Theaster Gates - Sanctum - Photo by Max McClure

Theaster Gates: Sanctum

Theaster Gates - Sanctum - Photo by Max McClureIt’s late afternoon on one of those early November days when it’s as if the sun has decided to stay in bed under the covers. It’s unseasonably warm, the air is damp and a few leaves hang on the trees like decorations. I’m on my way to Sanctum, Theaster Gates’s first public project in the UK, produced by Situations and MAYK as part of Bristol 2015 European Green Capital. In a purpose-built temporary performance space in the bombed out shell of Temple Church in Bristol’s Old City, Sanctum offers a continuous programme of sound for twenty four hours a day over twenty four days, sustained by more than one thousand performers, musicians and bands. ‘Hear the city like never before,’ says the publicity.

The programme is a secret. You turn up and it’s pot luck. It might be the Salvation Army. It might be a vocal group. A rock band. A performance poet. I spent several hours in Sanctum, and this is an attempt to capture that experience.

People wander in and out, sit or stand, still wearing their coats and hats. Some chat, some study their phones, others hold paper cups of coffee in their gloved hands or eat from foil wrappers. One woman has brought her knitting. On one of the low wooden dais to the side of the area where most of the sound happens, a young man is changing a baby. His partner appears at his hip, slips her arm around his waist and kisses him on the head.

I’m sitting on the wooden floor, tucked under the eaves. Constructed out of reclaimed materials from across Bristol, it’s a beautiful space that feels at once new, but also like it’s been here for a long time. Whilst not heated, it nevertheless feels warm, its slender rafters and sturdy joists lit with the colours of autumn. And it is fragrant – there’s an earthy, aromatic cedar wood smell on the air. Out of the slanting panes over my shoulder I can see the arches of Temple Church’s bombed out windows, and beyond them the latticework of trees against the sky.  At its edges there are signs of its recent construction and of the outside having made its way in – sawdust, stray screws, leaf litter. It feels interior, an underside. It feels like we’ve come through and into somewhere and something.

Sleepdogs are on. Stooped over their gadgets and almost off stage, they’re live-mixing something like a score that’s mutating and scattering. I think I hear the whinny of a horse and the blast of a machine gun, but I can’t be sure. Jump cuts, arrhythmia, skipped beats. An image comes to me of a colourful bird, frightened up into the air with feathers flying. Sounds layered on sounds, images on images. In the distance a celebration or a riot.

People come and go, stay as long as they can or as they want, choose to be here for a time. Just outside the tall double doors one of the production staff wearing a big jacket and a woolly hat is shifting from foot to foot and forking around in a pot of something hot.

We’re on the coast, in the city and in a forest. It’s like hearing in all dimensions at once and it’s like finding the music in sound. It’s sound like life going on somewhere else right now. The film it gives you is all your own.

People enter, bright-eyed from the outside, look curiously about and settle just inside the entrance, their arms folded or their hands in their pockets.

Next up is spoken word artist Akashic Roots and I struggle to make the adjustment to hearing words. Sometimes language can seem so intent on telling, when sound prefers to suggest. The compulsive internal rhymes, self-interruptions and re-qualifications which are the spoken word artist’s stock in trade present one of those jolting juxtapositions in which Sanctum specialises. He cries: ‘Scream out loud because you’re an animal,’ and people do.

Audrey and Sarah give us acapella folk songs in two-part harmonies. They say: ‘We enjoy singing for our own pleasure.’ Dressed all in black and slightly nervous, they smile at each other as they find their way through their songs, their bodies swaying as they breathe into the melodies. They clear their throats and swig from plastic water bottles. They make no promises and we have no expectations. It seems like this is a place where performer and audience are the same thing; everyone brings themselves and that’s enough.

Stereocilia is one man and his electric guitar and lots of pedals. He says ‘Stereocilia’ once before he starts and then ‘Stereocilia’ once more at the end of his set. His brow furrowed, he rocks forward and back on one foot, working closely at the strings, endlessly looping his strumming so that it becomes a massive echo chamber for itself. It’s all swells and reverb and it feels like his own intensely private experience. Meanwhile to one side of the stage the next act, still wearing their coats, are setting up a drum kit and assembling a pair of saxophones.

The chipper, fresh-faced frontman of Schoolboy’s Death Trio bounces into the space wearing a kind of academic gown in gold, red and black. It’s sort of punk Harry Potter. There’s an alto sax round his neck and his long hair is in a rough ponytail. His bandmates on drums, bass and tabla are wearing armbands emblazoned with ‘SDT’. They play funk crossed with spoken word and all the songs seem to be called things like Sex Blood Money Power.

People enter, settle for a few minutes or longer, stay.

People come and go and some come back.

It’s complicated, if you think about it, to decide to go and see a show or go to a gig. There’s all this stuff to navigate: where it is, what times it starts, how much it costs – let alone who’s performing, where you heard about it, how it’s described, etc… It seems to me that part of the effect of Sanctum is to disrupt all these things – let’s call them cultural trig points – with the result that we are able to think anew about how and why we choose to engage with the public manifestation of each other’s creativity. But to what end?

For me, the removal of these conventional frameworks has the ability to subtly but radically alter how we’re present at, for instance, a gig. A week ago I went to see Theaster Gates at St George’s, a music venue in Bristol. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Everything advertising the evening kept its cards close to its chest. In the event, we were presented with a performance by Gates, in which he sang all the hymns he could remember. It was challenging, and some people walked. If they’d stayed, they’d have heard Gates go on to resist attempts to elicit from him what Sanctum was ‘about’ and make a plea for keeping things complicated. It seems to me that one way to experience Gates’ performance was in dialogue with what was happening across town at Sanctum. Sanctum’s achievement, it seems to me, notwithstanding the extraordinary logistical feat it represents, is that it quite explicitly invites reflection on the gift exchange of expression and attention that occurs when we commit to time in each other’s company at a performance, and it asks us to allow for the possibility that this experience – wherever, whenever and with whomever it occurs – might be much bigger and more powerful than we can imagine.