Overspill: Shuffling the Deck

In the words of Robert Pacitti, in the introduction to the limited edition SPILL Tarot pack, ‘the tarot stands as viable a means of interpreting the world as any other – including science, philosophy and mathematics – and I defy any sceptic to prove otherwise.’ A Tarot pack is a set of 78 cards most often used, in English speaking countries at least, for the purposes of divination (in France and Italy it’s also used for playing games). The pack is made up of the Major and Minor Arcana, people and things that represent the elements of our world and the characters within it, and Tarot readings are carried out in relation to spiritual enlightenment, psychic communication, and the occult. But, as Robert Pacitti points out, a reading is as much an act of interpretation as one of prediction – the meaning of the cards reflects the reader’s frame of reference as well as her frame of mind. It’s this ability to crystallise thought that gives the cards their power.

In the case of the SPILL pack, the cards’ power is enhanced by the symbolic resonance of the images, and the way they have been produced. The Major Arcana – character types that include The Fool, The Hermit, The Moon, and everything in-between – are pictures of artists and other contemporary ‘mavericks’ from across the fields of art, academia, cultural activism and beyond. I have just cut the pack in three to reveal Robert Pacitti – Artistic Director of the Pacitti Company and creator, producer and curator of the SPILL Festival (‘Death’); Lois Kiedan – co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (‘Justice’); and Empress Stah – trapeze artist, Neo Cabaret performer and producer (‘The Star’). The pictures were taken by the photographer Manuel Vason, who has devised a unique working method in which he collaborates with his subjects to capture performances made for the camera. As a result, the SPILL Tarot pack does not just help crystallise the thoughts of the person using it; it also goes some way to crystallise the processes of collaboration, challenge and knowledge-sharing inherent in the SPILL Festival itself.

Coming at the start of the pack, The Fool is the journeyman of the Tarot, an innocent and a visionary who may be drawn in any direction by the rest of the cards. As such, the Fool embodies the reader and all her potential. The SPILL Tarot Fool is a figure in mid-air, leaping with abandon against the greying landscape of modern agriculture. A stony, pit-holed path winds through fields of dried out crops; an energy pylon and other industrial buildings line the horizon. As s/he jumps, the androgynous figure of the Fool stretches out of her newspaper costume, and pulls her mouth tight between a grin and a grimace. Above, a small clear moon makes an early appearance before sunset. Behind, a dog looks warily at the strange traveller with her eyes covered and her feet bare.

It’s hard to tell if the Fool is jumping for joy or desperation. She exists in both day and night, in the freedom of outdoors and within the cultivation of industrial agriculture. Suspended in the air, suspended in time and suspended between places, this figure embodies the ‘unbridled primal energy’ of the Fool.

But the card is also a picture of Rajni Shah, whose performance piece Dinner with America, was programmed into the SPILL Festival; and it’s easy to see how, like her performance, this image draws on the potency of symbols that slip in and out of recognition. But the energy of this suspended image – with Shah’s head thrown back and her arms stretching away from her body– must also be down to the eye of the photographer, Manuel Vason, and the synergy of the collaboration. There was also another collaborator in this image – Lucille Acevedo-Jones, a costume designer who works regularly with Shah, and who designed the newspaper dress for this Fool.

Like all the cards of the Major Arcana in this Tarot pack, the Fool is dripping with the residue of multiple and combined professional practices – the traces of as many professional practices, perhaps, as there are knowledge systems touched by Tarot itself. By bringing together this collection of people inside the rich symbolic web of Tarot , the project of the SPILL Tarot pack represents the working methodology behind the festival. As a whole, SPILL 09 was a collaboration between artists, producers, venues and audiences across a wide terrain – large theatres as well as site-specific spaces; performers familiar to London audiences as well as artists and work that was wholly unfamiliar; live art, theatre, performance, explicit bodies, music, dance, and much more. It brought artists to London from all over the world, and it did the same for audiences. As such, it reflected the vision of the Pacitti Company and its Director, Robert Pacitti. But SPILL was also woven from the enthusiasm, interest and sometimes controversy sparked in the minds and conversations of the people who participated by performing, producing or watching the work. Just like Tarot, it offered up glimpses of human experience, with the desire to be read and absorbed into others’ lives.

SPILL: Overspill was an attempt to respond to the energy and achievement of SPILL through writing that respected the form and content of the festival and its processes, and that developed with the festival over time. Together, the seven writers involved (David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mary Kate Connolly, Alex Eisenberg, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Mary Paterson and Theron Schmidt) created 55 pieces of writing. As well as responding to the work as we saw it during the festival, Overspill writers investigated the processes behind the finished product – interviewing artists, visiting rehearsals, and in most cases developing a collaborative process with the artist. We addressed questions to the audience and, within the confines of free blogging software, we tried to experiment with form. There were three days of writing workshops, two peer critiques, a complicated group editing system and ticket schedule, and one all night live writing performance. Like the SPILL Tarot, each individual blog post represents a complex web of professional practices and collaborations; what you’re reading here is the first card in the deck. We hope you will shuffle your own way through, and use this site to crystallise your thoughts in response to the SPILL Festival. Please make comments below, or email opendialogues@gmail.com

Mary Paterson is Co-Director of Open Dialogues. mary@opendialogues.com

Pieces of America 2 - by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

Pieces of America 2

A very sideways look at the experience of performing and attending Rajni Shah’s Dinner with America in real and conceptual space…

co-authored by Rajni Shah and Mary Kate Connolly

The following is a template designed for the consumption and digestion of splinters of cultural reference…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

A cavernous dining hall envelopes you. Upon entering, you cast aside fear and difference, strike up friendship, and explore common ground. A vast Honduran mahogany dining table inhabits the centre in isolated splendour. The linen is embellished in sparse Lutheran hand with the words ‘Pride, Hope, Kinship, Drive’. You are here with others. No one feels left out or passed over.

I am waiting, sheathed in plastic. Blind. A sweat in the palm, a loss of balance, a careful slow movement of the lashes. How many of them are there? What do they look like? Are they smiling or frowning or talking? Do they think they are making eye contact with me? Have they sat down? Do they feel welcome?

Whilst milling around the vast table and reaching out to one another, you are presented with the starter of the evening: the Optimistic Amuse Bouche. This is designed to whet the palate, and purge the body of negative expectation and prejudice. It is light, fizzy with promise, and lasts only for a moment on the tongue before dissolving.

• 250 grams of the ice of the Delaware and the grit of the people crossing it
• 50 grams of the majesty of untouched landscapes
• 5 grams of the sheer size and volume of all things American
• Shake vigorously till all ice crushed and blended with other ingredients – serve in a shot glass…

The game is on. I am in the space with you. Solo voices of U.S. citizens punctuate this quiet part of the evening. I have met them all, can picture their faces and surroundings – each now reinhabits that place and time we shared two years ago. Most have moved on to new cities, lives, and some to a new realm of being. We are dining with the dead, the angry, the ungracious and the hopeful.

Guests are called to table, and invited to share in fellowship and the spoils of a beguiling landmass. Presently, a vast melting pot arrives.

You tentatively devour the space we share. It is most probably not what you expected. I try to alleviate our frustrations by seducing you. Waves of success and exhaustion wash over us. I am blonde and blue-eyed. You are staring at me. I look into your eyes but my sadness and anger and eagerness make you shy.

Main Course: Promising Stew

Base ingredient: The power of the American identity, and the endurance of the souls and hearts and bosoms of the American people.

• Place in a large pot with 250grams of Patriotism. Heat till scalding.
• Temper with the Songs of the South, the Validation of the Individual and the Fear of the Other.
• Leave to simmer, until a myriad of histories and distant cultures dragged to the shores in famine and slave ships, have all been absorbed into the mix, peppering it with the flavours of far off lands.
• Finish and mature the dish with healthy dollops of the captains of industry, the soaring bricks and mortar of shiny sky-scrapers, the chic New England style of Boston and Cape Cod, the airy art spaces of New York, the balm of Californian breezes.

I am trying to hold this space. Voices crowd in. I am singing. You have travelled into the cradles and fields of your minds. I am still trying to hold the space. Though of course, of course, this is an impossible task. You have left and some come back. This space is one of coming and going.

Side-dish 1:

Forebear’s Bread

A simple unleavened bread – coarse and sometimes hard to digest, it is formed from the sparse sensibilities of Lutheran and Calvinist settlers, cooked by the steam of growth, and transformed into a hard-working, conservative outlook, impeccably mannered, friendly, and a touch distant.

There is nothing other than being with you in the room. All our trajectories collapse into one pointed moment. You are with me now. One last song. We have come full circle.

Side-dish 2:

Moulded Faith Rice

A sticky sweet rice, made from varying individual grains, moulded together to form a wholesome, loving solid which places the family at the centre of life, which places immense faith in a benign god, which places trust in other people, and which places emphasis on striving ahead as one.

I have made an attempt, that is all. As I shed the layers of this shiny blonde outfit, you watch from the darkness. I have no idea who you are any more. I look at you and there is pity and engagement in the space between us, but I could not say exactly where it sits. I take a practical approach to undressing. Now your thoughts cram the darkness. It is comforting. You witness my body as a shared landmark. I make my escape.

Side-dish 3:

Fun and Frolics Fondue

A frothy, synthetically-chewy dip. This contains the lure of consumerism, the whiff of fast food, the playful yellow beacons of taxis on Broadway, the gushing emotion of sitcoms and movies, the stars in the eyes of waitresses working the graveyard shift in a Hollywood diner, the preacher touting for souls outside the Elvis chapel in Vegas, and the endearing twang of ‘American-English’.

My numb feet cross the space, blundering between you and the crumbs of mulch. We find ourselves in different locations. I have left it behind. The burial of something. Preparation for a harvest. Cleaning.

Side dish 4:

Troubled Gravy

A bitter sauce which should neither be avoided, nor allowed to subsume the other flavours of the meal. Ingredients include the power and status accredited to violence, the despair of the sick unable to afford healthcare, the segregation and division of race, colour and creed, the elevation of image, and the furtherance of one nation above all others.

We watch a movie together. You pretend not to notice that I am by your side. I am afraid that at this point you are looking for the end. Some of you leave the space. I wish you would stay. But of course this is part of the deal between us. You come and go. We stay. It is almost time for the feast.

Dessert 1:

The first is Traditional Apple Pie with lashings of white peaks of cream. Warm and homely, it looks to a safe and prosperous past, a security and assurance that values were intact, that the future was golden and that America would prevail.

Oranges, Mandarins, Bananas, Apples, Dates, Pears, Plums, Dried Apricots, Chocolate, Chrysanthemums, Amaretti. How ridiculous. We consider making the world kinder.

Dessert 2:

The second is Mississippi Mud Pie. This dessert should be served cold. It is an intriguing, yet not overly sweet dish, formed by the power of hope, now muddied with change and the fear of disappointment. It looks unflinchingly forward to an uncertain future.

It is painfully awkward to find our way into this space of conversation. I come from a different trajectory into this feast. But having negotiated our differences, we sometimes fall into an entirely surprising conversation for a moment.

The lethargy of post-feasting cloaks you in warmth. Conversation wafts and thins with the rising steam of bitter black coffee…it is time to leave. Shyness tinges departures with awkwardness as new found fellowships forged amid the clamour, are met with chill night air. Smiles and connections linger, stored for a future time, a future feast…a lump in the throat, a twist in the gut, a warmth in the heart...

Rajni Shah is a performance maker, writer, producer and curator. www.rajnishah.com

Mary Kate Connolly is a freelance writer on performance and live art based in London

Fickle Cheese and Performance, by David Berridge

"The Modes of Al-Ikseer"

Harminder Singh Judge,

Shunt Vaults 13th & 14th April

There’s no telling what might turn up in some corner of Shunt Vaults, the huge network of railway arches that comprised the venue for the Triple Bill. After the woman painted in gold, and the man urinating whilst stood in a bucket playing the saxophone, there was a bit of standing around on Triple Bill night, before heading off to another dark corner, where Harminder Singh Judge rounded off the evening stood in a lake of slowly curdling milk.

Judge was in the middle of the lake of milk, slowly rotating on a small round wooden disc. Around his waist was a girdle of neon writing. For maybe forty-five minutes he slowly rotated, churning-tubes dangling from his body into the milk, drone-music blaring, the durational hook for the audience of slowly making out the sentence of neon words as he turned.

It was absorbing, if demanding stuff at the end of a long evening. Judge had a serious, focussed look throughout and there was a definite, challenging sense from the off that this was it for the duration. How long does it take to make cheese I wondered? I had no idea. Were we here in Shunt until this sloppy lake became a hard cheddar-like mass? It seemed unlikely. But duration is tricky to relate to necessity - on the second night the show was shortened, I heard, by twenty minutes.

At the end of an evening of intense, focussed performances I was finding it hard to concentrate. But maybe that was the point of such a performance. One’s mind wandered and drifted and when and if it returned there was Judge, another twenty degrees on, the sentence a few letters closer to revelation, if you hadn’t forgotten what the bit before had said and needed to wait for the whole thing to come round again, like me.

I’m being deliberately a bit flippant about this. There was a serious and challenging presence to this work, an engagement with rituals and Hindu traditions I knew nothing about, but which also were well aware of the slightly ludicrous situation in which they found themselves, both SPILL and Shunt Vaults and performance art more broadly. This isn’t my flippancy alone I’m talking about here - it’s how the piece worked the flippancy into both its seriousness and its wannabee cheese.

So somewhere in Shunt there was the Hindu myth of Churning the Milky Ocean, where Mount Mandaranchai was the dasher (churning tool) and Vasuki, King of serpents, was the churning rope (thankyou Wikipedia). If Singh’s body formed one layer of commentary on this source, there was another accretion in store. Two figures in white appeared at the lakeside, barefoot, wearing drums. They stood calm and posed, although around them stewards were busy spreading out blue hand towels, ready for drying their milky feet when they re-emerged.

I was struggling - whilst watching and again, now, whilst writing - to find another vocabulary for this - that acknowledged the specific types of drums and clothing. But I didn’t have the words. Then it happened. Revelation! Transcendence! Well, actually, no, or, rather, yes, if transcendence relates to a sudden soundtrack shift into Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, the two white robed guys playing along on their drums. It was a dramatic shift, hugely energising. The man next to me was mouthing along happily; feet were tapped; time became more familiar again. It was up to Judge to maintain the continuity, keeping the same mental focus, rotating, churning, same as ever, absorbing Dave et al into his concentration.

As well as enormous well-being, it was curious to think what happened in this shift towards Basildon’s finest. Partly, it was, after Jeremy Deller and Nicholas Abrahams feature documentary The Posters Come From The Walls, further assertion of Depeche Mode’s art-world renaissance. It was an assertion of connections across cultures and styles, the continuities and the differences. It also functioned as the eventual punch line to a long and drawn out joke, as, too, a sense of the age of the 1980’s as the great Thatcherite age of cheese production. I imagined the same performance crashing into a Stock, Aitken and Waterman track.

All well and good, but still no cheese. It was curdling more the second night, apparently, and I should have known better than to expect actual full scale dairy production from performance art. The performance ended with Harminder still the same as ever in the middle of the lake.

Feeling a bit of a Peeping Tom, I hung around to see how he made it out, the mundane after the ritual. I won’t tell you. There was no need to do this, really, other than a kind of backstage nosiness. His performance had itself explored this kind of interconnection, whilst avoiding any of the pitfall binaries such as on-stage and off, west and east, process and product, milk and cheese.

Small Talk 05 - Void Story by Alex Eisenberg

Void Story by Forced Entertainment

Soho Theatre

24^th April 2009

7.32pm – 7.37pm

Unreserved Seating:

Fourth Row – Seat 7/8/9 - (A)

Fourth Row – Seat 8/9/10 - (P)

On Stage – Usher (U)

You can read an introduction to Small Talk here.

______________________________________

7.32pm

A: Hello…How are you?

P: Are you supposed to sit here?…no…

A: Sorry?

P: Are you sitting with him?

A: No…

P: Oh okay…Sorry I thought you were with him.

A: Oh…I thought you were together!

P: Oh no…[ALL LAUGH]

A: No…I’m on my own actually.

P: Oh okay…

[PAUSE]

A: I’m a bit puffed out!

P: Yeah I just ran here as well.

A: Okay…

So what do you reckon it's going to be like?

P: Probably quite slow…

A: Why do you say that?

P: Cos they often…they can do that sometimes…be very slow…Have you seen stuff before?

A: Yeah I have.

P: But you know…I like it so…

A: You like slow?

P: I don’t mind…well…I kind of like a bit of both…the text is often good so…they can get away with it.

A: So you’ve seen quite a lot of their work before have you?

P: I’ve been seeing them for a long time…yeah…yeah…

A: Got any favourites?

P: ‘Dirty Work’…that’s quite a long time ago. ‘Speak Bitterness’…that’s a while back umm…I like their earlier stuff better actually.

A: Okay…so you’ve been a long time follower and it's 25 years in the making.

P: But I mean…I saw some of that on video…yeah…’Dirty Work’ I saw live…yeah…I did a workshop thing…like a residency with them in ninety-nine…ten years ago now…which was good but…

[LOUD]

U: Hi guys, welcome to Soho Theatre!

If I could just ask you all just to scooch along just a tiny tiny bit…In front of all of you is a number on the back of the chairs in front of you…if you all look at a number and all sit behind one that would be perfect. Because then we can get 14 people to every row…cos we’re completely sold out. Thanks a lot!

A: That was funny! …It is quite squashed in here isn’t it?

P: I think they always have to do this…and they do this speech…

A: They’re used to it…she seemed quite practiced.

Oh right…we’re getting into seat 9 and 10 here.

P: That’s right [LAUGH]

A: It's amazing how much room there is when we all…

P: Yeah…you see everyone wants to give themselves a bit more personal space.

A: Well also these seats, you know they’re quite…

P: Rigid?

A: Rigid…yeah [ALL LAUGH]

[PAUSE]

A: So have you been to anything else in Spill?

P: No I haven’t…I haven’t had a chance…I’m just going to see this and the other one tonight and that’s it…that’s all I’ve been able to…I would have liked to have seen some of the stuff last week but…

A: Oh you are seeing the show after?

P: Yeah.

A: That’s good.

[PAUSE]

A: So…are you involved in the arts at all?

P: Not really any more no…I look after my son now.

A: Oh wow!

P: Yeah!

A: How old is he?

P: He’s two.

A: Lovely…that’s your full time work is it?!

P: I used to do a bit…just marketing stuff…but I have to look after him now.

A: But you didn’t want to bring him along tonight though?!

P: I don’t think I could handle it!

A: Really! Is he a bit of a…

P: Well he’s in bed now.

A: Yeah.

P: He’s normally in bed about seven, seven-thirty. It's how it is with that age.

A: It would be good to go to bed at seven-thirty…

P: I go to bed about nine-thirty…[LAUGH]

A: Oh really! You’re an early sleeper?

P: Well I have to because he gets up at half six…otherwise I…I like my sleep so…you know…

A: That’s being a mum, isn’t it?

P: It's like…going to bed at eleven feels like a late night. Like, I watch a movie and I’m like…wooo ‘late night’. [LAUGH]

Gone are the days of drunken craziness!…Well I still do that occasionally but…you know…

A: Well I suppose you sort of succumb to the schedule of your child…
P: Yeah…they take over…

A: Yeah…It's interesting that…I’m not in that sort of schedule I’ll be honest with you!

P: It's funny…it does take over…I wasn’t before and now… you’re like…wow it's a very different thing!

[PAUSE]

A: I’ve been wondering what it's like to sit up there on those stools.

P: Probably not good.

A: It seems to be going quiet now…

7.37pm

VOID STORY

22.21pm

To find out about Alex's Small Talk click here: Small Talk by Alex Eisenberg

Below are links to the other conversations that I have had:

Small Talk 01 - Inferno

Small Talk 02 - That Night Follows Day

Small Talk 03 - Purgatorio

Small Talk 04 - Saving the World

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival.

(w)hole story by Eleanor Hadley Kershaw

Void Story

Soho Theatre

20-25 April 2009

The last few audience members are squeezed onto the benches of Soho Theatre studio. It is warm and stuffy, but a buzz of anticipation permeates the thick air above the steeply raked auditorium. A Forced Entertainment performance is about to start: I am expecting that once the steward has ripped my ticket and I have chosen my place and I have sat down and I have taken off my coat and placed my bag under the seat, once the houselights have (maybe) gone down (or at least dimmed a little bit) and once the performers are on stage and the audience quietens… I am expecting that theatrical conventions will be challenged, form will be played with, and that this performance will stimulate some thoughts about my – our – relationship to what’s going on down there below. And maybe more.

The rules of Void Story are clear soon after the performers have entered and taken their seats. As Mary Paterson describes, the four of them are tools, props, components in the telling of this story. They perform the function of sound: the voices of the protagonists, Kim and Jackson, are spoken into microphones by two performers at individual desks on one side of the stage, a lamp and a script next to each of their mics. Effects are created live or triggered from a soundboard on the long desk behind which the other two sit, on the opposite side of the stage. They speak the voices of subsidiary characters into more microphones, adjusting settings on two Mac laptops. A screen fills the gap behind the two pairs, onto which high contrast monochrome collages are projected; rough cut-and-paste snapshots of a desolate and threatening landscape through which a man and woman journey – the image version of Jackson and Kim – posed photos of two new faces, not the performers speaking in front of us. It’s all laid out for us to see, production methods stripped bare, each dislocated ingredient needing our imagination, our effort, our presence, to come together into a whole. The performance is two dimensional and we are the third dimension.

It will continue like this. A string of terrible events are inflicted on Kim and Jackson by the narrative, but they carry on across this harsh landscape, with no grand purpose and no final destination. They receive a visitor, who shoots Kim in the stomach. They receive intrusive phonecalls. They are stung by bees, they swim through shit, they climb over a tower of decomposing waste. They are chased by an open-jawed bear and a pack of angry dogs. We carry on filling in the grim void, just as Jackson, eyes closed, led by Kim, can still imagine the human entrails scattered along their path, at which Kim recoils.

Despite the horrible content of the narrative, this framing of catastrophe seems safe – everything is settled from early on – the concept is there, so we just need to apply our imaginative glue and join Kim and Jackson for ‘a rollercoaster ride through the decimated remains of contemporary culture’, as Tim Etchells’ programme note suggests. The violence and misfortunes that the characters suffer bring to mind a horror or disaster film, their ability to brush themselves off and continue after deadly injuries, a cartoon. No-one will really get hurt here, the good guys will survive till the end - it’s all just a bit of light entertainment, right? It’s not real.

But the general effect is far from calming. The sound is almost unbearably loud: at times I feel like I am being pinned to the back of my seat by the force of it. In imagining all these nasty events, and in battling against the volume of noise, and in the heat of the space, this experience is often uncomfortably challenging. It doesn’t allow the quick fix spectacular escapism on offer in Armageddon or The Day After Tomorrow. Maybe it comes closer to the gritty warning of Children of Men, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But it is still safe, it is darkly comic. It is apparent that this formula will not change and the narrative will reach no climax… rather we will continue uneasily trawling along a desperate grey plateau with its protagonists. After a while they encounter a sinister child on a bleak estate and she asks for some help with her balloon, it is stuck in a nearby tree. No-one else can help as they sleep during the day and work at night: “Our schedules don’t overlap much.” Kim and Jackson deliberate over whether –

There is whispering in the row behind me.

A young woman is slumped on the shoulder of the woman next to her, eyes shut, the people around are fanning her face.

She has probably fainted. Turn back to the stage

– Jackson is high up in the tree, “Jackson, be careful”. The balloon is shot by a –

but the whispering gets louder,

a man stands by the young woman. “Can you hear me? I’m a first aid officer. Can you hear me?”

To the panicked woman at the girl’s side: “Was she with anyone?”

“I’m her mother.”

Her name is repeated several times. “I’m the first aid officer, can you hear me?

…Has she eaten anything today?”

Glance back at the screen for a second – Jackson and the sinister girl and Kim are on the move, they are – then back up to the woman. Someone comes down from the back bench onto the stage, it is Tim Etchells. The performers’ voices halt, the houselights are brought up. “I’m very sorry, but we’re going to have to stop the show. There’s a medical problem.” He looks up at the young woman.

Everyone turns and looks.

A steward: “Is there anyone with any medical experience here? Is there a doctor in the house tonight?”

No response. Someone says, “She needs to be put in the recovery position.”

Everyone continues to look at the young woman and her mother in the middle of the seating bank. Her skin is grey.

The first aid officer calls an ambulance: “yes, she’s breathing but she’s not conscious.”

We stare.

No-one does anything.

This moment lasts a long time.

We stare.

A steward asks us to all to take a break outside the studio. We slowly filter out, dazed. We wait.

I think: So, is Void Story a disaster performance? It has presented us with a post-apocalyptic landscape, but the usual constraints of realism don’t apply. With a dream-like logic the protagonists have reacted to each crisis without ever considering the bigger picture (without the ‘sop of psychology’ as Tim Etchells writes): just like this show’s detailed attention to each individual component, and its intentional neglect of a complete, finished end product. We have been presented with a flat pack performance.

We’re thanked for our patience, and told the show will continue.

We wait.

I think: The performance has so far been deliberately out of sync with itself. Aside from the incongruities between aural and visual representation, and the strangely narrow outlook of the protagonists, the images have had warped perspectives within themselves because they are haphazardly thrown together from the elements of other compositions.

We’re told that the paramedics have arrived, that the performance will be started as soon as possible.

We wait.

I think: The performers’ style has been brilliantly underplayed and deadpan, always ensuring we’ve been aware that they are “just acting”, just reading from the script, just doing their job. They have been playing at being these characters, reminiscent of children doing the voices of their toys, or parents reading out picturebook speech bubbles to pacify at bedtime.

We are told that the young woman is looking a lot better now that she has received some medical attention, and that the show will be restarting soon.

We filter back into the studio, staring at the ominous empty space where the girl and her mother were.

Tim Etchells thanks us all for waiting, and tells us that the young woman is fine now and has been taken home. They’re going to rewind a bit:

– “Help me!” cries the sinister girl on the bleak estate. “Please help me!”, words spoken into a microphone that stretches Terry O’Connor’s voice into a high-pitched squeal. Jackson says, “This is one of those dilemmas that really tests one’s strength of character.” The audience laughs. “Do you run or do you help?” More laughter. “I’d say run…”

The performance continues through to the abrupt unconcluded end that sees Kim and Jackson in a final moment of inaction. But that scary intermission has changed the nature of the experience. Our expectations are blasted and nothing feels quite so safe anymore, now that we’ve been reminded that anything is possible, that unexpected eventualities can occur anytime, anywhere. And also it feels doubly safe, because nothing else unplanned will happen now, the chances of two emergencies in one show are very slim. Something shocking and demanding and real intruded into the set rules of representation, and we didn’t know how to respond. The light responsibility of creating a piece of theatre together immediately switched to the shared weighty onus of how to handle this unforeseen occurrence.

The spectacle of this episode was defined by our inaction – by our handling of it as something to be observed rather than acted upon – just as the final image of the performance shows Kim and Jackson giving up on reacting and trying out just doing nothing. Whilst we knew clearly how to play the game that the show proposed, this situation was uncertain, unguided, unknown. There were some attempts towards protocol, but it was clear to all that the possible directions were out of our remit, we couldn’t control them, and so we did nothing. We were helpless and redundant. Having re-entered, there is now a new definition of ‘uneasy’ attached to this space, and the loudness and disjunction of the performance have become comforting solid certainties. We watch the rest of the show, happy to be able to achieve something together, something that elegantly falls within the realms of our comfort zone, stretching us only as far as we choose to go. It’s in our hands again now.

Eleanor Hadley Kershaw is a writer focusing on performance and live art, currently based between Brussels, London and Bristol. ehadleykershaw@googlemail.com