The Candonble project
Relevant Links for AV and website info surrounding the project.
• The Candomble Project, 8 Minute teaser Edited by DOP Sam Campbell(2015): Here
• Rest and Rise Again, 30 min documentary concerning the social art practice, The Bakery Of Slow Ideas. Directed by Leo Kay (2022): Here
• Link to webpage on website created to represent the film not yet made: Here
• Link to webpage on website representing The ongoing social art practice, The Bakery Of Slow Ideas: Here
Article written for exeunt magazine . Jan 21st 2016
Leo Kay is the Artistic Director of Unfinished Business whose current projects include: Change My Mind, The spinning Wheel, Only Wolves And Lions and Mr sole Abode and Oblation to The Gods
Over the last few years my work has primarily drawn content from autobiography, be that my own or the artist(s) I am working with. It has moved further and further away from the process of making up stories and presenting them.
I believe that art has the power to heal on a micro and macro scale. I believe it is the job of the artist to take risks; to push at their own boundaries, in an effort to provoke change. Change in their personal perception and change in the receivers’ perception, in a hope that this will lead to change in thought and action beyond the performance context. I have found that the process of reflecting on the drivers behind ones choices in life has allowed for a deeper understanding and strengthening of ones political attitudes and ethics and this in turn allows the artist to articulate their politics with more clarity.
I believe that confronting stories from our biography and using them as source for performance can have a profound effect on both artist and audience. The more I explore this area of work, the more I understand that it is not an easy energy to work with. It takes courage on the part of the performer to confront the personal material and hold the audience experiencing it and it demands a maturity from the process facilitator or director; an intention to hold the space responsibly, to communicate directly and with sensitivity.
We’ve just finished the creation process and initial tour of The Spinning Wheel; a collaboration with New York performer/writer Baba Israel, which explores his biography and that of his late father; Steve Ben Israel. Baba’s father was an artist; a Jazz musician, performance poet and core member of the ‘The Living Theatre’ in the 60s and early 70s and he remained a key figure in counterculture scene of New York City until he died in 2013. Days after his father’s death, Baba was invited to perform a tribute to him. The poem he created and recited for that event was the birth of his mourning and healing process and was the trigger for the creation of The Spinning Wheel, which combines spoken word, conversational prose and improvisation with audio and video material taken from Steve Ben’s 50 year archive.
A few months before Steve Ben passed away Baba saw me perform: It’s Like He’s Knocking, which he had programme for Contact Theatre(Manchester). The show explores the life of my grandfather, my father and me. It excavates the grieving process in an attempt to put to rest the spirits of these two men, to honour my ancestry and allow the audience to connect with their own. Having seen this piece Baba approached me to co-create this new work about his relationship with his own father and our collaboration grew from there.
I believe that connecting with ancestry allows one to understand more deeply where you come from and to begin to accept elements of yourself that might be in conflict. There is a deep sense of ritual at the heart of both these shows, and this ritual seems fundamental when connecting to the past and inviting audience in to that process.
Another one of our current company projects that profoundly interrogates biography is Change My Mind. It is a 2 years performance research process and has already spawned an Emerging artist project with the Cannon Hill Collective at the MAC in Birmingham. The project asks that 7 artists, myself included, continually re-edit a filmed biography of themselves adding more information and creative material and sending it out to people around their lives. On receiving the biography these surrounding people are asked to set a task that they believe could positively change the way the artists experiences or sees the world around them. Then we continue an experimental and collaborative arts process creating work together every 3 months in a one week residency. The project is part self development, part process as product and part a deepening of practice in this area of documentary performance.
What I didn’t know when making It’s Like he’s Knocking In 2009 was that it would start a journey into supporting the creation of autobiographical performance with other makers including Polarbear, , Chris Redmond, DEci4life, RTkal, Rachel Rose Reid, Ben Mellor, Leonie Higgins, Ria Hartley, John Berkavich, and Baba Israel. Some of these interactions have been more successful than others. I believe that, among other reasons, this varying success has been down to my shifting understanding of the responsibility, maturity and depth of sensitivity needed to engage in a collaboration of this kind.
Autobiographical material can feel easy and necessary to write out. It can feel liberating to initially get it down onto the page, but it is in the further development of performance material from this source and the subsequent sharing of this work that the artist is confronted with the fragile state that this engenders and the strength that the process demands.
When considering my own role within these collaborations, I have realised that I have a great deal still to learn about how to hold a process like this responsibly. Many times I have had to check myself and remind myself that I cannot be the demanding director in the process; that the rawness of the artists experience must be respected and honored and given space and consideration. I have sometimes failed in understanding the depth of personal process the artist is going through.
I made It’s Like He’s Knocking pretty much on my own. I had some minimal dramaturgical support and an outside eye a couple of times but fundamentally I made it alone. This was, as I have said not an easy process, but maybe the idea of a traditional director for work of this nature is not right. It may be that a collaborative relationship unique to the individual process needs to be considered and outlined. A collaboration which is flexible and responsive; a collaboration which demands that the artist take full responsibility for their own process and the collaborator (previously considered a director) understands the lead artists possible fragility and need for sensitive, responsive, creative support.
I feel that working in this realm of performance should not be taken lightly; often the role requires a gamete of skills that you only learn through experience. Holding someone else’s precious, sacred and painful life experiences takes a maturity and a selflessness that challenges an artist’s need to manifest their own vision. I am still in the process of understanding how to harness this energy and hold space for others. Life and art cross over and intermingle. My deepest interactions are often with artists I have worked with and the deepest projects are often these contemporary forms of documentary performance.
Negotiations within these collaborations which explore deeply personal performance material present a momentous ask from all involved, but one that can bear beautiful fruit through friction, exchange and shared intentions.
Article written for Burracao magazine 2016
Breathing in The Unknown.
Crouched on all fours
Serenaded by the guide on a small stringed instrument. Flooded with colour and sensation. Focusing on my breath. Riding higher and higher waves. Always focusing on my breath.
Recognising elements of my personality.
The private side of myself, the desire to shine, but only when space is open to me.
Never needing to rip a space open with my presence.
Understanding the need to respect my personality and accept these elements as being treasures.
When Buracao approached me to submit a proposition for an article about my work in relation to the theme of Kamikaze I was initially intimidated, imagining that the concept demanded a brutal radicalism that was contrary to the often gentle nature of the work that I create.
The word brings to mind second world war fighter pilots nose diving to their death with utter conviction and dogged determination, channeling the Samurai’s commitment to loyalty and honour until death. But when I began to think about it more as a metaphor and replaced the ideas of commitment and loyalty to your country and honour for the political cause with a commitment to the acceptance of change and the importance of art, creativity and community, my thoughts became more lucid.
Kamikaze involves the act of facing, accepting and in fact hurtling towards the unknown. Death is the ultimate unknown and the aim of hurtling towards it, is to affect something outside of yourself as completely and profoundly as possible. For the Japanese world war two fighter pilot, it would be the allied target, for myself as an artist, it is the participating audience and the community the work is contextualised within.
Performing my work is a juggling act, I attempt to be present in the moment, whilst simultaneously presenting devised and set elements. I often aim to disguise the preordained elements in an attempt to enchant the audience, to bring them into the present, allowing them to lose themselves in the ‘realness’ of the experience and open the possibility of being deeply affected.
There is a search within my work to reintegrate with the audience, to find alternatives to the alienation that presentational performance can create between audience and performer, to feel that everyone is connected and in some way responsible, to break the precontractual agreement present within high art between the ‘presenter’ and the ‘observer’, the ‘expert’ and the ‘receiver’. I am often questioning the porosity of the line between audience and performer, of the responsibility that each has for the event. Through subtle processes of interaction and shifting of responsibility, I aspire to empower the audience/participant and to break down the separation between the individuals present.
For many years, I wanted to take the plant based medicinal brew Ayahuasca. This ‘medicine’ used in South American shamanic ceremonies is consumed in liquid form and takes the participant on a psychophysical journey into themselves. Often referred to as ‘Grandmother Ayahuasca’, her energy is known to be very harsh and very loving. People often see their own death and encounter their personal demons. Sometimes people meet animals or human guides that impart knowledge in some way.
Since learning about Ayahuasca whilst working in Brazil 15 years ago, I have known that it connected with my beliefs surrounding alternate ways of healing; ideas that suggest that we don’t all need western psychological processes of continually digging at our past to reimagine/improve our present or future. But every time the opportunity to experience Ayahuasca occurred, the timing was wrong or my mental/physical health felt too fragile for the journey.
Finally, this January I searched it out and took part in two Ayahuasca Ceremonies over a four day period outside of Mexico City, in an area renowned for its sacridity, near a town called Malinalco. Before the ceremony I was scared, I felt a risk (maybe naively) that I may not return from the experience the same recognisable personality, that I may shed all of the pretence that our society demands we build around ourselves. But fundamentally I believe that if I risk myself in order to shed some of my baggage, then I might be able to break habits that I’ve built up around myself. I believe that by taking radical action I might wash away the scar tissue and callouses that have grown around my joints and allow myself to walk freely, lightly and without pain. This sounds dramatic, but I think everyone gets scarred by life and it’s the process of opening oneself to the possibility of change that is a fundamental stepping stone in allowing the magic of renewal to take place.
“A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares for the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or ‘duende’. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die.”
Birds of Heaven, Ben Okri
In 2009 I started making a solo performance called It’s Like He is Knocking. At the heart of the show was a desire to risk exposing myself, my personality and some of my family's history. I wanted to erode the separation between audience and artist and break down the (largely western) barriers between the society/community and the art.
I invited audiences of 15 people to join me in a small intimate spaces, usually a flat or a bedsit. There I shared a contextualised series of autobiographical stories; it was intimate, personal and revealing of the strengths and flaws in my lineage. I shared some of my cultural influences, I also gambled and I drank with the audience, I offered space for them to reflect and write and I subtly invited space for us to communicate. This fracturing of pre-assumed constructs put me in an emotionally fragile space; like a clown I needed to be open and responsive, I needed to listen to the energy of the audience, to give space after intense moments, to align our breathing and attempt to place myself on their ‘level’, to respect their energy, in order to conjure a shared experience.
Within this work I wished to create an ‘ambiguous platform for performance’; a term I have developed to describe a space where audiences are unsure of the context they find themselves in (are they witnessing a pre-staged piece of performance or engaging in a late night conversation with an old friend). This is a kenetic not a passive space. I aim for this ambiguity to confuse the senses and possibly open people to new ways of processing and assimilating information received within the performance experience.
After performances of It’s Like He’s Knocking I often received responses from audience members thanking me for giving them a space to reconsider their past, their parents; to grieve a lost family member or thanking me for sharing this intimate ritual with them and for the courage they felt I had shown. Is it courageous in our culture to expose your emotional strengths and weaknesses? Maybe there is something countercultural, counter-habitual in the essence of Kamikaze: a letting go of the protection of oneself, one’s identity and the creation of a space to be open, present, unfiltered, yet responsible and interdependent in the presence of other unknown members of the human race.
To me the process did not feel courageous, it felt necessary, it felt vital and alive and, although on many occasions performing the work has made me feel raw and fragile, I believe this rawness is a necessary part of the authenticity within the work. This rawness demonstrates the possibility of living and communicating in a different way, as one artist friend often says to me, (I am not sure if this is her saying or borrowed from another practitioner) we must attempt to work with ‘radical tenderness’.
Whilst touring It’s Like He’s Knocking I began to think about a new piece, Only Wolves And Lions. The structure or ritual of the piece is simple; an audience of 20 people are invited to bring a raw ingredient to share in a meal, then over the course of three and a half hours we share ideas, cook, eat and talk with each other. The art of holding a space for this, where an audience can feel both supported and free, anarchic and safe, is less simple, it requires a subtlety of performance and engagement, which has taken the last few years of sharing the work to develop and come to understand.
Within the piece myself and the co-host, are the performers and also we are participants alongside the audience. We see the performance as a radical act which attempts to dismantle the hierarchy set up by traditional presentational performance forms. At the beginning of the evening, we toast ”To not being experts, but to giving it a go”. We have our ‘lines’ written out on a series of 45 cue cards so the audience can see the mechanics of the event’s structure. This is fundamental. It serves as one of the signals that indicates that we are not so ‘in control’. It also gives us the tools to re-find our place when the flow is inevitably interrupted by audience input. The cards allow us to be honest about the extent to which we are prepared and disconnect us from an association with ‘acting’ and virtuosity, immediately bringing us closer to the audience. They tell the audience that we’re open to the conversation being derailed by anyone who has something to say and that we’re excited about new ideas being inserted. They allow us to provoke the audience with radical thought, through presenting cited ideas from other philosophers and artists, they make clear that we are referring to pre-considered ideas and phrases, that we are not magicians or no greater wielders of magic than the audience/participants who surround us.
The discourse within the work focuses on themes of community and isolation in contemporary urban contexts; touching on the false gods of capitalism and questioning what humans really need to increase a sense of wellbeing. When I first performed this work I presented all the thoughts as my own, the ideas were not contextualised. As a result, I spent a lot of the experience either being agreed with or attacked for what I expressed as ‘my opinions’. This was a distressing situation, not one that expanded my ability to think, but that closed me down and increased tension. I quickly learnt that distancing myself slightly from the ideas enabled people to consider them more openly and engage in a deeper shared discourse. It was an important learning, that audience felt more inclined to muse instead of attack when the quotes presented less the ‘artist's’ perspective on the world and more other thinkers perspectives brought to the table for group digestion and consideration.
The event itself is a subtly radical act of generosity. It creates temporary community, where through the act of contributing food and then cooking and eating it together, we can question the assumed divide between strangers. We have developed many subtle coercive tricks that allow us to guide the process without imposing our will, that help refocus the group and return to the central themes and structure. No matter how many times we do it, however, we will nearly always be thrown a curveball of some kind and these are exciting and welcome and always force us to reconsider how we might adapt the piece in response.
I consider again the notion of Kamikaze and the act of willfully throwing yourself into the unknown. Only Wolves and Lions invites everyone (audience and performer) to step into the unknown together bringing their ‘whole selves’ to the experience. This shared act of everyday bravery breaks the individualism promoted within our culture and enables a temporary community to form quickly, which embraces those present and stimulates a surprisingly profound connection.
Another of our projects is Change My Mind; a two year part time performance research project undertaken in collaboration with six artists. It asked each of them to bring their ‘whole selves’ to a process of stimulating and recognising change, wherein people surrounding the artist’s lives were invited to set them tasks which they feel could positively affect the way the artist perceives and/or experiences the world around them.
The artists (myself included) invited four people surrounding their lives to set these tasks (designed to last between a minute and a month in time), which we then individually tried to accomplish. We reconvened for week long residencies (5 over an 18 month period) to share experiences, create together and develop ever evolving autobiographical films. These films in many ways documented the personal process of change throughout the project. The results of which can be seen on www.thisischangemymind.com.
The films were designed to serve as stimuli for a ‘task setter’ and were posted online for audiences to view throughout the process. Over the two year project the autobiographical films were in a constant state of change, being re-edited or re-made each time the group got together. They are powerful documents, however the making and sharing of these films became the most destabilizing aspect of the project, due to the extent to which they exposed the artists, their personality, their flaws and their present state of being.
Throughout the project it became apparent that the ambitions outreached the support that we were able to garner and time scale that the project was working within. The level of personal exposure, coupled with the financial and time based restrictions revealed a gap between a safe exposition, where upon the artist is resolved in their action, and a less considered one, where they sometimes felt less in control of their process. This raised level of anxiety, increased the ‘entropic’ process and the sense of reason within the research was diminished.
The relationship between complete commitment to the vision and the journey towards the unknown becomes more fragile, doubt seeps in and Kamikaze valour diminishes. If I were to consider this process in relation to time, I would say that the project was continually out of breath and rarely present to its own needs. This sense of presence is fundamental to the live experience, to the conjuring of possibility in the moment and the ability to expose oneself. To engage the Kamikaze one focuses both on the commitment to the intention behind the act and the ‘second by second’ process.
I return to the clowns commitment to and techniques for being in the present moment. When I was in my 20s I worked a lot with Clown, but eventually had to move away from it as I felt to raw and fragile within the vulnerable state that these techniques placed me in. More recently I have, with developed maturity and technique, returned to some of the essence of the clown without the desire to create comedy or ingratiate the audience. I feel that the clowns ability to be sensitive to the audience's experience and to attempt to act accordingly, is radical in its generosity. There is a willingness to reveal something of yourself and at the same time to kill something of your rigid identity in an attempt to move closer to your audience. There is a radical hopefulness that in this sharing, the audience will in turn share of themselves.
Maybe the cliche of the embittered clown has its roots in this continued process of engaging hope. The clown’s continual attempt at experiencing moments of shared humanity may wear away at their optimism, the rejection and cruelty of audience may create jagged scars in their open heart. To protect against this pain, humans and specifically performers find ways to ‘present’, ‘fake’ or ‘act’ authenticity, it’s a skill which can be learnt. Within our work we try to fight against this urge to ‘present’ and instead attempt to ‘share’ oneself. Though this may sound a little pretentious, I see this technique as connected to a spiritual practice. It is connected to being present, to following your breath.
Breath was my anchor when I took Ayahuasca. Our guide and healer who had spent 25 years as an Ayahuasquero alongside being a Qigong Master and a specialist in Tantric & Taoist philosophy, gave a lecture prior to the ceremony on the three treasure of Taoist internal alchemy. The First Treasure: Vital essence, the life force present within all of the fluids in our body, within the adrenal glands and most present within our sexual organs as the source of creation. The Second Treasure: Energy, manifest in every action taken in the material world and the Third Treasure: Spirit, manifest in the expansion of consciousness. The secret of the three treasures is to learn how to transform one into the other whilst slowing down the natural entropic process (the process of moving from a state of order to disorder). We must protect our vital energy which is not infinite, we must generate energy and expand our spirit or consciousness. It is the reduction of the use of unnecessary essential vital essence/energy/spirit in this transformational journey that means we can live longer and better and it is suggested that the key to this is through breath work. He said that when taking Ayahuasca you should think of your breath as the surfboard on which you ride the waves. The better your surf technique, the higher the waves you can ride. For 5 hours I focused on my breath. I stayed present and experienced everything in the present. It was hard work. Deep focused breath held me anchored to the moment and allowed me to ride enormous waves of experience.
I am beginning to understand that, for me, it is this process of being anchored to the moment, that is one of the things that brings performance close to a spiritual practice. This technique of breathing with the audience, of stripping away at pretence, of taking the time that the task needs, be this an action or an autobiographical story, allows the audience to be present with you, to experience as themselves as you experience yourself.
The idea that one would willingly expose oneself is counter intuitive and for me is associated to the act of Kamikaze, it speaks of the act of willfully killing oneself for a greater purpose. In the case of my practice, the purpose being to demonstrate that there are alternate ways of living and being together as humans, that we are in a war of the senses, that we can either live in a dulled virtual world dominated by corporate interest and filled with consumption or that we can attempt to learn more about our shared qualities, our celebratable differences, our connection to the world around us. This creative process sometimes involves killing former images of oneself in the attempt to express that which is burning inside.
