POLIS

PAUL+A

Polis is an experimental theatre project devised and performed by Pearson/Brookes Co. – an ensemble of performers and artists led by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, and constructed in the city of Cardiff over three summer nights. Five performers traversing the city at night creating encounters and situations and mingling with the crowds of weekend revelers. In Chapter Arts Centre across the city a theatre audience taken out five at a time in a fleet of taxis, watching listening and recording scenes of intrigue mystery and provocation. Back in the theatre those not out in the city help to assemble fragments and traces of these encounters; video, photographs, recordings and stories both told and written into the interpretation of larger events that may or may not be happening, on the edges of our awareness as perhaps they always are, in the city.

What is that man writing on a wall? What is she singing in that bar? Why is he taking photographs of lovers?
Was that it, what we saw? – A vivid snapshot of the city and its people over three balmy summer evenings.

One of the five performers, Paul Jeff (aka Paul+a) a photographer, decides that his contribution will be to visit five pubs or bars per evening dressed in suit and tie, armed with a hand held 5×4 camera and flash gun, to persuade the unwitting drinkers there, to help him make a photograph of an embrace. The taxi with the audience members will arrive at a pre-determined time so he has just 10 minutes to persuade and organise his subjects into a scene before they arrive. On their arrival they will watch and record his actions, watch his performance, watch him make the image, taking away with them, apart from their own recordings, a Polaroid photograph from the 5×4 camera. The participants of the embrace will also receive a Polaroid, a record of their part in the encounter.

Five different bars across the city between 8 and 11pm each night. Photography, performed out in the city to two separate audiences, one uncertain as to what is happening, but both participants in the event. Performed Photography, process and exhibition collapsed into the event of photographing. Experimental in the truest sense – provoked observation. The results may look familiar but the journey was different; strange, illuminating, exhilarating. The questions are different, we have come full circle and photography once again resides with time. 
Paul+a 2006.

Have you ever noticed how, while walking in the city on a hot summer’s night, couples involved in an amorous embrace seem to resemble a “still image” amongst the throng and chaos of city life. I always imagine them clinging to each other – as one – in a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable return to the maelstrom, when they will be cast asunder and rendered individual again, suddenly thrown back into the fray. It is a thought full of pathos and melancholy, but it somehow gives us hope for a safe haven and a longing for the existential island that constitutes the embrace…

The thing about the amorous embrace is that it delivers, it fulfils for however brief a time our dream of total union with a significant other – our imaginary beloved. In the embrace we find a brief sanctuary, it takes hold of us when we take hold of the other, and we enter the realm of the unreal. For a brief illuminatory moment the embrace delivers us from language and words are inadequate, although we may quickly whisper them in the other’s ear. The embrace transports us from the symbolic world into an enchanted other world of companionable “sleepiness”. All around us fades. Like the photograph, each embrace is a little death, an instant that transports us.

But the amorous embrace constitutes a significant instant, it is both primal in that it conjures up our mother, and sexual in that it represents the dream of total union with our imaginary beloved. These two representations are collapsed into “one” at the same instant that we are “at one”. The intensity of this at/one(mo)ment (atonement) carries us to both succour and desire. The embrace is the gestural extension of pure desire, and in a flash it whisks us away from life, all is suspended – time, law and reason, – this is an ecstatic deranged interval where all our desires seem definitively fulfilled.

And so, what of our two lovers in the city, lashed together against the storm of progress. They stand stilled, as their bodies melt into one, in a moment which tells endless stories. The delicious mist descends and they let go of the world and drift away to a solace so soon and cruelly checked. Mouths gaping they burst back to the surface immediately to be whisked along by the relentless current.

Paul+a: with thanks to Roland Barthes.

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