Live Art in the UK

Contemporary Performances of Precarity

Maria Chatzichristodoulou

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781474257718
• eBook ISBN: 9781474257725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

Since entering the performance lexicon in the 1970s, the term Live Art has been used to describe a diverse but interrelated array of performance practices and approaches. This volume offers a contextual and critical introduction to the scene of contemporary Live Art in Britain. Focusing on key artists whose prolific body of work has been vital to the development of contemporary practice, this collection studies the landscape of Live Art in the UK today and illuminates its origins, as well as particular concerns and aesthetics. The introduction to the volume situates Live Art in relation to other areas of artistic practice and explores the form as a British phenomenon. It considers questions of cultural specificity, financial and institutional support, and social engagement, by tracing the work and impact of key organizations on the UK scene: the Live Art Development Agency, SPILL Festival of Performance and Compass Live Art. Across three sections, leading scholars offer case studies exploring the practice of key artists Tim Etchells, Marisa Carnesky, Marcia Farquhar, Franko B, Martin O'Brien, Oreet Ashery, David Hoyle, Jordan McKenzie, and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Part One

Experiments in Life and in Art

1

‘All We Have Is Words, All We Have Is Worlds’: Language, Looping and the Work of Tim Etchells

Sara Jane Bailes

Introduction: working words

Tim Etchells works assiduously with words: hearing, catching, noticing them, collecting and gathering them in note form, isolating, repeating them, rounding them up, dismantling their semantic structures; troubling them, deleting or reshuffling a familiar order; reversing emphasis, celebrating their precision and their endless capacity to, just as easily, say very little at all, even as they resonate and perform for us. It’s hard to think about Etchells’ writing and his compositional approach to words without falling under the thrall of what he makes language do. His list-making is contagious. His observations often feel familiar, resonant with an understated boredom that’s peculiarly British. His writing is filled with longing, with sharp but understated political wit, humour, everyday ambitions and disappointments. Arranged in fragmented forms, decontextualized and reframed by a specific context or site in which his language-based text works are produced (such as a gallery, public/civic space, small theatre or large concert venue), Etchells uses words to recompose or dramatize a situation, to create formal distance or intimacy, suggest ideas and propose images; or else, to have them appear, literally, as concrete objects in the form of neons, or as sounds pushing towards abstraction. They are, in his practice as an artist, an active, live, dynamic force, whether they appear as a visual sign communicating across space and time, or as a unit or phrase within a spoken improvised live composition. In many of Etchells’ projects and collaborations, ongoing since his 2001 solo performance, Instructions for Forgetting, words function as both medium and material; often, they become a micro-event that stages larger propositions, or they can function as a bridge to a more visual, detailed world than performance allows. Yet, as with the work he has continued to produce for over three decades with his internationally acclaimed experimental theatre collective, Forced Entertainment, of which Etchells is artistic director and the company’s primary writer/author, language is used to illuminate the ordinary rather than to draw attention to the exceptional. As an artist who works with language and text across multiple forms, his practice extends a preoccupation evident since the mid-twentieth century with the idea of producing democratic methodologies and idioms in art practice that aim to soften the edges of self-conscious authorship and the distinctions between everyday (pedestrian) life and (high) art. His use of language as a material that can oscillate across different forms draws from popular culture as well as from ideas, overheard dialogue, the particular vernaculars that evolve in other media and their specific stylistic modes (such as TV, news broadcasts, film) and casual observations: an everyday, anybody, anywhere kind of language. Inevitably, this produces its own distinctive virtuosity and creates its own casual poetry, even as its affect is one that seems to belie mastery and precision.

Considering Etchells’ acute attention to the imaginary potential of a language gathered out of the ordinary (in both senses of that phrase), one antecedent that springs to mind is mid-twentieth-century sound poet, painter and performer, Brion Gysin, who, collaborating with William S. Burroughs in 1958, developed cut-up texts as a way of liberating language, intent upon freeing the writer from subjectivism and the idea of ‘owning’ words. Like many US artists working in other art disciplines at that time (including music, dance and painting), Gysin’s methods of composition sought to manifest and articulate those beliefs. In a brief essay in The Third Mind, a book he composed with Burroughs, Gysin explains the radical dynamism of the cut-up, famously declaring: ‘You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action’ (in Burroughs and Gysin 1978: n/p). Gysin draws our attention to several useful points: first, that language exists as shared cultural property, regardless of how it might be (individually or collectively) composed, edited or applied within specific contexts. It is communal. Language is perceived, therefore, as implicitly social, free, accessible, though its circulation and formations are inevitably bound up with ideology and (therefore) agency. Second, language can be activated and made to do certain things: its potential is dynamic, forceful; it produces effects. Formally, the cut-up releases language from the tyranny of narrative or a singular trajectory, something Etchells admits to having been frustrated by for many years in his work as writer/theatre-maker (Trueman 2017). Instead, to displace and (literally) cut up sequences of language from their original intended order proposes a more open way of reading/hearing language, allowing it to move through the individual in a less over-determined way. Meaning can be arrived at through a dissociative as well as an associative logic. Experimenting with new compositional modes and strategies, the relationship between author/reader, or performer/spectator, can be recalibrated not only by shifting the perceptive attention of the reader but also by refocusing attention from content towards the way in which ideas are filtered and distributed. I’ll return to this notion later in relation to the development of digital technologies and networked thinking.

Judith Butler reminds us that we are fundamentally linguistic beings, that is, ‘beings who require language in order to be’ (Butler 1997: 2). Though Butler is referring to language at large, within the public and social realm rather than its activity within specialized fields of art practice, to some extent the same holds true in both domains. We exist through language, as does our apprehension of the world. In theatre, specifically Anglo-centric theatre, language has always been moderated – restricted even – by its literal use as replication of first person dialogue. Yet within a more generalized field of art practice, where words are used as ingredients, language can structure and reorganize our sense of place, time, relationality and intimacy, our ‘felt’ or abstracted experience of the world. While J. L. Austin’s speech act theory has become central to discussions about performativity and performance, in particular the way words can do more than they say (where saying becomes doing) (Austin 1962), artists such as Etchells deploy language in ways that excavate its performative properties distinctive from the occurrence of the performative in everyday speech. While this includes foregrounding its concrete properties, in Etchells’ pieces one’s attention is often focused on the way language as a signifying practice brings a/many world(s) into being through strategies that call upon the individual, imaginative ability and corresponding thoughts and associations of the listener-reader. Is this the way that language as an event begins: as an invitation to collaborate in imagining? How does language perform ideas, things, attitudes, events in ways that other materials do not? In this chapter, I want to focus on some of the ways that Tim Etchells’ solo practice develops his interest and enquiry into the performative, spatial, social, choreographic and musical potentialities that language offers. I am thinking about these works under the umbrella of the generous and heterogeneous category, Live Art, rather than theatre where Etchells’ practice with Forced Entertainment usually belongs. Perhaps it is worth considering how these language-based text works belong to that less definitive category (Live Art), observing how these projects fall away from theatre to create conversations between and across forms.

The potential of language as a textual practice has always fascinated and concerned Etchells, underpinning his work with Forced Entertainment since they began as a theatre collective in the mid-1980s. In a recent interview with Matt Trueman discussing the critical value of text in the company’s work, he states: ‘I still care very much and take care of text’ (Trueman 2017). Working independently from the group has allowed him to further explore its possibilities without the concerns or obligations that inevitably develop (a different kind of care-taking) amongst a collective of closely-knit artists over a long period of time. In his own work, Etchells is liberated from the exigencies and demands of making a group/time-specific piece of theatre that can tour and be accommodated in a range of similar capacity venues. Instead, imagination itself becomes both site and object of each performance or gallery work. In that sense, the possibilities are, perhaps dauntingly, limitless and unclear. Each project relies upon finding different containers, strategies or holding patterns that allow him to fashion language into new ways of catching the experience of a thing. Usually Etchells performs his own works either solo or in duets. Recent collaborators have included Meg Stuart (dancer/choreographer), Vlatka Horvat (visual and performance artist), Aisha Orazbayeva (musician/composer), Boris Charmatz (dancer/choreographer) and Tarek Atoui (sound artist/composer).¹ While each distinctive project intermixes the formal structures, behaviours and limitations of these different media – primarily dance, visual art and music – the conventions of theatre are often implied in the situation created by Etchells through the texts he creates and sometimes through the processes that produce text. These pieces seem to work in dialogue with theatre performance: pushing back from it (no ‘action’, plot, characters being performed, no costumes, lights, etc.), emptying the space yet reliant upon a shared knowledge of its codified rules; eliminating as much as possible in order to better understand what needs to remain, the essential material for creating an exchange. There is a commitment, for example, to invoking an ‘already existing’ situation, to staging something as if pre-empting it or in its aftermath, to being here or ‘there’, locating us in some kind of temporal relation to it, retrieving parts of it, borrowing or retracing his own or an implied other’s experience, bringing not only time but place and mood into frame.

Central to these pieces, whatever form they eventually take, is an attempt to make the spectator actively complicit in the occasion. They explore the way that narrative and subject position are intrinsic to, but not limited by, compositional practice: one is always speaking to, speaking of, speaking from, about, for or with. They pay attention to the dramaturgical possibilities of text even as they work to include the visual, choreographic and sculptural, to expand our understanding of performance as multidisciplinary or even post-disciplinary. Certain questions guide this body of work and sustain it in particular ways: How does language become performance, or, how might performance dwell within the formations and arrangements of its limitless constructions? Is language ever anything other than fictional or fictionalizing? How does meaning shift according to the different rules or strategies we apply to words, or the way we might locate them within different forms and platforms (such as neon, live broadcast or performance, gallery or wall piece)? Functioning as a time-based vehicle rather than as dialogue, how can language expand our understanding of narrative?

In the following sections I’ll consider Etchells’ broader history as a writer whose practice has been situated in, and developed through, theatre and performance. I’ll then focus on compositional discoveries encountered through these works. The chapter then offers a detailed consideration of two performance pieces made in recent years: the solo work, A Broadcast/Looping Pieces, originally made and performed in 2014, and the collaborative duet, Seeping Through (2015), made and performed with composer and violinist, Aisha Orazbayeva. Both pieces can be performed in different versions (as durational or as a shorter version, for example), produced in different sites and contexts (gallery, theatre, for radio). The second work builds on some of the components and strategies that underpin Broadcast. In order to consider the development of these works, I’ll refer to earlier solo works by Etchells as well as relevant shows by Forced Entertainment. In conclusion, I suggest ways to situate Etchells’ work within diverse genealogies and contexts of practice.

Words as worlds

‘You can make anything by writing’

C.S.Lewis

As an artist, Etchells established himself and has become internationally recognized for his more than thirty-year history with Sheffield-based theatre ensemble, Forced Entertainment. As artistic director, he writes, directs and sometimes performs. The group’s work is programmed, discussed and taught within theatre, performance and Live Art contexts, nationally and abroad, and in recent years the group (and Etchells individually) has garnered a number of prestigious awards.² His 1999 book, Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, inclusive of the shared histories of the group, is arguably the most significant, and undoubtedly one of the most widely read collections of published writings on experimental theatre and performance in the last fifty years. Inventive in ways that echo the formal collaborative experimentation of their theatre-making, it reads as a kind of disjointed cultural, company biography from the perspective of its six members and their work, sometimes reframing them as characters (playing themselves, as they do in performance) in their own (semi-fictional) history. Together, the collection creates a kind of first- and second-person, plural mythology of their professional and sometimes personal lives together as a company, often failing (intentionally) to differentiate between private and public experience. It considers the theatre work they have made and processes of making, the performances and artists who have influenced them, experiences of touring, reflections from Etchells’ personal narrative (the birth of his sons, for example, and the influence of this on the work made) and other significant events that have shaped the group. Cast against the political landscape of Thatcher’s Britain and its aftermath during the 1980s and early 1990s, the book itself bears witness to the aggressive privatization, withdrawal of funding and diminished power of the public sector which defined that epoch, moving deftly and poetically between historical, cultural and personal fact and fiction. As both document and history of a specific and geographically located performance scene that prizes open the social, political and popular culture, the desires, behaviours and events that influence one theatre group, it intertwines making life/making theatre as two distinctive but interrelated, generative modes of experience: consciously or unconsciously, we fictionalize ‘what happens’ through each effort to recount lived experience, to narrate or tell. In that telling, or, if you like, in the different versions attempted, we inevitably absorb the histories, ideas and expression of others in order to create and engage a desired and desiring listener/reader. In other words, we repeatedly compose and recompose our ‘selves’.

In addition to providing a compendium of accounts and critical archival material from the company’s first decade of work (including loosely told memories, photos, scripts and programme notes), Certain Fragments established Etchells as a writer of distinctive and considerable brilliance. It demonstrated his ability to read and critically reflect upon the group’s practice while contextualizing it more broadly within late-twentieth-century performance histories without compromising the creative vision the group had evolved collectively. The book is structured in a way that plays with form (and varying degrees of formality), with the distinction between real, fictitious and exaggerated events. It offers an innovative exploration of the way a performance history might be gathered that reflects and corresponds with a company’s performance style as an extension of its aesthetics, its suspicion towards the idea of a singular ‘truth’ or account of events, its interest in popular culture and its various forms, and its concern with testing, breaking down and expanding theatre so it becomes a relevant contemporary cultural form. A willingness to play with and find poetry in the collision of materials that don’t belong together is evidenced throughout Certain Fragments, just as it is practised in their rehearsals and repeatedly dramatized in the group’s numerous theatre productions, documentation and durational works.

For Etchells, writing/text has always functioned as a critical and concrete tool in the development of his practice. In many Forced Entertainment theatre shows spanning their performance history, such as 200% and Bloody Thirsty (1987), Emanuelle Enchanted (1992), Club of No Regrets (1993), Hidden J (1994), Pleasure (1997) and the long video that followed it, Filthy Words & Phrases (1998), First Night (2001) and Real Magic (2016), and in durational works such as Speak Bitterness (1995 [1994]) and Quizoola! (1999 [1996]), text appears in a range of concrete and dynamic ways: as large, handwritten sign, as neon/backdrop, as script that is written and erased and rewritten on chalk boards, on paper, or in the form of a crumpled, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Live Art in the UK: Shaping a Field
• Part One Experiments in Life and in Art
• Part Two Performances of Conflict, Resolution, Hurt and Healing
• Part Three Camp, Comedy and Laughs
• References
• Index
• Imprint