Ikon: Let us storify the Lord!
Over the Greenbelt 2011 weekend, our team of opinionated and observant Guest Bloggers were out and about, seeing programming from across the breadth of the festival lineup - giving a unique take on all that Greenbelt has to offer. Here's Tom Price on Ikon.
Sitting down after seeing Ikon perform/play/preach/provoke I began to think that it had not been such a great idea to blog about it after all. The irony in trying to tell a story about an event which highlighted the limitations inherent in the stories we tell about our experiences is not so subtle. What was I thinking?!
Anyway, I’ll do my best to tell it like it was. As long as you all know that it’s just my version of the events. And that my fragile memory shouldn’t be trusted. And that as we’re using words, this account will be fractured at best. (Apologies for the post-Ikon hedging).
A lot of Greenbelt might be described as strange, and wonderfully so, but Ikon is an exercise in the deliciously weird and this event was no exception. Rumours abound regarding Ikon’s hiatus from the festival since their pyro-theological extravaganza in 2009, but this year saw the return of the group under the heading “Based on a truish story”. Ingeniously weaving philosophy, comedy, theatre, prose, poetry, film and song, Ikon are renowned for provocatively exploring faith and belief at the fringes.
As one might expect, the theme this year revolved around story. Entering the Big Top felt like walking into one of Tim Burton’s dark fairy tales as amber and red lights shone duskily down onto a stage where a solitary woman, clad in a white dress made of scrunched up paper, sat feverishly stabbing at a typewriter. Shortly after everyone had sat down, a message flashed up on the main screen warning about the language used in the event. Whilst billed in the worship section, as ever, Ikon was certainly not Songs of Praise suitable.
Binging on multimedia, the event was, like any good story, split into various different chapters. Pádraig Ó Tuama began with a bit of poetry, delicately riffing on the theological implications of story. No surprises there, classic Ikon stuff. However, Pádraig was soon interrupted by another Ikonian, dryly declaring that his words were nothing but foul bovine waste matter (in slightly stronger terms) and proceeded to put his poetry through the shredder.
Masters of feather-ruffling and unnerving the comfortable and confident, Ikon ingeniously proceeded through the next 40 minutes or so interrogating the ways in which we, as storied beings, narrate our own lives, and construct multiple and conflicting versions of our experiences of the earthly and the divine.
Alongside powerfully concocted visuals and skits, the heady mix of material was mischievously spiked with various parodical interludes of self-deprecation and self-conscious jibing (“What about that Phil Rollins fellow”). In fact, at times, the subtitling of the event resembled the narrative lampooning of an episode of ‘come dine with me’.
Through arresting meditations on memory and forgetting, on the lies in our truth and the truth of our lies, this thought provoking session poignantly reminded that whilst our stories are important, they are not as precious as each other, and that new experiences compel us to destroy our stories and imaginatively re-write them.
This dream-like sequence of performance artistry and guerrilla theology was compellingly drawn to a close with a powerful act of ritual, whereby we were instructed to hold the gaze of a stranger, grasp each other’s hand and imagine their name and story before whispering our own names.
As usual, upon leaving, we were all presented with a small gift. A little square of a page and on it a sticker with a tweet from a stranger, telling their own story of God. “God is a story that loves to be told” and I could listen to Ikon retelling this beautiful old old story again and again.
