Welcome to ......

 

To learn the value of what is lost
to learn not the value of meaning
but the value of what cannot be reproduced
or seen (again).
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, p. 152, 1993, Routledge, London.

Jo Mitchell’s cheerful re-construction of de-construction was a success because it was underpinned by der Fehler, as was the original, now mythologized event.Mid performance the chain saw ‘fucked up’ in true Cageian style for as the guru said, if you amplify a cactus you must surrender control to the cactus. Jo’s first reaction was disappointment - the actor had travelled repeatedly from Glasgow for rehearsals, she explained - she felt that she had let him down but true to the original intensity, he found other ways to clear a space through the piano and the error became the saviour from gleich.

However, as Peggy Phelan noted such a revisiting must begin with the knowledge of its own failure for it cannot be achieved. Performance’s only life is in the present. Hence, such an enterprise seeks to experience and engage with desire for that which is already lost, and of that fact, Jo Mitchell seemed very aware. She could only be, as Jane Blocker expressed in What the Body Costs (2004, University of Minnesota Press, London ppxi,xiii), a ‘second degree reader…engaged in the task of reading others’ skins, of texts, of images…the inevitable gaps, unexplained or half-forgotten details’.

Jo’s performance became a supreme example of Roland Barthes’ image of the disappeared event (The Pleasures of the Text) as a provocative momentary glimpse of flesh where the garment gapes; her actors briefly grasped the elusive rawness and power of the original and through this fleeting presence,(it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance) and her ragpicking of the tattered threads of the archives, Jo thus created an intermittent erotic excitement, where absent bodies flirted with those present, leaving us as partially satisfied voyeurs.

We were three days into the Apocalyptic year of 1984, with Reagan and Thatcher’s terrifying friendship making me wish that I had invested in a kitchen table large enough to shield my husband, daughter, pregnant self and cat from the consequences of their button-eager fingers, (despite two reassuring visits to the USSR where I found peaceful, friendly, busy folk bringing up kids too). The ICA, on the frontline of safely transgressory arts, decided to present a Concerto for Voice and Machinery as part of the Big Brother Rock Week. Commissioned by Michael Morris, the site programmer, with Mark Chung of Einstürzende Neubauten, the work was scored by Chung and F.M. Einheit for cement mixers, jack hammers, chain saws, angle grinders, breaker drills, banyo hammers, road drills, a metal locker room cabinet, a section of a tree trunk, milk bottles, bricks, loud hailers, a gently quiet upright piano and performers, Frank Tovey, Mark Chung, FM Einheit, Gila Groeger, Stevo, Alex Hacke and a ICA- banned Genesis P.Orridge. Blixa Bargeld made a last minute appearance to scream ‘sehnsucht’ into a microphone amidst the sawdust, petrol smells, smoke, sparks and chaos as the ICA officials unplugged the power and closed the show.

Varying reports suggest that Einheit jumped from the stage inciting others to drill through to the Royal Family’s nuclear hideaway under the ICA’s dressing rooms, that Stevo was goading the onlookers and that an audience member had called for an attack on the ‘fascist institution’ and attempted to initiate this. Others suggest that the 25 minute long concerto was all but finished, the players had left the stage, and that it was a few spectators who attempted a bit of de-construction jeopardising the PA system. Eye witness accounts differ wildly about everything from the length of the event, who was present (many still expected a full Neubauten gig despite the hand written notice disclaiming this, pinned to the door) and who did what owing partly to the consumption of ‘mother’s little helpers’, the movement in and out of the space (Mark Chung mentioned the illicit late arrival of scores of people through a side door) and the dust filled air.

So every account of this post-Punk Dadaism differs - hence the legend and the creative impossibility of Jo’s task despite her incredibly thorough research through bootleg recordings, photographs, witness statements, the availability of Mark’s score and her imaginatively close direction of the event.
The attention to detail extended from the carefully arranged ‘set’ of useful beauty to the ‘costume’ with Joel Cahen (Chung) and Nick Rawling (Einheit) wearing tailcoats and Jacopo Miliani’s (Bargeld) thin frame coated in black, with Caveian fallen- preacher dog collar, shocked hair and hunched stance over the microphone.

Was bleibt?

Certainly the mischievous nature of the original coupled with its extreme intensity and unplanned spontaneity can be partially grasped from the ‘archives’ - there is (thankfully) no video evidence so the myths can co-exist. Regardless of whatever actually happened and those there cannot agree citing a ‘if you can remember the sixties’ attitude, the revisit was of immense fascination and excitement, both because of the sincerity of the creator/director, Jo Mitchell and because of the committed and very talented participants who came from a cross section of the performing arts world.

Having badgered Jo to let me into rehearsals for my PhD on Einstürzende Neubauten, I was immediately caught up in the edgy excitement of a work which in some ways had to exceed the original in being a conglomeration of recalls and attitudes. Here were art-based folk, on average thirty years my junior, children of those dark times, as I had been a child of the sixties’ lost promise. Yet within those with whom I spoke, there was still a ‘sehnsucht’, a joyful anger, a willingness to use their art to transgress. I felt as one who had not survived the flood, who had gone under, and here were those who had emerged and still wanted to swim against the tide. Here were representatives of those generations to whom I had taught Drama often doubting that my planted seeds of questioning could fight off the proliferation of glittering consumer weeds. Seeds, from somewhere, had obviously rooted.

They were eager to point out to me that the original players were cheerful in their destruction, one even quoted Walter Benjamin; they focused my eyes on the smiles and lack of aggression camera-caught (and arranged like a storyboard across the black walls) on doers and watchers as that line of spectatorship blurred. (Unlike the rather unfortunately posed looks of moody anger on these performers’ faces in the press photograph for the re-enactment on ICA’s website which gave a rather different reading, or did it? One re-collector stressed that the adjective ‘aggressive’ was the only suitable one which she could apply to the original performers.) These 2007 interpreters enthusiastically talked to me in Artaudian terms about the Dionysian immediacy, the desire to go beyond rational thought, while still maintaining a discipline within the direct connection with the activity. They yearned to infect themselves and the new secondary audience who would witness this replay of performer and player-audience. They also saw the ICA officials in the role again of the potential spoilers who must be appeased and these latter seemed willing to wear the caps of the oppressors insisting that the carefully muted dress rehearsal viewed by the Westminster Health and Safety inspectors was repeated ‘on the night’.

Yet this dress rehearsal was still most memorable as a performance; by then I knew how carefully scored and rehearsed the work was while still leaving Löcher/holes for possibility; it was not about Dionysus dismemberment or brief relief but more a Nietzschean dance against gravity, it was not a quaint historicisation which I feared but a new gig, a new explosion and the edginess of the ICA staff reaffirmed this. If this carefully prepared machinery, all these protective measures of gloves, masks, air extractors, fire extinguishers would fail, would the audience step in again, would the planned silence produce new shouts of ‘you started it’? How could the original failure be successfully failed again or fail differently or fail better? What could be expected of a 2007 audience and what were their individual motivations for attending?

My observations deduced that there was a great age and dress range, many carried coats and rucksacks as if they had come from afar, many arrived late, very few wore the traditional Goth aura of a Neubauten concert; they remained quiet, still, attentive, even during the long opening wait and breakdown mid action, they did not riot but applauded at the end as if at the theatre and quietly filed out to the bar. Some were reading the booklet with care. A few left early – difficult with an event of around 20 minutes. On their part there was no transgression; they observed the Mohicans’s well-executed onslaught and frustration as a recreated performance much as they would a NT actor knowing that he is in role again, as yesterday, as tomorrow, but when s/he goes home tonight they do not fear that he will smother his wife or bargain too long for her son’s life. The potential for a new Millennium riot talked about by the performers did not seem even remotely possible; no longer was shattering the harmony a route to shattering the social system. This sober wine tasting spectatorship knew the rules and the boundaries; the ICA had nothing to fear. The Apocalypse was long gone dead.

Virginie Sélavy (interview with Blixa Bargeld www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk) speculated beforehand can the artists really conjure up the same dangerously exciting atmosphere or will it just be a sterile, sanitized retread of the events? Will the crowd be mainly chin-stroking art types taking in the infernal racket with blasé detachment or will the performers stir up another riotous reaction in the audience? If her first descriptive of the spectators became fairly accurate, then so did her first descriptive of the performance itself, for the noise, smell, dust, sparks, the gleefully, committed, intense yet playfilled performances of the those dopplegangers, the erotic thudding of the earth pounder and screams and wails of the ghosts of Gila and Tovey gave me a secondary glimpse into a seductive missing void of absent bodies and brought into focus my work on EN and those throughline questions- is this still musik? what noise does this make? will this collapse structure?

Another missing event conjured up by two members of Neubauten and on which my study also focuses, took place inside the steel cavity of a Schöneberg autobahnbrücke on June 1st 1980; it has been carefully and lovingly described to me by Andrew Unruh with images of bikes with baskets, quests to borrow batteries, long dawn hours from midnight to 6 am, screaming, beating, striking, strumming, unwitnessed, unrepeatable, cassette-recorded; then recreated a year later for a video evidence. This too, was about transgression; a forbidden space, a non-musical site, a playful anarchy in ‘is this music?’

The ICA brevity, in comparison, with those long dark-dawning hours of June 1st 1980, asks the same question in a more public fashion in a space which cried out to be challenged, in spite of, because of, its very liberalism in the face of Thatcherism; both lost being theres challenge the hatespeech of the Cold War, of a divided world encapsulated in Berlin, a post-conflict generation struggling to create a parent-free identity which would not/could not repeat the Horror, crying out for some kind of utopia.

The gig which balances these and the one at which I was ‘there’ has to be the Supporters’ Grundstueck (November 4th 2004), for it was still pushing out the boundaries of what is music, still playing the site, although if the first example metaphorically deconstructed the icon of Western Capitalism borrowed from Hitler, (the autobahn of free travel/ commerce and escape), the second literally hacked at the all too compliant liberal Arts Establishment, this last took on a controversial structure, iconic for the losers, condemned to ‘ruckbau’ by the winners in their rewrite of history. This time, the site was not attacked but gently tapped, stroked, coaxed, amplified, softened with light and filled with a 100 voices in a melancholic yearning for a social utopia; its rusty intestines taking on a new beauty which somehow captured the long claimed positiveness of Neubauten’s life-filled destructiveness.

And here too the audience refused to leave, feeling that the gig was incomplete, but instead of (possibly) putting their energies into dismantling the site, they continued to play on Unruh’s drum tables with a physical commitment and dedication worthy of Neubauten’s own ethos, proud of their resulting ‘wounds’ and blisters.

One ICA official commented to me after the Concerto Re-enactment that it was successful because it had been exactly the same as the previous day’s rehearsal! I prefer Alexander Hacke’s recall of the original - it felt ritualistic, meditative, like we were samurai….so we failed……(The Guardian, 16/02/07).

In 1984 it had been ‘Squatters’ music’ both as children’s play and (to butcher Heiner Müller’s quote on Pina Bausch), a thorn in the senses; given its new head, its afterlife could still make a difference or (to butcher another quote- Bargeld’s this time) offer ‘the unthinkable’. Perhaps, it needs to be more thorny so that we have to again, hören mit schmerzen.
23/02/07.

 

Rehearsal Photos taken by writer.