DELIGHT

Delight
For ”Between sky and sea” Herdla 08
Gillian Carson

I`m struck by the delicacy of performance art, the bonne bouche of authentic delivery and humility. I measure performance in terms of delight, delight in watching how another body meets familiar objects, situations or circumstances and in how the activity confirms or challenges my own perspective. All art should do what Horace thought poetry should, delight and instruct, and with the didactic nature of physical activity, perhaps performance art has the power to delight and instruct more than other genre.

Fourteen artists from eleven countries, performing in one day for two bus- loads of observers, who need to eat lunch and attend toilet queues, is an action-packed event. Herdla was a fort under German occupation during the 2nd world war and on route to the first performance of ”Between sky and sea” 08, I thought about action. In the modern sense we think melodrama; fast cars, guns, helicopters and people hanging out of 52nd floor windows waving guns to suitable music. However Aristotle thought action one story, something complete, and looked upon participants` value-laden human action as lesser than the action itself. Participants were elements driving the action, important, but only as parts of the whole. As attitudes changed action underwent examination until eventually the whole took on lesser significance than the parts, as with Happenings.

The artists of ”Between sky and sea” 08 participate in other international performance festivals and events, together with artists from all over the world. I wonder though, if even such a keen sense of being part of something larger will ever triumph over the human tendency to meet parts as wholes. Especially at Herdla where the focus was on artists exploring the complex area of affinity with both nature and urban.

Monica worked the space between the trees. At moments she held her moves in a classical tableaux. Have a body... be a body. Watch a body. A mild hypnosis held me but an intimacy implicated me. I watched a clothed body enjoy a natural environment and yet, I felt opportunist, privy to something. On hindsight I realised it was the dress. I`m an urban person who explores people in their cities. Aside from a need of the sea, which is totally satisfied by a horizon and waves lapping a wall by the side of a road, I have no bond to nature at all. Sometimes, while watching performance, I forget I`m looking at art. In these moments the performer becomes someone I`ve come across in the course of things and, in my urban condition, I saw a woman in a synthetic dress enjoying some kind of personal euphoria. If Monica had been naked or dressed in some kind of a robe, I`d have watched her as a classical tableaux and forgotten myself instead of art.

Deep down in the centre it can be hard to keep the whole in mind. My actions are large for me but it`s hard to see beyond the immediate. The concept of individual activity as an integral part of a whole is my modern identity as a global citizen and participator, yet I`m only either here or there and there`s always something temporarily out of use.

Roi carried a pristine white load to another place. He switched on sound and tied knots in a wire line stretched between two high wooden branches he`d cellotaped to unstable, rusty drums. His hands found large stones. High up on a branch he`d looped a mobile telefon and on cardboard he wrote, call bird 00358443301115. He put on rubber gloves and dyed his white load red, then hung it on his line to dry. When he removed his blindfold the sun hurt his eyes. While Esther unravelled a long string of white feathers to weave them through decades of barbed wire, Roddy`s finger clicked the on/off button on a lamp shining out to sea, signalling his location to no one in particular, perhaps no one at all. Agnes and Raquel, larger-than-life dishevelled sirens, fiddled with seaweed in their hair and clothing and shouted, to each other, to the public. Raquel raised her middle finger to the sky where my gaze was arrested by a sticky-plaster. I wondered if I ought to call bird.

Our actions are believed to spill over and beyond, to affect others spatially and temporally. I imagine an awareness of this must come and go with proximity.

Everything stopped with Monica and Boris who occupied a clearing. At first glance they looked still and peaceful. Monica`s arms hung by her sides and Boris was lying on the ground. But a rising tension in Monica`s gaze to the left was reflected in the space between Boris`head and the tree it was tied to on the right. They were two stabs in a canvas. I relived the desperate click, click, click of Roddy`s lamp, the tightening of Roi`s knots and the stiffness of Raquel`s middle finger, the tempo had increased but there was dead silence.

It seems like an exercise in stepping back and forth or up and down. I do it here then watch it there and if I stand back far enough, I might see it all at once. The priority seems to be presence, to immediately feel, regardless of reason and for the sake of the action. Later is the best time for reason.

On the way to flat land Boris rolled on the ground clutching a large, smooth stone to his chest. Every revolution must have laboured his breathing but his hands held tight to the stone which was as smooth as his head. I passed Boris for the whiteness of Pedro`s rocket and all its babies but got distracted by Robert`s house all alone in the field. I approached but it got up and pursued two observers and anyway I noticed an extravagant arrangement on the beach. Bits of wood, ropes, tools and portable spades lay around dead bits of trees pushed upright into the sand, there was an old sack and a saw, 2 boards, a bucket and what might have been an old inner tube, all waiting for their live aiPuto components. Far away stood Roddy, still, with his arms stretched wide.

It`s believed to have a rhythm.

Stepping over a baby rocket, I set off after Robert and found Kurt motionless on the beach under a shiny white table, next to a shiny white chair. The table top was a drawing he`d made with small pebbles, a few strands of hair and the sun. Robert stopped to interact with a sceptical dog. With arms pushed through holes in his house he seemed to appeal to the dog`s reason, but the dog was not convinced so he approached a boy carrying a blanket. The boy accompanied Robert to where a smaller version of his house lay by the sea. Together they took it to another place and built a wall to protect it from the waves.

And that the rhythm itself is powerful.

On the grass in the distance a blue bed with white sheets staged a slow ballet with two dead fish. Melati Suryodarmo rolled over boundaries, perhaps between between life and death, perhaps between passion and reason. Now and then her spell was broken by a synchronised dive from two facing rocks by Skylla & Charybdis. In the distance I saw that Roddy still hadn`t moved but I found a huge web in a cluster of trees occupied by Raquel Nicoletti, a bright orange work suit and a wellington boot. Agnes Nedregaard bared her teeth from where she crouched in an adjacent tree. I called bird but he was out. Robert`s house stood still on the field, it looked like there was nobody in but then an arm extended to greet a girl. Roddy moved. He took a white paper plane from his shoulder bag and caressed it long and slow. For some minutes his fingers stroked and stroked again on a wing and then a slow stiffening of his body launched the plane away. Where it fell I saw there were some thirty or forty paper planes. At that moment I saw Robert house with one of Roddy`s planes which was launched as it ran roof down at a wall. The house ripped at impact but he retreated to run and crash again and again, then he walked to the sea, placed his miniature house on a rock and kissed it.

Yet, like the whole and everything else, the rhythm fades in the face of  delight.

And then Kurt walked into the sea. The scene worked as a suspence, it seemed everything stopped to watch him enter and keep going till his head was a far out dot on the surface. So far out that now and then I lost sight of it in the waves.

Later I passed a roll of duck-tape on the path and then Robert`s house interacting with cows.