LU: How did you first meet Alaric Sumner?

KT: I came here towards the end of 1994. By the time I got somewhere through finishing the barns ^[1], I was looking around to see who was here, whom I could talk to ? sensibly. That is, about performance art.

I met Ralph Freeman through the Newlyn Society of Artists; because they had said they'd be willing to put on a performance of Doubtless. No, this is not entirely true, it was Emily Ash, the then curator of the Newlyn Gallery, who was enthusiastic about the performance event; with no hesitation she said yes and we arranged a date. And now I needed to look for collaborators for this event.

Ralph said There is a guy called Alaric Sumner who's a writer and I think you should talk to him.

I got Alaric's phone number and rang up. And we agreed to meet. And so we got together and started talking. He showed me his stuff, which I've still got actually, his publications. On first glance I saw something special.

I showed him Doubtless, that is, drawings and photos, script etc. which I'd done in Halifax and Dartington. I was wanting to do it here with a different set of people.

I very soon felt ‘at home with him’ sitting in the café of the Tate St. Ives, he drinking very black coffee, the sea behind us, the light, clear; both talking excitedly, flicking through each others material.

I said it'd be nice if he looked over the script and give me his thoughts. 

However, I was rushing ahead because the feeling was right: It would be nice if you read what is done so far and then wrote something for it. But it wasn’t immediate. It was about half an hour into the conversation and I realised, you know, This is a good man.

And I said Would you like to collaborate? And he said immediately Yes! What is it, a house on fire!

I don't think he'd done much before that around here.

He was known... He kept himself slightly apart. As I do now as a matter of fact.

So he was excited that there were performance possibilities.

I found Rory separately, through a dance company... Shallal. So I brought Rory and Alaric together, in fact. We all got on marvellously, with a great many conversations and not many rehearsals! (laughs aloud)

Alaric wrote this poem which you’ve probably got. It was printed in the brochure for the performance opposite my drawing of the installation for Doubtless; and he read it in the performance.

It is recorded, but you can't really hear. If you were there, it was very clear and related to the movement Rory and I where doing with long sticks moving slowly within the installation.

Emily who was running the gallery at the time was around the space getting on with her work. She was in and out of rehearsals and afterwards she said I didn’t realise it would all come together like that! Delighted surprise.

We had live music, and Alaric's poem, and Rory's input as well.

Rory’s movement and dance was really good, and Alaric also engaged himself in becoming a performance art artist by movement and voice in performed poetry.

I was trying to work it... not quite direction but guiding, and allowing people to come in... and Sandra Blow and Rose Hilton did a marvellous thing with dry colour being smudged along the whole of the Gallery wall to the live music of  Rod Walker.

And of course that brought Alaric and Sandra together.

And it was a fantastic success. We had an audience too! [laughing] We got 60 people. Could have been the first performance art piece in Cornwall.

It was the first time that live art was done down here. Nobody's recognising that now. Aside from a few people, It was quite a novel thing to appear down here. There were no grants or anything. That's a problem. Still very difficult to experiment here, something’s wrong somewhere, got stuck in classical modernism, I guess.

To get back to the performance. It was all in bits and pieces; didn’t have that much time for rehearsals; and, though the wooden installation was built for the previous events, we had to completely reform the timing and scale of the whole piece, particularly as all the people were new to the rewritten script that I had to draw and write.

The input from everyone was amazing, and I thought What a marvel to live in St. Ives. But that soon wore off; and why it didn’t really take off from there I don’t know. There was a great deal of publicity before the event that made the difference in audience interest. But the “Cornishman” paper seems not interested (uninterested art critic still living in the decade of St. Ives glory days) The St. Ives Echo however has been able to follow through quite a lot of what I do down here.

This performance though. I thought, God that's an epic!! It all came together, just like that, I think because of Alaric and Rory, and the enthusiasm of Rose and Sandra.

So many things happening. I can't describe it in detail, but there are the videos. 

I think the best thing would be to take stills from the videos, sharpen them up a bit.

I can do a selection, maybe in black and white, because we didn't have the right kind of light. There were two video cameras but they concentrated on the audience for some reason. Maybe I said something to them like The audience is important

We have enough though. One camera on the audience and one on the performance.

But it started just outside the gallery. I had three frames which were made by students at Dartington and they gave them to me when I left. (Two of the students went on to become known as “Lone Twin".

We used these steel frames as burning frames, with cloth wrapped round and soaked in petrol….burning, probably as a gesture of defiance to modern art (Performance Art steps out of the frame.)

On fire.

They were hanging outside the gallery. And the audience gathered outside the gallery.

There was a woman called Shoe who was wafting incense around and that was her contribution. She was a dancer.

I'd got a lot of feathers from pillows and Rory was throwing them down the stairs. As the audience came up the stairs, Rory showered them with feathers. People were covered in them; and the music was playing inside the gallery itself. Lively rhythmic sounds.

There was a violinist and a saxophone/flute and keyboard player. They were great. I learnt afterwards it was the first time they had played in public and were terribly nervous! The live music added to the energy that was going on and made it work really well.

So as the audience came in and up the stairs, bombarded by these soft feathers as part of the performance - that was the idea: participation from the start. So they came into this structure. We arranged them so that we could paper them into the wooden skeletal cubic frame work of the installation.

We papered them so that when they came into the actual gallery, they found themselves in a small confined space.

Music still going and only torch light moving quickly about. It was just confusing the audience about the space they were in. The release!

And then the paper was torn. A typical live art thing, hah. The music stopped and there was the sound of tearing. Alaric seemed to be enjoying that part.

So the audience had revealed a different space; but, within this wooden framework, the performers began a dance with large paintings; and, as the performance began and they - the audience - found themselves in the way, they had to move to safer areas of the gallery.

It was about showing paintings in a different way, in the dance movement. A new way to exhibit.

And realising that something was going on that had to be watched. The audience, in not wanting to be performers, went outside the structure; and were in fact forced against the walls.

There were long sticks and I think they’re actually mentioned in the poem of Alaric's. The sticks were in the final position, over the structure, at the end of the poem, reaching high to the ceiling. Slow movement, in deliberate perfection from position to position, drawing in space specific to the poem.

So that was a good moment. A very spatial dance. Taking the sticks very slowly off from where they were originally placed.

I think that was very nice; and it's such a shame that the video didn’t record this very clearly. Because the light was from torches only.

One of my main interests at the time and still is, is the use of words in performance art. How words as poetry could be brought into a performance. Each time it was different. When Maggie did it in Halifax, it was different.

Alaric's was different.

Poetry is important because it is expressive as a parallel feeling alongside performance.

The performance appeared to be cut into fragments or sections, rather like sequences of events. I don’t mind fragments. But nevertheless, I think everything was much more organic and surprisingly successful in coming together.

We worked from mainly a drawn script. People were asking for something clearer than something written. Rose was saying Well what is it about? I want to see it! I want to see it. so I did this script so it was ok  to explain to everybody what was happening.

The notation worked, in drawing, because Rory and I were experienced at this sort of thing; and Alaric too. Sandra and Rose, you could feel they were very hesitant. They became art students again, as someone remarked afterwards. But what they did was very beautiful, making bright colour marks on strips of paper, the lengths of the gallery. My main piece was with my head in a bird cage. 

That was the first time I had actually given a performance lecture. It was about Derrida’s deconstruction idea, performed with diagrams and speaking the theory.

I can't remember the sequence of the development in time, but there was an ease of flow, things fitting together. There seemed to be a very natural flow, I mean. Without much time in rehearsal for all of us.

While I was doing this performance lecture I ended up by doing a dance. And Rory was moving himself on a platform with wheels slowly across the floor, on his back propelled by leg movement. Very beautiful. And the music fitted in well.

The whole thing was alive with people thinking about it and doing what they felt like doing within the time and sequence of the events. So it was a beautiful kind of collaboration between us all. An epic even. And still, whenever I see David Kemp (keyboard), I say to him I didn’t realise how good you were! and he says Oh that's very gratifying. Because I had a completely different attitude to him before and wasn’t at all sure about the kind of sound required. And afterwards I realised that it was right. Because they were like the others involved in the process.

It was such a repetitive piece and thus became more powerful. They played beautifully and excited the audience.

One thing I remember very clearly was my performance lecture with diagrams.

Rory appeared - and I was very surprised by this - on a trolley, on his back, I was very surprised.  On the video it is a strange image of either, I don't know, somebody being born, or somebody dying, or both? or simply floating on some other space. It was just a very beautiful image.

The end piece was without music, just the sound of steel barbed rods being swept across the floor towards a central point into piles. A rasping hurting kind of sound.

And then I think it was Rory and Sandra, serving wine on a tray, placing it in the centre of the installation, out of reach of the audience, but seemingly a gesture, an invitation to join us in a celebratory drink. 

We performers lay on our bellies. Just waiting………… enticing........... Rose began to be nervous about the waiting silence. The silence was good, because at the end of the performance, the drinks were as a potentially symbolic image. So Rose invited the audience to take a glass and join us.

The audience were really appreciative. And I thought, from then on I felt, There is an audience here, in this part of the Cornish peninsula.

Later things weren’t too bad. And I did a thing at the Millennium. Called Traces, good audience there. The Millennium did it really well. The owner was good at publicity.

It dwindled from then on. You'd think next time we did something that people would say, Fantastic!

Back to modern art!

I’ve got much more controversial since then. Rebellious even. In a way.

With Doubtless, it's a very philosophical piece in fact. I think that's why Rory and Alaric were interested. That aspect of the piece was very important.

I've gone on since then being philosophical in the work.

LU: I've got a note here that you did it with Alaric and Rory at Dartington. Is this right?

KT: No, only Rory and Maggie O’Sullivan. She'd come all that way. from Yorkshire. We did it in a similar way to the format we'd had in Halifax, where she'd had a spot, as it were.

It was actually very fragmented and she was not happy with some sawdust and wood shavings on the floor. More so than it was in Halifax. Fragmented, that is.

Rory performed beautifully. As usual, but we had rehearsed it with the students quite well; and with Maggie it was a bit like arriving out of breath and straight into the performance…. A bit unfair, I think now.

So if you collaborate with someone you can't just bring them in and say that's where you perform - there -  can you?

Dartington had extremely helpful technicians, and it was like a dream, perhaps almost spoilt with technology. Had more light, more than at Newlyn, and therefore better definition in the video. There were 2 cameras.

Yes, so Maggie was involved there; and about a dozen students, two of whom as I have said were the “Lone Twin". They reminded me at another time in Buckfastleigh when Maggie came to perform, some amazing stuff, same programme as Alaric and Lone Twin!

After Doubtless, we did Angels Devils Deception. In this next performance in St Ives streets It was Rory and Alaric, a movement through the town.

It's just the journey. It's quite important. The library was significant. We came out of the library. About the idea of language, the angelic, the devilish and the deception within language. And made our journey to Norway Square from the library to outside the Salthouse Gallery, where I had an exhibition of angels amongst other things.

Great we had a grant from South West Arts so could have fee for artists performing.

I told the police that we were doing this event in the streets. I always do. They stopped the traffic, which was very nice.

We had quite  a crowd in Fore Street. Then went on to Norway Square where there was a structure. There’s some good video of this structure.

Alaric was inside the structure with a script, which I think is existent, and spoke about aesthetics and the philosophy of creativity and devils and angels. At least, I think [he did] - must look up the script. I was moving around the structure and we conducted a kind of debate, but this was all new to me and my answers were in movement and some spoken word with my script as notation were pinned up on the structure. As I moved around I was able to interject ideas into Alaric’s spoken text. At one point I made my thoughts evident by throwing choppers into the structure. (Safely.) And that ended there. That was the first part of the event, to continue the next Saturday from the structure and to move in stages of performance to the loggia of the Tate  St. Ives.

The next week we proceeded through the streets. It was a repetition. As in the last Saturday.

I was pushing a trolley with a sack with sand and water and a set of labels on which was written the word philosophy. So what I was doing was building sand-castles, labelling them philosophy, watering the word and the event, uttering the word repeatedly until Alaric came along to this fertilised mound of philosophy and taking out at random a book from his shopping trolley to read two or three sentences at random, disconnected - graphic descriptions from cheap novels which somehow were very droll and amusing spoken in a dry but dramatic tone. And read it by the philosophy label.

Rory came next to the philosophy mound and started tearing the pages up out of the book Alaric had left there, muttering letters of the alphabet - t! t! k! p! - as though trying to speak - the origin of language in sounds torn out of the mouth and scattered around on the ground small pieces of the book.

Arriving at the Tate was a climax of the whole piece or rather the second climax because the Norway Square event was extremely dramatic as the video shows.

In the Loggia we circumvented the circular space with Rory seated in the middle, reading I think silently and still. Painted as he was all over in green he looked a strange philosophical figure, building up the audience in numbers, until I went for one of the sculpture niches, pulling my sack trolley up into it with me and became a sculpture. Then Alaric did the same in the other niche. So we all became sculptures. Children whispered Is he dead? We stayed like that for an interminable time and it felt right. What had we done? From words and text, talking about the ordinary, about the power of philosophy. About angels, devils and deception to finally frozen as sculpture…………….hmmmmmmmmmm food for thought!

Footnote
[1] i.e. the place Ken Turner lives and works
 

Pictures from top: 1: Alaric Sumner (photographer unknown); 2: Audience and structure at Newlyn; 3: Rory McDermott at Newlyn; 4: Alaric Sumner at Tate St Ives; 5: Alaric Sumner and Ken Turner at Tate St Ives.  All photos of performance courtesy of Ken Turner.