Whilst Dunedin can boast an impressive sound art scene (mostly based around Chicks Hotel in Port Chalmers), and considerable dramatic theatre at the Fortune and the Globe, relatively little other contemporary performance, time-based materials, or more durational-focused art is on offer throughout the year.

Dunedin Fringe contained within it an impressive variety of contemporary performance works in this vein. These varied from Sascha Perfect’s short, deliberately opaque embodied scenes which she presented within her production The Quantum Enigma, a piece which owed much to Jodorowsky’s model of the Surreal and a richly adorned, Symbolist theatre structured so as to be beyond language or logical interpretation; to Alex Bennett’s fantastic necrophilic performance at the Blue Oyster Gallery, Stagpipes, in which his own emaciated physique clutched, squeezed and violently embraced a set of bagpipes made from deer antlers and fur, giving out tragic sounds of death and vivification; or my own contribution to the Blue Oyster program with a curated series of performance films and video documentation, focused around themes of embodiment, sound/music, vision/film, and dance/choreography.

Even some of the dance presented at Fringe—notably Jimmy Currin’s Twins—owed as much to sculpture, the measured passing of time, costume, and other elements, as to ‘choreography’ or ‘theatre’ per se.

Outside of Perfect and the Blue Oyster Programs, though, it was Jo Worley’s Leith Crossing which offered the most definitively non-dramatic model of what ‘performance’ might be.

Within this tradition, dating back at least to Futurist cabaret of 1909, but given a kick-start with the advent of so-called Performance Art in the 1960s, ‘performance’ became primarily a mode within which ideas might be tested in space and time. Sculptor Richard Serra (whose self-explanatory film, Hand Catching Lead, featured within the Blue Oyster Performance Series) put together a list of actions which sculpture might be based upon and so effect: “to roll; to crease; to crumple; to collect.”

Seen in these terms, Worley’s own list for Leith Crossing might be said to contain such “Actions to Relate to Oneself” as: to grab; to drag; to crawl; to push; to pull; to expend energy; to tire; to keep going; to endure; to be confident; to surpass one’s normal humanity; to become superman; to become machine; to become metal; to become train; to become bicycle; to risk failure; to risk non-completion; to be afraid; to melt; to fail to become metal; to die; to interact; to become one with the space, with the metal bridge, and with the surroundings; and to explore the conditions of mortality. 

Like Serra and Tehching Hsieh, Worley’s work proceeds from a relatively simple initial concept. Reconfiguring a broken exercise bicycle which the artist found at a junk shop—his patented ‘Beam Crawler’—Worley proposition was to fix this primitive, undulating structure to one of the two metal rails which cross the river near the Polytechnic’s Art School. Once locked onto this configuration, Worley’s only option became to painfully and only barely effectively force his body up and down such that the triangle made by the forward and rear outriggers of the bike folded inwards towards each other. Then, as Worley’s form struggled back down onto the acute-angled-V so produced, the Crawler’s front leg crept loudly and agonisingly along the rusted steel in front of this human-machine hybrid which Worley had thereby created through his act of physical effort.

In this performance, Worley and his device were transformed into a sort of dysfunctional train, an only barely working organo-metallic transport device fusing a bionic engine with railway technologies, as though in a kind of dark spoof on cybernetics.

It has been said that art, especially within the capitalist world of economic rationalism, might be defined as that which is not efficient. The beauty and pathos of Worley’s action was therefore quite precisely its uncompromising, obdurate inefficiency, in the very illogic of such an act. Although presumably relatively safe, Worley’s action deliberately exposed the artist to a series of dangers and risks for which there was quite simply no (other) logical reason to expose him to. The fall into the Waters of Leith below—little more than a rather unattractive, concrete-lined, semi-industrial drain at the point where Worley crossed—was not far, but it was a real danger nevertheless. 

In an interview, Worley compared his action to scenes such as those of Buster Keaton’s equally ridiculous travails along the railway lines in The General. Fringe Festival Director Paul Smith, by contrast, called Worley “a retarded Evel Knievel.” Worley himself invoked a similar characterisation of his crossing by giving himself the aptly banal, ridiculous and somehow quintessentially Kiwi alias of “Dodge Caravan.”

The reference to 1970s stunt-men was rammed home by his red crash-helmet with white racing stripe, and his asbestos-like, protective body-suit.

The curious irony of performing a genuinely dangerous act to little purpose, complete with safety gear—even though many of us in our younger days would quite happily have downed half a case of beer and run across this not inconsequential metal support with little regard to such issues in times gone past—certainly made for an interesting spectacle.

One of those present in the audience along the banks himself energetically clambered up some metal scaffolding to reach a local roof, in the process scattering a large flock of seagulls which loudly wheeled first once, then twice, above Worley’s violently undulating, hunched form—thereby adding a sense of lyricism and an incursion of partly tamed nature into this post-industrial vision. 

Worley’s suit also summoned up those ideals promoted by the European avant-garde artists associated with Futurism. Crossing the Leith at a site close to one of the many decaying industrial areas of Dunedin, one was tempted to recall the desires of those who wished to effect some kind of wonderful fusion of man with machine, to ‘metalize’ the body to create a creature rich and strange, which might best epitomise the new, angry, pulsing, progressive and liberating energies of the city.

Here in Dunedin, where the rapid metropolitan growth and trading of the 1870s and beyond came to an inglorious halt in the late 1960s, leaving a town full of extraordinary but now poorly maintained and decaying buildings, varying from the underappreciated, rough-surfaced, concrete, Brutalist lecture theatres at the University of Otago, through to the leaky Art Nouveau masterpiece of the old Post Office on Princes Street. Worley’s description of his costume as a “Miura-Faraday Solar Suit” is redolent of such times when technology and progress seemed to offer not only prosperity, but spiritual enlightenment—as in the celebration of the electric light and solar radiation by Futurist and Rayonist artists.

Crossing the Leith might be read as both a homage to these ideals—a celebration of the mad, silvery beauty they brought to life, to art, and to the metropolis—but also, simultaneously, as yet another nail in the coffin of such concepts, where all that Futurism seems to have left us with today is a squeaky metal exercise bike, eternally caught in a one way trajectory from the School of Education within the University of Otago, across the river to the School of Art, unable to ever turn, or to look back at the past, lest Worley and his Crawler turn all of us into a series of pillars of salt, a community of Lot’s wives.

Quite what all this might signify in these times of economic deprivation and vanishingly small allocations of funds for universities, polytechnics and the arts, remains to be seen.

Dr Jonathan W. Marshall is currently chair of the Board of Trustees of the Blue Oyster Art Project Space, and was a co-curator for the Bl ue Oyster Performance Program, Dunedin Fringe Festival, 2010.
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