September 29, 2008
This is intended to be the cutting edge of creative theatre – to make performances that are not static, and always the same night after night, but have the explosive potential to be different every time. You the audience are not supposed to sit there like baby birds in the nest waiting to be fed by the actors; you will actively contribute to the way the performance turns out. It took a while to figure this out. At first I wasn’t quite sure whether this was two rather edgy comedy performances or two rather disturbing expositions of serious mental illness (one delusional, one depressive) that happened to be quite funny occasionally. It wasn’t stand-up and it wasn’t sketches, it was a “durational performance” – a kind of improvisation within an imaginative framework which involves a great deal of audience participation.
This begins the second you arrive at the venue, where Ellie Harrison informs you that she is the security staff and that if any fights break out or anyone is attacked, you must call for her at once, while handing you a voting card. This predisposes the audience to support the contention that the first performer, Jennifer E Jordan, is barking mad and that we should in fact be afraid of her. Her durational performance is called Rock Aint No Riddle. Fact. Jennifer E is a beautiful girl (with, coincidentally, the most gorgeous teeth I have ever seen on a real person) who has cunningly disguised herself as Jack Black, and rabbits entertainingly on about the qualities you need in order to become a rock star while scaring the bejasus out of the audience with her wildly staring eyes, X-Factor reject conviction, and over-enthusiastic renditions of awful rock songs with rather clever lyrics.
At one point she successfully terrorized the audience into parting with £1 each to purchase a small piece of furry fabric with eyes. This is the sort of interaction that makes durational performance exciting (for the performers at any rate) – for evidently the interaction is not predictable and could take the performance in any direction (hence the warning about potential attacks). With the well-behaved middle class punters in Oxford the confrontation was not very eventful – nothing more testing to the improvisational skills of Jennifer E occurred than one clued-up chap offering to buy two furry things for the price of one, and then proposing to pay with a 2p piece instead of a £1. Hopefully future audiences will play the game better.
The second performance, Dressing the Part, was “delivered” by Ellie Harrison, who invited us to speculate on the transformational power of clothes and alcohol. First night audiences are traditionally padded out with friends and relatives; not last night, I suspect, unless Ellie’s parents would be pleased to behold their pride and joy repeatedly stripping to her underkeks, swigging down almost an entire bottle of wine (shared with a member of the audience so we can be sure it really is), and screaming obscenities. Again, the audience was a bit bemused and didn’t really enter into the spirit of the thing. Perhaps it might work better if the audience is informed beforehand what is expected of them.
This is a form of entertainment not for the faint-hearted, and the performers themselves need to be exceptionally brave and quick-witted (though not in Oxford, obviously). Do go along to experience something that could be truly edgy, challenging and just a teensy bit scary.
This begins the second you arrive at the venue, where Ellie Harrison informs you that she is the security staff and that if any fights break out or anyone is attacked, you must call for her at once, while handing you a voting card. This predisposes the audience to support the contention that the first performer, Jennifer E Jordan, is barking mad and that we should in fact be afraid of her. Her durational performance is called Rock Aint No Riddle. Fact. Jennifer E is a beautiful girl (with, coincidentally, the most gorgeous teeth I have ever seen on a real person) who has cunningly disguised herself as Jack Black, and rabbits entertainingly on about the qualities you need in order to become a rock star while scaring the bejasus out of the audience with her wildly staring eyes, X-Factor reject conviction, and over-enthusiastic renditions of awful rock songs with rather clever lyrics.
At one point she successfully terrorized the audience into parting with £1 each to purchase a small piece of furry fabric with eyes. This is the sort of interaction that makes durational performance exciting (for the performers at any rate) – for evidently the interaction is not predictable and could take the performance in any direction (hence the warning about potential attacks). With the well-behaved middle class punters in Oxford the confrontation was not very eventful – nothing more testing to the improvisational skills of Jennifer E occurred than one clued-up chap offering to buy two furry things for the price of one, and then proposing to pay with a 2p piece instead of a £1. Hopefully future audiences will play the game better.
The second performance, Dressing the Part, was “delivered” by Ellie Harrison, who invited us to speculate on the transformational power of clothes and alcohol. First night audiences are traditionally padded out with friends and relatives; not last night, I suspect, unless Ellie’s parents would be pleased to behold their pride and joy repeatedly stripping to her underkeks, swigging down almost an entire bottle of wine (shared with a member of the audience so we can be sure it really is), and screaming obscenities. Again, the audience was a bit bemused and didn’t really enter into the spirit of the thing. Perhaps it might work better if the audience is informed beforehand what is expected of them.
This is a form of entertainment not for the faint-hearted, and the performers themselves need to be exceptionally brave and quick-witted (though not in Oxford, obviously). Do go along to experience something that could be truly edgy, challenging and just a teensy bit scary.