Performance
Whilst I originally took up my first degree in 1985 as a young painter, it gave me the opportunity to train in contemporary experimental theatre and dance. I quickly learned to love that space of expression and by the time I graduated, primarily still as a visual artist (exhibiting painting, wood and stone carving, photography and fine art illustration, I was also in five performances! After graduation one of my first opportunities was to run a youth theatre housed in Burton Technical College and I discovered a love of teaching, which then took me into the A level programmes. In my first Youth Theatre cohort was the very young Paddy Considine who later joined the course and amongst my first students were Shane Meadows, Paul Fraser (screenwriter) and Mark Jeffries (Goat Island). Over ten years I developed contemporary curriculum with the most inspiring practitioners, many of who became dear friends, both at Burton and Stafford College. Looking back, we really achieved something so unusual and wonderful for 16 - 18 yr olds.
In the same period I developed experimental performance works with my wonderful family of artsists, the BET4 collective. We formed friendships with groups in Paris and in Germany and as a result I had the wonderful opportunity to take several performances to European audiences - my first international performances. I also trained in Butoh techniques and as a group, we bought a uniques twist to this!
Post-millenium, I began to develop my own works, other collaborations and, now working in HE, I produced many student productions, both in Live Art and in Devised and scripted theatre.
From around 2015, I returned to theatre, appearing in some film (most notably perhaps as myself in This is England 90), and collaborating after a decade with my wife, the Director Shelley Piasecka - I performed for her in a number of projects, with the largest role perhaps in her celebrated adaptation of Moby Dick but also as she directed me in my own one-man show adaptation of Antoine De Saint-Exupery's Flight to Arras, which took us all the way to Armenia.
Not long before Covid I was hospitalised for 11 days with a rare viral meningitis. Then, not wanting to miss out, I caught Covid before inoculations and was pretty ill. Folowing Covid, my practice has tended towards developing my work as a walking artist, an illustrator and a maker, in addition to some small film roles.
Below I shall build a selection of works , certainly not all, over three decades of practice. There has been so much - I may need some time to build this!!
BET4 Performance
Atsawaytodoit, mid 1990s
It was the early 1990s and up until this point we had really been a group of exhibiting artists. Drinking coffee on a Saturday morning, a few of us got talking about Punch and Judy - I had a bit of an obsession with it at that time but also was struck by it's sheer violence. I knew Walt Shaw was a great percussionist and suggested that we bring a performance project into the group. Everyone agreed! Atsawaytodoit developed over some months, physicalising the characters & cruelties of the characters, with Rob and Cathy Wilsmore joining us (although they weren't married by that point, I can't remember Cathy's maiden name!). The success of the piece, performed in Burton Brewhouse, Lingen, Germany, Paris and finally for three venues at the Edinburgh fringe, took us all by surprise. BET4 Performance was born out of it.
InsideOutsideIn, late 1990s
I think InsideOutsideIn was the piece where we really honed what we were about and it was also the piece that evolved the most during a number of performances - we had begun it very much as a gallery performance work, wearing white, but then I got a gig at Fulham Arts Centre, which was a white space! I had been training a lot in Body Weather work at that point and this piece became very Butoh influenced. Walt and Graham also introduced a lot of electronica into the sonic landscape of the work. SO by the time it developed at Fulham, having already been in the Derby Jazz Festival (a very loose interpretration of 'Jazz'!), and out to Germany, performed for Kunstverein Lingen and at Documenta X, Kassel, I redressed it in browns and colour and the group happily went with this - I still love the look of the work. Then we did the Gallery Municipale in Vitry, Paris (with our exhibition) and the Confluence Theatre, Bastille. What was it about? That evolved too but essentially I suppose that idea of being within and without belonging - there were so many conversations in there. I loved this piece and I think it developed me into a really serious and more confident performance artist.
SecondSands, 1999-2001
Secondsands was a millennial piece for us and as such, the clue is in the title. It was also possible the most purely Artaudian work of performance that I have ever produced - Artaud istaught in the A Level Theatre curriculum but teachers struggle to find examples that I think really match his intentions: this does! It may be that our audience didn't thank us for the cacophonous onslaughts but viewing this recently in the National Review of Live Art Archives (held at Bristol University), I feel very proud of how accomplished it was -we were extremely physically and sonically unified, even including a Taiko drumming inspired section. The work, although pretty dark (in respect of light and content!) can be viewed in the archive by clicking the link just below.
Mendel's Garden
Mendel's Garden was a BET4 collaboration between Walt Shaw and myself and commissioned by the Theatres of Science Conference in about 2007 (I need to check). Walt was original trained as a biologist and is also a fascinating artist and percussionist. We developed a palimpsest work on a 'blackboard' ground that was a garden of wired speakers. They would play Mendel's genetic rules as well as sound and shake peas onto the floor. We would measure the spill distances and collate data, playing between the notion of truths between the quantitative and the creative. Slowly the surface became covered in information, including biological science graphics such as Gamete trees. The work was a durational performance and performed for whole days at a time.
3rd Experimental Art Show, St Petersburg, 2000
During 1999/2000 I was selected as an artist for the 3rd International Experiemnetal Art Show in St Petersburg. This was a big thing at that time because it was just a decade since the end of the Soviet Union and of course experimental art had not previously been 'supported'. I wanted to take the whole of BET4 Performance but that just couldn't happen, so it was Shelley and I that flew out there. We had spent a long time ordering kit and equipment out there and the project had a lot of grant money attached. Basically, it was all stolen. When we arrived, a large group of artists from the UK, nothing seemed true - the money and equipment was gone, the accommodation didn't exist, our visa invites had been forged (our passports were then taken and Shelley and I were detained in Russia because we had unfortunately presented our visas at the very hostel thet the 'forger' claimed had invited us - and they hadn't! You might imagine that we were rabbits in very bright headlights. After two days of difficulty we were invited to sleep on the floor of an artist's garret studio (literally a garret) - Alexander, the artist, was a real saviour.
La Revolution Francais
Losing all our money and equipment in Russia, as well as being detained in the country, albeit free to move around the city, meant that I was challemeged to present completely new works of performance art with Shelley. These would rely on whatever materials I could source locally. Actually the challenge led to some of the best works of my career, so far as I'm concerned because they were produced fast and dirty! I created (and co-created) four of these with two main pieces. La Revolution Francais played with notions of having and not having - we were taken with the idea that the luxury of cake was actually made out of the most basic resource in a situation of need - grain and flour. I think was also thinking about milk and honey as a symbol. In the piece I basically ate 1kg of flour whilst covered in honey (an almost impossible task) whilst at the far end of a marked out tennis court, Shelley ate cake and drank wine. When I could no longer breath, I lay on the floor whilst Shelley poured wine from her mouth into mine, clearing my passages. The piece worked vicerally - there was a strong smell, I would cough the flour in clouds, and it adhered to the honey, transforming me. The lifeblood of wine from one mouth, splashed into the another mouth.
Underground at the Winter Palace
The first collaboration with Glyn Davies Marshall, who we met on a trip to somewhat of a swamp on the edge of St Petersburg. We gelled immediately and Glyn was one of those rare artists that I could tune straight in with. Over a few days we created a work that would operate beneath the brass gridded traps of the Manege, where the horse droppings of the Tsars horses would be washed away whilst they were training. We both felt mysteries regarding our grandfather's who had died before we were born, his saving someone following a mining accident and mine as a bomber pilot (from Poland/Ukraine). I had tried to search for family there for years but the Cold War had buried information. The piece in many senses was bring light to a dark place, with songs, words and drawings passed up as rolled up 'secrets' through the grating to the audience above. We worked for hours covering metres of subterranean space. A cleaner accused us of being mad and shouted for the authorities to be called, but most people were fascinated by our labour, peering down to us. I didn't know, but this was performed on my Grandfather's birthday, with candles from the military cathedral and, like a prayer, it led to a subsequent conversation with an artist called Valdimir Yobotchuk and led directly to my finding the family - his parents were in Ukraine and, unbelievably, his mother knew my grandfather's sister!
Brushing Action
One of the four works that I made was a durational brushing of teeth - I remember working up this action whilst considering xenophobia and fear of the Other. It struck me that the process of cleaning the teeth, concerned with hygiene of course, required a fast and jagged repetition of the arm, like a scrubbing. Combined with observation of others this felt like and embodied rejection of fear. Of course as the scrubbing progressed, so I foamed at the mouth and eventually there was some bleeding - it felt therefore like the opposite was achieved, a very unhygienic psychosis. Unbeknown to me the city newspaper was in and ran a piece called 'Brushing your Teeth for the Sake of Art'. Oh dear. It wasn't one of my best ideas either - I lost my tastebuds for four days (terrifying) and contributed to receding gums.
