Everything is illuminated ... Rhodri
Davies on the harp.
I can't say I often go to working men's clubs for an arty evening out, but a friend took me to Bethnal Green in London's East End the other night for something called the Rational Rec, which describes itself as a "monthly inter-art social occasion, incorporating sound, music, text, performance, film and psychological experiments".
This month's offering was curated by performance artist Ansuman Biswas. The conceit was that the evening was to be entirely electricity-free. When we climbed the stairs to the club's upper room (busy carpet, glitter ball, that kind of thing) the audience - grouped at tables listening intently to a percussion improvisation - looked like something out of an Otto Dix or a George Grosz painting, geometric hairdos and angularly applied lipstick illuminated solely by candles. There was something magical about it.
Other performances included Rhodri Davies, improvising on the harp and making sounds more extreme than you've ever heard from the instrument (fingers down a blackboard; a million pebbles racing down a metal tube). Jem Finer, he who used to be in the Pogues, deejayed using three wind-up gramophones. Mark Espiner and friends sang in complete and terrifying darkness. Marcia Farquhar stood on a pedestal had a bevy of lovelies paint her legs with Bisto, in the spirit of the Blitz.
The whole event was nearly ruined by some violent, charmless and pretty content-free performance art that I could have done without - but in general, despite the variable quality of the work, this felt like an brilliantly refreshing evening and a real discovery.
So I'd like recommendations - out of London, and indeed the UK too - of art events that slip below the radar and exist on the avant-garde byways.
