It went so well. bitches rocked out. Even the florescent lights coming on half way through didn’t shake it.
An early-afternoon storm destroyed some of the humidity and stifling heat that’s been slaying me every day, but by 3pm when I got to Park19, it was a cesspool of vampire water particles all leeching sweat from every pore. After throwing down 12 large bags of dirt, I was sodden. But the dirt was excellent. We found this garden supplies market in Fangcun (gotta be the only good thing in that part of town) and for 250 kuai + a rainstorm got it delivered. Black, moist like it was soaked with decomposing bodies, ripe with uprooted plantlife. The perfect dirt.
Then there was alot of sitting around, waiting for dancers, waiting for makeup, waiting for someone to cease cutting down a wall with a jackhammer, waiting for dusk to check the lights. All the usual. By 7pm, with everything pretty much ready, I’d turned into the despotic, megalomaniacal ogre I usually do before a show. Let’s just say I need either plenty of valium, or a stagemanager.
I was expecting maybe 20 or 30 people to show up, and a few less to actually find the place. Friends, friends of friends, plus the Park19 crowd. I didn’t expect people to start arriving at 7am, be transfixed by the light and dirt, come swarming like moths to the noose and Goya etchings, burn a factory-load of digital photos, generally hang out, and swell until there was around 150 people just waiting for the mayhem to start. Lucky there was good music, but damn did we need several cases of fine aussie champagne to oil the place.
Finally, makeup finished, dancers looking gorgeous, me about to explode with stress, completely thrown by someone deciding to wire in the wireless microphone system just when it was about to start, and me having visions of someone doing the evil and atmosphere-destroying pre-Chinese-show warm-up ‘speech’, and the programme I was using to run all the sound mysteriously not opening (solution to the latter: trash everything in the application’s folder; solution to the former: scream alot), and … are you ready to fucking rock?!?!?
Then: silence. The dancers come in wearing bikinis and high heels, flowers in spring makeup, looking like a Guy Bourdin photoshoot, and begin. The needle touches down on the record, then blinding noise. And again, silence, then rent by a malstrom, over and over. Then it finished. Nothing more and everyone started screaming, or maybe it was just me. The dancers, Dingyi and Congbin looking stunned and so happy, glowing under the lights, the centre of the universe.
And to the aftermath. Well, I didn’t get much chance to say thank you to all my friends who came along coz in true art-rock superstar style I got hauled into the bar for several interviews. Not that I was really coherent, or capable of answering questions lucidly. Whatever I said on post-modernism I’m certain was utterly farcical.
The highlight of the evening was later, when everyone had left, it was just a bunch of people sitting around the bar, drinking, eating fruit, hanging out, and there was these two guys, one who I thought was a fairly unassuming artist or something around Park19, the other I dunno who, but got the joke of my Chinese name dripping with innuendo. They put on this impromptu show, like a drag queen Peking Opera, that even with my retarded language skills was so brazen and hilarious I nearly choked on the watermelon.
So, Park19 rocks, especially Sofia who is off to Merrie England soon to do post-grad, and Yaping also, and really everyone there, who are making something amazing in Guangzhou. The dancers rock, Dingyi and Congbin, awesome and really fucking yay to them both for going there with weird foreigner junk. Long Yunna from the modern dance company rocks for all the little things that were the most important, that made it happen at all. And super-big thanks to Australia-China Council who somehow thought this was a good thing back when I honestly had no idea what I was going to do.
More pictures and video soon.
