I SAW LIVE
Acclaimed American performance artist Karen Finley weaves together a collection of texts, letters and poetry from 1983-1994 which reflect her deeply personal testimony of the AIDS crisis. Written in Sand combines poetry, spoken word and music, with the help of talented multi-instrumentalist Paul Nebenzahl. Joe Turnbull was transported back in time.
2015 marks the 25th anniversary of Karen Finley’s seminal book, Shock Treatment, which candidly portrays the unfolding terror of AIDS in the 1980s, acting as a searing indictment of mainstream liberal culture that so badly mistreated the LGBT communities at the time. To mark the occasion, an expanded edition has been produced and Finley is taking her show on the road.
Written in Sand acts like a musical accompaniment to the book. Finley’s series of lamenting elegies set to music are interspersed with renditions of songs made by musicians who have since lost their lives to AIDS including Freddy Mercury and the B-52’s Ricky Wilson. The title references the romantic gesture of declaring ones love in the sand, whilst also asserting the ephemeral nature of something inevitably doomed to be swept away by the tide.
Barbican’s The Pit provided a suitably foreboding venue. The lights were dimmed on a packed room. Little flames flickered on the stage area as Finley and Nebenzahl entered, fittingly giving the feeling of a candlelit vigil. The latter dazzled with his virtuosic flute-playing. Finley, after hamming up the crowd a little, dropped her first bombshell – or should that be poem.
The beat poets’ influence on her disjointed, rambling style, full of repetition and grating cadences, was clear. It felt at times not so much a performance, as an unleashing of pure emotion – grief the chief among them, but there was also plenty of room for anger and guilt. It’s small wonder. Finley lost as many as 60 friends to AIDS. She is still evidently enraged at the society that so shockingly shunned them.
What followed was a litany of fury and mourning through the medium of spoken word, Finley describing the programme as a “list of funerals”. Her ire for the contemporary attitudes towards AIDS was fierce: family members told her “it must get easier when you’ve lost so many”. This said whilst complaining about their fad-diets or boring marriages; “sometimes,” she screams, “I pretend to have their problems”.
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