Strength Weekly contains posts and articles that deal for the most part with the idea of performance as behaviour we can’t avoid, at any level.
I’ve written for live performance, film and TV; as a journalist for magazines and newspapers; as a composer of online text and image entertainments and for myself as a live presenter of such bar and club-based events as David Gale’s Peachy Coochy Nites. I’ve written a lot of performance scripts, particularly for Lumiere & Son Theatre Company, for which I was a co-founder and director alongside Hilary Westlake. On the whole Hilary directed them and I wrote them. Over the last few years I’ve also directed some of my own scripts. I wrote a novel a while ago. I lecture at the University of the Arts London, on the Wimbledon College of Arts campus on the Performance Design and Technologies programme.
As well as posts and articles, Strength Weekly contains an abundance of archive material relating to past and recent writings and image work.
The site, established in 2007, has been through a number of technical cycles, each of which was designed to make it smoother and more attractive. Many of these cycles involved the installation of (ideally) invisible progammes that improved site navigation. Sometimes these major changes have shifted the look of the posts and this has necessitated a post-by-post repair. That has been the case for the past several months but now, at last, the site reflects again the intentions of its designer.
Prior to the recent upheaval the site was extensively redesigned, thanks to the patience and artistry of web/graphic designer Genevieve Closuit. It now has, in addition to unseen yet powerful inner organs, a silken navigation and some handsome panelling.
Posts
Posts are ideally not too long. They might be about things that happen in the world. Such as in the street. Or a café. Some are imports from Facebook. When I say street it could be ideas that arise in the street. Or a café.
Peachy
Peachy Coochy is a live presentation format in which a limited number of timed slides are projected whilst being talked about by a presenter. First used in Tokyo as a means of compressing pitches by excitable architects, pecha kucha proved irresistible to artists who seized the format and pushed it to its limits. For three years I ran a Peachy Coochy cabaret evening with invited presenters from many walks of life. My own contributions over this period are featured here.
Text & Image
My work with Peachy Coochy involved deep searches of Google Images and this led to me to use Facebook as a platform for series and sequences that, in the case of ‘Pampas’ Seasons 1 & 2, transposed the elements of Peachy to a non-live environment. This led to further experiments with images unsupported by text, as in ‘56 Strips’.
Theatre
I’ve worked as a writer and director of performance for a long time. In my late twenties I remember thinking ‘This is what I’m on the planet for.’ I’ve only had that feeling once. Hilary Westlake and I were co-directors of Lumiere & Son Theatre Company for 20 years. Throughout that period we were funded by the (then ) Arts Council of Great Britain as a touring company purveying ‘experimental theatre’.
Essays
The Essays here deal with topics that I wanted to write about but may have been difficult to pitch to papers and magazines. This would probably be because in either topic or concept or use of language they stray from the highway to a side street. They do not arise from commissions so much as unremunerated urges.
Journalism
Writing for papers and magazines is almost as much fun as touring theatre. You get to fly to distant lands, sleep in good hotels and meet extremely interesting people in unusual places. The pieces here include interviews with film makers, actors, musicians, artists, scientists and authors as well as denizens of inner space and public isolation. After a while I became a Contributing Editor at GQ under the Editorship of the late Michael VerMeulen, a brash but decisive Chicagoan who enabled me to have an exceptionally enjoyable time.