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Animating Morecambe: Forkbeard Fantasy Goes to the Ball
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
Forkbeard Fantasy is one of Britain's oldest ‘alternative’ performance companies. Founded in 1974 by the brothers Tim and Chris Britton, who have continued to work with the company ever since, Forkbeard's practice may be identified with a peculiarly British variant on performance art, which dates from the mid-sixties. Influenced as much by elements of variety entertainment as by early twentieth-century avant-garde movements in the visual arts, it produced a unique form of integrated performance which was often daringly experimental yet refreshingly tongue-in-cheek. In the Spring of 1999, Nicolas Whybrow, then teaching at Lancaster University, observed the company's residency in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, over a period of three weeks. Here, he presents his impressions based on a consideration of Morecambe's identity as a place and the nature of Forkbeard's relationship to that place as residential visitors. His analysis takes into account the activities he observed – including his daily trips into Morecambe by train, media ‘takes’ on the town, informal conversations with contributors to the residency, and a formal interview with the company itself, represented here by interjections into the text. Nicolas Whybrow is now Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester.
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References
Notes and References
1. Thomas, Richard, ‘Suburban Bliss, Seaside Hell’, The Observer, 2 05 1999, p. 15Google Scholar.
2. Kent, Ingrid, ‘Miserable Morecambe?’, Visitor, 5 05 1999, p. 1Google Scholar; and Town Crier, ‘Wrong Image from a Casual Observer’, ibid., p. 8.
3. Amriding, Chris, ‘Visual Art at Bay’, AN Magazine, 05, 1999, p. 5Google Scholar.
4. The Live Wire project is funded to the tune of £239,560 over three years from a combination of A4E lottery money (the majority), matched by smaller amounts from city and country council departments and box-office income. The project began in September 1998 with the Nigel Charnock Company in residence at the Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, and has been followed by visits from IOU and Russell Maliphant.
5. Competitive dance sequences would be intercut with biographical detail and interviews with couples.
6. The colleges involved were the University College of St. Martin's; Lancaster and Morecambe College; and Morecambe High School.
7. Kaye, Nick, ‘Live Art: Definition and Documentation’, Contemporary Theatre Review, II, No. 2 (1994), p. 2Google Scholar. The internal references are respectively to Henri, Adrian, Total Art: Environments, Happenings, and Performance (New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; and McGrath, John, A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class, and Form (London: Methuen, 1981)Google Scholar.
8. Taped interview, 11 May 1999.
9. White, Tim, ‘The Screen: Looking through it, Walking through it’, Contemporary Theatre Review, II, No. 2 (1994), p. 112Google Scholar.
10. This relates, of course, to another ‘reel’, namely the child's one of the Freudian fort/da: see Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, XVIII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955)Google Scholar. Madan Sarup offers a succinct summary: ‘The child had a cotton reel with a piece of string tied to it. Holding the string he would throw the reel over the edge of his cot and utter sounds that Freud interpreted as being an attempt at the German fort, meaning “gone” or “away”. He would then pull the reel back into his field of vision, greeting its reappearance with a joyful da (“there”). This game allowed the eighteen-month-old child to bear without protest the painful experience of his mother's absence, to cope with her disappearance and reappearance. It illustrates the birth of language in its autonomy from reality and allows a better understanding of how language distances us from the lived experience of the real. The distancing is effected in two stages: the child moves from the mother to the reel and finally to language’. As Sarup goes on to point out, Lacan ‘interprets the story as being more about the disappearance of the self than that of the mother’. Both, however, see fort/da ‘as an allegory about the linguistic mastery of the drives’. Hence, the reel, as the first most basic indication of narrative, epitomizes the process by which the human subject becomes codified. See Sarup, , Poststructuralism and Postmodernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 8, 23Google Scholar.
11. Fantasy, Forkbeard, Forkbeard Theatre and Film Productions: Part 2, 1988–1992 (Devon: Forkbeard Fantasy, 1993)Google Scholar.
12. White, op. cit., p. 111.
13. Whybrow, op. cit.
14. Kershaw, Baz makes a similar point in relation to Welfare State International in Engineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook (London: Methuen, 1990), p. 218Google Scholar.
15. That does not, of course, take into account the enormous task of pre-planning material before it is filmed – that is, working out exactly what to film and how, so that it interacts appropriately with the live elements.
16. Whybrow, op. cit.
17. White, op. cit, p. 113.
18. Whybrow, op. cit.
19. Ibid.
20. The transposition of the aesthetic which takes place here would seem to contain an important lesson, too, for arts funders in their perennial attempts to assess the merits of practice on the basis of ‘quality’ – or ‘excellence’. In this instance, the quality of the practice clearly lies not merely within the confines of Fork-beard's performance aesthetic but also in the manner of the relationship it takes to its audience.
21. Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 13, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22. See Lacan, Jacques, trans. Sheridan, Alan, Ecrits: a Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977)Google Scholar.
23. Phelan, op. cit., p. 160.
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