Author Archives: Thomas Bacon

About Thomas Bacon

Thomas John Bacon is an artist whose current practice focuses upon the conception of the body, being & the idea of a multiplicity of self/s in performance. His work can be located within the framework of live art and philosophical/phenomenological investigations that look to de/construct and challenge perception, alongside the assumed liminal barriers of body-based practices. Thomas is due to complete his doctoral research at the University of Bristol, with his thesis Experiencing a Multiplicity of Self/s. He is supported by the Arts Council England and is also the founder and artistic director of the live art platform Tempting Failure.

Where is Gob Squad? Adventures in Remote Lecturing

Gob Squad is collective of UK and German artists who juxtapose fixed-form performance with the improvised and unpredictable. Typically their work can be found outside of a traditional theatre, exploring the corners of contemporary life, seeking absurdity and spectacle as they capture moments of exquisite humanity in our decaying urban existence.

Tonight, we are in the main theatre auditorium of the Arnolfini for a lesson that turns out to be about Gob Squad and, importantly, ourselves. After opening with a lecture preface about how there is no such thing as ‘wrong’ and how failure should be embraced, what unfolds is a work that envelops its audience in the world of this nearly 20 year-old collective – a piece as much about the process of creation as it is an active demonstration through performance. Questions circle around the projection of Self and persona on stage in a live action where we become Gob Squad.

What makes us uniquely ourselves? To be unique is an interesting concept that opens this adventure divided across explorations that question the Self. Using the concept of ‘remote lecturing’, select audience members have headphones placed on them and are invited on stage. They are told what to say, where to go and what to do. Gradually the two stage-present members of Gob Squad are replaced and the performance continues in this fashion with participants randomly choosing who from the audience will replace them on stage.

The juxtaposition between presence and absence in this adventure is exciting. To communicate through another person will always bring in a variable that cannot be predicted, but when that person is a conduit to relay another’s actions, words or perspective does this sense of interpretation reveal a truth of Being or an element of the Self unseen in the original? Strangers meet on stage: conduits for the unseen Squad. It’s a concept full of excitement as the richness of the work comes from this unknown factor, and failure in this guise would still fulfil the brimming sense of tension and anticipation that a work like this creates in its spectators. In this world, truth and fiction are indistinguishable and in that same sense we are all multiples trapped in the singular form of one body; here we’re allowed to explore the nature of who we are, the honesty in ourselves, and the lies or projected persona that we create to encapsulate ourselves or present who we are in life or on stage. As participants speak they reveal a side of of the unseen practitioner that, first-hand, could never be expressed in the same way.

The work as a whole is lovingly layered with the company members’ own moments of inspiration – be that clips of their working practice and lives, the recounting of moments of pivotal change, encounters they have experienced, or even influences from literature, music, TV and cinema where concepts of multiplicity take hold. A particularly perfect moment sees the recounting of a chance meeting between a couple that is so tenderly expressed by the two audience members that one wonders how this bitter sweetness could be retold and captured again. Yet much like its source it is a fleeting moment never to be repeated in the same way. There is a resonance that cannot be expressed, but it leaves you wanting to burst out, in much the same way that an old photo of happier times leaves one trembling to capture it again. This palpable potential for resonance is created in fleeting moments of living action, and later further enhanced with the screening of performances from the Gob Squad back-catalogue alongside the action on stage. Here an additional layer adds to the sense of mirroring, not in the predictable sense of copying, but rather once more in an ephemeral manner. A man chooses a woman from the audience, they engage in conversation, he then switches his headphones with hers and she is asked to query why he picked her. Laid bare before us are these two unique selves. Not only have Gob Squad stripped away themselves but they also have seized the opportunity to expose us too.

Tender, exciting and dangerous, Gob Squad challenge the roles of audience and performer, the nature of a company’s heritage, and who we all are at the heart of a projected persona. There is no such thing as a singular Self, and Gob Squad expose this authentic fiction superbly in an outstandingly brilliant piece.

www.gobsquad.com

Bobby Baker’s Daily Life Ltd: Mad Gyms and Kitchens

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.

www.bobbybakersdailylife.com

Idiot Child: You’re Not Doing It Right

Entering after a warm reception in the foyer where everyone was given Rum and Ginger Beer in washed-out baked bean tins, the audience are greeted in the studio space by ‘identical’ twins Peter and Finnegan. Both are stood in a fishtank of blue water, Finnegan communicating through semaphore and Peter through exaggerated expression. There is a sense of excitement in the air, as the twins finally have some visitors!

We are somewhere off the coast of England, on a small isle not far from Bournemouth and Brownsea. Here the twins ritually rehearse their tour of the island on a daily basis, doing their best to live by the ‘celebrated’ Modern Guide to Manual Living and Hygiene: the only item that their parents left the stranded pair. It is a routine filled with exhausted laughter and repetition to hide mutual resentment and loneliness – a set-up in the finest absurdist traditions which this deliciously, darkly humorous performance explores.

Slowly, the context of the twin’s situation is revealed; what began as a very funny performance inventively undermines itself as we learn how bleak their lives truly are. One almost feels guilty for at first laughing, but this is handled with care by Idiot Child so as not to play against itself, bringing instead gravitas to the world that the pair have invited us into. There is no fourth wall here – we intimately share and interact with the actions of these twins. In the grimaced laughter of Susie Riddell as Peter, we watch the mask she has created for herself slowly crack to reveal her hidden pain, while Adam Fuller as Finnegan, barely caring to speak, longs for something more and yet remains on this isle bound only by love, despite the building animosity he holds for Peter. Both communicate so much through action and though Riddell holds the weight of the dialogue the pair deliver equally expressive impressive performances.

The direction is precise and commendable. The work is inventive and fresh. The space is used intelligently and very effectively, with simplistic and powerful signifiers; the use of shoes that reveal the fate of their parents is particularly poignant and the animated sequences blend perfectly within the setting of the piece. It is therefore surprising that in what is a very well edited work the only criticism comes from two movement sequences that seem a little too long and jar with the narrative flow. These are used to develop the bond between the twins and explore their emotions, but they felt incongruous and in need of enhanced choreography. However, this is merely a minor note in what is essentially a fabulous piece of work and one that certainly deserves to be celebrated.

Stuffed Puppets: Schicklgruber

It is the Führer’s 56^thbirthday, his downfall is imminent, and unease festers in the air of his Berlin Bunker. Stuffed Puppets’ Neville Tranter portrays Adolf’s subservient valet and takes us through a cavalcade of infamous figures, from Eva Braun to Goering and Goebbels, in the puppets he manipulates. Each is a self-obsessed caricature, manifested in a greying, twisted form, their bodies distorted through their own self-importance and bile.

Schicklgruber attempts to be a sensitive satire and in doing so becomes at times confused in its own methodology. At its best it embraces elements of Brechtian theatre to alienate and question. Opening with Tranter on stage as the audience pass him to take their seats, he is aware of his space, the fourth wall is broken; when the lights lower he speaks with the puppet that is to portray Hitler as if both were fellow actors ready to take on their roles. The elegantly evil green monster of death, who interrupts the narrative with sinister attempts at song or magic, is a stroke of genius. Yet as the play progresses we lose sight of this disruptive flow as Tranter attempts to draw us into the fateful conclusion. A sense of poignancy grows through the gravitas of mounting deaths; the satirical overtones are replaced with moments of worry and compassion for the innocent that these demonic figures affect, leaving the political bite to retreat under the weight of a melodramatic narrative.

Tranter is undoubtedly a masterful puppeteer. Sweating profusely through the concentration and life that he brings to his cast, he works tirelessly in expertly crafting a sense of character and comic timing suited to this unique work. iot applications Yet as the play closed his voice had become lost amongst the many he was capable of making. What was he trying to say? We know the Nazi’s were an evil old bunch, but the bite of satire was smothered under a pillow of empathy. Tranter’s characters, caricatures no more, had taken control, telling their story very well but sadly not his.

www.stuffedpuppet.nl

Ulrike Quade Company, Jo Strømgren Kompani, Nordland Visual Theatre: The Writer

Inspired by the life and work of Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun, performer Ulrike Quade presents the audience with the solitary figure of a woman, surround by neatly stacked piles of books, reading and making notes. A gentle blue hue illuminates the space, and she is tiny in comparison to the vast environment – a landscape of paper mounds strewn across the floor and climbing the walls around her. In the background, the sound of a Nazi rally can be heard. The woman is a researcher, her thesis subject is Hamsun. She is a young German in her thirties who simply wants to understand why Hamsun, a Norwegian literary genius, endorsed the Nazi party.

But to put it so simply does this piece of theatre a disservice. This is a story of seduction; the flawed subject speaks to his researcher, drawing her into an intoxicating journey of love, frustration, passion and the undermining dark humour of guilt. Jo Strømgren and Quade, jointly the writers of the piece with Strømgren handling direction and set design, use all the magic of theatre to animate a living environment that vividly transports us to the top of mountains and into the heart of a man at various stages in his life.

A literary giant, in more ways than one, is presented before us and deconstructed as a Freudian conflict takes place between his Id-like reckless bohemian youth and an elderly Ego, guilt ridden and withered. The three puppets of Hamsun are astonishing and Quade’s masterful control is a tour de force; subtle, forceful but never cliched, she presents a woman in love with her subject and simultaneously brings life to those in the world around her in such a manner that the lines of control become excitingly blurred.

The lighting and sound design, by Stephen Rolfe and Lars Ardal, add wondrous touches: a conflict of Self manifests in the shadows projected onto the paper walls that surround the puppeteer, and an intimate calm, emanating from both aural and visual mediums, draws us towards the piece’s sombre end. On paperThe Writer would seem little more than an average biographical tale, but in the hands of these artists it is by far one of the most inspiring pieces of theatre of the year.

Total Theatre