Fear of flying

I was sort of relieved that Ann Liv Young didn’t turn up for her two Solo performances at the Battersea Arts Centre Burst season this week. Her reason for pulling out – one of the people involved has a fear of flying – might have occurred to her a bit sooner, given that she’s based in New York and Battersea is not only on the other side of the Atlantic but off the tube map. But hey, you can’t think of everything when you’re an artist.

Why relieved? Well, Young is the sort of artist whose performances involve a lot of nudity, noise, vulgarity, mess and what’s commonly referred to as ‘challenging your audience’ in the creative context, otherwise known as ‘making them squirm with embarrassment’ where I come from. Her most recent touring show, an adaptation of Snow White, involved her being given a good seeing to on stage by her Prince. With a dildo. And full penetration.

You have to be in the right frame of mind for this sort of performance if you’re a man. I suppose you have to if you’re a woman, too, but it’s easier for women. As on a nudist beach, no one suspects you of having sleazed in under false pretences – and even if you have, it’s somehow more acceptable in a female (we’re only talking London liberal circles here, of course), not to mention easier to hide your physical reactions if your body gets a bit carried away by it all.

Anyway, I didn’t have to navigate the dodgy interface between art and porn on this occasion (not that I’ve ever been entirely clear about the difference, although I do understand that wanking over Old Masters – in an art gallery at any rate – is a definite no-no). Instead, I had to make do with being blindfolded and tied up in a wheelchair (yes, yes, but it’s a different kind of eroticism) and putting myself at the mercy of five Belgians from the Ontroerend Goed theatre performance group (a pun that gets lost in translation, the name means, very roughly, ‘Feel Estate’).

‘The smile off your face’ was first performed in Britain at last year’s Edinburgh Festival. It’s described as ‘absolutely terrible, a dreadful experience … manipulation in every way’ in one comment on the Times Online theatre pages. The woman who went ahead of me looked as terrified by the prospect as the artist in Ann Liv Young’s company was by the thought of flying (the difference being, of course, that when you’re the person doing the paying for something, rather than the one being paid for it, you pull yourself together rather than pulling yourself out).

I don’t understand it. Being tied up (you should try it some time) is an exercise in giving up control, putting your trust in others (just make sure the ‘others’ are trustworthy). Being blindfolded, as well as heightening the other senses (sound, smell, taste and touch all feature in ‘Off your face’), breaks down some of the usual social barriers between strangers. You find yourself, having entrusted these people physically, beginning to trust them emotionally too. The enhanced intensity of the physical experience segues seamlessly into a more intense emotional one too. You may laugh, you may cry, you will come to understand the significance of ‘the smile off your face’. You may even come to share some of your deepest feelings with strangers whose faces you’ve not yet seen – though you will by then have smelt them and felt them and shared a dreamlike proximity to their sounds and other sensations. Manipulative? Of course it is, but then so is all theatre – manipulation by consent.

What you make of it, how far you enter the performers’ dream-state, is in large part up to you. I don’t want to say too much because it’s always best to experience these sorts of things with as few preconceptions and as open a heart as possible. But you can trust them (believe me, I’m a journalist). You will come to no harm.

In the strange safety that is sightlessness, I found myself answering the sometimes-deeply personal questions that were put to me by one of the performers. This included, as well as revealing some of what I think about love and beauty, telling her the biggest regret of my life. And no, I’m not going to share it with the rest of the world on here: if you want to know, you’ll have to get yourself tied up in a wheelchair and see if the woman from Ontroerend Goed will tell you.