NRLA. Day Three.

Having wrested control back from Charlie Montgomery, I continue to stroke my chin over the definition of Live Art. I know that Iona Kewney is performing in a few hours time, and the excitement is taking hold. I have almost given up expecting anything, merely letting the crowds lead me between events.

I am sitting in a queue. I no longer know what I am going to see inside the performance. A morning coffee with Alaistair MacLellan, whom I had watched blowing up balloons in a glass case, blew up my mind. I shamble between shows, no longer able to offer any clear definitions, desperate to write, desperate to watch.

MacLellan started off as a painter, but found the artistic establishment of the late 1960s too constrictive. In trying to discover a way to include his life within the art, he studied zen. In Vancouver, he was set a koan by a teacher, forcing him to question what it meant to be an artist. As he is talking, I see a solution to the perennial problem of how to define Live Art. The jumble of styles won’t help: what does the comedy of Forkbeard Fantasy share with the seriousness of a man reclining on a sofa with a skewer through his ribs? How does cannibalism accord with a woman sitting still on the far side of the room, a phone ringing without answer? MacLellan identifies the common strand. These are all artists who can’t fit in, who won’t allow the medium to define the message.

I wander around, brushing past a Post-Historical Cluster Fuck- the Trace Collective both creating and destroying an archive. A man leaps from a room, swears violently and disappears. I drink another coffee, stoke my chin. The twin muses have left the building, cadging cigarettes from Musical Theatre students who are trying to contain their bemusement.

It’s getting darker, too. After the good humour of the opening days, there are more endurance acts, more body pieces. Kate Stannard is still cycling in a corner, clocking up over one hundred miles a day on a static bicycle. La Ribot’s movie, restlessly following a dancer’s point of view as she struggles around a theatre takes the idea of dance on film and choreographs to its entrancing pulse. The audiences are restless, interrupting lectures, pacing in and out of shows. 

 

Half way through the NRLA, and I am appropriately confused.