SEAS: Skegness Blog Part 4

Thursday 1st October

So, here I am in Skegness, ready for anything the SEAS can throw at me and conscious already of what a hard act to follow Charlie Pratley is going to be.

Yesterday evening, having linked up with Michaela and Dom from ACE in Nottingham, I gatecrashed the networking drinks session preceding the VIP Festival dinner at the North Shore Hotel. Before I went in, I caught a late-afternoon, just-before-twilight, glimpse of the sea.  Very beautiful it looked, embellished with two magnificent offshore wind farms facing the coast - new since the last time I came to Skegness.  Good to put it all into context before starting on my seaside cultural binge. 

Inside, I found myself in a long conversation with Doreen Stephenson, the Leader of East Lindsey District Council.  I was bowled over by just how passionate and ambitious she is for the town and the district.  With political support like that, you feel that things really will happen.  As dinner was called, I departed for my more humble cod, chips and mushy peas in town - I know my place (no, I'm sure it was cod...).

After my meal I headed past hotel dining rooms full of senior citizens, for the Embassy Theatre and the first of the two spectacular shows I was treated to in one evening - not often you can say that.  League of Time is an extraordinarily complex and ambitious piece by Croatian performance company BADco.  I saw it with Anna Mansell of Dance 4 and we both agreed that BADco. would be perfect artists for NottDance - maybe next year? As we sat down, the set-up reminded me distinctly of a small-scale piece by Nottingham favourites Reckless Sleepers, Pilots maybe? But although the show consists of just four performers, the concept is on a massively ambitious scale.  Impossible to summarise, it is an excavation (at one point they call themselves "Utopian geologists", so the metaphor is an apt one) of the meaning of time. 

Taking its starting point from a 1925 piece by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Flying Proletarian, the piece interrogates a cosmonaut who has returned from space to relocate in America, and opens up to examine a whole raft of experiences: sleep, nightmares, Charlie Chaplin, King Kong, the imminent failure of the revolution and electric toothbrushes.  Absolutely precise but crazily surreal choreography - repeatedly interrupted by time-based orders or reminders from an authoritarian off-stage voice: "one minute", "1 minute and 55 seconds to the end of present time", "15 minutes out of 91" and so on - underpin what seemed to me to be the central notion of the piece - "Your method is hallucination".  The hallucinatory feeling was reinforced by ghostly lit bubbles rising to the ceiling, brilliant time-lapse film reproducing the outlines of the performers and an attack on the senses by the most painfully dazzling lights I have ever experienced.

A disturbing and difficult piece of work, but absolutely brilliant.  I hope BADco. can be brought back to this region, soon.

I walked straight down the road and into my second magnificent experience of the night.  Monday in the Sun is a piece for two male dancers, created by Turkish choreographers Bedirhan Dehmen and Safak Uysal and performed by Burak Yamanturk and Canberk Yildiz.  Michaela Butter was concerned that the party of civic dignitaries, fresh from their VIP dinner, might be offended by the subject-matter, including as it does large doses of homo-eroticism and hugely inflated condoms.  I think they survived unscathed, but I doubt they could have been unmoved.

Monday in the Sun is a superb piece which uses the location - the huge X-Site Skatepark warehouse - ingeniously and to brilliant effect.  It begins with a short piece of film from Istanbul, lots of edgy streets, following two men who walk across the city, ending in a doorway, where they stand smoking cigarettes.  The audience had perched themselves in strategic positions on the half-pipes (is that the word?) of the skate centre to watch the film.  Suddenly, as the lights came up, we realised that the two men from the film were there in the hall, sitting in a corner smoking and reading a newspaper.  The audience re-positioned themselves and had to continue to do so all through the hour-long performance.

The tension between the two men is palpable from the outset.  Pent-up aggression erupts suddenly into violence which is played out in a moving (in both senses - emotional and locational) performance.  What is their problem? you ask yourself, why do they seem to resent each other so much?  The questions are not answered, but the relationship between the two men unfolds around the huge hall in a pageant of violence, competition, homo-erotic grappling (interwoven in the violence) and explicit sexual activity.  Clint Eastwood and drunken football fans are implicitly checked; at one point the men crawl among the audience like animals, later one man supports the other who seems to keep collapsing. All emblematic of the way in which men are assumed to sublimate their relationships into unspoken activity rather than social verbalisation. 

Much of the show is backed by a noisy urban/sea soundscape that reminded me of Zineb Sedira's brilliant Floating Coffins/Middle Sea show at New Art Exchange earlier this year and the footage at the beginning recalled Three Monkeys, the latest film by great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. 

For the final sequence, the performers move outside to the huge skatepark, under a balmy east coast night sky.  After resting on a funeral monument-like block, they climb to a natural stage as a dance soundtrack voice-over states "Just imagine there is only one more starry night before the end of the world...".  Calm and synthesis seem to reign as the show ends.

A truly wonderful piece of dance and performance, profound in its examination of maleness, and powerful in its engagement with an audience who have to work hard to keep up - literally - with the action.

This morning, after breakfast with Michaela, Raoul and Dom from ACE, I joined the delegates for the opening of the SeaScape Conference, which is being held in conjunction with CABE as part of the SEAS Festival.  I'll return to this in a later blog.  I've made contact with Chris Torch and Adam Jeanes, the two lead organisers of SEAS and with Venelin Shurelov the creator of the Fantomat installations located around the town.  I am hoping to interview them and others later.

I left the delegates to their mid-morning coffee break and headed off through the Sky Line fun centre at Butlins to get my car to drive into town. I didn't have to struggle too hard to avoid the urge to have my picture taken with Daffy Duck - well, there was quite a queue - but I was sorely tempted to have a go at that brilliant game where you roll balls into holes to make your horse (or in this case, bizarrely, your camel) run forward in the race.  Maybe later.  Or if not I'll definitely catch it at Goose Fair this weekend.  But before then there is so much more to do and see here.

SEAS is a quite breathtakingly good collection of work, representing pulsating energies from around the edges of Europe.  How exciting to experience this in Skegness. 

I must get on....