Live art at the Dublin Fringe Festival bonds audiences in an oddly reassuring way, writes Peter Crawley
Any art form that requires the presence of an audience has a heartening and sometimes beautiful communal potential. Working the live art beat last week, for instance, I found it enormously reassuring that two souls, previously unknown to each other, might make eye contact across the floor of a six-hour performance installation, an apartment-based multimedia dance piece or an electronic interpretation of an Homeric epic, and silently, but palpably, reach an urgent understanding: "I'll create a distraction. You run for the exit."
In truth, it wasn't always like this, but just as the Fringe treats the term live art as a disorientatingly catch-all rubric - the equivalent of a performance category marked "other" - so the standards of the programme varied wildly. The week began encouragingly with Nothing Happens: an Evening of Disappearing Acts, in which an audience was led to a pokey apartment in Temple Bar to witness a performance by San Franciscan dance duo Sheldon B. Smyth and Lisa Wymore.
Illuminated and enveloped by video projections, Smyth and Wymore created a Beckettian universe of absent domestic pets and existential acrobatic routines - a sort of Waiting for Dogot, if you will - where their winning synthesis between agitated physical performance and kitschy apparitions unleashed the ghost from the machine. Why Wymore's body should twirl under a dot-matrix blanket, or Smyth should impart an absurd list of clerical, safety and relaxation tips is never clear - the scattered narrative eschews any organising principle - and consequently my audience couldn't play play ball during a suddenly announced Q&A sequence. Wymore and Smyth had galloped away and we were still trying to catch up.
The morass of domestic and musical signifiers in Jennifer Walshe's The Observation of Hibernalian Laws made it harder still to keep pace. A six-hour installation from which the audience are free to depart at any time (now you tell me), Walshe's performance had one concept - that sound has substance, which can be wrung from a violin or scraped from a trumpet, then whisked in a bowl like cake mixture.
Apropos of whatever, the artist would make clicking, hyperventilating noises into several plastic containers, or the hollows of her instruments - obviously signifying all that that obviously signifies.
Just five minutes of such daring experimentation felt like an eternity, the observation of Hibernian audience members revealing flickers of amusement, an upsurge of ill-will, sudden pangs of sympathy and a final lunge for the exit.
That spectators can turn so easily into stoney, unimpressed walls of resentment was a lesson also learned by Operation Seasaw, their Music Odyssey an ambitious but confused attempt to translate the Greek epic into listless electronica and melting mosaics of DVD projections. In the show's gentler moments, characters flung fist-fulls of change at the audience or yanked them from their seats abusively. An affront, perhaps, but nothing compared to what they did to Homer.
Although it really qualifies as "here's-one-we-made-earlier" art, Florian Thalhofer's charmingly interactive installation Love Story Project is mercifully unhindered by pretension. Matching its technical complexity (which has inevitably led to breakdowns) with thematic simplicity, it allows you to jump with a mouse-click through video snippets of young people from around the world ruminating on love.
Speaking with that level of intimacy, honesty and candour that this media-saturated generation reserves only for the camera lens, Thalhofer's illuminating interviews are connected with the accidental structure of the hypertext.
Much of the live art programme may distance and alienate the viewer, but Thalhofer's emotional internet persuasively suggests that - whether performers or audience - we are somehow all linked.
