Author: HJ Giles

Freelance Tax Returnathonaganza

Events

taxreturn

a participatory durational performance about tax, script by HMRC

Looking forward to panicking about getting your tax return in on time? Want to learn some interesting swear words from your peers as they struggle to find the correct answer to the form’s impenetrable questions? Want to trade receipt-logging strategies and get your crumpled bits of paper mixed up with other people’s? The FREELANCE TAX RETURNATHONAGANZA is for you!

From 11am to 5pm on Sunday 27th January, a group of bedraggled, confused freelancers holding bundles of receipts will gather at the Forest Café to suffer together as they complete their tax returns.

Part participatory performance, part 18+ swearing session, all tax nightmare.

There will be blood.

Open to everyone except the worryingly organised.

https://www.facebook.com/events/133630360130406/

Three Rejections

Events, Personal, Poetry, Theatre

I do lots of self-promotion. This feels necessary. When I make work, whether it’s a theatre show or a poetry book or just a blogpost, I rarely have much of a publicity budget or team behind me, so I make liberal use of social media to help attract an audience. Being young, being new, I have to work hard to attract interest in my work. I figure that talking about it a lot on social media attracts more people than it annoys. I might be wrong.

But the result of this is that I do a lot of bragging. This makes me feel uncomfortable. When I see friends and colleagues talk about their successes, I sometimes get anxious, start comparing myself to them, start worrying that I’m not doing well enough. Professional jealousy is shameful, embarrassing, and, I expect, ubiquitous. I would not like to be causing others to feel likewise.

I was really inspired and entertained by Tracey S Rosenberg’s NaReLeMo, in which she attempted to receive at least one rejection letter in the month of November. She failed at that too.

I write many, many proposals. At least 60% of them get rejected. Probably more. That’s how this arty thing works. Some of them are ideas that I developed specifically for the proposal context, and I’m always a little sad that they’re unlikely ever to be realised, and that only a couplle of people everry know about them. With the kind of performance work I do, the hardest part is coming up with the idea in the first place, and the most fun part is actually making it happen.

For all these reasons, I’ve decided to expose my soft belly and post three rejected proposals here. Like all the texts on this site, they’re under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means you can do what you like with them as long as you credit me and don’t use them commercially (click the link for the full details). If you’d like to help me do something with them, get in touch. They’re as I submitted them, except that I’ve removed the “artist’s statement”-type stuff, and I’ve occasionally removed bits to disguise where I submitted them. This isn’t to protect me, but to not seem to be slagging off the organisations: in each case I received a kind, professional rejection letter, and as an event programmer myself I entirely defend their right to reject me. If you work out what it was for, which you might, then just know that I wish each project the best and genuinely am glad for those who’re doing it. The professional jealousy gremlins can awa bile thir heids.

1. Tilting at Windbags

In November 2012 I (@harrygiles) began regularly insulting Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) on Twitter. It started because he made an off-hand comment about Scotland, and I joined in a nationwide tirade of broad Scots insults. I became fascinated by his own Twitter feed, with its statements veering between asininity and terror. I found myself daily coming up with new ways to be mean to him in 140 characters or fewer. He has never responded.

I would now like to engage more deeply with the broadcast insult as an artistic form. I want to know what makes me and others shout bile into the 140 character void. Is it motivated by a desire to pass on the trauma of childhood bullying, or the desire to undermine powerful public bullies? It certainly has no effect on Donald Trump, nor on any of the political campaigns against his businesses, but does it have any effect, positive or negative, on our minds?

Tilting at Windbags will be a free-standing insult booth, comprising vertical banner, table, chair, portable communication device and stack of feedback forms. Passers by will be invited to write an insult to Donald Trump (or the celebrity hate figure of their choice), using either specially-created Twitter accounts or, if they wish, their own. Having publicly insulted someone, they will then be asked a couple of follow-up questions: Did they achieve what they wanted to? Do they feel any better now? And do they think the insult had any effect?

download the full proposal

2. All I Want For Christmas Is The Downfall Of Globalised Late Capitalism

Participants will be guided through a simple one page form which will define their ideal strategy for an anti-capitalist revolution. They will be able to choose between immediate or gradualist, pacifist or militant, as well as many other options, including their own definitions, and a tick-all-that-apply list of tactics. They will also be asked to define a Mission Statement and three Strategic Objectives for the revolution. Finally, they will decide how the artwork’s £5 budget (defined as the usual budget for an office secret santa present) could be used to ensure the success of their revolution, including a breakdown of costs. The artist’s role will be to explain the form, offer prompts for stuck participants, and conversational guidance for subtle tactical points.

The following week, the participants’ suggested revolutionary strategies will be posted to a dedicated Facebook page and shared with all. The strategy which receives the most “likes” in that week will be deemed the winner, and so the artist will spend a £5 budget as suggested there. Thus a global revolution will be effected by democratic choice and on the smallest of possible budgets. A happy new year will be had by all.

The artwork (both 5 minute interaction and resulting revolution) is intended to be for all ages. The form will be written accessibly, and the artist will engage participants in conversation led by their own interests, knowledge and opinions (that is to say, rather than the artist’s). The aims of the whole are (a) to find helpful ways to talk about to anyone about revolution; (b) to satirise (i) form-filling, (ii) popular votes, and (iii) revolution; and (c) to effect the downfall of globalised late capitalism.

download the full proposal

3. Two Months (a sort of play)

The Promenade by Seafield Road East, Portobello.
Two middle-aged men in 19th century clothing are looking at the sea.

A: I expected more.

B: Portobello road, Portobello road / Street where the riches of ages are stowed / Anything and everything a chap can unload / Is sold off the barrow in Portobello road / You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road.

A: I’m not entirely sure that

B: Belladonna’s on the high street / Her breasts upon the offbeat / And the stalls are just the side shows / Victoriana’s old clothes / Yeah she got the skirt so tight now / She wanna travel light now

A: Really I don’t think that’s particularly

B: You don’t have to brave the crowds or the bad weather, or worry about stock availability. You can now have direct access to the great new design talent and quirky fashions available . . . all from the comfort of your own home or office.

A: I’m terribly sorry.

download the full play

Review: New Scottish Poets

Poetry

I’ve a new review up at Sidekick Books, of Jacket2’s New Scottish Poets anthology, edited by Sandra Alland. I was really pleased to be able to do this in depth review, because I think the  anthology’s doing important work at an important time: with the referendum on independence approaching, Scottish arts are focussing inwards, are considering their role, are thinking about their identities; this anthology makes a clear statement for a diverse, plural, complex Scottish poetics. You should read it.

Alland has chosen to select a series of voices-from-outside: queer, disabled, immigrant, and so on. When asked how Scottish their poetry was, her poets “pretty much shrugged”, but Alland sees “the new excitement in Scottish writing” being exactly in this outsider’s view, in a mix of “home-grown and migrant poets” which allows for “flourishing hybrid forms”. Like Alland, and like many of these poets, I too am “from here and not from here” (I grew up in Orkney, but to English parents, and so will always be an incomer to my own home), and so I too am thrilled to encounter a problematic and plural Scottish poetics. Alland and I are both partial in this way – inasmuch as we feel we belong to Scotland, we have to claim a Scottish identity that embraces plurality and the margins. Her introduction seems to imply that this becomes more possible as Scotland “comes into its own” – with its own Parliament, no longer partly identifying as occupied territory, there is less political need for or force behind a hegemonic Scottishness. As we confront the possibility of independence, and as our nationalism continues to assert itself, we are likely to find out just how true that rings.

Read the full review here, and the anthology here.