Thoughts from 1-1 Festival at BAC part 5

When i was 19 i got a job at a factory in Guildford which made steam wallpaper strippers.

My role consisted of taking short aluminium rods from a box on my right, pressing a foot peddle that started a spinning band of sandpaper, then milling a slight bevel on to each end of the rod.

I would then place the rod in another box to my left. I had to complete a certain number of boxes each hour. Despite the presence of a charming, german girl with whom i chatted at lunch, i lasted just 3 days at the job.

More recently, aged 29 i have been working in a factory which makes meaning. Again i have had to complete a set number of tasks each hour, now thankfully it was a series of performances lasting 1 minute or less.

However it was the most crippling difficult thing that i have ever done in theatre. Imagine that wallpaper stripper factory set-up, only now every single rod is completely different. You reach to get the next one and it is a gas, or an angry patch of sweat, some sense of longing, a bird, a bulbous tumour, rush of wind, a complex authority, an infinitesimal speck of dust. But still you must pick each one up, and put it through the same process, only now you get crushed occasionally, or your fingers get caught in the machinery or the rod ups and runs away, because now the rods are people.

I completed perhaps 700-800 such performances over my two week stint at the BAC.

After the first week of the shows i had to mentally drag myself to work, whilst each individual performance was a pleasure, the repetition, and hence the totality of all the shows i had done or was left to do became a pounding pressure in my temples.

I also had serious ethical doubts about the presentation of my performance The First Thing, after a number of people where shocked, insulted or otherwise upset by my reaction to them. In other contexts people are explicitly aware of what will happen when they enter the room, whereas i felt that as an unexplained part of a larger journey people were encountering what can be a very painful piece of work without any build-up or the processes which occur within the queue for the piece, in which people can see the effects of the show on others and make more of a judgement for themselves. If i do this piece again i will make sure to exercise more control over the aspects of the show which exist outside of the room.

Overall it was a difficult, thought provoking, exhausting experience.