Tuesday 3 December 2013

Open Arts Café

As you know, last week I went up to London to an arts evening I've been meaning to get to for a while. The Open Arts Café is hosted by the West London Synagogue near Marble Arch (although it is in no way a religious event and is open to anyone, not just Jews). The basic idea is that while there are many opportunities for musicians to meet musicians, visual artists to meet visual artists, writers to meet writers and so on, there are very few places in London where creators and performers of every kind can come together and feed off of each other. The other unusual aspect is that a lot of the work shown is still in various stages of development and feedback is encouraged. It's held on the last Thursday of most months and it turns out that it's well worth a visit - in fact its a thoroughly decent and thought-provoking night out for very little money. It's based around a very loose theme each time - last week it was "Secrets, Enigmas and Puzzles" - even if some of the acts had to shoehorn the theme in a little ;-)

The running order was varied. First up was Kirsten Irving, a poetess/publisher with a mesmerising voice, reading from an anthology of poems about computer games she'd published. Her response to Lemmings has actually stuck with me; its a long time since a poem wormed its way inside me. Then came John Conneely, an Irish singer songwriter with an unusual voice and as much of an interest in talking as singing - who'd have thought that of an Irishman... Next was the beginnings of a play, In the Surface of a Bubble. We only saw excerpts and it is only a week or two into its development but it is going somewhere interesting; it takes the use of masks to a level I personally haven't seen before, with each performer wearing several at once on different parts of their bodies to turn a troupe of 6 into a cast of dozens. Although it was still very rough round the edges, the performers believed so the audience believed. It was a proper lesson in the benefits of just going for it, if you're doing something don't hold back, be intense and you will carry people along with you.

At the interval, there were a couple of visual artists to look at; one of them, Lola de la Mata, is usually a dancer and designer. As a result she is interested in repetition and variation and her work is precise and clinical. She took a couple of puzzles - a Rubik's Cube and a cut up piece of perspex - and produced diagrams of different states they could exist in, using dance notation as a code to record them. The diagrams, to a non-dancer like myself, took on other characteristics with the perspex puzzle notation in particular strongly recalling Viking runes, another way of encoding information. The other artist was Samar F Zia, and the work she brought along was exploring a simple observation - that a pomegranate can stand in for elements of the human body, from the colour, texture and layered structure of the skin to the blood red cellular structure inside. She was combining this with an exploration of muslin as material through sculpture and painting - this allows her to develop a medical theme which emphasises the body-ness of the fruit. From a bald description like that there is no link to the theme but, when you see the work, on the one hand she treats the inside of the fruit as a secret she is revealing and on the other the finished work is enigmatic and its origins are not immediately obvious. It is building into an interesting body of work and I'll be curious to see how it develops.

After the interval we had Pete Yelding, building up a tune from a sample of Evening Standard sellers' calls using loops of a cello and a guitar - perhaps the most interesting act of the evening but not entirely making sense. It was beautiful, the development and origins of it were clear and recognisable but I didn't understand why the guitar melody he played over the top had a Caribbean lilt. Chase him round the internet though, he's well worth a listen. Then came Sanjay the Psychic, a slightly disarming act. Either it went wrong early on, or he lulls you into thinking he can't do it before being genuinely impressive at the end. In some respects he takes the Tommy Cooper approach where the showmanship is more important than the tricks, in others he takes the Penn & Teller approach where he makes no attempt to hide how he's doing things. Finally we had a little improvised jazz, and without meaning any disrespect to the players, that's all that needs to be said from my point of view. They could all play well enough, but I personally can't tell the difference between improvised jazz and self-indulgent showing off. Don't get me wrong, it was competent enough but really not for me and from the set-up I'm not convinced it truly was improvised.

In between, founder, organiser and MC Maya sang a little - think a female Tom Lehrer without the science!

All in all, it was a really, really good night with good people in attendance even if the audience was politer and less rowdy than I'd expected. Some acts were far more polished than others but it really has got me thinking about my own approach and whether going multi-disciplinary and collaborative would be a good thing or not. Conversations I had with people have let me work out what it is that's been missing from my work over the last year, and collaborations do seem like fun.

The next one is in January and is thoroughly recommended; if it can change my way of thinking it might be able to change yours!

http://www.openartscafe.com/

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