After quite an interval, performances of The Customer are starting up again. This brings to the fore that question of how much should I attempt to recreate what I previously did and to what extent should it be remade according to where I am now. I am not doctrinaire on this issue and can see benefits to both impulses. It was a performance that was carefully constructed so that all the parts resonate off one another and changing one part can mess up a whole lot else so I have to be careful before savaging it. At the same time, things have changed and I don’t like to think of a performance as a museum piece. One of the qualities that has always attracted me to performance the most is the possibility to be reactive to the moment.
I’ve settled for a compromise keeping most of what I have but reworking what needs changing within the time frame I have available to do so. The biggest challenge in fact is relearning the Chinese text. I was going through both it and the Chinglish translation and saw how some changes were needed and how I could be more precise about the mechanics of translation. This let me back to the translation websites and I now have a nice new version of it. Next week I will have it performed live by Vera Chok in London and in March we will present it in Chinese German in Cologne as projcetd surtitles. I’m still very interested in how to destabilise the power relationships between languages and their speakers in this piece so this looks like it will offer some more opportunities to experiment.
