Charleston Festival, 25 May 2006

["Andrew F Wilson" <andrewfwilson>]

Patti Smith gave an unique performance at Charleston Farmhouse last
Thursday.  Given her generosity of performance it seems presumptuous
to claim to have witnessed another unique performance, but it really
is justifiable.  The combination of readings from the work of Virginia
Woolf with a selection of Patti's own poems and songs, with Patti
accompanied by Tony Shanahan on acoustic guitar, was a one-off
configuration.  The selection of poems  mostly from Auguries of
Innocence  appears superficially similar to other recent readings.
The choice of songs was almost predictable, given the acoustic duo
format.  But this concert was more than the sum of its parts.  This
concert was an insight into the mind of an artist at an imaginative
and creative peak.  To have witnessed this evening was akin to sitting
next to Picasso as he drew the simplest but most breathtaking line
across a sheet of paper.

The Charleston Festival is essentially a literary festival, with the
particular spin of a venue imbued with the spirit of the Bloomsbury
Group.  It takes place in a small village on the south coast of
England in a farmhouse where Virginia Woolf's sister, the artist
Vanessa Bell, lived with Duncan Grant.  The Festival events are held
in a marquee in the garden, with a few hundred seats, and a stage
decorated with hangings and lampshades in designs by Bell.  The
audience is interested in modern literature, but the Festival is not
about preserving the writerly heritage in aspic.

The Trust which runs Charleston has established a fruitful
relationship with Patti Smith, allowing her to be an artist in
residence  but away from the public gaze.  In return, Patti performed
here twice in 2003  and now in 2006.  Other outcomes from her time in
Sussex are the poem Birds of Iraq  which mentions Virginia Woolf
directly, and was partly written at Charleston  and a series of
Polaroid photographs of interiors and landscapes associated with Woolf
and Bell.  The photographs are currently on display in a small
exhibition space at Charleston, and, though there were only 20
pictures, they provided an illuminating coda to the concert itself.

The concert was introduced by Virginia Nicholson, great niece of
Virginia Woolf, who welcomed the audience.  The format of the evening
was planned as two halves of 'about 40 minutes' with a 20 minute
interval.  In practice we were treated to a good two hours.  Patti
alternated readings from Virginia Woolf with her own poems and a
selection of songs.  In 2003 Patti had chosen extracts from Woolf's
'The Waves'.  This time the extracts were more personal, from
autobiographical essays on memory, personality and writing.

The programme flowed with a precision that belied Patti's apparent
randomness, and the readings from Woolf informed and enlightened the
choice of songs immensely.  A description of Woolf's earliest memories
of her mother led into an intensely moving performance of Mother Rose.
 Woolf's account of the widowhood of Lady Waterford led into a reading
of Eve of All Saints where Patti's emotion was so palpable that the
audience was drawn into a vital personal connection between Patti and
her late husband.

Songs heard many times before such as Beneath the Southern Cross and
Pissing in a River were presented in a context that gave them a new
universality in their connections to Virginia Woolf's own particular
world.  For the duration of the concert Patti persuaded the audience
that Woolf and Smith had connections between them and their work that
had lain waiting for discovery.

Patti clearly recognised the unique situation.  She commented on the
birdsong that could be hard in the marquee as dusk fell  and she
recalled the cows lowing that she had heard during the concert in
Charleston in 2003.  She told the story of her interval adventure,
attempting to photograph the mist, and slipping into an unnoticed tub
of water, necessitating a change of socks.

The poems from Early Works were read from a copy borrowed from an
audience member.  China Bird was sung, from a copy of the new edition
of Complete, and Patti explained the song was very personal and had
been only rarely performed.

The second half of the concert ended with a stunning version of
Pissing in a River  Tony broke a guitar string  double good luck
according to Patti;  the encore ended with Dancing Barefoot, and
suddenly it was all over.

We saw something special. We learned something new.  We were grateful.


SETLIST
Reading from Virginia Woolf (A Sketch of the Past)
Mother Rose
Reading from Virginia Woolf
A Pythagorean Traveler (poem)
Grateful
Easter (poem)
Reading from Virginia Woolf (On Being Ill)
Wilderness (poem)
Eve of All Saints (poem)
Beneath the Southern Cross
Burning Roses (poem)
Reading from Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)
My Blakean Year
(interval)
Reading from Virginia Woolf
Wing
Birds of Iraq (poem)
China Bird
Guernica (poem)
Peaceable Kingdom
The Writer's Song (poem)
Written by a Lake (poem)
Pissing in a River
(encore)
Reading from Virginia Woolf
Dancing Barefoot


Kind regards



Andrew