night flying

Night Flying: a performance conceived, devised and performed by Jane Mason and David Williams. Dramaturgical support from Luke Pell, Paul Carter and Wendy Hubbard. Lighting design: Mark Parry

Residencies at The Point, Eastleigh; Pavilion Dance, Bournemouth; Mark Bruce Company, Frome; Dance4, Nottingham; The Phoenix, Exeter; Exeter University

Premiere at Exeter Phoenix, then Bristol Old Vic, and Siobhan Davies Studios, London (as part of the ‘Open Choreography Performance’ programme 2019). Further touring in spring 2020 (Plymouth, Cornwall, London) - details to follow

For a review of Night Flying in Bristol, by Ian Abbott, see here

Photographs in tour pack (above) by Benjamin J Borley, Aaron Davies, Tessa France. Post-performance photograph below by David Williams

life forces

Over the past decade or so, in her solo and collaborative work in live performance and film, Jane Mason has explored ways in which the movements of bodies and objects can create ‘image worlds’ of great affective resonance and tenderness. These dynamic architectures of memory, loss, and longing combine dance, text, song and music in patterns of images that slowly align and unfold to suggest passage ways through felt times and spaces of a rhythmed intimacy and intensity. Usually triggered by some aspect of her own lived experience, these ‘worlds’ invite a quiet attention to detail, and an active slowing down into present process. Over the years, many of Jane’s images have lingered with me and etched themselves into my imagination – for in their exquisite precision and mystery, paradoxically they seem to invite and activate something of the life forces within our own memories and associational fields.

With its initial trigger in some boxes of photographic slides taken by her father some years ago, Life Forces develops this work of mining, uncovering, transposing and inviting, and opens up new landscapes of be/longing. Developed in close collaboration with a film maker, a writer-performer, a visual artist and a dramaturg, Life Forces offers a meditation on memory’s place in the face of uncertain futures, on place and home and their resilient fragilities, on the utopian impulse to ‘build’ together and to let (it) go, on the arcing electricity of connection and the drift of dispersal, and on transformation and change as the core ground of being, the ‘life force’ that links everything and everyone.

Short text written in the wake of various collaborations in recent years with the wonderful Jane Mason, and in response to her new performance piece Life Forces, prior to a showing of work-in-progress at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, in early July. With Jane Mason (choreographer/performer/writer), Phil Smith (performer/writer), Magali Charrier (film maker/animator), Sophia Clist (sculptor/designer), and David Williams (dramaturg). Tour from autumn 2014

the tears of things (for pina)

'I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them ... We are very transparent. The way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about the way they live or about the things that have happened to them. Somehow everything is visible - even when we cling to certain things ... Everything I do is about relationships, childhood, fear of death, and how much we all want to be loved' (Pina Bausch).
_________________________________________________

In no particular order, some images, culled from a reservoir that has coloured and buoyed my imagination for 20 years or more. These (and others) are indelibly etched into my psyche, and they proliferate and animate still: in my 20s and 30s, this work changed everything for me...

A group of women scurry across a leaf-strewn floor in pursuit of a man who plays the same short extract from Bartok's Bluebeard on tape. Rewind, replay, shuffle. Later, a slow somnambulist dance of partners, the women bowed and passive, their faces hidden, the almost-naked men masquerading their bodies - performing body-building poses to the audience, displaying them to both comic and alarming excess (1).

A woman in her underpants walks through a field of carnations playing an accordion. Around the edge of the field, guards patrol with alsatians on leashes. Later, Lutz Forster 'signs' the Gershwin song The man I love. Comedy and pathos in this overlaying of nostalgic heterosexual song and signing. The overlay doubles and re-doubles the song's lyrics, making them un-familiar and re-writing them. The male body mimes and 'tells' - through an iconic corporeal discourse of a possible love to which a dominant ideology is metaphorically 'deaf'. Forster himself is both source and site of the narrative, and detached from it, consciously showing/dis-playing it to us (2).

A group of besuited men repeatedly touch a solitary woman (Meryl Tankard) like a child - pinch her cheek, tousle her hair, pat her. Cumulatively over time, their actions constitute a kind of rape; intimate, patronising 'affection' is defamiliarised through repetition to reveal the shadows this infantilising tactile economy suppresses (3).

Two dinner-suited men, smug, self-congratulatory, mask-like smiles, posturing an image of suave gentility, wealth, sophistication. Then they squirt or dribble little fountains of champagne from their mouths - straight up, splashing down over their faces and suits, 'wetting themselves', like children. A kind of critical comic display of the infantile drives that underlie and inform their masquerade (4).

An environment of towering, bristling cacti, peopled by a discontinuous dream-like array of figures. Couples waltz. Passers-by pass by. A woman in bra and pants hangs immobile and upside down, her body apparently suspended from a cactus's spikes. A man force-feeds a woman, like a goose, coercing and constructing her; she lies inert. A man in a balaclava wheels another woman around the space in a glass tank of water; it's uncertain whether she has drowned or is dreaming, her body literally floating through space. A man in a skirt, shades and a leather jacket dances alone. A woman with two black shoes in her mouth struggles repeatedly to lift herself from the floor. A blindfolded man dances alone, a tea bag held over each eye by a red cloth, his partner a tea towel. Then there's a dancing pantomime walrus, and a group standing as if ready for a rather odd family portrait: a masked woman (one of those 2-dimensional Victorian paper cut-outs sometimes used for parties); two others beside her, their hats suspended above their heads, as they wriggle to fit inside them; and a slumped woman on a chair in front, her hair covering her face (5).

A man struggles across a field with an enormous wardrobe balanced precariously on his back. A drunken woman with a bottle in her hand shouts and lurches at the centre of a flock of sheep; the sheep respond to her every move, instantly and collectively, her impulses rippling out through this animal corps de ballet. A man, gravity-bound, chases a flock of starlings as they swoop and soar. Dominique Mercy in a ball gown, pinned to the wall of a room by a model helicopter hovering in front of him, buzzing him, its whirring blades pushing an updraft under his skirt (6).

A woman with impossibly long limbs and hair, a spectral somnambulist presence in a white night slip, dances through a maze of tables and chairs in a deserted cafe. A man clears her passage, his attention to his task all-consuming and selfless (7).

The everyday defamiliarised. The image as aggregation: the conjunction of bodies, objects, rhythms, music, space as psychic landscape. Even smell (the peaty earth in Rights of Spring). Bachelard's 'material imagination'. Brecht's gestus ablaze, signalling through the flames (8). Accumulation and repetition (what repetition?) Masquerade. The voyeuristic economy of spectating: the 'dis-play' of performing. Montage. E-motion: the continuous leak of affect. Excess. A corrosive theatricality. Irreducible ambiguity. Layers of fragmented narrative. Reversals. Ec-static exposures, uninsulated. Identities on the move. Possible worlds. The heart-land laid bare, in its resilience and fragility.

Love's work, its grain, its shapes.
The tears of things.

_______________________________________________

Notes
(1) Bluebeard.
(2) Nelken.
(3) Kontakthof.
(4) Two Cigarettes in the Dark.
(5) Ahnen.
(6) Die Klage der Kaiserin ('The Lament of the Empress').
(7) Cafe Muller.
(8) 'Gestus is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious, the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms' (Brecht).

Images: Pina Bausch (photo by Donata Wenders, 2004); Nelken at Sadler's Wells, 2005 (photo by Tristram Kenton); Ten Chi, 2004.

To watch Lutz Forster's The man I love (from Chantal Akerman's 1982 film One day Pina asked me...), see here

For a listing of other Pina Bausch materials on YouTube, see here

Obituaries for Pina Bausch: Guardian, Independent, Times, New York Times

shared enquiry

When I first arrived at UWA in Perth in 1989, at the same time as being rather overwhelmed by the beauty of its situation and that astonishing Moreton Bay fig tree, I was immediately struck by the university’s outstanding resources in terms of spaces for making theatre: the Octagon, the Dolphin, the New Fortune, as well as a small studio space. To my mind, these were world-class resources, far more ‘professional’ and plural in their possibilities than anything I had seen in England. During my six years at UWA, I was able to work with students in each of these spaces, and a wide range of contexts further afield for site-based workshop projects: the tree-lined open-air cinema behind the studio, the river front at the eastern edge of the campus, the quarries in the hills at Boya, even the sand dunes of Lancelin. 

In addition, I was struck by how adventurous and generative the theatre culture was on campus. Experimentation was thoughtful, conceptually informed, and often bold. My colleagues – notably Bill Dunstone, and David George at Murdoch – were intellectually gifted and challenging, inviting and provoking new thoughts, perceptions and questions in me as well as their students: about dramaturgy, historiography, representation, and performance as an epistemology. In very different ways, these two taught me a great deal about thinking into and through performance.

In particular I was massively buoyed and challenged by the students involved in productions, drawn from different courses at UWA as well as from Murdoch University as part of a joint programme. I was fortunate to work with people studying history, architecture, law and art as well as theatre and English. 15 years after leaving UWA, without nostalgia I can now see that they were amongst the best students I have ever had: inquisitive, intellectually and creatively energized, industrious, open and very brave. At the time I thought of many of them as smart, imaginative, driven, eccentric and often very funny people with whom to really chase something. 

At its best, for me, teaching has always felt like shared enquiry, a developmental arc for all concerned, rather than the giving over of knowledge by a supposed ‘expert’. Like theatre making, it is rooted in an everyday politics and ethics of relationality and exchange. This was certainly the case with such people as Barry Laing, Felicity Bott, Ahmad Abas, Janet Lee, Imbi Neeme, Andrea McVeigh, Chris Kohn, Ben Laden, Leon Ewing, Paul Tassone, Robert Hannah, Jodie Wise, Bronwyn Turnbull and others. They were unquestionably talented people, and since that time many of them have become established practitioners in their own right, in theatre and elsewhere.

In truth, I had little idea how to make theatre when I arrived in Perth, or at least the kind of theatre that I dreamt of but didn’t often encounter. I came brimming with enthusiasms for some work I had seen, sometimes live but more often on grainy videos passed on to me like samizdat, barely legible copies of copies. I knew I was interested in devised work rather than dramatic literature per se, and I suspected that performance rather than theatre was really where the ideas caught fire. I had a taste for the hybrid and the physically rooted, image-based events hovering somewhere between theatre and dance that I rather pretentiously conceived of in terms of a ‘critical surrealism’. Above all, I wanted something to happen. 

In my late 20s, I had a head full of Pina Bausch, Laurie Anderson, Peter Brook, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Hélène Cixous. I loved new dance, bands and live music more than theatre, which so often felt tired, its languages worn and predictable. I loved new fiction writing, and the presence of people like Gail Jones within the department excited me; I used to attend Gail’s lectures whenever possible, and she taught me a great deal too, about an attention to language and the writerly agencies of the reader. 

The Festival of Perth, at that time run by David Blenkinsop and Henry Boston, further fueled my enthusiasms, in particular through its outstanding dance and new performance programme. It provided me, and my young collaborators, with an ongoing education – through the work of, for example, Josef Nadj, Maguy Marin, Alain Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B, and the early pieces of Chrissie Parrott, as well as productions by internationally established companies like the brilliant Rustavelli from Georgia and dynamic young physical theatre practitioners like Theatre de Complicite. 

My core collaborator throughout this period was Barry Laing. When I first met him at UWA, he was a ferociously bright undergraduate student of history and theatre, and already an unusually compelling and gifted performer. From the outset I was impressed and provoked by his intellectual intensity, his genuine desire to make work, and his remarkable focus and presence as a physically engaged performer. As collaborators we were immediately attuned and generative; it seems we gave each other substantial courage, license, energy and ideas. Now a theatre maker and teacher in tertiary contexts in Melbourne, Barry remains one of my closest and most respected friends to this day.

Another core ally in the making of all of the student productions at UWA was Anne Hearder. On first acquaintance a somewhat daunting figure with her omnipresent and impossibly stacked-up ashtray smouldering to one side, and her (to me) slightly ‘old school disciplinarian’ protocols, Anne became a close friend and a profoundly trusted collaborator. She taught the students, and me, an enormous amount about managing projects, resourcefulness, communication, the pragmatics of stagecraft and the importance of networks of support. Although much of the performance work was distant in form from her own familiar territories, she was unhesitating and big-hearted in her support, and uncompromising in her commitment to seeing things through to the point at which they were the best they could possibly be. I loved and respected her for that; she was utterly invaluable.

With these students, these resources, the stimulus in term of models of contemporary practice, the food for thought provided by colleagues, and the indomitable Anne Hearder, UWA looked like an ideal context in which to really take the plunge and explore some hunches, some emerging ‘whiffs of worlds’, the beginnings of something. I wasn’t sure precisely what, but all sorts of things certainly felt possible.

Over the next few years, and with the encouragement of a most supportive head of department Bob White, then Gareth Griffiths, alongside many small projects generated within the curriculum I directed a small number of Theatre Studies public productions: a version of Caryl Churchill and David Lan’s A Mouthful of Birds (1989, The Octagon, and at the York Theatre Festival); a condensed, runaway-train version of Macbeth (Macbeth: a modern ecstasy, 1990, The Dolphin); a devised show drawing on texts by Deborah Levy, William Burroughs and Joe Chaikin, an attempt to make a spell to cheat death - a close friend in Perth had just died from cancer at the age of 32 (Thunder Perfect Mind, The Dolphin, 1992); and Still-life, a dance-theatre piece based on texts by Rimbaud, Seneca and Caryl Churchill (The Dolphin, 1994). 

I am proud of this work, it did its job – and the ambition and commitment of the students were consistently inspiring. Also, as part of the 1994 Festival of Perth, I directed a devised adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel Beautiful Mutants in the New Fortune. It is worth noting that a number of former UWA and Murdoch students took core roles as performers and co-devisers (Felicity Bott, Andrea McVeigh and Barry Laing, who was also co-adapter and co-director), as well as scenographer (the sculptor Ricardo Peach) and sound and lighting designers (Andrew Beck and Margaret Burton respectively).

My approach throughout this period was insistently collaborative and much more intuitive than intellectual at its genesis; thought emerged from doing as a mode and site of enquiry, rather than theatre making being a vehicle for staging pre-existent thought, for illustrating a ‘thesis’. We used whatever strategies and materials seemed to contain the possibility of momentum in any particular context: improvisation triggered by a text or an image, a lot of reverse engineering from things that were ‘a bit like’ what we were after, music as compositional structure to re-fashion and unfold in space, a lot of hovering around rhythms that ‘did’ things, fumblings with dramaturgy as an affective as well as intellectual weave. We worked obsessively, often out of our depths and off our maps. We got lost and sometimes found things. 

In retrospect and at the time, it was seriously good fun, richly informative (about working with other people, about art and the resonant shapes it might take), and intellectually, imaginatively and creatively demanding; what more could one ask of art making in an educational context? I am grateful for having had the opportunity to collaborate with such remarkable people in such a context. It changed everything for me, and these experiences continue to inform the performance making and teaching in which I’m involved today in England and Europe. 

This essay - memories of what feels like a previous life - and extensive photographic documentation were commissioned for the UWA Centenary Theatre Collection (a new permanent collection of over 500 print and graphic items), Perth, Western Australia. The essay reflects on my own theatre practice in Western Australia, 1989-1995. Curated by Bill Dunstone, Wendy Dundas and Collin O’Brien, the Collection will be launched on 15 March 2013. The entire archive is to be digitized and made available online by UWA Special Collections. The essay is dedicated to the memory of Anne Hearder. 

Photographs (from the top): Still Life; Thunder Perfect Mind; Macbeth, a modern ecstasy; Beautiful Mutants; A Mouthful of Birds. 

shuttle 11: glass of flow

_________________________

'Still today, it is water who is stranger here. Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth' (Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient)

'In the desert, the horse drinks first' (The Barbarian, Sam Wood, 1933)

Movement and transformation. The resilient persistence of matter, its survival, its memory - and yet the bottom line is that the only constant is mobility, change. It’s all circuits and flows in the mortality of forms, and the unpredictable migrations of their constituent parts. 

There are the remains of sea creatures in deserts and on mountain tops. Shells on Everest. And a tiny bead of sweat on a forehead might contain something of the exhaled vapor of another person or creature from long ago and far away. 

A glass of water here now is informed by the past. Perhaps it holds molecules evaporated from a glacier, a tree, tears, mist, snow, fog, ice, a cough, the gurgle of a new-born child or someone’s final sigh. Maybe even molecules from Archimedes’ bath water. 

Countless micro-moments of time, from yesterday or centuries ago on the other side of this blue ball, potentially co-existing in the same small container. The glass itself was once sand. 

It’s almost promiscuous, this co-mingling, and there is joy and mystery in that thought.
_________________________

‘Ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bridle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they eliminate it – and it’s settled. But if on the contrary one remains open and susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural phenomena, one discovers the immense landscape of the trans-, of the passage. Which does not mean that everything will be adrift, our thinking, our choices, etc. But it means that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life.

This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness, leave passage: all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give way, always. A thought which leads to what is the element of writing: the necessity of only being the citizen of an extremely inappropriable, unmasterable country or ground’.

(Hélène Cixous in Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing, London: Routledge 1997: 51-2)
_________________________

For a brilliant account of the histories, economics, politics and ecologies of water in the western states of the USA (and with the overpumping of the vast fossil  aquifer, the Ogallala, very much in the news right now), see Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, London: Pimlico, 1993

For drinking-water-driving music, here is James Blake's live cover of Joni Mitchell's A Case of You ('that was incredible, dude ...')

Photograph (at top): Nick Winter, 'Badwater, Death Valley', 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point on earth; summer daily average temperature - 116F/47C; highest recorded temperature - 134F/57C

shuttle 7: there is a moment

'There was a moment in prehistory when a large animal slumped down with its last breath and thoughts to leave its bones in the earth that the researcher is carefully sifting through in the fossil pit.

There was a moment when the Cro-Magnon artist lifted the pigment-dipped natural-fiber brush to the walls of the cave that one now enters with electric light to view the image of the ancient bison on its walls.

There was a moment when your father died, and his before that, and the same moment when the impulse and attraction between two human beings fused into the one that is yourself, as you will do / have done so many times in the past.

There is a moment when the newborn first lets out a cry into the dry air, when the pressure of light first falls on the virgin surface of the new retina and is registered by some pattern of nerve impulses not yet fully "understood".

There is a single moment when the flash of insight busts into your unguarded mind, when all the pieces fall together, when the pattern is seen or the individual element uncovered ... when the breath of clarity opens the mind and you "see" for the first time in a long while, remembering what it was like again as if suddenly jolted from sleep.

There is a moment when a single neuron fires in the darkness within the brain, when a threshold is reached and a tiny spark jumps the gap that physically separates one cell from another, doing the same shimmering dance when the heat of the flame touches the skin or when a deep memory replays on the surface of the mind.

There is a moment, only truly known in anticipation before it happens, when the eyes close for the last time and the brain shuts down its circuits forever (the end of time). 

There is also the moment of recognition, the return of the familiar, the second-time perception that releases the latent energy and excitement of the first. It can be in a face, in a landscape, in a desire.

Then there is the moment of awareness of the other, embodied in the physical separation of mother and child, and restated from the first conceptualisation of persons and objects in a space outside the skin, to the first encounter with an animal in the wild.

The power of the gaze crystallises these moments, and the eyes become the conduits of the exchange of energies between the organism and the environment, between the observer and the observed. A line of sight can just as easily slice through the separation between subject and object as it can define it ...'.

From Bill Viola (1995), 'I do not know what it is I am like', in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 142-3
  

song & dance

"Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan say the idea for The Boat Project first emerged during a cycle of performances called The Days Of The Sledgehammer Have Gone (1999-2005), in which they had explored the human body’s connections with water, and its intimate imbrication in weather systems and the hydrological cycle. In material, poetic and comic ways, these performances activated the body’s own meteorology of sweat and tears and playfully merged them in circulatory exchange with the circuits and flows of river, sea, cloud and rain. In related ways, a boat casts the body into a dynamic relational matrix of materially active elements, energies and rhythms and invites it to improvise: wave, tide, current, wind, wood, salt, sound, weather, sky". (From the introduction to David Williams (ed.), The Lone Twin Boat Project, Chiquita Books, 2012)

In the wake of a sail on Lone Twin's Collective Spirit yesterday, with Olympic yachtsman Mark Covell at the helm, today my body still hums with sensations. In seas off Hayling Island, with the wind gusting to 20 knots, we passed through intermittent bursts of rain and sun. At speed, riding the surf, the boat itself 'sings' a particular tone, an audible vibratory hum of its own. 

On water the gravitied mass of the boat flies, it becomes all lightness and movement. Its weight is translated.

I was intrigued by how sensitively Mark reads with his peripheral vision what's at play, in particular the wind, deciphering its imminent arrival and implications on the sea's surface, its energetic trajectories. Also his reading of waves, the impact of patches of sunlight on wind ('puff'), the lightness of touch on the tiller.

Sailing, one feels part of something much bigger than oneself. Dynamically transforming systems, processes, agencies, unpredictabilities. To sail is a dance of relations, response-ability and im/balance, a choreography in which one's body is all eyes and ears. 

Despite my clumsiness at trying to tie a reef knot (some lingering memory about a tree, a bunny and a hole - but no idea how to tell that story with a rope), it's a while since I felt so awake.

dad (6): crawl

I enjoyed your little film, Dad. Thought you were great! It's hilarious.

Which film?

You know, the village cricket film. It's lovely. I saw it on YouTube. (49-51 secs.)

Oh yes.

Fine bit of eye acting on your part, it's brilliant.

Oh good. Blink and you'll miss it.

I thought you stole the show!

Most of me is on the cutting room floor, as they say. He was here for hours.

It's a nice film, really well made.

Yes he's very good. Very professional.

Yes, you can tell. We both really liked it ... I'm in a couple of performances in coming weeks, weirdly. First one's on the main stage at the Barbican next weekend. Quite daunting.

Oh, what's that?

It's a Pina Bausch performance.

Who?

Pina Bausch. You know, you sent me a cutting once saying, 'This is the sort of thing you'd like'. German choreographer, one of my favorite artists ever, really. She died a couple of years ago.

Oh. B.A.U ...

... S.C.H. Bausch.

Thought so. I'll look her up. Do you have to dance?

Not really. The dancers dance, and do all sorts of things; they're astonishing. I'm in a kind of chorus of men, twenty of us. Extras, really. An odd mixed bunch. We do bits and pieces. I get my shirt off and iron it. I crawl. I polish my shoes ...

You crawl ...

Yes, I love that bit. It's very immersive.

Oh.

It's a huge event, Dad. There's forty something people in it. It's part of a cycle of ten performances, all made by the Bausch company in different cities around the world. Santiago, Rome, Japan, India, Palermo - this one was first made in Lost Angeles, it's sort of a response to California. She was my favorite choreographer, beautiful. It's extraordinary to see them at work. They're super nice.

Oh good. What's it called?

'Nur Du', 'only you'.

N.O ...

N.U.R. new word D.U: it means 'only you' in German.

Oh yes. 'Nur Du'.

It's part of the programme of cultural events for the Olympics.

Ah, the Cultural Olympiad. What do they call this kind of thing - is it dance theatre?

Yes, exactly. I guess Pina Bausch was the core figure in dance theatre in Europe. 'Tanz theater'. It's a fantastic thing to do, I'm really excited. Just have to make sure I don't collide with some long-limbed dancer in full flight. Or fall off the front of the stage.

No, you don't want to do that.

There's a dangerous drop at the front lip. And it's quite dark. It would make for a spectacular one-off performance, a dive into the lap of someone in the front row.

What do you mean, you crawl? Is there a story?

Not a story as such, it's a sequence of images really. Some of it's like Surrealist painting, maybe. The crawling happens in front of these giant sequoia trees, there's a kind of forest onstage. All of us crawl - the people in the chorus, most of the Bausch dancers, in suits or frocks - very slowly through the space, with our heads down, while three or so of the dancers dance. There's music. It's like a dream image ... 

Oh. Do you have to rehearse?

Yes. Yes, of course.

And do you get paid?

Yes, I do, it's a proper performance. They're really well known, she's probably one of the most famous choreographers of the past 30 years or so. All sorts of people will be in the audience, she has serious fans: Alan Rickman, Wim Wenders ...

Bim who?

... you know, the director of 'Paris Texas'. Fiona Shaw, Antony Gormley. 

Antony Gormley. Oh.

I don't do much, probably 15 to 20 minutes out of three hours - it's a bit blink and you'll miss it too - but I'm really chuffed to be involved. 

Oh good. I'll look her up.

And then I'm supposed to be in another performance over the summer, at the Tate. It's a piece made by a young guy called Tino Sehgal.

Tina who?

Sehgal.

Tina Seagull. Never heard of her.

Him. Tino. S.E.H.G.A.L. 

S.E.H ...

... G.A.L. He's half German.

Ah.

You know the big entrance hall, the giant space on the way in to Tate Modern?

Yes, I've been there.

Well they've had a series of large scale commissions over the years for that space. Called the Unilever Commissions. You know, that guy who created the weather system, with a giant sun and clouds ...

Mmm, no.

Anyway, it's part of that series. Tino Sehgal has the commission to make something that runs throughout the summer. Starts in July. Three months.

And what do you have to do?

Well I'm not exactly sure as yet. I'll found out more next week, there's some meetings, I'll let you know. But he's a conceptual artist. He doesn't make things, objects; he makes events, encounters. He calls them 'constructed situations'. A while ago he took all of the art objects out of the Guggenheim in New York, and people walked up the spiral slope, one by one, led by a child, then someone slightly older, and so on all the way to someone really quite old at the top - the conversations there were about progress.

Oh.

For the piece at the Tate there's a big group of us, and I think we meet people who come in to the gallery and talk with them. It's structured at some level, but inevitably different depending on who you actually meet and how they engage, what they do.

So you talk to people.

Yes.

About what?

Well, I'll let you know more about it once I know a bit more. There are themes, topics, but a lot of it's improvised.

What do they call that kind of thing?

Mmm, I guess it's performance. Or probably conceptual art.

Oh.

He studied dance when he was younger, and something of that remains. But it's not really dance.

Oh. Do you crawl? (chortle)

No, I don't crawl ...

You'll have to be careful who you engage in conversation, you don't want to get involved with a psychopath.

A psychopath?

He might punch you in the nose.

What? How many psychopaths have you ever met in the Tate?

Well, judging by some of the art in there, there's quite a few around. Some of the art's psychopathetic.

Blimey. Just because you don't much like it - that's a preposterous thing to say. So because you don't like Mark Rothko's paintings does that mean he was a psychopath?

Oh, just trying to bring a bit of levity to the conversation.

Oh, right.

And I don't always understand the words you use. Your words mean different things. I have to use a dictionary.

Really?

You'll need to be careful who you talk to.

Have you not understood this conversation?

Yes yes, this sort of thing is fine.

Well then I can talk with people. I can talk with you.

Yes, but I have to analyse your writing.

Oh ... Oh dear. It's just a conversation, Dad.

[PAUSE]

And do you get paid?

[...]

worthy farm

For music critic Paul Morley's hilarious and perceptive account of his first ever visit to Glastonbury Festival this year - a 'mash-up of humanity and tent ... the offspring of Woodstock and Butlins, with mobile companies, falafel stalls, BBC live coverage and Tuborg lager as the godparents' - see his Observer article here

All photographs by David Williams, except for the grooving Liz Beech - by Stephen Clarke.

Bands at Glastonbury Festival 2010, from the top: Matt Frazier and Taylor Rice of Local Natives, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the xx, Devendra Banhart, Candi Staton, Bassekou Kouyate, Laura Marling, Stevie Wonder