The Long Weekend

THE LONG WEEKEND
London Tate Modern
25-28 May 2007

UBS Openings: The Long Weekend is one of the world’s most dynamic celebrations of film, music, performance and visual art, set within the iconic architecture of Tate Modern. The four-day event, over the late May bank holiday, features a series of remarkable and unmissable one-off performances by celebrated international artists in the dramatic setting of the Turbine Hall as well as a full programme of family activities, workshops and games for all ages.

Many events are free. Details below are for the main evening events only.

Sleep (Andy Warhol, 1963)

Friday 25 May 2007, at 9pm
MAYA DEREN / IKUE MORI

This screening presents seven experimental films by the legendary, experimental filmmaker Maya Deren (1917–61). Four of these are accompanied live with new, specially commissioned soundtracks by the Japanese musician Ikue Mori, icon of downtown New York’s improvisation and experimental music scene.

With original soundtrack:
Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, 14 mins
Maya Deren, The Very Eye of Night, 1959, 15 mins
Maya Deren, Meditation on Violence, 1948, 12 mins

Accompanied live by Ikue Mori:
Maya Deren, At Land, 1944, 15 mins
Maya Deren, Ritual in Transfigured Time, 1946, 15 mins
Maya Deren, A Study in Choreography for the Camera, 1945, 4 mins
Maya Deren, Witch’s Cradle, 1943, 12 mins

Russian-born Maya Deren was an outspoken and influential filmmaker, writer, theorist and dancer and spent much of her adult life in New York. Her first and most well-known film, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, is recognised as a seminal American avant-garde film and indicates her interest in dreams, ritual, psychological states, and the manipulation of space and time. Although heavily influenced by surrealism, Deren disliked labels, so when the film was called ‘surrealist’ and ‘Freudian,’ she added music composed by her third husband, Teiji Ito, in 1957. Deren was a key figure in the post-war avant-garde, and many of her contemporaries – including Marcel Duchamp, Anaïs Nin, John Cage and Gore Vidal – appear in the films. She pioneered dance performance in film through ground breaking experimental short films from the 1940s, which a New York Times dance critic termed ‘choreocinema’.

Ikue Mori moved to New York from Tokyo in 1977. She formed the seminal New York No Wave band, DNA, with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright. In 1985 Mori started using drum machines and has created her own highly sensitive signature style in the filed of improvisation and experimental music. In 1999 she won the Distinctive Award for Prix Arts Electronics in the digital music category.

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Saturday 26 May 2007, at 9pm
THROBBING GRISTLE / DEREK JARMAN

This unique screening presents Derek Jarman’s rarely seen early experimental super 8 films, made in the 1970s. Jarman (1942–94) is best known for his films Jubilee, 1977, arguably the first punk movie, Caravaggio,1986, and Blue, 1993. Focusing not on his feature films, but on his magical super 8 material, this exceptional screening includes Studio Bankside 1970, a poetic journey through Jarman’s studio, with introductions to the characters who frequented it, providing a snapshot of the artistic social scene in the pre-punk era and the urban surroundings of Bankside.

Throbbing Gristle (who formed in London in 1975) are a British experimental and industrial music group. Renowned for their early confrontational live performances, for which the House of Commons famously labelled the group ‘Wreckers of Civilisation’, Throbbing Gristle pioneered the use of pre-recorded samples and made extensive use of special effects. The band’s founding members were Chris Carter, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti (whose work recently featured in the Tate Triennial 2006 exhibition) and Peter Christopherson. Throbbing Gristle collaborated with Derek Jarman on his films In the Shadow of the Sun, 1980, and TG Psychic Rally in Heaven, 1980. The band has performed in the UK very rarely in the last ten years and they will respond to Jarman’s films in an historic, one-off performance in the appropriately industrial setting of the Turbine Hall.

THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT - RETURNS ONLY

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Sunday 27 May 2007, from 7:30pm (to 3pm the following day)
SLEEP: WARHOL / CAGE / SATIE

The event runs all night but ticket holders can drop in and out. Food and drink will be available during the night. Feel free to bring a sleeping bag

To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s (1928–87) first ever film, Sleep 1963, is screened throughout the night, accompanied by the legendary musical performance that inspired it. The five and a half-hour film will be looped to provide over eighteen hours of continuous viewing, and is a meditative study of the poet John Giorno asleep in his apartment. Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s (1912–92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866–1925) epic repetitive work for piano, Vexations, 1893. This transfixing event at Tate Modern brings together two artistic landmarks from a momentous year, and will be a contemplation on stillness, repetition, time and death.

Cage was the first to stage a complete performance of Satie’s highly idiosyncratic work for solo piano, a 52-beat segment accompanied by the instructions that it be played ‘very softly and slowly’ 840 times. The piece was performed by ten relaying pianists each of whom played twenty minutes or fifteen repetitions of the segment at a time. The performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Andy Warhol claimed he attended the whole performance and that same year, decided on a new structure for Sleep based on the repetition of footage.

The performers at Tate will include renowned new-music specialists including the composers Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, alongside the composer and scholar Joshua Rifkin, who participated in the performance in 1963, the acclaimed new music pianist Tania Chen, and some of the brightest young pianists in London.

This landmark event is introduced by a special performance by John Giorno, the subject of the film, and accompanied by a panel discussion about the relationships between Warhol, Cage and Satie.

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Monday 28 May 2007, at 9pm
SYNTHESIS: Ryoichi Kurokawa, Toshimaru Nakamura & Billy Roisz, Sachiko M with Benedict Drew

These three performances by Japanese and Austrian artists Ryoichi Kurokawa, Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz of AVVA and Sachiko M with Benedict Drew use digital and computer graphics to create a synthesis of sound and images on a spectacular scale.

Ryoichi Kurokawa is an audiovisual artist living in Osaka. His works take on multiple forms such as screening works, recordings, installation and live performance. Kurokawa composes time-based sculpture with digital generated materials and field recorded sources.

Billy Roisz specialises in feedback video and video/sound interaction using monitors, cameras, video mixing desks, a self-built videosynth, computer and turntables for video and sound generating.

Toshimaru Nakamura has been producing electronic music on a self-named 'no-input mixing board', after many long, unhappy years with the electric guitar. The name describes the method of his music. 'No' external sound source is connected to 'inputs' of the 'mixing board'.

Sachiko M has been active as a sampler player since 1994. Early in her career she was involved in the cut-up and 'plunderphonic' (or 'plagiaristic') sampling movements. In 1998, in a drastic departure from those approaches, she originated the revolutionary method she uses to this day, manipulating the sampler's internal test tones. With the 2000 release of Sine Wave Solo, her extreme solo recording consisting entirely of sine waves, Sachiko M suddenly became the focus of intense interest on the international scene, including European music festivals and Britain's Wire magazine.

Benedict Drew is an artist who works with both sound and video for film and live performance. Benedict has worked with various improvisers including Tom Chant (as duo Suscete) Angharad Davies, Alistair Leslie, Steve Beresford, Seymour Wright, Rhodri Davies, Mark Wastell, Matt Davis and Otomo Yoshihide.

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at

Turbine Hall
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Nearest Tube: Southwark / London Bridge / Blackfriars
MAP OF AREA

Tickets: £18 per event (see Tate website for details of free activities)
Box Office: 020 7887 8888

www.tate.org.uk