Nice conversation with Robin Rimbaud / Scanner after Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular last week. Via talk of John Cage and the amazing Ubuweb we ended up at archives. Robin span thru a fantastic description of the audio tapes he started accumulating from the age of about 11 – home audio-taping TV episodes of Spiderman no less (pre VCR), with his own introductions – talking from these thru the recordings and collages he made at school (crash editing teachers in the classroom, random corridor chatter and flushing toilets) to the tapes he made of concerts and talks he attended as a teenager – all this before his own musical/sound work/recordings as such really began. Conversation about if and when to digitize or set free the above, and also the strange audio traces that accumulate behind each of us these days.

For me a small but tangible sign of this was back in the summer… Mark sent a scan of a Joy Division ticket, from a concert back in 1980 (19th April, Ajanta Cinema, Derby)  that he and I had gone to – the fourth time we’d seen the band, and the second-to-last gig they’d ever play. Googling that I found this link with a few pictures from the gig, a black and white shot of the venue (so weird to see it) amongst a whole archive of visual material, dates etc. Also in the same place a track listing and a list of various bootlegs which had featured the music from the gig that night in Derby. I was pretty intrigued by the thought that there was a recording and set out Google searching to see if I could find mp3s. Took me about half an hour… mainly leapfrogging thru fan sites with listings or people selling CDs, slowly closing in though. Must’ve been around 1am when I found what I was looking for (at this full-on, comprehensive JD bootleg site) and as the first tracks downloaded I was really quite goose-bumped to hear them – sparks of short circuit arcing backwards and forwards in time. Strange thing about the yell of a crowd that you know you are in… esp a small one I guess. You can’t hear anything of course. But you know it’s there. Plus the fact that I had no idea the event was recorded. A night a long time ago (call it 28 years) that is totally lost in any case, but then like this some audio spill from it reaches you, compressed, distorted, just a trace really but one that contains more of it than you’d have guessed at. The sound brings back the smell, the light and the heat. And all that out of Google.

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This fragment (below) from my Spill opening address last year, also tracked back to the Ajanta, this time by way of a gig by The Fall:

Mark E. Smith. Ajanta Cinema Derby, sometime in 1978 or 1979, back at the time when he was talking at least as much as singing, punctuating the songs with extended delirious rants about the proliferation of psychics and Cash & Carry stores or the possibility of time travel or how much he did not like Doncaster or the audience or Stalin you could never be sure which. Huge fucking row of music, small audience. A venue that used to be, by some incomprehensible irony, The Derby Playhouse (I mean before they built that new one with hexagonal barstools and purple orange cross-hatch carpets) and was by then (the old playhouse, re-named as Ajanta Cinema), a semi-derelict music venue run by some Asian guys maybe as a front for a drugs ring at least if you believed what was gonna be in the paper ten months later, who knows.

What does the character Price say about the nightclub in Trevor Griffith’s play Comedians? Something like: When I stand up there on the stage – I still hit my head on the ceiling. It might be literally true – but mainly of course he means it more like a metaphor – a way to say, that the world which Capitalism has on offer isn’t big enough yet to accommodate his dreams or imaginings.

Anyhow back in Derby in either 78 or 79, Smith wont take it for long. He’s at the very edge of the stage by this point, walking back and forth, pacing on the exact border, looking down off the low rise and into that other space – that other world, no-one in it and everyone eyeing it, a space in this case between him and the rest of us, a space not quite his and not quite claimed by the rest of us. Time passes. And then there’s a moment like there always is, a moment so good I won’t ever remember it, and could not in any case describe it, a moment in which he makes the jump and steps off the stage. He’s off, he’s over, gone into the emptiness down there, the band oblivious or inured to his probably amphetamine whimsy, and the music’s all thump and screech and grind and he’s wandering, caterwauling, out into the no-man’s land/wasteground that he’s somehow made his own now, barely tethered by the microphone lead and in some ways never to return. 

That, was an inspiration. And no mistake of all.

The rest of the Spill text is included in the publication/collection Live Art UK/LADA’s Live Art Almanac,  alongside essays by Lyn Gardner, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Daniel Gosling, Leslie Hill and Rebecca Schneider amongst others. Copies from LADA’s bookshop – Unbound.

The durationals find a new shape each time they are presented, within the parameters that are possible. We’re not really interested in them as ways to create outrageous narrative or developmental arcs though! They tend to be quite flat in that sense — to travel is better than to arrive kind of thing. You might best think of them as landscapes of endless variation… but in which no change is permanent. It’s flux.

One aspect of shape that is predictable or recurrent though are physiological or other rhythms. For instance, if a perfomance like Speak Bitterness or And On The Thousandth Night… is six hours long, the performers get tired and there is usually a certain hysteria by hour five. You are generally trying too hard in hour one. So you can say certain things about the shape and rhythm of those pieces, but it’s not written or dramatically forced. What’s allowed to happen in all of the durationals is that the performers step into the space, begin, and then play, and then at the end it’s finished. In a way it’s like football, or any sport: you know what the rules are, you know who the players are, but you don’t know what will transpire inside the set of rules.

Jonathan Kalb, Professor of Theatre at Hunter College, CUNY, wrote a great piece on Sight Is The Sense and Quizoola! that I flagged already a while back. He’s just added to the HotReview site a long interview with me, quoted above and focused mainly on the durational performances that I’ve made with Forced Entertainment including Quizoola!, Speak Bitterness, And On The Thousandth Night… and 12am Awake & Looking Down. You can check out the full interview online. It’s a nice one.

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Meanwhile I’m in London for Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular which started its run tonight until Saturday 15th. Looking forward to it  – the piece looks really good in the Riverside space.

I’m reading from the new Daiphanes German translation edition of Endland at Hebbel, Berlin (Hau 1, in the Foyer) with performer Thomas Wodianka, at 8pm this next Monday, November 3rd. Looking forward to that.

Here’s the intro I wrote esp for the new book.

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In the 1980’s, I had written a novel called Helen © & her Daughters. The book was messy and borderline incoherent; its landscape and tone very dark, brutal and cartoon-like. The story itself was crazy, set in the world that was a kind of hybrid of Thatcher–era North of England (i.e. selected lowlights of what I could see out of the window) mixed with all manner of other things and places, times and landscapes – some real, others invented. The language was also rough, cut-up, hybridised, slang. I was writing a lot of stuff for performance with the group Forced Entertainment at the same time and working on various short fiction things and film ideas and random projects and bits of writing.

My friend Tony White asked me to contribute to a publication series he had started, called Piece of Paper Press. The idea was to make a little book from a single sheet of A4 paper, cut and folded in a simple way, then produced as a photocopied edition. Some were by writers, others by artists; some were texts, others comprised sequences of drawings or diagrams. The idea appealed to me and I wrote a blunt, comical narrative called About Lisa. One tiny chapter per page. The sense of humour was very dark and a lot of the drive in the narrative came from stretching the world of the story really thin and making the world ‘be’ horrible to the characters. At the time I was reading 1001 Nights, William Burroughs, Russell Hoban, Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Alan Moore and RAW comics. In the background were Mike Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, Charles Dickens, David Lynch, Tarkovsky, Philip K. Dick and a million other things. I was listening to The Fall, whose lyricist/singer M. E. Smith was probably the biggest single influence on what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write it. The great thing about Piece of Paper Press for me was how its formal framework and restrictions forced my writing to become much more stripped down and economical. I remember I used to tell people that it felt like taking the world, tone and language of my (unpublished) novel Helen  © and boiling it. About Lisa and the other stories that followed in the following year or two – which would eventually become Endland Stories – were the result of that process of reduction. I plundered the novel for landscape, characters and gags and atmospheres, hanging them on sharp, brutal, compacted little narratives – postcards from hell.

Years before I’d done an interview with William Gibson for Performance Magazine where my friend Steve Rogers was the editor. Gibson said that the world of his book Neuromancer was only one molecule thick – that (in effect) any reality sensed in it by the reader was just a temporary effect – a momentary production in the language. I liked that idea – it made sense to me in terms of other stuff that I respected as writing. In the Endland Stories, I was trying to play with how thin and dense the world in it could be at the same time, how disposable I could make that world and the characters populating it, how violently contradictory, while still somehow keeping an engagement with the reader. It meant creating characters and narratives in the ruins of something larger, whose shape, purpose and extent could only be guessed at.

The stories came pretty fast, one after another. Elaine Palmer at Pulp Books included German Fokker in an anthology on pop culture, titled Allnighter, and soon afterwards agreed to do the whole collection as a book. After Endland Stories: Or Bad Lives came out in 1999, I wrote a few more stories (Taxi Driver/Antagonistes for that year’s Sceptre Brit Pulp anthology and much later Cellar Story, published in 14 Hills) that pretty much existed in the same world / landscape / language, but apart from that my fiction writing post-Endland Stories took off in quite other directions. *
Years later, in 2006, I got another out-of-the-blue invitation, this time to participate in an extraordinary on-going project by Australian artist Barbara Campbell, 1001 nights cast. In response and without really planning to do so, I found myself back in what could be called Endland territory, wandering (and plundering) a related terrain ten years later, but with different intentions.

Barbara’s request to guests on her project was to write in response to a prompt – a fragment she’d pull from that morning’s newspaper coverage of events in the Middle East. As an invited writer, you had to somehow use the phrase she’d selected – a word or a few words – as a starting point and turn the story around in a few hours. Each narrative produced had to be up to 1001 words long and each evening Barbara would perform that day’s story on the Internet as a live webcast. She did this continuously, daily, for almost three years – 1001 nights to be precise, ending in March 2008. Once again, there was something appealing and creatively liberating to me about the constraint – the very short length and the process of writing under a time limit. Most of the second wave of Endland Stories included in this collection ––  murky and opaque, intentions seem good, I thought I smelled something dirty, paying for a bullet, wanted to get a good look, generally unsmiling and now not moving ––  were initially written for Barbara’s project. Two further stories were also done around this same time for projects by other artists. For performance maker Kate McIntosh’s solo work Loose Promise (2007), I created a text which had to include elements from a menu of words and events she’d compiled. For Goran Sergej Pristas and Nikolina Bujas-Pristas of Zagreb-based group BADco meanwhile, I wrote at their instruction, a new version of Aesop’s fable The Ant and the Grasshopper, which became one of the texts for the group’s 2007 performance, Changes. This “second wave” of Endland stories is published together for the first time in this collection, alongside all of the stories from the original UK publication. Both “batches” share an interest in creating a place/space which hybridises different geographies and fictions and which is dominated by dark humour, absurdist puns and general air of malevolence. Shifting in time and apparent location, mixing the high tech and the decayed/archaic, colliding the realistic and the impossible, Endland was always a messy place: at once a capitalist free-for-all, an anarchistic bedlam, a post-apocalypse retro-medieval nightmare, a Central European civil war zone and a heavily trade unionised pre-yuppie-fication military junta Housing Estate in Rotherham or Doncaster. In the more recent stories, there is also somehow more America in Endland, perhaps since I’ve spent more time in America. There’s also more Iraq and Afghanistan in it, too – not surprising I guess – as the war wagons of geo-politics and atrocity have moved on in that direction. In addition, the fictional modes of fairy tale, pub anecdote, parable and condensed movie plot have been boosted by a thick residue of digital culture. As a result, the reality of the newer stories is now prone to error-messages, pixilation, artefacting and other compression faults, as well as to the jump-cuts, sarcastic punch lines, graffiti, exaggerations and pseudo-moralising that abound in the earlier set of stories.*Endland exists and does not exist. It is not locatable on maps and no doubt its relation to any ‘England’ described in newspaper accounts or in realist fiction of the last 30 years is highly tangential. My hope is that these grotesque tales out of Endland – ontologically, geographically and temporally confused as they are – might get closer to the heart of things than might be possible by other narrative means – fictional or otherwise. I hope that as work, these stories come closer to the bone – closer to the essence of the strange and bitter times we are living in. It is my belief at least, that the psychological, political and cultural landscapes we’ve been walking in these days – from Thatcher to Google, with IFOR, ICANN, Big Brother and Bin Laden in between – need strange fucking tools to navigate them.

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Finally my thanks go to Tony White and Elaine Palmer for their parts in getting Endland Stories started, and to Barbara Campbell for her project 1001 nights cast which offered space for me to continue these stories. I’d like thank my agent Ivan Mulcahy at Mulcahy Conway as well as Sabine Schulz and Michael Heitz at Diaphanes for their interest in creating this German edition. And last but not least big thanks to my friend Astrid Sommer who has translated these stories with a patience and an attention to detail that’s never ceased to amaze me. I will miss Astrid’s emails seeking clarification for the possible meaning of made-up film titles, invented slang words or arcane aspects of Endland/England and the characters inhabiting it.

Tim Etchells, Sheffield, 2008.

Long interview with yours truly by Helmut Ploebst at Corpus (Internet Magazine for Dance, Choreography and Performance). The new issue is themed on the ghosts. We are talking about ghosts, Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular, performance, the economic crash, Ghostdance and all and everything

Meanwhile some talk of That Night Follows Day over at the Guardian Live Blog including what’s below, from me, in response to various strands in the comments. Worth checking the link since both Alexander Devriendt, director of Once And For All (from Gent) and Richard Gregory of Manchester’s Quarantine both weigh in with lengthy comments on their own perspectives on working with young people, the kind of truth or authenticity we can or can’t achieve in performance and so on. Some nice links from Ant Hampton also, to materials on Beunos Aires director Vivi Tellas. Here’s my two penneth:

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Without getting into too long a thing about process, I can maybe add something here about how That Night Follows Day was made. The piece – which was produced by the Flemish theatre Victoria (Campo) – has a text by me, as noted by Lyn already and as I think anyone who knows my work (or reads the programme) can probably tell. The text was made in two stages – it started with writing by me, to which new material was added, developed, structured and refined in a workshop process with the 16 young people who perform the piece. It certainly wasn’t a case of my arriving with a completed ‘vision’ and a script and dropping it onto the performers – instead, as is the case with more or less anything I’ve ever done with adult performers in Forced Entertainment or elsewhere– this piece grew from, in and around the performers as part of a long long process – a process that involved discussions, suggestions, trying things, changing things, collaborative rewrites in doing you could say.

The whole question of if the performers understand and own what they are doing is a fair one. My experience working with and watching these young people doing the piece over the last two years is – that like a group of adults who have worked together on something – they know what they are doing and they own it very well. They’re acting. They’re finding a position within the piece from which to speak and face the audience. They know what that means. I take the young performers in the making and doing of the piece seriously. They made, regard and play it intelligently. It’s a structure, and they work to make it sing.

That Night Follows Day is about the frames (societal, intellectual, educational, famillial, physical) that adults construct for young people. It’s also, inevitably, an example of these processes. So far as I can work out there can be no interaction possible between adults and young people that escapes this. That’s what the piece is about. You can see my projection in it, and as an audience you can see and feel your own. The children are ‘in’ that – caught and free at the same time – just as they are in the outside world. What’s great I think is that young people are also always exceeding and escaping these frames. They do that in the performance too.

I’m glad to agree that TNFD is not “the authentic voice of young people” – ughhh. I wouldn’t set out to make something so naive. I wouldn’t claim to represent in that way. In any case I hardly believe in authentic voices fullstop, not even my own. Voices are voices – they are complicated layerings of desire, fantasy, limit, projection, haunting, fiction. Authenticity is a particularly contemporary tyranny of sorts, and has become a fetish, sought everywhere, by the media especially and (to be frank) most often quickly devoured as spectacle before the circus moves on. In that sense it doesn’t interest me – I’m interested in making something more complex in fact, and which knows very well that it is artifice, even as something like a truth moves in and out of it. But maybe that’s another discussion. What TNFD tries to make as a performance is an echo box, a space for reflection on how adults make and frame the world for young people. I think, from reactions over from audiences and critics in countries all over Europe over the last 18 months since we opened the piece, that it works pretty well in that respect.

Heading to Belgium to rehearse with the new cast of kids for That Night Follows Day, just as the original cast start their long journey back from the Melbourne Festival.

New York Times on Drama Queens. You may have to register but it’s worth it to see the picture of the actors standing slightly awkwardly besides the motorised sculptures – some kind of almost-ironic postmodern re-run of a Futurist moment. In the event though, they did a pretty great job with the text.

Lyn Gardner, Lois Keidan, Helen Cole, Ant Hampton, Robert Pacitti and pretty much the entirety of the UK Live Art scene have a good old go at Ekow Eshun here for his comments on the relevance and vitality of the sector, and for his recent announcement about closing the ICA’s Live And Media Arts department. Not that anyone really connects the ICA with performance these days but really – with a bit of imagination they could have an interesting program there with plenty of relevance and vitality. I guess private hires of the theatre space is too lucrative a cash cow.

My work City Changes (and Art Flavours) are in their last week at Manifesta 7, Rovereto. City Changes has, at the same time,  also just gone on show at PACT Zollverein in Essen.

Butchers – where my Wait Here neon resided back in the Summer months – now has a new show comprising Marcos Chaves’ video Laughing Mask. Curated by Ben Borthwick and Cylena Simonds.

Anne Colvin / TART in San Francisco are organising a series of events under the banner of The Colony Room and taking place at The Garage at Langton, Fridays and Saturdays, bar 7pm – 11pm. September 26 – November 6, 2008. Events start 8.00pm. This Friday, October 24th they’ll be presenting a selection of my video works plus performance by San Francisco artist Stephen Shearer. Should be fun… wish I could be there!

Anne is also editor of the very cool publication/artist multiple collection Skank Bloc Bologna, the third edition of which is out now more or less. It’s launched at The NY Art Book Fair, October 24 – 26, 2008 and features another international cast of contributors from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sheffield, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco including Jessica Brier, Anne Colvin, Ryan Gander, Alasdair Gray, Marie Jaeger, Lucy Keany, Kevin Killian, Darin Klein, Annika Larsson, Neil Mackintosh, Tom Marioni, Mark Orange, Ara Shirinyan and me. Silverman Gallery will be carrying all three issues of Skank at their Art Book Fair booth O-3. The fair is at Phillips de Pury & Company, 450 West 15th Street at 10th Avenue, 3rd floor, NY.

I am going to be talking about and reading from The Broken World as part of Sheffield’s Off the Shelf festival on Sunday 19 Oct. Due to circumstances etc the event has moved from its original location at Bank Street Arts to the Showroom Cinema, in Showroom 5. The starting time will now be half an hour later than planned – at 8.30pm –  to allow time for  anyone that turns up at Bank Street enough time to get over to the Showroom. Advance tickets are from the Showroom on 0114 275 7727.

I will also be reading soon in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre on the night of Monday November 3rd. This time it’s a reading from Endland – the German edition of my Endland Stories which also features a whole lot of new material including stories I wrote for Barbara Campbell’s 1001 nights cast and for Kate McIntosh’s solo performance Loose Promise. Endland has been translated by my good friend Astrid Sommer and for the reading I will be joined by a great performer Thomas Wodianka (he’s going to read the German versions, me some English ones). I first met Thomas working on Meg Stuart’s project Alibi. I don’t think I’ll ever forget his fading, almost whispered version of a passage from David Wojnarowitz’s amazing book Close to the Knives. Hebbel also shows my Manifesa 7 project Art Flavours as part of its season Fressen Oder Fliegen – Art Into Theatre – Theatre Into Art. There will be something like 6-800 portions of Osvaldo Castellari’s fabulous gelato (created for the project) going free in the season as well as screenings of my video work that documents the process.

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Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular kicks off its UK tour tomorrow at the Arts Centre in Warwick. My piece for Victoria (now Campo) That Night Follows Day meanwhile is heading for the Melbourne Festival, with performances 22-25 October.

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To celebrate all the above I will spend the whole day tomorrow locked in a hotel room in Coventry and working on my taxes. This hotel boasts of refurbishment by the way, but we all know that demolition is the only answer.