Please Add What Makes You Proud of Glasgow...

Like all good bloggers, I am getting lazy. Update the blog? No, I'd rather go onto Messenger and see if RolePlayGurl28 is hanging out. Besides, July is Vile Arts' Research and Development Month. Producer Harry and idiot Gareth are hanging out in cool bars, attending hip openings and networking. I'm the one in the beret, asking if anyone has a cigarette.

After eight months of being The Vile Arts Radio Hour, I decided that I wanted to be the Vile Arts Media Empire. As Rupert Murdoch's machine is slowly clogged up by the blood of innocent celebrity victims, my vague ideas about collectivism, collaboration and connectivity are poised to slip onto News International's Throne of Blood.

Just as soon as I can afford to get my internet put back on.

In the meantime, I am opening myself up to experience. Although I am not really keen on putting this blog into the public domain officially just yet, I am slapping down plenty of "first thought, best thought" ruminations. I am scattering the fragments of my experience across the floor like my dirty clothes, and seeing whether they can be pieced into a vision.

Subcity Radio has been a revelation. Online radio is one of those interestingly liminal media: not quite completely modern - the form preexists the shit-pump - it retains a heritage that goes back to shacks on hills, a single transmitter bleeping out the hillbilly music and anxious words of conspiracy theorists.

And blogs - well, they aren't even that contemporary. But the freedom of access attracts me, the ease of creation... no waiting, no editing. If I put the spell check on, they are reasonably readable, even after an all-night coffee binge.

Although the grammar check is very generous about my multiple clause sentences.

I know that I live in a city that is dynamic, and I love that I am going to walk out into the night in about twenty minutes to find something free and cool.

The Vile Arts has to be about documenting that.

I want to document it. I want to talk abut Noise Music with Kylie. I want to see Avenue Q through the filter of Live Art. I want to disrupt the business as usual of politics, which sees art as either a luxury or a branch of the social services.

I want to bring back the excitement I felt being in Prague. Not the excitement of cheap pints and accidentally walking in on a live sex show - I did think a cover charge was a bit steep for a local bar - but the realisation that twenty years ago, The Czech Republic had only ballet and folk dance: now it has radical dance companies and a big festival that rivals our own New Territories in scope and variety.

And I want Glasgow to remember that the "Glasgow Effect" is a buzz word for all slightly impoverished cities that want to rescue themselves through culture.

Let's hope the City Council remember that it is the artists who rescued the Merchant City, not the town planners.

So beneath this sad little entry, if you must read it, please add what makes you proud to live in Glasgow. Then I can steal your ideas and turn them into ten minutes of radio,

EXTREME sets and stages

Once I’d seen the sign for EXTREME scenography, it was inevitable that I would spend most of the day in a darkened basement, staring at costumes that were either sexually explicit or just plain nasty. A wedding dress that was made from bullets; an inflatable that looked like a big pair of knockers; opera body suits articulated like crap action figures: it might have come for the cheap thrills, but I stayed for the lesson in how a single outfit can express the entire philosophy of a performance.

Obviously, this was the stuff that nations rolled out to show who was the best at art. Every country wants to show how cool they are, and even theatre-makers aren’t above a wee spot of swaggering. But I have under-estimated the importance of costume – is this because I’m just not getting enough cool gear in Scotland?

Going back to that wedding dress made of bullets. It was for a production of Titus Andronicus – one of those Shakespeare rags that is worth reviving, simply because it tends to get ignored for another Romeo and Fucking Juliet. Titus is hardcore violent. Everything gets chopped off, there are none of those soulful soliloquies. It’s like Bill got the Chapman Brothers to brainstorm a concept.

The dress of bullets is pretty revealing: enough T and A on show to make the bullets fetishistic. It’s erotic in the filthiest sense, jarring the sexual response to naked female flesh by associating it with violence and death. This is the Two Girls One Cup version of Shakespeare.

The inflatable hooters, conversely, were an oddly slapstick presence in a work that overdid the kitsch. Yet they served a similar purpose, in short-circuiting an expected response. Shakespeare and Co. Are all well and good, but years of generic productions and education have blunted the edge.  It is this kind of magic that makes me so irritated by the traditional British veneration for the script. Despite my ranting, I am fond of words, right up until they become a replacement for the total, immersive potential of theatre.

Scenography and Prague

Aside from those times when I noticed Kai Fisher or Kenny Miller on the programme – or when the set overshadowed the actors and script, like in the National Theatre of Scotland’s Peter Pan – I have rarely paid attention to the art of scenography. Being in Prague, and stumbling across their Quadrennial of Design and Space, I confess my ignorance. Like a good script, coherent choreography, stunning central performances, costume, set and staging are a crucial part of a “good production.” The joy of PQ12 reminded me that theatre need not be all about the people present.

Since PQ is in its twelfth edition – and it has taken almost half a century to reach it – it is one of the more comprehensive performance jamborees that make up the progress of administrative personnel around the globe. Despite discovering it by accident, and being the only Scottish critic  in the Czech Republic that week, once I got my laminated pass, I was greeted by other delegates as an old friend. Much as I enjoyed the ego-massage, it didn’t remove my suspicion of the sort of people who turn up at these events. Obviously well travelled, they all held posts that sounded like euphemisms for “no creative input.” I didn’t meet any of the directors, or actors, or dancers or visual  artists that are supposed to be learning from these events, except on the stalls.

Cynicism aside, PQ12 is massive and brilliant. Nearly every country I have ever heard of was represented – who would have thought Uruguay had a thriving, imaginative theatre? – and the only disappointment was the UK stall. Understaffed, and featuring only one Scottish entry, it did, at least, feature some work I had seen: the wonderful, immersive set for Kursch, which got the audience right under the waves and into the submarine. And while Scottish Dance Theatre’s contribution was cool, I did reflect that Glasgow has always had a strong tradition of director-scenographers. Stewart Laing, who has rescued a few weak scripts through his knowledge of Tramway’s spatial potential, and Kenny Miller, formerly of the Citizens and now freelance, are the first two examples I remember. For PQ13, I hope that the Independent Republic of Caledonia’s President For Life will lobby for a Scottish section.

Scenography, according to the brochure, is a rapidly expanding area. Divided into costumes and sets, it wanders off into areas of film, site response, visual art, exhibition. Reflecting this, PQ12 had intermittent performances, an outdoor village of installations and a relaxed attitude to definition. Consequently, the different countries played to their strengths. Mexico and the States packed their areas with designs, videos and props, like relics of the performances now rendered symbolic. The Czech Republic went for a mini-exhibition. Japan let its scenographers write their own eccentric show. Israel loaded the room with boxes of condoms.

Wandering around the displays was enough, and I became convinced that most plays would do better if they dropped all that acting, singing and dancing nonsense and concentrated on the cool stuff – evoking place through carpentry. I’ve been toying with the idea of the stage as a sacred space, and here was evidence of a spiritual materialism to fill that holy rectangle.