The Great Court at the British Museum is not an obvious location for a performance - it's a space that is used predominantly to get to other spaces, spaces with things in them. The Great Court is full of people moving from one place to another, consulting maps, looking at their phones, occasionally looking up at the vaulted ceilings and towering marble structure of the paean to colonialism that is the British Museum. So to have Laura Wilson's durational, site-specific performance You would almost expect to find it warm in this strange and cavernous space seems like an unusual choice. Until, of course, you actually experience it. This mesmerising piece of durational, site-specific performance art responds to the complexities of this space in beautiful, nuanced, and provocative ways.
Laura Wilson is an artist concerned with the ways in which history, memory, and time manifest in processes of creation and craft, with a particular interest in the process of making bread. The fleshy materiality of dough is not only the result of an incredibly human process of kneading and waiting, it is also a site for the transference of embodied knowledge. Ways of making bread, the motion of kneading, the sensory knowledge of when the dough is ready - these things are passed on from person to person, and often generation to generation. In this performance, dough is used almost as a stand-in for flesh itself. Responding to a current exhibition at the museum of Rodin's work alongside sculptures from Ancient Greece, You would almost expect to find it warm uses dough to recall both flesh and marble, linking the sculptures (and indeed the giant marble structure of the British Museum) to intricately human processes.
The most immediately beautiful and affecting thing about this performance was the way that it invoked iterations of flesh. The bodies of the performers and the large masses of dough each one performed with were both autonomous and codependent - often it was unclear whether the movement of the performer was moving the dough, or whether the natural movement of the dough dictated the choreography. Further to this, in moments of seeming stillness, reverberations from within the bodies of the performers - breath, heartbeat - could be seen in the dough as well. The performance was continually flowing and moving, even in apparent moments of stasis. The fleshiness of this material was not limited to its appearance, but also found resonance through movement, and the way in which bodily and embodied human processes were echoed in the dough was utterly mesmerising.
Many of the passages in this work were quite maternal - the dough was sometimes handled like a nursing baby, sometimes carried like a child, sometimes moved around the stomach and womb and groin as though it was being birthed. These passages further complicated the resonances between the dough and human flesh, linking it more primordially to the bodies of the performers. In other passages, the dough was borne like a burden on the back or shoulder, invoking images of physical labour and the carrying of building materials such as stone.
The other visual reference implied through the use of dough was marble - both of Rodin's sculptures (of which it is often said "you would almost expect to find it warm" as marble fingers press gently into marble torsos) and of the structure of the building in which both the exhibition and the performance find themselves. In colour, the dough looked almost exactly the same as the stone that forms the giant cylindrical structure in the middle of the Great Court, and there was an element of surprise and delight in seeing that material, reflected in the dough, behave in a completely unexpected way. This elision of textures and materials also profoundly unsettles the idea of strength that underpins the architecture of that space. Over the course of the performance, the strong, clean, immense stone lines of the Great Court look more and more like the dough - fleshy, embodied, constantly moving. It's a beautiful and nuanced consequence of having this particular performance in this space, and a perfect demonstration of how site-specific performance can profoundly unsettle the politics and experience of place.
The other fascinating element of space within this performance was the presence of non-performing bodies, visitors to the museum who in many cases didn't realise a performance was happening. Watching audiences interact with performance is fascinating in any context, but particularly so when there isn't a performative context - the unexpectedness of happening upon something like this in a space like that is surprising and delightful. Performers often left the 'space' (to change over the dough or have a rest - four hours is a very long time), but instead of consciously entering or exiting, they seemed to emerge into performance from the crowds of non-performing bodies around them. There was something seamless, and again surprising and mesmerising, about these blue-clad humans carrying masses of dough, suddenly appearing in the space, and sharing it with non-performers. I particularly enjoyed watching children engage with the work - without the burden of context, or any concept of performance art, or what they 'should' enjoy or find interesting, children come to work like this completely unencumbered and will watch it if it's interesting, and find something else to do if it's not. Many of the kids I saw were initially curious, slightly confused, and then mesmerised. Many of them had to be dragged away by impatient parents.
Beautifully performed by Elina Akhmetova, Kirsty Arnold, Iris Chan, Adam Moore, Daniel Persson, and Piedad Seiquer, this piece was absolutely mesmerising. It was one of those rare and rewarding performances that became more complex and nuanced the longer you watched it, and that started to alter your experience of the space around you. Stunning, transformative work.