This is not a Love Song...

Artists and Avants

After a pause to spend time defacing jpgs of Clyde, the mascot for the Commonwealth Games, I return to my anxiety. The post-war absurdists - although it goes back to Duchamp and the Dada gang - articulated a new response to 'reality': it is riven by doubt and reflects through a fragmented structure - a society that no longer recognises any binding values and a universe that is hostile.

In doing so, they set up these tropes that have become signifiers of being 'avant-garde.' In imitating these tropes, artists imagine they are continuing a tradition, and assigning themselves the label 'experimental' when they are really just copying.

I am not sure if there ought to be a 'tradition' for avant-garde work at all. I mean, it is supposed to be a radical shift, isn't it?

Back in the day, I remember a biography of William Burroughs which spoke of his time 'experimenting with alcohol.' They weren't talking about the author suddenly exploring chemistry as a career change, but that he was getting pissed up all the time. After the first hangover, no-one 'experiments' with alcohol - they know exactly what it is going to do.

It's the same with performance: the possible impacts of nudity have been clarified - and it might have once been shocking, or sexy, or a short-cut to presenting emotional honesty. It is fine to get nekkid on stage - but it isn't avant-garde.

Meaning Goes Awry

Because of all the fun and Commonwealth games, I have ignored my current preoccupations. Last week, I was worrying about the death of theatre. Pondering the nature of Glasgow identity within performance, I noticed a deadly habit - the reclamation of certain post-modern tropes by artists, who repeated them as signifiers of experimental theatre.

Shall I put this in plain English?

Some time ago, there was a movement called Modernism (I'm sketching it out here - don't expect rigour, please). It was all part of the early twentieth century excitement about the speed and pace and drama of industrial society, and it placed a heavy value on 'newness.' In its most brutal incarnations, this movement got all aroused by War (hello, futurists), but it generally had a hard-on for progress. 

It is where all the contemporary chat about how brilliant science is comes from. It fits it quite nicely with nationalist politics, too: as nation states tried to define themselves after the collapse of the Turkish, British and French Empires, the idea of progress was hip. Besides, things were looking up: medical science, technology, diplomacy: the old days of a life brutish and short were on their way out.

It did mean ignoring the continued class war on the poor, and the exclusion of many African and Asian nations, but still...

The Second World War punched a hole in modernist optimism. It took a while for everyone to release, but defeating the Nazis was not as good as not having Nazis in the first place. Human nature, which had been looking tasty and progressive, was exposed as a shit-pit of racism and horror. Then the nuclear bomb got dropped, and the very air was contaminated.

The absurdists - Beckett, Pinter, Ionesco - sensed something was up with these post-enlightenment dreams: academic Carl Lavery has suggested (in not so many words) that they were shitting it about the state of the environment. The meaninglessness in their works - and the later emphasis by post-modern thinkers on refusing any single story or belief that could make sense of the world - was not so much tricky writers being vague: they were presenting a truth that challenged the notion of security, and thence the notion of truth itself.

Even trying to describe that is a head-fuck.

In exploring these ideas, theatre got experimental. Certain actions became associated with experimentation. 

In the next episode, we ask what happened next...

Revolving Pavlova

Scottish Dance Theatre's Drift (choreographed by James Wilton, starring a bruising track by Nine Inch Nails) is one of those pieces that gives "contemporary dance" a good name. It's a classic pas de deux format - sexy, bursts of technical brilliance, thumping yet emotive soundtrack - with a few added touches that separate it from ballet. Specifically, it is melancholic and the dancers play trust games - and the dancer's moves and gestures are spikier, more aggressive.

At only ten minutes, Drift can either stop the show or act as a juicy bonus. No wonder it has held its place alongside Kate Weare's Lay Me Down Safe on SDT's latest touring triple bill: and it acts as a comfort blanket before the finale of Rachel Lopez de la Nieta's experiment on Pavlova's Dogs.

At this point, I have a bad feeling I am about to shame myself by trying to use Big Theories. I am thinking post-modernism, contrasting popular ideas about what it is ("everything is relative, man"), a slightly more rigorous definition ("there is no central narrative, and everything is relative, human") and dance's specific movement (the Judson Memorial Church, buddy).

Because to call both Drift and Pavlova's Dogs "contemporary dance" seems absurd. I am not even sure if  PDs is even dance (not that that's a bad thing). It asks questions about the nature of dance - thankfully, it gets beyond "what is dance?" quickly and has a few pokes at ballet mythology. There's music and the two guys do a bit of "entertainment" (tops off, rocking out to Fleetwood Mac, or dressed as bunnies and camping it up to Flanagan and Allen). There are even four female dancers making shapes that would not disgrace the choreography of -well, Kate Weare or James Wilton.

Yet the main feature of PDs appears to be the chatter of two guys. It is their argument that creates the dramatic tension, their ideas that dictate the pace. Lopez de la Nieta works closely with a dramaturge, Henrietta Hale. Unlike Scottish Ballet's Streetcar, where the dramaturge seemed to just encourage the choreography's theatricality, it feels as if Pavlova's Dogs would be as comfortable as a theatre company's production.

None of these things are necessarily bad, unless I am trying to insist that rigid categories are more important than an art-form's flexibility in the face of an artist's vision. It's probably important to Lopez de la Nieta's intentions that the usual conventions of dance are so easily disassembled, and since her own training was in classical ballet (at least at first), it's as if she is working through both personal and public stereotypes of "the dancer".

It would probably be better to simply call it "performance", but that denies the importance of the dance conventions that the choreographer aims to deconstruct. And I can't call it post-modern dance: although it conforms to the more rigorous definition two above, it lacks, except in limited sequences, the precise strictures that came out of the Judson Memorial Church crew ("task-based" movement, fiddling about with the gaze of the dancer, rejection of virtuosity).

Here's the real post-modern magic of Pavlova's Dogs: it is never fixed, and any attempt at definition causes the definition to slip away, like the last pea on the plate, chased by the critical fork.

I am Post-Modern, Not Rubbish

As someone who has a show called The Radio Hour that last for two – at one time for five, but that was in another city and besides, the Fringe is dead – I hope that I have some sense of playful irony. My Producer Harry sometimes looks at me as if to say “Do you have any idea what is going to happen next?” and the answer is often “no.” Yet after yesterday’s VileArts Radio Hour, I realised that perhaps I’d make a properly post-modern broadcast.

Ever since The Ramones blasted out of NYC, the idea that dumb can be clever has had a hold in popular culture. Whether it is the innocent deconstruction of political dogma by Sacha Cohen when he used to be good – he undermined a fox hunter’s certainty through Ali G’s blunted questions, and Borat was a trip through cultural assumptions made alien – or the underground slang of UK hip-hop, the ancient belief that education needed to be on display in form and function has been dented. Beneath my atrocious research and random connections between guests – serious performance artist and feminist Nic Green to Sean Fae Solar playing sexist raps, anyone? – I’ve been curating a chaotic bricolage broadcast from Glasgow’s arts scene.

There have been plenty of dead-ends. Most of them come from my flirtations with Edinburgh, probably because I don’t really know what is happening there. I try to be too inclusive: yesterday, I tore out the teeth of James MacMillan’s Christus Vinctus by juxtaposing it with Peaches – and this is a piece of music that I adore because it is an unabashed celebration of religious faith.  And I have fallen far from my dream of recreating the feel of late night Radio 3, every time I fade in a blast from Ultimate Thrush, Holy Mountain or Take A Worm for a Walk Week. But I feel justified when I realise that I have just introduced Debussy into a conversation about electronic music. It is a reflection of how I experience the arts: a continuity that constantly asks questions about legacy, influence, tradition and resonance.

Psignal, a man that I am proud to call both friend and collaborator, recently characterised post-modernism as a strategy to break down the established notion of progress. The constant flittering between genre and style needn’t be a facsimile of the great contemporary lie, that gives everything equal worth and refuses to discern quality. By fracturing assumptions about what belongs together, and reviving apparently irrelevant arts, post-modernism is a comprehensive acceptance of the opportunities of global interconnectivity. Sean Fae Solar described his mixing as being like his web-surfing: distracted, intense, dispersed. Yet from this diversity comes something focussed and intense. The Radio Show is an attempt to do something similar.

There are times when I am hugely uncomfortable on air – usually when I am playing something that has explicit lyrics, or when the dynamics of a classical piece seem to have disappeared from the audible threshold. It’s only cognitive dissonance, the most creative state of the mind. When the information becomes contradictory or incomprehensible, the mind is forced to work harder. The Radio Hour tried to do that to listeners. It’s only fair I feel it myself.

And so comes to an end this week’s excuses for being shambolic.