etiquette @ cafe oto, dalston, 18 march 2009

ps it didn't say photos not allowed, and it wasn't documented during, so apologies if not permitted, let me know.

interaction.participation.direction. actor.voices in your head. the portal of performance. a happening.the quirkiness. the getting it wrong. the real people taking part v the character they become.am i a spectacle?

what i wrote in the comments book; (which was very full i might add- by situating in a cafe, people sitting and reflecting and scribbling away over a coffee)

" i loved this in so many ways, being in and outside yourself and the table being so many things to so many places- real and imagined. liked getting things wrong. my partner was by nature an extremely emotional character so though the tears were real until she started clapping- so perhaps remove this element? this brings it into the realm of real human emotion and how much you want to do this. loved just being in a cafe having coffee, then taking part, and then digesting over another coffee. lots of clever play- blu tak'd heads nice touch. what is reality? "

am grimacing over the last phrase i wrote, bleurgh, the age old chestnut of live art performance;)

some other thoughts from my notebook and now a few days on;

• the table, what is a table? liked this portal of performance to another world- a stage, landscape, cafe table here and cafe table elsewhere
  
• liked being told what to do and not quite getting it all, the problem highlighted with communication/ mis-communication in life, not saying what you really mean, body language not quite right
• my favourite part was the raindrops, the building up of a scene, sound overlay, transported to a hill side. interesting in considering the experience of this part of the piece, I was totally consumed by the voices in my head and the mental pictures, that although i was aware i was confused about what B was doing, it didn't matter. In discussing it afterwards with B it made me question how good an actor you should be for this work, or the fact that the opening part of the piece was on a stage, learning your lines, points directly to this fact being part of it. laughing at yourself in trying to convey an authentic furrowed brow
  
• some people had written in the book they couldn't hear what their partner was saying, so we were told to speak up by the usher before we started- comments helping refine the piece for others' benefit.
• the 'drinking of blood' the theatricality of my experience of that moment over B being told what it really was
• loved the blu tak heads, making it personal to you. could imagine the improvisational fun in developing the quirky objects interactions, sat around playing with a blob of blu tak and seeing what it could become of it. what if we had actually been asked to make something out of blu tak??
  
• acting v chance, interaction v participation. you are just told to follow instructions, but how people interpret those is interesting, i'd like to have sat and been close by when others' have taken part. i know a friend who went to see a version of this at the barbican who found this tedious, and started to play with the objects more themselves, invented their own scenarios, and for them that made it more interesting. was only chance elements in the way you act them out, no one is sat directing you to say that again with more umph, or also the chance element in the way you were told to make your partners head out of blu tak, open to interpretation.
• the sense of being present v presence. physical presence observed (i am here in body) v mind wandering/ letting yourself escape into the headphones (i am not here, but there). mental in the reality of the event and in the reality of real life
• layers of audience. you participating, you are also being a spectacle for the spectators in a cafe. the website talks about people not realising you're taking part...i think this is not really possible with the speaking out loud/doing odd actions/ not doing the usual cafe business of eating and drinking, even though you are sat at the edges, i felt very conscious of someone sat in the window a metre away. what about if in centre of the room- would have completely changed the piece, been entirely self- conscious
  
• the booking the table- it has to be for two so to say you could do it with a stranger (website) seems a little odd to actually have been able to do, how about if it had been to book a seat at the table, but logistically this could have been tricky to co-ordinate
  
• liked the low tech nature of it, the thinking you know what you're going to do with the objects by forming an impression looking at them, and then the pleasure in having this turned on its head. liked the use if the old school dymo mapping out the table
  
• B said " liked the low tech object, simple, using the high tech object of our minds"
• the aftermath, the coffee digesting it all.... changed my relationship to the cafe oto space, felt had more of a personal relationship, like having taken part in a secret pact and wondering if the other customers had too....starting conversations with those that had, that we may not have chatted to otherwise.
• what do i remember now? did the narrative actually stay with me? i think this wasn't important, the quirkiness of it was intriguing enough and the exact nature of the dialogue wasn't important apart form the mental descriptive landscapes e.g. the hill and the rain. i don't think in retrospect the stage stuff at the start was necessary and more about the prostitute/old man/hill/cafe. the pace of the piece meant it was hard to absorb the dialogue
  
• in thinking about this work before experiencing it, i asked myself, what it would feel like to be using a headset for my aural stimulus detaching me from my surroundings and enabling intimacy. I would say the work felt intimate to a degree, voices in my head, but the visual distractions being in a working environment meant i was locking in and out of the experience, i couldn't feel entirely detached the portal being i was rooted in both worlds simultaneously, it was a happening, like life in some parts but not life in landscapes of the mind.
  
• the participants become the performers- no bodily presence of them. this felt good,not necessary, they were voices in your head. more like connections with being in a gallery and putting on headphones. the outcome/piece to encounter/experience not the artist bodily present.
  
• ps i kept my bits of paper which were used in the event. sorry. it felt wrong to blog them though so they are kept secretly and safely.
  

so..for me? a possible way for relaying a score or having a live conversation through headphones? am unsure. perhaps people could develop their own images in a space through recorded or live instructions, or as my work has so many chance elements, is this potentially too crystal maze??!! where it becomes all about getting the tasks right and a real game show spectatorship ethic. any potential here in headphones for having an real time exchange? do you need to experience me? what about other more low tech conversational technology, e.g. tin can telephones? as my work is about photography is this becoming tangential? what i could also take from etiquette is the narrative integration and manipulation of objects- real and imagined uses. the real memory and the made up one. how much do people in my one-to-ones make up their stories in my pocket work? how much do people give of themself and take a risk? in the one-to-one of etiquette, mostly, you is at least mentally, safely hidden. unless you are faced with someone crying, is it them or another?

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the other thing that was suggested to me this week (and i remembered mentioning him in my MA blog about his choir 17 work with regarding temporality,) was bill drummond's 17 which is a book which amongst other things gives scores for action which are deleted afterwards, experienced only in the time and place it occurred.

autoteatro

quickly........must get to etiquette this month in my time off (a review here) , and other autoteatro experimental participatory works where they are bodily detached from the work which the viewer performs- am intrigued to see how this feels sitting on the other side as participant, how much is entirely acted and how much is open to chance? what does it feel like to be using a headset for my aural stimulus detaching me from my surroundings and enabling intimacy. i like the look of this too wondermart, brings back my hideous supermarket working days, which filled up my fine art BA days. the company, which i wrote about are showing at BAC at end of march. ant hampton also co-created the brilliantly-witty-yet-poignant, spoof live art programme at the ICA, True Riches, which like lyn gardner wrote,shows that the art form 'does have cultural urgency' with its offer of this virtual live art programming.

and must post den get on top of writing up some of the awkwardness-cum-frolicksomeness that has stayed with me from the NRLA.

one-to-one performance and Etiquette, Oto cafe, Dalston

two things i've found/been signposted connecting with the relationships that can happen in one-to-one performances;

One archive: Lyn Gardener's blog post, 'I didn't know where to look' (how does this sit, nearly 4 years on? NRLA in a couple of weeks with back to back performances/performative events will be a good place to consider this in 2009)

excerpts;
"Traditionally, theatre has been a communal experience, but Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency argues that in the age of the internet, the opportunity for audiences to have face-to-face encounters in real time with real people is enormously appealing. "It feels more real than real life," she says, "and because it isn't a mass experience you know that nobody is going to have the same experience as you have. It makes the event unique and it makes you feel special."

Laura Godfrey-Isaacs agrees: "Home has done salon series before that have concentrated on the communal, but this one-to-one season responds to people's desire for experiences that are more direct and unmediated, and less formal. It often results in something very charged because the audience member is crucial to what does - or doesn't - happen. It allows both the audience and the artist to take risks, because they are the only people in the room. They are the only people who will ever know what really happened during the encounter."

like these key things to think about more from the article in my constant thinking about why that style appeals to me: one-to-ones are unique, (and what is unique in my work?, ) you are the only ones who know what really happened,(the re-counting the encounter can be chinese whispers, and the complete privacy is to me, an unspoken thing, i don't re-count it in fact) more real than real life (what does that mean?) you and the audience take risks.......

One current, I must experience this: Etiquette, at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London throughout February 2009 and possibly beyond. A Lyn Gardner "One to watch."

excerpt from website:

"Alongside their innovative stage works (Doublethink, Five in the Morning) involving instructions to unrehearsed performers, Rotozaza here invite the audience to try it themselves. Etiquette offers the fantasy of speaking with someone without having to plan what you say, and the resulting thrill of disowning responsibility in a performance situation. Conversation is shown to be a kind of theatre whereby 'audience' and 'actor' roles are imperceptibly assumed and exchanged."

It is recommended by Etiquette company Rotozaza to watch this Godard clip which i quite like, in thinking about conversations with a stranger:



I like the idea that in Etiquette, the audience and performers are 'removed' and both are equal participants, you can do it between strangers OR between people that know one another,leave that up to the audience that turn up to choose. personally, i'd like to try it both ways, as i do in my own work, (I have said sometime intimate things to strangers I have not told my partner or anyone, and have learnt humbling things about my friends/family in 10 minutes than i never knew throughout my relationship with them, question: why does it take my work to do this??) although unsure if the headset dialogue is the same each time, spoiling the surprise.
The performative instructions for narrative action/conversation are given via headset whilst sat in a cafe. I have been thinking post The Darkroom at Duckie that my scores could be used by someone else entirely, like ideas in Fluxus of the blurring of performance and reality, and Tino Sehgal using actors to carry out instructions. In my application to SPRINT I have suggested there could be multiple encouters at the same time. Do I want to remove myself from the work in this way entirely? Or can I actually do this? More of a directing role akin to theatre??

In reference to participation in art, I will need to come back to thoughts from Art in the Social Sphere, the symposium I attended at Loughborough University this week, with excellent speakers: writer/artist Dave Beech, APG-er Barbara Steveni and gift-girl Lisa Cheung.