Chris Cunningham live at Vivid Festival, Sydney Opera House 5/6/2011

5

Unfortunately, tonight’s show was more notable for what didn’t happen, rather than what did – but more on that later. From the start, all of the portents were certainly promising. Having been advised to arrive promptly for a 8.30pm start given that there was no support act, I made my way to my balcony seat to gaze down onto a stage housing Chris Cunningham’s expansive live rig of computers and video mixers, offset by a looming backdrop of three large ‘triptych’ style projection screens. I’d been a fan of Cunningham’s video work since picking up Aphex Twin’s ‘Come To Daddy’ VHS release back in 1998 and since then pretty much actively tracked down all of his stuff, so I was particularly excited to check out his live performance, apparently composed of his own live edits of his more well-known music videos, unreleased material and his own music, with the Sydney Opera House’s main room representing an ideal choice of venue. As the lights dimmed, Cunningham emerged onstage with the opening I’d half-expected given recent events, the distinctive weathered blues vocals of Gil Scott Herron reverberating through the vast hall as he kicked his set off with ‘NY Is Killing Me’, the late Herron’s visage looking down upon a drifting sea of city lights, the numerous overlapping layers merging at points into a hypnotic wash of drifting images.

It’s certainly a powerful and gripping start, particularly as Cunningham extends the ending section of the track live, leaving Herron’s face in focus beneath the drifting sea of lights for a good few minutes after his vocal performance has ended, resulting in what’s easily one of the night’s more evocative moments. Rather than performing his set as a continuous flow of imagery, Cunningham brought each separate video to a discrete fadeout close, something that started to give me the sense that I was watching a series of video clips more than anything else. From there, things soon took a way darker tone with a clip I’d never previously seen involving a Japanese child in a hospital eerily similar to the one in Squarepusher’s ‘Come On My Selector’ sleeping in a bed beneath a bulb-like apparatus in the ceiling that violently manipulated her facial features into all sorts of rhythmic contortions and deformities, perhaps the scariest bit being that she appeared to remain blissfully asleep (or perhaps drugged?) throughout the entire traumatic procedure. From there, there was a comparatively short blast through The Horrors’ ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’, Faris Badwan’s vocals being dubbed out and cut-up amidst Samantha Morton’s strobed-out attack of tentacular genitalia, before another previously unseen clip sees a naked couple suspended in a yawning dark void apparently mid-coitus before a beam of white light strikes them, stimulating them to turn on each other and attack each other violently.

It’s easily the most confronting moment of the night, as the naked man and woman literally bash each other to a bloody pulp, the physical strikes synched to a violent barrage of beats and explicit footage of sexual penetration (it’s worth mentioning at this point the signs warning audience members of ‘disturbing imagery and high sound volume’ as we walked in). While it’s stylishly done however, it doesn’t really go anywhere else from here and before you know it, we’re already on to the next thing, which proves to be Cunningham’s own ‘Rubber Johnny’ short film, easily one of his better known and more widely seen pieces of work. While it’s certainly great to finally see ‘Rubber Johnny’s furiously gory body contortion visuals (noticing a theme here?) on a huge screen, disappointingly Cunningham only really performs the most basic of edits to the original version, focusing mainly on the bit where Johnny’s unseen relative opens the door ajar to the darkened room and tells him to settle down.

And with that, just over 45 minutes into the set, the house lights came up and Cunningham waved goodbye, leaving a good portion of the audience remaining in their seats for a good few minutes afterwards hoping for an encore. But that was it. While I don’t doubt Cunnngham’s skills as a video director, tonight’s live performance proved to be a real disappointment – when you consider the material in his videography, the set just felt plain lazy and a missed opportunity. And let’s not mention the early nineties rave lasers and dry ice that made a mercifully brief appearance at one point…

Chris Dowton

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A dastardly man with too much music and too little time on his hands

5 Comments

  1. I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed this show if I paid $20 to see it at a cinema somewhere. But when considering the average ticket price for the show was more than $60, I felt totally ripped off going to see this show.

  2. Agreed… And what was with the wash lights remaining on the screens after the show started? Any dark scenes were completely washed out! Amateur hour… 

  3. _specificsspacific on

    The guy sitting next to me seemed to think the tweaked excerpts from Flex were new, too… and judging by all the comments of people walking out, I wager this was a common misconception?
    I’ll admit you do actually say “previously unseen,” but you also start the article by saying that you’ve actively tracked down all his stuff, so it the two statements felt a little odd together. But anyway, things do slip the mind, so no big matter…

    Rather enjoyed the show more than you did, though. I actually thought it was nice to finally see Rubber Johnny played in a way that seemed to do it justice, since after buying it I’ve only watched it once because I never felt like I could give it the attention it needed on DVD. Being able to finally see a bit more of the aforementioned Flex was good, too, since it’ been completely impossible to dig up any more than the shred he included on his DVD. Of the stuff I hadn’ seen before, Gil Scott Heron was luminous, and the young girl, while pretty disturbing, was sort of fascinating in that while watching I remembered having vaguely similar imaginings while lying half-asleep in bed as a child.

    On the mention of “the most basic of edits’—do you have any idea what he was actually doing down there, behind all those servers and blinking lights? As the thing I took away most from the whole thing was that I obviously am not alone in having these clear preconceptions about what constitutes a live performance, and what constitutes cinema, and the twain shall only meet if everyone is very upfront about which is going to be which well ahead of time. After the show I’ve mostly wondered about the validity of those preconceptions.
    As such I’m rather curious what the reality is. Is it entirely live? Does he spend the time just editing the next screening, or playing online scrabble? Perhaps he’ spending each screening doing exactly what he does at home: watching what he’ so far created, and tweaking it here and there…
    If anyone knows for sure, do please clue us in, as I’ve been able to find very little.

    I can’ disagree with you that it was extremely brief, and could have been a hell of a lot more. In many ways I wish he would give up this live performance thing, unless he can pick up his game, and make a feature film already.

    Alex: Those wash lights, completely agree with you.

  4. Chris Downton on

    Re: On the mention of “the most basic of edits’—do you have any idea what he
    was actually doing down there, behind all those servers and blinking
    lights?

    Of course not, and given the lack of lighting and the fact that everything was couched behind Cunningham’s setup meant that you practically couldn’t see any of his gear unless you were flush against the stage. I tried taking a peek after the gig. In terms of edits, I was looking at the differences in cuts between the versions I was familiar with and the ones he showed. And there certainly wasn’t much going on that was particularly dextrous or tricky there. Glad you enjoyed it more than me though!