I first visited Mongolia in 2003 with Red Earth as part of the Roaring Hooves Festival. The internal politics of it are eternally interesting and worth the in-bus gossip, but ultimately Roaring Hooves is a gift. Travel half way across the world to carry the message of your performance to an audience of nomads who somehow know you’re coming and are prepared to travel distances; who arrive on horseback to see what you have to give. And like all street theatre it’s the hardest gig ­ no one’s paying to see you. No one has to stay (and in a concert lasting over two hours quite a few don’t; so where you are in the programme could seriously decrease your audience to a bunch of westerners who came over on the plane with you in the first place).

We were a team of three: myself, artist/musician Ansuman Biswas and performer, technician, trouble shooter David Statham. We had worked as a team before on several small intimate performative ritual events, and went to Mongolia with the intention of creating a series of performance improvisations; responses to place and experience. The story is long but we crossed (possibly too many) boundaries, sparred via heated arguments with other (European) members of the tour, and ended with an intense three hour late-night vodka-fuelled discussion with the State Shaman (really). When he’d had enough he closed with ‘At home you are shamans; over here you are artists’.

Mongolia is a strangely powerful place. Things happen (we’ll get onto the magic of extreme coincidence later). Ask anyone who’s been there; although there aren’t too many. It is the last frontier, the Wild East, full of nomads chasing after huge herds of wild horses; a nation reared on mare’s milk and living off goats. I must point out that when I say ‘full of’ I am merely using a turn of phrase. Barely two and a half million people in a country it takes five hours to fly across ­ and that’s the narrow bit. Over sixty percent of the population are still effectively nomadic. Most people live in the capital Ulaan Bataar, and many of them are young, mobiled-up and Modern. This, like many ‘developing’ countries, is a place of extremes and contradictions. Yet there is a very strong connection between modernity and history. Chingis Khan (that’s how you say it) is huge, everyone is related to him, and the traditional Khumi throat singers I met were young, enthusiastic, and, well, very good.

It does something, this vast, open wilderness; it has the capacity to open you bare. It brought me face to face with my intentions as an artist and as a human being, and opened up questions as to the nature and value of our work as a company, especially as cross-cultural operators. So, despite reservations after last year’s wrangling, on being invited back I decided to go ­ this time on my own - to process the shaman’s statement.

I knew the score. Roaring Hooves is a sort of peripatetic cultural visitation based around ‘new music’ as in contemporary music for classical instruments. The nature of the performances combined with the site-specific nature of the tour ­ open air venues chosen specifically for their beauty and pertinence (sand dune, frozen river, mountain temple) results in a peculiarly eccentric affair. Bow-tied opera singers, serious black-clad German percussionists, British artists in pin-stripe suits, vie with the sun heat and sand to create the bizarre image of a concert hall event without the hall. Indeed when it does take place eventually in a grand concert hall in Ulaan Bataar, the result is rather tame, even if you can hear things properly for the first time (as long as you don’t require stereo). But in the end, if the group is open, garrulous, engaging, interested, and drinks vodka, what happens is a wonderful esprit de corps where you are judged on your conviviality rather than on your musical merits. Last year no, this year yes.

I offered myself the challenge of creating performances which communicated the essence of who I am and where I come from to a people from a different culture living in a different environment, but with whom I felt I could reach some sort of non-verbal understanding through the performance/audience relationship. I was the messenger; and in each performance I was looking for what I was trying to say.

This took me along a steep learning curve. I had travelled ten hours in an aeroplane into the future to try something out which didn’t quite work but in which I already saw the holes and spontaneously started to fill the gaps with something different again. On the one hand I was testing untried performance abilities (eg singing) within a highly professional context (eg opera singers with international reputations). On the other I failed to take the sort of risks I should be taking as a performer with my level of experience and performance confidence; I was stepping over an edge, but it was possibly the wrong one. Conversely, when I look back, I remember some very powerful highlights, including a new sense of confidence, authority and ease in the last performance of the tour in that concert hall in UB. Here, on a classic stage in a contemporary auditorium ­ the most uninspiring and neutral space on the tour ­ and I was no longer ‘performing’; I was in it, just doing the ritual. The applause was magnificent (although this may have been due to my saying ‘Thank you Mongolia’ in Mongolian).

However, something happened. The performances became only one part of a greater whole. I had divided the trip into three parts: the performances, the socialising, and post-festival research trip to somewhere. What happened, in effect, was that the boundaries between all three became blurred. My performance was not limited to my four five minute moments of inspired under-confidence, but actually encompassed the whole of my time in Mongolia. I began to merge with my performance character, the guy who did have the confidence to step out and be seen; during the festival once or twice I became a sort of master of ceremonies, and I was the only westerner to participate in the (I must admit) gruelling art of Mongolian wrestling (but I nearly had’im).

Everywhere I wore my increasingly creased and dusty pin-stripe suit: wide lapels, slightly too short; it became the skin of my ‘character’ ­ the me/not-me traveller. I had originally intended just to perform in it but discovered that it was of course the perfect travelling outfit. Subsequently strolling through Ulaan Bataar, camping with American academics in the middle of a particularly enormous Mongolian landscape, riding back on horseback. I was the be-suited one, the fool, the trickster; I was permanently in character. I was on a trip, connecting back to and pulling together a handful of past experiences and personal explorations. The suit, the nomads, the desert; it was as if I was pulling in the strings of my experience, clearing away the detritus; refining my act/mission/life. And my alter ego, he was the messenger. I’m making a video diary, creating a montage of incidents from the journey, my journey and at the same time not mine; rather that of my alter ego, the man in the suit. The performances themselves were in retrospect only a small part of the work; a series of isolated fragments - extreme moments - in that journey.

And something else, because this is Mongolia ­ that extreme coincidence thing: chance, fate (which is only chance in retrospect) whatever: I end up cooking up a really big trans-global-everything-I’ve-ever-been-interested-in project spanning Mongolia, Britain and the USA with these American academics who I would never have bumped into and tagged a ride with and ended up camping with and discussing horse burial and environmental law and geology and the Ba’hai faith with if their cameraman with whom I‘d drunk lots of vodka in the Gobi a few nights before and then hadn’t said goodbye to hadn’t lost his wallet and so hadn’t been on the ‘phone opposite the airport café I was heading to while he was waiting to catch the same plane I was catchingÉÉ(not to mention arriving back at Heathrow at ten pm having failed to get anyone to pick me up, dreading the zombie-death-is-better coach trip back to Brighton, trying to push a trolley against a tide thousands of tired ex holiday makers who had all suddenly simultaneously descended on the luggage retrieval hall like some nightmare wave of humanity, and nearly running over some guy who is actually my friend Steve who lives in Brighton and had been on the same flight as me from Berlin without realising and who has his car in the short-stay car park ÉÉ.)

See what I mean?

This quality of place and time rubs off on you. As a direct consequence of this trip I have begun to review my entire life/work/history as an inclusive process. My several alter ego/performance persona merge into one constantly transforming entity operating in a liminal dimension between ‘art’ and ‘not art’. I am beginning to reassess how I can access and express core resonances which lie at the root of my work and how they can be realised through international collaboration. And I want to return to Mongolia to do this.

Mongolia is on the edge. It has rediscovered its history, its religions and its ancient culture in the fourteen years since the Soviets left. Its basic social structures are teetering, mining companies hang like vultures around the unspoilt landscape waiting for the government to let them in, hospitals and schools need support and funding (I couldn’t get a tetanus jab anywhere in Mongolia, something I was keen to do after slicing my head open with a cymbal).

And yet it is very upbeat. Mongolia is at a crucial point in its history, people know its potential, see its future - there is a plan to build a new capital city on the site of Chingis’s original site at Karakorum - but it could go either way. Or it could go another way entirely: Mongolia as a post-petrochemical nation ­ solar panels are the only source of electrical power for nomads, wind power could be enormousÉ(Well you do get a lot of time to think while you’re hurtling across the tyre scarred Mongolian landscape for eight hours in a very old bus.)

I’ll go back, to stand alone and do my thing in a landscape of insurmountable beauty and scale. You are insignificant, and at the same time there is nothing between you and the power of that landscape. Whatever happens, ultimately you are there to experience that huge, terrible, awesome silence It crackles.

Six thousand miles to get experimental because if you’re there doing it, that’s enough. And you’re too far away for judgement to matter (unless your mate’s really good mate happens to be there too and shares a ger with you. Really.)

Simon Pascoe
February 2005 - updated March 2006