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Four hours on The Darktown Cakewalk
On Friday evening I caught the last four hours of The Darktown Cakewalk, Linder Sterling‘s epic, 13-hour performance at the Glasgow International art festival. Four hours is longer than I’d normally spend watching anything, even a Battlestar Galactica box set, yet I found myself regretting that I hadn’t just taken the day off work and watched the whole thing.
If you can catch the show when it transfers to London’s Chisenhale Gallery on 10 July, I’d recommend the experience - although the London version will be completely different. The most obvious reason is that the show is almost 100 per cent improvised, but it’ll also be in a very different venue, with different musicians and supporting cast members - all of which will reduce the chances of anything being accidentally repeated.
There were lots of things I liked about The Darktown Cakewalk. Here are six.
1. The fact that I didn’t know what kind of thing it was, so had to throw away any assumptions about how I should be watching it. Linder is primarily a visual artist, who first made her name on Manchester’s punk scene, creating collages from women’s magazines and pornography. She has described The Darktown Cakewalk as ‘13 hours of collage in flux’. Instead of cutouts from magazines, though, she used people - almost 100 of them (a core cast of seven performers, including herself, plus dancers, musicians and even a northern soul DJ).
Now, a theatre person might argue that this is basically the same as what a theatre director does when making a ‘devised’ show, and perhaps it isn’t that different, but The Darktown Cakewalk felt very much like a show conjured from a visual art sensibility - an art installation that gradually evolved from hour to hour, rather than an unusually long theatre show. It made me think of all kinds of things - Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (also showing in Glasgow just now), or Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. Linder, being who she is, encourages you to watch the show in the way that you would look at a piece of visual art. You can stand wherever you want, walk around it, and come and go as you please. Think of it like an installation that is open for 13 hours throughout the day. And yet, unlike 24 Hour Psycho, I didn’t really want to come and go. The show was so mesmerising - so theatrical - that I didn’t want to miss anything. Discussing it with a friend in the bar, mid-show, we discovered that we both found this slightly frustrating at first - it wasn’t quite dramatic enough to be theatre, but slightly too eventful to feel like an installation. Later though, we decided we didn’t mind. It was what it was, ultimately, and had to be taken on its own terms.
2. The fact that it was 13 hours long. I like Linder’s explanation for this, from an interview in the Sunday Herald. “When I look back to British culture in the late 1970s, the 7-inch, two-and-a-half minute single was very radical. They were vital because the culture was quite slow and sluggish. And the actions to do with protest were like punk itself: spiky, pointed, fast. Now we’re in a culture of instant gratification and soundbites. Everything is so quick. So now the most radical thing to do is 13 hours of the most intricate dissonance, consonance, harmonic, rhythmic possibilities you can think of. And the shocks come in more subtle ways.’
3. The venue. The Arches might just be the perfect place for The Darktown Cakewalk, and I wonder if it’ll work quite as well in London. It’s a great place to wander around in, resembling as it does a big magical cave, particularly when there are spotlights casting huge shadows across the various spaces. All this made it very easy to interact with the show in all kinds of fun ways - walking in between the lights and the performers, you become a giant shadow behind them. It was also easy to find different places to watch what was going on - behind the stage, to the side of it.
4. The fact that Laura was in it, playing a character called the Cakewalk Queen. Which, some cynical people might suggest, skews my perspective on this whole show. Nah, I would have loved it anyway. It’s completely my kind of thing - although it was quite strange wandering around the same space as your girlfriend (and creative partner and bandmate) for four hours but never communicating. At one point in the show I found myself sharing an empty part of the building with her - she was sitting sadly in a spotlight, surrounded by mirror balls, I was in the dark a few metres away. I walked past, she stared back desolately, in character. If I wanted a smile or a wave, I had to choose a moment when her character was happy. Unluckily, her character is very unhappy for the last four hours of the show, so I had to wait until afterwards, when everyone decamped to a flat in Glasgow to drink wine and discuss the craziness of what they’d spent the past 13 hours doing - while, weirdly, listening to the new Swimmer One album, which Laura had brought with her to give to Linder.
5. The fact that it was made up as it went along. Which is sort of bonkers. None of the cast knew what time it was at any point, so mostly had no idea how long they still had to perform for. Even when the show was ending - and it was a very powerful, poignant ending, which didn’t seem improvised at all - the cast didn’t know it was about to end. Until the moment the lights went down, several of them were readying themselves to go and do something else.
6. The fact that at one point the show turned into a northern soul disco. And I got to have a dance. Earlier on, I got to play piano too. Finding an empty room with a battered old upright piano in it (covered in cream cakes, and out of tune, but still playable), I decided to interact with the show by sitting down and playing a little tune. After a little while, a man with a microphone walked over to me. I thought he was going to tell me off, but instead he started recording me, at which point I became, I suppose, a Darktown Cakewalk performer myself (aha, but do you need an audience to be a performer? If a show happens and no one is watching it, is it still a show? Discuss.)
Shortly afterwards, two audience members joined us. You could see them making a little mental calculation. Is this part of the show? No, they decided, it wasn’t. And so they went away, to see what else was going on.
Andrew
