Unrecorded: this is the next step.

Well, think I have recovered from the last performance held at Studio 180 Lambeth. How did I think Kernel Essays went? Well actually I was pretty pleased with it. I was delighted with the support from friends who helped me and also the accommodating nature of the host Sam Hacking who organised the event and the residents of the studio itself. I think I need to branch out with participants and collaborate with people to compensate for my missing skills and experience in designing performance however.

So I have signed myself up for a 10 week course in Cabaret and Performance called Variety and Variety at the Camden Roundhouse. Leaping out of my comfort zone? Yes! Hopefully this will help me with my project and get me working with a group of young performers in my age range.

In the meantime I have rewritten my budget for the No Strings Attached Scheme. Even though the previous grant application has been successful I have to consider all the options for an evolving work. It is fortunate that there is a gap between so that I can adjust figures.

I have now broken down the NAS part of the budget to cover mentor fees, transport, venue hire and documentation. Documentation is the largest segment of the grant so far after my fees for the project. It pays for two cameramen using dslrs, boom mics and camera equipment. The person who is doing this for me I know from part time work. If you work in a cinema you’ll be up to your eyeballs in film making enthusiasts.

So what about the work itself? Well I have come up with an idea but I am very scared. Can I recreate a 1930’s Jazz Bar in a Surrey church? Maybee. I have been listenting to a lot of Jazz recently. But there is this feeling of adventure, unity and progression from that era of creativity which is very alluring. There is also the music. And the poetry. Did you know Louis Armstrong was also a Poet? Ashamedly, neither did I. But there is a whole raft of it, mostly American from what I can see, though I could be wrong.

I guess what is sticking this atmosphere of smoky New Orleans in my head is a quote supposedly stated by Ezra Pound about The Waste Land: that Eliot was ‘drowning in a sea of Jazz’. What a statement. What an idea. Reading the words of T S Eliots work, I understand. I guess this is where my script for Kernel Essays came in. I broke its structure down. Perhaps the inevitable progression is John Cage territory – incidental performance? Is that possible?

And what has this got to do with art? Well it all comes from the same era. And what started up in New Orleans Jazz Bars became an innovative form of music. At the same time Modernism in painting and art was in full swing, and became a paradigm shift enveloping architecture, literature, art, music and fashion. I might be making a huge historical inaccuracy, but is there some truth in saying that Modernism had part of its origins in or at least shares its lineage with a form of music that originated in the Black community of twentieth century North America?

I have started drawing on musical notation paper and tracing around shadows. I have been dismembering my old photographs into boozy collages. I have been collecting glass containers. I have been listening to a ceremonial brass bell and letting it make drawings for me.

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It is the last week of August and I am working on a performance which will take place an event called The Shag, 180 Lambeth Road, London in a set of artist studios. The place is tiny, it has a cooker and a yellow piano, both of which I am going to make use of.

I been developing what originally became Kernel at The Betsey Trotwood in the beginning of August. However I have been researching more performance work and poetry. When seeing Emma Bennett’s work, I became aware that a voice, and the words spoken could be enough. I kept the print out of my Pantoum used for Kernel and broke it up with highlighters, taking lists I titled ‘edges’ – to describe the atmospherical devices I had picked up in the poem and ‘spaces’ – descriptions of locations in the Pantoum. I then played around with free verse, envisioning several friends reciting different parts in a cloudy Jazz bar. I have been looking at The Waste Land, specifically part III ‘The Fire Sermon’ and the different cadences of words thereof.

To top it off, I have been in the mood of hunting down Joyce’s last book, Finnigan’s Wake. While sojourning Skoob’s in London (it closes at 8pm, how good is that?) I picked up a free book they couldn’t sell as the cover had been torn off. What I acquired was W.E. Williams’ A Book of English Essays. Aldous Huxley, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.K. Chesterton, Francis Bacon: they were all there. So I came to annotate, taking upon Edward Thomas’ Broken Memories which describes the deforestation of rural England and the building of the Suburbs interring the natural decaying processes of fallen trees with the secret places of the hidden mind:

‘cobwebs and wholesome dust – we needed some of both in the corners of our minds’.

and my work went from four line verse to this:

‘the legs of the table were wooden, ribbon, silken, shrunken, sullen, fallen, common, octahedron, crimson.’

in a single line.

What I am becoming interested in, or focusing on are the edges of things. Kernel Essays, is a testing ground for this. What I noticed upon reading the notes of The Waste Land is that so much is unsaid, it is not so much what is written, as the non-site of the underlayers of reference.

Pouring though The Waste Land notes I came up with a rough list of references:

Book of Ezekiel

Book of Ecclesiastes

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Dante’s Inferno

The Golden Bough

Baudelaire

Miss Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance

Anthony and Cleopatra

The Tempest

Parliament of Bees

St Augustine’s Confessions

the complete Fire Sermon from Buddhism in Translation.

The list goes on.

I am reading Ian Brinton’s Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990, Mike Pearson Site-Specific Performance, Ulysses, A Book of English Essays. I might need to locate a residency to undertake this work, there is a lot to discover and make.

So I am performing a try out of Kernel Essays with some friends at The Shag, 180 Lambeth Road, London on the 6th Sept. it starts at 7pm. I hope I can get enough of this down on paper.

Wow, long time since I posted, I know. I meant to post after the 16th, honest. Only I became quite unwell and was bed ridden for a couple of days. Had to recover, and it took a while. When I was ill the last thing I wanted to do was stare at a computer screen.

Anyways, enough said. On Thursday 16th I met my mentor Sylvia Rimat for the first time in sunny Brighton. I then spent the next two hours with her talking about our practices and the questions I had put to her in the email. The responses I received were to be expected, I was enlightened to hear that my path though stemming from a different discipline, turned out to be very similar otherwise in terms of money and funding. It was therefore rewarding to know that if I pursue the route I am going down successfully I will have a sustainable practice one day. She also showed me the funding application for I Guess if the Stage Exploded… which was of course successful. Interestingly it had quite an informal anecdotal tone in places but what held my attention most was genuine written support from producers and curators. On pointing this out Sylvia then showed me a personal typed letter, which would be sent along with the body of the application.

We then talked about some of my work. Despite friends and colleagues supporting my work at exhibitions and for event evenings, I couldn’t help but wince at some of my recent performances. Lack of rehearsal time shows, but what came out of that was my use of props and popcorn to enliven the pieces and take them away from the I-am-the-performer-standing-in-font-of-the-audience model of thinking.

Leaving quite an intense 2 hour session (it could have been days in The Basement) of talking I began my place as the sickly child for the greater part of the next week. When I came out of brain-soup mode and desired once again to bare my senses to performance (risky, yes) I went to Camden Art Centre’s event tied with the Bruce Lacey show. Waiting for a friend, I hesitantly found myself sitting at the front next to a girl in a red top. Sending advance apologies to my friend as seats disappeared to quickly for me to spare any, I found out that I was sitting next to Emma Bennett: the evenings final performer. I didn’t reveal that I had seen her website, loved her work and that she had been a ‘suggested’ artist alongside Sylvia for the current project. The whole event was great, it is a secret shame that I rarely get the chance to see much performance because of where I am based. What I liked about Emma’s work however was its perceived simplicity, it’s fragmented yet confident delivery. Emma’s practice deals with language and this performance was no exception, rendering a Dylan Thomas? poem into consonant stutters, delayed trips and poignant streams of barely coherent verbiage.

Finishing the week with a couple of up-to-the-minute application deadlines I received the news that I have been invited to the panel presentation stage for the NSA scheme. The clincher. This goes through or no money. It is in October and I have begun to research in earnest: poetry, performance, anything, everything. And I have a performance again in just under 2 weeks: rushed? yes. How can I break this? How can I become calmly confident?

It’s been a busy few weeks what with all the stuff you can see in A London Persuit. So what have I been up to since my last post?

I had a performance at The Betsey Trotwood curated by the very friendly Kate Wiggs. I knew nobody there but it was all very friendly. I made a bit of a mess! Expanding my vocabulary of actions revolved around doing things with popcorn. Sealing myself off in my studio space before the event I noticed the amazing sound popcorn crunching under my shoes. I proceeded to do this at the show, making a circle to the sound of the opening of Carousel. Everyone seemed to enjoy the performance and commented particularly on the smell the popcorn made. If only I could get a microwave there, then the smell would fill the space. Portability aside, it would be good look at other objects and how to use them with the audience for future performances.

I will be meeting with Sylvia next week. It is not one of the sessions I have booked with funding but will be a chance to show my work and ask questions on being a performer and performance practice. I sent these three questions in advance:

1) How did you become commissioned by Spill Festival and what was the process of making the work? Did you have an idea in development before being asked or did you begin after?

2) How do you create new performances? do you plan a budget and outcome from the beginning of a project or is the process more intuitive? how does this affect your time schedule and working methods?

3) How do you work out a sum for the fees incurred in making a performance?

I also sent some footage via dropbox. I spent some of my time this week jumping through dropbox hoops to acquire the space to send the footage. But it is away. Good practice, I know.

Another thing to mention is the slight sense of panic I felt upon realising that the second part of funding for this project, the No Strings Attached Scheme, is open for applications. Assured I am on the mailing list to be notified when the scheme opened its process, I found out quickly this was not the case. The reason this happened as far as I am aware is a job shift: someone else is in charge of the applications. Fortunately all I needed was my laptop to give all the info for the phone interview. But it just goes to show you need to watch application deadlines carefully.

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