As part of artist collective Kuhle Wampe‘s residency at Nottingham Contemporary, I was invited to spend a day working with Amelia Seren Roberts, Craig David Parr & Thomas Kilby in The Space, where I took the opportunity to cajole them into contributing to some new footage for the ongoing project of The Ubu Film, a 20 minute cut-up of audio and visual material made to frame readings of two translations of songs from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Cocu (c.1897) – ‘The Chancellor’s Song‘ and ‘La Chanson du Décervelage’ (aka ‘The Debraining Song’). After the day’s filming and recording, I joined Kuhle Wampe on their (slightly premature) Halloween ‘Ghoule Wampe Ghost Walk’ from Nottingham Contemporary to The King Billy in Sneinton, during which we led our audience to a variety of locations – from a sandstone cave entrance to the BioCity laboratories, and from St Mary’s Church in The Lace Market to a random building falsely said to have been a former school – taking turns at telling completely fabricated tales of ghost otters, scientific experiments gone horribly wrong and other snippets from a not-entirely-accurate version of local history. My own contributions were a pair of texts written to accompany images from Robert Holcombe’s ‘Telekinesis Series’, puportedly made in the 1950s as an exploration of psychokinetic and spectral phenomena, and an excerpt from The Disappearances, originally written for performance in a Nottingham cave as part of Sidelong‘s A Walk Through The Underworld back in 2014. The Ghoule Wampe ghost walk ended with everyone – artists and audience alike – joining in with a free-for-all ghost-story session over several beers in an upstairs room at The King Billy.
“In the summer of 1957 the children of the former Mary Howitt Primary School, which once stood on this site, developed a strange and disturbing game. It would begin when the children, in whatever number were available when the desire to play took hold, formed a circle and focused their collective attention towards a point on the ground at the dead centre of their gathering. Each child would imagine the ground opening, mentally invoking a wound, a mouth, an eye, a Venus Flytrap at that single point in space. Once the correct degree of focus was achieved, each child in turn would join in with the song that would slowly grow in volume and force as it passed repeatedly around their small human circle, sometimes in the form of an elaborate but instinctive round, sometimes as a massed single chant, where all the voices present merged into one:
Open open turn this earth to mouth
show coral lips and ivory teeth –
cleave this ground to bring forth life
slice this stone with a surgeon’s knife…
Once the required mass of vocalisation and psychic focus was accomplished, a slowly expanding oval would materialise in the air, its appearance not unlike a shadow’s penumbra surrounding a brighter central area. Witnesses at the time variously described this apparition as “alike to a tiny nebula, or a cellular form, hovering above the ground, its circumference widening as its focus sharpened.” Within a few moments, the portal – for this, it was said, is what had been conjured by the children – reached its maximum dimensions, as determined by the numbers within the circle, then raised itself to conclude a smooth ascent somewhere around the average waist height of those comprising the circle that had invoked it. The portal remained stabilised at this height for as long as the chant was sustained by the children, though the fall of silence was generally accompanied by one or more inexplicable absences from the initial group. It is believed that the playing of this game ended when the last of the group with whom it began finally vanished…”
“Not much is known of the Sneinton ghost otter’s origins, only that its appearances seem to follow the path of a former river or canal, with the spirit itself manifesting in the form of a glowing otter, of normal otter-size, floating, as though swimming, a few feet above the ground. Before it fly small shoals of phantom fish and neither otter nor prey seem conscious of the presence of living bystanders. It has been said by witnesses that the ghost otter, chasing its spectral fish, has the appearance of a small white hound levitated in pursuit of luminous butterflies. The spirit is considered entirely harmless, though its abrupt manifestations, habit of swimming straight through the thighs and knees of night-time dog-walkers, and occasional passage right through an actual startled dog, have certainly been the cause of many a near-coronary and canine barking frenzy…”
Wayne Burrows 