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Review Apr 21 2009 « | »
SPILL National Platform at the National Theatre Studios Designed to showcase new talent in performance art, the National Platform made good its promise of creating a space......

Agnieszka Gratza

Designed to showcase new talent in performance art, the National Platform made good its promise of creating a space for emerging artists to rub shoulders with some of the most admired practitioners of this art form at the Spill Festival of Performance. With twenty or so back-to-back performances to take in over the span of a weekend, attending the National Platform felt a bit like a marathon. The audience's resilience and enthusiasm shows that there is a great appetite out there for performance in its many guises.

Saluted as the 'next wave' of performance art by the artistic director Robert Pacitti, the artists selected from among nearly three hundred applicants had a lot to live up to. The pieces I managed to see (roughly half of all the sessions) experimented with a variety of media and fused a diverse range of artistic practices in often unexpected ways - a testimony to the protean nature of the form.

The high points of the weekend for me included the blue thread drawing lightning-chaser Simone Kenyon precariously close to her partner Neil Callaghan in To Begin Where I am... Mokado (meaning 'soaked to the bone' in Gipsy); Photopollution that saw the artist Clare Adams gliding on a (single) roller-skate around a torch-lit room, in an effort to retrieve various items of her clothing from the audience; and Amanda Couch's delicate 'Dust Passing', in which the inverted image of the artist's dust-covered body gradually emerges, as if by magic, inside a camera obscura.

There were some low points as well, inevitably, among those Nathan Waller's aptly-named 'BAD BAD' and Rasp Thorne's 'Blinded Descention', involving copious amounts of egg-yoke and an unidentified skinned creature (possibly a ferret) strapped to the artist's waist in a piece with strong sadomasochistic overtones.

The live work on show this weekend, at its best experimental and daring, comes at performance from too many directions to constitute a 'new wave'. Nor does it create enough ripples to rock anyone's boat. At least not yet.

Spill National Platform took place at the National Theatre Studios on April 18th and 19th as part of the Spill Festival, running until April 26th. Details of upcoming shows can be found here.

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