A teenager in a balaclava starts the mosh pit. At the opening weekend of Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow’s international radical performance art festival, FK Alexander’s destructive durational show draws the most eclectic audience. It’s obvious who has turned up at this university building in the middle of the afternoon for the maximalist live art and who is here for the heavily tattooed hardcore bands battling between them to dredge the sludgiest sound from the depths of their diaphragms.
Happening throughout October, Take Me Somewhere savours beauty, mayhem and risk, championing boldly investigative and often delightfully odd work. Some of the performances I’m sorry to miss later in the month feature scent-based performance, lesbian-led explorations of cruising, and live welding. The first hunk of the diverse programme involves an exhilarating mix of interrogative performance and expansive work.
Alexander’s deafeningly loud response to the collapse of the music industry, The Problem with Music (TPM) (★★★☆☆), is inspired by Steve Albini’s essay of the same name. Alexander takes a selection of weaponry to records and CDs from her own archive for three interrupted hours, stomping over the ever-growing pile of vinyl shards and videotape. As she raises a pickaxe to another computer screen, an eager cluster of young hardcore fans thrash about gleefully to the sonic annihilation. They race from one side of the room to the other as local bands Endless Swarm (more frenetic) and Coffin Mulch (doomier) take turns, the majority of their lyrics incomprehensible to my untrained ears. The grungy, glittering spectacle is visually stimulating and audibly overwhelming, but after three loud hours to consider its deeper meaning, the show’s depiction of disintegration remains rather literal.
A different kind of demolition awaits with Out of the Blue (★★★★☆), a quiet, contemplative performance that sinks us 4,500 metres below the Pacific ocean. Eight large screens fill the wall like a control room, the space dim aside from their glare. Belgian artists Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere operate the show from their laptops, silently facing away from us. They use the screens to build up a gloomy picture of deep-sea mining, the terrifying new industry purportedly designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels by drilling into the seabed instead.
The pair use a moment in 2021, when three boats converged at the same point in the ocean, to combine arguments across industries about our future. Dredging company DEME-GSR was conducting the first deep-sea mining test, a group of marine biologists were there to monitor the impact, and Greenpeace sailed along to protest what was certain to destroy the future of a previously undisturbed ecosystem. From their apartment, Huysmans and Dereere interviewed people on all three boats, the show splicing their voices together with images of ethereal, jelly-like deep-sea fish. The functional practicality of the piece has a slight sense of remove, questioning more than it answers, but it retains a creeping sense of dread. As the information builds up, the pressure of the room seems to increase, and there’s a hard-to-shake feeling that we’re in the opening scenes of a disaster movie.
Across town in the festival’s base at Tramway, Christian Noelle Charles’s What a Feeling! Act II (★★★☆☆) offers a space of relief from existential dread, with a snippet of a show that’s more like being let into the workshop process than a polished product. Giving us access to a space and feeling that most of us will never know, Charles’s piece invites us into the X-ray feeling of being examined and judged in the audition room. A few members of the audience sit at a square of tables with Charles, with a little gap between the tables - minuscule in this cavernous room – where Emmanuella Damptey is examined. Charles keeps up a constant stream of chatter as Damptey dances, some of it critical, some enthusiastic, both high in pitch and volume, the intensity making both extremes lose their meaning. The moments of rest fall beautifully into place as the commentary dies away and a spotlight hits Damptey, the music lifting her chin and her body seeming utterly at peace in the movement.
Then comes the thwack of The Bride & the Goodnight Cinderella (★★★★☆), chapter one of the Cadela Força trilogy. The highlight of the opening weekend, this is a knockout, nightmarish odyssey that recklessly puts the artist’s body on the line. In a furious, desperate response to the proliferation of brutal violence against women, Carolina Bianchi takes a date rape drug, known in Brazil as “Goodnight Cinderella”. She passes out halfway through the performance, her body moved about as a dead weight for the rest of the show.
The first half of this electrifying performance plays out like a conference, with Bianchi rigorously weaving a picture of brutality through news stories, Renaissance painting and women’s bodies in performance art. As the drug works its way through her, she focuses on the horrific rape and murder of performance artist Pippa Bacca in 2008, a harrowing event that Bianchi comes to be obsessed and haunted by. When her body becomes heavy and she climbs on the table to sleep, the screen behind her falls away, the stage opens up and a troupe of performers emerge, dragging corpses and vibrating with movement. They dress and caress Bianchi’s body, creating a fever-dream around her. As the show expands, beautiful and grisly, Bianchi becomes not just a sacrifice to illustrate the story, but a physical symbol of the burden of her research. The rigour slackens a little later on but the scope and scale of the piece is astonishing, dragging us through hell and out the other side without ever being gratuitous or graphic in its presentation.
Perhaps it is the work’s proximity to death, the very audacity and risk of the thing, that creates such a supreme sense of vitality. The Bride & the Goodnight Cinderella highlights the boldness of this festival, as a space that relishes curiosity, fury and justice. In an artistic climate where risk is often passed over for shows guided by the safety of the A-list names that star in them, Take Me Somewhere is a longed-for jolt of work that feels truly – sometimes dangerously – alive.
Take Me Somewhere runs until 28 October in venues around Glasgow
