Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

The legendary performance artist Penny Arcade, in her own words

I am a performance and theatre artist, a poet and writer and an entertainer. Sometimes when I am working at my highest ability I am all those things at once…

I was an imaginative child. My very first obsessions were based on fairytales, and I lived in the metaphysical realm, with imaginary friends that were either fairies or angels. This also included intimate relationships with inanimate objects like rock formations, fields, swamps and groves of trees, based on fairytales and magical stories from my pagan southern Italian culture. Later, I was obsessed with Hollywood and fashion. I compulsively read movie magazines and hairstyle magazines and tabloids which I discovered when I was allowed to go to church on my own, using the 25 cents my mother gave me to put in the collection box to purchase the tabloids.

I dreamt that I had been discovered as a child movie star (like my mother’s favourite actress Shirley Temple) and that I was going to bring my family out of poverty by being a movie star. The crisis each night was that I believed I had to also write the movie, which kept me in a perpetual state of anxiety because I believed that this was how I’d save my mother, a single-parent sweatshop seamstress with four children.

By the age of 9 I was completely submerged in a fantasy world – I was actually convinced that I was in the television series Bonanza and Zorro, and that roles had been written especially for me on those shows. I was brought screeching into the real world when another 9-year-old girl told me she no longer wanted to be friends with me. I looked at her and said ‘That’s ok but you can’t be on Bonanza anymore! She looked at me with the strangest expression and said ‘Bonanza is not real!’ and I burst into tears and shouted ‘Bonanza IS REAL! It is REAL!’

By the time I was 11, the entire town was wrongly convinced that I was having sex with everyone. It was a very painful time in my life as I had no one to appeal to, no one to take my side or protect me, least of all my own family. I was an outsider among outsiders, which moved me increasingly further and further away and out of any society. I was a loner compelled to follow my destiny.

I was told I was bad by nature, that I had ‘bad blood’. But I don’t think of myself as a bad girl or as a rebellious person. I think of myself as a good person in a bad society. Am I still a ‘bad girl’? Do I still get cut out and left out of parts of society that are based on maintaining the status quo, based on fitting in at all costs to personal truth? As a woman in our culture that hates women – that especially hates smart and strong women – and as someone who could not hide my difference, my queerness, I was belligerent when faced with the petty lies and hypocrisy of the bourgeois world.

I became an artist because I was compelled to express myself. This was my earliest sense of myself, my desire to create my own reality and to escape oppressive emotional circumstances which I had no control over, and couldn’t deal with in a conscious way. Creating theatre deals with these subconscious feelings in a conscious way, making use of them in a transformative way.

Being an artist was not a career choice in any sense: even when I was a Warhol superstar at 19 and was told I had a career, it made little impact on me. It was much, much deeper than that, and it has only gotten deeper as I have grown older. I now, many years later, see it as my role in life. Everything in my life was and is funnelled through my imagination and creativity. It is the only way I have ever known how to make sense of life.

I met Andy Warhol through ‘Superstar’ Jackie Curtis. Andy was a friend of John Vaccaro’s and a fan of his theatre, The Playhouse of The Ridiculous, where I was performing. Andy came to see all our shows. Andy asked Jackie to bring me to the Factory because he had seen me on stage and was looking for new ‘stars’. I was the ‘It’ Girl of the downtown art scene in 1969 because of my performance style and my youth and my ability to communicate verbally with anyone. By 1969 Edie Sedgwick was quite diminished by drugs and mental illness. Viva had moved on to other things. They were all a lot older than me. I was precocious. I had met Taylor Mead on my own, on the streets of the East Village, which is the way one met most people in those days. I wanted to be like Taylor. He was a comedic genius.

I don’t think that most people fully understand that as a child of the depression, Andy Warhol fully believed that he was going to become rich by making movies. Of all the Pop painters, Andy’s work was worth the least. His paintings were never sold at the prices other Pop painters like Oldenburg got. Andy made most of his money through commissions from society people and this too was looked down on. Andy was pretty much a joke in the art world until after his death.

Andy Warhol didn’t pursue content. It was we who brought content to him, and that was why he needed us. None of us were interested in ‘real life’, but Andy was the least interested. Andy was like a metal detector. He detected ideas. He didn’t actually work from his own ideas. He found ideas in other people. That was the genius of his mind. His ability to find, follow and act on other peoples ideas. It is this quality of his mind that makes me say that Andy convinced the art world he was an artist when he actually was an art director. You see his influence and a great deal of his legacy in advertising, because there is so much art in advertising today, and so little art in art.

Glitter, that is what is left from those days. And the magic that resides in some people’s spirits that nothing – no hardship, no criticism – can remove, then or now. A twenty-something drag performer was at my house the other night changing for a performance in a nearby club. She said, ‘I have to warn you, I leave glitter everywhere.’ I replied, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can take you to East Village apartments where people are still annoyed by the glitter I left between their floorboards in 1968.’

When I started out making my own work I created characters from real people I knew, so in that sense I did drag of them. Male and female and actually drag of drag queens like Margot Howard Howard, the famous NY drag queen. She was a working class intellectual of German-Irish extraction who convinced NY Society that ‘she’ was the granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk! That was my work in the 1980s.

I will say that very little has actually changed in ‘sexual politics’ over the years. It has just shifted, and in some ways the situation is worse because the issues have been deflected. Transgendered people are still on the lowest rung of both the gay world and the straight world. Bisexuals are still considered aberrant and lesbians are still invisible and do not have the cache that gay men have long enjoyed.

My sex and censorship show Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! still has a massive impact today, even though it was written 20 years ago. People routinely come up to me after the show and say ‘No one is saying what you say in this show! It is so contemporary. I can’t believe you didn’t write it this year.’ The show started as a solo fellowship audit for the National Endowment for The Arts in 1990 at the height of the Censorship Crisis, what is now called The Culture War – a war that incidentally has never ended in the USA. It was meant to run for four performances. It sold out immediately and continued to run for two months. It began as an improvised show, like all my work, with just the ideas that I take on stage with me and two women strippers, Arlana Blue and Diana Moonmade – both staunch freedom-of-speech advocates and feminists. In 1990, in NY’s downtown art scene which was highly politically correct, strippers were simply unacceptable. You could play a stripper in a play but you couldn’t actually be one without being seen as pandering to the patriarchy. In 1992, Mark Russell, of Performance Space 122, which had lost its funding (like every other theatre that presented queer work during that period) and was looking at having to close the venue, unable to pay salaries, asked me to bring B!D!F!W! for the summer. It ran and ran…

A week after we closed at Performance Space 122 we opened at the legendary Village Gate (which had launched Lenny Bruce) and played there for one year. I had the very great freedom to continue to improvise: after every show my collaborator Steve Zehentner would bring up questions that were sometimes very difficult for me but forced me to dig deeper into what I was trying to say. One of the best lines in B!D!F!W! came from Steve pushing me about what it meant to me to be a faghag! Finally I just burst out in anger and shouted, ‘Faghags are like certain Christians who hid Jews in their attics.’

I decided that I needed to include men in the show if I was serious about my feminism, because feminism that doesn’t include men and strippers is not a feminism I can be part of.

It was a queer show, based on a political humanism that said: We are all equal. We are free, and so don’t use your gay liberation to oppress my gay liberation or my inclusion in the human race. The show represented ideas and values that did not have a voice in the theatre or anywhere else. The queer politics that I espoused in the show were in complete contradiction to the ‘gay’ world that either sought to distance itself from anything that seemed unseemly, or had completely capitulated to a very narrow ghetto marketing mentality – to the point where it was creating the same institutions of distrust, hatred and oppression towards heterosexuals, bi and transgendered people that decades of gay people had suffered from.

Of course Quentin Crisp was a big advocate of the show because he had been the victim of so much oppression by the ‘politically correct’ gay world. It was, and remains, a very important show about personal freedom and individuality. Many, many people saw that show at least three times and as many as 25 times bringing everyone who mattered to them. They brought their parents, co-workers and neighbours to the show and even came out to them during the show. It is a show as much about the audience as it is about me, my ideas, and the dancers.

The question the show has always asked is: How do we live now? How do we really live? How do we find the freedom to inherit our natural legacy of joy and fulfilment? How to love ourselves and stop feeling oppressed and tortured by other people? How do we stop hurting others, stop limiting others because we ourselves feel hurt and limited?

The truth is that someone will always be ‘queer’ because humans are pack animals, herd animals, and humans want other humans to fit in with the crowd. Humans don’t like outsiders, but then conversely humans admire outsiders when they are at a great distance, not in their midst – and they especially admire outsiders once they are dead. Look at what dying did for Jesus Christ, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo!

The kind of censorship that two decades ago was rampant in America, and is still rampant today, has infected the whole world. B!D!F!W! is grounded in separation of church and state. When I performed in Britain 20 years ago, the British press was shocked by how narrow-minded America was. The were stunned by the fact that no American newspaper, or radio or television show, dared use the title, except for the Village Voice. From The Times to the Guardian to local British newspapers, the title twenty years ago was not an issue in the UK. This year I was a guest on the Joanne Good show on BBC1 and before I went on the air the producer took me aside and said, ‘I am afraid we can’t say the title of your show on the air. BBC rules.’ Jo Goodman and I spent the rest of the show speaking about the censorship that has crept into Britain. Twenty years ago there was no Born Again Christian movement in Britain. Now it is everywhere.

The personal politics which were so radical and put the artists who expressed and worked with issues of race, gender, sexuality and personal identity at real risk in the 80s and 90s have become a branding idea. A provocative gesture is simply not enough. An artist has to dig much deeper to talk about these issues at the depth they need to be spoken about. The accepted societal mood and pose today is sardonic, sarcastic, cynical and eschews anything that smacks of real feeling or real emotion, and that’s led to emptiness in the theatre. I see so many young artists who have had no real life experience trying to communicate using nudity, bodily fluids, sexual action on stage to get attention – and of course they get it, but within ten minutes it is clear that they have no ideas, no emotions, no experience to communicate to the public.

I see very little real politics in performance art today. Politics meaning what we do to one another in the world, culture meaning how we talk about what we do to one another in the world. Most of the work I see among young people is about personality – their own. The values of any given era are reflected in the work of that era. There is a big focus on becoming famous, and successful. The work is very career driven, which limits how political people can be or want to be. The artists I know who are political are marginalised. It seems there is a haze of political meaning to work, like a veil cast over the concept of it but most of it is about the artists themselves. Not all of it, but a great deal of it. This is natural I suppose when people come directly out of school into ‘Performance’: there is very little life experience to draw from, so much pressure to be successful and to have a career, with art being taught as a profession – when art is in fact a lifelong vocation.

For a political response to the world as it is today, I look to Judith Malina of The Living Theatre, who at 85 is still making political theatre and working as she always has for the beautiful, pacifist, non-violent anarchist revolution with her mainly very young company.

There is nothing in the world that compares to seeing the work of artists who have consistently made work for over 25 years. Art is one of the things that one gets better at doing. I have long loved the work of Richard Foreman, The Wooster Group, Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines, William Forsythe, Meredith Monk, John Jesurun, performance poet John Giorno, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver… Amongst younger artists, I admire David Hoyle, Robert Pacitti, Taylor Mac, Meow Meow, and I am often as influenced by painters, photographers and musicians (from Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith and beyond) as I am by theatre-makers – perhaps because I am fundamentally a conceptualist.

I do not think and then speak. I think as I speak, I find out what I am talking about as I speak. Every good line, every powerful line in my writing, was born by my speaking it to someone in real life, long before it was spoken on stage. Or it was born on stage while I was supposed to be saying something else. To improvise is to be a medium, to be an antenna. It is a somewhat frightening thing to do because you have to relinquish control on certain levels.

I am very happy. I grew up to be the kind of person I wanted to be. I am very proud of my work… Everything is next!

Penny Arcade is a writer, poet and theatre-maker/performance artist. Always a keen documenter and observer of people, she wrote her first play when she was 14 years old in reform school (Borstal).

She started performing professionally aged 18, creating improvised theatre with The Playhouse of The Ridiculous, and then joined Warhol’s Factory aged 19. She continued to work with various different experimental theatre groups (as a performer, poet and singer) until she was 34 years old, when she launched her own work as a performance artist Although she moved on to create scripted work, she has always maintained a high percentage of improvisation in her live shows.

Penny Arcade’s seminal work Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! premiered in 1992, and ran to great acclaim at PS122 and the Village Gate in New York City, then subsequently toured to 20 cities around the world from 1993 to 1995, including two tours of Australia, and a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe. She retired the show in 1995 and created four other full-length shows. The show was revived in 2006 and has enjoyed great success since. It is playing at The Albany, London 15-23 December 2012; see here.

Penny Arcade also creates ‘ hosting monologues’ for Pussy Faggot, a performance art party she has hosted over the past three years for Earl Dax.

Apart from her performance appearances, theatre-making, acting and touring, Penny Arcade currently also writes poetry, essays, and magazine articles. Her long- running video documentary series – The Lower East Side Biography Project, Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia – was created with longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner (Steve is also dramaturg on Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! and designer of Penny Arcade’s work). It broadcasts weekly on cable television on Wednesdays at 11pm NY time, and also streams online at the same time.

Julien Cottereau: Imagine Toi

An empty stage, curtained back wall, red lights. Enter dishevelled young man in too-short trousers and a floppy felt hat, wielding an invisible broom. Cue classic clown/mime sequence, in which a series of imaginary objects and actions are animated by live sound – the performer’s own squeaks, whistles and body-percussion. Ideas and images start simply and build beautifully. Example: there’s a piece of chewing gum on the floor, it sticks to his shoe; he pulls it off and pops it in his mouth, he chews and chews then pulls out a great long length, which becomes a skipping rope, which becomes a lasso to catch a buzzing fly. Later, there’s a rubber ball that morphs into a beach ball bounced back and forth with the audience, which becomes a football passed to a young boy, who is invited onstage for a game of footy-keepy-uppy, which the boy wins – so the ball gets passed out again to the audience, which then gets lost under the seats.

At which point there is a glorious moment of impromptu audience interaction. A little girl, no more than three years old, scampers down the aisle to help find the ball, hopping happily from one foot to the other. At which point our entertainer stops in his tracks and stands watching her – not for seconds, but for minutes. She hums to herself, oblivious, and carries on peering under seats or picking dust off the floor. It’s a moment worthy of Philippe Gaulier, the on-stage pause in action pushed and pushed, a collective holding of breath giving way to riotous laughter.

And Julien Cottereau is indeed Gaulier trained, his stint with the master-clown coming after his graduation from France’s renowned ENSATT theatre school, and before his long-standing employment with Cirque du Soleil, most famously as the solo mime Eddy in their best show, Saltimbanco. His skills as a clown and mime are superb, and this first section of the show is a perfectly realised showcase of these skills. Here, as elsewhere in the show, these physical skills, together with that clever live sound accompaniment and well-chosen bursts of recorded music (cheery synth bleeps from the Popcorn instrumental Euro-pop hit; moody twangs of Ry Cooder guitar), combine with a simple but strong scenography of light which uses colour washes and spots and strobes to animate the empty stage for each carefully crafted vignette.

The second block of scenes takes us into slightly more grown-up territory, with a dating scenario acted out with a young woman chosen from the audience – the predictable nervous-clown-seeking-a-kiss spoof following on from a slightly suspect model-girl photo-shoot sequence. We then have an interesting section playing out a moral dilemma, in which a wounded dog needs to be put out of its misery, an audience member chosen to fulfil this gruesome task. It’s wonderful how much empathy an audience can be made to feel for an invisible dog! The final big audience participation number brings the ‘girlfriend’ back onstage as a silent-movie melodrama heroine, tied up in sacrifice to an invisible growling beast which has been making an intermittent appearance, through sound and pulsing red light, throughout the show. A large-bodied man picked from the audience is schooled by Cottereau to stomp and growl and slash, but he seems unsure of whether he is supposed to be the beast or the hero, and we are thus also unsure. In all three of these scenarios using adult audience participants, I have the slightly uncomfortable feeling that Cottereau has picked the wrong person to play with.

That could be just bad luck, but I have seen this show before (at the Edinburgh Fringe 2010), and had the same concern about the ‘beast’ section, which similarly fell a little flat. I can’t help thinking that whilst the interactions with children are pure brilliance, and the general whole-audience exchanges are beautifully managed, the grown-ups brought into the action aren’t really dealt with as well as they could be. And at 90 minutes, it all seems to drop a little in energy towards the end. It feels like an hour-long show drawn out beyond its own comfort-zone.

It is hard not to draw comparison to that other famous Gaulier trained solo clown-mime, the Total Theatre Award winner Dr Brown, who seems always to pick the right people – people who morph from audience participants to full-on collaborators in seconds. It also has to be said that in the 21st century, Cottereau’s traditional typecasting of male and female characters seems a little old-hat.

Imagine Toi has been touring since 2006, winning awards and charming audiences across the world. It is a show for everyone, but it is not a children’s show – the marketing of it to ‘age 4 and over’ implies that the key target audience is young families, which is a shame. Ninety minutes is a long time for small children to hold both attention and bladders, and a number of very young audience members are carried howling from the auditorium.

It is a delightful show in so many ways – but in the three plus years since I last saw the production, it seems to have shrunk rather than grown, and is perhaps now ‘done and dusted’. I’d love to see what else Julien Cottereau might use his extraordinary talents to make and do – he is, regardless of anything else, a breathtakingly beautiful performer!

http://juliencottereau.canalblog.com

Paco Peña Flamenco Dance Company: Quimeras

Spanish flamenco guitars, African koras and kalimbas, and Afro-Venezuelan tambores. Loose-limbed Senegalese dancers, legendary Sevillian singers, verbatim voice-overs about migration, and compás clapping in counter-rhythm to the djembe beats.

Quimeras is indeed a strange beast, created by Paco Peña in collaboration with various Spanish, South American, and African dancers and musicians. The core of the company are very specifically of the Andalusian flamenco tradition, whereas the ‘Africans’ are a kind of drawn-together mish-mash from various traditions, although this fits the logic of the piece, which is purportedly about migration from Africa to Spain. Throw in direction by Jude Kelly, and you have indeed a chimera…

There is an irony in the naming of the show – for Paco Peña, it is in acknowledgement of his interest in exploring the notion of illusion – but the outcome is that the creation of such a hybrid creature perhaps inevitably results in something that is both fantastical and unbelievable, an odd mismatch of component parts.

The show opens with a solo spot from the man himself, followed by a kind of battle-of-the-bands play off between the Flamenco team and the Africans. We get a Cook’s Tour of classic palos (flamenco music forms), and a selection of traditional African songs. All well and good – everyone is of course highly skilled, and it is a well-executed showcase of talents. There’s some interesting mixings that start to emerge, most notably a beautiful section in which singer and dancer Marisa Camara (originally from Guinea, now settled in Madrid) takes the spotlight for what appears to be a poignant lament for the lost motherland, or perhaps the moment of decision to leave – a slow and mesmeric Dougoulente (work dance), with a choreography of gestures distilled from the physical work of toiling the land, accompanied by Spanish guitar and African kora (a gorgeous harp-like instrument). This is countered with a scene called Un Sueno (a dream) – an excuse for one of the flamenco women dancers to epitomise a dream-image of Spain, white dress and shawl swirling dervish-like in the moonlight. There’s a rather odd choice to introduce pre-recorded music here, in what is (other than the recorded voice-over texts and an occasional sound-effect) an otherwise live show.

Towards the end of the first half, we learn of a journey by boat (telling rather than showing, in this case) then get a strong choreographic section in which the four flamenco dancers, now out of traditional costume and wearing all-black trousers and shirts, immediately giving them the look of fascist ‘black shirts’, face off the Africans with a staccato drumming of the feet, the stage swept with searchlights. So, we understand, the immigrants have arrived to a less-then-welcoming environment.

The second half starts with a lovely image of the Africans grouped downstage, faces illuminated in the spotlight. We hear a voice that says: ‘Our dream was to get to Europe. Now we have got to Europe, what is our dream?’ A great question – but having been raised, it is not really explored. What follows is puzzling: a very long traditional flamenco Fiesta scene straight out of a Carlos Saura film – the Spanish troupe sat in a horseshoe clapping and olé-ing, singers and dancers taking turns to up the ante for the next performer. The Africans are lurking on the edges – an image of exclusion from Spanish society. The flamenco is all very thrilling, the performances of a high quality, if lacking something of the duende passion you’d find in an Andalusian nightclub (and from the audience’s response it is clear that the flamenco is actually what they are here for) – but the image of inside society versus excluded outsider is formed very quickly, so there is a question mark over the length of the scene within the context of the show as a whole.

We then move out on the streets, for some very lovely African rap and blues, and to a scene between two male dancers of the opposing camps that is so clichéd in its narrative of uptight European versus loose-limbed, let-it-all-out African that it is embarrassing – with a ‘we are all brothers’ huggy ending that has toe-curling undertones of Ebony and Ivory. This all seems just far too patronising.

The question for me is what Jude Kelly’s role in all this was: with auteur Paco Peña at the helm, and two credited choreographers on board alongside Kelly in her directing role, there seems to be nobody actually steering the ship dramaturgically. It rocks all over the place – now a showcase of music and dance talent, now attempting to be a theatre show with something to say about the plight of immigrants.

Quimeras raises the age-old problem of attempting to theatricalise intrinsically theatrical forms such as flamenco. When the drama is inherent to the form, trying to twist the form to create drama can be tricky (as many artists, from The Tiger Lillies to Camille O’Sullivan, have discovered). It is not a problem confined to music and dance that wants to tell stories: witness the eternal dilemma for circus-theatre. The problem here, as is often the case, is with attempting to keep a linear narrative and a bunch of self-contained showcase pieces balanced.

Unfortunately, with all its component parts jammed together in such an odd hybrid, this chimera loses both the fire that should be at its flamenco heart, and the sting that could be in its narrative’s tail.

www.pacopena.com

Beyond Circus – A Long Weekend at the Albany

The Albany in Deptford continues to bring the best of contemporary circus to South East London with the return of Beyond Circus, a long weekend of thrilling, graceful and gravity-defying performance curated by Vicki Amedume of Upswing and presented as part of the Albany’s 30th birthday celebrations.

The weekend opens on Thursday 22 November with Off the Ground, showcasing extracts of new work in development by female circus artists. Dark and playful, these pieces will be narrative driven for a more thought-provoking and immersive evening. Off the Ground includes work from Lindsey Butcher, Circkus Mlejn, Collective and then…, Frederike Gerstner, Francesca Martello and Alice Allart.

After two sell out shows in 2010 and 2011, Circus Bites returns on Friday 23 November with delectable morsels of circus cabaret hosted by the fun and flirty Tricity Vogue with DJ Jean Genie spinning the tunes. Audiences are seated in the round to enjoy exhilarating snippets of contemporary circus from a stellar line-up of artists including Linn Broden, Simone Riccio, Yam Doyev, Joli Vyann, Duo’ver and Stefano di Renzo. Albany perennial and ukulele-strumming songstress, Tricity Vogue, will mix an intoxicating cocktail of cabaret, comedy and song to accompany proceedings.

On Saturday 24 November, Tumble Circus bring their outdoors show, Death or Circus, inside for the very first time. A bad advice absurd circus show presented by Bono and Bjork, Death or Circus is a satire on celebrity culture using circus skills including duo trapeze, corde lisse, partner acrobatics, hula hoop, slapstick and clowning. Their recent show This is What We Do for a Living won Best Circus Show at the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2012 and played to packed audiences at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival (reviewed very favourably by Total Theatre here).

Finally, on Sunday 25 November, families get the chance to enjoy some circus action at the Albany’s Family Friendly Circus Workshops where children aged 7+ and their grown-ups can have fun tumbling, flying, swinging and spinning with Vicki Amedume.

See the Albany’s website for further details, or to book: www.thealbany.org.uk

Richard DeDomenici, Pop Will Eat Itself: A Quickfire Response

‘Hello my name is Richard DeDomenici. People often ask me what motivates me as an artist. I often say something like: I want to create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility…’

So, here we are – The Basement on a Friday afternoon, embracing uncertainty and possibility: it’s a sunny day but we are underground in the almost-dark, gathered in the cool (in both senses of the word) main space of ‘Brighton’s buzzy home for avant-garde theatre’ as the venue was dubbed by the Independent’s Alice Jones.

We have the pleasure of Richard’s company and guidance for a Quickfire workshop – Quickfire being The Basement’s latest wheeze, a series of one-day workshops with an established artist which leads to a performance the next day at Supper Club, a once-a-month platform for live art and experimental performance.

The group stand in a circle a little warily, the ice not yet broken. It’s most definitely a mixed bunch: the youngest of the group is an 18 year-old who has just left school, on a gap year; at the other end of the age-and-experience spectrum is a 50-something actor with a wealth of experience on stage and TV and a producer of cabaret events. There’s a Laban-trained dancer with a strong interest in live art, a University of Chichester Ensemble Theatre graduate, a would-be stand-up comedian, and a student on the legendary Visual and Performing Arts course at Brighton University (the course that spawned Robert Pacitti and Marisa Carnesky amongst many other feted alumni). I’m there as a fly-on-the-wall, but I soon get drawn into the game…

After the usual name exchanges, we are given a five-minute intro to Richard DeDomenici’s work, onscreen and live – in effect, an extract from his latest show, Popaganda (which was also referenced at Supper Club the following night, and which I got to see in full when it was presented at The Basement in the week after the Supper Club appearance).

One of the characteristics of Richard’s practice is that he often cannibalises his own stuff – one project getting referenced within another in a kind continuously building body of work that incorporates all that has gone before. We could see his life as an artist as one great big ongoing game of Blob. Thus, previous projects such as his Unattended Baggage intervention (in which a seemingly abandoned suitcase is left in key sites in city centres; when approached, the suitcase grows legs and scuttles off), and his legendary walk down a Chicago street with head hooded in a plastic bag and hands tied behind his back, both find their way onscreen into the new show.

He notes (in his Quickfire workshop, at Supper Club and in Popaganda – so obviously an idea he is fond of!) that he has ‘shamanistically’ managed to pre-empt major world events, citing for example that the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal broke just weeks after the Chicago performance work was enacted; and ominously his Attempt to Earthquake-Proof Tokyo, which featured the installation of bobbly strap-hangers in all sorts of random places, was enacted in Japan not long before the devastating earthquake of 2011.

Not only has it become a given that Richard’s shows will keep you in the loop about his previous works, but also that revisiting past works sometimes becomes a new aspect of the current work. But what with Abu Ghraib and the Japan earthquake – not to mention the unfortunate murdered-spy-in-the-suitcase scandal that has made him feel a bit uncomfortable about Unattended Baggage – there are some actions that it is getting hard to consider revisiting. He does, however, get to ‘check out the Checkpoint Charlie Museum’ in Berlin to see what happened to the Looking for Freedom exhibit he ‘covertly installed’ (well, stuck on the wall in plain view of anyone who might be watching, actually!) three years earlier. Apparently, David Hasselhof (I don’t watch TV and sometimes have embarrassing gaps in my popular culture references – he is apparently a pop singer who had a hit with Looking for Freedom, an anthem filmed on the Berlin Wall) had given an interview to a German magazine saying he found it ‘a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum’ and – well, Richard to the rescue. And yes, you’ve guessed, three years on Looking for Looking for Freedom reveals that it is still there where Richard stuck it – either because it hasn’t yet been detected, or because the museum are grateful to Richard for providing a necessary exhibit that they’d crucially overlooked.

The blurb on Popaganda on the Arts Admin website describes Richard as ‘a jetlagged litterpicker of the world’s cultural landfill’. He certainly does get around, but it’s not all exotic hotspots – he is often to be found in his hometown, Watford, or its arch-rival Croydon (a rivalry probably invented and most definitely nurtured by DeDomenici). There’s a lot about Croydon in Popaganda – the Destroydon project at the sadly now-closed Croydon Clocktower; and a very funny reflection on the use of Croydon as a film location stand-in for Manhattan, and how that notion can be subverted by making films about Croydon in New York.

Humour in general, and satire in particular, are paramount in his work. The humour verges from the downright silly (Swivelympics on office chairs, anyone?) to the ludicrously funny and daring – none more so than in his other Olympics-related project, DeDomenici Torch 2012 in which he toured the country running ahead of the official torch-bearers appropriately-attired and bearing a convincing-looking fake torch (the real ones are pretty fake looking, so they aren’t too hard to fake). One of the craziest aspects of this project was that even when people realised he was ‘fake’, because he looked like a real torch-bearer they wanted their photos taken with him. An interesting reflection on make-believe versus real-life that goes right to the heart of performance-making…

Which brings us back to the Quickfire participants and Richard’s workshop. As someone who most often makes work in public spaces rather than on stages, how was he going to approach leading a workshop that aimed to create three-minute staged performances? The answer to that was a well-held workshop that used a variety of techniques to give participants the opportunity to develop whatever forms of work they were happy with. Some Augusto Boal (via Larry Bogart) physical exercises; a creative writing section that moved from free-writing to sharing in pairs, to re-tellings to the whole group (raising all sorts of interesting questions about truth and fiction, owning the story, and the ethics of a storyteller’s poetic licence with someone else’s personal material); and later (after I had sadly had to leave the group to it) an outing to Brighton’s Poundshops (or 99p shops for those keen to budget their resources) to find the one object that would best serve as the vehicle for the storytelling when staged.

It was interesting arriving at Supper Club to witness the resulting three-minute Quickfire works, stories I’d heard in a raw state earlier now transformed into a series of performance pieces all loosely worked around the theme of ‘relationships’, using many and various forms and techniques.

Some were pretty close to the original pieces of writing – a story about a childhood den inside a wardrobe is retold sitting cross-legged on the floor, a hand-held torch lighting up the actor’s face. Others had undergone a radical process – a tale of shame at a boys’ football club becomes a carefully honed and cleverly choreographed series of physical actions and whittled-down words with a plastic football as a prop. One performer, with a story about her childhood hideaway shed being destroyed by her parents when she went off travelling, had obviously been encouraged to let out the anger she’d suppressed all these years – but found a way to do so that balanced outrage and humour, her parents’ cheery emails and photos documenting the destruction of the shed passed round the audience, with the mini-performance culminating in a plastic toy battered to pieces in a symbolic release of frustration. Of course these performances were raw, and of varying quality – but what Quickfire was offering was the chance to feel the fear and do it anyway. Whether you’re just starting out, or have 30 years experience, it takes guts to make a piece of work from scratch in just one afternoon, then show it the next day to a ‘real’ audience.

Richard DeDomenici was perhaps the perfect choice for the first outing of this new initiative – so much of his own work is about having the bravery to just do it, regardless of the outcome. And this bravado coupled with his trademark humour encourages a ‘whatever happens it’s all good’ attitude to audiences both of his own work and of anyone he is supporting or mentoring.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Quickfire series plays out over coming months, with sessions by Victoria Melody (Friday 2 November for Supper Club on Saturday 3 November) and Ivan Fabrega (30 November / 1 December) lined up.

For more on Quickfire and The Basement programme see here. For Popaganda tour dates see the Arts Admin website. For more on Richard DeDomenici’s work see his website and YouTube.