Keni Davidson – performance and theatre maker, artist
Born
September 3 1965; died November 23 2018
Keni
Davidson, who has died aged 53, was arguably the most avant-garde theatre
artist to have come out of Scotland in the second half of the twentieth
century. Fiercely uncompromising, free-spirited, mercurial and at times
wilfully self-destructive of his own talents, Davidson couldn’t or wouldn’t fit
into a mainstream system bound by box-ticking exercises designed to stifle or
shut out anything beyond its bubble. Despite this, in his early years working
as an artist at least, he managed to navigate the vagaries of arts bureaucracy
to some extent, and left behind a unique if barely seen body of work which
became the stuff of legend, even as it was all too fleetingly being shown.
Today,
recognition for that work is slowly but surely trickling its way outwards into a
collective consciousness that will eventually and inevitably recognise Davidson
as a major artistic force ahead of his time. If he had been around a vibrant
artistic underground that fused form, content and environment, he might have
fitted in enough to be feted and to flourish, just as he might have bloody-mindedly
resisted being part of a scene and fled from it.
Either
way, no-one was doing what Davidson was doing in the 1980s and 1990s, certainly
not in a newly styled cosmopolitan Glasgow. His performances took place up
hills or in venues where he would plant a field of wheat or else fill it with
soil. He would put a donkey onstage with a child in ways that blurred the lines
between life and art as he shook up otherwise passive audiences.
There
was something both primal and holy about Davidson’s work, with its conceptual
chaos leavened by a painterliness which had broken through the frame, sometimes
smashing it as he went. Such works were drawn, consciously or otherwise, from
Antonin Artaud, Tadeusz Kantor and Joseph Beuys as much as his beloved James
Joyce. Arts producer and founder of NVA Angus Farquhar likens Davidson’s work
to Jean Cocteau and Luis Bunuel; producer Steve Slater, who worked with
Davidson at Tramway, to Andrei Tarkovsky. Actor Tam Dean Burn, who Davidson
collaborated with over a decade, calls Davidson the last modernist.
Like all
those named, Davidson created visual poems made flesh, and which lived and
breathed with a messy and organic glory. What now looks like an umbilically
linked canon of raw, no-holds-barred works used performance in a way that is
commonplace now among visual artists, but which also rooted itself in a
theatrical tradition Davidson both understood and kept his distance from.
As a
consequence of this, Davidson didn’t fit easily into either box, so few
producers in Scotland knew what do with him, even if they could rein in a
reckless and at times volatile nature which at times alienated him from the individuals
and institutions who championed him. At its heart, Davidson’s work was both
unique and uncategorisable, with Davidson himself a one-off creation moulded in
his own image.
Kenneth William Daniel Davidson
was born in Glasgow, one of three children along with his brother Gordon and
sister June to Gordon and Margaret Davidson. He grew up in Oban, where he
attended Oban High School before going to Lomond School in Helensburgh. Davidson
went on to the University of Edinburgh and then to Glasgow School of Art.
Davidson’s
earliest sightings as a performer were during the early days of the Beltane
Fire Festival, revived on Calton Hill by Farquhar and Test Dept. Farquhar
remembers Davidson as one of the ‘Red Men’, smeared with scarlet body-paint and
“embodying pagan and bacchanalian archetypes. He
had a beautiful body to move with, lithe and with the energy of a tiger, with
his haunted fiery eyes he seemed utterly possessed and truly owned the ritual
life he created in those early years. At one anarchic Beltane he and another
red scaled the pillars between the circular Dugald Stewart monument, taking
himself three or four metres up the vertical lines with flames licking below.
It was an unbelievable act of strength and vision of embodied madness. That's
how I'll remember him, up above the monument on fire, driven by a demonic
energy, cackling with laughter.”
Davidson
embarked on a series of one-off performances in clubs, flats and the likes of
the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, where Slater, then the venue’s performance
co-ordinator, recalls Davidson previously
trying to blag his way into events for free. Once Davidson made it onstage
himself, Slater remembers one early show, in which Davidson “managed to smash
his face open and blood was pouring everywhere, with the audience visibly
shaken. This would have been around 1989 and the AIDS crisis was still pretty
fresh in everyone’s minds. Ken carried on performing regardless, blood-soaked
and glorious.”
Davidson
listed more than 100 credits for himself in various guises over the last three
decades, be it as writer, performer, director, choreographer, film-maker,
artist, curator or consultant. His presence alone was enough to conjure up
something shamanic and disruptive in equal measure.
It
was at Tramway in Glasgow where Davidson’s work gave him something resembling a
profile. This came by way of a ten-year project under the company banner of Process
[Ten 28], which brought to life chapters from James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans
Wake, as a series of site-specific interpretations. There were nine such episodes,
with each featuring crucial sound design by John Cobban. Tam Dean Burn, with
whom Davidson formed a fertile creative alliance, appeared in them all.
“I did
really revel in the jobs Keni gave me,” says Burn, “and loved that he would
create amazing landscapes for me to play in, both indoors and out.”
Burn’s
then eight-year-old son, Skye McDade-Burn, appeared in two works, Lessons, at Battersea Arts Centre, and Shem, performed in the ballroom of a disused
arcade as part of Cleveland Performance Art Festival in Ohio.
The
first of Davidson’s Wake-inspired creations took place over four and a half hours.
The second, Here Comes Everybody, saw Davidson grow a field of wheat on the
then derelict site where the home for Scottish Ballet now stands. At one point
during a meeting with Slater at Tramway, Davidson proposed to set fire to the
iconic Peter Brook Wall, built by the legendary theatre director to help
accommodate his epic production of The Mahabharata. This had been the first piece
of theatre presented in the former transport museum that would go on to become
one of Glasgow’s most iconic venues. Davidson’s proposal wasn’t taken on, and
the wall is still there, but its audacity summed up an approach that took no
prisoners, however sacred.
Hill
took place in the woods of Cathkin Brae in Castlemilk on Midsummer Night, and
saw a four-year-old and a two-year-old sporting angel wings and toy swords as they led Burn, a reluctant donkey and the audience on a procession towards a
panoramic view of the city. And so it went, with other works presented at the
National Review of Live Art at the Arches, or else on a walk that began in a
cemetery in Transylvania.
Back
at Tramway, the final piece, past Eve and Adam’s, involved a cast that included
Burn and Citizens Theatre actor Derwent Watson, as well as Davidson’s best
friend Jimmy Donoher and his young son Danny. There was also a cat, a chicken
and a horse, 36 tonnes of sand and a crate of Guinness. More work followed, at
the New Foundry in London, in a graveyard in Moscow, and on a residency in
Japan.
Davidson
founded Kabaret Uh-Huh, a series of events that took place in the Tron
Theatre’s Changing House space, and which featured radical compendiums of
performance-based work that recalled the spirit of the Dadaists original Cabaret
Voltaire club. Performances and exhibitions followed, both in spaces such as
the Transmission Gallery and Old Hairdressers in Glasgow, or else besides
beaches or on mountain-tops. A series of performance texts drawn from material presented
at the likes of the Foundry and Zero One Gallery in London was published in
2013 as Karaoke City. Live footage of these events are astonishing documents of
Davidson at his most visceral.
It is no secret that Davidson was the prime inspiration for Paul Bright’s Confessions
of a Justified Sinner, director Stewart Laing and writer Pamela Carter’s
fictionalisation of a theatre director whose work was too radical to
fit in anywhere. In his CV, Davidson also stated that a character in Alan
Warner’s novel, Morvern Callar, was based on him. Laing and Carter’s creation
was told through monologue and a series of ingeniously constructed films and
artefacts, and for those aware of Davidson’s work, his influence wasn’t difficult
to spot. In real life, however, that work was moving increasingly underground
to the point of invisibility.
Laing
remembers Davidson as “a major Scottish theatre maker. The work he did at
Tramway and elsewhere was completely visionary and individual. Keni was making
his own radical new work, involving amazing and original images that burned
into your consciousness. The scale and ambition of that work was vast. It is a
great shame that Keni wasn’t recognised as the visionary that he was. On a personal
level I always found Keni intensely intelligent, vulnerable, genuinely
struggling, and sometimes beaten down by the effort to get his work taken
seriously, but still believing in his own artistic drive. Keni always wanted to
talk about art. He inspired me and I will always be grateful to him and his memory for
that.”
At the
time of his passing, Davidson had found a new lease of creative life with
connections established at the University of Glasgow. As a core member of the
Radical Film Network, based in the University’s Film department, he
joined a group of activists, artists and filmmakers in developing an
alternative, experimental film culture in the city. He also produced a series
of live film essays to accompany their events. The success of these led to him
collaborating with the University’s David Archibald and Carl Lavery on their
experimental performance project, Glasgow Glam Rock Dialogues, of which
Davidson became an integral part. Their most recent Dialogue took place the
week following his death, and was dedicated to his memory.
Davidson
had also recently been awarded a scholarship to conduct a practice as research
PhD at the University. His research, supervised by Archibald and Lavery,
involved a philosophical interrogation, through Gilles Deleuze, of Artaud’s
concept of the ‘Body Without Organs’. By all accounts, staff at the University
were excited at the prospect of the new work that he was developing there. He
was also an enthusiastic member, perhaps unsurprisingly, of the University’s
ongoing Finnegans Wake book group.
As with all his work,
Davidson went beyond theory. He lived and breathed what he learnt as he
absorbed it, every inch an artist in whatever he did. Not everyone could deal
with that, and Davidson’s passing raises questions about how artists who don’t
fit in with prevailing orthodoxies are treated by the gate-keepers to resources
that might otherwise empower them. How Davidson’s work might have developed is
a mystery as ripe for dissection as much as everything he already achieved. It
is vital that the archive he left behind must now be preserved, cherished and
shared, so a new generation of non-conformists can shake things up as much
as he did.
Davidson is survived by
his mother Margaret, his sister June, two nephews and two nieces.
The Herald, January 8th 2019
Ends
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