LAM LAM IG POMF

source: kristinsherman

With its myriad of multi–function, pseudo spaces, South Hill Park, was the location for the first event in Testing Ground’s 2011 programme, conceived around the concept of Failure. South Hill Parks’ Outi Remes and William Trevlyan have created a uniquely facilitative context for experimental live performance to take place, drawing a truly eclectic audience. Amidst a back drop of adults dressed in scout uniforms, and milling theatre goers the audience was led to the ornate Haversham room to view Kristin Sherman & Natasha Rosling’s LAM LAM IG POMF.

Their dada title didn’t disappoint. The pair transformed the paneled octagonal space with a series of squeaky, scratchy surfaces and squidgy sculptural forms. Six teenage girls wearing black, complete with gaffa tape faux protective headgear, also occupied the space.

As the girls begin to move, with heavy feet and vacuous expressions they manipulate the achingly tactile, cylindrical sculptures to make both shapes and non-shapes, coming together in an understated Hokey-Cokey formation using the sculptures to make delicate drawings within the space. As the nostalgic references to school and childhood pour in they are perfectly off-set with sinister tones such as the kitsch noose-like shapes leant against the walls.

LAM LAM IG POMF was a beautiful portrait of adolescence, and a fair handed one too, full of both fairytale and unwelcome recollections of gym class. Their performers moved in Morse code and used their glib Vanessa Beecroftesque facial expressions to focus the audience on their synchronicities, executed with amateur perfection, neither under nor over-rehearsed, with neither mistakes nor beauty in their routine. The evocation of childhood devoid of nostalgia was an exquisite triumph. Timing, motion and movement formed a perfectly naive syntax on which the audience could project their own, personal flashbacks.

In the short performance the pair also touched on some of the heavyweight questions within live art. A carefully toed line of who was laughing at whom. Unsure if the performers were in on the joke or not, Their perfect pregnant pauses allayed any doubts in the minds of the audience as to whether or not, they were in on the joke and furthermore that they were injecting their own irony on top of Rosling and Sherman’s conception. There was a beautiful moment when Rosling stood at the back of the room watching intently as her performers glided over one another like dominos to collapse in a line. As she stared into the middle distance she appeared as one confronting six of her former selves, splayed out in the mirrored wall of a ballet class.

Rhythmic gymnastics, Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, the Olympics, synchronised swimming, puberty, 60’s sculpture, the British school system, Jacques Tati and Dali; the references were all there, broad and plentiful, bound in a seamless enigmatic portrait of a performance. Sherman and Rosling have created a fully immersive environment. Their world is composed of cherry picked aspects of daily life; the banal, the delicate and the downright ludicrous. They have crafted a visual language, which we can understand, but only they can speak; a master class in how to do things badly – well.