed) participants claimed the space of a busy thoroughfare as dusk descended: their focussed stillness a silent chorus of ‘here we stand’ – unthreatening, but somehow eloquently challenging a rush hour crowd to see and accommodate their presence.
On the opening night (of three), Nigel Rolfe created the kind of profound performance/ installation where carefully considered, punctiliously executed actions belie their apparent simplicity by melding into a collage of grief against everyday violence.
The news of a fatal stabbing at an Aberdeen school made Rolfe’s solo all the more mordant as he slowly caused spillages of water, white talc, intense red and orange pigments, to ‘wound’ previously calm surfaces - including the fabric of a newly-donned white shirt. A soundscore of religiously chanting voices was overlaid by brisk, coded exchanges between police cars – a reminder, like the objects he laid out like a crime scene, of how matter-of-fact we have become about killing both in and out of war zones.
Artists talks and film screenings were interspersed with live performances from eastern European and UK artists who all shared a visceral awareness of how valiant, yet vulnerable our humanity is in the face of changing borders.
Vest and Page ended this remarkable event by putting their own bodies on the line, enduring physical attritions while a voiceover intoned the clauses of the UN’s bill of human rights.
When, finally, he walked barefoot over shards of glass – it cracking like bones under his feet – it came like an act of voluntary penance in memory of those victims of carnage the world ignored in life, and is quick to forget in death. TIPA was itself a reminder of what we have lost with the enforced absence of Milican’s New Territories.
Music
SCO
City Hall, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
ONCE in a blue moon, along comes a concert I will never forget; an event so special that I just know it’s in my mind, heart, spirit and, instantly, seared into my memory.
On Friday the moon beamed an unforgettably-piercing blue for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a spectacular concert of music largely by Sibelius and Nielsen, for which, I’m almost embarrassed to report, there was a pitifully small turnout.
There’s no point in being surprised: there was a new piece on the programme, there was Nielsen’s Violin Concerto, which has never exercised the same magnetism over audiences as Sibelius’s Concerto; and there was the UK premiere of The Maiden In The Tower, an orchestral suite drawn from Sibelius’ relatively unknown one-act opera of the same name that, obviously, people can’t have heard before, which fact itself could be a deterrent, though they might resent me saying so: many music-lovers prefer the familiar.
Perhaps it was unfortunate the SCO put all of these jewels into one basket. The fact conductor Tuomas Hannikainen is not known here and was making his debut might also be an element. Who knows?
Whatever, it was a supreme SCO concert, with Lotta Wennakoski’s Verdigris an effective starter (I loved the Ravel swirls) Pekka Kuusisto’s Nielsen Violin Concerto the finest, most wonderfully characterised account of the piece I ever expect to hear: what a masterpiece, with Kuusisto’s genius in full flight; while conductor Tuomas Hannikainen’s blindingly informative arrangement of The Maiden In The Tower opened a new chapter for Sibelians.
That’s what this business is all about: wake us up; all over again.
Theatre
Thingummy Bob
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
BOB has lost something. For this gentleman of a certain age, it might just be his whatsitsname, or it could well be his thingummy. Either way, and even if he can’t remember his own name, he’s going to make the great escape from the old peoples’ home that houses him and get back to where he came from.
Before all that, however, Linda McLean’s new play for Lung Ha’s theatre company has the five cast members introduce themselves both in and out of character. Our guide is Karen Sutherland as Bob’s niece in Australia, Lesley, who gives us an insight into Bob’s life in a way that he’s not capable of these days. As Bob makes a break for it to a soundtrack of old Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard numbers, his topsy-turvy world also includes a surreal line-up of invisible dogs, would-be superheroes and talking CCTV cameras.
With a spate of plays looking at the effects of Alzheimer’s appearing over the last few years, McLean’s is probably the most out-there, making a virtue of the cast’s assorted learning disabilities. Maria Oller’s production, presented in association with the Luminate festival of creative ageing, capitalises on this as it taps into the often absurd head-space that Alzheimers sufferers occupy.
While John Edgar’s Bob is at the centre of things as he perambulates around Karen Tennent’s set of domestically decorated ramps and platforms, it is Sutherland and Emma McCaffrey who drive things, with Mark Howie and Kenneth Ainslie lending support to a play of laughter and forgetting. It tours to Inverness and Glasgow this week.
Theatre
Threads Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre
Neil Cooper
FIVE women sit on chairs in a row at the start of Sylvia Dow’s new meditation on the role knitting has played on Borders life, their faces lit up by the patterns formed from the projections of 19th century mill workers.
When they sing of lifetimes spent in those mills, it is in a harmonious unison gloriously at odds with the disparate yarns that unravel over the next hour in word, song and image.
Developed over the last three years as part of an oral history project dubbed Knit Two Together and presented by the ever fertile Stellar Quines Theatre Company as part of the Luminate festival of creative ageing, Dow’s script flits from latter day knitting circles to poverty stricken women imprisoned for stealing thread to illustrate a hidden history excavated and presented in this most playfully inventive show and tell.
Muriel Romanes’ production transforms all this into a crisscrossing cut-up collage which, with its mix of sketch-like scenes and songs overseen by musical director Robert Pettigrew at the piano at times resembles a 1970s style political cabaret. Not that there is anything remotely roughshod in the well-drilled delivery by performers Joanna Tope, Molly Innes, Paksie Vernon, Pauline Knowles and Annie Grace.
The shapes they throw as overseen by choreographer Sophie Stephenson are impressionistic little turns given even more atmosphere and depth by Jeanine Byrne’s mood-laden lighting. There are fantastic cacophonous too as the rhythms of the mills explode into life beyond them. What Dow’s construction evokes most of all as it navigates its way around a short Borders tour is the power behind a shared history as the ties that bind are stronger still.
Music
BBC SSO/ Brabbins
City Halls, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
MY, how the world has changed. Or so I felt on Thursday, listening to the BBC SSO playing Bach. I know that, to some listeners, the very notion of a symphony orchestra, even a radically cut-down symphony orchestra, playing Bach these days is anathema.Well, that’s what the BBC SSO did on Thursday. Worse: do you know what else they did? They played in a style that seemed to pay little if any attention to the good table manners of the Baroque: I’ll swear I heard somebody’s finger quiver, if not actually vibrate, on a string. And to exacerbate matters, you know what else those musical scoundrels at the SSO did in this Bach? They used one of those conductor chaps that waves a stick around.
Of course this is all rubbish; but there is a point, and it’s one made here many times: why shouldn’t symphony orchestras, punching at a lighter weight, perhaps, play Bach? Well, it might not have been “authentic”, but I must say I enjoyed my rare encounter with well-cooked Bach, with the Double Concerto sizzling on the plate, delivered with gusto and fried onions by SSO violinists Laura Samuel and Kanako Ito, while conductor Martyn Brabbins, I suspect, enjoyed his bit of Bach from the bridge of the boat. That, I was informed, is the first time in decades the SSO has played the Bach: and that is how much the world has changed.
Elsewhere, Brabbins directed a moody, if colourful, account of Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes, while the SSO delivered a breezy, rather dashing performance of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony.