Drawing on the scores, scripts and performances from films such as Woman Under The Influence, Love Streams and Minnie and Moskowski, Under The Influence is a live improvisational performance by artist Kathryn Elkin and artist-musicians Simone Congreave, Anne Marie Copestake, John McKeown and Ariki Porteous that explores the exchange between script and soundtrack in the films and compositions of John Cassavetes and Bo Harwood.

Notorious for a directorial style that encouraged actors to embody their character’s meaning using voice, gesture and interpersonal relations, John Cassavetes’ films have long been couched in terms of theatrical improv and noted for their absence of the traditional cinematic semiotics. Sound producer and composer Bo Harwood began his twelve year stint with the director in 1971, first credited as musical supervisor for Minnie and Moskowski and later going on to compose the soundtracks for Cassavetes classics such as Woman Under The Influence and Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

Though Harwood was an accomplished composer it was his unflinching, unrefined and emotive soundtrack demos that Cassavetes often took to the final cut. These scratch tracks the populate many of the director’s films provide their audiences with an acoustic mirror that doubles and bolsters the raw, gestural performances of the cast.

Setting the scene musically, Congreave, Copestake, McKeown and Porteous will deliver a blend of compositions written by Bo Harwood for John Cassavetes’ films, accompanied by and producing the conditions for Elkin’s impromptu obbligatos of remembered lines, dialogue and gestures.

Under The Influence is the final instalment of the Shady Dealings With Language series. It is devised by artist Kathryn Elkin and generously hosted by Rhubaba Gallery, Edinburgh.

History Arising takes place on Thursday the 24th of July at TOAST, Manchester, 18:00-21:00. The evening event is the third instalment of Shady Dealings With Language series and is curated with artist Joseph Noonan Ganley. It includes new performance works by poet Sarah Kelly, artist and sociologist Nina Wakeford, a screening from award winning filmmaker Chris Paul Daniels and a new live work from artist Frank Wasser.

Considering cliché as a generative form, works are presented by artists and writers who take cultural embarrassments head-on within their practices, to produce works that address the bubbling-up of histories present in their respective production techniques, their research materials, modes of delivery and approaches to audience. How might these traces of history be temporally different, how might they be read, if they were to be mapped onto a singing voice, an act of writing, the making of paper, a script, a documentary film?

For one night History Arising will occupy the sixth floor of Castlefield Gallery’s Federation House to designate a space for a sincerely positioned ambivalence toward histories both personal and cultural and their representation in contemporary research and art practices.

Shady Dealings With Language is four events guest-curated around art writing and performance, in Leeds, London, Manchester and Edinburgh, programmed by Claire Potter.

The first event in the Shady Dealing With Language tour is Language Urges, programmed by writer Lauren de Sa Naylor. It will take place on Tuesday the 13th of May and includes discussion from translator, writer and academic, Eric Prenowitz; an installation and performance from renowned artist and drone musician Bridget Hayden and a one-off curation of miscellaneous writings from recently deceased and greatly missed, campaigner and educator Callum Millard.

Language Urges considers the effect of language on the body. What traces are left by language and how do they work on us? Where does the urge to articulate come from and what does that desire reveal to and conceal from us? Do we have language urges or does language urge us?

With the tenth anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death as a backdrop, we look to a dislocation of meaning as something that is as significant for the tongue-in-cheek memo writer crafting their double address, as it is for a bi-lingual translator negotiating linguistic shifts, and equally the musician who disseminates information phenomenologically. Experience ploughs through meaning, which is itself cultivated by experience. This flux of production we can guide, signpost and fine-tune, but we can neither command nor predict the transference from one system or body to the next. We each code our knowledge according to our own poetics.
As a result, something is always perceived to be lost in translation; language tending to distort rather than transmit knowledge. But nevertheless it might be that something can be gained through bypassing and de-authorising original texts, traditions and other arbitrarily appointed authorities and systems, affording us the opportunity to delight in the elasticity of meaning and breathe in the freedom of a no man’s land.