Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019)
Interview with Eddie Peake

Recall: Evening of Performances (2008–2019) is a year-long programme of interviews, podcasts and contributions from some of the artists who participated in the twelve editions of the celebrated Evening of Performances. Highlighting the evenings’ extraordinary legacies, we will be exploring what the next wave of contemporary performance can become with the artists who have shaped it so far.

Interview with Eddie Peake

the Roberts Institute of Art: To start, could you give us an overview of your performance at the Evening of Performances in 2012?

Eddie Peake: Creating And Collapsing a Drama or How It Must Feel To Be An Ill Dog Wearing One Of Those Plastic Head Funnels was a devised performance with a cast of seven: three female dancers dressed in knickers and baggy t-shirts, three male camera operators dressed in day-to-day clothes, and a female flautist dressed in a gown typical of what you might expect to see a soloist wear in a classical music recital.

I wanted the attire of the three dancers to have the feeling of what I might typically have seen in the kitchen of my family home when I was growing up. It was the main communal area of a very social household. There would often be large groups of people there, and in particular large groups of teenage girls on account of my three older sisters and their friends. If there had been a sleepover the night before, which took place frequently, then they might have been dressed in t-shirts and knickers, say, while eating breakfast and chatting.

The main premise of the performance was to construct dramatic sequences using the cast and the space, and then to explode the illusion of drama so that all that was left was its constituent parts, and I wanted the performance to be constantly swinging between those two states. I would emphasise the build-up of drama with sentimental and emotive scores played by the flautist, and then abruptly collapse and fragment it.

Though the piece was devised, we rehearsed it at length. In spite of that though, some aspects of the performance were improvised, and I must admit veered out of my control and beyond what I would have wanted. But I had a conviction for the improvised-ness, and so that risk was inevitable, really.

Each dancer was assigned a camera operator, but the flautist was supposed to have a slightly different status within the ensemble. Perhaps she was even a bit sprite-like. She would sometimes soundtrack the performance with emotive, sentimental music, and sometimes aggravate it with abstract or frenetic sounds.

I saw the cast, and in particular the three dancers as a Bacchae-like chorus, orchestrating havoc and directing their own drama, stepping outside of it in order to commentate on it. I wanted positions of power to constantly be swinging from one character, or one group of characters, to another, at times seeming to be occupied by the camera operators, and at others by the dancers, and yet others by the flautist, or even by the audience.

RIA: What was a highlight for you at the Evening of Performances?

EP: The highlight was being able to make a single performance work in which the unity of time and space could be fragmented and collapsed. By virtue of the fact that there were four or five separate conjoined spaces within the DRAF (as RIA was known then) building it occurred to me at the outset that it might be possible to play with the linear-ness of the work, and how the audience was able to experience it.

It was quite an antagonistic and anarchic work in its relationship to the viewer since I had made it in a nonlinear way that necessarily prevented anyone from being able to experience it in its entirety. For example, there were moments where different performers were doing different choreographic or dramatic sequences in entirely different spaces, but as part of the same work.

Prior to that work, but in the same year, 2012, I had made quite a lot of performances all of which possessed very tight beginning-middle-and-end-ish structures, even if they had included within them devices that meddled with or undermined that convention. So, the DRAF space seemed like it invited — or even required me to really focus on that specific aspect of my performances.

Another highlight for me was making the process of documenting the work be a fundamental part of the work. Documentation has always been a big issue for me, one I have never dealt with in a fixed way. But making the camera operators actual characters within the work enabled me to both document the performance from within and address a number of other consistent themes from my work, e.g. power dynamics within relationships, the significance of the body, particularly with regards to gender and sexuality, and the gulf between performer and audience.

RIA: How do you think this informed the way you’ve documented your work going forward?

EP: I have made a number of works where the camera operator is present as a character within the performance, including in my 2020 performance film made for the Piccadilly Circus screen programmed by CIRCA, A Dream of a Real Memory, in which I myself appear as the camera operator. But even when the camera/camera operator has not been present in that way, they have been at the forefront of my thinking.

This is probably a very old-fashioned view, but I don’t like the camera to be present during live performance in front of an audience because it affects the way the audience behaves. Unless I specifically want to work with that phenomenon, like I did in my DRAF work. (Having said that, since Instagram etc., I do think people — broadly speaking — are way more accustomed to having cameras present in everything they do, but I still find it jarring). More generally speaking though, when filming performers, I have tended to shoot handheld or with a steady cam. I like that doing so replicates, to some extent, the movement of a body or a human gaze.

RIA: What draws you to performance as an art form?

EP: Primarily I’m drawn to the fact that performance induces very strong feelings in me, both as a maker and as a viewer. That’s a quality I always want from art: real and extreme feelings that get stirred in me and that I can’t prevent. That is not a quality that can be taken for granted, so when I do experience it, I know that whatever caused it is something I have to do/think about/pursue.

Beyond that, I’m drawn to the way that performance in an art gallery context necessitates a unique and particularly intense dynamic between the work and its audience. It is distinct from, for example, the cinema, theatre, or dance, even though those forms could be said to have similarities with performance in terms of the audience.

I would argue that the art gallery context incorporates the viewer in whatever they are looking at to such an extent that they are implicated in the subject matter of the work. They are one of its protagonists. This phenomenon is most true in the case of performance, where the viewer is often as much on display as the performance is.

I am also compelled by the ineluctable ephemerality of performance.

RIA: You mentioned that performances induce strong feelings in you as a viewer — are there performances which stand out to you in how they have impacted you?

EP: There are many, but to name a few... Before I started art school, I saw a Brian Catling performance at Matt’s gallery. I wouldn’t say it was one I necessarily felt a great connection to at the time, but it was so unfamiliar to me and exciting for that reason. It was uncomfortable even, but in a way I later came to appreciate. It was staged in the round, with Catling occupying the centre of the gallery along with a collection of objects that he would pick up and activate.

I also saw a Gary Stevens performance at South London Gallery years before I started art school. It has stayed in my memory in a profound way. It had a looped structure that the viewer could enter at any point, with no clearly delineated divide between where the performers were and where the audience should be.

Then when I started art school in 2001 there were lots of students — Laura Cull, Steve Cornford, Megan Broadmeadow, Eemyun Kang and Anna Karen Johnson — making performance work that really moved me.

More recently I saw a Zhana Ivanova work (incidentally at DRAF) that I thought was just so brilliant. In fact I was in it, but I somehow still felt like a bystander since there was no rehearsal at all, and my participation required me to not know what I was going to be doing. It was hilarious and cutting, and more or less narrated precisely how the audience should respond, as well as what the performers, none of whom knew what they would be doing, should do.

I also saw a Jasmine Johnson performance at the Barbican which I just thought was so beautiful. It was slightly more fourth wall-ish, insofar as the audience just observed the action from beginning to end, but the ideas at play, and the script, lifted from exchanges the artist had had with her therapist and with lovers and friends she had met on a polyamory dating app, were hilarious and heart-wrenching.

Edward Thomasson’s Chisenhale offsite performance a while back had a similar effect on me. His works tend to have a huge emotional impact on me. I think that’s very hard to achieve in any medium. Another work that affected me very deeply and emotionally was a performance by Roland Carline and Francis Majekodunmi.

RIA: Can you tell us about your early experiences of creating performance?

EP: I would say that my work was always performative, if not outright performance, and so I’m not surprised that at a certain point I started making standalone performances. In 2004, I did a student exchange at Bezalel in Israel. For a few years prior to that, my work had been gradually prising itself away from the wall and into three-dimensional space, but perhaps it was being away from home that enabled me to feel like I could take it further and experiment with performance as well as other things that for some reason I didn’t feel like doing back at home.

The first performance I did was a walk to the security wall that divides Israel and Palestine, which I did alone. It was quite scary and intimidating. The work was the act itself and a piece of writing I later did. But then when I moved back to London, I started making live performances with audiences, the first of which was Fox, 2005, made in collaboration with Sam Hacking.

It was a piece in which two people, one of whom wore a fancy-dress fox outfit, exchanged clothes while trying to not expose any part of their body. Soon after that, in 2006, I made a five-a-side football match piece in which each player was physically conjoined to a player from the opposing team by way of kits I had sewn together.

The thing that I think distinguishes these early performance works from much of my work now is that the action was not ‘performed’ as such — it was not scripted or acted out. Rather there was an instruction at the outset and the performers simply carried out the instruction, the performance ending once that had happened. Much of my work now is devised, rehearsed, has a narrative arc, a linear or non-linear structure, live soundtracks, choreographed movement and scripted dialogue. Occasionally I like to return to my instruction-based way of making performances though, e.g. Touch, the naked five-a-side football performance from 2012, and Everything, the performance I did every day in my 2018 solo show at White Cube in which I would dress as a clown and basically just be in the gallery space for its opening hours.

RIA: What are you working on at the moment?

EP: The two main things that I’m working on are a body of new paintings and recorded musical soundscapes.

The paintings use a motif of blended colours (which is something that’s been in my work for about 20 years now) combined with representational imagery that is partly recognisable and partly fantasy. They depict dramatic mise-en-scenes with characters, foreground, midground, background and personal narratives that echo my thoughts and experiences.

The way they are painted with blended oils means they are made very slowly, which is quite a contrast to the fact that much of my work from the last 20 odd years was made quickly. The kaleidoscope of blended colours also has the effect of making the paintings appear somewhat like CGI 3D models, and yet the fact they are made with oil paint and brushes, as opposed to airbrushed with acrylics, means they possess a painterly depth. It’s also significant for me that they are an attempt to marry — more explicitly than has tended to be the case within my work — the performances with my paintings.

Some of them depict imagery lifted directly from my performance work, while others are completely invented. Though they are a departure for me insofar as they pertain to the convention of painting as a window that you look into/through (which is something I’ve tended to resist, my work and in particular my paintings having up until recently emphasised their own surface and reflected the viewer’s gaze) they contain themes that have been present in my work for a long time, like the drama inherent within relationship, a scrutinising of what masculinity does and can mean and an ambiguity around sexuality and gender.

The other thing I’m doing most regularly in my studio is related to sound. For a while now I have kept an archive of sound recordings, field recordings, voice notes and original compositions. I use them in DJ sets and standalone soundscape recordings and sometimes I have played them live as an element within my performance works.

RIA: What are some things we can do to make performance more sustainable and accessible?

EP: Frankly, I’m not at all sure how you make performance more sustainable, and the odds are stacked against it. For my part, it was clear at the beginning of my career that I would need to create some means of supporting my work as an artist and in particular my performance work. But I also knew very early on that I wanted to have my work as an artist sustain itself, rather than requiring me to always have other employment, and the only way I knew how to even try to make that happen would be through selling it in galleries. Not that I took for granted that anyone would ever want to buy my work (in fact to this day I am astounded any time my work is bought by someone). And since much of the work I make, regardless of its media, is not obviously saleable, I also did not take for granted that the work sustaining itself would even be a possibility, let alone that a gallery would want to work with it.

So to me, it seems miraculous that I have managed to get this far in my career making the sort of work I make. Of course, I would love for it to be more self-sustaining, and less reliant on such a ruthless and volatile economy, but I just really don’t have any idea about how that could happen, sadly.

As far as making performance more accessible, my first instinct is that at this point I don’t think the question needs to be focused solely on performance as opposed to art at large. When I started making performance works, my audience was a small circle of friends and family, and honestly, there was always the feeling of it being awkward, inconvenient, embarrassing and unwanted.

Now, however, I’m surprised when I go to an art gallery or museum or any kind of exhibition and there isn’t a performance taking place. It’s a very popular art form at the moment as far as I can tell and has been for a while now. So, the question of the accessibility of performance doesn’t seem to me to be any more of a pressing question than it is for art at large. The issue of its sustainability on the other hand strikes me as being as desperate as ever. I wouldn’t necessarily put those two things together.