Sorcha Dallas

By the time Tate Britain’s doors opened, the performance had already been going on for an hour. As you walked towards the back of the Duveen Galleries, the volume and density of the sound slowly increased, literally filling up the galleries’ physical space. There, a group of musicians (three drum kits, several guitars and basses) were playing within a large oval shape, looking inwards. There were also 12 women, dressed in black, performing slow, ceremonial moves on their own or in small groups. And another woman, wearing a horse tail and, later, a beard, walking around, lying on the floor, sometimes shaking violently.

The Working Class Goes To Paradise was a restaging of a performance piece that Linder Sterling first organized in Manchester in 2000. Manchester was, for many years, Linder’s hometown and also the city where Ann Lee, leader of the Shaker movement, was born. With The Working Class, Linder proposed a sonic experiment (can the Duveen Galleries, the first public galleries in England designed specifically for the display of sculpture, be exclusively filled with sound?) and an exercise in endurance (what happens when three groups jam together for four hours without script, oblivious to an audience?), besides posing a political question (what is the voice of the working class, and can it change, through this voice, its own condition?).

The Shakers, as in Dan Graham’s ‘Rock My Religion’ (1982-84), offer the perfect connection between sound and music, on the one hand, and a notion of community and difference on the other. Their escape from marginalisation in industrial Manchester to a new marginalisation as a utopian community in America at the end of the 18th century, their dance-induced trances and their dual God (neither man, nor woman, but somehow both were used by Graham to draw parallels with Patti Smith, her ‘rock as religion’ and her questioning of gender positions (in her wanting to be a man, in order to be a rocker). All these elements are present in Linder’s performance (in her priestly, bearded figure, her female dancers and the music-induced trance), but with one extra element: politics.

If the Shaker movement offered a way out for the working class in the middle of the industrial revolution through an immersion in heretic sounds and voices, ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’ presented not a single voice for the working class, but a set of voices characterised by the ability to question fixed positions. With Linder turned into a symbol of dislocation herself, the performance’s lack of script or direction created both moments of confusion and unison – the three groups, 3D Tanx, Baby Judas and The Pylon Boys, all from the north west of England, not able to see themselves, were obliged to follow each other’s sound, converse, disagree and sometimes agree, but always momentarily.

Two hours after being allowed in, the audience was asked to leave, while the performance continued for another hour. Walking out of the galleries, you could still hear those sounds and voices claiming their right to occupy a space they were never supposed to enter.