So we mark it on our calendars, remember the day, and then move on to paying the electric bills. Is there a way to expand witnessing? This great Israeli painter and theorist, Bracha Ettinger, calls it "with-nessing." She says, let's stay away from sympathy and empathy and call it besidedness. Can you walk in proximity to a horror, a great wound, and not foreclose it, not just "I feel your pain"? You stay with it longer. You don't pass judgment, but you keep pace with it in some sort of parallel way. So the answer to your question is Blue Hammer is an attempt to answer this question of witnessing.
AND, DESPITE THE GRAVITY OF THIS QUESTION, YOU ARE LOOKING TO THIS EXPLORATIONIN PLEASURE. Yes, in a lot of instances, we self-police and say that's perverse. Your grieving and pleasure have no part together. The idea is with this unholy car crash of a performance piece, where we're witnessing the passing of a storyteller called Vin Pays that works very hard to fabricate a certain kind of witnessing. He says, "I'm talking about Art and Love" as an explanation and the other character says "I'm talking about the sharp limits to both." In the guise of dinner theater, as we're witnessing these playful jovial references to appalling things, we're smelling our dinner being cooked. The piece concludes with the leading lady, Tabla Rasa, singing Joy Division's "Disorder" a capella as the dinner is being brought to the table. It's that kind of fabulous frisson. Joy Division? Leading Lady? Lamb stew?
That uncomfortable amalgam, it's the way we live our lives. We do it a little more effortlesslessy or elegantly. We can go from proclaiming our love for somebody, to receiving a call saying the electric bill is being cut off, to preparing for class in the morning. That as a model for a creative act, where we bring elements of our history and what we might suspect might be disparate arenas to a center point and say this is where we're going to conduct this investigation. And it's all being cooked with conscientious attention to detail.
The idea is that we want to launch a permanent dinner theater in Portland. It might be nomadic, it might be in a building — this idea that, with real integrity in terms of looking at food culture, ecological sustainability, we're going as deep as we can talking with Slow Food, talking to farmers. Barak Olins is a baker and a chef. It's not an affectation, every part of the amalgam is rigorously engaged with. We feed people in convivial pleasure while incubating new works in sonic phenomena, theater, film, new media. A season would be completely dreamy, to deliver new works in a collaborative way. In this case, we've got people working on dinnerware, music composed in Florida, one actor coming from LA, the other local, four-person tech crew, VJs, DJs.
WHY THIS MOVE TOWARDS COLLABORATIVE PERFORMANCE? I would argue that if we start with something called art, or creative practice, certainly as it's currently taught in art schools, very little in terms of what I've witnessed between educator and classroom ever happened without communal vigor. I'm talking about active listeners, active narrators that forge exquisitely articulated invitations to come closer, to play and make work. I very seldom saw it in painting studios.
