NEW LIVE ZOOM PERFORMANCE: 'PEER' WORLD PREMIERES AT BRAZIL'S FESTIVAL ECRA
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'An intriguing piece of performance art: neither theatre nor film, it tries to find something a little different to play with’
Louise Penn, LouReviews 18/07/22
“What you choose to see is up to you”. Powerful.'
‘Beautiful combination of painting and film’
This is a recording of a live Zoom performance called Peer by British artist and poet Lee Campbell for Brazil’s Festival ECRÃ on Sunday 17 July 2022. The imagery you will see is drawn from my personal archive of artworks (drawings, moving image work, performance art documentation etc) as an artist of over 25 years.
Read review of the performance by Louise Penn here: https://loureviews.blog/2022/07/18/review-peer-by-lee-campbell-online-zoom/
Innovating the possibilities of media re-use, feeding-back and looping round of text, and the layering of the voices, this multi-layered multimedia sociocreative performance live Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of my memories of the seaside.
PEER is rooted in the Kent/Sussex coast and features footage, images, and drawings on seashells and postcards of places/people/objects made along the coast since a child – my own version of scrimshaw. The imagery is juxtaposed poetry I have written which explains the significance of the seaside to me, featuring my family and friends. It captures the strangeness of the British seaside using a telescope that operates like a blinking voyeuristic eye. It reuses performance documentation and footage from my archive as an artist including performances and drawings. The locations of the moving image footage and the drawings on the seashells and postcards were shot/drawn along the Kent coast including Herne Bay, Margate, Whitstable, Sheerness-on-Sea and Dover - all the seaside towns I loved going to as a child growing up in Kent in the 1980s.Black and white drawings reminiscent of the work of artists William Kentridge and Tacita Dean speak of a dark narrative through their nostalgia intercut with snapshots of human activity that pick up the vibes of the seaside. PEER follows on from my prior work that is very observant of English leisure rituals, in places offering snapshots of a less cosmopolitan England, Englishness and a nostalgia for an England that may or may not have existed. A Britain making do with the beaches that we have. The sentimentality and nostalgia within my drawings of Butlins are ripped apart by poetry that discusses how queer people have been silenced in the past ‘This holiday camp where the camp was for straights as campy redcoats were instructed by their bosses not to come out’. This sets up the context for me to discuss my concerns with LGBT allyship in poetry that is humorous in tone but vehemently angry ‘You reduced me to a sandwich, who the hell are you trying to kid? Switching BLT with LBT just to make a few more quid’.
At surface level, the film is made up of just three simple elements: 1) mechanical viewfinder eye 2) the word ‘peer’) 3) footage behind. It may be easy to watch but there is so much to take from it. Putting together disparate images then allowing viewers to draw their own story, what is ‘seen through' a telescope combines nostalgia, British cheekiness, slapstick and a play on words (peer, pier etc.) The telescope eye used as a mask throughout the whole performance is constantly trying to focus.
To read about my long history of creating Zoom immersive performance experiences in the vein of PEER, please read:
Interview with Jane Glennie, Moving Poems Magazine July 2022
See Me: Windows to the Self of the Performer-Autoethnographer, The Autoethnographer
