The upcoming Wild Gift Festival, 26th May-1st June, 2006 is a festival of live art which features new work by eight internationally acclaimed artists. According to Wild Gift, what brings the artists of this festival together is their signature style: A commitment to theatricality, spectacle, artifice – and utterly serious content! Just as there was a reaction in the 90’s to “Cool School” Art, so there has been a reaction to the more “conceptual” manifestations of performance art.
The organisers of the Wild Gift festival have perceived a major shift in the area of live art practice in the last decade; “With regard to “Art”, including painting, installation art, and sculpture, it seems to us that a new artificiality has come into vogue in the last ten years – and that this is significant, and shows the influence of the live arts on art in general. It’s a case of the surface and the deeper content being separate, and this being evident and significant.
“The aim of the Wild Gift Festival is to identify an “aesthetic tendency” or bent, in current live art practice, and to explore the connection between performance and art as well as performance art and traditional live arts. The Wild Gift core team comprises; Rosie Cooper, a live/video art practitioner and freelance curator.
David Lillington, a writer, curator and lecturer. Ann Lawlor, an independent curator, producer and project developer. And Gavin Butt, Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College. Gavin was commissioned to write; You Cannot be Serious for the Wild Gift website.
Wild Gift believes that certain kinds of events, “were simply not happening in 1990. Perhaps artists longed to get back to some kind of expressionism, without being earnest in a way that no longer seemed possible. In the 80’s if you weren’t ironic you were nothing… But even irony can pall. We are selecting artists who each represent aspects of the “new theatricality.” It’s our contention that this aesthetic shift hasn’t been given its proper dues, or that it is only beginning to be fully recognised.”
The work represented in the Wild Gift Festival is decorative, mediated and authoritative in its composition. In the words of Wild Gift, “We are not interested in work which promotes transgression for its own sake, or subversion, provocation or the breaking down of borders- for their own sakes.”
Wild Gift believes that the new incarnation of “decorative” work is now much, much more political. “We think it represents the uncelebrated core of what has been happening in art generally.”
Special international guests at the Wild Gift Festival include:
Fabienne Audéoud (France)
Audéoud will present the premiere of her new solo work, Extreme Happiness. It is her long-awaited piece about “an extreme form of happiness, an uncanny and ecstatic perfection, conceived as a piece of music.” It shows a week compressed into a single performance: A film, made exclusively for the piece will be presented live with Audéoud on stage.
Marisa Carnesky (UK)
Carnesky’s new work entitled, Magic War, will through monologue, “performance actions” and magic, look into the most surreal story of 19th and 20th century warfare – the deployment of stage magicians – and explore war, power, illusion and deception.
Rose English (UK)
English’s piece, The After-image of the Act will be shown in the Study Room of Theatre Museum. English will present “a talk and an event”, with video, still image, and an assistant – and objects from her own collection. It will be “exclusive and intimate,” will look at “materials left over from ephemeral practices, and how things do or do not transform in the moment in the same way as a performer does or does not have presence. It will be light, as light as the shoes I had made from horses’ hooves.’”
Rose English has been writing, directing and performing her own work for thirty years. Her productions feature a diversity of co-performers including musicians, dancers, circus performers, magicians and horses.
Kozek Hörlonski (Austria)
Kozek Hörlonski will present, Wollblut, a new piece for Wild Gift based on The Hanging Gardens The background to this work is the story of two young men, Mahmoud Asgari (aged 16) and Ayaz Marhoni (aged 18) who where executed in Iran on 19 July 2005. Their crime was to have engaged in sex with one another, two years earlier. Thomas Hörl and Peter Kozek have collaborated since 2003.
Kathe Izzo (US)
The Musical Theatre of Love is an extension of previous True Love activities, devised for Wild Gift. Izzo will make herself available in a room at the Great Eastern Hotel, by appointment. Poet, filmmaker and performance artist Kathe Izzo works with love: childhood, motherhood, sex, and community. Her elegant installations, both confrontational and emotionally intimate, incorporate her physical presence with the natural and sacred worlds; lying in fragile tableaux, she works in a meditative atmosphere between limitation and liberation.
Elena Kovylina (Russia)
Kovylina, visiting the UK for the first time, presents her celebrated performance Waltz; “A stirring performance in which grace and violence mesh.” (Holland Cotter, NY Times.) A metaphor for the rise and fall of the Russian military and culture, and a piece geared, like other Kovylina works, to create an inescapable moral tension. Waltz was first performed in Berlin in 2001. This will be the last ever performance of Waltz.
Wayne Lloyd (UK)
Drawing on his own stage presence and rudimentary painted diagrams Lloyd will give a bravura one-man rendition of Last Tango in Paris, as a replacement for the film itself. This is a premiere, devised for Wild Gift.
Nike Savvas (Australia)
Savvas will present her new work, Anthem 2006 (Is That All There Is?). Featuring disco lights painstakingly programmed to a song you can’t hear, to create a silent dance floor.
As part of the festival launch, Wild Gift commissioned a paper from Visual Cultures academic Gavin Butt. In his paper, You Cannot Be Serious , Butt contends that performance and art (and whatever that means now) is having a joyfully, noisy renaissance of interest and is enjoying new audiences. Butt points out, “…From the absurdist elements of Dada performance and the theatre of the absurd, to trashy performances in US underground film, to the arty vaudeville of Rose English and London queer club Duckie, Wild Gift showcases how this tradition continues to be developed by a younger generation of artists in the contemporary moment …”
Butt then goes on to circumnavigate the complex of historical and political changes that bring us face to face with the new concerns of live art. “Few things are more serious than war and death. One might think that in the face of the momentous import of the war in Iraq… that such playful, light-hearted works as collected together under the auspices of Wild Gift might seem improper, and that a solemn, earnest art is called for. But…Wild Gift might give us pause to think about the value…we attach to sincerity and serious attention in contemporary culture. In particular in the wake of the Iraq war, and with so many earnest pronouncements on the moral case for the war from George Bush and Tony Blair, we may be reaching a point at which the very register of the earnest and sincere comes to look increasingly dubious and unreliable…”
Butt posits that our doubts and even our cynicism about contemporary politics make us very uncomfortable in the face of apparent earnestness in politics. “Even as our political leaders insist that they are telling the truth, it is evident to most that such a profession of sincerity is cynical, that theirs is a performance of truth-telling, of sincere lying even, which we have come to associate as the modus operandi of contemporary politics. This might lead us to desire something other than the purportedly earnest or sincere, to turn away from such self-sanctified statements of moral seriousness and to find cultural engagement in those forms which address us differently…These are the kinds of questions which Wild Gift asks at the level of contemporary art practice…”
And if indeed live art is accused of merely flirting with serious content, that’s fine by Butt. He cheekily quotes artist, Adam Phillips, who notes that, “…people tend to flirt only with serious things – madness, disaster and other people.”
There is a lot to suggest that Live Art operates much like the rats onboard the Titanic: By the time the ship hits the ice, they are long gone!! Similarly, the German avant-garde and cabaret scenes were satirizing the rise of political insanity as early as the 1920’s. Gavin Butt seems to be saying that in times such as these (increasingly conservative and overtly cynical), the live art of our culture can offer us a new and immediate relationship to the “serious” present. To quote Butt, the work represented by Wild Gift, “…plays with our commitments and convictions, and realigns us in an odd relation to serious issues and forms of attention.”
WILD GIFT FESTIVAL May 25th-June 1st, 2006
**Unless indicated otherwise, performances are free**
THURSDAY 25th MAY: Launch Night
Nike Savvas, Anthem 2006: Is That All There Is? Ada Street Gallery, 6 -9:30pm
FRIDAY 26th MAY
Marisa Carnesky, Magic War. Theatre Museum, £5 / £4, 8pm**
Kathe Izzo, The Musical Theatre of Love. Great Eastern Hotel, 1 – 7pm (by appointment)
Nike Savvas, Anthem 2006: Is That All There Is? Ada Street Gallery, 1 – 7pm
SATURDAY 27th MAY
Fabienne Audéoud, Extreme Happiness. Rio Cinema, £5 / £4, 1:15 – 2pm**
Wayne Lloyd, Last Tango in Paris. Great Eastern Hotel, 7pm**
Kathe Izzo, The Musical Theatre of Love. Great Eastern Hotel, 12 – 6pm (by appointment only)
Nike Savvas, Anthem 2006: Is That All There Is? Ada Street Gallery, 12 – 6pm
SUNDAY 28th MAY
Kozek-Hörlonski, Wollblut. The Boxing Club at Limehouse Town Hall, 4pm**
Elena Kovylina, Waltz. The Boxing Club at Limehouse Town Hall, 6:30pm**
Kathe Izzo, The Musical Theatre of Love. as Saturday
Nike Savvas, Anthem 2006: Is That All There Is? as Saturday
MONDAY 29th MAY
Kathe Izzo, The Musical Theatre of Love. as Saturday
Nike Savvas, Anthem 2006: Is That All There Is? as Saturday
THURSDAY 1st JUNE
Rose English, The After-image of the Act. Theatre Museum, £5 / £4, 8pm**
Advance Bookings : It is possible to book the following:
Theatre Museum: book for Marisa Carnesky or Rose English. +44 (0) 20 7943 4750. A joint ticket for both: £9 / £7**
Rio Cinema: book for Fabienne Audéoud. +44 (0) 20 7241 9410
For more detailed Wild Gift Festival listings go to:
www.wildgift.org.uk
www.liveartuk.org
www.newartnetwork.org.uk
www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk
