Edmund Kean (died 15 May 1833)
Born in Westminster London, Kean was regarded as the greatest English actor of his time. His last stage appearance was at Covent Garden, when he played Othello (alongside Charles, his son, who was also an accomplished actor). He suddenly broke down mid-performance, crying “O God, I am dying. Speak to them, Charles” and collapsed into his son’s arms. He died two months later, at Richmond, Surrey.
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Over 100 onstage deaths are chronicled on www.centrefordyingonstage.com; a black sphere hiving over the webpage like some unrelenting “damn spot”. There’s an amateur magician whose “buried alive” stunt went fatally wrong, a dancer whose skirt set on fire, and even Curtis Mayfield, who was paralysed after a rogue gust of wind blew his lighting scaffold down on top of him. The site makes for deeply saddening yet morbidly fascinating reading, but if it sounds like a cheap thrill, this isn’t quite the intention. “What began to interest us wasn’t the deaths themselves, but what happened in the immediate aftermath,” says Kate Strain, curator of The Centre for Dying on Stage #1, the research body’s first exhibition, at Project Arts Centre. “How the audience might have felt, or how co-workers had to quickly respond to the situation.”
In comparison to the website, the gallery show is much less explicit in its themes and content. Humming quietly in the far corner, Performer/Audience/Mirror is a video documentation of a 1977 performance by Dan Graham. Beginning with the artist narrating his own movements, the atmosphere shifts when Graham peers into the mirrored wall behind him and begins describing the audience. (Anyone who’s ever sat front row at a comedy gig will understand the crushing hyper-self-awareness that comes with no longer being a passive observer.) Christodoulos Panayiotou’s The End marks a 2009 performance in which startled audiences – anticipating entertainment – were confronted with a the nothingness of a black backdrop for one hour; the backdrop was then folded up, never to be opened again.
This element of anticlimax is mirrored in Meggy Rustamova’s Green black out, a series of botched holiday photos in which the remnants of forms, friends and memories smothered by a noxious green fog obscuring all. Dina Danish’s Stop, Sun! Continue, Sun! is a diptych of paintings, one of which is destined to fade in sunlight. (The lack of natural light in Project Arts Centre is cannily circumvented by a pledge to move the piece to the window should the temperature sizzle and pop to above 23 degrees.)
There is an overhanging sense of yearning in the exhibition: an attempt to cling on to something, or to evoke a past event which has slipped out of our clutches, like Coleridge desperately hankering after his Kubla Khan. Intentionally demanding, without context many of these works may draw blank stares from audiences. It’s perhaps essential, then, that alongside the rather formalist exhibition, there is a series of events taking place in the gallery space: The Dive Bar Programme. For each one, Karl Burke’s steel structure Taking a Line will be reconfigured, adding a dynamic element to the exhibition programme. The events will explore the themes of performance, memory, audience participation and transience in more depth, and a bespoke cocktail will be served for each one. With titles like Herky-jerky total eclipse and The obituary, we’re not sure if The Centre for Dying on Stage want to you to experience a total blackout, but their makeshift bar is a good place to begging to ponder your own mortality.
The Centre For Dying On Stage runs in Projects Arts Centre until September 13th, for more see their website.
Words: Rosa Abbott
