Sorcerer by Ed Atkins & Steven Zultanski

Published by Prototype, one of my favourite publishers

Look… I liked this. Honestly, I did. But – and it’s a big but – I imagine most people would [fucking] hate it, and they might be right to do so.

–///–

Sorcerer is a script-slash-score for a play-slash-interdisciplinary-performance-piece originally performed in Copenhagen (partially backed by the Copenhagen documentary festival, CPH:DOX), and though I enjoyed reading it and imagining it performed (and I would be interested in watching the filmed version of it mentioned in the introduction (or in the acknowledgements, I don’t remember which and why should I???) if anyone can link me to that in the comments please do), I very much felt like the things I was enjoying about this were things that I shouldn’t be enjoying, things that creative types shouldn’t be encouraged to turn into art, things and experiences and images that don’t really need to be performed or expressed or published…

The book, and the performance evoked by it, feel redundant, superfluous, unnecessary….

But one can easily counter that almost all art, almost all creative expression in any cultural form, is redundant, superfluous, unnecessary, and my need to point this out here (but to not point it out when e.g. discussing something I enjoyed less and felt was even more unjustifiable as existing art) comes down to guilt, self-hatred, self-contempt, being too fucking sad and frustrated to function…

I liked this, therefore it is bad.

I enjoyed it – I, a fucking loser scum pseudo-intellectual failure of a human whose life and ability to exist in a satisfying way is either stalled (hopefully!) or finished (I fear but try not to dwell on) – which means that the text shouldn’t exist.

If a book is pleasant for backwater nobody losers like me, then should it not be pulped rather than published?

If it creates joy in me while not doing or saying anything that expands human knowledge or expression, then it’s even more contemptible than something that creates no joy in anyone and does nothing positive for the wider world’s soul, no? (My examples of cultural products that do nothing are most mainstream films, almost all contemporary commercial art (and 100% of it with a price point above a certain number I couldn’t accurately pinpoint), the majority of the world’s books and all but a tiny percentage of every second of television… (Music does better than most arrforms, I think, because a song or a piece of sound art has to fundamentally fail to not evoke some kind of feeling, and that’s hard to do. Music can thus be used/exploited/manipulated by live performances to create emotionality and thus an implied “meaning” where otherwise it would be absent)???

I dunno what I mean here by something positive. A catharsis? A connection? An image, a sense of recognition, of selfhood? An moment that makes life easier to live?

Who fucking knows what I mean?

I don’t know what I mean.

I’m a fucking waste of my own fucking time

Sorry.

–///–

So, right, Sorcerer is a play that is half just like some friends hanging about in a flat and chatting about largely vacuous things (e.g. how to take off/put on different items of clothing; what are the best words to use to describe removing eyes from people’s faces; they play a game where they make up a horror story, each saying one word at a time), and then the second half is one of the actors left alone, who performs a choreographed piece in front of a camera and screen at the back of the stage where they mime like taking their face apart.

While all of this is going on, various movements are occurring all over the stage, including a bed with sheets that constantly fluctuate due to a system of spinning wooden discs under the sheets in place of a mattress, a levitating ink cartridge, functioning radiators and a TV screen showing live local broadcast television, which I always forget still exists…

It is, then, a performance that shows and documents something that is just a tiny step adjacent to simple reality…

Sorcerer shows pleasure taken in friendship and conversation, it shows play – physical (both solo and with others) and verbal (only in the group tho) -, and it shows domestic spaces.

I liked its simplicity and its [description of] complexly tweaked and mechanically altered reality; I liked the dialogue, I liked the way the space was described and set up and the images included in the appendix to evoke it further.

I liked it. But…….

I didn’t think it had anything original or important to say and I didn’t think its methodology was surprising or unique-feeling. Again, I liked it, but it didn’t feel like something that couldn’t have existed at any other point, really, for decades and decades.

Maybe I’m missing something and this is a more serious and experimental and discursive and powerful text than I took it to be.

Or – and this is maybe more likely to be true – maybe it just doesn’t have the ambition to be those things, and the nice, fun, engaging and enjoyable text that I felt that I read is enough, is valid, is good, is fine.

I liked it. But I don’t think many others would. Or maybe I don’t think many others should.

Who fucking knows what I’m trying to say here?

I’m sad. I’m bored. I’m not yet primed for a less than shit new year. 2024, woo woo woo. Wtf???

Apologies if I’ve offended anyone with my comments here. And apologies if I did miss something and Sorcerer is a transcendental masterpiece.

Again, I liked it, so if you think you might then you probably will too.

Order direct from Prototype here