Yesterday we had a performance of The Customer (as it is now becoming known to me in short form) on the Guildhall Square, Portsmouth. It was touch and go whether it would or would not happen at all but the forecasted heavy rain failed to materialise. Looking back on it now I think I can safely say it was one of the odder performances I have done with this material in the sense of it being pleasantly incongruous.
I was joined by both Boris and James who had recently worked with me on the indoor performance, and I was also joined by Hannah, one of my Chinese language partners who ended up in a performance art piece for the first time in her life. Boris and James essentially stood on the outside looking semi official in their yellow day-glo waistcoats, a nod to the excessive H&S regulations I had to negotiate in order to use the space. Hannah however was quite firmly inside the performance acting as my English interpreter. Although she has no background in the arts she does work as a simultaneous interpreter and was able to draw upon that experience and deliver the garbled Googled text to the public rather well.
One of the things that was amusing to observe was the look of surprise on the faces of the several Chinese students who happened to be crossing the square when they heard amplified Mandarin and then saw me as its source and what’s more me doing not so normal things.
I am starting to realise that this work occupies a rather special niche in the sense that it can be a bit too Chinese for general British tastes and a bit too Western performance art for general Chinese tastes. I had an interesting conversation the other night with a mainland Chinese woman and her friend a non Mandarin speaking British Chinese man. She said she had the greatest access to the work as she could understand me speaking Mandarin. While her ability to understand my utterances is true I also see that the broader language of the performance in terms of its genre is also a language with its conventions and references and familiarity with this also gives access to the performance. What’s more the scrambled texts have been tweaked between two language software sites so as to produce a poetic text that, at least to my ear, works in English. I had the feeling that operating between a number of languages, as it does, it is a piece that attempts to keep everybody at a little bit of a distance and play with this mixture of understanding and not understanding the work. The form of it requires of the spectator going outside of ones zone of familiarity and competency. In this way I suppose it reproduces the dislocating experience China had upon me rather than communicating it within a familiar convention.
