It begins with an apology. John Moran hasn’t got his new show ready. Nowhere near in fact: he’s got nine minutes of material. Standing on a bare stage with just a speaker, a laptop and a stool for company, Moran embarks on a dog story of exceptional shagginess, explaining how and why he has turned up so unprepared. The long and the short of it is however, that he has been unable to focus; he’s drifting. He’s taking full responsibility for this failure, and asks us to help him “let it be known that John Moran doesn’t make excuses.”
He’s not joking. This is not a cute preamble: there is no lying with John Moran. He’s got nine minutes. But what a nine minutes.
Moran is a composer who in recent years has developed a process of taking everyday conversation and sound and using them as the basis for a musical score, which he then mimes and lipsynchs to live onstage, often practising these sequences up to three thousand times before showing them to an audience. The net effect is wholly unsettling, intermittently hilarious and whispers something of the occult. This material is new, however and its roughness and inaccuracy allows us into the possibly genius mind of John Moran.
He titles a series of sequences “Portraits of Amsterdam.” Having had to leave Bangkok (his last show was about Thailand) because of flooding, and with nowhere to go – Moran is effectively homeless – he shores up with a fan in Amsterdam. It truly is stranger than fiction. These portraits are of people whose rhythms and melodies have burrowed into his head: a ten year old boy in a coffee shop; an old Italian friend; his grumpy English host; the cat in the garden. These sequences are often invaded by the refrain of earlier – his own voice chastising him: “John, who are you talking to you? You’re drifting. Wow. I’m drifting.”
This isn’t a cop out – a break out of character, nod and wink to the crowd – the sense of loneliness, melancholy, drifting, is embedded in the fabric of the show. There is nothing really between this artist and his art: and he wants to share it with us. Literally. He takes time out to explain his process, how he records people or rather “my memory of people”; how he finds the music in their breath, their footsteps and maps that sound around a 70bpm tempo. Intermittently he brings said tempo in to prove to us this really is music. Not everyone’s impressed: “this guy here is looking so pissed off at me right now.” Indeed he is. There are some, who will absolutely hate this show.
There is something haunted about John Moran, cursed even – however charming and funny – in that he has heard something in the rhythms and melodies of life that compels him to make this work and you cannot help worrying for him a little. “You know, my job is basically to get flown around the world, smoke pot and think about what it is to exist. So it better be good.” Finally, apologetically, he launches into “the nine minutes” – not broken up, not commented upon, not illuminated for us – and it’s quite remarkable. His grumpy host, the ten year old card player, the louche Italian, the grumbling cat, a haunting score of piano and bowed double bass, all come together in a bewilderingly beautiful expression of life as art. It’s stunning. It’s difficult. And it’s unique.
