1 February 2007 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” (Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle)

Standing in the present: trying to react

How many degrees are we removed from reality? How many screens, mirrors and walls of glass do we have to negotiate before we can step out of our virtual worlds and feel the cold winter air against our skin? Has the comfort of middle-class consumerism sedated our will to act in the face of adversity? In January 2007 when Ken Livingstone announced a 33% rise in transport fares across the city, how many of us did anything more than release a short sigh of despair? And when Wandsworth Council sent a letter on the 10th of January 2007 “informing the BAC of a funding cut and demand for commercial rental on the building” and Lyn Gardner sent out that SOS cry for help, what did we do but post more sheepish comments and blog responses like this one? I know some of us sent letters and emails, others filled in online petitions, I tried calling a Wandsworth councilor but couldn’t get further than his secretary…yes we do care, I know that, but are we still able to act?

And then, not entirely unrelated, but I read in the newspaper that “75,000 Mexican unionists, farmers and leftists” had taken to the streets of Mexico City in protest against price rises in basic food stuffs caused by Filipe Calderon’s market-oriented economic policies; and I thought, some people still believe they can make a difference but then again some people have little other choice than to be the difference. What about England? Habeas Corpus, free democracy, Comet, Asda…how far are we willing to go to save a cultural icon like the BAC? Today’s press release shows that the BAC’s future is still in dire straits. But let’s face it, closing down a theatre is not going to bring starvation to the London masses. How much of a staple is theatre in our consumer diets? In a perverse sense I’d rather welcome the closure of a centre like the BAC, if only as a test to see whether us Londonites would react. When theatres have fallen prey to conservative politics in the past how has this country reacted? Isn’t it time we stopped relying on funding from mainstream governmental institutions, ticking their endless racial, gender, PC, boxes and started stripping the theatre back to something less industrial, something more radical? Or has its venom been detoxed by the great British organic push of the new millennium?

Jumping backwards: radical performance + Welfare State International

Against the backdrop of social upheaval and left-wing student/worker activism in 1968, John Fox and Sue Gill founded the UK theatre company Welfare State International (WSI). During the 1970’s the group worked in the “performance art end of the alternative theatre spectrum”(1). Travelling around Britain in caravans and attempting to blur “the distinctions between art and life”(2) they performed ‘carnivalesque’ events such as the first Parliament in Flames performance in 1976 which consisted of a ‘community bonfire’ for Guy Fawkes night and the burning of a huge model of the Houses of Parliament. WSI was opposed to the consumerist, excess culture of modern developed countries and sought to build a collective, socialist, egalitarian utopia. As the company’s work progressed with large scale projects that attempted to apply their ideas in conservative contexts, they became aware that the performances were being received to critical acclaim more for their artistic and aesthetic resonance than the ideological change that they were trying to implement. Fox located the problem as one of not being rooted in a specific community: “We could not allow ourselves to develop pieces organically over years to respond to or follow up the longer term needs and rhythms of the host community, because essentially we were not part of any community.”(3) This led to the company’s relocation to the small, conservative community of Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria. What transpired from their work in Barrow, and was brought clearly into focus in their performance event called Town Hall Tatoo in 1987, was that in order to practice and materialize their ideas in the community they had to operate in a way that both pleased the town council, who was allocating funding to the company, and stir up the conservative ethos of the community. In short they had to resort to what I would call ‘infiltration’ and the means that allowed them to do this were visual and aesthetic, primarily representational. For example, in Town Hall Tatoo the event included:

“A Victorian market; a forty-five-minute town hall oratorio […]; a Queen Victoria lookalike competition; an official opening of the town hall by the Mayor; a grand parade of wildly decorated council vehicles […]; a ten-foot diameter, three-tier exploding birthday cake; and the ‘enhancement’ of the building itself.” (4)

Representation versus direct action is an issue that challenges the limits of radical performance’s potential to instigate change. If we agree that the primary purpose and need of radical performance is to bring change to the status quo by revoking the institutional structures that support it, then to bend to the rules of the custodians of that infrastructure would suggest that the radical has been tamed into relativist social humanism of the type that is found in the ‘political plays’ that fill theatre houses across the country. It was clear from the start that WSI was about working outside of existing structures, taking performances to places in which performance had never been done; this was the case of Town Hall Tatoo. But I wonder, as an audience member, a tax-payer watching that event, would there not have been a sense of feeling ‘cheated’ on; you thought you were paying for entertainment when in reality you were there to be ‘transformed’? The codification of imagery and language and secrecy behind the plot was WSI’s weapon to combat the status quo, and the skeptic in me says this process is probably more effective than going all out to form a political party and battle for change in a democratic arena.

But clearly, for WSI the onus lied in performance before anything else, and given that the company ran until 2006, there is hope in the possibility of representational ‘infiltration’ maintaining long-term trajectories. Note that while WSI officially stopped its activities in 2006, John Fox and Sue Gil formed a new company called Dead Good Guides where they “explore the area between theatre and contemporary ceremonies for rites of passage, are responsive to time and place and originate site specific art works.”

Interlude: Invoke a dead poet’s point of view

[audio:Thomas.mp3]

The radical in England today

One of the biggest shifts in the last two decades of British politics vis-à-vis arts and culture has been New Labour’s injection of government money into the arts through the Arts Council. In January 2006, as part of the independent think tank Policy Exchange, Munira Mirza, published a report titled “Culture Vultures: Is UK arts policy damaging the arts?” Mirza points out in her opening paragraph that “according to the chairman of the Arts Council England, Sir Christopher Frayling, we are living in a ‘golden age’ for the arts’. […] New Labour has kept up the pace, announcing the single biggest increase in support for the arts in the new millennium: £100 million over three years on top of a £237 million base.” (Mirza, p13) While the figures in 2006 suggested that there had never been a better time to be an artist in England, what ‘better’ actually meant in terms of artistic creation and the freedom practioners have to challenge the rules is quite a different story. I already touched on this point before when talking about WSI’s move to Barrow and having to negotiate funding and radical performance practice.

This has become the common story today in England for any practioner who relies on state funding; and the term ‘rely’ here is very important. In instances after WW2, when money in the public domain for arts funding has been scarce or non-existent, artists have had to resort to other means of subsistence. In amongst other things, self-sufficient communities and ‘squats’ have not been uncommon. But If an artist is forced to live on the edge of society she will probably end up questioning why that is and quite possibly address this through her art. Here we’re dealing with the notion there has to be a basic ‘need’ for the radical to exist. With New Labour and its lavish funding, there is the possibility (it is not a given fact) of being able to subsist on that money, but the result is the dissolution of the ‘need’ for radical action. It removes the ‘check’ from the ‘balance’ One could argue that this was is a government strategy to quell the poison that artistic movements have been known to inject, but that would only be a small part of the picture. What we must also consider is the wider social context of England today.

The first word that comes to mind when thinking about the orientation of society in England today is ‘consumerism’. Compared to the state of consumerism in 1968 which Guy Debord and the Situationists were rebelling against, capitalist consumerism today has become all-encompassing, it has become a primary raison d’être in life. Only recently, there was an article in the BBC Online edition referring to England as “a nation of “overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex-and-celebrity obsessed television addicts” What we have reached is a level of comfortably sustainable status quo both socially and politically. The country has long since risen above the poverty line, the health line, the education line. Now the important struggles that face us are presented as ‘global’ issues: global warming, wars against ‘Muslim fanatics’ and dictators in far away lands, causes that are presented as out of our hands. There is a prevailing sentiment that there is little left to do but sit back and watch the drama unfold on our screens. And the more we loose touch with the workings of our societies the more control the government and crucially the consumer corporations can gain on the public sphere: anti-terrorist laws, restrictions against large congregations in designated areas, excessive health and safety risks, brain-drain from television and mass media popular culture etc. etc. In short there seems to be little left worth fighting for on a popular scale and thus little ‘need’ for the radical to exist.

Instead, what has happened in the arts world is the clever government manipulation of the expectancy of what art should be in the sense that the arts are a progressive and healing force and should be nurtured and funded as such. As Mirza points out: “Arts policy today (within the wider remit of cultural policy) is infused with the idea that the arts are good for society, and that they can help achieve a number of social policy objectives. The people who fund the arts, provide the arts, and research the arts have all produced a consensus about the value of what they do, which hardly anyone challenges.” (Mirza, p15)

But we must accept that even the smallest of performances can invoke reaction and change at a later date and thus gauging the impact of the performance is something to be left to history. The means of engagement in radical performance, the ideology, the application and form all play key roles in determining the outcome. But overall it seems to me that it is much less important to calculate how much impact a performance will have and far more important to identify where the need for it to happen is. If there is the ‘need’ for the BAC, and the worst does happen, then surely its our duty to defend that need.