Christeene @ Latitude 2016

What is Christeene?

Formerly a ‘machine’, variously a ‘queer art terrorist’ or ‘messiah of the dispossessed, now returning, via Soho Theatre’s sponsorship, with harder, tighter grooves and better dance routines. American queer hip-hip, filtered through punk and outrage and the taint of drag.

What is the impact?

Room reduced to half-full within first song upon appearance of Christeene and two dancers. Those who ‘should not’ be there quickly left. Those who remain, remain. Devotional and, as Christeene points out: the moment of liveness, being together (notional: temporary autonomous community), the rejection of the mediation of the machine (as this speech is made, camera phones are bought out).

What is Queer (reference to specific event/character context)?

American queer not identical to British tradition (possibly defined by films of Jarman, in short/simple slogan). Associations: Peaches, Revolting Cocks – artists marked by ironic appropriation of excess. The judgement of society by its own measures, only this time from the perspective of the judged excluded. Example: song that mocks outward forms of masculine display (and introductory speech) in heteronormative modes. Appropriation of dominant culture (hip hop, electronic dance music) towards subversive ends. Rejection of heteronormativity and possibly gendered identity.

Is this more than a gig?

Rock music (et c) has relied on ideas of authenticity. Christeene is a created character, self-conscious and yet promoting (shades of the preacher) a libidinal revolution. Emphasis on this moment now, this feeling now (generic rock etc tropes). Yet also: backing tracks, monologues (Bruce Springsteen had he grown up in the backwoods and queer). Production values betray irony, content does not.

Immediate Impact?

Positive.

Nora and Martyrs (RISE and Southside Fringe)

Eleanor Sikorski and Flora Wellesley Wesley are Nora, a contemporary dance duo. They perform the work of invited choreographers, using their bodies and training as a starting point.

Gustav and Jacob are The Creative Martyrs, a cabaret team. They perform their original songs, using their musical skills and voices as a starting point.

Despite coming from different performance cultures, both couples set their relationship to each other at the centre of their work. Evoking the theatrical tradition of the double-act (and alluding to Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Orville and Keith Harris, Plato and Aristotle, even if not literally), they perform the process of self-creation in the collaborative mode.

In Bloody Nora (choreographed by Liz Aggiss and, consequently, having more than a few references to old time London fun), Sikorski and Wesley battle each other like rappers, exaggerating and mocking each other's gestures and fumbling together identities that take in Max Wall and the techniques of Bausch's 'dance-theatre'.

In Funny Trap (written by The Martyrs but performed primarily by Jacob), a story of treachery and imprisonment provides a context for Jacob's paranoia: Gustav's only contribution is a voice from off-stage that reminds Jacob of his eternal sentence. Yet this single line is the spine of Jacob's character, a mixture of the fear-inspiring absent father and the threat of political power. 

Because of Aggiss' style, Bloody Nora is closer to The Martyrs' cabaret than most contemporary dance, and the sparring between the dancers parallels the arguments that run through many Martyr's routines. Beneath the content of specific works, the performance of both couples exposes the necessity of another in the building of personality.

High Concepts and Low Morality

When Vice said that Martin Shkreli was claiming that his market manipulating antics are performance art, it was too good to be true. He did do an interview in which he achieves the apparently impossible - making him appear even more hateful - and between sounding like a teenage boy who has listened to a bit too much hip-hop and is threatening his Latin teacher for giving him a low grade, Shkreli refers to his financial activity as selling drugs (see what he did there? Gangster to the max, bro'). And there's this gem.

It makes you wonder what art is. To me, what I’m doing right now in the media, raising prices, all this shit, believe what you want, but it’s interesting. It gets people talking. At the end of the day, that’s what art is.

Thank goodness that discussion's over. It's been a struggle to get a clear definition of art - there has even been attempts to define assassination as performance art.  Shkreli avoids the nitty-gritty of specific forms and contexts, and sees it in terms of its consequences: it gets people talking. Like Star Wars.

Let's assume he is right, and this isn't just a desperate attempt to justify his willingness to make cash money off suffering. 

His behaviour actually reads more like a patron's position: he's got the loot, he spends it on art, and there is no obligation for a patron to be a good person or have any taste. I mean, Cesare Borgia, right?

My new pal Diderot would probably agree. In his treatise in defence of his (badly received) plays, he sees the role of theatre in a social context. He's weaponising theatre to make it a tool for bourgeois revolution, so he wouldn't mind The Shkrel's big wallet bragging. 

In fact, his description of the genius - extreme sensibility and moments of calm, even cold, action - is mirrored in that DX interview. Anyone who reacts to RZA's dissing by waving a metaphorical pistol, but can also raise prices on a product that is essential to the survival of the customer is totally a gangster, and conforms to Diderot's definition of genius.

Then there's the precedent of Marina Abramovic. Once upon a time, she did some intriguing art, examining the nature of gender, desire, the boundaries of art itself. Now she tries to make the green off her own myth. Grant Morrison (off comics) said that making money in Hollywood is a form of magic. 

And despite Shkreli's dubious assertion that there hasn't been a really rich rapper, his mate Jay-Z does something similar. Oh yeah, he completely used Abramovic. It's making sense.

Then there is Kanye West. Anita Sarkeesian has something to say - it did get people talking, didn't it? Although I encourage the belief that it is the interpretation rather than the art that generates meaning, allowing Kanye's Monster video to operate as a critique of objectification rather than a celebration, I have sympathy with her position. 

So yeah, I think Martin is totally doing art. There isn't a genre for it yet - performance art would be a place-holder label. It's great that he has kept going with the act: getting arrested gets people talking, and he's introduced an element of comedy into a serious narrative. I mean, it got people laughing when he got nabbed for fraud. There's even a sense of natural justice, the wicked getting punished. 

Criticulous is BACK!!!

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