Alright, Treacle?

I attended my first ever piece of Performance Art last week.

Treacle, by Robert J. Anderson, performed at St James - a performance space that was once a church, owned by the Jersey Arts Centre.

In one sense it was everything and nothing I expected from the genre. It was closer to a piece of abstract theatre that I would have studied in Performance Studies than a piece of live art that I would have investigated in Fine Art - but the cross-genre postmodernism of the piece was warmly accepted by myself and (a majority of) the audience. The OAP's beside me disagreed.

At a memorable climax of Avant Gardism, I found myself watching a naked man standing on a step ladder being painted by four members of the audience in treacle whilst a young man (also from the audience) recorded the process with a disposable camera. Church-like music played as four more members of the audience were invited to wipe the performer clean whilst a man shouted crude remarks. Admittedly, the man was not part of the performance, which added to the spontaneity of the genre.

In short, I was left moved by the piece. The bellowing vocals of the artist as he attacked his piano in a way that crossed Patti Smith (I must broaden my music knowledge) with Henry Cowell and Florence 'and the Machine' Wells was deeply emotive, whilst the image of him straining to push the piano across the space as he played proved both comedic and powerful. In hindsight, there was a careful balance of lightheartedness (when Anderson stripped on an elevated stage to pop music, dollar bills thrusted into his underwear and socks) and more enigmatic content that could have been mistaken for pretentiousness.

The religious imagery of the cleansing was sufficiently mirrored by the performance space, which still had church pillars, arched windows and an altar clearly visible behind the stage lighting and stripped-down vacuum of performance space. The religious connotations also reminded me of a recorded dance piece I viewed entitled Flesh and Blood, choreographed by Lea Anderson.

This is a very brief evaluation of the piece, and I would go further into detail if I felt that anybody would enjoy reading it at all.