Hugh Metcalfe, Noize Choir, Rhodri Davies

CIRCA Projects is pleased to present an evening of new performance and music in response to works by concrete and sound poet Bob Cobbing (1920-2002). The evening is co-curated with Rhodri Davies, and is part of Bob Jubilé: a year long series of events and displays devoted to the career and legacy of Bob Cobbing, organised by William Cobbing and Rosie Cooper. ‘Gig’ is the second in a series of events held by CIRCA Projects that celebrates the social space of the bar.

Often manipulating the bodily aspect of language through live performance, for Cobbing, language had a life, a finite material presence - mutating as it decomposed. In his work, the gravel of the human voice stretches and tears across fragmented words; the larynx, the tongue and tonsils, which produce sound, take on a presence. Many of Cobbing's printed 'scores' for performances were abstract blobs, typographic experiments and dismantled sheets of found text, photocopied into obscurity. No formal musical notation, these scores were read aloud subjectively by Cobbing: a score because he said so.

Drawing upon these scores, CIRCA Projects and Bob Jubilé present an evening of performances by a variety of people: Hugh Metcalfe, a collaborator who knew Bob Cobbing well, Rhodri Davies, who saw Bob perform many times, and the Noize Choir, who did not know him at all.

‘Gig’ takes its title from a 1997 collection of Cobbing’s work, published under his prolific imprint Writers Forum. The evening honours the informal gatherings that he continued to organise and perform at, until his death. Taking place in pubs and social clubs across North London, the evenings featured film, music, poetry and workshops. They continued the intense energy that characterised Cobbing’s early career as a prolific publisher and organiser, setting up the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, and establishing Better Books as one of the leading avant-garde performance spaces of 1960s London.