Poetry and Painted Light

There are poems and there are poets. And then there is Billy Collins the American Poet Laureate who has had an influence on my own writing ever since I discovered his ‘animated’ poems on youtube. His poems are rich in imagery and visual texture, evoking mood and metaphor at unexpected turns, delving deep into the imagination without ever leaving the surface simplicity of everyday words. I’ve always found his work a refreshing change from the cloudy abstraction of a lot of contemporary poetry because they are accessible and immediate. The videos one can find on youtube are certainly interesting interpretations of his oeuvre and I’d definitely like to try my hand at ‘visualising’ one of his poems one day.

On of my personal favourite poems by Collins is Sweet Talk in which he compares his lover to the Mona Lisa, Boticelli’s Venus, a painting by Delacroix and finally a work by Edward Hopper. You can see the video edited to a reading by Collins himself here.

I wasn’t familiar with Edward Hopper’s work when I read this poem but in retrospect, I really think I ought to have been. Edward Hopper is one of those artists every scenographer should study in order to understand lighting, colour and architectural composition. He was a master painter of sunlight and is known most famously to have said:

“All I ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house”

A few days I ago I was fortunate enough to visit a comprehensive exhibition of the American painter’s work in Rome at the Fondazione Roma. Curated by Carter Foster of the Whitney Museum, the exhibition brings together sketches, prints, oils and watercolours spanning Hopper’s output as a student, illustrator and painter. The real treat on display is a digital reproduction of one of his artistic “ledgers” that documents his paintings in sketches and notes.

The prologue to the exhibition consists of a scenographic reproduction of his 1942 Nighthawks in which the visitor is invited to walk into a mock diner filled with Hopper’s subjects and photograph oneself in its environs. One is invited to “become part of the painting” and experience oneself inside the three-dimensional world  of Hopper’s two-dimensional representation – something rather like walking into  Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and taking position in the scene.

Nighthawks, 1942

Second Story Sun, 1960

Morning Sun, 1952

The exhibition then follows in a chronological fashion, taking us through his work as student and then as a professional illustrator. His Paris paintings follow,  displayed against a shaded backdrop that imitates the sky, recreating an atmospheric experience of his work.

Some paintings are preceded by Hopper’s sketches and colour studies. Seen together they provide an insight into the painter’s methodical and almost scientific process as one reflects on his colour scheme and lighting plan. Other rooms contain black and white etchings that evidence Hopper’s mastery of contrast and tonal variations, capturing sunlight in black ink and white paper.

Although the exhibition is comprehensive in its content, I found myself wishing that it had been hosted in a more suitable location. In certain spots one had to walk from one room to the next through narrow 4 foot wide corridors and navigate through the exhibition in an unnecessarily enforced order dictated by the Italian guard that simply would not let you pass from one room to the adjacent one without walking through 2 other rooms first. The rooms were small and in some cases when I would have liked to stand a good distance away from the work in order to appreciate it, there was just no space to manoeuvre.

View of one of the galleries

The exhibition claims to be the largest assembling of Edward Hopper’s work in Italy and I do encourage you to catch it either in Rome or in Lausanne where it will be on display next.

You can visit the exhibition’s website here and find out more about Hopper and his Times in an interesting multi-media segment of the site here

(All images are from the exhibition’s website)

Art on the Underground: Linear by Dryden Goodwin

One of the things I love so much about London is the way the city embraces art and makes it a part of everyday life. Taking a trip underground can become quite an adventure sometimes. On occasion I’ve been amused and entertained by the odd surprise Poem On The Underground and on those days I’ve always walked away from the Tube station with a smile on my face.

Living near Southwark station makes my Tube journeys even better. The Jubilee line in particular has sponsored a number of art projects over the years, the latest of which has been done by artist Dryden Goodwin. In February, there came up all along the perimeter wall of Southwark station, a grid-work of portraits of Jubilee line staff. The accompanying poster informed me that the Transport for London website had more information on them. After much procrastinating, I finally made it to the TfL website last week and was happily surprised to find that I was already familiar with the artist’s work.

For this project titled “Linear” the artist Dryden Goodwin made pencil portraits of 60 members of the Jubilee line staff, capturing videos of each portrait in process and recording his conversation with the subject while he was making them. The website created for the project has time-lapse videos of every one of these 60 portraits overlaid with an excerpt from the dialogue.

A video still from one of the films taken from the TfL website. All (C) Dryden Goodwin, 2010

The resulting collection of videos is an intimate, intricate and detailed essay on the diversity of the team, providing us with glimpses into each person’s life. Many of the portraits seemed to have been made while the subject was on duty in their cabin, or on the platform. One minute their monologue and response to Goodwin’s questions is directed towards him, another moment their mind switches back to the call of duty as they answer a walkie-talkie call or take a phone inquiry. One hears these very real people tell the story of how they came to work on the Underground, what they enjoy about they jobs, the numbers and statistics they have to keep an eye on – even what they like to do when they get home after the day at work. Watching the videos gives one an immediate sense of the secret working of an Underground line: a simultaneously complex and seamless process that involves so many individuals and runs on the strength of a single team.

The result of Goodwin’s interaction with each staff member is not just the drawing he presents us with, but the video and audio documentation of the process as well. We never hear each conversation in entirety, nor do we see the person’s face whose picture is being drawn, and in that sense each portrait seems incomplete with just enough room to imagine the person themselves. One constructs each person individually and is drawn into each story in a unique and intimate kind of way. This combination of drawing, video and audio captures personalities and emotional encounters in a way just video or photography might not have and therein I think, lies the sensitivity shown to each subject.

I spent hours on the project website and recommend the stories born from Linear to everyone interested in oral histories, drawing, the Underground in particular and trains in general.

Find out more about the project at the TfL website here

As TfL recommends, you can “unlock the video story behind each portrait” here

The Story

When: Friday, February 19, 2010. All day

Where: Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London

Event Link

“Caring is sharing”, people! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. My truly awesome day at The Story event is courtesy Aditya Pawar who, sitting in the Netherlands, read this blog last week and sent over the link to the event. As luck would have it (and destiny, and karma and all that universal energy), I grabbed the last ticket to the day’s event which was described on the website as such:

“The Story will be a celebration of everything that is wonderful, inspiring and awesome about stories, in whatever medium possible. We’re hoping to have stories that are written, spoken, played, described, enacted, whispered, projected, orchestrated, performed, printed – whatever form stories come in, we hope to have them here

[...] There have never been so many stories, never so many ways to tell them. The Story will be a celebration of just a small sample of them.”

HOW could I not HAVE to go?

***

Given Matt Locke’s descriptions of his hopes and dreams for this event, I knew right away this was not going to be a conference. Or a seminar. Or a roomful of academicians (althought the distinct lack of participants in my age group became a distinct concern about 4 minutes into the morning). The event was about stories. So I expected to hear some stories told, some dissected, some performed and some evaluated. I was eager to hear Tim Etchells talk, and also Sydney Padua. I was curious about some of the speakers and entirely clueless about the rest. At 10am the day was just beginning and amidst some lous cheering, hooting and clapping, I knew it was going to be a fun day if nothing else.

Excerpt from the event newspaper

The day started with sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow reading aloud an excerpt from his The Story So Far…and beyond. His intriguing piece of fiction was followed by Dr Aleks Krotoski taking us through a slide-show of her behind-the-scenes story of BBC 2′s documentary The Virtual Revolution. I know that we were talking about the worldwideweb but at some point I lost the point of the presentation and instead was overcome with envy at the places this lady travelled to make the four-part series. Her story of a story was interesting though. A documentary of a documentary if you will.

Next up was Jon Spooner of Unlimited Theatre. I like the way he described what he does as “telling stories of science” and he definitely inspired the geek in me with his brilliant and witty performance that explained the co-relationship between neutrinos and coincidence. I didn’t even realise when he left “presentation-giving” mode and entered into “performance” mode but he had us all in giggles and chuckles at the end of it.

Jon Spooner on neutrino impact

Up next was the man I’d been waiting to hear: Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment. Now I’ve been seeing a lot of Forced Entertainment’s work in lectures and they’re quite highly regarded in theatre circles for pushing the boundaries of text vis-a-vis performance and staging. Tim Etchells himself is a well known writer and as I’m discovering, has some intriguing ideas about the theatricality and theatre itself. I thought we’d hear something on the subject from him, but since the ground rule for the day was “no theory”, I shouldn’t have been surprised when he read out 3 short stories instead. His toneless voice just read and read and read, matching his story perfectly. If it hadn’t been for his voice, I don’t think I’d have been able to pay attention to his messy narratives of highway diners, Hollywood celebrities and urban decay, but I just floated away into his dystopic fantasies.

Post the black-coffee induced caffeine-kick break, Sydney Padua came on stage to talk about how she puts together her hugely popular online comic called Lovelace and Babbage. She defied the “no-theory” motto for the day, but I’m still a fan of her work. Check out the comic online. You’ll know why I wanted to hear her speak.

Sydney Padua

Just before lunch we had a presentation from Annette Mees and Tasoos Stevens about A Small Town Anywhere. They’re a part of a group called Coney and I’m definitely interested in knowing more about this project. Sounds like a fantastic piece of community created theatre which they call “adventure-making”.

Still buzzing from their presentation, I headed out for a quick wrap and chocolate croissant lunch in Red Lion Square. It was so coooold in the park that I jumped from bench to bench looking for maximum sunlight. Brrrrr! Back to the warmth of Conway Hall!

Lunch Doodle

Chocolate.

Did someone mention “chocolate”? The afternoon session opened with chocolate, m&m packets, creme eggs and apples being thrown into the audience and everyone was scrambling for the goodies. Wicked way to get everyone to sit up straight and be awake, I think. No one dozed off after the sugar-rush that followed.

Did someone say we were at a “conference”?

Alexis Kennedy was up next to talk about Fail Better Games’ Echo Bazaar – a wildly popular Twitter- based browser game set in Fallen London from a hundred years ago. I have never played it, but apparenly many of the audience members have and everyone nodded appreciately as his presentation explained casual narrative structures and interspersed bits of wisdom ( “People like stories where bad things happen to them”) with super serious advice (“Make up cool sounding names for stuff”). Tim Wright followed with a reading of a gag he played on his friend had us in spilts as we followed his devious trail through Harrison Fraud. Excellent, wicked stuff this!

Sam Connif of Livity inspired us all with his story of Jody McIntyre a south London youngster with cerebral palsy who has, despite the challenges, travelled the world, fought for peace and now lives in Palestine writing, blogging, bringing awareness and dreaming of being an MC. Jody is one inspiring dude. Read his blog here Life on Wheels here.

The last two speakers involved performances by Stuart Nolan and David Hepworth. While Stuart talked about the depth of character and how it is influenced by the choices one makes, David’s performance was a good old fashioned, wholesome, juicy bit of storytelling. His coming of age story about legacies, fathers, sons and sartorial pursuits was such a good finish to the day!

I left Conway Hall that evening with a warm fuzzy feeling that only a well told story can give. I don’t know where I’ll be next year and if The Story will indeed become an annual event, but I’m looking forward to more such storytelling, storyhearing, storyperforming adventures in London. This city just get better and better every day!

Speaking Out

I went to watch my first poetry slam 2 years ago at the Kala Ghoda Arts festival and was immediately drawn to it. Now my exposure to the slamming was limited to Caferati’s events in Mumbai, and I often wondered at what it would be like abroad. London has quite an upcoming spoken word scene, so when I got here, of course I decided to check it out. There are a fairly large number of poetry slams and spoken word events that take place across the city in hidden away pubs and cafes, on small stages and studios adjoining theatres, on street corners and in parks at festivals. The form is becoming so popular that in BBC Radio 4 organises a nation-wide slam every year and the competition can get pretty darn intense.

(Wondering what on earth a poetry slam is and who the heck does it? Dizraeli was winner of the BBC competition in 2007 and is known for his distinctive style with his words.  Read about the competition and the history of slams at the BBC site here)

One fine day, I insisted that stillwater accompany me and a friend to a performance poetry evening in SoHo. A couple of days later she sends me a link to a symposium at the Tate Modern called Speaking Out. It’s on a Saturday, they have student concessions, so a couple of clicks later I’m signed up for it.

I thought I was going to a symposium about poetry slams.

About 5 minutes into the symposium, I realise that I’m in for a completely different kind of ride!

***

When: February 06, 2010

Where: Tate Modern

Event Link

Speaking Out: The spoken word in artistic practice was a symposium was organised by Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) run by the London College of Communication (LCC) together with the Tate. The programme for the day involved “talks” by 10 artists each of whom uses the spoken word as an element of their artistic practice.

Except that most artists didn’t talk: they performed. They showed us recordings of performances they had conceived. And then, afterwards (but not always) gave us a litle explanation of how they used or were motivated by spoken words, verbal utterances and human sound. Some of the pieces played about with language. Some were entirely non-verbal. Some juxtaposed language, sound and image in most unexpected ways. All of them pushed the boundaries and notions of what it means to speak out aloud. There was no academic analysis of the performances: just pure art straight from the artist’s themselves. And all their work really did speak for itself!

Some of the artists whose work I particularly admired that day were the following: Tomomi Adachi, Caroline Bergvall, Nye Perry, Trevor Wishart, Imogen Stidworthy, Brandon LaBelle and Inua ‘phaze’ Elams (one of my favourite slammers). Each artist had a uniquely different perspective on the spoken word and each performance was a pleasure to watch. A truly exciting, fresh, mind-opening, horizon-broadening kind of day.

***

I’ve never thought about sound art. In fact, before this day, I hadn’t even considered that something called ‘sound art’ exists. I have always tended to think of art as something visual or tactile, but I’ve never thought of a single spoken word as an artistic work. I play with words myself: on paper and on-screen. I play with typography and calligraphy and poetry, but think I’ve taken the spoken language for granted. Yes, I’ve always thought of oral storytelling and acting as ‘artistic’, but then those are rather conventional uses of language aren’t they? One has to ask oneself why a piece of poetry spoken aloud can’t be art. Can it be performance art? Can it be just art? Are performance and art separable in certain instances? When does utterance become ‘art’?

London is driving me to ask many, many questions. Too many questions. About the nature of something I thought I was already pretty open-minded about: Art.

***

Here are some of my sketches and notes from the day of the symposium:

Opening comments by Cathy Lane

Tomomi Adachi's performances

Lunch: Table for 1

Panel Discussion: 1

Panel Discussion: 2

Panel Discussion: 3

The Black Hole at the Tate Modern

When I received an invite from a A Twin Fish a.k.a. stillwater to join her for a talk at the Tate Modern on February 6, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have the time, and to be honest, I was still grappling with the outcomes of the symposium I’d attended 2 days earlier. She managed to convince me however, that I pretty much HAD to attend because there was to be a story-telling performance involved. So of course, my ears pricked up, my brain started to get excited and I agreed to join her at the Tate’s Experiences of the Dark lecture series, this particular event being titled The Black Hole.

So what is this lecture series about, and why did it get me excited? The Tate Modern (like all great museums should do) has organised a special set of talks, workshops and performance in and around the installation of a new artwork by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is. This installation is part of the Tate’s Unilever series which has included works by Anish Kapoor and Juan Muñoz in the past. These works are usually installed in the museum’s massive Turbine Hall and are free to the public to come, observe and experience.

How It Is by Miroslaw Balkav

When I walked into the Turbine Hall recently however, I looked around for this famous new piece that everyone was talking about. “Where on earth is How It Is??” I asked myself. I couldn’t see anything anywhere. I read plaques that annouced the piece, saw Miroslaw’s name everywhere and yet I couldn’t figure where I was suppoed to be looking. Until I realised that I was supposed to be looking at a rather large metal container sitting at the back of the Turbine Hall, looking very smug, fitting in rather too well with the environment and mimicking the surrounding architecture so spectacularly, that I hadn’t realised it was a “work of art”. I tend to be daft about these things, but as soon as I walked around to the entrance of the installation, it ocurred to me that this experience was going to be anything but ordinary.

The installation – one might even call it sculpture or architecture – is a 13 meter high, 30 meter deep box-space filled with beautiful velvety darkness. At you stand on the threshold of the darkness, wondering just how to venture into it, its sheer size is awe-inspiring. That awe quickly turns to terror and aprehension before soothing you into numbness as you find yourself surrounded by the inkiness, the outside world reduced to just a hum and the insides of this space becoming clearer and clearer as your eyes adjust to the absence of light. It’s a fantastic experience and it conjures up all kinds of imagery: of black holes and dark alleyways; of long corridors and deep trucks; the bogeyman and the bodies of strangers to bump into as you fumble through the container, feeling its walls, breathing in the dark.

“The lecture can’t be all that bad,” I thought to myself as I remembered the installation and got down to booking my tickets online.

Dastangoi

The word “dastan” like “kahani” means tale or story – only a dastan is what you would get if you took a kahani, stretched it, wrapped it around itself, added a few dozen characters, stewed it in magic and soaked in overnight in a steaming cauldron of the beauty that is Urdu and then served it up on a platter decorated by the skilled dastango’s voice. For the magic of the magic of the dastan and it’s telling lies in the physical act of recitation: in the inflections of the performer’s voice, his choice of words, the whisper that creeps into his voice when he describes palace intrigue or the shrill pitch of his giggle when he takes on a princess in a playful tease.

The tradition of Dastangoi is a centuries’ old practice of oral story-telling. As I understand it, the artform was popular under the patronage of Mughal emperors and at least Akbar is known to have practiced it himself. The practice became especially popular in the 19th century when dastans began to be composed in Urdu up until which point they had been composed in Persian. Many of the dastans that survive today come from the Dastan of Hamza and they are still with us not in the least due to their immense epic-scale popularity as printed stories from the 19th century. Of course there are as many different styles of Dastangoi as there are dastangos and each practitioner brings his own special flavour to a performance.

In July this year I was fortunate enough (and free enough) to attend many of Motley theatre company’s performances at their fortnight-long festival at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. The company has made itself a unique niche with its performances that work with the idea of “storytelling on the stage” and among the many of their thought-provoking productions, my favourite was their Dastangoi narration. The performance I witnessed was derived from a volume of the Dastan of Hamza. Written by veteran dastango Mahmood Farooqui, joined by Murtaza Danish Husain and the inimitable Naseeruddin Shah, it is one of many dastangois that are seeing a revival across India and indeed, the world.

A still from the performance at the Motley festival. Image from the blog http://dastangoi.blogspot.com/

The artform saw a rapid decline in the 20th century as did the language of the dastans themselves. The performances that we see today however, are thanks largely to the efforts of dedicated dastangos like Mahmood Farooqui and his team. If you’re interested in knowing more and in being a part of a dastangoi yourself, I highly recommend their blog which you will find here.

Of course there are other performers discovering the magic of this form as well. In June I was at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai for a Ekjute company’s production called ‘Hum Kahen Aap Sune’. Directed by Nadiraji Babbar the performance was supposed to be a re-contextualised adaptation the dastangoi tradition. Since it is a relatively new production, you may still get a chance to see it in Mumbai or when Ekjute goes on tour. Catch either of these performances around Mumbai or Delhi later this year or early in the next.
References:

http://dastangoi.blogspot.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamza_ibn_%E2%80%98Abd_al-Muttalib

and publicity material handed out during each of the above mentioned performances