Unusual changes

Never had a come-down like it. Exhaustion and then illness. Normally a huge show has the recompense of singing and performing for the next 20 days which re-fills my pot, but here the safety net was different and I blindly fell into an abyss of gloom. Luckily my attention span is short, so my abyss moment lasted about 8 hours before emerging just a bit ill. An unusual upshot of all this work, is extra listening...or maybe I was just too tired to jump in like I normally do....but back in the bar, folks would reel out a long sentence, pile through a long drinks list, but rather than me interrupt, I just waited and then asked questions.... to my surprise, people responded with warmth, I was tipped, thanked, smiled at.... how extraordinary... my previous thought was being efficient....jumping in quick to ask details....but no, people want to be listened to, not 'corrected'. Listen, wow... life changes in unusual ways.

What The Guardian said....

Concrete Dreams: new show celebrates Southbank's history of performance Exclusive: exhibition looks back on London cultural centre’s legacy through 50 years of archive material Chris Wiegand @ChrisWiegand Mon 9 Apr 2018 16.33 BST Last modified on Mon 9 Apr 2018 23.55 BST An innovative new exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre gives visitors a performer’s perspective of its newly renovated brutalist venues, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. Concrete Dreams, which opens on Tuesday, is a tour through 50 years of archive material, imaginatively presented in dressing rooms, bathrooms and other backstage areas. It is a tribute to the eclectic talents who have played there over the years. Rifle through a box of index cards and find handwritten notes recording performance dates for Stan Getz, Roaring Jelly and André Previn. In one room, you can watch a Deep Purple gig, scan one of David Bowie’s set lists, see Cleo Laine’s dressing room sign and programmes for poetry festivals featuring Wole Soyinka. Meticulously kept attendance books list artists who played there and how many tickets they sold. Pick up the receiver of a dial telephone and hear oral histories from those who worked at the venues. Concrete Dreams is heaven for architecture nerds too. Original hand-drawn plans for the building line the corridor walls and are used in animations projected on to office windows, accompanied by Steve Reich’s music. The exhibition features original plans of the building. You can watch TV documentaries about London’s 60s building boom and listen to Harold Wilson’s 1963 speech about the “white heat” of technology. In wood-panelled dressing rooms, concrete cores removed from the QEH during rewiring are displayed alongside scale models. The tour ends with an arresting live performance in the Purcell Room that captures the venues’ incredibly eclectic artistic history with sophistication, style and humour. The finale features footage of Merce Cunningham’s dancers, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Lemn Sissay among many others. The exhibition has been created by design practice LYN Atelier and performer collective KlangHaus, who had a hit at the Edinburgh festival in 2014 with an atmospheric gig-come-installation staged in a former small-animal hospital. That show was a sort of musical mystery tour, with projections on the walls and performers popping up in unexpected places, playing right under the audience’s noses. The company’s ethos is to make “a collaboration with buildings” and they say they became obsessed with concrete while preparing the new exhibition. They have even used tracks by musicians who trained as architects: the composer Iannis Xenakis and Pink Floyd. The bathroom is used to display images from the Hayward Gallery. KlangHaus’s Jon Baker explains that they chose to open and end the tour with birdsong – a reference to the bird noises on Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd, who played at the QEH in 1967, and to the influence of birdsong on other artists whose work has been heard at the venues, from Olivier Messiaen to gamelan musicians. “We had this weird notion that when you build a building, what you’re actually doing is enclosing the outside. You’re colonising a space that was once outside,” says Baker. “So we wanted to bring the sound of birds into the building.” As part of the Concrete Dreams season, there will be a concert of Sam Lee’s Singing With Nightingales, an evening of “human-bird duets”. Georgia Ward, participation producer at the Southbank, said: “We wanted to talk about the amazing history and design of these buildings, but also the performative history. There were some real firsts here: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, Jessye Norman did an extraordinary performance, Different Trains by Steve Reich. We knew KlangHaus could play with the archive in a beautiful, creative way.” The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall was built in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. Sixteen years later, it added the QEH, for classical music, dance and opera, and the smaller Purcell Room for chamber music, solo concerts and cabaret. Concrete Dreams also acknowledges the history of the Hayward Gallery, which opened in 1968. A backstage bathroom features displays from the Hayward’s 1969 pop art show and the 1972 exhibition The New Art, where Gilbert and George were billed as George and Gilbert. On the bathroom wall, beautiful silhouettes of photographed visitors at the gallery’s 1970 Kinetics exhibition stand out against the white tiles. The free, one-hour guided tours, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, are designed for 15 visitors at a time. Concrete Dreams runs until 29 April and culminates in a three-day festival including a workshop run by the Rambert dance company who once rehearsed in the QEH’s foyer.

Hardest day of work

Sunday April 8th. It has become a blur, the day lasted two days with 20 minutes sleep. an extraordinary meeting happened at 7pm on the first half of the two days. A meeting of supreme focus, to request new footage and oral histories that really had to be included, for the sake of professional relationships. Meanwhile the archive still not quite in position, with some perspex fronts not the right size... We spent hours running backwards and forwards with film and photo content on USB sticks, the files too big to export. Nathan at Sal's shoulder, editing what she had the brain space to delegate. Meanwhile permissions for copyright were coming and going.... you can't use this, you can this... You can't use the Harold Wilson, White Heat speech... Jon, requested the transcript of the speech, disappeared into a dressing room with his recording set up. Fashioned his voice, pitch shifted it and Harold Wilson appeared, job done! 24 hour printers were used to print the give-away postcard... print was collected at 5am. We fell asleep briefly onstage on beanbags. The finale was completed at 6.30am. We grabbed a cab home for showers and clean clothes. To return for press calls and interviews at 9.15am. All day we met folks, talked about the exhibition. The Guardian came in first, a reporter who had seen us first in Edinburgh with the very first KlangHaus. He turned his review around within hours.... More tours, an interview with Concrete Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine...the speeches...Jude Kelly and her successor, reeling out speeches, but proudly saying, the whole Concrete Dreams Team slept onstage together to get the job done... legacy....THe QEH opened with the Chineke Orchestra, I had been looking forward to it for weeks, but couldn't go knowing I would fall asleep. We sat on an island of a table, with booze, I barely drank, again, knowing I'd lose myself, we laughed and chatted and tables we're cleared around us, re-laid and moved again. We gathered in huddles outside, smoked fags and laughed. later that night we slept.

Knife through butter

The last day of having the place to ourselves. Like knives through butter on lots of things. Sal has arrived after her mammoth editing session with Jon last night. The archive is going in. We want to set the ground floor tonight before Chi Chi and her orchestra turn up tomorrow. We will be like ghosts. The tear sheets don’t tear easily because the graphics place put the holes too close together and the billboard vinyl is peeling off. We didn’t give then enough time to turn the job around with the care and attention it needed. Andrew, the designer, is patient, he just gets stuff re-made, re-printed. We plotted the lights for the dancers and screens, we sorted the phones. We laughed a tonne especially in the cab on the way home.

Three days to go

Today was hard. I spent two hours getting in as had errands to do, but the errands seemed small for the time spent. 10 bulldog clips and thank you presents for the team. Our producer had tricky problems from the furniture movers and a brick wall on us using sofas from the RFH. The legs fall off when they are moved apparently.... rather than fight that thinly made battle, we went on gumtree and bought two sofas. Next we needed to give the dancers attention. The project lead came up trumps and revealed herself to be an expert choreographer! At points they move like ‘toothpaste’ as she instructed! Then we realised the lighting state would have to be incredibly dark for the screens... would the dancers be visible? Could we gently introduce light, that could be programmed with a one button push? The wearable sound devise is unresolved. The sound in the cupboard in the corridor is too complex. The First floor looked like a problem.. a quick conversation to the right people solved it. Dead tired. Feet hurt, can feel the bones.

The run of the place

Hurray for bank holidays.. and this 4 day block, we have had the run of the Southbank offices just for us and the Concrete Dreams team. It’s been amazing. Writing texts, pulling info together that seemed insurmountable this morning. We are slowly getting really tired... it’s 9pm and Jon and Mark are oral history editing, Andrew is formatting artwork, Georgia, Kate and Chloe are hoovering the exhibition space, Sal is designing the entrance hoarding and I’m photocopying newspaper cuttings onto newsprint. All quietly busy with no difficult questions to answer.... until tomorrow