…can you hear the drums? 

The official poster for Clark Beaumont’s production ‘So Where The Bloody Hell Are You?’ for SafARI 2012

Mona Hatoum
Pull, 1995. 
What appears to be a recorded installation reveals itself to be live. Mona subverts the expectations of digital jiggery-pokery. The audience is invited to tug a braid of hair that hangs in an alcove, below a digital screen featuring the artists face upside-down. With each tug, the face registers shock and pain; the viewer suspects its a recording, but in fact, it’s a live feed, and the hair is the artists own, attached and sensitive.
Artist of the week. 

The dismantling of conventional narrative and characters in filmed and live performance has a long legacy that includes Dadaist cabaret, New Wave cinema and the Happenings of the 1950s and 1960s. Happenings were developed by Allen Kaprow, among others, in bid to rid theatre of the primacy of the text based script; instead, they set up a series of conditions under which performance would take place. It might take the form of an installation in which a number of artists, poets and musicians were invited to contribute elements; what ever ‘happened’ might have been planned, but it was unrehearsed, it took place just once, and there was no audience, since all those present were considered participants.