Red Velvet Curtain Cult

Dozens of artists from the Red Velvet Curtain Cult are taking over the De La Warr Pavilion this week, for a special Random Fridays evening entitled I Believe (Tales from the Edge of Everything).

The free event, co-promoted by East, will witness performances, projections and installation all around the Pavilion, both inside and out, this Friday (March 12).

Soundtracking the evening will be DJ Sy Hackney, with bizarro London electro popsters The Teeth playing live.

East headed up onto the roof of the De La Warr for a chat with some of the Red Velvet Curtain Cult to find out more...

Lili Spain & Sarah Grainger-Jones, Red Velvet Curtain Cult curators.

E: How did you select the artists for the Random Fridays event?
RVCC: Some of the artists we've worked with in the past and we knew their work. We did put a call out through the Arts Council as well. We spend a lot of time sitting down working out who works, who works with each other as well. It's a balancing act.
For Random Fridays, we invited artists to think about (current De La Warr Pavilion exhibition) Richard Grayson’s work, directly or indirectly, and basically... travel to the edge of their imaginations and fall off the side! To bring back their tales and ideas, of the uncanny, belief, otherworldliness, the universe...

E: Some of the artists have previously performed their Random Fridays pieces in other galleries. How will the seaside and the Richard Grayson exhibition alter these performances on the night?
RVCC: There are a couple of pieces that have been performed elsewhere, but we thought they were so strong that we had to have them here. But the space in which you display the artwork frames how the work’s read. If someone’s performing in front of a window with the backing of the sea it’s a different event, a different experience... It leads to different readings. And that’s what we found quite interesting as well: we always encourage artists to work with space and find new ways of developing their performances.

E: How will Random Fridays compare with previous Red Velvet Curtain Cult events?
RVCC: It's pretty big. We generally work with between three and thirty artists, so there's often lots of people in a space. The De La Warr Pavilion's a nice venue where we can allocate more space to people, and the artists can directly interact with the exhibition that’s going on.
People will be able to encounter artwork as they’re moving around the building. They encounter it in different ways, maybe somebody roaming around grabs them to be involved. Or it might be the other way round, there might be somebody doing an installation and then the audience comes to them. There’s gonna be a lot more of a sense of freedom, lots of interactive work, and hopefully the audience will get involved in that as well.
We've got a nice bunch of artists. The workers are fantastic! It’s always really nice, you can never tell exactly what’s going to happen...

Nicola Woodham & Robin Bale – The Green Ray

E: Tell us about your performance The Green Ray
NW/RB: The Green Ray will be on the roof. It’s like a disco light: we’ll be on one side of the roof projecting it outwards in waves or lines. We don’t know how far it will project . In an ideal world it will shoot to infinity over the horizon. In all probability it will vanish!

E: And this is to a trance, rave soundtrack...
NW/RB: We’re actually performing it as a dialogue, in a very, very deadpan kind of way, so the euphoric lyrics of rave or trance, and the euphoric trance of the green ray, will turn into something relatively anti-romantic. The banality of the rave songs will be turned into a dialogue. Because we’re a duo and we’re obviously of different genders, inevitably all kinds of tensions and all sorts of other things automatically arise in the lyrics.

E: There’s a few rave casualties around this stretch of the coastline. Hastings Pier was used for raves, the South Downs too.
NW/RB: Yes, we think the references to party events and raves should have a lot of resonance for people, especially in coastal areas. It also ties in with this Utopian dream of the De La Warr Pavilion. A dream compromised by hard reality. But what rave seemed to promise, and what The Green Ray is meant to be, is this idea of transcendence, reaching out beyond the inevitable.

E: Where does the idea of The Green Ray come from?
NW/RB: From the Jules Verne novel ‘The Green Ray’. A very lovely, romantic, melodramatic story about a young woman who goes out searching for the green ray (an optical phenomena seen at sunset), and never actually gets to see it. After many adventures and falling in love with this man who saves her from a flooded cave and whatever else, at the end of the story she’s too busy looking into his eyes to see that actually the green ray finally happens. And they instead find true love, which is the most important thing. It’s very very melodramatic, very romantic... a Victorian romantic, so there’s a certain amount of sentimentality about it
But the green ray can happen, apparently, most likely at sea, where there’s an uninterrupted view. The green ray just about hits the horizon, so the sea is the most likely place to see it. There are probably other ways, it doesn’t have to be at the seaside. It’s a shame it’s just slightly too early in the year for our performance to coincide with the sunset.

Genetic Moo (Nicola Schauermann & Tim Pickup) – Growth Line

E: Tell us about the Growth Line...
GM: The main projection is enabled by a web camera. It’s based on movement, people moving in front of a projected line. The line’s body will ripple depending on where the spectators are, and if they stay in one space near the line you get this growing globule with wriggling innards...

E: The line itself will represent the horizon?
GM: That’s right. We’ve done previous pieces of work around creatures, looking at eggs or cellular activity, and when it was suggested we could coming down here we thought of the horizon and how that would work with it. The ideas of having the line, the horizon and the waves as well excited us, and that combination helped with the progression of the work. Our work’s always been based around sea creatures, so it’s logical that we should do this for our first time actually exhibiting at the seaside

E: Have you been down to Bexhill before?
GM: We have travelled along the coastline, although this is our first time here. This morning we went to the museum, we heard there are dinosaur prints to be seen if you go along the beach. We’d heard the museum had a piece of amber with a spider’s web in*, the oldest relic of a spider’s web there is. The two guys at the museum were really confused, they obviously hadn’t got it themselves but they said they’d check it out for us, they’ve got so many things like that. But the creature that comes out of the Growth Line globule is made to be spider-like because it was a cultural link to this wonderful story.

[* see East's report on this discovery last year]

Jonathan Ford – An Audience With Wernher (And His Birds)

E: Where have you chosen to perform An Audience With Wernher (And His Birds)?
JF: Downstairs, where the big sofa is. By the shop there.

E: You’ll be pretty much the first person people see when they come here.
JF: Bit of a worry. Well, for me. Not for you!

E: So, this is a piece you’ve performed before?
JF: Yes, well I’ve not really performed it since last year, but I’ve done it three times altogether. It’s changed every time: it develops as it goes along really. The film of the performances, the archives, all become part of the work. The performance is way of trying everything at once to create a narrative for a story that needs to be told, but not by specifically telling the story.
The interactive nature of it is that originally people could ask me why I do it. So you get these question sheets. You put your name on it and ask your question, take one half of your raffle ticket and post it through the door, and then I’ve got an old Morse code machine. I communicate with a dead bird with the machine, a lot of tapping goes on with that and the typewriter. So you’re tapping out a message to the birds. They take the message back and I answer the question, type it out on an old typewriter - there’s no ink in the typewriter, I have to use carbon paper - and you get your answer back with a cut-out card and a piece of slate with a bird’s foot symbol on it, as if I spoke to the bird...

E: That Morse code machine is fabulous.
JF: Yeah, it came from a next door neighbour, he was in Berlin after the war, so this is a German one. There’s connections with the rest of the stuff in this place, there’s a portable record player and a radio, like stuff I’ve found in a laboratory, lots of things to give you the clues about who I am and what I’m doing. So there’s tracings of some kind of rocket, and some wagtails, maps, diagrams, bits of found sculpture of trees, maps of wagtail flightpaths, obsessional stuff. I’ve got an analogue synth as well, that plays what someone once said was ‘Like the sound of a thousand birds screaming’. Also there’s the radio in there that I send stuff to, which has got all kind of conversations running and soundtracks from Kes and things like that, that have kind of clues as to who this character is and what he’s doing.

E: Bexhill was many WW2 associations, of course.
JF: Yes, there’s a chain of home radar bases close to here, plus it’s nice to see across the sea to where all that stuff was happening out there. It’s an interesting place to perform, this 1930s vintage building. That time, the technology, are all tangible, which I quite like.

E: Everyone gets something to take away at the end of the evening too.
JF: Yes, exactly. I guess I’ve done about 50 questions in a night before. The questions tend to get quite serious, and can take quite a bit to think about. People will be all around me, but I kind of quite like that, being far back with no interaction. It’s almost like my character’s doing his work, it’s been going on for years, and he’s always doing it. So there is no dramatic beginning: every time I’ve done it people have come into the space while I’m already doing it. It could be going on forever and people have to guess the story. That’s how I’d like it to be: it’s not just about full stops, it’s forever and ever...

E: You’ve got a four or five hour stretch...
JF: Yeah it’s brilliant, it’s good to do for a long time ‘cos it takes a while to get warmed up and obviously people feel they have to move round it, feel what they can and can’t do, until they write something down. It just takes a while for them to do it and for them to get an answer. Last time I did it in Bristol, for the first hour there was nothing (WHISTLES), just a bored technician, and then for the next four hours it was non-stop. And then you can’t get out, ‘cos people say ‘Where’s my answer? Where’s my answer?’ (LAUGHS) Which is fun you know, it kind of surprises me the way that it’s something people have never done before, that they’re kind of apprehensive about too. It gets quite serious. People ask me quite personal questions, a lot about people who have died, for instance. Things that mean something to them, but not in the way I intended the piece to be. I did it at a college, and they were quite young people asking the questions, and all theirs were like an agony aunt’s, you know, ‘When am I gonna fall in love?’ So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of questions I get... I don’t know why people trust me to answer them!

Rebecca Birch – The Butterfly House In The Arctic

E: Your performance is based around a visit to the Arctic you made.
RB: Yeah, on a research trip. I make videos using conversations with people, talking to them about landscape and where they live, and end up extracting material for a performance. I went to the Arctic to find out what it’s like to live in that whiteness. But I didn’t want to influence that by seeing it myself, I wanted to try to capture a sense of landscape just through words. I went there when it was dark 24 hours a day, and minus 35. So people are using their words to try to tell you about the outside space. I visited the furthest north town in Canada, the only official town inside the Arctic circle. It’s one of those places at the end of the world, so it kind of attracts some oddballs. People keep travelling and they get to literally the end of the road: this town at the end of the only highway that crosses the Arctic circle.

E: I picked up a big road map in Canada a couple of years back, and the roads just trail off into the whiteness...
RB: Yes. I went to ‘the butterfly house’ with a man called Larry the Meatman, and we drove up the highway and it stops. In the winter it continues along the ice road on the river, very literally perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. There’s these pretty, tiny little mobile home people living in really basic looking buildings .Grey buildings that just appear out of the whiteness, literally on a little spit of land raised up slightly. You can’t tell what’s what land or sea, islands or ice, and this is where we met this woman with the butterfly house. She’s a native woman in basically an Inuit settlement, and as a visitor there was a real tension between where I could pry and where I couldn’t.
Another man told me amazing, extraordinary stories. He’d been out there alone, and it was a little bit like being on the edge. One of the things that happened was, he had his dogs with him, and they were alone on the ice. And they encountered this very strange, large creature, and not knowing what it was his dogs were freaking out, sort of turning round in fear. Later on in the library he saw an illustration of prehistoric elks in a book, and recognised he’d encountered this extinct creature. There are lots of beasts around up there, but I wonder if it was because he’d just been alone on the ice for so long.

E: Was everyone aware you were gathering conversations for your artwork?
RB: That’s right, and there was a weird mix of real warmth and real coldness from the people there. It was quite strange.

E: How will your performance work?
RB: I’m going be sitting down somewhere at a table in the bar, and I’ll have a tiny projector and paper and I’ll be telling a story. I’ll be relaying the conversations I had, and when people ask me questions I’ll keep talking in character. I’m going to be modelling with the paper, tearing and folding it, in the manner of the gestures people used when they were describing the landscape. I normally use drawing, but this time I’m going to have to force myself to describe the gestures with my hands. The models will be small, and my projector is a table monitor, so people will have to sit down with me to see what I’m doing.
I’m actually doing a series of films called the notebook screenings. Obviously this is part of an event in an art gallery, but I often do it in cafes. People can email me by my website and make an appointment with me. Then I come and give you a one-to-one performance really. This is happening throughout 2010.

E: Are you hoping to return to the Arctic?
RB: Yeah. I was out there eight weeks, and I had such extraordinary conversations that I’m thinking of going back and making a film to tell the stories in the most direct way.

Alice Gale Feeny & Ruby Glaskin – Long Distance Relationship

E: What will your performance involve?
AGF/RG: We’re doing a radio transmission piece called Long Distance Relationship. We’ve got a radio downstairs in the foyer, at the base of the spiral staircase – it’s just a normal plastic radio - and our performance is going to be playing through that. The idea is that the broadcast is coming from somewhere beyond the horizon. It may sound like just distant snippets, where you constantly feel like you’ve not listened to it from the beginning.
We researched it in both a literal and a lateral sense, by looking at directly what was beyond the horizon, due south from Bexhill. And there is this town called Fécamp which was actually home to the first broadcast that was transmitted to England. It was translated there and broadcast to the south, which was a really odd thing, 'cos we chose this town and looked into its history and it seemed to link perfectly to Bexhill. As we researched it, the parallels between there and Bexhill were very similar and we started thinking about connections. Fécamp is very similar to where you are and the people are very similar, so you’re building up this relationship through the radio broadcast. You’re getting short bursts of description, and it’s up to your mind to draw the parallels. It’s using the idea that when you haven’t been to a place, your only information is through words and through photographs. So it’s an idea of describing this place you haven’t been to, and trying to build this mental picture of things there. You don’t quite believe what’s coming from the radio, but it could be a real broadcast. There really could be people in Fécamp talking, and it could be playing real adverts.

E: There’s quite a tradition along the south coast of people tuning in to stations like Radio Luxembourg...
AGF/RG: Well, yeah, that’s what we were looking at. Radio Normandy for example.

E: And there’s a club at the Komedia in Brighton, Vive Le FIP, which was allegedly to do with a French radio station, but I was never sure how much of that was actually true or whether it was entirely made up...
AGF/RG: No, no, FIP’s true. It’ll be interesting, it’s that kind of thing where you’re told, ‘Oh this is real people’, and you’re like ‘Really?’ I think we are playing with what you’re told is what you believe in some ways, whether this is a broadcast from Fécamp, and whether what we say about Fécamp is true or not, or whether it could actually be...
We’ve also got a performance piece we'll be doing at the bar, where we’re at two seperate tables with recording devices on. We’re not highlighting it as necessarily connected to the radio piece, but people can make the connections. One of us will be describing things in the present tense, and the other will be doing something similar but in French, and there’s this invitation to sit down and talk to us. In a way we’ll be translating each other’s language, but we don’t really want to say too much about it. It’s going to be quite a subtle thing, and there’s an invitation to sit down and join in with the exchange...
I don’t know if we should say too much. It’s hard to explain very well, and we wanted it to be quite abstract... We don’t mean to be secretive!

Adi Lerer - Amen

I Believe (Tales from the Edge of Everything) also features performances from Maria Bartolo, Cack-U-Like, Amanda Castro & The Jeremis Iron Collective, Jack Catling, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Camila Fiori, Folie a Trois, Adi Lerer, Poppy Jackson, Simon Raven, Nicola Singh and ThickandTastyxxx.

Random Fridays starts 7pm, Friday March 12 in the De La Warr Pavilion. Admission is free.

For more information on the Red Velvet Curtain Cult, see www.redvelvetcurtaincult.com