(The following text, provisionally entitled "Alex Kovacs Interviews Himself about The Dismantled Cabaret" was written for inclusion in Openned Zine #5, as yet unpublished. The Openned Zines are electronic poetry magazines, with previous issues available here: http://www.openned.com/epubs )

What is The Dismantled Cabaret?
 


It is a live event, which has so far happened on two occasions, largely organised by myself and providing a platform for avant garde and experimental work of differing kinds, to date within the domains of music, performance art and poetry. The essential original purpose was to create an event at which anything whatsoever might happen, to challenge expectations by placing sometimes unlikely acts together and if possible to rediscover some of the energy I've always imagined being present at events like the original Dada cabarets, or the New Departures Live events of Michael Horovitz, or "The Festivals of Free Expression" organised by Jean-Jacques Lebel. Ideally, I would like for everyone present to feel that they have experienced something that was at least a little unexpected, an occasion which involved one or two things that they really hadn't seen before... 
 

                       (the author of this blog hosting the second Dismantled Cabaret)

What happened at the first Dismantled Cabaret?
 


The first Dismantled Cabaret took place on the 30th of November, 2005 upstairs at the Cafe Royal, in Edinburgh. This was inside an old ballroom with high, corniced ceilings and large mirrors, upstairs from the Cafe Royal proper which contains a spectacularly beautiful bar with hundred-year-old decor and a restaurant whose speciality is oysters. There were nine acts. About forty people attended. 
 


At this first event a gentleman named Blue provided some storytelling with a great number of props which he had brought along in a wooden box on wheels, distributing them amongst the audience who were asked to stand up and participate, until about half of the room had done so.

A poet named J.L. Williams read from her poetry. She has since written over a thousand poems and had her first book, Condition of Fire published by Shearsman. It is a collection of incredibly beautiful, incantatory poems. All of them were written whilst staying on the volcanic Aeolian Islands, which lie off the coast of Sicily, and were inspired by various aspects of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 

A gentleman named Pogo was the band leader in a five-piece improvisation group formed especially for the evening. This group included myself, playing percussion instruments in a strictly amateur capacity. We were called "Array" and the other players mostly played Jazz instruments but in such a discordant, unsettling way, with each player meandering in very different directions, that the title of "Jazz" was more or less discarded. Ryan Van Winkle, of the Forest Cafe, later christened this music "Spo-yazz".
 


A young man, who I lived with at the time, and who shall remain nameless, had an alcoholic-narcotic-psychotic breakdown on stage whilst half heartedly attempting to read from his poetry. After throwing many of his sheets of paper in the air he took to screaming "Who wants to fuck me in the ass! Who wants to fuck me in the ass!" repeatedly, before eventually having to be carried away from the microphone after refusing to leave its vicinity. It might be worth stating that he is a heterosexual. Eventually he curled up in a foetal ball in the corner of the room and started making little yelps and whimpering noises. It was quite an extraordinary spectacle to behold, but not one which I would like to see again.
 


To end the evening Atsushi Muramatsu from the band "Lipsync for a Lullaby" played a solo set, plucking at a cello fed through electronic devices whilst singing traditional Japanese folk lyrics. He made two young women cry. 
 

It was difficult for me to abstain from the desire to repeat such an event one day.
 
 


                                       (downstairs at the Cafe Royal, Edinburgh)

Who performed the second time?
 


The second manifestation of The Dismantled Cabaret took place at Chats Palace, in Hackney, London on the 28th of July, 2011.
 


There were ten solo performers. Four performance artists, three poets and three musicians. I was again the compère.
 


The performers took the stage in the following order:
 


Jennifer Allum (Improvised Violin)


Remlap (Performance Art)


Edmund Hardy (Poetry)


Filipa Guimarães (Performance Art)


Keston Sutherland (Poetry)
 


(And here there was an Interval)
 


Mai Nguyen Tri (Performance Art)


Emily Critchley (Poetry)


John Chantler (Electronica)


Ryan Styles (Performance Art)


Wooden Spoon (Electronica) 
  


                                  (Chats Palace, formerly Homerton Public Library)

How did you find the performers?



By a variety of ways and means. Some were friends. Others were discovered in a long series of lonely and obstinate trawlings through many different kinds of performance events throughout London. A great deal of time was also spent in front of a computer screen, sifting through many different sorts of texts. I could tell a different story about my discovery of each performer and most of them would be quite interesting.
  

Who or what is Remlap?
 


Remlap is a person. Gender= Masculine. Mostly, as an artist, he paints. Recently he has recorded most of his visions in monochrome. On the night of the Cabaret his tall lean frame was covered in a pair of red one-piece long johns which took him out of all ordinary fashion discourse, with a red corduroy cap atop head, black boots with thick heels on feet, clutching a pipe in hand, he performed sitting and standing up cycles repeatedly, whilst talking to a mysterious individual on the telephone named "Michael" who was busily giving him commands. The piece culminated in a spectacular display of gesticulations and sputterings in which Remlap enacted "a transcendental experience", at Michael's request, by making his face swollen and red with the blood circulating within his body, his veins popping out, engaging in a frenzy of limb motions, whilst reciting a sound poem called "Wiss Fong Gumperding" by an individual named Sir Ralph Chêvalier, which was both a parody and a gleeful validation of the avant garde, existing in the lineage that includes similar work by Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters.  



                                         (Remlap)

What about Filipa Guimarães?



She is a performance artist, originally from Portugal. I first met her at Tate Modern early in 2011 when I spontaneously decided to heckle a piece of performance art which was purportedly embodying a spirit of revolution. As spontaneous heckles go it was a complicated one and it would take me too long to go into the specfics, but its worth saying that afterwards one of the artists responsible for creating the piece said he had liked my intervention. After the performance Filipa approached me and a friendship developed.



At the Dismantled Cabaret Filipa performed a piece called "The Art of Making Money". Dressed in a dark business suit she placed a clay pot filled with soil on the floor of the stage and carefully "planted" a banknote in the soil, encouraging it with a sprinkling from a violet-coloured watering can. After lying down and watching the pot, waiting for some kind of miraculous growth to take place, she walked around the entirety of the audience, asking each person individually for money by making a silent begging gesture with her outstretched hand. This created quite a tense and charged atmosphere. Having been given some coins and a £10 banknote, she returned to the stage, carefully placed these new examples of money into the soil and again used her watering can to attempt to hasten their growth.    



                                                      (Filipa Guimarães)

And Edmund Hardy?
 


He read from Desertion, a work assembled from fragments of speech taken from the trials of British Army deserters of World War One. The work examines a moment when an individual's use of language, as much as anything, was placed under intense and awful scrutiny.

Some of the sentences discovered are remarkable for their rawness and power:
 


Even as a child, I said to myself, 'I'm going to die'
 


In their new arrangement, as fragments, as new juxtapositions of language, there is an occasional extraordinary abstraction:
 


It didn't end, the thermal wind and the force 

Which to me almost feels like the statement of a mystic.

Edmund Hardy has done very well to draw attention to these oral statements and rescue them from absolute obscurity and neglect.
 


 
                                     (Edmund Hardy)

And Ryan Styles?



Ryan Styles is a performance artist who often performs in drag. At the cabaret he enacted a piece entitled "Old Age". This commenced with him cutting up onions and crying, in heavy make up and apron, to loud melodramatic musical accompaniment. He then tore away his initial costume to reveal a number of hidden rubber teats, one of which he squeezed, producing a liquid which he collected in a glass. He then smoked a large bunch of cigarettes, drank alcohol or its stage equivalent, danced and twirled, threw some plates across the stage, blew up a red heart-shaped balloon emerging somehow from his chest, before balancing on top of a stack of plates whilst wearing a pair of stilletos, destroying a number of things in the process and leaving the stage to the loudest rendition of clapping and cheering to be heard all evening. 
 
 


                                         (Ryan Styles)

So what about the musicians at the Cabaret?

 

The Cabaret this time around involved two electronica acts and one improvised performance on the violin. In the future anything and everything unusual might be considered for inclusion in The Dismantled Cabaret, be it hurdy-gurdies, sackbuts, claves, vocal gymnastics, odd manifestations of clicking and droning, intense and wild noise. All is possible.           
 


On this occasion Jennifer Allum commenced the Cabaret by playing the violin and making beautiful fragile hushed scraping sounds which often came intensely close to a state of silence. Everyone sat in utter stillness within a state of rapt attention.
 


John Chantler possesses a device which can generate random sounds from his 70s synthesizer and the music he produces is to me extraordinary for its subtle shifts in form, with many divergent pathways being offered simultaneously, as if each sound commences a new possible route of investigation.  
 


Wooden Spoon provided lush exotica in the form of tape loop manipulations which sounded as delicious to me as the prospect of pieces of bright yellow fruit hanging from a tropical cartoon tree which are waiting to be picked and handled by outreaching hands. 
 



(Jennifer Allum improvising on the violin)

                                         (Wooden Spoon)

And then what about Mai Nguyen Tri?
 


Mai performed a piece of physical theatre, garbed in a white dress, feet also coated in white, her feet bare, a length of white rope tied around one ankle and this extending from a large coil of rope behind her. The piece involved a series of movements away from the coil of rope, and so "outwards" into the world. When Mai moves during her performances, the spaces which she traverses usually take on metaphorical qualities so that her movements represent those taking place between birth and death, or from imprisonment to freedom.  
 
 


                                         (Mai Ngyuen Tri)

And so what exactly do you have to say on the subject of Keston Sutherland’s poetry?

On the evening of The Dismantled Cabaret he read a new poem called "Ode to TL61P 1" which will be published in The Chicago Review in late Autumn. The title refers to a component of a Hotpoint dryer and is the first of five odes to that object. I have yet to understand the precise significance of this particular industrial component. Indeed it is probably impossible for me to write about Keston's work with any "accuracy", but perhaps that isn't the point. I believe he would like us to encounter his texts before any act of "deciphering" them takes place.
  


Quite how an individual should react to such an extraordinary abstract cascade of verbal ingenuity I do not know exactly. All I can say is that anyone who speaks the English language and is interested in innovation within contemporary literature should attempt to hear Keston Sutherland read his poetry in person. On the page (or screen) the work is also very exciting, but to really understand the precise jolts and lilts of its music, I feel a direct aural encounter with the full emotional force and speed of his vocal delivery is necessary.
 


Reading through his "Ode to TL61P 1" after the event, his work has struck me as being intensely angry, and highly masculine, profoundly aware of the physical in anatomical terms, and the implications that follow from thinking about the facts of our mortality and sexuality. It should certainly be noted that "Ode to TL61P 1" is partly a love poem and arguably the most tender and straightforwardly emotional section of the poem addresses this love directly, a moment at which the anger undoubtedly ceases for a few moments. 


In much of the rest of the poem there is a great abrasive confused encounter with the universe, with occaisonal grim jokes, as well as bursts of genuine horror and outrage. The reader will find an enormously wide-ranging series of allusions, jumps from one seemingly disconnected image to another, reminiscent of Dada word collage to my ear, but much more carefully composed, and with a decidedly contemporary and individual tone. In this poem we have snapshot encounters with Percy Shelley, Martin Amis, the Canon MF8180C (a photocopier), Alkindus (a 9th Century Arab philosopher), a Tefal Maxifry (a deep fat fryer, available in white or black, and containing a "viewing window"), Zayid Rashid al Zayani (responsible for bringing Formula 1 back to Bahrain), Pyotr Tchaikovsky, "Danny Boy" (lyrics originally by Frederick Weatherley), Félix Gallardo (a Mexican drug baron) and more besides. At the very least such an unusual range of references displays a profoundly original imagination at work. This is incendiary, convulsive, violent poetry. It deserves to be heard.

 

                                         (Keston Sutherland)

And how about Emily Critchley's poetry?

On the night Emily Critchley read the first part of her poem "Some Curious Thing", to the accompaniment of some extraordinary music by Peter Zinovieff, which personally took me into a place of almost primordial strangeness in which words seemed to be re-inventing their meanings whilst being spoken. After asking about the meaning of her work, Emily sent me the following e-mail, which I would like to quote here in full, because it seems to me to be as well written and dense and considered as her poetry, and because it contains a fuller, more illuminating analysis of her poem than any I could offer: 

Some Curious Thing was prompted by the happy collision of two events two summers ago: reading Joan Retallack’s Memnoir (2004) & then a few days later coming across Peter Zinovieff’s libretto for The Mask of Orpheus (1986) at a Prom performance of Harrison Bertwistle’s opera (of the same name). The two texts touched, in v different ways, nerves & passions & themes that I’ve been working on for a while, such as the relationships between consciousness & self-consciousness, development & time, men & women, perceptions & representations, childhood & adulthood, memory & myth & their ‘afterrimages’ (Retallack) on writing / society / us. Orpheus =of course traditionally the god of poetry, but also, historically, a real figure in ancient Greek political life responsible for transforming Greece from a matriarchy to a patriarchy.
 


Retallack's Memnoir has a feminist thrust, for instance, in its examinations of the portrayal of female ‘characters’, e.g. in film noir; the poem as a whole explores the way cultural points of reference enframe our ‘lived perspective’ – in phenomenological terms. The Mask of Orpheus, too, plays on the interrelationships between myth and reality; each of the major characters - Orpheus, Euridice and Aristaeus - appear in three forms: as a singer who represents their human forms; as a mime, representing their heroic selves; and as a puppet, representing their myths. Individual events also occur and reoccur within the opera, as they are being predicted, as they happen, and as they are remembered. It is suitably, elegiacally, about what happens in the gaps between these moments/states.
 


Rather than telling the story in a linear way, The Mask of Orpheus happens in a number of directions simultaneously (literally by dividing the stage into different sections & having multiple people play the same character), examining the various versions of the myth: their overlaps, as well as their contradictions. Memnoir, too, has been described as being ‘a high-speed chase through intersections of chance and consciousness’. Both, in other words, disrupt ordinary chronology & the fiction that any one perspective / order is realistic, as does my own poem.
 


Given that Memnoir & The Mask of Orpheus (& so much of the poetry I love) are about thinking through the experience of experiencing, it was almost inevitable that my interest in phenomenology would come into Some Curious Thing, hence its refs to The Phenomenology of Spirit, esp re. the tensions between attempts to become self-consciously reflective & the creative mess caused by intrusions of circumstance, context, body, emotion, other people, etc. I.e., phenomenology understands that if consciousness attends to what is present in itself and its relation to its objects, it will see that what looks like stable and fixed forms dissolve before one's eyes. Thus the old flow of deductive reasoning alone no longer suffices. Art realized this ages ago of course!
 


The discovery of Zinovieff’s Agnus Dei (1976) - the music I played on the night - came after I’d written the poem. An example of musique concrète, it perfectly marries with the anti-traditionalism of the writing & thinking that interests me. It utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource, such that the compositional material is not
restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as ‘musical’ (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). To put it simplistically, this not being diatonic – i.e. neither in a major or minor key, but hovering somewhere nervously, hopefully, on the cusp between – perfectly evokes the ambivalences of the subject matter of SCT. AD has haunting qualities of memory & loss – re. relationships, time & god? – whilst being fundamentally not negative & not un-open (unlike Bertwistle’s music for The Mask of Orpheus which is terrifying & overpowering in its directions & ramifications). Agnus Dei thus chimes with the anxieties but also hopes & thankfulness in my poem, esp regarding the feminism of Retallack’s generation that won so much ground for women of my generation. Agnus Dei is quite a gentle & mysterious piece, as you’d expect from its title. The distortions, backward loops, phasing and frequency shifting effects (derived from a Delay Line) mirror the effects of time’s patterns & repetitions, such as Euridice dying all over again & Orpheus killing himself or being killed, according to whichever variation on the myth you read.

So when will there be another Dismantled Cabaret?

A third edition of The Dismantled Cabaret will be taking place at ] performance s p a c e [ in Hackney Wick, on Saturday the 17th of March, 2012, commencing at 8pm. Further details are below.

                                          ]performance s p a c e [ 

                                         (...and its Hackney Wick environs)