Sometimes,
life just throws you a gift. Sometimes that gift is a friend buying
you cake and sometimes it's A PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL BUYING YOU A
RETURN TICKET TO MARSEILLES FOR THE WEEKEND. No strings, no
expectations. I looked really hard for the catch, double-checking the
invitation email for the small print that said “oh and you have to
write about us or we'll have the flight and hotel costs back”, but
never found it. I don't have to be doing this. But I want to, because
the Travellings festival does a lot of things I want all performance
festivals to do, with heart, consideration and a genuine approach to
experiment that takes failure in its stride.
This
was my second year at Travellings and the two festivals were
surprisingly unalike. Not in the basics: Travellings is curated by
Lieux Publics, a long-standing French organisation that supports
multi-disciplinary outdoor performance, and takes place within the
same former industrial complex where Lieux Publics has its offices,
which happens to squat across the road from a sprawling housing
estate. And it coincides with an annual meeting of the In-Situ
network, an EU-funded collaboration between 20+ arts festivals, each
of whose artistic directors attends, bringing with them an artist or
collective, someone whose work they want to share with the rest of
the group. So Travellings has to perform multiple functions, creating
space for the In-Situ network to conduct some business, but also
creating an informal atmosphere of sharing and discussing
performance, and doing this not in a closed way but opening out to a
general public, not just the culture aficionados unfazed by the
rickety journey from the centre of Marseilles, but also the people
who live on the estate opposite, for whom performance – even
outdoor performance – might be an elitist and inaccessible thing.
Where
the two Travellings differed was in structure and atmosphere. Last
year (which I wrote about here) there were panel discussions in the
mornings, and the meetings between artists and artistic directors
took place over lunch tables with a scrupulously organised seating
rota, and the public programme of work was by artists unconnected to
the In-Situ meeting, mostly “finished”, and stretched across two
days. This year, the panel discussions were dumped and the lunches
free-form, while the performance programme was condensed into a
single four-hour period and entirely featured the artists engaged in
the In-Situ meeting, presenting work in synopsis or various states of
unreadiness, followed by a party shaped by local group Rara Woulib.
Neither structure is perfect: what this year gained in informality,
it lost in comprehensiveness; I had frustrations last year, I had
different frustrations this year. But Lieux Publics' willingness to
rethink and remodel is highly appealing.
My main problem this
year was time. There were 17 works on offer, some durational, some
with set start times, and lasting between 15 and 60 minutes. At the
beginning of the day I was arrogantly declaring that I'd see all of
them, but within a couple of hours queues were defeating me,
overheated rooms repelling me, and motivation flagged. In the end I
saw just over half the work, a result that made the competitive idiot
in me balk.
Of what I did see, I'm
going to focus on the most positive. Luke Jerram's Museum of the Moon
is 100% brilliant. BRILLIANT. He has all sorts of different settings
planned for it, and the one at Travellings was probably the simplest:
the moon was suspended from the ceiling of a massive shed, deckchairs
were arranged along one edge of the room, and in the background a
soundtrack played, a tidal collage of static and recordings of the
Apollo landings and classical music and more. The moon itself is just
a gigantic beach ball, but over its surface is pasted, as declared on
the project website, a “120dpi detailed NASA imagery of the lunar
surface”. And it's illuminated all the way around: what you see on
first entering the room is the far side of the moon, the bit usually
hidden from earth. That's a thing of wonder in itself.
Looking at the near
side, our side, I scanned the pock-marked surface for the faces so
easy to project from earth, but its shadows denied anthropomorphism.
Proximity afforded new ways of looking, of dreaming and reaching. I
circled it, tracing patterns in its craters; lay directly below it
and through the air molecules felt its weight. And then a lonely
piano played and I wished there were someone I could dance with, or
that the room might flood with old people, gliding the floor in a
foxtrot while singing silvery tunes.
Jerram, it turns out,
is the man who first started putting pianos in public places: in his
version – commissioned as part of the Fierce Festival in Birmingham
in 2008 – they're decorated by local community groups and bear the
inscription Play Me, I'm Yours. He's based in Bristol (which means he
also saw the Fake Moon that was suspended over College Green in 2013
as part of In Between Time; I loved that too, but it was piffle
compared with this one), and initially trained in sculpture and
performance art, but soon decided that he didn't want to make
small-scale work that played to the curator and a handful of industry
people. So this is what he makes now: not just big sculptures or big
spectacles but big possibilities for gathering people into a fold.
Works for me: Museum of the Moon is coming to the Norwich &
Norfolk Festival in May 2017 and already I want to be there.
From seeing the moon to
the feeling of walking on it: designed in collaboration with an
architect, Intraverse takes an individual audience member up several
flights of stairs before inviting them to buckle on a harness and
abseil down again. That's already a massive spoiler so I'll avoid any
others, but for me this was a profoundly philosophical work, one that
invited participants to contemplate the leaps in life that seem too
scary to undertake, and with that the possibility that the place they
take you to could be as calm and safe and banal as the habitual
already known. Which somehow went beyond how the makers – Vektor
Normal and Balint Toth from Hungary – presented it, despite the
multiple ways built in to subvert and play with perception.
The rest of it was less
developed; another game invited us to reflect on anger, friendship
and happiness, while the third united both groups and sent us on a
treasure hunt, which ended with us attempting to fly a banner reading
“you are not alone” that proved to be too heavy for the balloons
tied to it so had to be truncated to “you are not”. That's work
in progress for you: risky.
Saffy Setohy and Bill
Thompson's light and sound installation Light Field suffered from
this fragility: most people I spoke to dismissed it as unformed, but
they'd also spent only a minute or two in the room, when really it
needed 10 or 15 minutes to get something out of it. It's still in
flux, and I had a lovely chat with Saffy – a choreographer usually
– about the various ways in which she's staged it so far and what
might be the optimum setting for it, but in this iteration I loved
the quiet rhythms of the movement, the ways in which humans gathered
unselfconsciously in flocks, scattered and clustered again. The room
is dark, but on the ground are a few wind-up torches; the invitation
is to carry them around the space, whirring the handle to stir the
atmosphere. I did this for a bit but then sat in the corner and
watched as the lights brightened and dimmed, drifted and gathered.
The simplicity of this unintentional, spontaneous choreography really
appealed to me; and to another of the writers, Joris van den Boom,
who stood against the wall and successfully startled another
participant when they shone a torch into his face.
Even
with all that goodness, my afternoon ended on a note of
disgruntlement: I saw a couple of not great things, and missed the
work everyone else said was super interesting, an
installation/lecture by Collectief Walden, a company from the
Netherlands comprising an actor, a philosopher, a dramaturg, and a
biologist/musician, which is my new favourite model for what a
performance ensemble might be. So I joined the “evening with”
Rara Woulib in a discordant frame of mind. Based in Marseilles, Rara
Woulib are an amorphous group of musician-performers who take their
name from Haitian music and carnival traditions, essentially shaping
the same in urban settings. I missed them in London in 2014 when they
brought Deblozay to Greenwich;
there's a glorious review of it by Matt Trueman, savouring its “power
and excitement and possibility”. So grumpiness was also woven with
expectation that at first wasn't met.
The
“evening with” at Travellings was slow to start, slow to
coalesce; slow to draw the network and festival public across the
street to the Aygalades housing estate, slow to convey a sense of
purpose in doing so. As its inhabitants looked down from balconies
and windows, I felt an uncomfortable prickle, that we were invading
their territory, unasked and unwanted, swarming their landscape with
our puffed-up ideas about art. It's a discomfort Rara Woulib
acknowledge, I think, and in other ways heighten: our journey took us
into an unlit subway, crammed with people and noise, alarming to
anyone who experiences even a mild claustrophobia or fear of the
dark; walking through it was a kind of scouring, ready for anything
that might come next.
What
came next was anodyne: a gathering in a higgle of grass festooned
with lights and dotted with ramshackle bars serving fruit cocktails.
Here the real fun tried to begin, but its rhythm kept faltering;
singers surged through the crowd, stamping and swirling and chanting,
but then their voices fell silent and a vague sense of boredom
returned. It wasn't until we were lured to another clearing, where a
long wooden table was set up, laden
with fruit and vast trays of sushi, which were carried out to the
crowd, while a black woman dressed in a raggedy gown stamped along
the table's length, incanting a story I couldn't understand literally
but thrilled to emotionally, that something began to click into
place. A sense of ritual. Of a different necessity. Of communing
beyond self, beyond rationality, beyond purpose.
From
here the performers – the women dressed now in white lacy frocks, a
chirm of mismatch brides – led us along
another path, flicker-lined by candles, snaking further into the
Aygalades. As
the growing crowd drifted in the wake of their distant music, I
realised I'd been to another performance exactly like this in 2014:
the Good Friday procession through my mum's village in Cyprus. It
starts at the church, once night has fallen; led by priests and the
epidaphion, a funeral coach decorated in flowers, bibles and pictures
of Jesus, the entire village amasses to re-enact the journey to
Christ's burial place. At least, that's the impetus; how it actually
plays out is that a bulging line of families and friends gossip and
chatter as they meander through their streets, occasionally being
offered a splash of holy water and catching the call to chant Amen.
The Rara Woulib procession followed these particulars until it
reached another clearing, much bigger this time, edges glowing with
more flaming torches, half the space set with benches and trestle
tables, bowl-plates and cutlery and cauldrons of soup. In two of the
corners industrial barbecues crackled, and at the centre, a band
began to play. The ritual had reached its zenith in what was
effectively an old-fashioned village wedding – and everyone was
invited.
That
everyone was now a huge number of people: all the festival-goers from
earlier in the day, but also teenagers and families and elders of
Aygalades, drawn in by the hubbub and now sitting down to eat
together. It was gorgeous: a genuine moment of expansive community.
And although as the evening progressed the architecture of the whole,
the dramaturgy or arc of movement and energy, became more focused and
impressive, essentially Rara Woulib's tools were the most basic: meat
and bread and vegetable soup; rambunctious music; limitless
generosity. The singers included not only members of the group but
women from local choirs; the band featured men in costume alongside
men in everyday wear, drawn from local bands. The sense of symbiosis
was exquisite; so was the kindness of the gesture, the openness of
the invitation.
It
felt like a wedding; it felt like a village gathering; it also felt
like a slap in the face of certain modes of thinking about culture.
Earlier in the day, a Greek journalist also invited to Travellings
had asked the staff of Lieux Publics: why here? Why not by the docks,
somewhere central, where the people of Marseilles can more easily
take part? It infuriated me, because this is exactly the value of
holding the festival in and alongside Aygalades: the reminder that
its inhabitants, too, are the people of Marseilles, easily forgotten
or misrepresented or belittled, subject to prejudice and assumption.
(To be fair, the Greek journalist appreciated all this later, too.)
The evening reminded me of the writing, endlessly inspiring, of
Francois Matarasso, a specialist in participatory and community arts,
whose free-access books on amateur theatre and rural touring, among others, are
luminous with curiosity and compassion. Working from the basic
assertion that “everyone has the right to create art and to share
the result, as well as enjoy and participate in the creations of
others”, he draws a distinction between culture as “how we do
what we have to do” – the example he gives is how we choose what
to eat, how to prepare it and how to share it – and art as “how
we do all the things we don’t have to do. How we sing, dance, play,
tell stories, make things up, share dreams, frighten ourselves,
arrange objects, make pictures, imagine and all the rest.” This
felt so pertinent to this evening with Rara Woulib, where the tools
of culture were used to make art – an art in which everyone could
participate equally, whether by eating, dancing, or just sitting
beneath the stars.
For
most of our time in that great green square, Rara Woulib gave the
evening to their audience. And then, in the final section, they took
it back. The band stopped playing in concert formation and shifted to
a new position, at the heart of the informal dance space. They began
to sing a final song, a murmur at first, building in volume and
urgency, until it seemed to play not from the strings of instruments
but the sinews of the bodies held in thrall. A song so Dionysian that
satyrs might have clattered among us, stamping out its beat. It grew
and grew, surged and crested, and then subsided; softly they began to
walk, still singing, shaping a path with their bodies, the audience
walking between as their voices scattered like confetti a song of
farewell. And so many people refused to leave, clinging to the spell,
that eventually they just had to say out loud, goodbye, and still an
old and toothless man turned his face to the strangers around him and
danced. Power and excitement and possibility. Pleasure and joy and
love.
In
the midst of the party, I emailed my friend Leo, who also makes work
from the tools of food, ritual and generosity, wanting to make him a
part of it too. In the midst of the party, I laughed with an American
called Jay, who told me he'd never wanted to get married, but now
understood why people did. In the midst of the party, I drifted and
danced alone and unlonely; I watched a child reach his fingers
towards the flame of a torch, guarded by his mum, and cursed the
British health and safety laws that would never let that pass; I
jostled for ice-cream and was bitten three times by mosquitoes. In
the midst of the party I knew I was at the heart of something
perfect: a necessary antidote to the violence and inhumanity of
socio-political machinations beyond this square of grass. And I was
happy.
All images by and copyright Gregoire Edouard, and used with permission. (For a change.)
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