Why attend the CREATIVE FUTURES season at the Sound & Image Festival?
Dr. Gareth White
Early November’s Do As You’re Told? symposium presented by the Centre for Creative Futures at the University of Greenwich was about instruction-based performances. Participants included artists, students, researchers, and at least one person who’d been passing by on Sunday and got drawn into the whole three days. It was a chance to catch up on some classics of the genre as well as to try out some new material, and to talk through what attracts us to performances like this, as makers or as participants.
Despite the title, perhaps, there were freewheeling discussions and lots of playfulness, and lots of space to take things on our own terms. Conversations turned around what it means to give people very specific, detailed things to do, and to experience, and how this doesn’t amount to telling them what to think or what to feel. Hosted by ZU-UK’s Persis Jadé Maravala, Josephine Machon and Jorge Lopes Ramos, there were also guest artists Silvia Mercuriali, Maria Oshodi and TAG - the Technoculture, Arts and Games team from Montreal -, bringing their own practice and distinctive perspectives. For a researcher like me, a gathering like this is an invaluable opportunity to sample this work and pick the brains of others who have experienced it, as well as those who made it.
Following the symposium ZU-UK continue to show several of their small-scale, intimate pieces, making them accessible to the public through the rest of the month and into December. So why should a non-specialist make time to experience a ZU-UK piece? Because you’ll come away with some striking memories and stories to tell your friends. But you’ll also be thinking, and feeling, a little differently too.
It’s tricky to talk about the very best of what they do, without giving spoilers. So, I’ll highlight a few moments without naming the shows they’re from, so perhaps you can join the dots yourself:
● Trying to keep my eyes open at 3 am, while I’m being tucked up in bed and while a scene I want to watch happens in another bed a few feet from me, and other audience members snore away nearby.
● Walking incredibly slowly, all alone, in a public place, concentrating on each step and each breath, while the normal world bustles on around me.
● Looking into a stranger’s eyes, suppressing laughter while trying to stay true to the bizarre flirtation we’ve both been led into.
● Being brought back from the brink of an imagined death, and being just slightly disappointed to be still alive.
What I find fun in their pieces is the mischievous wit of their scripts, the oddness of their situations, and the way they structure experiences to take me from one peculiar situation to another.
But what I find interesting is how these constructed experiences add up to an encounter with myself. Novelty and mischief are important, and there is nothing cheap about the effects that come with the surprises and the seductions. But because I am in the midst of the performance, it becomes a thing that happens to me rather than a thing I watch. And because the action is often about things I do myself, it happens through me as well as happening to me. My feelings are provoked and primed, and my feelings take the stage. My body isn’t just in the same space as the thing I’m watching, it’s in and through my body that the most striking moments happen. This can be, at points, confusing and contradictory. You’re likely to be deftly and delicately taken care of, because the brief journey of these pieces can take you quite deep. ZU-UK ask you to trust them, and they know they can’t abuse that trust or ask you to give it lightly.
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s something going on in performance, and in our culture. Artists, especially performance makers, are creating experiences, as much as they are creating shows. The show that made ZU-UK’s name — Hotel Medea — was epic: overnight, six hours long, and packed full of action and interaction. Like a few other shows in the early 2000s, it pulled together ideas and ambitions that had been circulating among theatre practitioners for decades, about community and commitment, physicality and affect, interaction and immersion, ideas that anyone interested in experimental theatre had talked about at some stage but never got around to really following through. But, remarkably, ZU-UK pulled off a show that went further (and longer) than almost anything else, and audiences went with it. It was a once-in-a-generation kind of show, and probably a once in a lifetime effort from the artists involved.
The pieces they’ve made since, and that they’re re-staging now, are in comparison restrained and brief, chamber pieces rather than symphonies; but in their own way they are just as ambitious. They’re still aiming to take you out of yourself, or deeper into yourself, and to engineer exciting and memorable encounters between people. And each of them is a deep and detailed exploration of what performance can become, often using the newest technology. The adoption of tech is not incidental or opportunist. It’s using these tools to create deeper involvement with the world, when we know that often it’s the tech that can over-mediate, and become a barrier to engagement, in every aspect of our lives.
Each of these pieces takes as its context a rapidly changing and unpredictable world. We’ve learned in the last few years that we can’t take for granted the time that we spend together, and that increased connectivity doesn’t lead to stronger connections. This work offers some peculiar and special ways to spend time, sometimes with strangers, sometimes with those already intimate, and often with some new and surprising version of ourselves.
LINK: CREATIVE FUTURES Programme
Ends 17th December 2023
Dr Gareth White is Reader in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, he is a teacher, a researcher and a theatre director specialising in participatory practices. His writing includes Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Palgrave, 2013), a monograph theorising the transformation of spectators into performers, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (Methuen, 2015), exploring the idea of the aesthetic in performance practice with social aims, and the forthcoming Meaning in the Midst of Performance: Contradictions of Participation (Routledge, 2023).
