Green Screen
When Florian Habicht’s Rubbings from a Live Man was launched in 2008 there was a standing ovation at a packed Civic Theatre, and at Waiheke’s little community cinema. I saw the film again last night 14 years on and seven years after Warwick’s death in 2015 in his Waiheke home. This time round, screened to coincide with this year’s Pride Festival, there were three people in the Waiheke Cinema auditorium.
I came away from that last screening thinking of masques and masks. I concluded that (Warwick’s chosen and disturbing title), unlike his multitude of marvellous Dadaist, surrealist theatrical extravaganzas—his masques—was, quite deliberately, Warwick un-masked. Warwick in the raw. And what a paradox! All those mad, magical, events he had conjured up over decades were never recorded. That was Warwick’s dictum. They reside in our memories. Even some we never saw—I can vouch for that, having heard many descriptions of, for exhibit. My gallery/bookstore Tivoli hosted three Warwick performances and, in the year before he died, one of his last renditions, by then a little shaky, of . Warwick performed at some of the outdoor Pendragon Mall courtyard Poetry Festivals too. I remember him emerging like a turtle from a crocheted blanket on the ground, manically swinging a bucket of poems in flames next to the then i-Site Centre, dangling his leg over the balcony above in a failed attempt to swing down . . .
