There’s more to the Spill National Platform than the sum of its individual performances; the 48 pieces selected for this year’s programme provide a unique glimpse into the next generation of performance and live art makers.
The stakes here are comparatively high: a jury made up of representatives from a range of institutions comes with an inevitable stamp of quality approval. More importantly the thoroughness Spill employed in attracting applications all but guarantees that what has ended up in Ipswich is in fact a good sample of artists that might just be on their way to becoming household names. With that in mind and with a relocation out of London allowing more artists than ever to take part, it’s perhaps more relevant to look at what the pieces in the selection have in common, rather than simply judge them on individual merits, and pick out the winners.
The overall impression is that the emerging forces are no amateurs; on the contrary, these artists are very much in the know when it comes to the ins and outs of their trade. There is an overwhelming understanding of the language they use, the structure, and dramaturgy, with clear choices being made about the style and the traditions artists adhere to.
Even a selection of pieces from the fourth day of the festival delivers two companies strongly informed by the likes of Forced Entertainment. Touch and Meet and Figs in Wigs are both concerned with the mechanics of a theatre piece, though their performances explore this concern in different ways. The former are insistent on removing all traces of suspense of disbelief in their scratch piece A Volcano Perpetually erases its own history. With the changeovers and transitions visible and done without a gaugeable difference in ‘performance mode’, the show goes to great lengths to avoid any sort of ‘magic’ taking place. A story about a pilot stuck in Reykjavik during the ash cloud conundrum, who, having been deprived of what defines him – flying – suddenly finds himself restless and depressed, A Volcano.., attempts to make a connection between these natural occurrences and 21st century identity crises, staying clear of didacticism mostly with a helping hand of intentionally failed humour. Figs in Wigs on the other hand take their interest in the formal aspects of theatre to another level: Leftovers is a compilation of fragments scrapped from their other shows. Taken from the freezer (where they were put for preservation), they are just about glued together into a new piece – one that revolves around a pea-eating contest, and references Mat Hand – a man who built a career out of attempting to break silly world records in the legitimacy of galleries and performance spaces. Repetitive, cyclical and endurance testing, Leftovers balances between self-satisfaction at managing to recycle the extra material and what seems like a start of a potentially bold statement: ‘If pea eating is art, why can’t this be?’
It’s evident that the preoccupation with self-exploration through performance is perhaps the most appealing of subjects for emerging artists, with the legitimacy of using raw autobiographical material left uncontested. Ira Brand’s A Cure for Ageing frames personal letters and recordings that document a slow falling into the darkness of dementia, with fascination induced by the only living organism capable of self-rejuvenation, and at least in theory, eternal life. Effort is put into emphasizing the personal and intimate nature of the piece – letters are taken from the pocket and carefully unfolded, and the stage is all but bare, with almost no theatrical make up involved. The difficulty however is that the piece is full of inevitable baits for the audience that guarantee emotional involvement of extreme but questionable nature: at one point Brand calculates the year one of the audience members will die, and confronts him with all the events he will miss out on. What’s occasionally lacking to avoid the reaction of generic ‘aw-s’ is a more strict avoidance of those universal fears – that everyone might have but that are, in a performative context, an easy ride.
On the other side of the identity performance spectrum is Madeleine Botet De Lacaze’s piece The Shell, which digs into body-image territory. This short, intimate, and evocative performance includes a video of the artist cleaning herself, projected onto her present and naked body. It quickly succeeds in justifying its name and posing some general questions about the concept of the body – but argument clarity is very likely not on the top of priorities for a piece that uses clever and enticing visuals to inspire diverse reactions and thoughts amongst the audience. Aleks Wojtulewics explores the notions of masculinity and femininity through his durational piece Man vs Woman in which he assembles a utility room and washes his clothes. His own masculine appearance, ruggedly dragged up, is effectively used as a tool to contest dominant gender images; this, combined with his concentration on a real, complex task at hand, means Man vs Woman manages to avoid the trap of many durational pieces by creating actual, palpable tension.
What this glimpse into the National Platform selection reveals is that the emerging forces are clearly well informed and equipped at realising their ideas. The work showcased is crisp: the artists might be newcomers, but they are frighteningly clear about which tradition they belong to, with performance and live art divided, and rare inter-collaborative pieces. What’s also clear is that all the effort put in by institutions to legitimise these art forms and give them a vocabulary have been successful, although it has perhaps also resulted in derivative work. The influence of Forced Entertainment over the last decades for example, is already as canonical as the company itself, but it can still be overwhelming to see it to such an extent.
There is of course nothing wrong in influences being obvious – if anything it’s to be expected and cherished in emerging work. The problems begin when these influences turn out to be only formal; deprived of motivation and intention they result in work which is pure form. Touch and Meet and Figs in Wigs both successfully showcase a learned vocabulary but the ideas inherent in their pieces remain underdeveloped. A Volcano… begins and ends at an analogy between personal eruptions and those that stop planes from flying, while Leftovers allows for too much idealisation and appropriation for the piece to have a critical edge. Meanwhile, it seems like proclaiming a performance deals with identity is now a good excuse for artists not to scrutinise their own work – at the very least it’s bad manners to say someone’s experiences or body image issues are not potent enough to simply be laid out, or to imply that a performance needs to transcend the personal, if it’s not to become surrogate therapy. The Shell, Man vs Woman and A Cure for Ageing are, to various degrees, only initial steps, first drafts of what should be complex thinking that goes into and emerges from a piece of work. Finally, and somewhat defeatingly considering the history of performance art, all these pieces suffer from an almost complete lack of politics. This is not limited to the kind of politics that would invite the masses to overthrow the government, but expands to all realms of social engagement – anything that would suggest a consciousness of the world we live in was present beyond the buzzwords.
It’s perhaps not surprising to find the piece least concerned with technical and stylistic achievements, Lucy Hutson’s If You Want Bigger Yorkshire Puddings You Need a Bigger Tin is the most socially concerned one. Hutson interviewed three generations of her female family members, asking them various questions aimed at painting a picture of female identity, and then edited the material into a video that could benefit greatly from a better sound and even a more developed visual language. What she discovered, and what is plain to see even through all the imperfections of her work, is a study of how different classes, different generations and women in different parts of the country can be strangely unified around some basic issues – even if one proclaims the most important thing in her life is her politics while another is working away on her fake tan. Rather than simply being about gender If you want… also challenges the notion that England is fundamentally divided across the social factors that supposedly divide the women in the video. The imperfection of the piece allows it to have a sense of urgency – but moreover it can be rectified. The lack of concern for things other the form and the self, is more difficult to address.
What the platform uncovered is a trend not usually associated with ‘young’ art: polished, finely tuned work that is entertaining (in the best sense of the word), but not as challenging or inquisitive, with a known selection of key words replacing real involvement of the art form with the society. It is of course important and fair to admit that the random selection discussed here might not be the most precise of samples – but the impression is that the similarities that emerge from it are so stark and evident, it would be a pleasant shock if these findings turned out to be a statistical error.