Brenda Atkinson : Performance
Carfax, industrial home to Johannesburg’s edgily paranoid and elegantly pierced, was an apt venue for last week’s one-off performance by intellectual techmeisters, The Sunless Ensemble. Conceived, written and directed for Sunless by academic James Sey, the performance, titled Symphony of the Invisible City, is an epic hard-core venture into the pleasures and pitfalls of technologised urban space.
Delivered in three movements pinned together by an intermittent monologue spoken by Sey, Symphony combines narrative, live music and “found video” to tap the irregular pulse of urban pathology. An ambient classical throb introduces and concludes the piece. In between, it builds into a slick drum’n’bass thud, then contorts into muscular techno. Sey’s narrative voice begins the obsessional journey of a delusional character with quiet conviction, plotting the “hellish logic of the city-machine”.
For the academics out there, we’re talking JG Ballard’s auto-smitten James in Crash, Michael Brownstein’s sexually compulsive victim in The Touch, Deleuze and Guattari’s body-machines – the territory of theories about desire, identity, and the urban condition, and a male character who knows exactly what he’s doing and how messed up it is, but can’t escape the lure of his own intellectual compulsion.
Sey’s concept works best in terms of the show’s visual medium – the film clips are impressively reconstructed and the precise, creative editing makes compellingly gory viewing. The clips run from Videodrome to Scarface to A walk through H, and the monstrous sex-cyborgs in the Tetsuo films. Multiple clips of tits are spliced with slicing, shooting and violent blowings- away.
“This is sex and violence in the context of women and cars,” Sey explains when I ask him if I’ve missed any crucial subtleties. His narrator, he says, is a generic figure with “specifically intellectual pathologies about identity and technology”. Sey also claims that it is the academic approach to the instability of self that makes this particular take on the phenomenon “alternative”, somehow less likely to be recuperated into the comfort-zone of the mainstream.
I’m not convinced about that. As Sey himself points out, Ballard and de Bord taught us years ago that in the “society of the spectacle” there is rarely such a thing as a true and enduring counter-cultural act.
But there are moments of implosion. The Sunless Ensemble may use pop culture to protest against the voraciousness of pop culture, but their collective skills have made it work for an hour or so in which you might actually be appalled enough to wonder at your own cynicism.