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15
Hello Between Teeth, otherwise known as Jimmy, Taylor and Liam and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving around the problem of communication and identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist collective but also as human beings in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
Jimmy: It’s the reverse isn’t it really? It’s got a lot more to do with our aesthetics forming our identity. Our identity is something that is still forming, so it’s very much in flux. The few anchor points that we have for our identity are deeply rooted within and a direct result of our aesthetic practises. For example, the way in which we interact with ideas and the way we break down ideas releasing the power of the feeling that lies hidden. This has got a very, very clear link to our aesthetic and it’s from that, that we start to get a sense of identity. With regards to the times, I’m not interested in social narratives I’m just not interested in them I think that what we’re dealing with is more to do with… Liam: …I’d say rather than dealing with the kind of surface level of things which are going on, we’re trying to cut underneath. For instance, in ‘Perpetual: A Sonic Opera’ we talk about the modern mantra of “the need to go on”. This is something that we’re interrogating and there are all sorts of symptoms that you can make a social narrative out of; you could link it to the rate of technological progression, you could link it to environmental protection, never ending consumption with finite resources for instance, but that kind of thing is not the stopping point for us. We want to dig deeper than that and identify some sort of core human truth to it, some sort of underlying drive, but not in an intellectual sense. We’re trying to capture the feeling that makes us want to continue whatever the cost.
Jimmy: When have there ever been stable times? Things have always been in flux in that kind of sense. It’s similar to what Liam was saying that we’re not interested in who is president right now for example, we don’t deal with the surface membrane of the issue, it has got a lot more to do with what is underneath that. For example ‘Perpetual’ for me is slightly cheeky because it does have a lot of links to free energy and finality, but for me it has a lot more to do with our experience of time and how that’s changed in the face of modernity. And that goes through a much slower progression of change, our experience of time and how we treat time. It’s not something that changes from one year to the next. We’re more interested in something that gestates within us which may or may not be a result of social and political change rather than these things which we can clearly see are directly enforced upon us. In that sense we’re not political because I’m not dealing with a direct oppression, but rather the ways in which this manifests itself emotionally. Or in terms of our experience of existing I suppose Tay: And that’s why our identity is forming very slowly too. Jimmy: Identity is not something we’re consciously crafting. We’re crafting it for marketing purposes yeah, sure. We write something about our identity and we describe it so we can sell it. But in terms of our actual identity, in terms of three individuals that form this company, it’s not something we’re conscious of yet: we are still infants staring into the mirror, confused, trying to learn the language with which to describe what we see staring back at us.
Would you like to tell us something about your artistic and daily background? What inspired your company to be at this artistic point where you are now?
Jimmy: At the moment we’re working with sound, the potentialities of sound in performance and in actor training. From the very beginning noise has always had a strong presence. Even going right back to the first iteration of Perpetual 3 years ago, there was Bioni Samp, a noise artist that constructs compositions with the bees he keeps. As we became more developed in our aesthetic, more aware of recurrent elements in our work, we found ourselves, quite naturally, drawn into a deep research into sound. Then we broke up for a while and I kept exploring it, and then we found James Shearman. I loved his compositions and that very much led to what we’re making right now. And I suppose what that is, is a certain need to interact with the form itself, the form of theatre, but also other artistic forms. So in terms of daily background, it’s a lot of consuming different art forms, a lot of interacting with artists from different backgrounds, and also a certain dissatisfaction with the kind of performance that we’re seeing, particularly in theatre. In Theatre, there’s something about our existence that is not activated by what we’re seeing at the moment. This creates a kind of existential need to fill that hole. Hopeless as that may be but that’s what instigates the impulse for us to go on this journey
Taylor: Which is kind of an ironic link to the research behind Perpetual as well, with regards to the research we did based on Perpetual motion. How, despite the impossibility of this feat, people continually try to attempt to achieve it, even though it is scientifically impossible. Maybe there is a link there between our need to look for or create experiences that will be a temporary relief…
Jimmy: …I don’t know if it’s about relief. For me it’s not relief, it’s just about creating a space where we face these things, come into contact, it’s about contact. We come into contact with the pain of being alive, the joy of being alive, these essential things, and it’s not about judging them to be good or bad or providing anything. If people feel relief in relation to our work, then that’s great, but if people get pain from it that is also great. I don’t see a huge distinction between those two because pain is also very very important and if you take away pain from the equation, then it kind of nullifies your existence on the most basic primary physical level. That’s what it’s about; it’s about contact with the emotional body.
Taylor: I suppose for me I feel a need to create spaces where we re-establish meaning but without meaning anything, where everything looks meaningful but isn’t meaningful in a wider context. It has an intensity where it feels like our emotions are conjured in such a way that there is a sense that it’s all for something but not prescribing what that something is.
Jimmy: Ideally we make shows about nothing. Existence happens no matter what, that’s what we’re directly trying to interact with at the most direct level, but you can’t take a direct route there because the language of theatre does not take direct routes. Theatre wanders through avenues of representation which are never direct, that’s one reason why we utilise such dense images; they have the effect of ‘opening up’, rather than ‘closing down’ or concluding. This is also why we have these very dense soundscapes: they are indirect routes to, strangely, nothing.
Liam: I think that clarifies our interest in noise art. That as much as the language of theatre is always representational; is always in-direct, the noise art serves as a kind of antidote to that. Because the sounds we use often aren’t even identifiable in their source, but they create an emotion. A guitar or a violin or a harp or a drum each have a certain set of associations that you create with, whereas the noise is raw you can’t build those associations because there’s no origin point.
Jimmy: Strangely enough it’s taking an indirect route to nothing in particular apart from contact with existence itself. But what sound does brilliantly, particularly in the way that we’re using it, is that it is extremely direct without being directly prescriptive. It is direct in a physical sense, it hits the body and it interacts with the body, yet it remains invisible. It’s sound closer to its primordial state; energy, sound as energy, and its very direct in that sense. At the same time, it’s not as confined as instrumentation or as music to an emotional paradigm, it has a much wider scope than that. It can yield emotions, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily have to, it can for example, simply collide with your body.
Liam: It’s about moving people, not like a beautiful song would move you, like how a strong vibration will move you, like a strong bass you can feel rumbling up through the floor that you can feel in your stomach. That’s the level we start with in our compositions.