LIVE ZOOM PERFORMANCES
'Repetition is such a propulsive force
here to emphasize significant themes and experiences!'
Thank you National Poetry Library @nationalpoetrylibrary for inviting me to perform as part of last night's The Poetry Showcase.
Watch here:
#performancepoetry #liveart #performanceart #poetryfilm #videopoetry #newmedia #spokenword #poetrycommunity
LIVE ZOOM POETRY PERFORMANCE FOR PRAGUE BIENNALE 2022
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'The rhymes are so clever and a delight'
Favourites: “Can can clicks; 'Slapstick haptic'
'The drawings are lovely.'
“What you choose to see is up to you”. Powerful.'
‘So unusual and original beautiful images and the rhythm is so engaging. Great ending’
‘Weird and wildly wonderful’
‘A cross between Specsavers and the end of the world. Seriously well conceived!’
‘Loving the little snippet vibes … like fleeting memories’
‘I enjoyed: “Neo fantastical” “Discounts applied” “East Life” hahaha “Favour/waver” Clever lens and absolutely lovely drawings Lee. This has a very powerful message’
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 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
‘Love the live element alongside the constant peeling and reworking layers of time and perception’,
'Can so relate to George Michael!',
“Dad watched the match; I watched the players.” Love the idea of football as erotica and the ‘soundfield’!’,
‘I also smuggled Gay Times!’
‘Never seen anything THAT immersive on Zoom!'’
‘It had a cadence and a reality that I found powerful’
‘You have the ability to verbalise all those layers that I feel but have yet to find a voice for! Angry and authentic, Avant-garde like Derek Jarman’
‘GENIUS meld of powerful messaging, word play and sense of history’
‘‘So relatable, so cool. I love this - so theatrical!,’
‘Seeping peeping, great ending echo'
Collage is such a tired word. Clever at Seeing without Being Seen proposes a new way of thinking about collage as a term by creating a bridge between video and performance. What may it mean to remediate, excavate and bring back to life a personal archive of paintings and drawings and mobile phone recording made over the span of 25 years through the medium of moving image and then remediate that remediation through the medium of live performance via 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 young queer experience told through my own personal autobiography. ‘Never seen anything THAT immersive on Zoom!' one audience member recently commented.
The key underlying principles in early video art were the body and the performance object and that was the thing that signified its liveness and differentiated it from the history of cinema /avant-garde film. The parts of the performance presented as a back projection performance comes from the history of video art (Vito Acconci, Valie Export, early Nam June Paik, Robert Morris’ film Mirror etc.) where the camera becomes like a mirror or a viewer that can be controlled. The video being live and able to feedback on itself is similar to my Zoom usage here.. On one hand the work is like a flashback 45 years but now bought into the present due to the now unprecedented familiar use of Zoom as a desktop communication tool in 2020/1 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Zoom attempts to put bodies in a room (at a time) when you can’t have bodies in a room. People have become much more familiar with it to a point of fatigue in terms of amongst other things, how it promotes a disembodied embodiment. In this Zoom explosion, primary importance has been given to the face and the way that we are looking at each other now even to the naming of an app like Facetime (similar model to Zoom just different name) and not as Matthew Noel-Tod, when in conversation about this work, wittlingly remarked, called ‘Backtime’. The face is hugely significant in all this technology so me turning my back is a simple yet powerful reversal of that. Reading me as well as hearing me. A recent viewer suggested that my turned back appears almost demonic. Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either. A friend commented upon seeing the performance that her favourite part was when I turn around to check if the audience are ‘still there’.
The performance really pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. With my back turned to audience, my back operates like a screen/projection surface, exploiting the fragmented-ness and inaccessible feeling of turning your back to the audience. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. Green screen effect employed with a constant repetitive video being played ‘projected’ onto my back gives the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body, that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment, that of a body that has been layered with fragments of text/images/ history. Sounds that can be heard throughout the performance are textured, glitchy and uncomfortable deliberately to give a sense of layers which in turn gives the painful impression of things (the many bodies that feature) being skinned. My back turned to the camera/to the audience constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body that keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. Whilst some viewers have comment that they thought I was really controlling the green screen, but I have no control; as the green screen progresses, the body seems to disappear more and more as more and more layers on the surface.
Containing so many visual and audio clashes and dizzying sound levels for texture and difference, the layering subsides in places and towards the end and the taunts are heard more clearly. Whilst there are moments throughout the performance where I make everything super clear and then I go back out, this is a performance where the importance and clarity of hearing an understanding is deliberately obscured/ intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience many not understand what's going on. Whilst audiences may or may not pick up on all the many references here, it is intended that they will, at base level, have a sensory/elusive view of the work, as one viewer recently described ‘a block of amazing visual and auditory input’.
Whilst it could be said to turn one’s back on an audience is a deliberate act to conceal oneself or block the audience, that’s not what is happening here either. The audience is never sure what is live, what is pre-recorded and what is playback of what has been recorded during the live performance. Pre-recorded sounds playing in the background on iTunes shuffle which I react to there and then in the moment of liveness. Some viewers of documentation of the performance have mentioned that they are completely unaware that they were watching documentation of a live performance. Some have suggested that the writing on my back is happening live too. Whilst the green screen background acts a base, each live iteration containing so many levels of improvisation means that the performance can never be repeated twice. Its duration is important (beyond the initial early iterations of this work at approx.. 5 minutes); through a length(ier) the viewer is shown the complexity of the layers, what’s in them and how they interact, and they are being show that again and again and again and it’s never the same.
Queerness is inherently performative; we play different parts to survive.
This performance nails a specific talent queer people need to acquire, the title. It evokes sharply and poignantly a lot of the feelings which are so common to discovering one's sexuality in adolescence ('I got very clever/Very clever at seeing/Without being seen'). As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. It is a self-reflection – a journey through identity and a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I speak my personal truth, my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst it can be understood as one person’s (my) narrative so too can it easily be read as lots of different voices layered to talk about wider levels of experience with various references to cultural context that (any)one can relate to: George Michael, late night tv, bad porn. Intimate and personal in a really powerful way, part of the performance includes reference to a dad and son (me and my dad) conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way. Here we travel back in time to 1996, to a football match between Chelsea and Aston Villa courtesy of a cassette recording played through a tape recorder made at the time of the match. Inspired by Samuel Becketts’s usage of the tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape, the tape recorder becomes an an extension of my body. The double of the term ‘tackle’ is one of many humorous double-entendres/double meanings employed throughout including: tackle, cruise, hole, and fag. The performance sets up a range of ambiguities and spaces for interpretation. For example, depending on who the subject of the call is, the ‘eye-eye’ imagery and audio chants can be seen as threatening or flirtatious/provocative in a threatening or flirtatious way.
THIS is what it was like for me to grow up gay in 1990s working class homophobic Britain and then a self-reflective critique of gay male subculture, of what it meant for me to come to London in early 2000s and be confronted with the implicit power relations attached to gay male queer physical social spaces of conviviality. For example, when I go into the pub for ‘bears’ and ‘cubs, I directly confess my personal experience of these spaces, laying myself bare using cultural expressions to talk about queerness as a community and speak of its challenges, pressures, pros and the cons like gay male identity labelling and body policing etc. The gay male subcultural milieu needs critique – it creates such stereotypes.
The work underlines the message ‘just be you’; the work gives others permission to be themselves., My performance is raw and authentic, I am saying that to be authentic I had to look at and collage together images and visuals to explain my identity to myself. This performance is my path to authenticity, and I share this in order for the audience to become more authentic. The idea of building a queer identity was so different pre-Internet. In the manner of bricolage – building /constructing what is at hand/available, as a teenager I could be said to be the queer bricoleur making my collage constructions in my teenage scrapbook which I refer to in the performance. At the end of the day I had to experience the same cultural elements (as heterosexual folk around me) and make something entirely different with it. I was seeing things in things that were not necessarily meant for queer people. I was making things queer, these little building blocks in my identity and it was not meant to be there at all e.g. watching the same football match with my dad with my Dad watching the match and me watching and fancying the players.
OTHER RECENT LIVE ZOOM PERFORMANCES
PRESS PLAY: A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS
‘It’s just so funny, using your jumper to dry the dog!’
‘Love the mixed media & humour’
‘Such an amazing use of visuals and multimedia!’
'Lee, don’t share the bonds like he and Alex together’’ A rhymical piece with a sweet lyrical feel. You’re a master at rhyme. Lovely flow and delivery’
This live Zoom performance poem is an exploration into gay male coupledom and the quotidian, PRESS PLAY: A DAY OUT WITH RUFUS relates to what me and my partner Alex remember about a shared experience: a day out with Rufus the dog, the dog we often dog-sit. As individual memories aren’t always shared, the conversation might reveal some startling yet humorous differences in terms of each person’s recollection. Creating a bridge between video and performance, drawings of Rufus that I have made over the course of a few years appear projected onto my body, giving the impression of text and imagery superimposed over my body as a screen/projection space; that I am wearing text/imagery like a garment and of a body that has been layered with fragments of images/history. This effect is achieved through the green-screen effect on Zoom to really push Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame, act as a visual container and play with different levels of order and chaos through the visual confinement achieved. My body constantly comes in and out of the green screen; my body keeps getting subsumed and emerging again. A tape recorder acts as an extension of my body and offers another set of voices ( those of Alex’s) to that of mine performing and other voices heard elsewhere. An ongoing tension between me and Rufus unfolds throughout the performance as if he’s taking over my body and taking over my relationship with Alex.
SEEING/NOT SEEING (2020)
‘This is WONDROUS! Cor! FAB!! What IMPACT Can’t wait for a full IMMERSIVE theatrical experience of this! Awkward interactions with non queer population’ very trippy…wow this is disorienting. Very immersive. I also smuggled Gay Times!’
This performance is performed and recorded live via Zoom making usage of its green screen effect. The images that you can see are drawings and paintings I made between 2005-2007 and 2018-2019 and photographic stills and moving image recordings that I took between 2011-2019 on various iPhones.
This short spoken work performance charts teenage-hood; discovering one’s sexuality in private, away from one’s parents. As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. This performance is a self-reflection - a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. I speak my personal truth, my personal history of seeing and not seeing to confront the politics of seeing and underline how validating seeing can be but also the difficulty of not being seen. Whilst it can be understood as one person’s (my) narrative so too can it easily be read as lots of different voices layered to talk about wider levels of experience with various references to cultural context that (any)one can relate to: George Michael, late night tv, bad porn. Part of the performance includes reference to a dad and son (me and my dad) conversation exploring what one is seeing and what the other is seeing about the same action of men in football with one person viewing it one way and the other a different way. Here we travel back in time to 1996, to a football match between Chelsea and Aston Villa courtesy of a cassette recording played through a tape recorder made at the time of the match.
POLARI PUPPET (2020)
A performative reading of the text delivered via Zoom that pushes Zoom’s visual aesthetics as a means to frame. The text was written by me to accompany the exhibition Radical Ventriloquism which I curated earlier this year at Kelder Projects, London. The reading operates as a self-portrait of all different levels of me; on the tape recorder, me speaking with back turned and me reading that disintegrates and gets mashed up by the end. A collision between me reading a lecture and reacting to the sounds of (my voice but distorted) gay slang Polari on shuffle there and then. But more than a self-portrait - a triptych of multiple ‘I’s: me ‘speaking through’ the finger, me speaking with my back turned and me on the tape recorder. Only some people can understand the Polari slang and therefore makes you think about who the audience is in terms of levels of understanding.
