Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?
Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts
Fragments From an Interspecies Opera: Acis and Galatea Rewilded,
or, a Serenata; or Pastoral Entertainment in the Age of Extinction
The moths that appear in this film were gifted by the renowned entomologist Dr Roger Key to Will Evans who is a current PhD researcher on the BioDar project at The University of Leeds. The moths were contained in four boxes acquired by Key nearly twenty years ago when the Leeds City Museum restructured its collections. Although the moths were in an undamaged condition, they did not have enough data attached to them to warrant keeping. Dr. Key’s own collection, that he made as a child, was donated to Scunthorpe Museum during the 1970s. When Dr. Key visited the museum there he found that his boyhood collection had been reduced to powder by museum beetles, booklice, clothes moths and mites. Will Evans was taught his insect identification skills by Dr. Key.
Will Evans collaborated with Redell Olsen in the making of this film by scanning the moths on the project’s newly acquired Artec 3D scanner. Filming took place under lockdown. Evans set up the insects in the lab and they were then filmed by Olsen through a digital online platform as Olsen directed Evans to move the view of the insects by moving the cursor on his screen. That the cursor remains visible in the final film offers a trace of the process and production involved, a Brechtian reminder of agency and control rather than a Hollywoodization and reification of insects long dead.
The audio that accompanies the film reimagines George Frideric Handel’s pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea with the new lyrics of an imagined inter-species opera, extracts of which are performed in collaboration with the Chorus of Opera North and bass-baritone Matthew Stiff, as a response to the current climate crisis and environmental degradation.
The new text of Handel’s air to be sung to the music of Acis and Galatea – O Ruddier Than The Cherry holds particular contemporary relevance in relation to the meetings by international leaders at Cop26 in November 2021.
Opera North
Oliver Rundell and the Chorus at Opera North:
Sarah Blood, Sarah Estill, Rachel J Mosley, Victoria Sharp, Anna Barry, Cordelia Fish, Katie Walker, Warren Gillespie, David Llewellyn, Arwel Price, Graham Russell, Ivan Sharpe, Paul Gibson, Ross McInroy, Richard Mosley-Evans, Jeremy Peaker, Gordon Shaw with Martin Pickard – piano ‘radar watchers’.
Matthew Stiff – ‘bass-baritone’, David Cowan – piano
Redell Olsen, Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel, subpress, 2012.
This work was commissioned by Isabella d’Este for the walls of her studiolo after she attended a daylong screening of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster at The Roxy in Brixton, London, and a few weeks later stumbled upon an artist’s talk by Raphael on Ed Ruscha’s painting “They Called Her Styrene.” However, it was her experiences that same evening in a karaoke bar off Oxford Street that convinced her to go through with her planned idea and to approach a writer who could carry out her design for a bar rock pastel. At the time of the commission the patron was herself concerned with the plight of deer on the roads of Europe and North America and was an ardent campaigner for the introduction of sonic deer deterrents based on installations pioneered by Max Neuhaus. In a drawing, now unfortunately lost, and in this written description (for the first time available here within the text of a popular edition) she details her request for a masque of grotesque pastoral and mythic proportions, a cloven poetics that would feature commerical activity to be streamed live on the walls of her studiolo. She similarly required the inclusion of players as ordinary citizens—or often as ordinary citizens as artists—”got up in devious animal brocade,” to perform whatever forms of cultural consumption, display and collection they encountered over the duration of their everyday experience, all this for her personal entertainment and meditative consolation. D’Este paid for the work upfront safe in the knowledge that she had purchased a piece of poetic invention in which even the title was against itself.
Author City: LONDON / CAMBRIDGE, UK
Redell Olsen’s previous publications include: Book of the Fur (Rempress, 2000), Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004) and the collaboratively edited bookwork Here Are My Instructions (Gefn Press, 2004). From 2006-2010 she was the editor of How2 the online journal for modernist and contemporary poetry, poetics and criticism by women. Her recent projects have involved texts for performance, film and site-specific collaboration and include: Newe Booke of Copies (2009), Bucolic Picnic (or Toile de Jouy Camouflage) (2009) and The Lost Swimming Pool (2010). She is reader in poetic practice at Royal Holloway, University of London where she is the director of the MA in Poetic Practice.
issn: 9781930068568
Available here from SPD