Transmission review: Kate Davis Queen of Monotony (27th Jan 2010)

By Brook Davis

Kate Davis began is presentation by stating that the movie had been made a little rushed and had some technical problems, therefore would expect some failures

Well, who is honest deserves respect, but…

The movie started, a camera fixed on one side of a bridge, showing the other side in the darkness, the visibility was almost none, seeing only a few moving lights. Behind, a voice quite monotone, his own, reading a text about bridges and how they connected the people and how people were connected to each other, yet the prevailing thoughts throughout the text, was absences and a repetitive me, me and me. In fact that entire monotonous monologue spoke of misunderstandings and chance encounters, past somewhere behind, under or over bridges. Connections and disconnection all this over a day that would lighten the image, while a monotone voice continued to unwind the thread, but getting nowhere.

At the end, another excuse, I’m not a writer and this was my first text… Frankly, it was better to have been silent.

However behind all that blablabla something left that made worthwhile, a phrase resonating in my head: If a city is a body, the bridge is its spine.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission rambling: Monotone versus Monotonous (27th Jan 2010)

By Xesko

I do not know what to say, I hope that this first transmission of the quarter will not be an omen of what awaits me. The first one I attended last quarter, was an unexpected surprise as well as the past quarter, while this … Well as I said, I do not know what to say.

Kate began with a series of excuses about the movie she had done and when the presentation started I realized why. In fact the movie was awful. It was too dark (should have used a night filter) only a few lights in the background when some cars and buses passed and, suddenly… An omnipresent voice echoed through the sound system of the showroom, a monotone voice reading a text.

The text in the beginning was interesting though it was highly personal and the word heard most often was me, which demonstrated a huge ego hidden in that little sad figure.

And in the midst of darkness began the monotony of at completely monotone text; bridges, me, connections, kiss, me, love, caresses, fluids, me, sex, zzzzzzzzzz.

That monotone monotony assisted with the darkness in the showroom caused me to asleep. Someone somewhere next to me gave me a shove and I woke for the day, not for a real day but on the movie, we already could see something and that voice still ubiquitous and monotonous, and finally a question by the author, the movie is over? I think so!

And so at last, ended the massacre of the bridge of the voice of the river and of the silence.

Summarize it in one word. Monotonous.

Want to read more? Writings from my Head

Transmission 25th January 2010 Julie Westerman presents Kate Davies

(b) Julie Westerman worked with her guest, Kate Davies, to produce a video gift to the transmission audience. Combining footage of Sheffield’s Lady’s bridge with a live reading of a text piece made on a previous residency, on another bridge, host and guest sublimated years of chance meetings near water to create an alternative presentation. While the artists acknowledged that the piece was unfinished it was unable to function under such strenuous circumstances, both video and text needed a lot of editing. Opinion on the presentation was mixed. Some found it brave, revealing and inspiring, while others thought it was self indulgent and utterly exhausting. The introduction by JW along with the Q&A afterwards provided the insight and enthusiasm that the central performance lacked.

Transmission 25th January 2010 Julie Westerman presents Kate Davis

(a) First Trans. Back. ‘I’m ………….. delighted’.(J) Painted bronze. Water, bridges, crossings, Venice. All of these connections and meetings between them. (I feel included in a distant kind of way, having swam with J at the Lido myself). A boat house, the interior painted gold- a fire burning. J paints this beautiful picture, so full of love I almost cry. A bare chested man, glistening and taught (I am back at the Lido, watching the sea from my deck chair..I’m faidng away if front of the golden boy).

In the spirit of the host and friendship a gift is presented. The Lady’d bridge. I love that they’ve made a film together for the presentation. A laboratory of only 2 days. A space to evolve, thinking also about the chap book. J mentions the richness of their discussion. Text piece. The bridge. A bridge. Any bridge.

Not to be confused with my own friend Katie Davis.

It begins, the lights go out and KD is reading her piece. I think about voice as a medium. How is it functioning beyond poetry, not yet performance. Spoken work. Live reading. Blake, the poet and image maker. Dreams..cross over into them. Night becomes dawn and day anticipates dusk. The other side. On the way one is neither here nor there. I like the paradox. Busses and coughing are distracting. This is a long piece, which is fine but the people behind me are talking which doesn’t make it easier to endure. They talk through the questions too. How long?the video is unedited, so is the spoken piece. It was a text to be read not listened to, it should have been edited to serve this new purpose. For it to work here and now. In this regard it seems rather self indulgent. The length, (of the bridge), is a bit of a conceit.

How do you read this kind of thing? How do you make the voice sound. K is doing a bit of a newsreader thing, that tone..not too bland some intonation, but with a rythym that bears little resemblance to ordinary speech. She isn’t acting. Compare this to Slam Jam at Bloc last night…the first 5 mins would have gone down a storm and created some awe I imagine.

The intersection in the middle of a bridge is a kind of crossroads. River and bridge, (a Carrefour. In celtic belief rivers were a portal to the underworld. I read recently about a former archbishop throwing valuable religious relics into the river near Durham cathedral. He wasn’t supposed to do it. I love him for it.)

We find out how she’d made a proposal (for the original). It was interesting how she responded, how her circumstances changed,  and changed her reaction. It changed even further (though not enough for my liking) with this performance today. The kids behind talked through that bit too. Idiots! The dicussion is like a crit given the nature of the presentation.

Crossing..to-ing and fro-ing. Those stories, were they dreams. Im disappointed when she intimated they might be true events. They’ve been turned into dreams through her repetition. You are just like your mother, go away etc.. an internal bridge. Being a child is like being a bridge..between worlds, between your parents. Some one asks why the presentation was this way, I wonder if they felt cheated. I become aware how difficult it is to communicate with students of this age, How is it possible to share a common ground? There’ll be one person who’ll be totally obsessed with avoiding clichés from now on. KD didn’t mean to humiliate her but she did. LS is the only tutor in the front row. The talk was so long and boring that I sense an air of lawlessness. The works relation to psychoanalysis. ‘I pick at it like I pick at materials’ she says. Repetition, the events . Acting outside what has happened to them. Relentless.

Transmission: Kate Davies

My damp skirt slaps against my legs. Her my, my me. Her highly personalised me. Her… ‘Voice’ over filmic new media. She presents from the stage. Centre. Left. Stood, stark ~ but not. Dark jeans and ‘T’, face in shadow half-light picks up the contours. Cups her peaks her trunk and thighs. Liminal. Half lit. Lectern. The affect of a ghostlike part presence. The narrative reading clearly emanates from the surround-sound-speaker-system around the walls than from, herself. Presence self negated the effect is a very close thing to be able to pick up on. She becomes not here. I would rather have ‘said’ not all there, but I cannot. Superego. Speaks to us from somewhere else. On, or around the bridge. Unseen. ‘A ghost in the machine’. A liminal being. Betwixt. Between. Present…~ation. Assist affect. The style. Materiality of present~ Of words. The  gaps – between… Posit. This idea [art]. Of the bridge. As spine. From. The solid, undeniable and objective, ‘concrete’ bridge ~ to ~ the body. Flesh. ‘Drift’. Fluid. Feel. Change. Unknown workings. Tacit knowledge. The supposed and philosophical space of duality. ‘From head. Down. To hole – below. The spine. The bridge.

The centre of the middle. Journeys are for ‘others’. Bridge is place. Bridge is host. Bridge transmits, from head to whole. My damp skirt slaps, against my legs. Feel. Evening. Turning, into. Night. Dusk, mid~point, liminal, dangerous. Limen. Threshold. Diapason. Busses as they gear away. Middle distance. Away. Away the end. Journeys are for others. Upon the bridge. Time. Dérive. The draw of water, through. Drift. Green tints. Brown clouds blow. Half light early a.m sky, lens of ora street lamps glow. Night comes damp to morn/ day slow. Black dark river, forces, through, below. Damp skirt slaps my [my not your ~ become, your ] legs. PISS, CUM, SPIT. Startled cack-laugh pan-mouth clacks. Cityscape lifeform. Mind. Separate. From. Body. Though still the same. Bridge – conduit – spine. From head, down, to hole below. Dérive. Body. Host. Open. Hole. Open body. Open share. Private[s]. Intimate[d]. Her mental space. This place. This host. This hole. Separate. Same. Shared. Both hers and yours. Damp skirt slaps against my legs. Again… again, yet not against. Analepsis.. The bridge was the last place I saw him. The bridge connects. Back. Leading down, from head to hole. The bridge. One side… the other. Camera. Pan. Scan. Across. Slow. Surveil. Scan. Time and time. Night to-day and back again. Abridged from here. Foreshort. Her non~place. Fort. Host. Bridge and omphalos. ‘ The now’ Bridge. Back to the city. Where he is? One leg through the first railing. [..] They brought me drinks. Talk, swallow, cry, piss. I swore if I ever walked again. Invalid. Rash. Rash.. Rush, water, head. From head. Down. To hole. Headwater, brush brow, trunk now, past bough, down to, dark, wet, open holes below. Dérive. Flow. Water. Through. Pull. Dérive…My damp skirt slaps against my legs. CUNT – SWEET CUM and VOMIT. The centre of the middle, in~between. Joins one. Joins ‘other’. Separate. Same. Now.

Anon.

Closing Crossing, Transmission

Kate Davies Transmission

Closing Crossing

A bridge, a voice. An invisible body. Total silence. Total darkness. Here, tiny spots of light, water from a river flowing under a bridge: Sheffield.

Water as a passage of time, the time of separation. As a fixed place in a space, a bridge crossed by different cars, vehicles, buses. A nowhereness animated by memories of two separate beings. The water flowing under the bridge carries a text full of emotion. Words uttered slowly by a feminine voice. On her tongue, a flavour of love lost, of kisses exchanged. The smell of bodies entwined. The author of this text is an artist, Kate Davis.

Plunged into the darkness under the bridge, a body of perdition, carried by a voice, is awaiting a presence, the presence of an invisible yet unnamed beloved, a burst into his reality ravaged by pain. He does not manifest himself. “It’s raining and the river rises” this phrase chanted the text until the end. Dreams intersect in the absence, the reality is filled with ghosts, voices, gestures, elk unfulfilled, scents of enlaced bodies, kisses exchanged.

Tears reach the river, the river rises, emotion wins, the night is darker. Nothing can stop that voice, not even brushed memories. Nothing has come to end sleepless night under the bridge. Nothing can stop her melancholy. If the body is a city, the bridge is its spine, the river is a mixed blood of lovers through which memories are vivified by words.

Closing crossing. A sunrise. The narrator’s body is a red spot blend into the dawning day. Her white voice is masked by the noise of cars passing over the bridge. Between two runs, her figure is draped in a red cardigan. She walks. The voice of shadows is hit of clarity but no presence of the missed one on the bridge. She walks like Jensen’s Gradiva. Without destination. She stops, appears and disappears. What did she expect? No promise can justify her coming and going. Expectation is the only justification, the ceaseless flow of coming and going without reason. Walking aimlessly, with words of love, forgetfulness and lack sole sacrament.

Walk, live, fall, get up when fatigue wins. She is still living under the appearance of vacuum in a rubble of memories, words of missing, kisses exchanged, clasped hands. “ I’m here to catch your eyes. I am here to catch your glaze”. No glimpse, no glaze, no promises. The gift of peaceful words is not the promise possible of elsewhere. The hands of the invisible lover have long left her body, caresses have vanished in a glowing oblivion. Walking is the only resource for the one who claims to have lost everything. Crossing the bridge to the other side of life, where all could be reborn, love renewed. The bridge is a memory, a gap between two possibilities, in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately for her, the bridge is still a place where nothing happens.

Walking, falling, walking : is the only way of the vacuum. “ Closing, crossing, closing the gap crossing.” The words continue to flow in a steady stream. Hope stumbles against a wall with red bricks ; red as the melancholy of days without events, without caresses, without the taste of lover’s kiss on her abandoned lips. Red as the color of her coat, as the blood of a sealed pact. The bridge connects two definite points of a city but the lovers are still separated. Illusion of possible meeting on the bridge is brought by a hopeful voice. The truth is : absence prevails, the reality is punctuated by a lack, a  vacuum filled with memories and distressful gestures of the past. Under the bridge, considered as a body junction between past and the present runs the water. The water carries her illusion where it belongs: in the nothingness.

What else happens when you lost everything? Your voice, your words, a body of solitude, your treasurehouse. Is talking the only issue, as said Novalis ? Maybe. Walking, falling. …Speaking is trying to get the balance. Talking, caressing the running present, kissing the memories of the past, brushing the same gestures of tenderness and deep love. Closing crossing.

It rains and the river rises.

The voice falls silent.

Bona