Mints & Whip cream in my instant noodles, thank you!
Saturday, March 6th, 2010We found ourselves in a chic concrete basement. The space was filled with tables and the walls were lined with white linen booths. Each was numbered, a stage for an artist (some British, some French, many Japanese) to create a 4 minute long one-on-one encounter with an audience member. We were given a series of these dates across the night and the rest of the time we had the opportunity to sit and watch and drink in this busy patchwork of Micro-performances.
This is one of the nice things about the experience of Live Art Speed Dating. Being able to take a step back and just watch the chaotic-seeming melee created out of such tightly structured format. The performances are never contained within their designated space. They are written over each other.
A girl with an umbrella leads her date on a silent dance across and through the space. A video artist helps someone to create a kaleidoscopic pattern of shapes that shoots up the wall. Someone watches through binoculars a figure hidden in the far corner. Three people stand silently in the midst of all of this holding each other. A cacophony of sounds bleed out over each other into comfortable hubhub that might easily be mistaken for the random babble of a busy bar.
The event creates its own miniature world. Little connections. Stories. Moments of engagement. A simple network of intimate encounters that when collected together becomes something more than that. Something incredible and wondrous and full of life.
The structure that its makers have created is just flexible enough that it allows it to become overwhelmed in this way by the artists contained within it, without the whole thing collapsing in on itself.
It’s a delicate balance and one that requires an incredible amount of care to try and maintain. It’s nice watching Stoke Newington International Airport continue to tweak and tend to it as the night goes. By that point it’s a living thing, this controlled mayhem they’ve built and they care for it like a horse that hasn’t quite been tamed.
In amidst this wider view of the night there are of course a series of tiny moments to be cherished in the dates themselves. My favorite was undoubtedly with Taiyo Tochiaki, who used a live camera feed and a writing pad to create a brilliantly simple four minutes in which we traced around an image of our own hands held under the table beneath us.
It was a lovely experience and this was my last date of the night….
ENJOY! WE MISS THE HELL OUT OF YOU TOKYO! SPECIAL THANKS TO THE HOMIE MIKA FROM DOG WHO INVITED US TO THE SPECIAL CEREMONY!
