AWEdience

Technology gives us access to a great amount of things; communication, knowledge, new spaces and communities. 'Light' by Theatre Ad Infinitum is a enlightening performance that highlights these advantages in practise within a story that encapsulates the other side of the light...the darkness that technology creates. Set in complete darkness, with no spoken word but only gestures, the show uses up to date technology, LED lights and an LED screen, to light up a futuristic dystopia where leaders use technology to control the thoughts of the people they claim to be protecting. In a world where social media tracks your every move and everyone walks with their face glue to their phones, this story really hits home about the possible dangers technology exposes to us. Yet this creates an apparent confliction between the themes of the performance and the style in which it is performed. Although technology is illuminated as the danger of the performance, by using only torches and light bars to portray the story and no speech, it is technology that allows Theatre Ad Inifinitum to create such an accessible word, especially for deaf or hard of hearing patrons. This is advertised as a positive advantage to their show; so why is technology put in such a bad light?

‘Light’ by Theatre ad Infinitum. Battersea Arts Centre 3/2 2016.

I went to see Light at The Battersea Arts Centre on a Wednesday night. By Thursday morning I had forgotten that I did. In a word, my reaction was: meh. There is no denying that it is a technically intriguing production; the lighting design meant that the play managed to capture my attention, but then had nothing to do with it, once it had.

The play by theatre group Theatre Ad Infinitum, first premiered at Edinburgh in 2014. This year has seen two revivals, first a limited run at the Barbican and now one at Battersea Arts Centre. It is a dystopian tale of a future where people are oppressed by way of government mind control. One agent, the son of the evil dictator, is send to kill the rebel leader. He becomes conflicted when, in a twist that surprises absolutely no one, it is revealed that said rebel is actually his long lost mother. The mother was left for dead, following a failed attempt at destroying the oppressive technology, she herself helped create. Our main character is then caught in a battle between his freedom-loving mother and his cold, controlling father and must choose a side.

Good review practice would probably discourage from revealing the plot in this fashion, but the storyline is so boring and inane that it is easily guessed in the first five minutes. The lazy tropes are borrowed from your least favourite YA bestsellers, and the question at the heart of the performance (‘Will our 21st century dependence on technology combined with our ever growing fear of terrorism eventually lead to us all being controlled like puppets by an invisible state?’ spoiler alert: yes) is so mindless and tired, that it seems incredible to me that this play has existed for almost two years, without severe rewrites.

Which brings me to the much more interesting question posed by this performance: Can a well executed form make up for lack of originality and nuance in the story telling? Light is a technically impressive show. It takes place in the dark and handheld lighting, operated by the actors themselves, lights everything in the play. The performance is wordless, using a combination of displayed text, mime and over exaggerated mouthing of words to convey the plot This makes the play accessible to deaf or hard of hearing audience members, a fact underlined by a bsl translation of the preshow notes. This is in and of it self an interesting and praiseworthy quality, but also makes me wonder why the performance itself was not done in bsl, instead of the weird mishmash of mime and noncommittal hand gestures that I saw on stage.

{and an attempt at explaining why we feel like we do by a complete amateur.}

There’s an inherent fear for an audience member when watching difficult work; The Fear of Isolation. Often in work like this the audience aren’t allowed to sit silently in the comfort of the darkness but instead must stand in the light watching the performance, vulnerable to it.

In Martin O’Briens work we are invited to watch his body come under harm, both by his hands and someone else’s. In this particular piece we watched an older woman first stretch his skin and then attach thick, black pegs to his chest, pulling the skin taught and pinching it into redness. This very imaginable pain although cringe producing is watchable and it may be that, for a moment we can imagine the pain and this empowers us, we can watch it. Martin has yet to over step our known experiences as an audience member and with this is a form of comfort.

What happens then, when we do step over this line?

The point where it first leaves the imaginable is when he has hypodermic needles pushed through his penis and I doubt that it is merely my status as a woman that stops me from imagining that pain. This makes us want to respond, to avert our gaze, speak out, something and usually we can’t, we are trapped by the courtesy of performance. We watch as Martin is finally cut free from his Sarcophagi and he now moves around the space, penis still pinned to a board as the performance continues. It is awkward and pained and funnily enough in particular moments the audience laugh, in fact Martin laughs with them and suddenly we are back to an understanding, to something we know, something more human. I think this is where I find my own thoughts on this performance challenging, I almost dehumanised it, dehumanised him because I found some of it difficult to watch.

Some elements I found entrancing, like his relationship with pain and pleasure in moments where the pain was fetishized. The woman spanking Martin with a leather paddle, on its own, within this performance was interesting as I didn’t fully understand this tonal change but this was layered the pain of him having his hands hooked and stapled to a table, he was trapped. Now I have a personal fear of staple guns, inexplicable yet real, and for me the hook moment was the hardest to bear.

This maelstrom of painful acts, in person, must have been difficult to upkeep the theatre etiquette through and thankfully I did not have to.

I got to watch a recording of this piece, in the comfort of FADS, with a group of fellow students and we had no such etiquette to upkeep. Jokes were made throughout out, quips, likely, at the cost of the piece were made but there was also an open display of discomfort and even fright. There was yelling, verging on screaming at some points. Our emotoions were allowed to run free, our reactions came unbidden and we created our own little group therapy to help us through the piece. We may not have had the comfort of sitting in the dark, but we had the comfort of freedom to communicate. The interesting thing, to make jokes of something you have to pay attention, to watch. I felt comfortable enough to watch some of the most challenging points of this piece because I felt supported, I knew I could laugh to dispel tension and make jokes out of my own discomfort.

Or: ‘In a Shocking Turn of Events, Marie Doesn’t Know How To Verbalize Her Emotions’

For this week’s class we watched documentation of a performance piece by artist Martin O’Brien, which we were meant to go see this last Friday, but which was sadly cancelled. Instead we watched an hour’s documentation on what I believe was an earlier performance of the same work.

It’s been five days since I sat down to watch it in Holly’s dorm kitchen, with Holly, Rebecca and Ashley, and an assortment of Holly’s friends walking in and out of the room. I still don’t know what I think. Or maybe, more accurately, I have no way of putting what I think and feel about this piece, into words.

So instead I’ll start with this fact: When I sat down to watch it I was both very nervous and very very angry.

Nervous for two different reasons. One, because although I knew little about the performance we had to watch, I knew it was a form of body art, dealing with chronic illness, specifically cystic fibrosis, and that it would be graphic and presumably ‘hard to watch’. Watching performance art (excuse my sloppy and broad use of the term) makes me uncomfortable to begin with. It has a way of simultaneously making me feel incredibly stupid and like an arrogant asshole, neither of which are pleasant feelings. And so I was nervous about ‘getting it’ and not being overwhelmed by any graphic or difficult elements. Two, I was nervous going to Holly’s, because I have only just met her as well as the other girls we were watching it with, and I (like a big percentage of the population) have, what might border on an unhealthy preoccupation with getting people to like me.

My anger had nothing to do with any of the above, but rather with the current political situation in Denmark. The Danish parliament, my elected officials, had Tuesday passed a law called L87. The law is a further restriction on refugees seeking asylum in Denmark. Now we have many horrible and xenophobic laws in Denmark, but this one is something else. Danish police now has to seize assets, such as jewellery and the like, from any refugees arriving in our country, presumably so they can help ‘pay for their stay’.  I had spent the morning reading about this vote, the debate, and national and international reactions. Our prime minister was very fittingly portrayed in a Nazi uniform in a satirical comic in the Guardian, and all the politicians were very offended. (I will refrain from going on a tangent about the Muhammad cartoons, freedom of speech and hypocrisy; you can thank me later).

So when I sat down to watch this I was very nervous, very angry and a tiny bit late.

The performance begins with O’Brien wrapped in what seems to be a plastic cocoon, lying on a table in a room. The video makes it difficult to determine the size and shape of the room, but my first impression was of a very intimate space. A fellow performer walks up to him and starts cutting away the plastic, slowly revealing parts of his body. As she does, she attaches body clamps to part of his torso, and sticks some type of needles in his penis (the small screen makes it hard to tell what exactly is happening). These first minutes of watching were probably some of the most uncomfortable for me. I was unsure of what was going on, and the anonymity of the body lying wrapped up the table with no face attached to it, with no ability to move, was hard, because as a viewer it offered no context for O’Brien’s role in the piece. Were we just to watch an hour of him having painful things done to him by other people?

My first inkling, that I was not going to be  indifferent to this piece, came when the plastic was cut of his face. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and I felt my body relax as he was finally freed from the plastic. After that, O’Brien got up and moved around the space, performing, or having other people perform various different acts on his body. Several of them hinted at a relationship between pain and pleasure, which I found unsettling, but not entirely unpleasant. However, it is the moments where he had his breathing restricted that really stuck out to me. He had a kind of a plastic bag; it looked like an overgrown, mutated swimming cap, which he placed over his head. It restricted his breathing and when he inhaled it stuck to his face, making a grotesque, contorted shape. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe.

Like famous writers, philosophers, painters (any creator in fact), the audience of said creations do not receive them in isolation. We all enter the performance coming from different lives, different places, and different days; in Give Me Your Love I felt especially conscious of my role as an audience member. On the day of the performance I felt nervous: I knew that whilst the performance was taking place, on the other side of London the play I had written with Bronwen was being pitched to Queen Mary Theatre Company through a video pitch we had recorded earlier that day. So obviously, I was nervous because I wanted the pitch to go well, I wanted it to get a good reception, but I had no control over that because I was an hour away watching a performance for Reading Theatre.

On entering Battersea Arts Centre, it struck me how interesting the presentation of the building was - it's an old town hall, and it shows it. In renovation, Battersea Arts Centre has not so much tried to change the space but to transform it, meaning that the buildings' dual-status as town hall and theatre co-exist rather than one replacing the other. The whole building has a feel of reinvention and repurposing to it - the theatre for example is an old council chamber, and the sign above the door reads as such. It is interesting that although it is obviously not used as a council chamber anymore, the old sign remains as an acknowledgement of the buildings' history. The aesthetic of the building blends the new and old, in a consciously makeshift style recently popular for edgy fringe venues (old rugs, chalk boards, fairy lights - I would describe it as 'very Shoreditch').

Whilst in the show, I felt very conscious that I was meant to have an emotional reaction to what was happening in front of me, but I couldn't help but tune out. I think this distraction stemmed from the sparsity of the production – this was of course an artistic choice and representative of the themes of loneliness and isolation presented, but it became easy to zone out, for example when I realized that the box wouldn’t be coming off of Zach’s head I more or less accepted it and thought no more about it, when I kind of knew I should probably question it more. The show felt like it was trying to provoke me into something, but I never felt inclined to do so because I was too busy worrying about my own problems – I do of course realise that I was a very lazy audience member.

I kept getting distracted by the smallest things – here’s an extract from my notes:

‘these walls could probably do with a paint, or maybe it’s an artistic choice…I don’t really like the main man’s trainer, I wonder if they’re the actor’s normal clothes or if he got them especially, I hate those kinds of trainers…oh I’m very cold (this appeared three times in my notes, the theatre was very chilly)…I wonder how the pitch is going, I’m very cold.’

When watching this performance the words that came to mind were: calm, content, natural, confusion. A repetitive dance sequence put together by Marco Berrettino (who I later found out was also the male performer) involves a young women and a middle aged man dancing a repeated sequence to the strange sound of a warped voices talking of ‘nature’. The experience as a whole I found to be incredibly calming and reminded me of those moving illusions you see of things continually folding in on each other; these create focus and ease anxiety. There was a strong beat and although the dancers held blank facial expressions and conducted the same movements they both had a character to the- they seemed to be enjoying themselves and in turn it made me enjoy it more.