| Water Banquet by Richard Downing |
| First presented in 2001 by U-Man Zoo |
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synopsis: Performance installation. A table of water, ten metres by two; a cyclical but constantly evlving banquet of sound, image and story; a memory of meeting and departures ... and some fish. Presented first as a work in progress at the TheatrShop Cymru weeken at Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 2001 A table of water, thirty feet long and six feet wide; a cyclical but constantly evolving banquet of sound, image and story; of memory, meeting and departure... and some spoons. U-Man Zoo is an interdisciplinary artists collective based in Aberystwyth. Blurring boundaries between performance and installation, Aqua Impura is delivered to an audience of only eighteen gathered at its unique table. Intimate, evocative and restrained, this is a foodless dinner of lasting savour for the hungry of eye, ear and imagination. Performed again at Tactile Bosch, Llandaff North, Cardiff 16-19 April 2003 |
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| Extraordinarily watery rituals.... | |
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Water Banquet
by Richard Downing
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[print] |
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venue Aberystwyth Arts Centre |
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November 11, 2001 |
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| U-Man Zoo, the performance art company that brought the wardrobes installation to the Aberystwyth Arts Centre at last year’s Theatreshop Cymru festival, returned this year with new project, which they call a Water Banquet. No tickets were required and as it did not take place within an enclosed space it was truly open to everyone who wanted to see, hear, touch, and participate. The several scenes or courses of the banquet took place at intervals over the three days of the Theatreshop week-end. I was unfortunately only able to see some of these scenes, so on this page I can only provide some sketchy descriptions weighed down by an awareness that there is a lot that I missed. PLACE SETTINGS: SATURDAY NOON Noon on Saturday was the first time I saw the setting of the Water Banquet: a long, wide wood banquet table with a collection of mismatched, vaguely Victorian or Edwardian chairs arranged around it, taking up most of the floor space between the Great Hall and the Arts Centre Café, and easily visible from the stairs and the second-floor balcony. The surface of the table was covered with what appeared, if one wasn’t looking closely, to be a sheet of glass. But when one passerby reached out a hand to touch the slick tabletop, the surface melted and fingers vanished under it: the “glass” was in fact a layer of water, contained within a four-inch frame built on top of the black tabletop. The woman who had tried to touch the table looked at her fingertips under the water, then stepped back and gave the entire table a closer glance. I recall an architectural diagram, from a magazine article about archaeology, which I had seen years ago, showing what a Roman atrium would have looked like. In the centre of the room there would have been a shallow rectangular space, filled with water, to be used as a well or reflecting pool. To walk around, drink from, and see yourself in. From the balcony I looked at the banquet table. It appeared in aerial view, like a diagram. People walked around it and looked at themselves in it. Others looked at the lookers. Later that afternoon, at about 1 p.m., a U-Man Zoo member dressed up in a black tailcoat like a waiter walked round the table lifting stones out of the water with a pair of bread tongs and placed them on a tray, accompanied by French accordion café music broadcast from a hi-fi placed in full view a few feet away from the table. The chairs were empty. The wet dark stones gleamed. The ‘waiter’ smiled at people eating lunch at the café. A little girl grabbed the edge of the table, pulled herself up, reached toward the water before dropping back to the floor to stare at the waiter as he moved round the table. At 6 p.m. Saturday, the accordion music was playing again, and at each place setting there was a small watercolour painting, executed in vivid colours. One depicted bottles of wine on a table—appropriate enough for the surroundings. Others showed houses, street scenes, other still-lifes. Next to each was a bread plate which seemed to have been used as a palate for its corresponding painting. Evidence of paint-mixing, residue of the process of creation stained each plate, and looked as if it had been consumed by the artist. Having missed the previous episode of the performance, I don’t know what happened at the table before things came to rest this way, but it was difficult not to imagine that a group of painters had sat in the chairs, pulled themselves up to the table, unfolded their brush-wipingcloths and placed them on their laps, passed the pigments round, dipped their brushes into the water surrounding the place settings, and painted—some ravenously, some with polite control, then, when they were finished, had left without doing the washing up. On Saturday evening, three toasts were offered. ‘Guests’ were invited from among the spectators. Our host filled glasses with Sambuca and placed them neck-deep in water. Then he set their contents on fire. The second toast consisted of the first two lines of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal.” I watched from the balcony alongwith a crowd of people, most of whom had just been released from the theatre at the end of Torch Theatre’s “Conversations with a Cupboard Man,” as the host dispassionately asked his “guests” to “extinguish” their drinks, “stand forward,” “stand forward behind your chairs, stand forward two paces back.” He reached under the table and set the row of tealights in the centre of the tabletop on fire. A cathedral choir’s recorded voices burst out from the speakers, controlled by a technician lying on his stomach under the table. Helium jets shot sheets of flame toward the Arts Centre ceiling. The guests were asked to drink to the toast. Commanded, in the same dispassionate voice. Drink, “to modest proposals.” I wondered if they would obey his command. Why would they? Swift’s “proposal” is a satire—most people know that. Nobody wants to take seriously the idea that it would be sensible for the English to starve the Irish—or any group of people who have been subjected to political and/or economic colonisation. The “proposal” could easily be written today with the entire developed world as consumers and the underpaid garment factory workers in Mexico’s Maquiladora zone and growers of coffee and chocolate in Africa as the consumed. Still, the Water Banquet was a joke, a game, a play—a ritual with no consequences—wasn’t it? Our host smiled silently at the drinkers without partaking himself. What would have happened if someone had decided not to drink to modest proposals? If I had been invited to this banquet, would I refuse to drink? Would you? The third and final toast of the evening, offered at 11 pm, was more palatable. We were asked to drink to art, to its power to change our surroundings and ourselves. I was invited to be a guest this time. I stood forward, moved behind my chair, moved back, followed the director, played along with the ritual as the voices soared with the flames. What I saw of the “Water Banquet” was an intoxicating cocktail of cool ritual commonplaces and vivid, jarring out-of-places. This was perhaps not surprising for a group of artists responsible for a previous “event” in which, I have been told, they drove around in disused washing machines on castors. The Water Banquet demonstrated that kind of abandon, using ordinary objects and rituals in extraordinary ways that bent the way spectators see things, the way an object half in and half out of a glass of water appears bent when you look at the glass from the side. |
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| reviewer: Rebecca Nesvett |
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