Dummy Company

2011-08-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

as part of the PBH FREE FRINGE (http://www.freefringe.org.uk/)
we are performing our most recent ventriloquent exploration into
Kurt Schwitters' 'Ursonate' with

SONATA

in the Princes Mall (space L8 and venue 203) in Edinburgh
on SATURDAY 6th and SUNDAY 7th of August @ 4.45pm
tickets: £o.oo

Dummy Company are at present:
Sarah Blisset
Ollie Evans
& Harriet Piper

featuring puppets, voices, and the elegaic use of tape and vinyl players.

it would be a pleasure to see you there.

Nimrod plays a tune on the face-organ

Dummy Company @ 3K Cabaret

2011-02-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

We performed a new rendering of the Ursonata at the 3K Cabaret in Manor House on 22nd January 2011. Presented on a packed lunch.

Welcome new dummies: Sarah Blissett and Harriet Piper.

We're working on a new show that we may well perform in May in South Bermondsey and very most likely at the Little Angel Theatre in September.
Here are the YouTube links, because it takes years to upload onto the blog:

Ursonata Presented on a Packed Lunch Part I. (1:Theme & Variation; 2: Largo)
Ursonata Presented on a Packed Lunch Part II. (3: Scherzo; 4: Presto)

Pogiff.

2010-11-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

Leer

Once was
an egg
that cupped
between palms
hinged over
sink, cracked
apart was
recongealed
and taken
to be
a piece of
shell or
yolk juice
no fool
but he
could muster.

Once irrevoked
never that
shell cracked
lost in sink
but only
dead yolk
yoked
between
his skins
whilst
rains beat
or sands
squiny
eyes sewn
back to
look.

Seg? No.

Yes, they
innerprison
the Thing
or mistrue
to verify

under
the mouth
sense is
mugged
or mute

silence
gagged
with
name

or only
sometimes
they O
their pout
or slit cheeks
with cry
that
sound dead

in mother’s
arms

swaddling
spouts

sense slips
round

it all

Recent Acquisitions: Glossia (Colourhouse Theatre-Aug 2010)

2010-09-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

Glossia

Here are some some photographic records of the last Dummy Company show, Glossia, which we performed last August.
A strangely satisfying and challenging evening for all concerned, including the local patrons which consisted of an unanticipated audience of a family with their children.
The duration of the event might have lagged too much, primarily because we resorted to 'short' intervals to change the set up for each mini-show. But the benefit of this arrangement led to an informal occasion punctuated by the shadows of an expected formality. Despite the theatricality of its setting, complete with a velvet red curtain, it felt like we had invited people into our front room, as if we had just moved into the area and were keen to have any of our new neighbours over for a look at our workshop. Apart from the inevitable attendence of friends and associates, we had a welcome selection of strangers who were willing to give us their time to see and hear these strangers perform in their local theatre. Unfortunately we were never privy to what they actually thought or felt, but we know there was laughter from a child and a late middle-aged woman.

In hindsight, it must have been quite an overwhelming night full of guttural noisescapes, and performance pieces on hydrocephalic infants and female ejaculation. If you spend a lot of time thinking and working on these things it's easy to forget that the large majority of the rest of the world hasn't really given them much thought. But perhaps we opened a few minds...

Carina Levitan in Glossia

Thanks to Shaun May for providing last minute tech support and putting the night on the internet, which you can get as a free podcast here.

And thanks to Carina's friend whose name I have regrettably forgotten, for taking these photos during the get in.

Myself performing 'Stoma Tong'

Kirstin Smith preparing for 'Stunt:Ejaculate'

GLOSSIA at the ColourHouse Theatre

2010-07-24T04:49:00.000-07:00

Glossia
with Stunt:ejaculate and Stoma/Tong
7.30pm August 3rd•
Colour House Theatre
£6.50

Merton Abbey Mills
London
SW19 2RD
Box Office: 0208 544 1222

GLOSSIA is an evening of new sonic and verbal performances.

Kirstin Smith promises to teach and delight with her modernist inflected and erudite lecture on Female ejaculation whilst Ollie Evans will speak, chant, belch and sing his new electric opera, Stoma Tong. All of this will be bracketed by Glossia, an ‘Articulated Babel Construction’ made in collaboration with Brazilian sound artist, Carina Levitan.

KAOSSONATA: Ursonate in Brixton (6.5.10)

2010-06-09T07:24:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I performed the Ursonate for the first time with live electronic manipulation (e.g. my Kaoss pads).
At the risk of 'translating' it into a cheap digitalisation, I think it opened it up even further to the possibilities of its performance as a piece of 'Merz' - where forms miscegenate and coagulate.
Rather than a straight 'accompaniment' it became more of an accomodating conflict between the input of my voice and the output of the kaoss pads. Maybe...

LISTEN: Kaossonata @ Arch 468

Residency in Cambridge Pt.2: Finnegans Wakes

2010-03-17T12:54:00.001-07:00

Finnegans Wake: Ventriloquent Agitations

The speedboat steered towards disaster seciton of the residency.

The attempt was deceptively simple enough: try to get Finnegans Wake through new throats whilst miscegenating objects in the same splace.

On Thursday 4th, I led a 'workshop with close friends (who else would want to attend one of these things at the end of term?). The last thing we did involved everyone (but me) reading from and playing with Finnegans wake. I inserted labels into a copy of the book with words like "fall" "homunculus" "stomach" "ventriloquise" and "miscegenate" written on them. Being a 'ventriloquent agitation' (FW, 56), rather than a 'performance' or 'improvisation', material was literally 'agitated', as in the way the OED describes agitation as 'the mental tossing of a matter to and fro'. I wanted something that has existed for so much time inside my skull, to be tossed about in a room with other people.

It was an indulgence to say the least.

But on that day, my (mostly) sceptical colleagues played along with the whim and produced some interesting doings. Despite the apparent formlessness of everything that was happening, things were remarkably tied together (aside from Kirstin's proclivity towards the spool of string) by the voices that spluttered, delivered and refused the text. This is a text that rarely instructs you how to read, yet due to its delusions of mythology, it can often determine a particular, grandilquent and ultimately pathetic tone. But when someone like Jeremy Hardingham flicks through the pages, beginning with a cod Irish accent flattening into something which quite simply takes the piss, the joke of the matter really seeps out.

This book shouldn't be read with reckless abandon, but it should be abandoned, it will always be abandoned because it can never be finished. A performance of it will always be an abandonment in some way. There was a point when Jeremy began reading, probably one of the most famous passages in the book, the tale of the Mookse and the Gripes, at which point he violently spat at it and flicked to another page. Afterwards he told me that he starting making some of it up whilst Kirstin tied him to the lecturn with string.

Is it frustration? tedium? disgust? does the text agitate its reader as well as itself? I thought that this could be, out of all this impossibility, an entry point into a performance of Finnegans Wake. A series of abandonments, agitations and revulsions. As well as the love that is always there whenever someone generously offers to read it.

However, I should have left it at that and let these thoughts sink in. A week later I attempted to recreate the agitation in the Miscellaneous Theatre (?) Festival, but this time with strangers from the audience.

I outlined (what I thought was) a simple structure that would lead into a crescendo and then descend back to a single reading voice. It was a large audience and they'd already been there for 3hours (and there was at least another 3 to follow), and people did not hesitate to participate.

The long and short lesson to be learned: the gift of freedom can be an ugly prison.
I was entirely open to 'anything' happening, so politically I don't regret the 'performance'. But there was a part of me that lost faith in humanity as I saw people sawing my objects in half and mindlessly dropping flour everywhere. I am, of course, entirely to blame for encouraging such directionless squalor and my vagueness in my introduction, "You will be given a label with a word which you can regard or disregard as you please", didn't help to dictate any kind of ethical expectations. But ultimately I was disappointed in the general lack of respect that took place. It's one thing to tie some one up with string, but it's another to confront another persons objects (whether physical or mental) with deliberate violence. Apart from the examples above, I can't really pin point specific actions but it was more the violent absence of communication that was quite disturbing.

Alot of this does depend on circumstance, the mood of the room , the selection of volunteers, what had come before and what was to follow; and perhaps I did waste alot of people's time. But despite the failure, it was a valuable, ugly experience which was necessary for figuring out what I want to do with Finnegans Wake in the future.

Finnegans Wake: A Solo Droma

The quieter, solitary route into 'performing' with the Wake.

Following a sketch for a 'Ten Minute Tone Performance' that I had made a few weeks before, I gathered some materials (A flower, some eggs, water, two puppets (Which I had made as Albany and Cornwall from Unfolding King Lear), and a large hardback book, the Complete Lewis Carroll), and then I recorded an audio piece to accompany some tabletop object manipulation.

Whilst listening to the audio and going through the actions Jonny came into the studio and watched. Afterwards he told me that it was far more engaging watching me perform to myself, with headphones, than if he could hear the audio that I had composed. I agreed (half because I thought the audio I had made was pretty mediocre), and it became part of the performance.

Essentially, the little performance attempts to depict the skeleton of the Wake through symbolic objects (e.g. The egg for HCE, water for ALP, the flower for Isabel and the puppets for Shem and Shaun). But the outcome was not to effectively describe or represent Finnegans Wake to an audience but to present a creator doing Finnegans Wake, exploring the many ways of treating and ultimately cracking an egg. My favorite moment involved using a cracked egg as a mouth which plucked petals from a geranium and eventually devoured itself as the pressure of the bites gradually crushed the shell.

It's hard for me to really assess the piece as its so introverted. In a way, it doesn't really feel like a performance, or more precisely, it doesn't feel like I'm really 'showing' anything, but simply 'doing' something in front of an audience. In a way, the absolute extreme opposite to the Ventriloquent Agitation in which the audience are asked to participate.

But did I forget about the audience entirely? How can a performer actually 'forget' an audience?
I think there's a value in the act of giving something to the audience, even if it is just a series of solitary actions. An audience doesn't have to be physically dragged into an action in order to feel part of it.

But ultimately, with a text like the Wake, which will always seem to be a 'members only' kind of experience, how far can an audience be included in work made around it?

That's the next (series of) question(s) for the project.
How should we consider an audience if we are ultimately abondoning a text in front of them? How privy to this experience can they be? And how far can they 'understand by enjoying', as Gertrude Stein would put it, whilst retaining the inevitable sense of bafflement and frustration that the text inevitably produces on everybody in the room?

Residency In Cambridge Pt. I: Doing

2010-03-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

One Doing

We set rail on a crusty Monday morning, a Luna, a Liron and an Orte in toe, clasping backsacks.
We depart with the Luna at Shadwell who, the night before, had lulled us to the harmonic tones celestial of glossolalic incantations, after le Liron played us out to a Town Bloody Hall.
Evenmore the night before, they did condecent to join me in the Little Angel where disembodying puppen won amok with amateurisms. But the impotent ring being that we played with our shadows.

So above is the record of this playing with light in the studio
we kept for the week, all ourself, and we put a whiten sheet up with string and brick.

'One Doing' from the Gertrude Stein through the Kaossssss Pap.
Rilke's Elegy IV found its splace. Happy coindents like 'quivering before heart's curtain' and 'enter first dancer...no...', 'glowing behind every shape'...now was not a compliment to sentimental puppentry but a critiquical invest into both pome and form....And no to mention where ay maun put Hugh McDiarmid to rights with the dulcets ofNaplammo Death. Still, undistilled, I run out with Nothingman by Pearl Jam - from the 6months previous exerjive when Lironi did bop his Edmund hips to the trip of Macreedy, gossard, ament, camron and vedder.

I wanted shadows and this being an OBJECTSPERFORMINGTEXTS residence, his tropical body became the obbjet, but who could keep him from being a toy? we pull down the shadow curtain he being touching from behind 'OH FOE PA!! DO NOT SO MUCH AS BRAKE THE RULER BY TOUCHING THE ILLUSION, YOU'LL BURN!'
so touching the mask.

But how not to do doing? Do nothing? what is doing nothing?
Not standing neutral for only, as that is clearly doing something.
In the end, did we get it? eyes moving, legs hesitating, breathing breath-ing.

Light on a body, one that was once a model for Egon Schiele, is affecting but statuesquing.
Once we tried to balance on bricks but then it became a spectaculule of virtubotic endurance.
Who has not quivered in front of the curtain of your heart, before an audience and the light.

A Doing

Chooseday and Wegsday morning up out for Cauis continental 8aim into studio for 10aim and warming up we doing 'Doings.' Below is one doing of a doing.

Rilke's Duino Elegy IV

2010-02-21T07:08:00.000-08:00

Here is an example of cutting at its finest. I wanted to translate this important poem (important for puppeteers at least), and use some of it in the final scene of 'Stomunculus the Homunculus'. So in rehearsal we cut it down to about three stanzas, keeping in the 'relevant' bits about Angels and Puppets and corridors between world and toy. But after we tried it, with all this talk of Angel and Puppet and the cycle of transformation, it became quite clear that we were starting to bombard our audience with 'interpretation'! So in the end we cut the whole thing.
But it was a worthwhile attempt at trying to use Rilke on stage, if it was only to become a hamfisted one.

Below is my translation of the poem. Not the entire thing, and I take a few liberties with words, such as using 'dummy' for 'spielteug'.

Duino Elegy IV

O living trees, when is your winter?

We are not in tune with the migrating bird.

Overslept and overtaken

we drag ourselves up into the wind

and drop onto an icy pond.

Birth and death weld in our minds.

And the lion power-prowls majestic,

alien to the meak.

But we, as our minds fix on one thing,

feel the tug of another thing. Combat

is our neighbour. Lovers always tresspass

on eachother’s space – despite the promise

of a sprawling hunting-ground called Home.

We don’t know the actual contours of our feelings,

Only what crafts them from the outside.

Who has not quivered before the curtain in his heart?

As it opens onto a parting scene, the familiar

garden swaying softly then…enter, the first dancer.

No, not him! Enough of this. However light

His moves; beneath this mask is a man who

scuttles into his home through the kitchen.

I won’t tolerate these half-filled masks.

I want the Puppet. The puppet is full. I will

bear its bulge, its wires, its wooden face.

Here. I wait.

Even if the lamps go out and a voice from the dark

Says to me: “That’s all” – even when the stage

Drifts emptiness in a grey draft towards me, even if

my silent ancestors do not sit with me, nor women neither,

or the squinting boy with brown eyes.

I’ll still sit here. You can always watch.

Is it too much to ask

to sit before a puppet stage and stare

so intently, that, to realign my sight

an angel is forced to ignite these stuffed actors

to life?

Angel and Puppet. At last, a true theatre.

Where the things we divide by being here

Come together. Then, from our lives

Will arise the entire cycle of transformation.

Above and beyond us

The angel plays.

The dying

Must know that all we do is a lie, where everything

Is forbidden to be itself –

O, hours of childhood,

When more than the past glowed behind every shape,

And what was formed before us, was not the future.

We felt our bodies grow and already yearned to be

Bigger, half for the sake of those with nothing more

Than their bigness. But even then, we were in love,

When playing alone, with things that endure. We stood

In the corridor between World and Dummy,

In a space which, from the first beginning,

Had been established as a pure event.

Who displays a child as he is? Who moulds

His death out of clay, or leaves it on the shore

For the water…Murderers are easy to understand.

But this? That death, the entirety of death, before

Their life has even begun, can be

Embraced so gently, without the fear of being,

Is inexpressible.

Ursonate @ Shunt, 13th February 2010

2010-02-15T08:09:00.001-08:00

On the 12th and 13th of February I performed 'Ursonate' at the Shunt Vaults.
On the first night (Friday) I had to go it alone as my compatriots were busy looking for or doing actual jobs. The audience received it rapturously (most likely because it was performed in the Reading Room right next to the new bar set up in the corridor). It was the first time I've had an audience whoop and cheer during a reading. I felt a bit like John Coltrane.

The following evening it was Dummy Company's time to shine and Shaun and Sophie took centre-table with various objects and puppets. This time we did the whole sonata and, having only just improvised it an hour before, the final movement went down a treat as we debuted our new 'Golemming' puppets (new for Stomunculus the Homunculus).

A Golemming

The final presto sounds a bit like techno music, so I decided to throw a little Golemming party complete with party poppers, shaving foam and a little glitter ball. Aside from the laughter, the audience were the complete opposite to the night before, as they focussed intently on the puppets.

Here is an audio recording of the Saturday 13th performance:

URSONATE@SHUNT (13th Feb, 2010)

or

files.me.com/shaunmay/aq5zf2.mp3

Some Nice Words

2009-12-03T09:17:00.000-08:00

Here is an appraisal of Dummies (thus far) from Kelina Gotman of KCL on its debut at RADA earlier in the year. Maybe this will give people an idea as to what I might be doing with this thing:

Dummies is easily one of the best works of theatre I saw all year [2009]. It is raw, open, messy, polyvocal, poetic, and completely insane, unravelling before our eyes (and ears) all the indecipherable codes and speech patterns that transpire from the City to our kitchen sinks, and the operating table to the lecture hall. It repurposes banana peels and garbles machinic language, to produce a frightfully lucid depiction of the madness of corporate cultures, work life, and play, in an act of creativity that recalls Joyce, Artaud, Carroll, and the grand traditions of bunraku puppetry. Not quite clown, and not quite performance art, it occupies a space between high and low art, folk and the avant-garde, slipping between worlds faster than it can pause to mop up the mess that was left in the scene before. Truly delightful.

Ursonate at the Camden Head (15th Nov 2009)

2009-11-25T04:55:00.000-08:00

Kurt Schwitters

As the wheat made their excuses and left after a long night of new theatre, the chaff remained, much to my delight, and experienced the first (and hopefully not the last) performance of Dummy Company's 'Ursonata: 1st movement'.
It had been a long evening at Short Fuse and I had previously performed in a friend's piece called 'Death of the Author' which, being a piece of straight-forward comedy, had left me feeling quite dejected (despite the audience's warm reception, it reaffirmed why I never even tried joining Footlights). Plus, to top-off the unnecessary pre-performance drama meter, my poor mother had made an oddyssey driving through north london trying to find the Camden Head, which, according to Google was in Angel rather than Camden. All this just to bring me an amp which (don't tell her if you see her) WE DIDN'T USE! She was so tired and stressed that she didnt even stay for the night's entertainment. I was duly punished by lugging the useless device all the way back to Beckton. (Although an amp makes a good seat on a crowded train).

With all this behind me we finally took the space to perform the opening of the Sonata (it would have been too cruel to do the whole thing, and we havent finished devising it all yet). For those who don't know, 'Ursonate' is a half-hour long sonata for voice by Dada/Merz artist, Kurt Schwitters. More a piece of dadaist sound poetry in the heritage of Hugo Ball and shamanistic chant, it requires a lot of tongue blasting and jaw bombadeering. Here's a recording of Schwitters doing it himself: (ignore the cow, lovely as it is)
In anxious preparation I had been downing a glass of water every 10 minutes and my visits to the toilet were getting tedious, also, my throat, rather than feeling limber and cool was feeling chappy and thick so I started drinking a pint of beer which solved all my problems. (I might start performing with a beer all the time now...here my troubles begin).

So anyway, I wanted this to be a practise for my voice and for Shaun and Sophie to do more puppetry. The piece opens with a mini-play with my two 'Little Dog' marionettes. The audience, quite predictably, were taken in by them and thought it quite cute. My worry was that the main performance to follow would render the marionette show meaningless but because it was taking such an informal, un-theatrical form, they seemed to flow quite neatly.
Then we began the 10mins of 'Ursonata'. To my surprise I hardly tripped over anything in my reading and it's definitely the most intense delivery I think I've ever given to anything. The one thing that I did falter over, quite intriguingly, was when I thought I saw an 'r' instead of an 'f', during a long passage which constantly repeats the phrase 'fummsbowotaazaa...'. I thought I saw 'rummsbowo...' and pronounced it. Even though I practically know it by heart, it is evident that my performance was still a 'reading' rather than a memorised delivery.
The object manipulation from Shaun and Sophie, according to the audience, was very engaging. Wish I'd videoed it all, it feels pointless describing it all in detail.

The long and short: we will do the WHOLE sonata as an object/voice piece. And even more so, as I have been dwelling on the idea for a while, we could bracket the sonata with puppet interpretations of some of Schwitters Merz Fairy Tales which have recently been published by Princeton Press. Hope someone else hasn't or doesn't get there first, although what do I care?

Stomunculus Underground (Fragment#?)

2009-11-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

Stomunculus blinks voicelessly amongst the crowd.

They march past his trunk and smash his stump.

One follows the other with plugs stuffed in each mouth.

Stomuncles’ oracle is the only unplugged orafice in the tube –

Non-electric unlead mistriggered to his tongue.

Shots of molecular phlegm squeal into Stomucles’ mouth, as a voice tells him to:

Mind the placental jelly that often makes surfaces slipp

ery during inclement residue.

There, across the narrow bars that flicker sparks and come and go into two giant holes, golden screens flash gleams of excrescent beauty; and when their silicone tongues lick a golem’s earhole, the golem drops its jaw, lets fall its plug and dives open mawed towards the glimmering sublime, as its bulk shatters across the spitting tracks.

Stomookoo feels his ribs shuttering within the capsulated stream, pressed by golems blindly sculpting him with paper. Beneath his forming feet heats the beat of something roaring near away. His open mouth lets in the onrushing course of wind as it shafts down his throat.

The golemmings squeeze in clumps on the platform edge, clustered together with their feet on words saying

MIND THE TRAP

A little pickaninny notices Stomoral’s gaping O and, under the deluzean that it is a tunnel, puts her little head inside. Barely noticing the little feet kicking from his mouth, Stomuckle stands obedient with the golems on the platform.

By now the beats that beat beneath are rippling through their cortices and the wind storms from the gaping cavity. Paper rustles and golems clench their clusters while the yearning scream erupts from the hole.

GLUTTED OF THIS

2009-10-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

Way back in January Jeremy Hardingham and I made a film around Faustus. It's called Glutted of this and if you go to http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/glutted-of-this you can watch it in full and read about its genesis and consequent exegesis from Raphael Lyne who gave it an insightful interpretation.

A picture of JH thinking about what it means to watch film

Stane Musik

2009-09-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

Here is Hugh MacDiarmid reading 'Emis Stane' with a bit of Ligeti and Napalm Death. Some how I think that Scots just goes well with grindcore metal. It's designed to be played leading into 'One Doing'. I think I might want to make a little album out of these.

Stane Musik

Doing what one is doing

2009-09-17T16:22:00.000-07:00

Bunged up and groggy I decided to muck about with sound on my computer. Using Soundtrack Pro I created this:

One Doing

Using Gertrude Stein's portrait of Matisse, Shubert's 'Nacht und Traume' (probably because Beckett wrote a TV piece with it) and a bit of Varese ('Dance for Burgess') I spliced, reversed, delayed, phased and flanged my way into this little meandering 'traume'.

Dummies @ The Red Hedgehog (29th July 2009)

2009-09-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

follow the link and wait for it to buffer.

thanks to Benjamin Hajir for filming it last minute and Ian Winter for putting it on the cybernet.

some footage was made in my garage.

Filmic Residua Preview of the REAL thing! @$%!#&!

2009-06-27T19:21:00.000-07:00

26-27th June 2009

Ian Burrows and I filmed a little something whilst I was up in Cambridge.

And now, for the first time, introducing........MR.PEEL!

So I don't get sued:

Music provided in part by Aphex Twin, Beethoven, Exhaust and Mogwai. Thank You.

The Birth Booth ReConceived

2009-06-17T04:22:00.000-07:00

SHOW US YER BITS! (Southwark Playhouse, 4.6.09)

Show Us Yer Bits!, a Southwark Secret curated by GETINTHEBA CKOFTHE VAN!

This was the first proper public performance of a Dummies fragment. I had spent a week on the Isle of Wight and made a marionette. It was supposed to be Stomunculus the Homunculus, but I'm not sure it really looks like him. (I don't even know what he looks like, I'm thinking of creating a rod puppet out of goo so he doesn't have a recognisable shape). The performance was a combination of the Birth Scroll with some new puppetry. I'd never performed with a marionette in front of an audience, let along a rickety one I had made in a back garden, so the challenge was quite exciting.

I ate an apple (or tried to eat an apple) as I delievered the birth scroll. Bits went flying everywhere. I wanted to find a way to make speaking a difficult, almost painful process, I think it worked.

The mess we created went well too. Although I splattered a woman in the front row with red food colouring, she didn't seem to mind. If it's worth getting your blouse stained to see the performance then it can't be all that bad?

Becky was in two minds about assisting me (Dr.Shaboo), as we hadn't really prepared a slick routine as 'Doctor and Assistant', but on the last minute we decided to just go for it. The audience wanted more interaction between us, more precision with the objects and more of a performance as a double act rather than man with woman to his side handing him things. These were probably the most important points made as they gave Becky the extra confidence she needed and myself a kick up the bum in regards to incorporating other bodies into the performance. I have to accept that this is more than a one horse show; other people want to work on it too.

Getinthebackofthevan want me to come back on July 14th for Bitten, so finally the birth booth will become conjoined with Stomunculus. (But by then Dummies will have to have reached 60minutes already seeing as a week later it's being performed at RADA).

I'm happy with the role of newspaper in this piece. Kelina Gotman made a comment on how it was like we were cutting into it surgically. Another signpost of manipulative language which I tried to hint at with the Applescript introduction on the soundtrack. I think 'media' is the Golem of Dummies. Newspaper has not had its day yet.

This should link to the backing soundtrack that I made: yLife

The Birth Booth

2009-06-08T03:50:00.000-07:00

Out of the Birth Booth, into the Backofthevan

Genesis of 'Birth'

The first bit I had put together for this fragment was a 'Birth' scri pt. It is supposed to be the opening of a book that I want to eventually write. I was interested in re-articulating the voice, making it difficult and experiencing it through an erotics of sound. It presents utterance as a form of birth, but after the first time I read it aloud to an audience (in a very small writers' group) it was quite clear that the thing had a sexual element to it. Then I discovered an article about women who experience orgasm du ring childbirth - as if now I had validation for writing such an ambiguous string of sounds.

The structure of the piece is centered around the most open vowel sound, a:, which I wanted to exlore as something primal and instinctive, a return to the first utterance, the adult equivalent of smacking your lungs into place as an infant. The first half, therefore, has no a: sounds and is full of short, sharp gutturals, closed vowels and consonants. Then, once I reach the word 'open', the script is overwhelmed by 'a:' words like 'part' 'pass' 'laugh' etc. Within it there are other gradations of the letter A, but I think the effect is bombadeering.

The first performance I made out of it was part of my course at RADA. I used two willing female vessels (Helena Bytnar and Stefanie David) to emit sounds and limbs from under a concealed table with slits cut into the front. As the speech was delivered by me, reading from a scroll pulled from the top of the table, they would produce grunting, wheezing, gargling noises until I got to the a: sound. The piece finished with a collective chanting of the vowel a: which I had coerced some of the audience members to join in with.

I decided to present my part as a sham priest/healer so I put a CD on my head and a bit of white tape on my collar - the birth of Dr.Shaboo. Part of the reason for this had to do with the vicinity of the Church of Scientology which we all had to pass every time we went to Rada on Chenies Street. I had found some a fantastic schizoid, poetic lecture given by L. Ron Hubbard on YouTube and used it as part of the sound recording, being a loose allusion to religious manipulation, whether cynical like the Scientologists or bodily, as with the Glossolalia of many Pentecostal Christians.

One bit that went down quite well was at the beginning when Dr.Shaboo breathes into the top of the table and the sheet is lifted up by the two bodies under the table so it looks like a giant, breathing lung.

Miscellaneous Festival (English Faculty Studio, Cambridge, 12.3.09)

This was a bit of a rushed affair. I didn't have any time to rehearse it with my two accomplices, Jeremy Hardingham and Ian Burrows, and I hadn't quite thought out what I intended to do. Infact, I was also using an entirely different text. I wanted to try out 'Stomunculus the Homunculus', a Finnegans Wake induced tale about a Homunculus who lives inside a stomach. I was inspired whilst reading Steven Conners' book about Ventriloquism (Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism; Oxford, 2006) and eating a sandwich in a Cafe near Russell Square.

Now that I think of it, I did use the birth scroll and then got Jeremy and Ian to read bits of Stomunculus. During Stomunculus I used some clay and eggs to accompany the text, in the hope that it would provide a visual and aural parrallel to the viscous sibilants in the words. But because I had not planned what I was actually going to do with the materials, they lost their effect fairly early on so that rather than providing a gut churning excitement within the audience, all I got was some baffled stares, probably a bit regretful about the rampant waste of food and modelling clay.

The first half however, was not a complete disaster. (Not that I'd call anything in performance a disaster). I delivered the text through the table again, with J and Ian doing what Helena and Stef had done, but because it was unrehearsed, and hadn't taken into account the masculine grains of their voices, it became quite shambolic. What had previously been a near mystical presentation became a noisy mess.

Nonetheless, a valuable lesson in the value of rehearsal. Even if you want to leave things to chance and indeterminacy.

The Birth Booth of Stomunculus (Pangea Project, Stoke-Newington, 20.4.09)

This was a 20+ minute piece made especially for Stomunculus. The Birth Scroll wasn't used this time. Most of the work was spent in recording it (you can find the draft here) and making the little cardboard booth. I'm thinking of producing Stomunculus as a radio piece because there is so much emphasis on sound and it has more to do with its musicality than with theatrical representation. But here was an opportunity to work more with materials that assist the story rather than tell it.

Overall, the performance was too long. The elements that did work were:

Porridge - a curiously revolted reaction from the audience. Within the porridge is the character 'Jonash the Hebroth' (Jonah and the Whale fame), who was made from white tac covering an egg. He also had a disgusting beard made from a girls' hair extension I bought from ASDA. (Actually I seem to buy most of my performance tools from ASDA these days). I look forward to working more with gooey, gloopey substances in the future.

Jasper - Warren Drew suggested that when Jasper appeared at the end, crawling through the stomachal box, creeping through the top, lighting a match and flying away, the piece took on a 'Promethean' twist. Unfortunately Jasper suffered in this performance and along with burning his fingers, two of them fell off!

Shadow Puppetry - Towards the end, Kham of Canaan tells a story about the magical beasts that God put into the Ark in order to save humanity after the flood (ofcourse, Noah and his family ate them all because they were hungry). At this point I stopped bothering with bits of miscellaneous objects to put behind the little shadow screen (made from card and greaseproof paper) and used my upturned hand to lip sync his speech. Afterwards I was told that this was a highlight. Kirsten Smith was quite moved by the speech and the simplicity of the hand. Plus I think putting a glass of apple juice between the light and the screen created a nice effect aswell. One to consider.

The next thing to do is to cut it down from 20 minutes to around 5-8 minutes, so I can splice it into the birth sequence.

The 'Dummies' Project, or wriggling a finger through the skin of solipsism

2009-06-07T09:52:00.000-07:00

Since 'Dummies' will be performed at the Camden Fringe in August and is going to be my final Dissertation project for my MA, I've had to start thinking of it as a 'show' - a performance piece that I have to reduce to a number of words, whether for publicity or academics. As much as this is incredibly helpful (I actually have to start prioritising things and ensure that there is some kind of substance behind my words and images), summarising work that, for me, is in a constant flux, telescopes the focus into minute spheres that obscure everything that surrounds it.

Dummies is about Something

because it is in Everything
which is next to Nothing

or,

d= E = (d< style="font-style: italic;">about or around to the area in Something, S, which is still nonetheless contained in the sphere of Everything, E.

S is a subset of E, and so is d, but d is also an occasional member of S (and a permanent member of E). It follows that if S={d} and E={d} then N={d, S, E ...} so d=N and, therefore, Dummies is Nothing but the sum of Nothings parts which are Something and Everything which are Aleph-one (Ω) infinities because they are uncountable.

Yet a performance is anything but infinite.

So when Dummies relocates into the Something set during a Performance it no longer belongs to the Everything or even the Nothing set and is set free from the powerset, in fact Dummies does not belong to any set (except for when I put it into a set). But in reality, the only set that Dummies belongs to is Performance which is, after all, Everything. Therefore Dummies belongs to Everything because it is sheltered away from Nothing (in a giant circle); it belongs to infinity, but only a set of possible infinities, so each Performance is a fragment of stolen infinity...

I think I'll come back to this Algequatic Investigation at a latter date when my 'pataphysical bullshit tools are improved.

Jasper

Jasper is a little Puppet-Doll that I made from clay, cloth and cotton-wool. He is a Body without Organs (BwO). I do as much as I can to support him. This is a little film that I made about Jasper.