Blog – Page 69 – Hannah Nicklin

I thought I’d throw down some quick thoughts from the two pieces which have stuck with me most from my day at Fierce Festival on Wednesday. Fierce, if you don’t know, is a Birmingham-based festival of live art, plus lots of lovely words like ‘supernow’ and ‘hyperlocal’. Which actually, it kind of is. Fancy that.

Symphony of a Missing Room (Lundahl & Seitl):

Symphony was, in the simplest terms, the augmentation of the Birmingham Museum and Gallery with sound and light*. An experience begun and ended as a group, but that very quickly evaporates into a binaural audio wandering-for-one (extremely effective in the acoustic environment of a museum); then vanishes into bright blindness as goggles – through which you can only really distinguish shifts in the light – obscure your vision. You are guided on journey by a voice, and by the touch and brush of warm hands.

Symphony reminded me of the best of my childhood dreams, always about behind, under, through. I had this particular dream (I tried to write the book of it aged 9, it had an illustration, and everything) that on a certain night, running in the dark through the big creaky barn-house that was where I grew up, I would take the stairs, but it would be a set I had never walked down before; a set of stairs that took me to another time, or another place. Symphony was like that feeling, like striking across a playing field with dusty knees and stripy dress in summer, but also knowing, knowing, it was a spindly bridge across the fiery lava pits guarding some treasure.

The piece played with your trust, but pleasurably so, the guide was both reliable and flighty; easily scared off, but as you moved – guided by the touches of numerous hands – you never felt lost.

It began curiously, with slowings-down, reveals, and the constant question ‘is this a part of it?’ – it was in this very beginning question that I felt the piece was its strongest, it’s most taught. The blind wanderings through the secret door (to find the missing room) were almost magical (though left to go on a little too long), and at the last you are left lying on a piece of carpet, as regular museum-goers walk quizzically around you – feeling how I always imagined the humans in a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream feel as they wake up; back in the real world, with a sensation of having tripped across worlds, but never having left that spot.

Unfortunately the main voice grated a little for me (kind of like a fairy that you want to swat). I’d have also like to have seen it play a little more with physical sensations, of rushing air, water, or the smell of tree bark, and to weave in the male voices a little more sense-fully. But these are minor, and probably quite personal gripes. Mostly it was transporting, mostly I felt like I was in a secret room hung with cobwebs and adventure, mostly it was a journey that didn’t fill you in as a character, or part of a narrative, but that asked quiet questions about perception, buildings, and the spaces we travel between life and art. A fracture of a fairy tale, that you slip through for a moment. Continue reading Fierce

Image shared via a CC license on flickr by lukeroberts

For a small piece of Christmas/art intervention that Mr Andy Field released into the world this December passed, I wrote a snippet about moments. It was sort of about how I like the taste of cigarettes on some people, and mostly about what I wanted for Christmas, which, as it turned out, was a series of moments. This was one of them:

I would like something like a Zombie Armageddon, but not. Kind of like the kind of situation where you have to survive by your wits and strength, a well packed bag, and good fore-planning, but where no one dies, really.

So I guess, like, maybe camping?

I’m thinking about apocalypse at the moment. Well, more than usually at the moment. A couple of sniffs of apocalypse in the theatre air (including Andy’s piece ‘Zilla’), a couple of recent calls for ideas/work on the theme of it, and also, if I’m honest, much of my work – ‘Home’ most openly – and reading continues to be fascinated with it. With the end of the world, or at the very least the end of the world as we know it. Ruthlessly nagging as my mind sometimes is, it now frames the question: ‘why exactly is that?’

There’s something that strikes me about the ideas of late capitalism simmering in my thesis-related reading; that of a culture in which the wars no longer physically approach us and our ways of life (this is why terrorism, rare though it is, makes such a good bogey-man for the state), where we are alienated both from production and from the processes behind that which we consume – our food, our clothing; a world where the cold war has passed, and no one born in the West need starve (though they do, in nursing homes, on the streets, in hospitals, and on housing estates; as the food mounts up in the skips around the back of Pret-a-Manger and Sainsbury’s). Imminent death isn’t around the next corner for you or I (a reasonably safe assumption, if you can access this blog). Oh it is, in an abstract, hit-by-a-bus sort of way, but only one person ends there; not a street, a community, a country, a way of life. Apocalypse is everyone, and everyone will always include you. Continue reading Some Musings on the Apocalypse