September is film month

The Jersey Film Society launches its new season of 17 films at the Jersey Arts Centre on Monday 13 September in what promises to be a strong and varied programme.  I'm particularly looking forward to A Single Man (described as 'a ghost story, a study of grief, a love story viewed from its wake'); Bright Star (Jane Campion's take on poet John Keats); Nowhere Boy (Sam Taylor-Wood on John Lennon) and Duncan Jones' Moon, which I never did get to see at last year's Branchage...

...speaking of which, the third Branchage International Film Festival, 23 - 26 September, again offers eclectic delights in unusual locations - from Battleship Potemkin in a tugboat and Lourdes in the Town Church to Horses in a horse box...Out On His Own with Jersey resident Gilbert O'Sullivan should be interesting, also new British comedy Tamara Drewe, post 7/7 drama London River, and Tilda Swinton in I am Love as well as many others, including shorts - and after all, I think that to get the best out of festivals, you have to immerse yourself for a few intense days and be open to new work that you might not otherwise have seen.

Despite, or perhaps because of, being an island with only one remaining cinema open, Jersey festival organisers and venue managers are admirably creative - as well as the above, recently there have been al fresco films in Howard Davis Park and silent cinema in Caféjac and November will bring the 6th Jersey Amnesty International Human Rights Festival to Jersey Arts Centre - bound to be thought-provoking and powerful.

yoko ono at MoMA

found no 6 - hole

sunset

rooms and death

I was looking through the book reGeneration: 50 Photographers of Tomorrow recently and was struck by a series of photographs People Who Died Alone 2003 by Mieke Van de Voort.

Undertaken in collaboration with Amsterdam social services, the photographs show the interiors of apartments as they were found by social workers researching the identity of people who had died without any known friends or relations.

I am thinking about why I find the photographs so powerful.

At first it is the rooms themselves and what they reveal and hint at or hide, a kind of voyeurism, looking for clues, reading objects - about order, disorder, collections, rituals, routines, beliefs, history, memory, memorabilia, the physical, obsessions, compulsions, possessions, structures, the outer shell, our 'living rooms', the unfinished, the hidden or forgotten stories...

and through the objects the strong presence of the absent person - the missing life, anonymity, being invisible, isolation, the spiritual, the inner life, the finished life...

and the presence of death - the room as shrine, funerary objects, mementoes, the past - as if by looking hard enough you can see how it announces itself, see it coming for you...

found no 5 - door

Treacle in St James

photo: David Stokes

This year Jersey Arts Centre has showcased the uniqueness and versatility of St James as a local performance space in an initiative inviting theatre groups and artists to take up residency to explore, experiment and devise new work.

January saw The Frequency D’Ici take shelter in the church after an apocalyptic flood, in a scratch performance of Free Time Radical.

In June 1157 Performance Group’s Tao of Hamlet deconstructed the classic text in a haunting, evocative and richly visual experience.

Not to be outshone, in March the Arts Centre youtheatre presented an innovative mad-Brechtian-science-lab Life of Galileo and a delightfully quirky, psychedelic and immersive Alice in Wonderland in July.

Each of these productions transformed the energy of the space, and the relationship of the audience to it, in a new and exciting way.

Last night was the turn of Robert James Anderson in a solo show which encompassed piano playing, running, original and haunting love songs, delicate poetry, strutting his stuff beneath a disco mirror ball while women tucked dollar bills in his pink underwear (in a neat bit of audience interaction in response to his written instructions) strong coffee and green tea, a suspended mirror, video, acting as his own lighting and sound technician and culminating in possibly the first live art/performance art experience in Jersey Arts Centre’s 27 year history.

Belying the T shirt he wore at one point which read ‘Average at Best’, RJA is multi-talented, and good at judging mood and at modulating his relationship with his audience, moving fluidly between comedy and intimacy and eliciting participation at key moments.

The highlight of the evening for me and many others was the live art sequence in which audience members used paintbrushes to coat his now naked body in treacle (which dripped off him onto paper in luxuriously viscous drips) and others then washed his body in a tender ceremony of almost religious simplicity, which it was a privilege to see.

This was a show of many parts and which could be developed further in different directions. Expectations about rehearsing and perfection versus spontaneity and liveness differ between theatre and performance art practice. At times I imagined I was in a Manhattan loft apartment watching the unfolding story of a character, who might or might not be Robert James Anderson, going about his day, exercising, dressing, composing poetry and singing torch songs.

There was a baring of skin but also a baring of emotion and, what held it all together, a generosity of spirit that engaged and embraced the audience.