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Bbeyond performance, Titanic Belfast (April 2nd, 2012)
Slavka Sverakova, 2011-04-20
Bbeyond artists and guests: Marilyn Arsem, Amy Brooks, Brian Connolly, Jayne Cherry, Felipe Faundez, Kris Gillen, Jennifer Hanley, Tony Hill, Sandra Johnston, James King, Paul King, Alastair MacLennan, Sinead O’Donnell, Rainer Pagel, Kasia Pagel, Caroline Pugh, Brian Patterson, Anne Quail, Pavana Reid, Elvira Santamaria Torres. Angela Halliday, Fiona Larkin, Emmanuelle Negre and Jordan Hutchings documented it.
Named after the chief draughtsman the Andrews Gallery hosted the centenary celebration of the Titanic being tested to meet the Board of Trade standards and being handed over to the owner. An irregular long room on level 2 of the new Belfast tourist attraction called Titanic, nicknamed already "the iceberg", refused to appear festive.
Three female voices, one mellifluous alto, dactyl loving, the other cheerfully down- to- earth and the third of the folk singer, presented fragments from several secondary sources, in the compilation by Ali Joy White, which she made available to me for the quotes below, in italic.
The story line was upbeat, positive, centred on those who built and tested the ship, listing the uplifting expectations trusted in the intelligent design and skilled labour, of draughtsmen and workers at Harland and Wolff during the period it took to built Titanic: from 1907 to 1913, more than fifteen thousand men and – some women - are employed.
A Tuesday... What’s the weather like? Clear and fair. Nice day for it.
If you want a good ship built, come to Belfast! This one took just over thirty seven months.
Harland and Wolff working hours: Start at ten minutes to eight, finish at 5.30 pm. Ten minutes break at 10 am and a half an hour lunch break. Saturday – finish 12.30. A nine hour day, forty nine hour working week will earn you £2 a week and if you have it in you to work all night Friday and all day Saturday, you can shunt that up to £5. There are no special amenities or modern facilities such as showers or canteens. E: (Bring your own piece.) Holidays: two days at Christmas, two days at Easter and one week in July. These aren’t paid holidays – wives are advised to save one shilling a week to cover. Oh, and smoking is not permitted, ANYWHERE.
Hundred years ago
78 men worked in the Titanic’s engine room, firemen, stokers, greasers and support crew. Thin wisps of smoke from the second and third funnels show the furnaces are fired…41 officers and senior crewmen – engineers, chief stewards, cooks and storekeepers...Over the wireless apparatus, Jack Phillips and Harold Bride crouch. Adjustments to be made, wires to be connected, generators to be tested. All state of the art - fresh from the Marconi factory... - Murdoch, Lightoller, Blair, Pitman, Boxhall, Lowe and Moody… It’s going to be a very busy day.
Just before 6am, the tugs come up the Lagan to pull her away from the basin, through Victoria Channel, into Belfast Lough. She reaches a point almost two miles off Carrickfergus. The tugs cast off, and wheel round to return to Belfast. Titanic stands, for the first time, alone in open water. A brief command, and the blue-and-white burgee, the signal letter A is run up: ‘I am undergoing speed trials’. A moment of suspense – silence - followed by a jangle of bells in the engine room as orders from the bridge are received to set the engines in motion. A faint, almost imperceptible, shudder radiates through the ship, as the immense steel and bronze propellers revolve for the first time..Notes are taken, observations compared. In their cabin behind the officers’ quarters, the Marconi operators continue to test their circuits, transmitting test messages to wireless stations at Liverpool and Malin Head.
Wearing complimentary white rosebuds, the audience in casually distributed seats faced the glass wall, the daylight flattening the two readers and the singer into dark silhouettes. If this abstraction was unintentional, the sound work(language) could have been embodied in the space more successfully.
The glory of invention, skill, and devotion has survived as nostalgia, after the monstrous collision with immortal nature that soon after crashed the victorious labour’s declaration of pride, veiling the hubris of the idea of unsinkable Titanic. Nostalgic longing is perceived as a response to feeling uprooted or unmoored. After thirty years of darkness, called The Troubles (manmade suffering) Belfast longs for the confidence of that earlier era. To connect revival of the city with a memory of a ship sunk by an iceberg is a strange, comical and ironic, choice. Yet, history is full of evidence of civilisations fascinated by tragedy, suffering and death, from Greek myths up to 9/11, Katrina disasters, etc.
The Bbeyond artists faced contradictory and formidable contexts: the above positive storyline and the consciousness of the tragic end; the space named after the leading draughtsman and its anonymous ugliness and emptiness; the audience called by a brief announcement from various stages of visiting "experiences/memories" of the new Titanic "museum". Layers of past and present, fact and legend, belief and loss of it, meshed with the presence of storytellers and performance artists.
Titled Holding Time, the group performance involved a slow walk across the longer axis of the gallery. The barefoot Bbeyond artists, dressed all in black and wearing white carnations held a glass full of water each. Holding it tight and not to spill any effortlessly evoked the notions of discipline, perfection, caring and collective mood. The real people and real action ripped apart the constructed veil of the story line. The event became original, authentic, unrepeatable for each viewer. The black attire provided visual homogenity as did the decision to start the walk minutes before the storytelling and to end it a while after the readers finished. While the storytelling set the idea of overestimation of people’s competence, hubris and Titanic as failing protagonist, the black group echoed the role of classical Greek chorus. The parodos (procession) signified the opening of a curtain before a play started, the exodus (exit) served as the curtain closing. Greek chorus is a homogeneous group of performers who comment in a collective mode on some issue to help the audience to follow the verbal. The chorus works in unison, often applying synchronization, echo, ripple, and changes and rhythm led by the coryphaeus. Indeed, one Bbeyond artist took a similar role. The dedicated carrier of a carafe watched over and without haste added water when it was spilled. Negotiating the furniture, unevenness of the floor, legs of seated people, walls, other performers and gravity, the silent performers focused on holding the glasses. Not losing even a drop of the gift of nature, not making a hasty change in breathing, holding, walking, moving the weight from one leg onto the other not making the slightest error, keeping it perfect, not spilling - all those coalesced in an idea of confidence in humanity without irreverence to nature.
The authority of the legend of Titanic was replaced by the dispassionate intimacy, at once elegant and sensitive, insisting on the noblest trait of human existence, vis a vis mortality, togetherness and mutual support. Holding Time sidestepped the final confrontation with time - the black river of extinction by evoking the secret strength of slow silence. A brilliantly simple motive, carried the ethos and aesthetics of a humble obligation to do a job well, with precision, guarded by self-control. The performance dealt with hubris by rejection, and the group appearance evoked classical chorus giving advice about not provoking Nemesis. The black procession embraced the inevitability of death by casting off self enhancing preoccupations, by existing moment by moment, without any concern for the past or the future. Touching thus on the Buddhist concept of death becoming a non - event if we abandon any concern for self, since that is the very thing we lose in death. However, an existentialist idea surfaced next to it. By valuing the contribution of each individual carrying the glass, and by clear rejection of an illusion that time is limitless (holding time indicates that) the loss of self in death is keenly regretted. The consolation offered by Epicurus, as long as we are alive, death happens to others, became muted to something akin to: live in your particular way KNOWING that you deprive yourself of all the others. Thus the silent chorus expressed what the story- line would not be able to, ever.
While the story telling, the newly built site and aim for an economic revival of Belfast, provided outer contexts for the Bbeyond performance, its inner core was free from the fascination with the disaster, with the massive news coverage, and enquiries. To its originality the verbal compilation was unequal.
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