NON Unravelling the Onion

Maurice Blok. collage by Stephanie Spindler

The environment of the festival allows the audience to see many performances in one place over the duration of the exhibition.  There were a broad range of approaches and many overlapping formats; for example dance, theatre, actions, sound, music, audience participations/ collaborations, painting, film, video, photography, and I’m sure I missed a few, but I will try to add those in as I unravel the layers of performances through the blog.

As established in a previous blog, the artists were invited to come to Bergen a week before the actual festival and create new work to be performed in the Never or Now Performance Festival.   The kinds of performance were varied from sound installation, installation still life, narrative, endurance, participatory and others that involved overlapping of traditional performance elements with things that I can only describe as Action performance.

Action Performance involved nonsensical actions, and what I mean by that is that the performances were not telling a narrative story or something linear in nature, other than things happened on a time line, sometimes simultaneously. There were several performances that stand out in my mind that shared similar characteristics but had different elements pushing them in different directions. Maurice Blok, Irma Optimist, Hege Eriksen and Shannon Cochrane.

Maurice Blok. Image by Bernhard and Ulebo.

Each of these performances involved elements of the artist doing tasks but as an audience we were participating in different ways. Blok’s performance was charismatic of action adventure; we were there with him not knowing the out come of the scenarios that were happening. It felt evident that neither him nor us knew exactly how the tasks were going to end. There was suspense, tension and curiosity as Blok set up tasks; they had no clear function but, that didn’t matter, I found myself anticipating a sort of dare devil feat being prepared in the beginning and expected each action to relate to an end finally. The actions included, creating a circle by spinning on a chair spilling milk out of his mouth to create a circular perimeter, suspending flowers with a pulley, setting a fire to the string, sticking his head in piles of dirt and then breaking bottles of beer behind his head, walking a plank and jumping onto a very tiny balancing platform. It was absurd, but in the context of the performance it transported our expectations somewhere else.

Art is about stretching the ordinary into the extraordinary, whether that is within a period of time or if it stretches further to stay with us in our minds for further probing. It left me with a sensation that I carry around with me, because of the anti climatic nature of the performance the anticipation stayed with me, strangely unsettling, curious and wanting to keep a little magic with me that Blok conjured with his performance.

Irma Optimist. Collage by Stephanie Spindler.

Irma Optimist’s performance was a series of actions that were pre meditated. It was dark like a surrealist film, the stage was reminiscent of a washing line, and there was a clear order of actions, but familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was physically dark but it was also dark like a disturbing, voyeuristic happening. I could easily conjure up stories about what was happening because of the simultaneous familiar and unfamiliar. From beginning to end there was a feminine specific role, it was sexual, there were elements of endurance, painting, and the use of materials was highly specific and symbolic. It was captivating and one of the most intense and sinister of all the performances of the festival.

Hege Eriksen. Photo by Bernhard and Ulebo.

Hege Eriksen was the first performance of the festival on the Friday evening, this picture says a lot. She was the stage, and she was poking fun at performance, what it can be, what it’s not, what it wasn’t.  Her highly charged prop of the wedding dress and her enormous pregnant state were quite beautiful and funny in the context of her ‘failed trick’. The content of the work was very simple and embodied the body, her body, her personal content and context. What was most endearing and lovely was the simplicity and I’m not sure if I was nine months pregnant if I would be so generous with my state of being. It was extremely special and intimate.

Shannon Cochrane. Image by Bernhard and Ulebo.

Shannon Cochrane’s performance was more narrative but also engaged with the audience in a personable way. We were part of a dinner party, but the part that was important was the warm heart, smelling the roses and being a part of it, rather than being just the audience. A social engagement that was upside down, backwards and formality was treated with deliberate neglect and destructive abandon. I want to name this performance something like ‘ass backward stand up dinner party’ where I believe the elements being stressed were the moment, the company and the engagement. Acts of passive aggression in its appropriate theatre has never been so inclusive.

Four different performances, and four different emotive qualities even though I have put them in a category of action, it’s only my way of sifting through over thirty performances that all live within live art, performance.