The Tool Box - What can Theatre Learn from Performance Art, Danjel Andersson

lecture at the Municipal Theatre

Danjel Anderson gave an exposition of the developement of the Performance Art tradition centred around its implications for theatre. It opened for an approach to the field that would be unavailable from a Visual Art perspective. Four fundamental concept were involved convention, quality, blood, and audience. Performance art needs convention to transgress, or brake it, thus creating a possibility for the audience to experience itself and the act in a new perspective. In this setting the concept of quality is reversed as the teather performance is judged relative to established convention and convention is what should be challenged in the first place. Both convention and quality judgments maintains the aesthetic distance that performance art tends to break down. Blood is a useful mean for that end. It has an immediate impact on people which goes beyond reason. Like in a shock reaction perception is changed by the mere sight of blood. The audience gets involved in the scene in a way that seems characteristic of performance art. The audience is regarded as a witness rather than a distanced spectator.

We ended up at Nybron after the lecture by Danjel Andersson on the fundamental elements of performance art. There had been a lot of talk involving blood and we were pretty upset by some film sequenses from I Apologize, an intriguing work with dolls by Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper. Timing in the work was distorted as blood was poured on the floor before the head ended up in the pool, and the shot was fired even later. Christina Eriksson Fredriksson was enthusiatic over the way time and narrative was handled. It made her see events in her own life in a new way. It reminded me of the spacetime of icons, and the reversed perpective. It had a strong impact on me as well. WE felt lik transported to a surrealist dimension were anything was possible.

Spiral, by Roi Vaara

Colour code: B4, G4, Y1, R1
Roi Vaaras work Spiral is a core performance artwork. It is highly creative and conceptually charged, but has only slight elements of emotional involvement and mental disturbance. The artist writes on the pavement of the Court Yard of Upsala Castle a series of concepts characterising destructive tendencies in contemporary culture. The writing took the form of a spiral, which seemed to cause the artist to lay down his pencil and wheel around until he fell to the ground. After a while he recovered and started scoring out the words of the spiral replacing them from the end towards the beginning with new ones. Thus an old concept crossed out became paired with a new, akin but slightly more favourable counterpart forming a set of surrealistic twins. White House became a pair with Black Hole for example.

Of course the strong political implications of the chosen words might be mentally disturbing to some, but for me the only disturbing thing was the loss of political meaning in the aesthetic context of the Art Museum. This however was of minor importance to the experience of the work. Its associative richness opened new alleys for the thought, and its creativeness made it impossible to predict the next move of the artist. In the end the impression was one of a strong logical unity and impact.

The likeness of Vaara's Spiral to the traditional rune stone inscriptions was not intentional, but created a new dimension in the work determined by the place. In other circumstances the modern graffitti writing might have a similar function. Not every aspect of an artwork need to be predictable or intentional.

Performance Takes Place

A challenge to the idea of a fixed meaning of the concept of art lies at the heart of the performance art movement. An element of provocative transgression therefore is vital to performance art. This make performance akin to the Kantian concept of free beauty, to surrealist views on art, to critical theory, and to the concept of symbolic form. All these themes are important elements in 20th century philosophy of art.

We don't understand words by definitions, we understand them as they are used in a specific context. The same can be stated about the understanding of art. In a the case of a performance artwork the stakeholders understand the meaning of the work from their different perspectives. The artist, the critic, the audience, the hosting institution, the sponsors, all have different views on the same work. Occasionally there are conflicting interests involved.

An art form that is self conscious, and reflective needs to take into account and interact with a host of dimensions as it takes place. That is why we may high light the way a performance is Taking Place, by using metaphors of war. The inauguration ceremony with seniors and their rollators climbing the hill of the Upsala Castle accompanied by Giuseppi Verdi's La Forza del Destino/The Power of Destiny, then, may be set in pair with the rock album by Brian Eno named Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy after the model play of Chinese opera during the cultural revolution.

Now, the work by SU-EN is eccentric in relation to the established definition of Performance Art, but it is still a work in the performing arts, and it performs the actual inauguration of the festival. Three different uses of the concept of performance are presented in the work and thereby the theme of the festival is well caught in this single work. The span of performance art interlacing with contradictory definitions creates a complex serpentine gestalt akin to the rune-stone ornaments characteristic of the Swedish Viking culture.

How to understand the Friction II festival

One good idea is to use the programme questions to shade light on individual acts as well as the interaction between different parts of the festival.

What can we do and what can we not do?
What are we allowed to do, what are we not allowed to do?
What will arise from uncomfortable meetings and encounters?
How do we find and define friction in our daily life?
How can we use that friction in a constructive way?

The Festival curating is a part of the butoh choreographer SU-ENs pay back to the city of her origin. She is a rigorous nature. Nothing is left unattended. The intention and planning probably goes deeper than what we might expect from an ordinary artistic event. Friction II is also a follow up to the first Friction festival in 2006, and the planning started already there; all along the process the curator is improving, polishing, and exploring new possibilities opened up by success, or scandal.

The Friction II festival offered Live Art in Upsala city in a series of strange performance acts. Seniors citizens with Rollators were climbing the Castle Hill to the accompanying music of the Linné Quintet, Roi Vaara wrote and enacted on the pavement of the Castle Yard his work Spiral, the fakir Håvve Fjell in his work Floating hanged suspended over the Fyris river for two hours during the ordinary week end shopping, Delta RA'i offered his Feet Wash Ritual outside the Celsius Building at the mall of St Per, Malin Anrell made provocative acts of invisible theatre titled To Many Qustions entering situations of private citizens in the city area, Girilal Baars gave an out door/in door midnight musical performance Litanies in Zero Kelvin through the shining portal of the Chapel at the Old Cemetery, and Cecilia Germain, dressed up as a spruce, planted her Wild Seed in the Botanical Baroque Garden.

All these activities opened up for a more alert and immediate perception of our city. New aspects of places and restrictions, their richness and coerciveness, claimed their place in the consciousness of the audience. More questions were raised than will ever be answered, but the reflection over them is itself a creative activity. Here we might highlight a difference. People who just happened to be on the spot during one, or more performances probably have an all together different notion of the specific event, compared to those who attended the whole festival either as audience, or as part of the festival organisation. In the festival, the different acts were single Artworks, as well as building blocks in a sophisticated structure addressing philosophical and artistic issues concerning Performance Art. In this way the festival was interesting and relevant not only for the audience, but also for the artists and other stakeholders in the presence and future of Performance Art

Performance art was used as well, to explore the relations between institutions and individual artists, or art works, and further, between the art works and specific sites in the city kernel, or at the estate of the Ulva Old Mill.

Two main cultural institutions i Upsala were involved the City Theatre and the Art Museum. Together with the facilities of administrative, technical support, and arenas for the performances the institutions contributed with their different traditions and perceptions of performance art. There were clashes. For example when the aesthetic distance still prevailing in the Art Museum was challenged by the outright devotion to provocation, and the urge of theatrical performance to brake conventions, disregarding the mental disturbance it might cause. This was a fact when Malin Anrell in the announced Artist Talk was replaced by an arrogant boy (an actor) while the artist herself was lurking back stage. It was like the tool was taken directly from The Tool Box presented in the lecture by Danjel Andersson the same afternoon, but it wasn't. On the other hand, a conventional border line was perhaps unintentionally addressed in a subtle way when Arti Grabowski in the project room of the Art Museum attacked A Wall, while the audience was seated like in the theatre. Seen in this perspective Grabowski's performance became a comment to theatrical convention in a Visual Art setting. Interestingly enough, there is an art gallery at the city theatre; the Theatre Gallery. Here a video show was installed with five different works. Two live performances were presented here as well. It was the debutant work by Johanna Bodzek, Monastery of colours, where the artist played out with colours accompanied by the shaman music of Per Wedin, and it was The Seed, a work by the established performance artist Melati Suryodarmo based on black sesame seeds (who for mysterious reasons are hard to find in Western countries, while more common than the white seeds in the East). Video shows and two performance events were presented in the Project room of the Art Museum as well. Here Anna Berndtson presented her politically charged work Melt. Two elements of friction did occur during her act. Firstly, a conflict between the distanced aesthetic attitude of the audience and the urgent environmental message of the work, and secondly, the behaviour of the audience, framing itself as at the theatre, leaving chairs on the floor of the exhibition hall. The rest of the indoor performances took place in a regular theatre setting. It was the Fried Egg - Crazy Cabaret by Tine Louise Kortermand and Nina Björk Eliasson, which as the title suggests was well adapted to a scenic context. Further, Jenny Grönvall's A Briefing on Peggy Sue and Art was a faked lecture, and as such naturally addressed to a seated audience. Also in the video supported work 3/3 by Anders Rönnlund the seated audience was in its place. Finally it was comforting to see Seiji Shimoda executing his act On the Table in the same setting, now reminding of a circus. The scene comes natural to all these slightly different practices. In conclusion we might state the importance of institutional context and established practices for the possibility of discerning subtle qualities and friction between habits and news in art.

The feeling in public space of the city where Art met people in their every day lives was very different from the intimate atmosphere at Ulva Mill estate, where the audience attended the artworks due to their conscious choice. Only three works were presented at Ulva, the closing lunch uncounted. Melati Suryodarmo in the middle of the Fyris River made a two hours long Silent Trip, standing in the water with wings of red cloth suspended from trees on the shores, and wrapped around her body. Roi Vaara gave a fifteen minutes performance digging surrounded by singing birds in his work Showel, and Delta RA'i continued with his Feet Wash outside the mill. Finally, the closing of the Festival made us all participants in a blindfolded Concluding Lunch at Ulva Inn, where the distance of the glance was replaced by the intimacy of touch, as we were mutually finding ways to handle the challenges of this ordinary life situation, while deprived the sense of sight. In the city the Art clashed with non art events of different kinds. These clashes caused questions and comparisons concerning art versus commerce, traditional rituals, or the normal behaviour in public situations. At Ulva, on the other hand, the situation invited to make comparisons and search for cross references between the different artworks themselves at the actual site, or during the festival as a whole. The setting at Ulva was also dominated by the beauty of nature itself, which interacted in the most surprising ways with the performances in the perception of the works.

Litanies in Zero Kelvin, by Girilal Baars (II)

Installing a musical performance in an atypical surrounding is a way of challenging the concept of performance art. The conceptual, sensual and visual elements of the experience must be taken in account. The obscure inside of the White chapel illuminated in the night creates out of the black box an experience of a shining iconostasis. Through this archway, then, the voices of different traditions reaches us, as through the medium of the artist. The physical experience of standing in the misty, chilly, darkness of the cemetery contribute to the uncanny feeling of standing in a twilight zone, very far from the white cube of a traditional modernist art museum. And eventually, this adds dimensions to the bracketed question in the work title: How to Clear Your Voice?

Remember Me and Make Me Come Alive Again

A performance has its afterlife, where memory makes the act interact with other phenomena in the world. Remembering is like putting the pieces in a puzzle together. But there is a great difference. The performance act remembered will result in many different world views. In fact, it seems to me that this feature is essential to performance art.

In my memory then, the act of Cecilia Germain as a young spruce walking around in the botanical garden of Uppsala, from now on, will be connected to the visit in Paris by Kerstin Ekman in the fifties. The well known author, and withdrawn member of the Swedish Academy , commented in Swedish television on her alienism in the metropolis. - "I felt like a spruce on Place de la Concorde", she said, and the comment made me see Wild Seed in the light of a long since ongoing struggle for a language of female experience in Art.

The Focus of the Artwork

The intended focus of an artwork might be characterized by a set of key words. At the moment I have this short list of potential foci: spiritual matters, body, politics, duration, place, event, social behavior, conventions, gender, myth, ritual