ROSE ENGLISH at the CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE

‘A Premonition of the Act’ is the title of Rose English’s show currently at the Camden Arts Centre.

Still from filming of Ornamental Happiness with the masterful Acrobatic Troupe from China

 

Entering a pitch-black gallery we see, pinned to the walls of, brightly lit papers enforcing a fixed path to follow like some Hansel and Gretel trail of pebbles.  Blindly we are led along a line images or written jottings or references or photos of past performances of the masterful Zhejiang and the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupes of China and other research of extraordinary performances and sciences, and, to accompany this trail, there is a poignant and intoxicating sound installation with music voices and percussion written by Luke Stoneham.

In the next gallery there are glass objects exhibited like museum pieces, as if evidence that their presence in three-channel video installation is true.  This documentary footage from China shows a performance, Flagrant Wisdom, at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland in 2009, where the performers juggle with the glass objects and, in a third room video documentation of a fifth work, ‘Ornamental Happiness’ of 2006, presented at the Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art from this project is also shown.

We are led, it seems, to a state of bated breath.  We watch the risk and dare in the installation performances with an anxious caution, to check glass is not broken and that balance is not lost, feeling awe at the results of harmony, having travelled a path of uncertain outcome.

The extraordinary skills of balancing glass

But this is Rose English's forté and this is her work.  Known for her creation of theatre that forces us to objectify and analyse those states that would otherwise pass us by, she will, in a blink, show these transitions between thought and matter, with her intensity and humour which is so much the soul of her wit. 

Rose English performs in Walks on Water

English is the orchestrator of this piece of disparate parts, she is the female diva, as beautiful as a Marlene Dietrich and as absurd as a Vaudeville performer, she will switch from poetry and metaphysics before casting this to flame and laughing in its smoke.

In this show she is as stately as a Wizardess of Oz, entrancing her audiences with Venetian glassed ornaments that are so beautifully juggled with before their eyes. 

Delicate image of glassworks exhibited

Two elastic-bodied women, one arched into a crab, the other standing upon her belly and holding into the air a tower of delicate champagne glasses, which twinkle like stars in a dark penumbra. Then, a 3 pound glass vase is hauled into the air and left to land… not on the floor or into a hand, but upon the upper part of the thrower’s back.

A heavy glass bowl thrown into the air and caught by the back of the neck

English’s guidance and watchfulness, like a conjurer or magician, lead the suspense safely home to a place of relief as these masters of physical balance use their instincts and skills to forge and drive solid glass objects to float in mid air, taking the audience into a dangerous journey of risk and peril.  We see their delicate bodies as fulcrums and their spirits as magicians, willing their glass objects to fly and Rose English, close by, guiding and watching, as if they are making real her dreams and wishes.

In this show, ideas about scientific study are conjured: fulcrums, machines, magnetic force-fields, velocity projectiles, sound waves fireballs and crizzling, all born from “eureka” moments and then she also conjures a world of imagination and invention, almost graspable, through thought act, word or sound, so that, like a peak moment or an object thrown into space, it is almost as if, in a climax, the audience is present before an incredible moment of enlightenment…

This titillation causes the synapses to delight, which is then exacerbated by the tension of potential danger and yet English does not let her theatre fall into the nadir of tragedy or doom.  Like the glass goblet that is so perfectly caught by her acrobats, she lets magic have a final say and it is in awe that we see this exhibition levitate, like a eureka moment or a fireball, or a flying acrobat, the exhibition in itself beautifully explores the intrepid venture of conjecture in solid form.  It is a beautiful jewel of work in its own right and I am reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem:     

A deed knocks first at thought,

And then it knocks at will,

That is the manufacturing spot,

And will at home and well.

It then goes out an act,

Or is entombed so still

That only to the ear of God

Its doom is audible.

“A Premonition of the Act” is on show at Camden arts centre until 6 March 2016


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