IN good old fashioned performance style, the front row seats seemed like dangerous places to be for the opening events of this year's Live At Project mini festival of live art. Poland's Wladyslaw Kazmierczak and Ireland's Andre Stitt both offered emotionally intense and arresting, performances, while extending the sense of physical hazard as close to the audience as possible.
Wladyslaw Kazmierczak's Multiple Self Portrait in Mirrors seemed to contain several broad hints that the subject of interest to the Polish artist was the self. The self in, Kazmierczak's performance, however, turns out to be something that if it ever existed, is now irreparably smashed, converted into a hail of mismatching fragments.
Setting his work in a kind, of room, Kazmierczak surrounded himself in mirrors, of both the literal and the metaphorical sort, so while the artist watches himself in an array of mirrored glass arranged on a dressing table, the audience also benefited from Kazmierczak "selves" distributed through slides and a live video image.
Sitting at the table, Kazmierczak incised three lines on his forehead with a blade and then attempted to, fix small, heated glass jars over them. At first the artist attempts to find a place for this "repaired" self within the projected images, but having failed to do this, he seized a large mirror panel, climbed onto the table, raised the fragile glass above his head.
With a tumultuous classical soundtrack playing loudly, Kazmierczak stood for some minutes with the mirror poised, and then with no particular warning, brought it crashing down onto his head, shattering the glass into a shower of light as the falling shards caught the spotlights.
Climbing down from the table, Kazmierczak collected some of the larger fragments and began fixing these to his head by wrapping (in an echo of Nigel Rolfe's rope trick) black masking tape around his head, pressing the jagged fragments into the flesh of his face, in a direct and violent image of guilt and social disintegration.
The violence of Andre Stitt's Second Skin/Inquisition (yesterday's second performance) while every bit as inwardly directed as that of Kazmierczak was for the most part more suggestive than actual. Second Skin/inquisition, which seemed to involve a catalogue of a programme of activities to overcome dehumanisation, had a pronounced sense of boundary, an impression undoubtedly created by a strongly ceremonial mise en seine, in which an array of implements and containers was set neatly about small elevated platform.
As the action begins, Stitt moves around an on stage bathtub, blowing incense as a film of the approach to Auschwitz II plays on a large white cloth screen behind him. Soon Stitt switches from cycling the bathtub to abusing it with a hammer and chisel, scattering chips of enamel around the theatre.
Eventually, after the bathtub has been covered with various liquids, screamed at, and finally set ablaze, an impression emerges that it is the performer rather than the tub is being "treated". As his metaphor finally begins to focus, Stitt slashes the projection screen and heads off, apparently following the train that has dumped us all at the gates of Birkenau.
