GOLDEN

Days 5 & 6 – Encounter, Curiosity, Method: The Making of Practice – excerpted paper presented at Tate Britain, 27 October 2006:

[SLIDE 1]

Susan Pei San Lok. Susan P-E-I, S-A-N, two words, no hyphen, Lok, L-O-K. Or Lok Pei San. Or Luo Pei Shan. Or Susan, Lok Pei San. Or Susan Lok. Or Susie / Sue, or Su-without-an-e. Or Susan Pui San Lok – Pui San – two words, P-U-I, S-AN. Or Susan, Lok Pui-hyphen-San. Or Susan Puisan – one word, no hyphen – Lok. Or Susan, Lok Puisan.

[SLIDE 2]

[SLIDE 3]

Day 4 – Ballroom Lesson – The first of a series of strictly DIY ballroom sessions, facilitated on alternate days by dancers and choreographers Jenevieve Chang and Annie Pui Ling Lok. As a way into the material, picking up on visual and textbook motifs, Annie improvised for a continuous hour to the provisional Golden Hour mix, documented by two cameras, one static, one hand-held. Concluded with a discussion on possible tactics to enable audience participation.

For the second ‘lesson’, we worked together from diagrams and instructions copied from Alex Moore’s Ballroom Dancing (1936), to figure out certain steps, encouraging visitors to ‘have a go’ too… diffusing the division between ‘instructor’ and ‘student’, ‘professional’, ‘amateur’ and ‘novice’, the motive being to open up a ‘do-it-yourself’ space that referenced ‘standards’, but focused on the gap between imaginary ideals and desires or aspirations…

Day 3 – Golden Hour – the opening ends with a pre-mixed selection of ‘Melodies for Dancing and Dreaming’, from my father’s record collection…

Day 3 – Mobile Chorus – I’ve commissioned the composer Mat Davidson to translate Songs (2005) into Chorus (2006), a three minute score for five voices, for live performance. A group of volunteer amateurs arrive, and begin to rehearse in the Upper Space, led by Mat, not so much learning as singing along to pre-recorded parts on headphones. Forming and performing a seemingly impromptu chorus, the singers move from Upper to Lower Space, and into the Arch. Their singing appears to be to themselves, to degrees of self-consciousness, combining to create beautiful, harmonious interludes, the lyric, ‘golden’ repeating and echoing across the three spaces.

Day 3 – Trialogue – a conversation in English takes place in the Lower Space, between with Sonia Boyce, Irit Rogoff, and Naomi Siderfin, three perspectives on nostalgia, aspiration, and diaspora, from disparate artistic, curatorial and theoretical practices, chaired by Joanne Morra. My poor, simultaneous Cantonese translation is delivered facing the speakers as if in a parallel conversation, but the audience – in terms of who has access to Cantonese – is limited to a very few, so it’s as much a conversation with myself, that nevertheless inevitably distracts – as a continuous aural stream, now a low murmur, now staccato, that rises and falls in volume. A performative attempt to address, enact and amplify something of the duplicity, multiplicity and hierarchy of often quiet and unnoticeable yet necessary cultural and linguistic manoeuvres.

I make little sense. It is incredibly tiring. I stop, and start shaking with relief…

Forgot to mention, I also have a workstation set up in the Upper Gallery – a table, a couple of chairs, a monitor and DVD/VHS players, and of course a record player. This is where I’ll be based for the duration of the residency…

Records played:

• Cheung Yi Man (Chueng Shing, 196?)
• Dance to the Music of Victor Sylvester and his Orchestra (EMI, 1966)
• Dong Pui Pui (Regal/EMI, 196?)
• Lazy Latin (Morgan, 1968)

I’m beginning with an evasion; it’s actually day two of my residency at Beaconsfield – a little easier to start writing when the imagined pressure and significance of first words on the first day has been side-stepped and deflated, despite knowing full well that ‘first’ is merely a notional moment / place from which to depart…

Everything is in its temporary place now:

Lower Gallery – Vistas (2005) in a split-screen version on an LCD screen, Songs (2005-ongoing) on headphones hanging on the opposing wall, lightly ‘braced’ by the score for Chorus (2006), a sequence of A4 sheets.

Arch Space – Years is projecting onto two tarpaulin screens at either end, image sequences opposed where they have previously been juxtaposed on adjacent walls or, on a much smaller scale, monitors.

Upper Gallery – Lighting filter in ‘rosy amber’ (described by its manufacturers as ‘warm, emotional, romantic’), covers every pane of glass of the arched windows, flooding the space in a pink wash. Once in the space, looking back, the light beyond the entrance takes on a green hue; I imagine the threshold as a sentimental cusp between a proverbial rose-tinted nostalgia and hint of an envious green. The temperature is up, psychologically and literally it seems – the space feeling distinctly warmer than the rest of the venue. (I later learn that the thermostat had been turned up…) Yesterday, the gold shimmer curtain went up too, hanging from rectangular lighting rig to sloping floor (a drop of some six metres or nineteen feet). Voluminous and luminous, it dominates the space, yet its weight shifts with the light, now heavy, now almost transparent, gold veering from fire to white, a million movements, surprising and mesmeric.

Records played:

• Big Ben Hawaiian Band: Hits Hawaiian Style (Columbia, 1964)
• Mona Fong: East and West (EMI, 1968)
• The Elegance of the Waltz: John Pritchard Conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra (Pye, 1967)
• Foong Gok Yan Sau Mai Liu Ching¹ (Kun Lun, 1964)
• Must Be Madison, Must Be Twist: Joe Loss and his Orchestra (EMI, 1963)
• Lazy Latin (Morgan, 1968)

Note

¹ My Cantonese romanisation is improvised.

It’s time to bring out the dancing shoes, China Daily, 3 August, 2004.

’Saucy’ Latin dance attracts new enthusiasts, China Daily, 29 November, 2005.

Some “melodies for dancing and dreaming”, from L.C’s collection

“(I left my heart) in San Francisco” / “If ever I would leave you” /

“You’d better love me” /

“When you dream about Hawaii” / “My blue heaven” / ”’S Wonderful” /

“Our day will come” /

“Trade winds” / “Harbour lights” / “Sunrise, sunset” /

“Who needs miracles” / “This could be the start…” /

“Fly me to the moon” / “How soon” / “Time flies” /

“I feel fine” /

“Perfidia” /

“I remember you” / “Stranger on the shore” /

“Green green grass of home” /

“Too close for comfort” /

“Now is the hour” /

“Dance on” /

Some of L.C’s records:

Joe Loss and his Orchestra, Must Be Madison, Must Be Twist (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1963)

Joe Loss and his Orchestra, Go Latin with Loss (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1964)

Big Ben Hawaiian Band, Hits Hawaiian Style (London: Columbia, 1964)

Big Ben Hawaiian Band with the Mike Sammes Singers, Blue Hawaiian Skies (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1965)

James Last and his Hammond-Bar Combo, Hammond A Gogo: 28 Melodies for Dancing and Dreaming (London: Polydor, 1966)

Dance to the Music of Victor SIlvester and his Orchestra (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1966)

More Dancing Sounds of Cyril Stapleton, selected by Bill and Bobbie Irvine (London: Pye Records, 1966)

John Pritchard conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra, The Elegance of the Waltz (London: Pye Records, 1966)

Joe Loss and his World Championship Ballroom Orchestra World Championship Ballroom Dances (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1967)

The Lazy Latins, Lazy Latin (London: Morgan, 1968)

Hard to shake, this habit of counting… Up… Down… Counting as a yearning; reaching for the ‘was’, the ‘maybe’, and all the while missing while staring into the glare, hardly sensing an injury… ‘T/here, th/here’...

An uneasy shift as the counter clicks – an inaudible tick (we don’t like clocks in this house), then, fire is worked to shock out the old and shake in the new, shaking the screen. Resolutions, aspirations… 3 weeks on and another chance looms, to re-start, re-fresh, re-kindle, re-turn, with dragons.

On New Year’s Day (Gregorian), no.9 filled briefly with L.C’s old ballroom tunes, thanks to the recent purchase of a cheap record player, and we waltzed and cha-cha’d badly in the cramped living room. L.C showed off his various amateur ballroom dancer’s awards and certificates from the late 1960s, and I made a couple of connections:

1. M.-with-the-beehive and G. – L.C’s friends in Southend – were his one-time dance teachers (or was it just Beehive-M?).

2. L.C also danced in Leicestershire for a while – and I may have acquired footage of the dancehall he frequented.