I Swear I Was There - The Legendary Pasts of Tessa Lynch - By Neil Cooper
1. Then
On August 13th 1970, artist Joseph Beuys and impresario Richard Demarco travel to Rannoch Moor, the fifty square mile expanse that straddles Perth and Kinross, Lochaber and Argyll and Bute. On this boggy site described by Robert Louis Stevenson in 'Kidnapped' as 'A wearier looking desert a man never saw,' the German icon championed by Demarco since the pair met in Dusseldorf two years previously performs 'Action on Rannoch Moor,' in which open space and artist become one.
Ten days later, Beuys exhibits and performs as part of 'Strategy: Get Arts,' an exhibition of contemporary German art at Edinburgh College of Art. Beuys' contributions to the show include 'Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony,' performed by Beuys with three tape operatives, and the first version of what would become 'Arena - where would I have got if I had been intelligent!, 1970-1972', a series of photographs documenting Beuys' sculptures and actions. The latter will be revised with each subsequent showing.
On the same day, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, English avant-rock band Soft Machine, named after William Burroughs' 1961 cut-up novel, are preparing to play live as part of that year's BBC Proms, the first rock band to do so. A record of the show is released in 1988, and in 2007 is a bonus disc with a remastered CD edition of Soft Machine's 1970 album, 'Third.'
Rewind to 1963, and Mark Boyle's 'Erections, Constructions and Assemblages' appears at the Traverse Art Gallery in Edinburgh. Boyle also reads poetry behind the paperback bookshop run by Jim Haynes, one of the driving forces behind the Traverse. Boyle and former Edinburgh College of Art student Joan Hills will later produce work with their children Sebastian and Georgia as The Boyle Family,
On September 7th, towards the end of the Edinburgh International Festival Drama Conference at the University's McEwan Hall, Boyle, Hills and others including American theatre-maker Charles Marowitz, who directs radically reassembled collages of Shakespeare, take part in 'In Memory of Big Ed,' a Happening on the balcony which attracts press attention primarily due to the appearance of a naked young woman.
Zoom to December 23rd 1966, and Boyle and Hills perform 'Son et Lumiere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water' at London's premiere underground club, UFO, after which they provide light-shows for the club's live acts, including Soft Machine, on a regular basis.
Cross-fade to 1967, and in France, Boyle, Hills and Soft Machine score a production of Pablo Picasso's play, 'Desire Caught by The Tail.' Back in Edinburgh, they collaborate with choreographer Graziella Martinez, and create a sound and light show for a Traverse production of Alfred Jarry's play, 'Ubu In Chains.'
Fast forward to 1969, and Boyle and Hills present 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The show features a 360 degree projected environment, and on June 24th, two films by Boyle and Hills, 'Beyond Image' and 'Son of Beyond Image,' are premiered. Soft Machine perform live.
By the time 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' is seen at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, and at the MacRobert Arts Centre at the University of Stirling in 1973, Soft Machine and the Boyles have ceased collaborating, and it seems neither party will be seen or
heard together again.
Of course, all of the above is the stuff of legend. All we have are the pictures.
2. Now
Fast-forward to July 25th 2010, and in Edinburgh, Tessa Lynch's 'You Are Here' is going over old ground.
Commissiond by the Collective Gallery, 'You Are Here' is happening in Festival Square, a public space tucked off Lothian Road's busy city centre thoroughfare. Over the road opposite are the current home of the Traverse Theatre and the newly extended Usher Hall, Edinburgh's equivalent of the Royal Albert Hall. Set to one side of the square close to the road is what looks like a seriously oversize TV screen.
In the centre of Festival Square, three dancers aloft various size platforms act out rituals that mirror their own images captured on the screen facing them as trippy music pulses them along. Onscreen, the dancers filmed movements are more or less the same, only with backdrops projected behind them
Look, there's Rannoch Moor in boggy living colour, and see, there's something that looks like a poster from 'Strategy: Get Arts'. Now wait, there's the triumphalist grandeur of Calton Hill. And the music? Why, that's Soft Machine at the Proms, wigging out for all they're worth in the pillar of the British establishment's locked groove.
Running for twenty minutes and repeated four times, 'You Are Here' is a gloriously impressionistic pick-and-mix collage of the iconic artistic history on its own doorstep. It continues a rediscovery of the 1960s and 1970s by a younger generation of artists weaned on name-dropping counter-cultural legend but who want to get beyond the fetishised mythology of peace and love.
Lynch's previous Collective commissioned performance piece, 'Alexandrite,' took place at Edinburgh International Climbing Arena in Ratho, and referenced Picabia and the theatrical illusion of Dr Pepper's Ghost, which gives the appearance of two things happening simultaneously.
'You Are Here' chimes too with other Collective off-site works. In 2004, Jenny Hogarth's 'Pentland Rising' reimagined the Covenanters 1666 Battle of Rullion Green at Midlothian ski slope. In 2009, Henna-Rikka Halonen's 'Commonwealth Suite' restaged and filmed 'The Bathhouse,' Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1930 constructivist satire. Halonen's piece featured a cast drawn from Edinburgh Diving Club, and was filmed inside the Commonwealth Pool, which opened in 1970, the
year Edinburgh hosted the Commonwealth Games as well as 'Strategy: Get Arts'.
But 'You Are Here' is not a re-enactment. Rather, it is an inquisitive forage through
history en route to becoming something else.
3. Then Again
Rewind to April 30th 1971, and documentary film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, who captured Bob Dylan's 1965 UK tour in 'Don't Look Back,' is immortalising an event that will eventually be released in 1979 as 'Town Bloody Hall.' The film bears witness to a debate on women's liberation in New York Town Hall before a packed audience, who watch radical feminists Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Caballos tear chunks out of bullish novelist and the event's Chairman, Norman Mailer. 'Town Bloody Hall' thrillingly captures the volatility, naiveté and passion of the post 1960s era when some kind of idealism still existed.
Fast forward to April 2009, and theatre artist Nic Green and her company are performing as part of the Behaviour festival of experimental theatre at The Arches in Glasgow. The piece is also called 'Town Bloody Hall,' and forms the second part of what will eventually become 'Trilogy.' The third part will culminate in a mass choir of women volunteers singing William Blake's 'Jerusalem' as they liberate themselves of their clothes, 1960s style, and dance naked.
The original idea for 'Town Bloody Hall' was to re-enact the film in full, line by line, gesture by gesture, tic by nervy tic. Green and her company had already learnt it off by heart before they changed their minds. Once an excerpt is screened, it's clear that any live interpretation would have been upstaged at every turn by the sheer bombast of the film's fly-on-the-wall charisma.
Instead, Green and her cast use Pennebaker's film as a springboard to explore what feminist ideas may or may not mean to women – and men – today. The end result is deeply personal and, as an understated counterpoint to the verbal bruisings doled out in the film, quite quite beautiful.
4. Now Then, Now Then, Now Then
Those who don't learn from the past are destined to repeat it.
Pan back to 2010, and the same evening as 'You Are Here' is being performed in Festival Square, across town Damo Suzuki, former vocalist with German band Can, is playing. Suzuki joined Soft Machine contemporaries Can some time in 1969 or 1970 after being spotted busking by bass player Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Leibezeit while in a Munich cafe. Suzuki added freeform vocals to crucial Can albums before retiring from music in 1974, only to return as a solo artist in 1983.
Accompanying Suzuki is a group of locally sourced musicians he dubs 'sound carriers,' who can be anyone who emails him expressing a desire to play. The idea, on what looks like a restlessly nomadic never-ending tour, is that every show is different.
The Edinburgh four-piece may be young, but they clearly own a few Can records. What emerges over an hour–long improvised set is a form of fantasy-wish-fulfillment homage that is the closest the sound carriers will ever get to being Can. Yet, by attempting to be Can, they are becoming something else. They are rehearsing the sound of their future. Suzuki on the other hand is the one repeating himself, caught up in his own moment, a tribute band re-enactment of himself.
5. Now, Then, Always and Hereafter
April 2007, and for one night only at the ICA, Joan Hills and Sebastian Boyle remix 'Beyond Image' and 'Son of 'Beyond Image' to a live recording of Soft Machine from the same era.
The event is part of a series of re-enactments, including 'Concerto For Voice and Machinery 2,' Jo Mitchell's recreation of German industrial iconoclasts Einsturzende Neubaten's original 'Concerto For Voice and Machinery. ' Commissioned by the ICA and performed on January 3rd 1984, the performance ends in chaos after the band attempt to drill a hole in the ICA floor, allegedly to expose secret underground tunnels in the Mall, close to Buckingham Palace.
In 1988, Test Department, British contemporaries of Einsturzende Neubaten, reconstitute the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. Based on an ancient Pagan Mayday rite, the Beltane Fire is a politically motivated re-enactment which is in part a response to the draconian legislation that outlawed open-air raves with the Criminal Justice Bill. A May Queen, drummers and dancers painted blue, red or green process around the hill prior to a ceremony in-between the pillars. It looks like film director Kenneth Anger's lysergic version of the underworld.
Beltane continues today as an annual fixture of Edinburgh's civic calendar. With Test Department, who morphed into site-specific environmentalist collective NVA Productions, no longer at the helm, today's Beltane is arguably a re-enactment thrice over. The Criminal Justice Bill, however, is long gone.
Rewind to 1981, and Edinburgh post-punk band The Scars film a video for their song, 'All About You,' on Calton Hill. In the video, a man with blue body make-up and Medusa-like snakes for hair terrorises the band from one of the towers like some spectral arbiter of Beltanes past, present and future.
Back-flip to 1970 and the wide open space of Beuys' 'Action on Rannoch Moor,' to Soft Machine at the Proms and to 'Strategy: Get Arts,' which, like all palindromes, looks backwards and forwards simultaneously, Dr Pepper's Ghost reborn in words.
Now jump-cut to 2010, to Tessa Lynch and 'You Are Here.' Only the legend remains.
Repeat to fade ad nauseum.