The New Performance Festival Auckland

I along with  three other writers from different disciplines have been asked to write four responses to four new performance works in The New Performance Festival. Conditions are that the writings are between 300 - 600 words and must be written within 24 hours of seeing the performance. The intention is to find common language between the four writers. The first of my writings appears below.


The Politics of Distraction: I am a Wee Bit Stumped

By Kristian Larsen

This performance collaboration between NZer Mark Harvey and Sweden’s Johannes Blomqvist poured drily over the entrails of the life of an artist within the context of a broader fiscal narrative. Taking place in a conference room so benignly alienating and Gervais-like it threatened to usurp all genuinely creative endeavours, ‘I am a Wee Bit Stumped’ used many physical materials at hand – seminar props, coffee machines,office stationary, hideous chairs and a cannibalising of its own audience (esp. in the intelligently constructed opening sequence involving a long queue & ‘class room’ type activities ).

Repetition is a common device in Harvey’s domain and it showed up reliable and ready for a good nights work in this duet with Blomqvist. Repetition was threaded into an intentionally exhaustive act of lifting a table up and down whilst delivering a monologue. Harvey talked and grimaced his way through a vocal thread covering the common absence of mortgages and children in the lives of other artists that he'd met internationally. For me Harvey's efforts in that solo reactivated Blomqvist’s earlier story about an Uncle (?) who still works at a factory making cupboards for IKEA - met his wife there, holidays at the same beach
in Majorca every year for 25 years.

Personal stories were delivered in bland but engaged tones whilst performing disconcerting tasks. Earlier in Stumped Harvey was squirming along on his belly with Blomqvist lying on his back talking about something. But I can’t remember what he was going on about because the entire audience including me seemed so utterly focussed on their own distraction that they temporarily cared nothing for the performers. This non-caring shifted audibly when it seemed Blomqvist was about to rain a box of hole punchers down on Harvey’s head from on top of a ladder.

The consistently bland delivery of the text seemed to falter in a closing section where Harvey adopted a thinly veneered theatricality. But maybe it was intended. Shades of Kafka in a minor chord as Harvey unseen side stage interrogated Blomqvist about what was in his back pack, where he’d been, and if he did drugs.
This section reminded me that I was watching a show, whereas prior to that I had felt immersed as a participant in an event.

If I was to reduce this complex and rich work to a three word byline I’d say something like ‘Bureaucracy Destroys Art’ although paradoxically this work appears to have been generated in part by adverse bureaucratic conditions. But as artists (and many others) are continually conscripted into activities that serve and feed larger economic machinery it’s interesting to examine what it is that we are left with. At one point in the show some doors were opened which inadvertently revealed the post performance remnants of Sean Curham’s work shown just prior to Stumped. Both of these shows had left behind a big bloody mess.

Thanks Johannes and Mark for the coffee and cake, and for 120 minutes of your time at $10 a head.