Pilot 14 Rocked

This will be a big old ramble of a post, there is a whole bunch of stuff on my mind, so here goes...

I'm just back now from Birmingham where I performed some material at Pilot, for those who don't know this is a wonder scratch night hosted at the Custard Factory. The night had a really good mix of performance styles and levels of readiness, so that the 7 different pieces on show all stood out in there own ways. For me the highlight as an audience member was the piece by Spanner, really engaged physicality and a thought provoking show about the potential pitfalls of power, in which the BFG (Big Friendly Giant) plays the role of good while still managing to kill quite a few people.

As a performer it was a great audience and I found presenting material that was largely improvised was really liberating (although of course before getting on stage I was burning with fear) in fact the greatest eye opener was the audience suggestion of 'Hugo falling through space' which won't make much sense if you haven't seen the show, but essentially it involves mashing two characters into one. For the next scratches of this show I want to push this mix up idea further to generate new material.

The next bit is really more of a rant-

Buildings embody and present an ideology, architecture can either liberate or constrict the soul. The other day I had the misfortune to take a walk through the new development in the centre of Bristol: Cabot Circus. One word, repeated five times: ugly, Ugly, UGly, UGLy UGLY. This development is an architectural horror. More than that it is anti-human, it is against life, against hope and the sooner it is torn down (projected lifespan 30 years) the better it will be for Bristol. Let me list, if you are interested, it's faults-

Firstly the elevations presented to incoming traffic entering Bristol via the M32 are sheer, blockish, faceless, and inhumanly bland these walls tower above the workmen below and to me they feel not just uncaring, but hostile. It is as if the whole project has it's back turned to the rest of the city and everyone entering it. Cabot Circus is inward facing, in the most negative sense, those walls for me tell the rest of Bristol to Fuck Off.

Secondly you might ask: what is presented inside this inward looking development? A horrible mismatched hotchpotch of every architectural trend since 1990, the whole things is a grim pastiche of other peoples good ideas done badly: we a have a slender, curving elevated walk way, that feels like an inept reference to London's Millennium Bridge; the semi geodesic dome of the British Museum, has been lifted whole sale, only the grandeur is missing; we have an elliptical tower that seems like a reject from Canary Wharf that has shrunken and faded in the wash. Everywhere are buildings designed so that they already look like the special effects on reruns of 1970s Top of the Pops- outdated, naff, confusing and unnecessary. It is the materials that get me though, every surface seems to have been rendered with a different type of stone, brick or glass, in such as way as to create the greatest possible visual unpleasantness. The designers of this multi billion pound project apparently gave control of the exterior design to a random generator that hashed out a whole nonsense of incompatible styles of cladding, mindless of the outcome. Cabot Circus is unadulterated crap from beginning to end.

Which is to say nothing of it's greater faults- all of the national and international chains that will take up residence in this brittle mausoleum are economic leaches, parasites that will be a net drain upon the resources of the city, for every £100 spent in this type of store less than £60 goes back into the local economy, compared to spending £100 in a locally owned business, which thanks to the multiplier effect, actually generates £120. All this blind consumerism at a time when the ecological roosters are coming hole to roost: Bristol could be under water in 20 years time, to say nothing of a world consumed by conflicts over oil, water, bauxite, Antarctica, the caucuses and outer space. So for me the ideology or Cabot Circus is the ideology of Mammon and the Grime Reaper. Enough, I have a plan, redemption is at hand: Learn Mandarin and move to higher ground, and learn to shot straight or co-operate.