The company’s ten-year story has not been without difficulty or probing from its critics, but as Shunt prepares to leave behind the much-loved Vaults, closing the door on that Carrollian hole at London Bridge station, I caught up with artist, academic and Shunt lighting designer, Mischa Twitchin, to take stock of Shunt’s achievements, to talk Money, and to ask what the future may hold.

Interview contents / Quick Reference 

Please note: in editing the interview transcript and dividing it up into ‘bite-size’ sections, I made several alterations to the chronological order of the original discussion. Any incongruencies in the text are therefore my doing. All photographs used in this article belong to Shunt and must not be reused without prior permission.

1. Origins     (↑ top)

(Two SHUNT Cabaret flyers from September 1999)

Andrew: How did Shunt begin?

Mischa: Shunt is a collective of ten artists – we met on a one-year postgraduate course at Central School of Speech and Drama ten years ago. That course then was about fostering companies. You worked in different groups throughout the year and then the last term was given over for each company to make a show. The task we set ourselves was to explore medieval representations of torture. On the whole, the company for that project was self-selecting and before the course was over we had agreed to rent a space to continue working together. So, being a member of Shunt in the first few years meant paying £50 a month cash to rent a railway arch in Bethnal Green!

We made The Ballad of Bobby Francois there and Dance Bear Dance, and we also did bi-monthly cabarets. Dance Bear Dance came at the end of a five-year period by which time we’d taken over the arch next door and the performance explored the relation between these two, parallel spaces. As it turned out, it had some big theatrical coups in it. It also happened to coincide with the change of Artistic Director at the National Theatre (NT). Part of Nicholas Hytner’s new strategy was to open up what counted as “theatre” for his audience at the NT.

Several people from the NT saw that show, including then Nick Starr and Nick Hytner. After five years, we were looking to move – having exhausted the arch spaces – and they invited us to do something in one of the non-theatre spaces on the Southbank. We thought what could we possibly do there? But all credit to them, they acknowledged that, and when we found this space [Shunt Vaults] Nick Starr hosted the negotiations with Railtrack in his office. It took about a year to get into this space. They also supported us with a couple of fundraising evenings – obviously, we had no money – and, then, crucially the tickets for our first show here, Tropicana, were sold through their box office, so there could be credit card bookings in advance.

However, that also meant, in contrast to our experience in Bethnal Green, that we opened the show with 200 people outside – which rather pre-empted our usual practice of working on the show with an audience in previews. We had this whole choreographed beginning, for example, and it was obvious on the first night that it wasn’t going to work. It took a couple of months of really learning what it meant to have an audience in this space for that show to come to fruition.

The tie-in with the NT also meant we were committed to a press night, which we’d never had before. So, there was one evening with a raft of critics who’d never seen any of our previous work and had no particular interest in our way of working. Indeed, why should they? They were waiting for the show to start, with no real sense that they might already be part of it when they came in. So, the main press record is not so good for Tropicana – but then it ran for nine months! In a way, that scenario had changed a bit by the time of Amato Saltone, and it helped open the door for work off-site associated with the NT.

2. Money     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Money)

Andrew: Shunt is launching a new show in September 2009 in a new space close to the Shunt Lounge at London Bridge. It’s your first show since Amato Saltone in 2006. What’s the basic premise behind Money?

Mischa: Conversations started over a year ago about what might be the material or the starting point for a new show. We have used a common text source – not necessarily literary – as a point of departure before. With The Ballad of Bobby Francois, our first show, it was a book called Alive; and then the handbook of rules for lawn tennis for The Tennis Show; or for Dance Bear Dance there was material around the Gun Powder Plot. It’s about coming to an agreement around a shared source that’s accessible through that reading. That’s not to say that the book is the source of the work; it’s just one element together with the people and the space. Then the key question will always be what is the journey of the audience that we’re constructing with these elements?

The conversations started before Easter last year, so before Northern Rock, but after the Enron scandal. One topic in discussion was the hubris of the financial world. Then for other reasons too, we were reading various novels by Émile Zola.

Andrew: Why Zola?

Mischa: One strand of conversation at a certain point was “why not take a novel?” Thérèse Raquin seems to be used every other year! So, there was a sort of curiosity about that. Then, of course, any individual Zola novel is part of a bigger cycle, so different people were reading different books to comment on in meetings.

Andrew: Were any of these books connected to the company’s prior discussion of the global financial situation?

Mischa: Well, as the crisis unfolded then people were reading about it. A couple of us had already read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, for instance. There were other books too. Lizzie [Lizzie Clachan] brought in a book from around the 1880s I think, a sort of an encyclopedia of the future, illustrating the technology of one hundred years’ later (so, in our time) as imagined by people in 1880. Then, I think, David [David Rosenberg] came across Zola’s novel Money (L’Argent), which has in its background Zola’s diagnosis of the corruption of the Second Empire. This, of course, chimed with our own times. Indeed, it’s interesting that the preface to the English translation, which was made around 1900, references specific financial events at that time, suggesting to readers how interesting it would be for them to read Zola’s account of similar events forty years earlier. So, you don’t need to be a Marxist necessarily to recognize cyclical, structural crises within capitalism.

We kind of settled on Money as a common source in a similar way that we had settled on the works of Cornell Woolrich for Amato Saltone. And also there’s a slight theme from Zola’s La Bête Humaine, with the image of a train that’s out of control.

3. Space     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event The Tennis Show)

Andrew: Money is being performed in a new space, an old tobacco warehouse not far from the Shunt Vaults. I’m interested in the relationship, if there is one, between the genesis of Money and the new space; whether there’s any element of site-specificity to it, and whether artistically the space has been a source of renewal for Shunt as a company.

Mischa: We’ve been in two spaces over the past ten years: Arch 12a in Bethnal Green and the Shunt Vaults, here at London Bridge. Essentially the company has always been committed to having a space of its own.

To the degree that it’s possible, then, we have control over access to it. Like the company name, ‘Shunt’, the space doesn’t already say “theatre”. It means that the invitation to an audience can be part of the work, part of the dramaturgy, part of the scenography. The actual entrance to the space can be materially reinvented for any particular show.

One of the things that the ten members of the Collective could agree on artistically was that, even if any individual had an interest in working in theatres, there was a shared commitment to working in our own space. For the public – distinct from the critics, perhaps – the work needn’t then be prejudged in terms of “a night out at the theatre”.

Of course, there will always be those associations, particularly for Tropicana because it was marketed through the NT. But, nevertheless, having our own space meant that it was possible to build a whole journey for an audience coming out of the tube station. The first quarter of the space of that show was wholly constructed, complete with a lift! So, in that sense it’s not site-specific – we make a fictional world for the audience. In the case of Money, we’ve built a vast machine.

So, there’s a relation to a space that has atmosphere, but which is, in a sense, neutral in theatrical terms – such as a railway arch. It can be more or less atmospheric, which already gives you something, but we’re not making a show about railway arches. We’ve not made a show at the Vaults about the construction of the railway in London. We’ve made fictional worlds for an audience that nevertheless are, of course, informed by, and produced in relation to, the space that we are in.

We’ve been at the Vaults for over five years and obviously at some point we will have to leave here. We’ve had three stays of execution and we’re here now until November [2009]. The idea was to set up the new show in its own space, and there was this warehouse just round the corner. It’s an empty shell, totally uninteresting as a building, but now there’s an extraordinary machine inside it. It’s great when people ask what it used to be before!

4. The Gaze     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Amato Saltone)

Andrew: I’d like to talk about the ‘gaze’ as a leitmotif in Shunt’s work.

Mischa: I suppose that was largely thematized in Amato Saltone.

Andrew: Yes, in Amato Saltone, but also in The Tennis Show, where you have that wonderful moment between female and male audiences who see each other on two sides of a tennis court, after having spent most of the performance in gender separation.

Mischa: Yes, in the Bargehouse. There were two points of access to the space, which already suggested the possibility of separating the audience. Then there were the rules of lawn tennis. Many games have this separation between men and women. So, you had this play with the men’s game and the women’s game. The same sort of social structure exists in dancing. So, the idea of the point of meeting was to have the two audiences facing each other across the tennis court, and once the lines of the court had all disappeared – down a hole that was there in the floor! – we had this voice-over invitation, using everyone’s names thanks to the tickets, with some schmaltzy music: “Would x like to dance with y?” Although it only actually happened once, I think.

With Amato Saltone, it was one of the initial ideas: trying to construct a scene in which the same thing could be seen by two different audiences. That was the initial idea and then the Cornell Woolrich theme was something that emerged out of other strands of our reading. As it happens, he is the author of Rear Window, which follows precisely this structure. Besides that, there is also an interest amongst most people within the company to have at least some moment in which there’s a common experience for the whole audience to share the image of something together.

Another key visual moment was in Dance Bear Dance, this point where the parallel audiences were revealed to each other. It was interesting the way in which audiences went through the process of asking whether it was a mirror or another set of performers, before acknowledging that they were part of a show that included them, in this image of the other audience. That was quite a theatrical coup, as it turned out.

5. Audience Participation     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Dance Bear Dance)

Andrew: In terms of the two productions at Shunt Vaults, Tropicana and Amato Saltone, I’m curious about the extent of ‘freedom’ that you give the audience to roam, search and explore the space. Sometimes there is a given set of parameters whereby in Amato Saltone, for example, the audience was given names, keys and a party invitation message; or more loosely in the case of Tropicana, where upon exiting the lift you were able to explore the space before a narrative sequence unfolded in the operating theatre and encroached on that sense of liberty. From my perspective as an audience member, the effect this sense of freedom has is one of participation, of straddling the line between actor and spectator, and that’s exciting and exhilarating. However, more often than not in Shunt’s work, I find that sense of freedom gives way, as the shows evolve, to a more traditional, proscenium-type configuration in which the lines are more clearly defined. Could you talk about the notions of freedom and participation?

Mischa: I suspect that this “freedom” is rather spurious. It’s the way you describe the experience, but the part of the experience that you’re calling “freedom” is no less conventionalized and constructed than the part of the experience that you’re calling traditional. There are a whole set of accidents that compose these possibilities as well as the decisions, of course; but, as I said before, one of the main interests of the company is to consider the journey of the audience. The work includes “an audience”, distinct from a group of people wandering randomly. How they are included is our responsibility; we are making an experience for an audience, in an environment that we are constructing. It’s not a Happening, it’s a rehearsed show and even if it’s not apparent to anybody – even ourselves sometimes! – there is a narrative structure.

The audience doesn’t have “a role” other than that of being an audience. There’s absolutely no role-play – the audience is not invited to perform.

Andrew: Even when a telephone rings and doesn’t stop until an audience member plucks up the courage to answer it?

Mischa: It’s a contrivance. There are moments in which there’s the invitation to the audience to act in the situation, but the production isn’t putting the responsibility of the performance onto anybody doing it. But it makes a difference, of course – and that’s the fun of it. It’s exciting and interesting to keep open the sense of possibility in the present moment, but the key thing is to keep open the sense that something can be imagined, which doesn’t mean you’re going to have to do it or take on a role.

So, what is the place of an audience? How to make coming to see a particular show already part of the experience of that show? With Amato Saltone, the first week it was people coming into a surprise birthday party, but that wasn’t going anywhere; so, by the end of the first month it was people going into a swingers party, in which we were giving people the fiction of an identity, with a name and a key. Curiously, that was something that appealed to a lot of people, but all it actually meant was that you had a secret name. You didn’t have to do anything, but it made your imaginary relation to being in that environment more active. After all, it was an environment that consisted of the other people that you were with. In that sense, it wasn’t a case of: “I’m watching a swingers party over there on stage, which they’re representing for me”; rather, “I understand that I am part of a swingers party, although I know that I’m not – but that is the story of what I’m doing here, and so where’s that going to take me?”

6. The Collective     (↑ top)

(The 10 members of the SHUNT Collective)

Andrew: What is the organizational basis of the Shunt Collective?

Mischa: There’s no need for rose-tinted glasses, sometimes it’s fraught and difficult, but there’s an ethos. With the last two shows and, of course, the Lounge, a team of people has gravitated to the space – some really fantastic souls. There is a wider sense of individual work that is equally part of a larger project.

That spirit of collaboration is something special; it’s about the quality of the particular person, not simply their extraordinary skills, but their own ethos. Professionalism is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. You can’t institutionalize individuals’ sense of commitment to their own work within a situation like that.

7. Cabarets     (↑ top)

(Flyer for a SHUNT Cabaret event)

Andrew: Could you talk about the significance of Shunt cabarets in the development of the company’s work and how they fed into the creation of the Shunt Lounge?

Mischa: We did two big shows in our Bethnal Green space: The Ballad of Bobby Francois and Dance Bear Dance and we also had a bi-monthly cabaret – on a Sunday. The only condition for performing in the cabaret was that nothing could last more than ten minutes, but otherwise you could do anything you liked.

It was important in the sense that you were participating in collective projects, which were things you wouldn’t necessarily have envisaged by yourself – with the excitement of realizing something that you couldn’t do or imagine by yourself, as the creative possibility of the group. And connected to that, the cabarets provided us with the circumstance in which people could individually show to other members of the company the different kinds of work that they wanted to experiment with. I think that’s important.

With Dance Bear Dance, we did a week of cabarets trying out ideas; a series of individual responses to a particular theme that fed into the production. And certainly, individual shows have developed from things that people have tried out in various forms in cabarets for themselves.

The Lounge was in some ways a continuation of this. It is a space in which people can come in and experiment with something. It’s been a unique thing in the London theatre scene.

8. Shunt Lounge     (↑ top)

(A short musical documentary by Susanne Dietz about the Shunt Lounge)

Andrew: To what extent, both artistically and commercially, has the Lounge Project been a success?

Mischa: The Lounge has been a huge success. It has been going for three years and the number of artists who have been able to experience for themselves what their idea could be in relation to an audience is remarkable. The key thing is that we provide the space, the technical support and a diverse audience coming in and experiencing the work. If you perform here it needn’t be to a coterie audience or just your friends.

There are over 2000 people a week in here – so, in relation to other things the Arts Council support it’s an extraordinary benefit, particularly when considering the phenomenal level of work produced, consistently, forty-eight weeks a year.

It’s spectacular here every week, but not necessarily a spectacle. It’s not advertised, there are no reviews, you pay to come into the space – a fiver on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and a tenner on Fridays and Saturdays – and then you have access to everything for free. So, whether it’s Stationhouse Opera trying something out, or an opportunity to tattoo bananas, there’s no prior judgment. That’s important where artists are experimenting with an idea. Their work is part of a whole evening that includes a lot of other work, installations, maybe a band, the bar, and so on. Each week – or fortnight – is curated by a different Shunt artist, supported by Andrea [Andrea Salazar] and her team, and it will be different in its dynamic, depending on all the work that’s being shown then.

9. Working Process     (↑ top)

(Scene from the SHUNT event Sightings)

Andrew: In the case of the collective, you don’t take on hierarchical roles so how do you actually go about creating a piece? What’s the Shunt working process, particularly given that your productions seem to be in continual evolution?

Mischa: The work is always in development with the audience. There are always company members watching the show, and then for the performers, as often as not, proximity to the audience is like ours in this interview now. If any particular moment is rubbish, you know it. Why would you want to do it again tomorrow? Of course, there are periods at which it’s exhausting and it takes a lot more effort to initiate bigger changes. But with Amato Saltone, for example, we changed the end in the last week of the run.

So, once there’s a sort of agreement on a common topic, there are basically a lot of improvisations and then proposals for other exercises, games, other things to explore, get sedimented out those. People also have responsibilities then in order to realise the structure of a production. So, there is a director, there is a designer, there is a lighting designer, a sound designer, and there are performers. But the work is a collective realisation. It’s not that any one of those roles has simply instrumentalized the others to realize a particular artistic vision that could otherwise have been achieved by just employing other people to do the work. What has been produced is the work of this particular group of people – both the Shunt members and our collaborators, the Shunt Associate Artists. In a sense, even if for any one person, they don’t feel they particularly “own” very much of it, it’s owned by the collective.

The tag line of “designed, directed and performed by Shunt” doesn’t necessarily refer to just the ten of us, it includes other associate artists like Nigel [Nigel Barrett], Tom [Tom Lyall] and Simon [Simon Kane], or people who have regularly worked with us like Steve [Steve Royle] with the lighting and George [George Tomlinson] with the whole scenic production – people who are also part of creating the work. So, there’s Shunt in so far as it’s the name of the collective of ten people, and then it’s the name of the event, which involves a much larger group of people.

10. Archives & Documentation     (↑ top)

(Image taken from the SHUNT website archives)

Andrew: You mentioned earlier the idea of documenting the Lounge. If that project were to go ahead, whom would the documentation be for and what form would it take?

Mischa: There are various bits of documentation. There are two films on Youtube, with links from the website, one by Inigo [Inigo Alcaniz], who has taken photographs at the Lounge for a long time, and the other by Susa [Susanne Dietz], a video artist who is one of the Shunt “family”. She has done the video work in all the shows and also has an archive of material that goes back to the early cabarets in Bethnal Green. I think she has plans to work with that material.

The problem with a lot of the shows is that they were lit for the eyes, in the actual space – not as a picture to be looked at separately. So, there’s a lot that is too dark for the camera. For me, lighting is about the contrast between light and dark. In “professional theatre”, there’ll be a photo shoot for the press and nobody could care less. It’s just a case of “put all the lights on”, and that’s fine, of course, because it’s just some random press photo. Also, with most of our shows there hasn’t necessarily been one point of view. What would it be to film a show like Tropicana? There’s the autopsy scene, of course, but apart from that it would be fairly difficult, since the first half of the show was about the spatial distribution of the audience – in darkness! Nonetheless, there is video material, but there isn’t really any narrative documentation.

I am interested to gather stories though – I’ve set up a little postcard link on the website with Nahum [Nahum Mantra], to try to elicit testimony as to what the Lounge means to people – anecdotes, memories, things that will otherwise be unrecorded but which concern the real experience of being here. Not just for the audience but also for the amazing people working here and their contribution each week.

So, who would it be for? Well, in the first instance it would be a sort of present for all those people, to be able to say retrospectively: “Oh, that’s what I was doing!” But it would also be an historical testimony.

Like the Lounge itself, perhaps the documentation could encourage and support the development of confidence for somebody to explore ideas and a practice in relation to an audience – if that’s what they’re concerned with. Wouldn’t that be great?!

11. The Future     (↑ top)

Andrew: What direction will the company take over the next five years?

Mischa: There’ll be the new show in September and then by sometime early next year – we trust – there’ll be a new space for the Lounge. Those two things mark a big change for the company.

Andrew: Why do you have to leave the Shunt Vaults?

Mischa: Because London Bridge station is being redeveloped. There are issues to do with access and the structure of the viaduct. I don’t know what the long term plans are for this space, but it’s part of the development of the station. But even if this space becomes sanitized and turned into a series of Starbucks, there will be a number of people who pass through to the station and think: “Oh, isn’t this the place where I saw people snogging dogs?”; “Isn’t this the place where there were two people sitting in hoops for six hours?”; “Isn’t this the place that had that strange concertina box that extended the whole length of it?”

The point is there’s the company with the wider group and its organization. Before moving here, the company was essentially the ten members. Since being here the company has grown as an organization. There needs to be another way in which the collective can develop with the shows and the Lounge – something new needs to be explored in relation to all of that experience. Let’s just hope that in another five years’ time we will still have an audience!

Bear with the comparison. Provided you’re willing to risk a few unaided leaps of logic, it does eventually make a surprising amount of sense. (In that regard, it’s a bit like the production staged inside the machine: Money, a SHUNT event inspired by Émile Zola’s novel L’Argent .)

The machine is the undisputed star of the production, which, after a few deliberately confusing false-starts, eventually reveals itself as a parable about the dangers of stock market speculation. As a performance space, the machine is constantly, wondrously surprising; just when it seems it has nothing left up its sleeve, whole new rooms emerge from under ingenious camouflage.

Its steampunk pistons and flywheels also drive the plot, such as it is; we, the audience, are speculators suckered by the smug Saccard into investing in the machine, despite neither him nor us knowing what it does. SHUNT’s playful sense of humour goes to work here, as we’re shown a gallery of ‘artist’s impressions of the future’ – Photoshopped images of the machine in the desert, coasting along railway tracks or perched halfway up a mountain.

The production itself is a series of disjointed scenes and encounters, ranging from the Kafka-esque (as Saccard pitches his ‘vision’ to eccentric business moguls who entertain guests only in the sauna, or travel only by footcycle) to the Python-esque (as Saccard turns a board meeting into a blackly comic game of condolence one-upmanship) to the weirdly voyeuristic (as we sip champagne and observe events occurring two storeys below, through two layers of plate glass).

Each individual scene is entertaining, often humorous, but it’s difficult to identify the purpose of the whole by examining the parts, and a certain amount of imagination is required to fill in the blanks. In that regard, it’s a bit like the machine itself; and the machine itself, as I’ve mentioned, is a bit like investment banking. It’s inhabited both by presentable official staff and by unacknowledged, sinister unknowns. It has levels and mechanisms that aren’t revealed until the very end. And as it barrels towards disaster, the obvious exits are sealed off, forcing those foresighted few to abandon ship by less conventional means.

Amato Saltone is an ‘environmental’ piece that begins with a long walk down a dark tunnel into the heart of the vaults at London Bridge. The following paragraph is a personal evocation of the tunnel experience intended as a point of reference for the discussion.

Just outside London Bridge tube station is a door in a red brick wall. Beside the door sits a ticket collector. She hands me a ticket and a key and I ask, “Is there anything I should know?” She looks at me for a moment then shakes her head. I pass over the threshold into three-quarter darkness. The hubbub behind recedes to a small background din and my senses begin tuning into the new surroundings. I move further along the tunnel, past a second set of doors with a small sign warning not to climb on ladders; there are no ladders, but by the time I realize this I have already been sucked into the performance. I stand in silent apprehension, breathing in the damp air, getting used to the smell of mold from the carpet beneath my feet. I am faced with a choice: do I try opening the doors to my right, disused and half-buried in the shadows, or do I brave the walk towards that wisp of light in the distance? Am I even allowed to go that far? Shouldn’t a member of staff have intercepted me by now? Nobody comes, so I head towards the light. It’s easier than I anticipate. The light gets brighter and reveals a gate, beyond which is a type of bar. The gate is locked. So I observe the people at the bar. Perhaps they are the performers, perhaps the show has already begun and I was too late to get in. Then I remember the key. It fits, of course. I pass through gate and lock it again behind me.

i. Darkness as disorientation – disorientation as evocation

That an inconspicuous door should turn out to be a ‘magical portal’ between two worlds, is symbolic of the territory one is entering with Shunt. Transformation is essential to the workings of the Shunt environment (1), and it operates first and foremost with the transformation of the spectator into ‘spect-actor’ (2). In the tunnel scene this is achieved through the use of darkness and its inherent ability to disorientate. In his poem, “The Raven”, Edgar Allan Poe writes: “Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; […]” (Poe, pp70) By correlation with the Shunt performance, not only is the audience member plunged into a completely new environment from whence he/she came, offering a sensorial shift (3) , but he/she also experiences a parallel (and connected) psychological shift through the absence of rules. In other terms, the audience member is given a degree (bound by the physical limits of the theatre artifice) of physical/psychological freedom to explore the space at will, and by doing so, the sense of logic and control that is present in a ‘conventional’ theatre scenario,

entrance > foyer > box office > auditorium > seated in darkness

is removed leaving him/her to create a personal/individual structure and narrative for the performance. In the result is the potential for every audience member to experience a very different performance. Though this sense of freedom becomes more controlled as the performance unfolds, the basic notion of ‘choice’ is still kept intact when the audience is split up and invited to explore different places. However, in the final scene of the show, where the audience is ushered into fixed seated, that sense of freedom is removed and we return to the ‘conventional’ schema of theatre. To what extent would an audience be willing to create their own performance structure if none was offered to them? (Note. This was partly the aim of the recent large-scale site-specfic performance Faust by Punch Drunk at 21 Wapping Lane, I’ll be attending the show next week and will post a response to it here.)

ii. Darkness as illusion – illusion as reality

In Artaud’s writing on the Taoist principles of fullness and emptiness as applied to his ‘theatre of cruelty’ he raises the following question: “What could prevent me believing in the illusion of theatre since I believe in the illusion of reality?” (Artaud, pp101) The equivocal sense of reality expressed in this citation is another one of the fundamental pillars that Shunt’s environmental theatre relies on, and as before it is achieved through the manipulation of darkness. If we leave Artaud’s philosophical interpretation of reality aside for the moment and focus on the issue of reality and illusion in the Shunt environment, there are several issues to contend with. On one hand there is a clear distinction to be made between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ world, as marked by the passage through the door at the beginning. The outside appears more real than the inside, because prior to entering we have mentally predisposed ourselves for a theatre show and thus we are aware that to a greater or lesser extent this will involve a degree of illusion. On the other hand, once fully immersed in the ‘inside’ world there is another distinction to be made between the reality of the environment, the fact that it is a historic underground building whose original purpose was not designed for theatre and thus it bears none of the architectural signs of the ‘conventional theatre’ (billboards, foyer, ticket office, cloakroom, auditorium etc), and the illusory side of the environment such as the gates, the bar and everything that the Shunt collective constructed for the show. Where darkness comes into play is in its ability to blur the lines between the reality and illusion of the space, so that the real may seem illusory and the illusory may seem real.

Though this is the same phenomenon found in the ‘conventional’ theatre space, Shunt’s departure from convention is in allowing its audience to interact with the environment, to ‘feel’ the boundaries for themselves, literally to touch the set and touch the ‘real’ walls and structures etc. However, in that moment of being able to touch the set, to pick up a box of ‘Sugar Puffs’ for example, what is happening is a concretization of illusion, a transformation of the illusory into the real. This desire to touch is the same as the experience at the end of a ‘conventional’ theatre show, in which there is a clear physical/spatial distinction between stage and auditorium, audience and performers, yet upon on leaving the space there is the desire to walk on stage and explore the world in which we have just suspended our disbelief. In the Shunt performance, the end result is somewhat different in the sense that upon leaving the theatre, the distinction that was in place at the beginning, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ worlds, is blurred so that London Bridge station becomes a gigantic performance space (albeit momentarily), and thus Artaud’s ‘illusion of reality’ becomes a possibility.

Read part two of this article »

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Footnotes

(1) – The use of ‘Environment’ and ‘Environmental’ in this article pertains to the experiential/sensorial/atmospheric rather than the ecological.

(2) – spect-actor: This is not a reference to the ‘spect-actors’ in Boal’s ‘forum theatre’, rather I intend to use the term here to refer to a type of audience that for the most part is asked to ‘spectate’ or observe the company’s actors, but on certain occasions, that are engineered and accounted for within the structure and timing of the performance, is also prompted to ‘act’ or participate.

(3) – It is important to note that this sensorial transformation is not necessarily a pleasant experience for all audience members, especially if one is subject to darkness- related phobias. This is an element of planning/devising that Shunt either overlooked or deemed detrimental to the result of the show.

References

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1977)

Poe, Edgar Allan, Poems: 1827-1849, ed. James Havoc. (London: Creation Press, 1989)

iii. Caught between comfort and fear

In a well-lit tunnel there is no moral dilemma, it is just a passageway between two points. But when a tunnel is plunged into darkness a paradox occurs: whereas the entrance to the tunnel remains a ‘comfort’ zone, the exit is now riddled with the uncertainty of what lies between. The relationship between the individual’s gaze and his/her knowledge of the surrounding world (4) is removed and subverted through the imposition of darkness. It may be that it was a conscious decision to put the audience through this initial ‘test’, perhaps as a transformational device as I have suggested above, however it is arguable that through Shunt’s repeated use of darkness/blackouts to achieve this disorientation/alienation effect in the main body of the performance, the impact of the subversion weakens as it becomes a recognizable and controllable pattern. Once aware of the pattern, the experiential/environmental artifice of the performance begins to crumble, prompting the search for a ‘coercive’ narrative or a new pillar of meaning underpinning the performance. Michael Billington touches on this point in his review in the Guardian newspaper: “I would like to see Shunt move beyond sensory titillation and show they can rise to the demands of narrative.”

Billington is so intent on pinpointing the weaknesses of Amato Saltone that he allows no room for a different understanding of narrative (a point which I raised in section one); a fragmented narrative based on the juxtaposition of imagery, sound and the environment, in which the individual’s choices of position and interaction along his/her journey allow for a unique experience and understanding of the show. What is problematic about this type of structure and particularly in Shunt’s implementation of it, is that to be viable with any sense of integrality, it requires sustaining the audience’s sense of ‘freedom’ while still nurturing tension between comfort and fear, all in a non-linear and non-repetitive way. Shunt only went half way towards this end, because after the initial ‘penthouse scene’, a grotesque cabaret in which the boundaries between performers and audience were excitingly blurred, they began to push the audience down predetermined paths by dividing us into groups that ended up sitting in the static auditorium configuration from which they had tried to deviate in the first place. This was somewhat of a shame since their choice of material, inspired by the work of Cornell Woolrich, “the father of film noir” and used to explore the theme of voyeurism and the city, was distinctly apt for this type of alternative performance structure; it could be spliced, juxtaposed, and rearranged in a montage/pulp fiction manner, which the audience could easily ‘dip’ in and out of.

iv. Darkness and the gaze

Beyond the sensorial use of darkness in Amato Saltone, a great deal of work had gone into exploring its thematic use in line with the ‘film noir’ genre. Specific references were made to the Woolrich-written, Hitchcock-directed ‘Rear Window’, a film that portrays a wheelchair-bound photographer who spies on a neighbouring apartment and becomes convinced that one of the neighbours has committed a murder. Similarly in the performance, the audience observes the shadows of people in windows committing murderous acts; then in another scene actors gaze at the audience through binoculars, and later on the audience, now split into groups, gazes at each other through large living room windows; in the final scene, in the mock cinema auditorium, there are moments when the actors on stage stop and peer at an audience member illuminated by a spotlight. A part from the shadow scene, these are all examples of a type of voyeurism in which the voyeur relies on his/her concealment in a state of darkness.
Although the audience is often being subjected to potentially voyeuristic situations, the power of the gaze is intentionally annulled or restricted from fulfilling the act through the visual clashes mentioned earlier:

ACTOR < > AUDIENCE        AUDIENCE < > AUDIENCE

This can be read as a reaction to the long debate on ‘scopophilia’ sparked in 1975 by Laura Mulvey’s famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a feminist critique of patriarchal values in ‘classic’ Hollywood cinema where “pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female’ (Mulvey, 1992. pp27). The audience is finally ‘allowed’ its voyeuristic moment, when a tall black man undresses under a small spotlight and changes into a sailor’s costume. This is perhaps an allusion to how the ‘gaze debate’ opened up in subsequent years to address issues beyond gender such as race, status and power.

Visually ‘maimed’ and debased of power, the audience leaves the Shunt vaults to step back out into the ‘reality’ of a busy London Bridge station. I was immediately drawn to the voice of a woman speaking over the station’s Tannoy system: “To ensure customer safety and security measures, CCTV is in 24 hour operation on these premises”. There was a chilling sense of irony in these words and the feeling that the performance is to a degree, never-ending because somewhere somebody is spectating.

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Footnotes

(4) – Reference to Carl Jung in Chapter XI of Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “…Under the influence of scientific materialism, everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt…”

(5) – Cf. The Shunt Website: http://www.shuntevents.freeuk.com/amatoleaderpage.htm

(6) – N.B. The undressing scene was not present in the first performance I saw on Friday 10th November 2005 and had been added subsequently.

References

Billington, Michael, ‘Amato Saltone Review’, The Guardian Newspaper Online Edition, Jan. 26, 2006. Consulted on Feb. 15, 2006. Website address: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ arts/reviews/story/0,,1695224,00.html

Caughie, John, Annette Kuhn & Mandy Merck (Eds.) The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992)

Jung, Carl, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984)

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In Caughie et al. (Eds.), op. cit., pp. 22-34.