STARBEUYS
COFFEE CEREMONY
Performance: Nagoya, Japan. March 2006.
Duration: 15 minutes
Presented as part of NIPAF 06

In Japan, where the intensely traditional tea ceremony sits incongruously at the centre of the Global Village, I made a performance that cast an uncontrolled, shamanic figure in the role of an assistant at a coffee house.

Backcombing my hair and stripping to my underwear, I made a ‘magic circle’ of sugar sticks and generally made quite a performance-mess with coffee, milk and sugar. With great ceremony I put the kettle on and jumped around the audience gibbering and chanting incantations while it boiled.

After much further ado and with no little élan, I then made a single cup of coffee in the centre of the ‘magic circle’. I presented this fruit of my labour to a somewhat reluctant recipient in the audience with a final exhortation to ‘have a nice day’.

Alongside the various ‘crises of masculinity’ that reflect the rise of feminism, it strikes me that a male artist’s uncomplicated self-election into a ‘shamanic’ role as a performance artist is largely untenable. Whereas such a self-figuration was historically useful for male artists wanting to abscond the patriarchal-bind and claim ‘outsider’ status for themselves (even whilst being sustained in their work by lectureships and other institutional appointments), since the time of Joseph Beuys et al, perhaps the implicitly heroic stance of the male ‘shaman artist’ might be considered to be historically fixed.

Part of the traditional shamanic persona, according to anthropological and ethnographic accounts, was that the shaman would often have a physical impairment that – initially involuntarily - positioned (usually) him on the ‘outside’ or the margins of society. But in a contemporary frame, such a position is counter-productive to the political needs of disabled people (male and female), since we precisely want more access to the power-centres of society, and romantic notions of heroic outsiderness are not particularly empowering. In the spirit of homage however, in this and other performance works I find that by mobilising a variety of distancing devices it is tenable to impersonate rather than claim to be a performance-shaman in order to bring ceremonial drama to the depiction of menial tasks and to thereby make certain reflections on the worlds of art and commerce.