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serralves

Serralves 40 Hour Party: Thoughts on Fun

by Paddy Johnson on May 30, 2011
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“Are you having any fun?” artist William Powhida asked me yesterday over twitter. I was slightly embarrassed to read the question — a critic’s opinions should be clear enough that this doesn’t have to be asked — but then my feelings on the 40 Hour Party aren’t entirely straight forward. Even if the festival by any objective standards is great — and it is — the only native English speakers are the roughly 40 percent performers who’ve travelled here to perform. Of course, most people here speak English, but for me, knowing only three words in Portuguese makes me uncharacteristically shy and forgetful. This isn’t particularly helpful to a journalist.

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40 Hour Party Best in Show: Sideways Rain

by Paddy Johnson on May 30, 2011
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Here’s a more concrete visual reference to the PR about ALIAS’s Sideways Rain depicting “the human condition, the evolution of Man and the transformations of the universe”: It’s basically a performed version of the arcade video game Frogger. The dancers are cars. There is no frog.

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James Lee Byars Rises Again

by Paddy Johnson on May 30, 2011
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Can any art event truly be considered complete without spotting at least one person describing themselves as “living art” while walking around naked in full body paint? Perhaps only North Americans and the British tout this ridiculous tradition because I didn’t spot any during the 40 Hour Party at Serralves over the weekend. I did however do one step better: The locally famous James Lee Byars impersonator, Carlos Lobato. This is a man who participated in the Spencer Tunnick group nude installation in Porto (read: an expensive photograph of bunch of nude people likely infront of a monument of some kind), and managed to create quite a bit of ruckus. The best account I heard was that the artist often took his own dive-like poses in Tunnick’s sea of crouched figures, though the artist has a slightly different take on the matter. According to him he just had plenty to say while the camera was off, but when the actual photographs were taken he conformed. Oh well.

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Serralves 40 Hour Party: The First 20 Hours

by Paddy Johnson on May 29, 2011
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Last night was surely a grim evening for bar owners in Porto. With the exception of only a few house ridden teenagers and adults, I’m fairly certain the entire city attended the Serralves 40 Hour Party yesterday. I saw babies. I saw parents. I saw grandparents. You name the age group and they were all watching art band Chicks On Speed perform last night. I exaggerate a little — many of the small children had gone home — but not as many as you would think.

All this is to say, that the free event, which is a marathon of performances in various disciplines, draws an incredibly diverse spread of people, most of whom live in Porto itself.

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