Review: Submerge Festival, Ghosts

I enter the Church of St Thomas the Martyr to find a much more sombre atmosphere than I encountered yesterday at the Loco Klub. Elusive techno/industrial producer Rrose is dressed head-to-toe in black, sitting onstage cross-legged in meditation pose, with her back to the audience. A huge gold gong is hung before her, which she begins tapping methodically. The sound is gentle at first, but gradually builds to a fearsome crescendo that eventually fills the church’s vaulted ceilings with brutal cascades of noise. 

A work of intense focus and concentration, the performance is a rendition of Having never written a note for percussion by American composer James Tenney. The concept is based on a Buddhist Koan – an kind of riddle to test students’ understanding – and to experience it feels like observing some kind of ancient ritual, in which the audience is slowly engulfed and transported by pure sound before being spat back out into the normal waking world again. 

The second of the evening’s three performance takes place next door at The Fleece. As the crowd shuffles in, I notice an ominous sign tacked to the door which reads ‘this performance contains blood’. Feeling a slight sense of trepidation, I watch as performance artists Helen Burrough and Philip Bedwell are slowly led into the centre of the space, naked and facing each other. The bodies of two artists, who begin the piece in an embrace, are held together: tiny silver chains unite their bodies, pinned to their flesh with body-piercing needles at the forehead, torso and navel. They begin to unfurl their embrace and slowly step away from each other. When the chains are almost taut, they begin to remove them, one by one. 

It’s a very unsettling thing to witness. Brave and beautiful, and performed with utmost and precision and grace, the piece, which feels like a physical meditation on intimacy, is underpinned by the possibility of violence, and Bedwell’s face is streaked with blood as it reaches its climax. 

The last performance ramps intensity levels up even higher, with the most visceral 45 minutes I witness all weekend. While the work of French sculptor, painter and performer Olivier de Sagazan was familiar to me, through films such as Samsara, there was still little preparation for seeing it in the flesh. Indeed, the weirdness of human flesh is the central theme of his Transfiguration series, which he has been working on for two decades. 

Starting out dressed in a suit, pacing and muttering before the church pews, de Sagazan ascends the stage where a mound of clay and bucket of water is set before him. He slaps the clay onto his face, creating a grotesque set of eyes and mouth with black and red paint, before ripping his fleshy mask off and beginning again, screeching and chanting in both French and English throughout. His body is transformed, decomposed, degraded until the human being on the stage has morphed through a series of hellish configurations: ghouls, monsters, demons, fallen humans. 

It feels almost sacrilegious to watch it in a church, as the idea of a divine precedent for the human form is thoroughly skewered. It’s a thrilling and disturbing experience, like witnessing a demonic possession, a lewd and often funny wail of confusion about what it means to inhabit a human body.