Back to Battersea

Back to the Battersea Arts Centre last night for the second part of my experience with the Belgian performance theatre group Ontroerend Goed. BAC is a somewhat spartan place to visit at the moment. Stripped off its Red Death masque, which it had worn so well since last autumn, it has a semi-naked feel, dark soot-marks from the Red Death candles leaving shadows of the Punchdrunk production’s presence. One of the BAC people tells me that, brilliant success though The Masque of the Red Death was, they are glad to have their centre back. In addition to a range of smaller arts events, they have two more ‘playground’ productions in preparation for the space that was once Battersea town hall. I can’t wait.

After Tuesday’s wheelchair experience with Ontroerend Goed, I’m a bit nervous about turning up for another piece of such intimate theatre so soon afterwards. I wonder whether I revealed too much of myself last time, and contemplate going in disguise in case anyone from the company remembers me.

This time the performance is called ‘Internal’. There are five performers for each member of the ‘audience’. The five of you line up at the beginning on white crosses marked on the floor in front of a black curtain. When the curtain rises you are each faced by a member of the cast. Silently, a few of them exchange places; then you are led away by your allotted partner to one of the five cubicles lined up along a wall.

Each cubicle contains a small table, two chairs facing each other, a bottle of spirit and two glasses. My partner is a strikingly attractive woman with soft lips, dark hair and deep blue, soulful eyes. She is dressed in black. We sit down. She pours a drink. We touch glasses. We drink. She smiles. Her eyes never seem to move from mine.

I say something like, ‘This is strange.’ I am aware of a hubbub of conversation coming from the other cubicles but these are the only words that will pass between us in ours; she says nothing.

She takes my hand. She caresses it. She continues to smile and engage my gaze with those searching soulful eyes. She moves her hand to my face and touches it gently. Then she moves my hand to her face and encourages me to do the same.

She takes both of my hands on the table between us. She holds them. We hold each other’s hands. She moves her fingers between mine. I move mine between hers. She continues to smile and look at me. We caress each other’s hands on the table.

After how long, I don’t know, she turns her head and looks out of the cubicle. I follow her eyes where they lead me. Everyone else, the other four actors and their partners, is now sitting in a circle of chairs. They are looking at us. There are two empty chairs. We get up go and sit in them.

Each actor in turn now introduces their partner and says something about them. ‘This is Jackie, she’s 24 years older than me.’ ‘This is Melanie, she’s not as nervous as she was at the beginning.’ When it gets to my partner, she says of me, ‘I don’t need to know his name.’

Then each actor says a few words about what they think of their partner and whether they think there could be anything between them. ‘I think Jackie has experienced a lot of love pain.’ ‘I think Simon can look at me for a very long time.’ There is a round of negative comments too. ‘I don’t want to know about Simon’s interests and hobbies.’ Melanie is asked to go and stand outside the group, while her actor-partner tells her what he thinks of her. He comes back without her and announces to us all in a whisper, ‘She makes me nervous.’

My actor-partner says she thinks there could be something between us because ‘We can communicate without speaking.’ When she is asked to say something negative about me, she says that she thinks I am ‘a kind and gentle man’. Why am I flattered? I know this is just a performance.

Jackie’s partner asks if he can hold her. Jackie says no. He asks why. She says she doesn’t know him. Then my partner stands up and takes off her top. ‘Is this what you want to see?’ she asks, once more smiling and never shifting her gaze from mine. Perhaps now there is music, I’m not sure. At any rate, we are each invited to dance with our partners within the circle of chairs and then asked, personally, privately, for our addresses ‘so that I can send you a letter’.

And then we are guided back to our crosses on the floor, where we each stand facing our partners. The black curtain comes down and we are left to find our way back outside the performance space into the comfort of the Battersea Arts Centre entrance hall. I have a stiff lemonade and feel, in the word used to describe the performance by one of my fellow audience members, perplexed.

Ontroerend Goed have spoken of creating theatre ‘that is equally challenging and treacherously shallow’. And in some strange and intangible way, I did feel simultaneously challenged and betrayed by this performance. Not to mention by those deep blue soulful eyes.

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.