Yearly Archives: 2008

Matthew and I perform in the Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City.

Performing Match somewhere like BAMOIC is a complex series of compromises. I’m clear that I don’t need a stage to show the work but I do need space for the long lines of the piece’s energy to be visible. So I can’t perform in the small courtyard with its mix of cobbled stones, stone seats and trees. Part of me feels bad for not being adaptable enough but I suppose it’s clear to me that this work has to be about the negotiation between what I’ve prepared and what I find. The work can’t be completely determined by the environment. There needs to be an integrity in the work that offers the possibility of redefining the environment in which it unfolds. The work claims the space it needs, where it needs it: though it can only claim what it needs from what is available.

Matthew and I are in Beijing performing Match as part of the Irish Arts Festival here. (Thanks to Culture Ireland and Dublin City Council who paid for us). Our performance was as the hors d’oeuvre to the official opening of an exhibition of Irish visual art. It was held at the Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City (http://bamoic.info/) in the centre of Beijing. However, eventhough, my work made it from the art periphery of 798 where I performed last year to this political centre (with a very considerate Minister Dick Roche and Ambassador Kelleher in attendance), yet again, it was about fitting the work to the constraints of the environment. This was the first time we performed indoors, so we had a narrow corridor with a tiled floor to contend with. No football boots then.

But the performance went well and it was a good opportunity to show the work, even if I started my performance with a nervous energy heightened from trying to preface the piece with a few well-rehearsed remarks in Irish, English and Chinese. (Eurovision was a formative cultural experience).

One of the elements of the visual arts exhibition was a series of photos by Varvara Shavrova (http://www.varvarashavrova.com/) that links the disappearing hutongs of Beijing to abandoned cottages near Ballycastle in Co.Mayo. I was pleased to find myself near this work that made visible links I sense in my own imagination.

Before we performed we warmed up in one of the gallery spaces that the catering staff was using for its preparations – all the hors d’oeuvres together.

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Maybe this virtual architecture isn’t so suitable anymore? It’s ironic since this very video was used by a group discussing censorship on a Clore Short Course last Thursday. Now it’s lost in the digital ether.

In reply to my 16th January post – maybe we could own here – temporarily at least

When I saw Mitch’s photographs I was drawn to how he placed the human figures in the urban environments he’d chosen. The figures aren’t the dominating subjects of the images but he still makes a place for them in a frame that includes much bigger urban fabric. It reminds me of the traditional Chinese paintings of beautiful mountains with tiny figures human crossing rivers at the bottom of deep ravines. The video of Xiao Ke and me in an earlier post gave me a similar feeling.

Stéphane, Matthew, Mitch and I went to shoot photographs in some of the locations around Sherrif st that had already resonated for me because of their combination of ambitious construction and wasteland nostalgia. Builders cheered from the scaffolding as Matthew lifted me. Others shifted to one side as we tussled down the footpath. We made small transgressions – into the middle of the road, through a gate that kids had cut open to allow access to a green arena, a playground of dereliction – all under the shadow of the cranes.

Photographs by Jonathan Mitchell

This isn’t my work. It’s a photo of one of the many beautiful moments in Track, an audiotour by Brokentalkers that takes people through the centre of Dublin and invites them to see the city accompanied by the narration of various Chinese people living there. It’s delightful and moving and seemed like a different but related take on how we can occupy the urban landscape and make of it something that allows us to grow.

This space reminded of the the ragtrees near holy wells, like Gobnait’s well in Baile Bhúirne or Glendalough. The trees carry tokens of the dead or the vulnerable and a hope for their salvation….

What I see are the passing people, the separate place where Stéphane dances, the bare trees that are being cut down, the new apartment buildings, the hoardings around new construction.

What I hear is the sound of timber boards and jack-hammers and one strong bird whose whistle momentarily defeats the mechanical music.

What I know is that the blob under the tree is a concentration of Bernadette energy and that Stéphane is fighting the inhospitable cold and yet the fight, vulnerable and strong, moves me.

On our reconnaissance walk, we came across 163 Sheriff Street. It seems to be a cottage left behind when all its former neighbours have yielded to new development. 163 Sheriff Street is surrounded by the kind of tall gates that protect building sites and no one can wander in to knock on the door. But whoever lives there has maintained a vegetable patch in the shadow of the overlooking apartment complex. It would be easy to imagine a narrative of resistance in this single remaining cottage, but that says more about me than it bears a relation to fact.

They came with me, leaving the familiarity of the studio where so many interesting ideas, touches and relationships were already extending. We went into the gloom of a cold January afternoon and I asked them – Bernadette, Matthew and Stéphane – to see and feel for me. I brought them on a walk down Sheriff St, past the new developments of Spencer Dock, the new DART station and on to the edges of the new tide of development. Bernadette asked me later what it was about particular places that made me identify them as places where I’d like us to put our physical material, our embodied relations. Her question made me realise that it’s not so much buildings as atmosphere that draws me; but that the process of construction, particularly on the scale we see in Dublin, creates an atmosphere.

When I look from the bridge at Spencer Dock and its development, I see the meeting of the gleaming aspiration and the unreconstructed dereliction. I see the energy of the new and the powerful vestiges of the old. I see cranes, mountains, rubbish, plate glass and many, many high visibility jackets. I see in the juxtaposition of these elements a location where our physical inhabitation can be like a lightning rod for the energy of the juxtaposition. We can help it be seen through our work.

Who owns this space between public roads and private property developments?