song for the decade

100 year old rock'n'roll band (UK & Finland)

On its final evening, the festival culminates in appropriately celebratory and boisterous fashion in the main hall of the Kulttuuriareena youth centre, with a one-off performance of a single six-minute song written for and performed by a group of people from the city of Kuopio. The project proposition to mark the tenth anniversary of ANTI was ‘one week, one band, one song, one gig’. British artists Sue Palmer, Joff Winterhart and Simon Roberts (above), in collaboration with the Finnish musician-composer DaveForestfield, set out to gather one person aged from within each decade from one to a hundred - someone under ten, a teenager, someone in their twenties, in their thirties, and so on - and to assemble a ten-strong band. Forestfield drew on existing musical contacts in the city to provide a rhythm section from local r’n’b musicians as well as a well-known jazz clarinettist in his mid-seventies. Sue and Joff found other band members through chance encounters on the street, in a community centre and elsewhere, including a sixteen-year-old vocalist met while buying milk in a local corner shop.

For Sue and Joff, such encounters with strangers were conceived to be as much a part of the ‘work’ as the song itself. They spent five days on the streets of Kuopio asking people whether they played a musical instrument, using this initial point of contact both as a mechanism for invitations to join the band and to generate material about Kuopio for the writing of the song. In the moment of performance of the song itself, a hilarious punk-pop reflection on ten years of ANTI, the band members’ pleasurable, energised engagement is palpable, realising some of the artists’ core concerns in this participative, inter-generational undertaking. In addition, a range of less visible connections and alliances are reaffirmed in the civic gathering around the song’s performance; for a significant number of those others encountered en route return to witness the performance as spectators, whooping and hollering as part of a broader temporary community celebrating ANTI, the band, the song, and new friendships enabled by unforeseen meetings with strangers.

Kuo-Kuo-Kuo-Kuo Kuopio, where does the smiling runner go?
The hundred year old band will play, laulu vuosikymmenelle
ANTI-fest in Kuopio, it started here ten years ago,
The hundred year old band has played, laulu vuosikymmenelle

* Children’s Choice Awards: ‘Most Musical (Fastest & Loudest)’, ‘Funniest’, ‘Most Relevant’

Photo by Pekka Mäkinen 2011

beastie

Lone Twin (UK)

The ANTI 2011 programme included a number of events that either targeted or implicated children, and as suggested above, all events apart from Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke were evaluated by the school kids who made up the jury of the Children’s Choice Awards. One work made specifically for younger audiences is Lone Twin’s Beastie, an encounter with an anomalous other: part Big Foot, part affable biped horse-muppet (the animatronic costume was designed by Darryl Worbey Studios in London), part imaginary friend concretised and unleashed into the urban everyday. Drawing on Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan’s experiences as writers for children’s television, Beastie has the characteristic immediacy and playfulness of much of Lone Twin’s work, its apparently joyous simplicity unfolding gently into greater complexities – related to imagination, desire, belief, identity, friendship and temporary communities constellating around stories.

The opening sequence of Beastie, rarely witnessed by adults, occurs here in a closed room in the Kultuuriareena youth centre. At each performance a small invited group of children become active participants in the naming of this particular manifestation of the creature. They propose certain attributes and narrative details, and help assemble the costumed figure from inert body parts laid out in dismembered form on a grid outline on the floor. In one performance in Kuopio, for example, it is decided that ‘Otsu’ has been hatched from an egg on Jupiter, and is still a youngster at 700 years old. Mistaking the egg for a football, another creature had kicked it through space to land on earth near the youth centre. Once the performer is ensconced within the full costume, an exquisitely effective and mysterious transformation occurs at the moment when the seated figure’s head is lifted and its aquamarine eyes blink open for the first time to countenance those who are there. Although the process of construction has been witnessed from the outset, and the creature’s artifice is wholly apparent – everyone knows it’s a performer inside a costume - at this moment of initial animation the impulse/desire to ‘believe’ the illusion seems to be compelling for the adults almost as much as it is for the children. From this point the creature is seen in a complex way that is reminiscent of a ‘both-and’ mode of spectatorship in forms such as Bunraku: a pulse between immersion in a wide-eyed illusionist credibility and a knowing distance that fully acknowledges manipulation and artifice.

Beastie leads the children out into the streets of Kuopio in search of a similar creature, a ‘friend’ on the loose and concealed somewhere within the city, and they accompany him through comic chance encounters with passers-by and moments of predictably unpredictable animal behaviour (e.g. pissing out of an elbow). Finally, the friend is located and the two waving creatures disappear into the distance, arm-in-arm. For the children, perhaps this simple open-ended narrative trajectory seeds the possibility of future encounters, other creatures, other forms of befriendable life happily at large in their city.  In the course of the festival they have already had a fleeting encounter with another anomalously shaggy ‘outsider’, Aaron Williamson’s ‘marooned wildman’, a pathetic, abandoned figure glimpsed and heard in the undergrowth of Vasikkaasaari Island, a short boat trip from the shoreline out into Lake Kallavesi. The city teems with others, it seems, in need of our help.

* Children’s Choice Awards: ‘Hairiest’ (tied with Aaron Williamson’s The Marooned Wildman), ‘Most Extraordinary’, ‘Best of the Best’

Photo by Pekka Mäkinen 2011