I had never feelingly understood the
phrase “hoping against hope” the way I did on seeing Neil Bartlett’s
Everybody Loves A Winner, the first
of three Manchester International Festival shows I saw within 24 hours.
Bartlett’s portrait of the culture of bingo – the staff, the players,
the rituals of the game – evokes an unsettling blend of optimism and
desperation. Fifteen players chorically recite a kind of credo,
affirming their belief in the possibility of, and the possibilities
offered by, a win even after countless failures; the staff minister to
their faith and see them through their crises. Those 15 players are
members of the cast, but on the night there are more than 600, since
the audience join in; this is not an outside-in “look at” its subject,
it’s immersive. When an audience member excitedly shouts a win, even
though it is a non-cash practice game, caller Frank is spot-on when he
jocularly mocks, “And you thought this was a game for
other people!” On the night I
attended, 595 out of an audience of 700-750 bought tickets in the
interval for the second-act game with a top cash prize of £200;
and yes, a “civilian” won – there is no rigging of the games that
matter, this is the experience itself. Ian Puleston-Davies is excellent
as Frank, working the crowd affably even though we also see his private
bitterness. The man sitting beside me was a bingo operator: he remarked
that the aesthetic of the show was a few years out of date (the big
chains have since tried to glitz up the business), but pronounced the
show overall “scarily accurate”.
From chance and grim hope, a short taxi ride to determinism and
engineered despair. Punchdrunk’s
It
Felt Like A Kiss is phenomenally well put together, but
unsatisfyingly manipulative in impressing upon us its thesis that the
United States has during the last 50 years attempted to impose its own
narrative upon the world, but that the world’s resistance has led to
fracture and fragmentation. Adam Curtis’s 35-minute montage-based film
at the centre of the work is every bit as tendentious and marshalling
as it claims the American agenda has been, all the while implicitly
pretending that because it consists of archive footage (backed by pop
songs of the period), its implications are also factual. Sometimes, as
with repeated cuts from chimps to Rock Hudson via onscreen captions
about HIV/AIDS, they are downright crass. The series of installations
which one walks through before and after seeing the film are similarly
directive. At one point visitors, proceeding through a disorienting
labyrinth of nightmare scenarios, are pursued by Leatherface from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the
only real “performer” in the work). I stood my ground and bellowed in
his face. He did nothing. It seemed emblematic of the piece as a whole:
neutralised by a mere reluctance to buy into its package.
I felt a similar hollowness about many of the performance art pieces
gathered together in the Whitworth Gallery and curated by Marina
Abramovic. After an hour of drilling us through various exercises in an
attempt to elicit new modes of watching and responding appropriate to
durational work, Abramovic left us to wander at will through a dozen or
so other works for a further three hours. I suspect that for a real
breakthrough into different ways of seeing, something more like ten
hours is required. In the current set-up, it seems to me that those
works which speak most to their watchers are, simply, those that do
actually deign to speak to us, to grant us a meaningful presence or
even interact with us: Fedor Pavlov-Andreevich’s disembodied mouth
requiring viewers to feed it or brush its teeth, Eunhye Hwang’s
experiments with white noise from transistor radios when she begins to
work with the bodies of the audience and we in turn respond in
collective, unspoken physical improvisations. And we thought this was a
piece by
another person!
Written for the Financial
Times.