EYE MAGAZINE

1996.04.11

A Toronto based weekly magazine, interviewing Myra Davies

1992.12.02

AT THE BANFF CENTRE

DANCE CONNECTION 49

APRIL/MAY 1993

Myra Davies wrote and directed "Miasma, a Butoh Opera", collaborating with composer Gudrun Gut of Berlin, and butoh choreographer Hiroko Tamano of Tokyo, and Berkeley, California. With fifteen guest artists, all of them female, the trio performed an hour-long mixed media assault that made a cautionary statement on the brittleness of human nature.

Stretched on the rack of conflicting desires for selfless sacrifice and selfish consumption, the artists posed a choreographed philosophical question that rolled over the audience in a barrage of imagery. Miasma unfolded figuratively and literally as a cloud, billowing, dissipating, and billowing again in the psyches and lungs of its audience.

Arriving early to ensure admission to this hotly-rumoured but unadvertised event, we were confronted with thirty fog-bound minutes of Gut's visceral electronics and a cyclorama layered with two image sources: one, an endless film loop of giant, grainy ballerinas repeating arabesque, step, step, part du bras; and the other, medical scans of a human brain in cross-section. This induced a feeling of stasis, that the organic flow of one's body has been stopped and time itself has been arrested.

The inertia ended when Gut appeared high in a black tower of machines, and Davies entered on ground level. In their opening cabaret number, Davies argued that wickedness lurks behind conventional decency. Her point was proved, when the demure Ms. Gut shot her.

No time to meditate on that; two Little Girls delivered demented versions of nursery rhymes and a gay interpretation of children at play that drifted down into a dark, almost obscene sense of enslavement, as they played at hard women's work with grunting and staccato slaps of hands on the floor.

Next an eerie apparition. A white ghostly figure - Tamano- gliding out of the fog-filled primal hole in the centre of the back wall. Here is a master artist. All eyes are riveted to her bare foot, to the delicate placement of each tendon and muscle, of heel, instep, ball, and tow, flexing and balancing on and off the gravity line at a surreal suspended pace. Tamano floats on the transcendent music, pulling us further into timelessness with her mystical blend of sacred and profane, of life and death, of the feminine and of humanity beyond gender.

The Little Girls return and they've got their Prince. The music says they're cygnets in Swan Lake. The Prince is a dummy with glass eyes and golden crown. They throw him off a cliff into the lake and wave bye-bye.

Big Girls, go-go girls? Three in old lady corsets and garters, on a high platform railed by industrial chains and steel pipes capped with butcher knives rampant. Confident, cocky even, but no less slavish, The Big Girls cynically flaunt their wickedness in a not-so-subtle projection of the toughness at the core of this opulent and sensual review. They manifest cultural enslavement and the impact is heightened by their placement within the romantic setting of baroque candelabras (old set pieces from the opera Eugene Onegin). Their daring is rendered tragic by the simple addition of a baby doll stitched onto the garter belt of the stripper which bounces as she dances.

Heroines arrive. Three passion-ridden suicides from the classics: Madam Butterfly, Anna Karenina, and Marguerite Gautier (La Dame Aux Camellias), archetypal reminders of the destructive dialectic that is Romantic love. In a stentorian rant entitled "Heathcliff", Davies revises romantic morality and sinks out of sight on the arrival of the murdering Choppers - Diana the Huntress carries a high-tech hunting bow and a bloody stag's head and these are not theatre props. Salome - vindictive temptress, or innocent adolescent? - carries a man's head on a tray. Judith, heroine of war, and its anguished victim, arrives wrapped in a blanket in a hail of artillery fire. She opens the blanket and the head of Holofernes in a burnished Roman helmet falls from her arms.

Neither the Suicides nor the Choppers have any strength beyond their past stories. They fade away into ghostly presences drifting gently in the fog like reeds in a swamp, oblivious to the Little Girls who play a spirited game of soccer using the head of John the Baptist.

Davies, with the Big Girls as back-up singers, delivers a piece on the use and abuse of power. The sound and pace are building. Five foetuses, wet with red potters slip, unfold centre stage in the butoh tradition, their mute screams a direct hit to the heart.

Wager's "Ride of the Valkyries" and the roar of engines are heard as the hole in the centre wall vomits fog and a glow deep in the recess grows ever brighter. The Valkyries on motorcycles, wings mounted on their helmets, make a landing approach with the help of an airport ground crew. They are pall-bearers for a a mummy-stiff corpse bound to his heroically over-sized sword. The Valkyries reverently lower him to the ground. Gut descends from her tower. It's not clear whether she plans to revive him or feed like a vampire. One thing is evident though, this hero, like the Prince, is a dummy.

Distant, schmaltzy German waltz circa World War I. Headlights blazing on the Harley-Davidsons, the characters wave a fond farewell and shrink back into the smog. A freight door descends walling the retreating forms away from us. Centre stage, the dead hero-dummy lies alone. In spite of entreaties from the audience, nobody comes back for a curtain call.

Kudos Tamano. Brava Davies, Wunderbar Gut. I hope this international combination of artists will work together again soon.

- Dean MacKenzie

PERFORMANCE REVIEW

Whirl of Emotion

(Vervirrung der Gefühle)

Electro-acoustic atmospheric sounds introduce the show, slowly blanketing the murmuring of the audience at Lagerhaus Schildstrasse, artificial fog was blown noisily onto the small stage, and Myra Davies and Gudrun Gut made their entrance.

The latter stands behind a silvery hip high object decorated with snakes and body parts; half chancel, half cockpit, which hides computer instruments and a video player. The performance of this duo, with the title "Miasma" (both band and project name), uses pre-recorded material called up by the German avant-garde rock musician Gudrun Gut ("Malaria", "Mania D" were names of her earlier bands.) The Canadian Myra Davies speaks her own English lyrics to it. Video cuts (mainly old film extracts, clips from perfume ads, and experimental graphics), and somewhat restrained use of lighting effects round off the multi-media show, that pulls back and forth between romantic confusion of feelings, (longing, desire, lust, and the hypnotic and restless effect of techno-beat stacatti). The lyrics by Myra Davies follow this restlessness, sometimes logical conclusions following on the topic (No Time), sometimes associated series (as in the German-English "Chains/Ketten"), sometimes word play day dreams that lose themselves in a flow of pictures, emotions, and ironic calculations, ("Power").

The sample sounds by Gudrun Gut go from intentionally cool hard electronic beats to lascivious trance passages; from dramatic forceful undulating sounds, to schmaltzy classical extracts. While Davies and Gut ruminate in the cryptic "Lesson 2", about desire and longing, and with irony, forge a morbid chain of moral decay, a tenor exiled to an endless loop, cries of grand passion.

The multi-media project "Miasma" has a lot to do with the early experiments of Laurie Anderson, the literarily ambitious, but basically still Rock attempts of Patti Smith, as well as capricious performances a la Diamanda Gallas or Jana Haimsohn. But Myra Davies and Gudrun Gut stay closer to the topic of primordial gender conflict which they joyfully dissect and comically analyze. An impressive performance.

- Christian Emigholz, Weser Kurier

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NOTES No 10

1994.02

(Translated from German by Walter Wittich)

Gudrun Gut, who most of us probably know from "Malaria", attracted notice for her extremely provocative lyrics, and finally, for bringing the war of the sexes into music. Now it comes even harder than in the days of From Behind! With this unusual Album, title: Miasma , (also a unique project), these two women (Gudrun and Myra Davies), in almost hypnotic arousal, show us a collection of stories, observations and lyrical acrobatics, musically underlaid by electronic sound structures.

Miasma (= Clouds that cause plague) - the deathly Virus that shapes us into something that does not spring from our source; that eats us and slowly leads us into the abyss - into absolute emptiness. Miasma - the infection of desire, (as opposed to pure lust), a trap from which there is no escape and in which neglecting our true nature, we degenerate into beings reflecting the masculine picture of us, in a slow sneaky process that starts happily and leads to unfulfillable longing - a "chained enchantment". The next stage is disintegration, the fall, and loss of personality - Thus the irony drenched question arises "If we two become one, which one will we be?" (in Heathcliff, which was inspired by Emily Bronté's Wuthering Heights. )

Myra Davies, who guides us to the roots of all evil, has mastered the art of dropping herself into roles that at the same time she perceives as observer, grasping them on the basis of her own experience. This voluminous voice goes hand in hand with the musical/electronic sound assemblages of Gudrun Gut. They spin the net of their life experiences around the male - and ironically take the "poor creatures" apart. These women warily avoid the common musical clichés. They let their stories run free. They want to shake us awake and break the chains of enchantment. Metaphorically they feel their way slowly - the cosmic sounds end abruptly in brutal reality. An all too short journey through the feminine brain! I want more of it!

WESTZEIT

1994.02

(Translated from German by Walter Wittich)

Shakespeare's poetics transformed into the nineties, these years that slowly bring the millennium to an end. Gudrun Gut's sound arrangements (Ex-Malaria) and Myra Davies' spoken-sung word. Comparisons with Laurie Anderson and Ann Clark are obvious. An avant garde project, next to danceable, that contains a lot of meditative atmospheric music. Their integration is delicately woven, romantic and yet fragile, emotionally detached, and erotic. The VOICE, as if coming from outside, irrationally describes, a small flirt in a taxi. Is it real, or just imagined in the dreams of the protagonist? "No Time": Zeitgeist captured in the hectic pressure of time in our reality. I DON'T HAVE TIME. "Tattoo": contact wanted yet refused, desired yet rejected. The conflict between men and women is a constant theme. Yet sexual desire remains hidden in small hints. Deceit becomes the program. But who is the deceived? The listener? Or do the interpreters themselves submit to self-deceit? The process of experience of two women, that I as a man can not fully follow, I do not dare to judge.

WESTZEIT

1994.03

(Translated from German by Walter Wittich)

From a completely different corner come Myra Davies (spoken word) and Gudrun Gut, who met in Berlin, where Davies was studying German Romanticism and Ms. Gut was working on one of her projects with bands such as Malaria. Their experiments with lyrics and sound collage were so promising that the two ladies decided to continue to collaborate. Out came a Butoh Opera with Japanese choreographer Hiroko Tamano. At the end of last year they appeared with a new show at The Angry Women Festival in Berlin and Vienna and at the moment they are are on tour. Their project "Miasma" brings romanticism and intellect into a clinch. The listener feels themselves pulled back and forth between sensuality and cool electronic rhythmic. Somewhere between the avant garde performance of a Laurie Anderson and the thoughtfulness of an Ann Clark, two maturing artists show us conflicts that we all know, and not without wit and humour! Very interesting!

AUDIO

1994.03

(Translated from German by Walter Wittich)

The Canadian German lady-duo delivers the sound track of the performance Miasma: The wonderful English lyrics written by Myra Davies float above a synthetic sound carpet by Berliner Gudrun Gut. The controversy between male compulsion and female intellect (and vice versa), is the theme of esoteric compositions. The rhythmically threatening Taxi, the sarcastic Heathcliff, mark the anti-romantic finale: macho notions about power, chains, and tattoos, are musically destroyed and totally made fun of verbally.

MAXI MAGAZINE

1994.03

(Translated from German by Walter Wittich)

Poison Kitchen

From Malaria to Miasma. In the '80s Berlin musician Gudrun Gut, with partner Bettina Köster established the most attention grabbing womens' rock project in Germany. Now, with Canadian Myra Davies, she has created a "Gesamtkunstwerk" consisting of techno-rock, poetry, and visual and theatrical effects. Miasma: a concept album with live performance.

Content of this one hour stage show: Surreal seeming dream visions composed in waves of fog as well as flickering video and light installation. Images in zero gravity of "irrational sensuality and intellectual hardness", (Davies), of feminine perception, and of the gender war in riddles.

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