The ICA Theatre in London was pretty nearly full for this performance, part
of the "Fortune Cookies" (terrible title) season of performances,
installations, screenings and talks "by contemporary artists from across
the Chinese Diaspora".
"Where the Sea Stands Still" was a dual-language performance of Yang Lian's
poem sequence of that title. On a darkened stage, four large video screens
carried an ever-changing display of texts from the sequence in both English
and Chinese, together with sea images. John Cayley and Yang Lian emerged to
read, from their own computer monitors, a "cybertextual" version of poems
from the sequence selected, apparently in random order, by the computer:
English first (translations by Brian Holton), then Chinese. Two of the
large screens behind them displayed the texts being read. The performance
was timed at exactly 30 minutes.
I had previously heard this sequence at SubVoicive, and found it difficult
to comprehend. Having the text displayed helped a great deal; I found
myself able to follow the Chinese characters on screen so that, even
without knowing any Chinese, it was possible to get a good idea of the
rhythm and shape of the poems. It also helped that the English translations
pretty faithfully followed the structure of the Chinese verses. The random
nature of the computer's choices meant that some of the poems were repeated
later in the sequence, in some cases two or three times, and this
repetition allowed a concentration on other aspects of them than the
semantic "meaning".
The culture gap remains difficult. It is clear that Yang Lian is influenced
by European modernist and, in particular, post-Surrealist poetics. What is
harder for the European reader/listener to grasp is his relationship with
the body of Chinese literature. What is being alluded to, what is being
subverted - these are the questions that kept coming up for me. However, it
was an intriguing performance, which sent me back to Yang Lian's
_Non-Person Singular: selected poems_ (published by John Cayley's press
Wellsweep, [log in to unmask]). (Also worth checking out is John's _Ink
Bamboo_, a collection of his own poems and translations, published by
Agenda/Bellew.)
The second half of the performance was a disappointment. "The Horse and the
Buffalo: a multimedia music production" by a group of Chinese and British
artists (not including Yang Liang or John Cayley) used the metaphor of a
web page to invite the audience to select the performance order, but was
marred by an embarrassingly amateurish approach which quickly had members
of the audience, myself included, groping for the exits.
Ken Edwards
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