Occupy London: Energy Tour

In 2011, the Occupy movement sought to call global attention to the worsening distribution of income and wealth stemming from the centres of global capitalism. As a rare manifestation of anger around a constantly simmering (and tragically escalating) situation, Occupy stands out as a major contemporary attempt to collectively change the global narrative around fast-disappearing human rights, connected with economics and space. Extending from this, Occupy London Tours is an  attempt to keep this conversation alive in the heart of the world's banking sector (they want to "throw open the secretive world of finance and politics for all to see"), through participatory, volunteer-run community and educational events.

To this end, Occupy London Tours has been running several city tours since 2012, spanning Mayfair, the City, the recent high-rise development at Canary Wharf, and the newly-minted Energy Tour. A walking tour is a nice format for education and community-building, and there was a social feel common to the best of community projects as we strolled around London's Southbank precinct, chatting to each other in between sites. Your correspondent picked up the tour halfway - drained from the previous fortnight's residency here, I was late and had to intercept the tour through some sleuthing - and so for me the tour began at the surprisingly-located Shell Building,  just behind the London Eye. Out hosts (Alice Rose Bell and Chaitanya Kumar), wearing top-hats, explain to us that this nondescript brutalist building is the home of the Shell Foundation, Shell's philanthropic arm, which may or may not be well-intentioned, and proceeds to go through some of the history of Shell, including its founding (by an English trader interested in, surprisingly enough, shells), merger with Royal Dutch Petroleum, expansion into Nigeria, interference in local conflict there, and other global operations, to its present-day strategic maneuvering against activists, environmentalists, and communities.

Photo: Occupy Tours London (pictured: Alice Rose Bell and Max Wakefield)

It's not news to anyone remotely involved in environmental activism, and Royal Dutch Shell features at the top of most lists of history's worst contributors to climate change. All the same, it doesn't hurt to hear it again, and there's something symbolic in the innocent-sounding, small-town British backstory of Shell, and its gradual embedding of itself as inseparable from government - a kind of extreme early business prototype for how to become too-big-to-fail - serves as another reminder of the near-impossibility of change in a world of oil economics (not to mention the location and size of the building itself). The story of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist executed by the Nigerian government for non-violent resistance against the environmental destruction of his homeland Niger Delta in the 90s, is a particularly acute reminder. Such events continue today, with oil companies, as shell did in the case of Saro-Wiwa, doing their best to wash their hands of direct involvement in conflict whilst simultaneously doing whatever it takes to maximise profit. Though there are few cases where this was as direct as Saro-Wiwa - which resulted in Nigeria being somewhat hypocritically suspended from the Commonwealth for what, let's face is, was probably in the end the actions of a British company - it is commonly acknowledged that such instances are now part of the day-to-day running of a global resources corporation (Brazil's Vale, or Australia's BHP and Rio Tinto, for example). That activists continue to risk their lives fighting against such global machinery is necessary, but their personal sacrifice cannot be anything but acutely felt.

Not co-incidentally, the next location of the tour is the Nigerian High Commission, where out top-hatted chaperones explain a little more about Saro-Winka's story and the ensuing international furore, before finishing the tour with a visit to the building which, until recently, was the headquarters of the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change. It was big news when one of Teresa May's first actions on 'winning' the UK Prime Ministership was to absorb the 8-year-old department into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to form the ominously-named Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, following the lead of countries like Australia in erasing the implicit acknowledgement that climate change exists, and therefore also erasing any potential liability. Not only did it seem to represent a denial of the prominence of Climate Change in government policy, it also took away the potential for the department to extend its operations, apparently mainly limited to decommissioning nuclear sites.

The tour can only touch the surface of some of these issues, but nevertheless, as I broke off at the completion of the tour to do some fairly cynical sightseeing in London's centre, I was aware of my newly-informed gaze. As someone who has always looked at the buildings of London (and not only London) with a degree of suspicion about what they actually are - what their history actually is, what people are actually doing in there - the choice of Occupy Tours to equip us with the history and significance of some of these buildings can only be a good thing. At best, it's a reminder that the strength of human beings working together to overcome the embedded violence of the global system, here represented by the monument of architecture.

At worst, it makes you feel a little less alone in the overwhelming worldscape we are now in.

Other locations include the Tate Modern, the Coin Street Co-Op and the Thames.
Occupy London: Energy Tour guides include Chaitanya Kumar, Alice Rose Bell, Max Wakefield and Sophie Neuburg.

Occupy Tours runs monthly throughout the year. 
http://occupytours.org/

Screens

Some of my writing on London theatre over at AYT:

http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-screens-theatre-503/
 

Over the Ruins of Amazonia: At the Frontiers of Climate Change

The indigenous population of the Amazon are key chess pieces in the current 'game' of climate change. Located mostly in Brazil but shared with neighbouring countries, and representing over half of the world's remaining rain forest (!!!), what happens in the contest between protectors of the Amazon rainforest - including activists, some scientists, some NGOs, and indigenous populations - and those neoliberal multinationals and government forces which would want to exploit it in the context of Brazil's emerging economy, will play a large role in determining to what extent irreversible damage is done to this particular pivotal area, and have a reverberating effect on similar conflicts. As with many contested sites: the battle-lines are increasingly clear, the stakes are global, and those defending the Amazon are in a position of increasing weakness against well-resourced, in a way unbeatable, global machine of capitalism. As hopeless as it is to struggle against this overwhelming force, it won't stop soon.

Brazil's 'coup' (parentheses only for technical definition reasons, I am happy to call it a coup) last month has not exactly helped the situation, although as architect Paolo Tavares points out in his comprehensive lecture, part of HAU's curated Brazil-focused program called The Sky is Already Falling, it's just another complicated political event in a long tradition of Brazilian political history. The leftist governments of the 1980s, he points out, actually accelerated the forced relocation of indigenous populations in the Amazon, in the name of forest clearing and cultivation. The impeachment will have an effect, and yes that would appear to be largely negative in terms of the aforementioned conflict, but it's not necessarily a large change from what was already occurring anyway. This is a bipartisan project of colonial violence propelled by capitalist interest.

Faki Epilogue: Ghosts in the Medika

Well, it's over. Over the 6 days of the festival, I saw all 26 shows except my compatriots When We First Met by Anything is Valid Dance Theatre (AU), a victim of an unexpected public holiday, and managed to review 20 of them at a rate of about 3-4 per day. If that doesn't seem like a lot, you have never written a review. Engaging with 3-4 shows a day, 3-4 entirely different realities in one gruelling evening, only to wipe the slate clean and begin again with the previous night's shows still ringing in your ears, is difficult. Not to mention talking with artists about their work and what you've written about it, getting to know them, and then not having the time to talk with them because you have to write about the new shows. Human interference is complex but, as I was reminded at Faki, it's part of living in a community. Along with sweeping, cooking, and mopping, making society is part of the work which must be done.

I became a kind of machine at Faki. Like a critical thought computer. If my writing seemed to take on the same rhythm each day that's why.

The art at Faki was revealing of some growing and continuing trends among artists in Europe. The tendency for 'emotional mining of the self' - exploiting and manipulating your own ontology for performance, was pushed to the extreme in some cases. Metaphors, once kind of important in art, were now uncool - much better to simply manipulate and intervene in reality. Collaborations seemed also to lose their power in comparison with the authentic power of first-person story.

Faki Day 6: Artifice, everyday violence and non-justice

There’s something about the pharmaceutical factory Medika that has a weird effect on memory. Of course the friendships made through collaboration and conversation will last and even strengthen - but the stronger memories from Faki will seem to never be the ‘known’ but the ‘un-known’, or the partly known. It’s the passing glimpses of a perverse moment, the random acts of generosity and humanity, or the hidden menace that stick to the brain. I don’t know if that’s just the sheer labyrinth-like nature of the place: creating surprises around every corner, small shocks to attune the senses and unsettling reality. These are the unforgettable content filling the frame of the factory. The normality disappears.

The final day of the festival began with a Zagrebian circus performance about torture, followed (after a quick scamper through the rain) by a polished surrealist performance from Patricia Hastewell and group All These Places Had Their Moments which blended various styles of movement. The site-specific choreography collaboration from Clipa Theatre, Collective B and Liv Fauver was the only show to fully utilise the courtyard of Medika – and a unified collective of punks, artists and revellers, and a dog, watched on in silent reverence.  Daniela Marcozzi closed out the festival with a widely referential work Right On! addressing today’s troubled perspective on justice.

The only apology is the circus performance from Cirkorama.

All These Places Had Their Moments

Writing, or attempting to write, or failing to write, so much on dance these last few days has taught me a few things. One is that dancers will inevitably tell you that you don’t need to know much about dance to write on it - that a naïve perspective is ok. I think this is partly true. A traditional aim of the artist is to communicate on a universal, symbolic level, so why shouldn’t I then be able to write about what I understand of it? On the other hand, working with a technical language is naturally inclusive of finer points, which a critic must be able to cover. When a piece of theatre fails, for example, I know enough to guess why it might have failed – I can see the intention, or see the bigger picture. With dance, that’s more difficult. There are some works that are trying to do something quite specific, and this point itself doesn’t render the whole initiative invalid. Achieving something specific within a limited frame can have a flow-on effect, even if more than half the audience doesn’t get it. This s true not only of specific work, but is inherent in the concept of avant-garde, where the audience will be alienated because the piece is trying to discuss something which does not yet exist. Again – that it was comprehended does not mean necessarily that the objectives were valid.

Faki Day 5: Spider-man in Zagreb, Greek suffering, and state volence

It's morning on Day 6 of Faki, and everyone at the former Pharmaceutical factory Medika is running on empty. People meet you with exhausted smiles as they head lazily for the kitchen, their exhaustion removing the normal social barriers, creating either what is either love or a kind of co-dependency. Most artists have, in different ways, been working for a solid week now - it mightn't seem like 'work' to host a party with refugees, for example, but creating love and human connection at a time like this is so important, it becomes a type of labour. This is why we're here.

An easier day for your correspondent today after yesterday's writing got big on me. I can see the finish line now, but there's still some work to do. Yesterday's shows sat nicely against each other: Dror Lieberman's site-specific action-adventure The Lowest Spot in Zagreb was a crazy way to encounter locals, Elli Papakonstantinou and Odc Ensemble's Re-volt Athens is the first work of this kind of festival to go nuts and destroy everything, and Alexander Manuiloff's The State was a political experiment that provided a very hilarious - and I'm sure very Croatian - outcome.

Apologies today to Fika Danza, whose work Calamaleonte Primo (Chameleon First) again shows my shortcomings in dance criticism. Gotta go and get that dance criticism training.

The Lowest Spot in Zagreb

I am terrible at working in public space. I don't know why - I think it's the built-up fear that I have of police, poverty, maybe even social interaction. These fears build up over time - through not exercising your rights, you forget about them - through not taking risk , you never know the limitations imposed on yourself or others. And these limitations are undoubtedly important: our freedoms in public space are a symbolic representation of our freedoms more generally, often expressed in the right to freely protest (an interesting question now), the right to occupy (hmmm....), the right to human mobility (er....) and the right to employ space for something other than commercial use (...forget about it).

Faki Day 4: Blackness and Queerness, Self-Punishment, and... Yoga

It's morning on day 5, and it turns out the noise I heard at 3am was someone smashing up a kitchen sink in the courtyard. There's nothing like sweeping in the pharmaceutical factory Medika - it's a task dutifully undertaken every day but it's an impossible task nevertheless, the layers of dirt seem so caked on as to form their own surface. There's pieces of glass actually embedded into the concrete - they weren't planted there when it was setting, they've just been there so long they've kind of melted into the ground. I just sweep it in a big pile so that no one steps on the ceramic shards - and later it's gone, as if by magic. Medika taketh away and Medika giveth.

Day 4 was another assortment of powerful voices asserting wildly different realities. Things began as they do for many in the morning - with Yoga, courtesy of Jindřiška Křivánková and Markéta Magidová's blissfully parodic Migra Yoga. A sweat later, we were made to feel inferior by the extremely physical Neither Soft Nor Light, a punishing performance of masculinity, forming an interesting double with Malik Nashad Sharpe 's challenging performance artwork Assimilation. The night ended (for some) with Stephanie Felber's Medomai, a curious transfer of a street performance to a hyper-slow motion version of Strauss' Blue Danube.

Medomai is also the casualty for today - again for technical dance reasons I suppose, although it's categorised as a street performance. I will not give full breadth to Roxana Küwen's Shift, instead focusing on a specific claim made by the circus artist. See the end of the post for that.

Migra Yoga

I have friends who will be angry at me for admitting this, but I am a yoga cynic. Cultural appropriation aside - it feels, in a first world sense, like a solution created to avoid a problem: the void of the self created by capitalist societies is neatly solved by the commanding, believable spiritual leadership of the yoga teacher, with their promises of connection, wholeness, and openness contradicting those negative feeling you get from advertising or the more damaging elements of social relations under capitalism - all for 12€ an hour. There's something about the form of it that goes directly against my critical instincts - the way the student-teacher relationship is so one-way, the positivity of it, the economy around it. It seems to me a perfect example of instead of addressing the cause, we create a social counter-balance: in this sense it fits perfectly into other contradictory phenomena that characterise western society.