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Post-festival thoughts
I’ve been working hard editing a daily magazine about the Edinburgh Festival for the past few weeks, hence the lack of blogs. I saw a few good shows this year. I particularly enjoyed Accidental Nostalgia and Stefan Golaszewski is a Widower at the Traverse, Cybraphon, an ingenious robot band built by our Edinburgh friends Found at the Inspace gallery, and Power Plant at the Royal Botanic Garden. If none of that means anything to you, oh well, you missed out. Come next year.
For me, one of the more exciting things going on at the festival this year was the number of shows offering intimate, interactive experiences for small numbers of people (or even just one person) at a time, such as Internal at the Traverse (a cross between theatre, speed dating and group therapy, for an audience of five), Footwashing For The Sole at the Arches @ St Stephens (a one-to-one experience in which performer Adrian Howells washes your feet for you) and Rider Spoke (in which you ride a bicycle around the city, recording answers to questions set by a computer perched on your handlebars).
Internal, in particular, seemed to catch people’s imagination, provoking much debate as audiences spent hours, sometimes days, getting their heads around what had just happened to them. Was it fair to ask audiences not only to become performers, but also to confess intimate secrets in front of strangers as part of a show? Was it ethical to ask actors to get intimate with a different stranger every 30 minutes, all day? And what did it all mean anyway? Was it even a show?
I’m very interested in these kinds of intimate shows at the moment, not least because I’m making one for this year’s Arches Live festival in Glasgow. I am also slightly repelled by them (which, to me, is a good reaction, suggesting something boundary pushing is going on here - genuinely cutting edge work often should repel you in some way, because it takes you out of your comfort zone). I’ve experienced two of the shows listed above, Internal and Rider Spoke, and have been struck by how similar my reaction was to each one. In both cases I felt uncomfortable and, afterwards, violated. Like I said, that’s is not necessarily a bad thing. This is, among other things, what art should do.
I’ll talk about Internal first. I went with Laura. Both of us, like the other three members of the audience, were ‘chosen’ by one of the actors and taken off for one-to-one chats in a series of low-lit booths. I was chosen by Maria. She introduced herself, offered me vodka, and we chatted, like two strangers in a bar. Maria’s questions were very direct and flirtatious - her opening gambit was to ask me what I looked for in love. I found myself sending obvious signals that I was Not Available, as you do when you are happy and secure in the relationship you’re in.
I felt slightly ridiculous doing this - I was talking to an actor playing a role, after all, not a real person in a bar who was actually flirting with me. The odd thing, though, was the many ways in which this encounter was ‘real’. Mostly, if you disregarded the way Maria held my gaze for the entire encounter, it was innocuous chat. Uncomfortable that the focus was on me, I asked her polite questions - where she grew up, how she ended up in Belgium making a theatre show, her relationship with her niece. And she appeared to be answering as herself rather than as a ‘character’. After about ten minutes of this, Maria said ‘do you think we could be friends?’ It was a sweet thing to say, so I replied that yes, I thought we probably could. It was true. She seemed nice.
The second part of Internal is the group session, when your partner talks about you to everyone else. It was in this part of the show that the most unsettling thing happened. One of the actors asked me if Maria and I ‘clicked’? I said yes, I suppose we did, although it was difficult to tell after a ten minute conversation. ‘Show us,’ the actor replied. I had no idea what to do, so just sat there. Then I saw that Maria was leaning in to kiss me.
Here the unreality of the situation took over. If you are in a bar, and a stranger leans in to kiss you while your girlfriend is sitting right beside her, obviously you politely decline. But this was a ‘show’, in which you find yourself deeply uncertain as to whether you’re supposed to ‘perform’ or not, and what that should involve. The best way I can explain the split second calculation I made in my head at that moment is that turning away would somehow feel disruptive to the ‘performance’. Would the focus of the ‘show’ then be on me? So - very briefly, and with my mouth firmly closed - I let a complete stranger kiss me, on the lips, while my girlfriend watched.
And for days afterwards I felt wretched about it. It made Laura uncomfortable, and I have had to ask myself all sorts of difficult questions about my reactions to peer pressure. Am I a complete doormat for not resisting a situation that makes me uncomfortable? Am I so easily manipulated? Am I disloyal? I am quite sure that if Maria had tried to kiss me in the private booth, I would have turned away. Oddly, the boundaries in that situation were clearer - kissing her there would have felt, very straightforwardly, like cheating. I can’t help wondering if Maria sensed this and didn’t make a pass at me then for that reason.
I know that a lot of kissing went on in that performance space last month, both in the booths and in the group session. A lot of people’s boundaries were pushed. Laura’s partner covered the table between them with naked photos of himself, and asked her which one she liked best. From talking to other people who went, I know that the actors frequently made passes at their partners in the booths. One actor regularly showed her partners her breasts. I wasn’t surprised at all when I discovered that some audience members were going back night after night. A friend of ours even decided - and I still don’t know how serious she was - that she was in love with one of the actors, a situation made even more blurry by the fact that she met him for a drink and kept his phone number. The friend in question is single, but I can’t help wondering if Internal has broken up some relationships, as - in the space of just 25 minutes - it forces people to acknowledge their desires, or to question who or what they want.
Internal throws up all kinds of questions about how relationships work. Sitting in those booths, you’re keenly aware that the person across from you, talking to you about love and life, is an actor playing a role. But aren’t you doing the same? Aren’t you always performing a version of yourself to the world, in the decisions you make about what to show and what not to show?
The other theme here is the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private, something also explored in Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke. I didn’t do this show in Edinburgh, because I’d already done it in Brighton a few months ago. In both cities, it involves getting on a bike with a computer attached to the handlebars, and then riding around the streets using the computer’s satellite navigation system to look for places where other people have stopped and recorded responses to personal questions asked by Blast Theory (‘When and where were you happiest?’ that kind of thing). Once you find the places, you can either listen to other people’s responses or record your own.
It was a nice idea, but I found most of what people had recorded pretty banal (as well as difficult to listen to, given that they were often recording it on a bicycle in a high wind). I was also very uncomfortable about the idea of recording answers to personal questions but not knowing where that information would end up and who else would hear it. Like Internal, Rider Spoke asks you to volunteer personal information, but is unclear about the nature of the contract you are making with it. Arguably this raises ethical questions about both shows - what right do these artists have to do what they’re doing? Then again, you don’t have to buy a ticket. And how many audience members are already giving out personal information about themselves on the internet every day? These shows, I think, simply reflect a culture whose ideas about what is public and what is private are very much in flux. Everyone who participates has a duty to think about what their personal boundaries are, and how much you’re prepared to let an artist mess with them.
Laura did Rider Spoke in Brighton too. She says her favourite review of the show was one in which the critic basically took the piss out of the whole show, deliberately flouted the rules and got roaring drunk. Laura still wishes she’d done the same. Her point is that, in asking audiences to participate, these shows promise an interactive experience. But most of the time they don’t really deliver. If it’s interactive, that suggests equality between audience and performer, or audience and show. It’s an embodiment of Joseph Beuys’ idea that everyone can be an artist - if a show is genuinely interactive, the audience member is an artist as much as the people who made the show.
The problem is, rather like Black Eyed Peas inviting fans to remix their new album for them (the subject of a previous tirade on this blog), you’re expected to participate on terms set by someone else. Arguably, then, the only proper artistic response is not to participate, to rebel. What true artist wants to conform, after all?
So, if you’re doing Rider Spoke you should ride the bike wherever you want and record random ambient sound instead of answers. If you’re doing Internal, be disruptive, lie, walk out, start singing a song, whatever. The more I think about it, the more I wish I hadn’t let Maria kiss me, not only because I made Laura uncomfortable, but also because it would have been the proper artistic response to the situation. Not letting her kiss me would have made me a better artist.
Andrew
