Hidden under the chaos of the living moment… Thomas Bacon on Bobby Baker’s Mad Gyms and Kitchens
Entering the space of Bobby Baker is a disarming experience. The audience are onstage at the ICIA; fluorescent striplights domestically illuminate the space. There are no gels, Gobos or carefully positioned Parcans here: the theatricality is stripped away and Bobby shuffles about greeting a few of us, encouraging audience members to take a seat or perhaps a pea-green floor cushion. Our backs face the the auditorium; we could be in any cold hall yet Bobby’s carefully constructed housewife persona brings a warmth and intimacy to the space within moments of the performance commencing.
One could be fooled into thinking that this work is about Booby; she repeatedly reminds us through her journey ‘wending her way to wellness’ that her actions are centred upon ‘doing it for herself’. Yet this personal journey documenting her life from 1996, during a period that included 43 admissions for mental health, osteoporosis in her knees, coping with related surgeries, anti-psychotic medication, an eating disorder and ultimately breast cancer, is far from being solely for herself. Oddly there is a real sense of shared catharsis at play within what is such an autobiographical piece. With Bobby placed openly at the centre we empathise with the wider concerns of the contemporary human condition: to get fit, eat healthily, find peace and stillness in our homes, and hide the loneliness at the heart of our commodity-obsessed world.
It is this last point that I find fascinating: Bobby’s back-catalogue thematically explores the connection between memory and objects, but here there is a darkness. Mad Gyms and Kitchens features five glorious reveals, where production trunks are transformed into stations for living on her odyssey of recovery, but it is in her penultimate setting where she sits in a microcosm of a living-room, surrounded by objects, that one is given the impression that none of these things can replace the life itself. This momentary punctuation is fleeting and necessary; a sense of stillness takes hold before once again the air is broken with playful laughter. And it is this sense of play, running throughout, that lifts the work into being a comforting celebration of life.
As with all her work there is an exciting structure hidden under the chaos of the living moment. Bobby is adapt at bringing a sense of the unpredictable to what is questionably a fixed form. But perhaps that isn’t the point as this live art is about us: it takes place within us as audience – within our thoughts, our journey and our reaction, all of which are captured in a quintessentially home-made conclusion of tea, biscuits and audience engagement of arts and crafts as we share our own secrets to a better being. Starting on stage and ending on stage, we are all together in this performative and living journey; as a collective, we wend our way together with Bobby our glorious leader, finding what we need to do it for ourselves.