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drinks Monday 1 September 08 Edinburgh Reunion in London
Topping And Butch Hit Leicester Square 26-27 September 08
Producing Mise Eire
London’s Irish Club won’t have Irish artist Dylan Tighe throwing up Guinness as he dissects the essence of Irishness in Mise Eire - I Am Ireland. Mary Paterson buys Velcro, writes press releases and dodges the bullets of London squat politics - to bring Mise Eire to the East End stage.
by Mary Paterson
I squinted nervously into the dark interior of the Golden Heart. The door clanged shut, blocking out the sunlight and leaving me momentarily blind. I found my way to the bar and ordered a drink, hoping the stranger I was meeting would recognise me before I had to peer at every table in the pub.
‘Mary?’ My plan had worked. Dylan Tighe fitted his description well – an Irishman with long dark hair and dark glasses. I was relieved to see these were dark glass frames, not shades – whatever else he was, at least he wasn’t that pretentious.
Dylan Tighe is a performance artist who advertised for a curator / producer for his upcoming project. We’d arranged to meet, and he emailed me an outline of his plans. Which meant I had spent the last few days reading Eastern European philosophy to find something intelligent to say at this - our first meeting.
‘Guinness?’, I asked. Damn.
In fact, the question was surprisingly apposite.
Mise Eire (pronounced ‘Meesha Aira’) means I Am Ireland, and Dylan Tighe’s performance aims to decode how Ireland or Irishness really works. Against a backdrop of documentary footage of Irish history (from both English and Irish points of view), the stage is covered with emblems of Irish cultural identity – from plastic leprechauns to Catholic memorabilia. He sits, for the duration of the performance, drinking Guinness. One shot a minute. Until he throws up.
‘Sounds great!’, I enthused, already witness to Dylan Tighe’s extraordinary ability to drain pints of the black stuff. We spent an hour or so being positive about each other’s experiences and ideas – 10% politeness, 10% nervousness but a good 80% percent of real, excited interest. And then we had one of those It’s Easy conversations.
The It’s Easy conversation comes at regular intervals during the run-up to a show, and each time it fills my stomach with foreboding. Because right after the It’s Easy conversation, something goes badly wrong, or at least proves Very Hard Indeed.
But each time the conversation happens, it is impossible to know what the difficulties will be or how they will arise. Like a young couple in love, the It’s Easy conversation really means, ‘I’m being insanely naïve’.
We scribbled out what to do. The smooth path to a successful performance lay before us like a dream. ‘We’re all set’, I thought as I walked home. ‘All we have to do is find a venue and confirm a date. And source the props and find some assistants. And print the publicity, badger some journalists, persuade all the right people to come, blag the equipment and put on the show.’
The pleasant haze of wine lifted as I realised that our budget stretched to printing some flyers, if we were lucky – everything else would have to be done free. I was already working six days a week, with two hideous deadlines looming, and Dylan Tighe was performing in Croatia for the next few weeks.
THE PREPARATION
We needed an identity. Luckily, I work in a design studio and my designer colleagues are not only extremely talented but also very generous. The whole show would come under the banner of The Museum of Fraudulent Identity (MOFI) – a fictional museum that would exist only for the time and place of Dylan Tighe’s performance. I tactfully asked the designers if they wouldn’t mind making a logo.
Where to stage the performance? The converted church on Hackney Road? Sounded perfect, but they wouldn’t budge on price. The Bethnal Green Working Man’s Club? Very trendy, but too cool to answer their phone. The Irish Club? No siree. The Irish Club did not want to see a compatriot throw up on Guinness. Eventually we found what seemed like the ideal location: a squat-run community centre in Whitechapel called RampART. We could use the venue free, they had a stage and theatrical lights, and it was in the right part of East London to attract an artsy crowd. ‘Just come along to our weekly meeting’, I was told, ‘So you can propose your idea.’
There’s a lot to be said about communal living. It’s very democratic; it tries to be fair; it opens its arms to all members of the community. But, judging from my three-hour ordeal at RampART, the meetings are pure hell. Even the most dreary business meeting will have an agenda, and the participants will be encouraged to act in a semi-professional way. In a squatted community centre, where the couple running the squat are having issues, each suggestion can trigger a minefield of nuanced glances and offence. As I sat through hours of discussion over the legitimacy of selling leather purses (‘We cannot condone capitalism of any kind’), a very skinny man sitting next to me licked the inside of a yoghurt pot with alarming obsession, and I wondered whether we were doing the right thing.
Who was I kidding - it was free, wasn’t it?
As the weeks moved on, little things fell into place. Somehow I managed to find the time to buy miniature neon lights and white Velcro, to write the press release and approve copy for the flyers, to contact the press and pester enough of the right people to turn up. I also tried to find some assistants: ‘Would you like to be part of a performance? Great. Would you like to dress as a whore-nun-terrorist? Oh, not so keen?’
The mantle eventually fell to two of Dylan Tighe’s classmates at Goldsmiths. He was finishing his MA, and hoped that the performance could count towards his exam. The others were happy to step in, for the performance and for duties like guarding the very expensive museum-cases we’d managed to find, and making sure no-one nicked the equipment.
The night loomed and there had only been a few minor disasters – printers breaking, props difficult to find. I pitched up at RampART at 10am on the Friday morning, ready to dress the room as the MOFI, and with plenty of time to prepare for the 7pm start.
In the three weeks since my last visit, Selene and Ben, the couple in charge of the squat, had clearly seen their relationship diminish beyond repair. The atmosphere inside the squat was electric – in a bad way. I spent an engaging hour talking to a twitchy man who had had no sleep – possibly due to chemical enhancement – before Selene remembered we were there and let us in. The room we had been given was filled with detritus – naked mannequins, off-cuts of wood, strange papier-mâché creations suspended from the ceiling. None of this had been there before. After some prompting, Selene said we could store it in a room upstairs, so I got on with that while Dylan Tighe and his classmates started setting up the equipment.
It took about an hour to clear the space, and to pack the stuff neatly into the tiny room we were given upstairs. It took about five minutes for Selene to start throwing everything down again, screaming and shouting at us, her boho outfit shaking with rage and the mood rings on her fingers turning a worrying shade of brown. How dare we put rubbish in the room? How dare we treat her like this? Who the hell did we think we were?
She shouted and shouted and shouted. She was shaking. I was shaking. I was stunned. I apologised, I smiled, I was self deprecating – I tried all the usual tricks to calm someone down. Nothing worked.
Eventually, she stopped – for breath, presumably. It turned out we had put some pieces of wood that Ben had collected into the store room upstairs. But Selene didn’t want these pieces of wood and didn’t know why Ben had kept them. Somehow, in the emotional torment that was her break-up, we had become responsible for Ben’s aggravation, and we were not going to be let off.
Still shaking, and with the spectre of a red-faced Selene watching over us, I just got back to work. Sound-check. Smoke machine. Props, projector, film. Flags to go round the ‘museum’ walls. We even had mementoes from Dylan Tighe’s childhood in Ireland to exhibit – school reports (‘could do better’), an enlarged photograph of his passport – as well as cheap badges of the Pope, and Irish Republican symbols.
By 7 o’clock, the room looked perfect. Television screens stood at each corner, silently repeating film clips featuring Irish families. Flags for Ireland, the UK and the EU hung from the walls, interspersed with flags for Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists. Heavy museum cases sombrely promoted the detritus of Dylan Tighe’s past, and Selene – thank God – had been taken away to calm down. I rushed back into RampART, soaked – of course, it was pouring with rain – clutching 100 plastic champagne flutes and some MOFI badges, just in time to see the room descend into a faint mist of smoke from the smoke machine.
SHOWTIME
Only ten minutes late, we opened the doors and welcomed our first visitors with a flute of Guinness. Staff for the night were wearing balaclavas, and although there were a few strange looks from the Whitechapel locals, there was no animosity. A trickle of visitors turned into a flow, which turned into a flood - and by 8pm the venue was full to bursting.
With a signal from a balaclava-wearing assistant, Dylan Tighe walked on stage, naked and shackled. The performance lasted nearly two hours, during which the audience stayed and watched, (seemingly) content. After the denouement – yes, he threw up – there was a quick loo break. And a discussion.
In the midst of one of the It’s Easy conversations, me hosting a discussion between myself and a drunk performer on the complexities of Irish identity had seemed a good idea. At least now I know how to use a microphone – or rather, how not to. I know that you’re not meant to make it squeak and squeal so that your entire audience bury their heads in their arms and stuff jumpers in their ears. Or hold it so far away that no-one can hear. But, with a few good heckles from the crowd, the evening segued perfectly into good Irish craic.
There was Irish music, singing and dancing, and we partied away till the wee hours. In a miraculous twist, Selene even apologised for shouting at us, and both the squat residents and the artsy crowd seemed to enjoy the night. I thought things might kick-off again when my ultra-trendy friend looked around her at the people living there and said, about ten decibels too loud: ‘This place is full of hippies’. Luckily, enough Guinness had gone down to keep everyone calm.
And so it is, that with a generous dollop of luck, stupidity and understanding loved-ones, this kind of thing always works out in the end. Our final It’s Easy conversation came a week later when Dylan Tighe was going back to Ireland, and we met to debrief. ‘It’s Easy’, we both cooed. ‘When shall we do it again?’
END
(c) Mary Paterson 13 September 06
Mise Eire at the Museum of Fraudulent Identity was first staged at RampART, Whitechapel, East London on 26 May 2006. It was performed to a larger crowd at Spitz on 25 August 06. It is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin on 31 October 06. More information from - Mary Paterson, museumofi@yahoo.co.uk
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008
