Thursday 26 February 2009

Sometimes... Exhibition: Day 3

Yes!

We are up and running, excited but weary, sore feet, aching legs, but it's fun. So far today:

Selina Bus & Walk 12.00 Noon - 1.40PM - Piccadilly Gardens - Rusholme - Oxford Rd opposite Cornerhouse, shopping for accessory's for a sister's school leaving-do. £10

Rowena - Bus 12.00 Noon - Number 8 Bus, with anecdotes. £TBC

Ian - Walk 2.30-4.00PM - Tour of gig venues, city centre, searching for silences. £TBC.

Chris - Walk 4.30-5.15disused railway line, Fallowfield to Chorlton (where he used to walk Madge the Dog). £5.

Gareth - Walk 6.00 Foot of the Hilton Tower , to Castlefields, Deserted. £TBC

Wednesday 25 February 2009

Sometimes... Exhibition: Day 2

Yes!

Day 2 of our journeys is underway with the good folk of Manchester. So far: 

Jenny - Late Cancellation but possible reschedule.

Sophie - Bus / Walk 9.30-12.00 Noon: Castle Irwell, Salford - Fallowfield - Deansgate: tour of halls of residence and old houses. £15

Natalie H - Walk 12.00 Noon. Jackson's Row Synagogue, to Town Centre. £TBC 

Kathryn - Walk 2.00PM-3.30: Greenheys Centre, Manchester Science Park to Christie's Hospital, Wilmslow Rd. £9. 

Mark - Walk, 4.00PM-5.15 Koffee Pot, Stevenson Sq to Manchester Museum to Chinatown. £8

Tuesday 24 February 2009

Sometimes... Exhibition: Day 1

Yes!

Sometimes... (art collective I work with) have begun our residency at Manchester's greenroom, leading towards our exhibition at that goes up on the 6th March. Following on from our MEGA £500 giveaway for 'Wouldn't it be nice...' in 2007, we are spending this year's £500 budget we are paying participants £6 p/h. Our brief was to develop an exhibition with show with a number of Manchesterfolk, exploring most beloved places, so phil and I will be walking, cycling, bus-ing and train-ing around, strolling and yomping and dashing and traipsing along with 22 of Manchester's finest citizens. Yesterday we had a marathon meet&greet with participants and we timetabled what looks to be a very busy week. So far we have scheduled visits / journeys to churches, homes, inland waterways, steam train lines, bus routes, parks, disused buildings, gig venues, cafes, and popular attractions.

Big thankyous to the very very helpful Aowyn Sandeson, current head of marketing at greenroom, who has worked with particular efficiency to help get this project off the ground.

Today's journeys so far:

Tom - Walk: 10.00AM-12.00 Noon: Along the canalside up from Deansgate Lock to Piccadilly Basin, then Oklahoma, for peppermint tea (£12 for 2 hours + £14 for train fares).

Natalie S - Cycle: 2.00PM: Sacred Trinity Church (renowned venue) to home £TBC

John - Walk: 3.30PM-4.30PM from Duke's 92 up canal. £6

Rob - Walk: 5.00PM: Tour of Tall Buildings for City Skylines £TBC

Thursday 19 February 2009

Zenit TTL

On Monday Night, discussing the marvelous photographs taken of Kings of England's BAC show by Kate Rowles (see post below), our family discussions turned to photography and the lamentable failure of my recently-purchased Sony Cybershot camera to take decent pictures under theatre lights. My Dad, who was perhaps never "a photographer" (although he has taken many pictures) told me that he still owned a 35mm SLR, bought in 1986 after Mum dropped his other one on the deck of Grandad's canal boat. So as a family we rushed upstairs to discover the camera's wherabouts. And we discovered 1 x Zenit TTL 35mm stills camera; 1 x Zenit TTL manual; 1 x Toshiba flash unit (with cracked bulb-cover); 1 x screw-on-leather cover & strap, 1 x leather camera bag. So this week has been mainly a process of discovering how to use this almost entirely manual device (it has a light-meter, which is its most modern feature). After ripping one film in half I went to Glossop Tescos with Dad to do the weekly shop and bought a Kodak Gold 400ASA film and took a lot of pictures of tree branches which were pretty uninteresting. The 1-Hour Photo counter wasn't doing 1-Hour Photos today so I took the film to Lorrel's in New Mills, and, 30 minutes later after a brief spend-athon in OXFAM, I got back 36 exposures, all of which were clear and unfuckedup. But the best 2 were of birds.

1 was of a single bird with its wings spread out, that reminded me of the tattoo that you have on the inside of your right arm. The other was of 4 birds in formation, circling something, blurred. They aren't brilliant pictures but they prove that the cameras work. But it's the excitement of having something else to do, another thing to hold, a new possibility.

Tuesday 17 February 2009

Kings of England BURST Commission, BAC, 20th/21st May

Good News! Excellent News, in fact -

Kings of England have been offered a small commission and a chance to perform at BURST, the Battersea Arts Centre's Annual Flagship platform for theatre / performance, live art and all that. We gladly accept. Our gigs will be on the 20th / 21st May, so diary it if you are London based or somewhere close by. Unfortunately Mum can't make it as she will be on a walking holiday, but Dad and I are excited. The bonus is that this time, it should be worth a week's wages, a bit of expenses and a 50/50 box-office-split. More details "soon".

Big Love,

K of E. x

Kings of England Accepted to Performing Lives Conference, Kingston University, 6-8th July

Indeed. My first conference as an "independent scholar" post-PhD. The proposal read:

(In response to the question: “WHOSE LIFE?”):

Since April 2008 I have been performing alongside my 74-year-old father under the name “Kings of England”. Our show, “Where We Live & What We Live For” has been scratched at five times and has confirmed for support by the BAC, the Nuffield Theatre and Leeds Met Studio Theatre in 2009.

I found a picture of my father (before he was my father) jumping from the rocks toward the sea. The picture, taken off the South coast of France in 1958, catches him partway down.

In 2001 he suffered a transient-ischemic attack, falling of a bicycle in the hillsnear home. My mother reports that for an hour, he did not remember his name, now where he was; nor where he lived.

I asked him about his fall, and about his landing, and he seemed to be unable to remember much at all except for “how clear the water was” and “all these little fishes”, he said: “talk about a clear blue sea”.

In response he has given me license to reclaim that lost hour, writing invention and supposition into the spaces created in the event of forgetting.

We may accord these inventions and suppositions certain ethical significance, drawing a Blanchotian treatment of the verb “to research” through Levinasian treatment of the unknowable-ness of the other: inventing fictions to replace lost facts, we aim to preserve the dignity of the unknown as unknown, as a point of convergence between us.

For ‘Performing Lives’ we propose to show 15 minutes of performance followed by 15 minutes Q & A.

Hauser 'I made you a submarine' Tour All Wrapped Up

Kings of England at MAP LIVE, Source Cafe, Carlisle, 4th February

The following extracts were delivered as a short lecture at the Source Cafe as part of a night organized by the excellent Di Clay from Matrix Art Projects, combining Regional and National work with the ACE-funded LANWest tour. Also on the bill were: Leentje van de Cruys, Andy Wilson, Krissi Musiol, Katy and Peter Merrington, and Chris Fitzsimmons.

INTRODUCTION:

Good Evening and welcome to the first of tonight’s lectures, which concerns, for the most part, the passing of time.

We are looking for a way out, an escape, an evasion, it could be a door but more likely a window, mark the exits for your safety {point} and it seems that the event of performance is the place in which we are least likely to find it. We are gathered here on the condition that we will disperse. We will go home, sooner or later, more or less directly, for a night cap or a cup of tea, supper, take the dog for its late-night walk, get some sleep before work. To leave and arrive returned, to put distance between here and there, will somehow relate to us that ‘familiar story, the old, old story of…’ time told by the ticking of seconds, minutes and hours.

Article 1/-

You are sick, the doctors say no fluids, and I tell you that when you get out of there were going to going to get you drunk as a Lord. You like the sound of that and for a last time, you laugh. Three or four days later, you die. A toast, then, to the passing of time, and furthermore, to dead dogs, dead children, dead lovers, dead heroes and how good it is to be alive.

Article 2/-

24th January 1915 - 12th January 2008. Thirty-three thousand, five hundred and sixty-eight (33,568) days have gone by.

Articles 4 and 5/-

{first picture}

He is in the third of his ninety-three years. He is already a quiet boy, belying the modest and humble man he will become. He has a lifetime of hard work ahead of him, several disappointments. But for now there is time, as the shutter clicks and the powder flares and the shadow is cast, to be witnessed blameless and free, as the shadow lengthens on the curtain backdrop.

{last picture}

He is in the last of his ninety-three years. It is the last picture in which you can clearly see his face, or rather, his features, as they had been, consistent, to the form that had shaped them, belonging to his twenties and thirties as much as to his eighties and nineties.

He can’t hold much food down and has been troubled by a urine infection to which he will finally succumb. He is visited regularly by his two daughters, their husbands, but he has not seen his youngest grandson for months, and he has not seen his eldest for years. But he is, at least, outwardly, without complaint, and although his wife has died and his memories are receding, and his lodgings are more than can be afforded, he never breathes a word of these losses, not one. You see there are some men who are born complainers, these men have been bested and find no glory in hardship, and little reward. And there are some men, once capable men, who count themselves fortunate. These men have been bested and take pleasure in giving respect.

Article 6/-

Between the first and the last presented with a kind of incontrovertible evidence, if we accept that the first and the second are indeed two points of a continuum, two images of the same person, old man, little boy.

To think that time can be cut and mended, looped, ribboned, tangled and unpicked, is to beg a kind of freedom from the advancing of hours. But I look at your blood that collects in the bag, dirty black blood, and the greyish whites of your eyes and they tell me: don’t believe it. To love time and aging is to understand and accept consequence. The wish to stop time, or open it forever, reflects a desire for a life without consequences, in which mistakes can be rectified, words unsaid, deeds undone, deaths un-died. But then you turned to me and you asked me “is there another world” and the last thing I tell you is “Yes”.

Article 7/-

There are some things that we don’t talk about, because we no longer believe that we need to. Some things we are square with, or else they cannot be squared. And there are some things that we don’t ask about, but because we are young and have boundless love of questions and have not yet been told not to, we ask:

When I asked him, he looked at me and answered.

I wanted him to point and show me and say: “I killed these men”, but they were buried somewhere, far off, where the rivers and forests and villages had names I couldn’t pronounce.

The simple “Yes” satisfied me, even then, and it satisfies me now. He killed those men, got captured, starved for three years. Amongst hundreds of thin men they called him “the thin man” and because he could fix the trucks, the guards thought he was useful and so he survived it, and having secured for himself a reasonable chance of a future for himself, he returned to his wife, raised two daughters, who each had a son and from then he lived as if it were peacetime, kindly, and very decently. And that’s it, and that’s all.

Kings of England at BAC New Year, New Spaces 30th/31st January






Top-to-bottom:
"Style is the answer to everything..."
Dad comes out of The Wilderness singing an old hymn "The Pilgrim Stranger"
Dad, returned from The Wilderness, dances with Mum to "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free" arranged by John Fahey & His Orchestra.
Photographs by friend and collaborator
Kate Rowles.