EROGATE/SURROGATE PERFORMANCE SERIES: CLOSING THE CYCLE
Text and photos by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen
Ilya Noé's Erogate/Surrogate series, which has been featured in the MPAB program for the last three years, closes its cycle with a performance wheel of 10 selected performers being both erogates as well as surrogates to each other’s work.
Erogate/ Surrogate Circle: Illustration by Ilya Noé
The last part of Noé's Erogate/ Surrogate project started on May 17th with Jörn J. Burmester surrogating Ilya Noé's own Deerwalk from 2007. Burmester did a walk of approximately 33 km in a formation of the Berlin Bear corresponding to Noé's walk in Portugal, which route took the shape of a deer, relating to the site specificity of the animal for this region. The second part of the grand finale of the Erogate/Surrogate series was an afternoon and evening program of performances at the Month of Performance Art Hub: Meinblau. Here the outcome of the collaborations and conversations of the performers was shown, both as a process exhibition as well as the performances themselves. The process and the dialogue of the performers were here a very crucial part of the work. As the other years, it was essential for Noé to keep this an important and visible part of the presentation of the project.
The first performance that kicked off the afternoon was Adrian Brun’s surrogation of erogate Francesca Ciardi’s Holiday Inn, where the Hub was transformed into a beach with a sunbathing Brun in the middle accompanied by others, doing the same action. This seemed like a nice and relaxed way to kick off the performance program of this evening.
Speaking in tongues
Associative speech, transcendence, and the use of language and narrative were concepts used in a few of the performances. The first one was Aleks Slota surrogating Adrian Brun. The piece was inspired by a quote by the artist Matthew Barney, that had followed Brun for years and read:
"The final formation of a perfectly hermetic circle is when you are capable of sticking your head up your ass."
Brun had never performed this piece himself before, but had for a long time intended to make a piece related to this quote. Proposing this to Slota seemed like a good match, with Slota sitting on a chair under a poster with the Barney quote above his head. After sitting down and preparing himself for the performance, Slota informed us that he would now go on a journey and that we were very welcome to join him. He placed earplugs with music in his ears, as well as additional headphones to block all external sound out. He then lit up a joint, smoked a bit and taped his eyes to deprive himself of the sense of sight. After shutting out everything around him, Slota started to inform us through speech of his inner travel, of the images that appeared in his head. A process that in some way represented the Barney quote and Slota's inward travel, going deep inside himself.
Aleks Slota performing Adrian Brun's piece
A nice observation is how this piece can be connected to Slota's own work with associate speaking and ritualistic behaviour, which was also in focus of the work proposed to his surrogate. The performance Tongue Tied was performed by Florian Feigl that evening. Slota himself performed this work in 2012.
Florian Feigl performing Aleks Slota's Tongue Tied
“Language is confused, language is confusing, I confuse languages. I get tongue tied, I trip on words, I get stuck on words, I keep speaking”, says a text connected to this piece on Slota's website, which gives us a framework for this action. The setup was minimalistic with Feigl sitting on a chair in the white space of Meinblau. He was speaking an endless stream of words in both German as well as in English. In the piece the performer, here Feigl, stopped his stream randomly by slapping his cheek, which reset his actions and the wordstream restarted. Feigl's intensity took up the whole space and kept the audience concentrated for the 30+ minutes that the performance lasted. The setup was made so that Feigl could have continued longer if he wished to do so. Slota commented in the discussion afterwards that he could see a piece like this to run over a longer time, to be performed to an end, to exhaustion, and in this sense also to be reaching a state of real transcendence.
Narratives and instructions
Another of the performed works that used the spoken word as prime medium, was Camilla Graff Junior's surrogation of Joël Verwimp's older Dummy: Three Day Therapy Combination Pack. The piece took its departure in a conceptual instruction kit for therapy of so-called communication infections. The days before this program Graff Junior had already done the two first parts of the therapy, making the last become the surrogate performance for the evening. The instruction for this final part was to speak about the last three months of her life. Graff Junior started speaking about her extensive travelling and her finding out that she herself was pregnant and the impact this so far has had on her life.
The use of autobiography is not a new thing for Graff Junior, the same with the use of speech and narratives, which she herself uses as prime components in her work. This action therefore had a very natural and intimate character, where she was sitting in the seats with the audience telling her story as you would do to a trusted friend.
Lan Hungh surrogating Jörn J. Burmester's: My Last Performance
Verwimp's piece was instruction based, which we also witnessed in Lan Hungh's surrogation of Jörn Burmester's My Last Performance. In this performance the performer had a total of 200 cards and on each card was a sentence containing "This my last performance". The performer divided the cards into stacks and placed them onto the floor. He then picked up the cards one by one and read them aloud, throwing them afterwards on the floor. When Burmester himself performed the piece, none of the actions described on the cards took place; they were instead intended to be happening in the mind of the people attending. Hungh had another take on this, with actually placing some props and using these during the performance in relation to the actions read aloud. The surrogated piece therefore became a fusion of Hungh's own work with instructions in the shape of illustrated cards and props used for actions in the frame of Burmester's concept.
Another piece that dealt with the use of language was Lise Mignon surrogating Camilla Graff Junior's No More Being Quiet. When Graff Junior performed this piece herself she encountered people on the street via the act of speech, imposing speech on the passersby. Mignon chose another take on this task, reflecting on the way we use language and speech, where today we are always surrounded by voices in our engagement with society. In this sense, how is it possible to make an opinion stand out?
Lise Mignon and Camilla Graf Junior
Therefore Mignon chose to be quiet for a whole day, only communicating with her eyes and her body. In this way she wanted to give the meaning back to the voice, and also reflect on whether this act was empowering or disempowering for her, to feel if this made her stronger or more fragile. The piece in this new form, became about silence as a way of communication. When presenting the piece at Meinblau, Mignon wore a shirt with the text: "Today I am being quiet", sitting quietly in front of Graff Junior playing a sound file explaining her actions, which was in the form of a letter written to Graff Junior addressing her reflections on the topic of speech and not speaking.
The initiator and conceptualiser of the Erogate/Surrogate project, Ilya Noé, was herself a surrogate this evening. This year for Florian Feigl. He instructed her to laugh at her mirror image for five minutes. This instruction based piece was introduced as a part of Feigl's artistic research and so-called Self Portraits. These pieces are intended to be each five minutes long and are primarily done as video performances. Feigl sees these performance pieces as compositions performed after a strict scheme. Noé therefore entered the space formally dressed, first she sat calmly and then started to laugh at herself. The laugh increased and the audience started to laugh with her, laughing at the absurdity of the action itself. When the five minutes had passed she stopped and the action was over as instructed by Feigl.
Ilya Noé surrogating Florian Feigl. Feigl introduces his concept
Reworkings
Joël Verwimp did a surrogation and reworking of Lan Hungh's Buy Clothes. Verwimp chose to take components from Hungh's piece and to restage these in a conceptual way, using the architecture of Meinblau as a central component in his actions. On the end wall was a video projection of Verwimp swimming naked in a lake, going after a box. This box he brought with him into the performance space and showed the audience that it was full of coins. Verwimp then walked up to the first floor of Meinblau and slowly started to drop the coins down, one by one. He repeated this action after the shrine was empty; like he was dropping these into a pond for luck. Verwimp additionally included the audience in the performance, where he placed three witnesses 'on stage'. He whispered a line of a song in the ears of the witnesses to sing: "Ding dong the witch is dead", which originates from The Wizard of Oz. In Hungh's performance the coins were central components and dealt with economic crisis in the symbolic shape of him needing these to be able to buy clothes for his naked body. Maybe therefore Verwimp chose this song as a reference, due to the fact that the story of The Wizard of Oz has been interpreted as a monetary allegory, which also can explain why he himself was swimming naked out in a lake, going for the shrine filled with gold.
The last performance of the evening was Francesca Ciardi's surrogation of Lise Mignon's I Always Wanted To..., which was a series of actions Mignon did some years ago in a collective of performers. Mignon asked her surrogate Ciardi to do something she always wanted to do, but for some reason has never done, or wouldn't dare to do unless somebody asked her to. Since Ciardi couldn't be present in Berlin she made a video performance from Rome, which was projected on the wall of Meinblau. The form was a simple, again language based, piece related to Mignon's instruction, but with another take: Ciardi chose to use negations instead, what she had never wanted to do, and instead of only one action, she listed 100 things that she never wanted to do.
Erogate/ Surrogate performers final discussion
Concluding the cycle
Essential for the concept of the Erogate/Surrogate project and the performers of the last section of the series was that of collaboration and shared authorship. Last year's Month of Performance Art had a focus on shared practices, which was a research that this evenings group of performers all were involved in, and which seemed to have been developed even further this evening. The discussion therefore also inflicted on the form of the erogation and surrogation, and the formation of the circular structure proposed by Noé. This way of working therefore seemed natural for all performers involved, which created a beautiful whole closing of the Erogate/Surrogate cycle.