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Barbara Campbell/Jane Gleeson White

April 22

Those of you who enjoyed the essay 'To Prevent Contact' by Jane Gleeson White in our December issue (67:4 - extract below) would be interested to attend this talk by BARBARA CAMPBELL next Wednesday, April 29th at 6.30, Faculty of the VCA and Music, The University of Melbourne, School of Performing Arts / Theatre, 28 Dodds St Southbank, Melbourne. Rsvp – leisac@unimelb.edu.au

To Prevent Contact (This essay, and many other's, will be posted in it's entirety on this website soon)

In Paris on Friday 15 June 2007 performance artist Barbara Campbell found the words ‘to prevent contact’ in an article about Palestine in the morning’s New York Times. She painted them in watercolour and posted them on her website, http://1001.net.au. Using her three-word prompt as my starting point, I wrote a story for Campbell to perform online that evening. My story would be # 725 of a planned 1001 stories that would comprise Campbell’s most remarkable work: 1001 nights cast, a durational online performance inspired by the Arabian classic One Thousand and One Nights. For 1001 consecutive nights, from 21 June 2005 to 17 March 2008, Campbell performed at sunset (according to her physical location) a short spoken piece based on a story that had been written for her that day. Her performance was relayed as a live webcast to anyone logged on to http://1001.net.au at sunset, Campbell’s time.

Campbell is an acclaimed Australian performance artist who describes herself as a ‘non-spiritual intermediary between latent historical material and living audience’. In her work she has always been attracted to stories about certain mythologised women—Mary Queen of Scots, Lizzie Borden, Trukanini—and so she was drawn to Sheherazade, the tale-telling heroine of One Thousand and One Nights (Nights). Since 1982, Campbell has worked in her performances with the particular qualities of her chosen sites, which have ranged from museums and galleries to towers and stairways. For her 1001 nights cast, she chose the internet as her site, for its global reach, 24-hour availability, interactivity and accommodation of niche communities.

Three months after Campbell had completed 1001 nights cast, I spoke to her about how she had conceived her rich and multilayered performance, and what had drawn her to work with The Arabian Nights. Although she can no longer remember the specific instant in which her project was born, Campbell says she had been ‘harbouring the story of Sheherazade somewhere in my body probably since first seeing a B-grade movie about Sinbad or Aladdin, but with any degree of intellectual awareness, since reading Robert Irwin’s text The Arabian Nights: A Companion in 1994’. In Irwin’s companion Campbell learnt about ‘the meta-tale of the One Thousand and One Nights, its migration as a cultural product from east to west in the early eighteenth century and the structuring principle of Sheherazade’s frame story’. . .

It was not until 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, that Sheherazade ‘really began to stir’ in Campbell and 1001 nights cast began to take shape as a performance. Campbell was reminded of Sheherazade because the media reports from ‘embedded journalists’ in Iraq recalled for her the nineteenth-century Middle East reportage from writers such as Richard Burton: both were partial and both attempted to ‘explain the exoticism of the east in a way that made sense to our culture’. And so to Campbell’s raw understanding that in order to survive her husband’s death she had to perform something every day was added her awareness of the media’s partial view of the war in Iraq. ‘Here, again, it was not the Middle East that we were learning about, it was the West’s relation to the Middle East that was on display.’


 

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