n quentin woolf

november 17th

The 1920s silent film star quotient was up by an infinite amount on the previous week’s programme, this week; for this we had to thank Eli Nudlemann, whose alter ego Blanche Vissaro provided some of the best music we’ve had on the show. A Piaf fan through and through, Eli also gets

compared to Tori Amos (for no greater reason, in Eli’s opinion, than that they are both women with pianos). Again the comparison makes a lot of sense. ‘Blanche’ turned up in our Shadwell studios wearing an outfit which was part Dita Von Teese, part Snow Queen and included a fraught decolletage and Minnie Mouse shoes. Or rather, I should say, an electric piano so heavy

that it took two men to carry it arrived, with Blanch Vissaro struggling valiantly beneath it. Her music was bewitching; it’s the first time in ages that I’ve genuinely felt music cast a spell. The studio was enraptured. Eli/Blanche was thoughtful, charming and an extraordinarily gifted musician from whose fingers flowed riff after riff of desperately attractive music. It was the sort of experience that validated the whole existence of the show for me. And this was but our first guest!

Ian Giles is an odd fish: he likes nothing better for his art than forcing himself to dance by having people light the stoves upon which he is standing. Or, as his next project demands of him, to be locked away in the Mojave desert for weeks on end with nothing but his blog for company. This new project is all about recording whatever creative experiences happen to him. It would be easy, I think, to

imagine one going a little bit nuts with cabin fever with nothing but the flat horizon and the dull tinned food, nevertheless, Ian seems confident of his quest. I’m hoping we’ll be able to put in a few blogged messages to him during his time there, find out whether the Mojave is treating him well.

I’m beginning to realise that we have been and continue to be horrendously spoiled where performance poetry is concerned. The week we had not one, but two, highly talented exponents of the art form. The first, Rebecca Greig,

specialised in tender, charming pieces several of them quite domestic in nature. I think it was the honesty of her voice that was the real clincher but the variety in subject and approach of these bite sized poems shows that she is a voice to keep an ear on. Sophie Mayer, meanwhile, is a highly accomplished wordsmith. Her piece on ‘not being Sylvia Plath’ for instance, was full of internal rhythms and reverberations and not without a healthy dose of cynical humour; her concept of writing ‘film poems’, shows a great originality of form as well. It’s not surprising that Mayer has written for a clutch of the very finest poetry publications. I’m looking forward to seeing her again.

Our final guest on this week’s show was never meant to be on the show at all but stood in at the last minute for a colleague. Verity Coombe made a good fist of it discussing the ‘Moving Bodies’ project she and several other Queen Mary’s art students are engaged with. It’s a socially sensitive piece as it deals with the Jewish graveyards on the Queen Mary site. But this is only one of myriad issues which any artist might find daunting: the brief is to address the issues of reality and non-reality and one senses that this is so broad a canvas that the ‘Moving Bodies’ team is having to work tirelessly to navigate a path through the tangle.

Their final performance is just a few weeks away so I hope that reality and non reality will combine forces and help them to finish their project in good time.

Tags: Blanche Vissaro, Ian Giles, lovescandal, moving bodies, Sophie Mayer, Verity Coombe