PHOBIARAMA say the blinking circus-tent letters on an otherwise plain black pop-up cube in Granary Square, dwarfed by the much larger, calmer, Waitrose sign, under which one goes to get pre-sliced comfort food. It’s a fitting spatial intervention for Phobiarama, Dutch visual artist Dries Verhoeven’s latest installation-performance to be presented at LIFT; the piece, as its title would suggest, plumbs the portmanteau of irrational fear and spectacle present in the carnival tradition of horror/funhouse, a controlled space where people pay to feel ill at ease, also known as an ‘attraction’. Verhoeven offers us a reminiscent, if not exactly nostalgic, ghost train ride to explore the co-operations of fear, entertainment, mediation and manipulation. All populist – sorry, popular – stuff: in the absence of a crier shouting ‘roll up, roll up’ there’s already a healthy queue in the square.

Any forms of sustenance you might have just bought – along with keys, money, phone, the materials of security, identity, and connection – are checked at the door, at the smiling suggestion of people in festival badges. You are given a door number and fumble down a narrow, pitch-black corridor. Behind the door a two-person fun car is perched on a meandering track, waiting. There is no longer anyone to give instructions; as in a dream, there is only one thing to do: get in, primed for vertigo, and wait. There is no seat belt or steering wheel.

The ghost train lurches into action, slowly at first, carrying you through darkness punctured by abstract emanations from TV screens mounted in the corners, curving in loops around a succession of strangely configured rooms and columns, to a soundscape of thick drone; on the telly, a verbal overlay of fuzzy news and political rhetoric. Lights turn on and off unsettlingly, irregularly. You catch the image of a figure in the corridor.

The interplay between the kind of visceral fear one might experience when, say, confronted by a bear, and the sort of cortisol-raising stress about news-story dangers, like immigration, or microplastics, is there to explore as the trolleys speed up; Nigel Farage’s voice booms from the corner; and the space fills gradually with bears. Tall, furry, lumbering creatures in any case, in a dream where you can’t be sure, or see things directly. They lurk around bends, behind columns, approach in a kind of clockwork choreography: the moment of threat feels unnaturally distended, but then your car slides away at the slow-motion last minute.

In the next part the bears undress, momentarily assuming human movement to remove their, okay, costumes. Whew! Oh. Now they are clowns, dancing with creepy hip gyrations, climbing on the back of the cars in a mechanical, wind-up toy sort of way. The clown in front of you pulls off his mask, to reveal the naked face of a man, staring directly at you. He strips down to red boxer briefs, folds up the clown suit neatly and goes into the shadows.

What seems like a checklist of phobias (where are the spiders?), performed as a show; I think is supposed to work as an excavation. Or is it? On the CCTV, placed conveniently right beside the smoke detector (ones you get on unclutterer), you see all the performers at once striding as a gang – each and every one of them tall, built, muscled, tattooed, straight out of a TV prison show. The monitor shows passengers being stopped and interrogated, and then led away. There are muffled sounds of screaming.

The burly men continue to stride around, half-naked, staring at you mutely. They might come after you. They might not. Now the visceral sense is back – not a fear itself; you haven’t fully suspended the fact that at the end of the day you’re at a Dutch art thing next to the Waitrose. Stripping back further layers as the lights come on, you feel these men not as menacing criminals but chosen specimens in a show, bodies on display. What if they could shed their muscle suits too? It’s true that you don’t see bodies like this in one place everyday (note: you should go to the gym more) – but are you ‘supposed’ to be afraid here? Would you clutch your purse, if it weren’t already in their hands?

The installation artist exploring fear as a concept does not enter into the same contract as the funhouse operator promising to induce it, but Phobiarama manages to do pretty well with both.

Animal skulls. An old globe. A bowl of snakeskins. Binoculars. A stuffed hare whose body is stretched out in that unnatural way bodies are hung up before they are roasted, or like a cat waiting to be stroked. A vintage television set. The body of a fox on his hind legs, holding a silver tray of apples.

Those who make the pilgrimage to Deptford’s folksy junk paradise of a market, on three days a week, a stone’s throw from here, are used to seeing jumbled compositions of detritus on tables; so are, presumably, the locals hanging out in the concrete square, sitting on the benches drinking in a not-so-picturesque way. There isn’t any green in this square. It smells like piss.

This time, the arrangement signals the starting point of Nocturne, a dusk to dawn nightwalk performance promising to take us to the ‘edge of the city.’

I know Deptford as host to half the art and dance students in London, so maybe ‘edge’ is too strong a word. Nonetheless Deptford is full of small ones: it’s a place arranged in slivers and strips. The gritty market square has just sprouted a sleek station-side twin, all nice brick and dense coffees; the high street’s a sagging riot of colours and smells, interspersed with freshly-injected hipster bars. The poetics of displacement, traces of the past overlaid with the new, are hard not to walk through.

What we’re promised in Nocturne is a chance to note and experience the overlooked, the forgotten, the elusive. In the cracks and behind the shrubbery. In the dark. At night.

But first, of course, we are to read about it.

In the library, the audience is in groups of six, ushered to a cluster of chairs. A handsome, hard-bound book awaits in each seat, introductory poetic portraits of rats, gulls, foxes – the beings we are about to tune into.

The walk begins: a cluster of six human theatregoers hold onto a short loop of rope, attached to the back of our black-clad guide, who, it’s easy to imagine, has trained either as a ninja or a dog. Behind them we’re a clumsy noisy racket bumping into one another, a bit like a cartoon, but stopping and pricking our ears up on cue. We loop around Deptford, from the high street down an alley and across the street, through an overgrown parking lot, a nature refuge, fenced-in courtyards, the hedges by a housing complex, periodically cued to stop and observe: a fish in a shop window aquarium, a fox in that patch of grass. On some stops, I can’t figure out what we’re supposed to be noticing; the guide’s abilities seem preternatural, or my mind distracted. But then the more it happens, I start calling shenanigans on there being a particular object to attend to, and think rather as an invitation to just pay attention generally.

Rats or gulls never materialise, or I miss them when they do, but foxes are everywhere. When we stop to acknowledge one, the recognition is always mutual; there is a moment. I would be happy for an entire night of these moments.

But woven into the performance is us weaving, from these outdoors expeditions to the library, the repository, to decant or consolidate artefacts. The performers recount sounds and observations enumerating elements from the walk; then a concert of sounds, screeching, ululating and communicating with each other; the library becomes a kind of aural forest.

We go back out and do the loop again, with our guide, this time with the rope let out in a line. The human inhabitants of Deptford are bemused at these people, going about in odd packs; there is also a moment of mutual noticing with that.

The next time we enter the library, there are lit cylindrical tanks, one for each group, and our guide starts dropping things in: the skull of an animal, a pack of cigarettes, plastic toys, living plants. The container looks much like a test tube. We watch these settle in unexpected relationships to each other, something between a still life and a jumble one might encounter in a river or creek, were the water clear.

By the time I am outside for the third zigzag journey, there is a cart of apples in the street – the fox’s offering. A set of chairs is arranged as a theatre overlooking the scum-covered creek behind Laban, and many of us dutifully sit, waiting for some sort of show. People start making pre-show chitchat. A sprinkler comes on. The stage is set, as though what we are waiting for (and maybe we are) is for a host of animals to prance into view, as for a curtain call. But there’s a reason we’re all facing the river, on the hill, with all that open air: what comes into your sphere of attention, mostly has to do with your quality of attention. Right? I take a blanket from the chair and wrap it around myself, eating the apple perhaps meant for the fox.

Fox-hunts of the classic variety, I learn, are still being held in England, but now in mock fashion, the fox-hunt without the fox, a kind of heritage theatre, like war reenactments, where the ceremonial trappings of an imperial gentleman’s sporting activity can be practiced. A trail of artificial fox scent is laid out for the dogs to follow, in a winding, zigzag trajectory that might mimic a fox’s movements. On occasion, however, an actual fox will find themselves on the grounds, and confuse the whole thing. If the dogs pick up on their scent, then the entire operation is oriented towards hunting an actual fox, and the simulation unwittingly becomes real without any of the humans noticing. The person laying out the fox spray plays a different game than a fox would; the choreography operates on different logics. Hunters say they prefer following human trails, because they know better how to ‘play the game’.

Quick quiz! One question.

Imagine the world is run by children.

Utopia or dystopia?

It’s a juicy early summer twilight and on the grass in Mile End, by the pub used as a landmark, clusters of adult humans mill about exchanging masks of pleasant expectation, as though preemptively bemused, being more furtive than usual with their beers. It’s time for Night Walks with Teenagers, a peripatetic encounter-performance led and facilitated by – you guessed it –local teens, in which the usual rules of shepherding are reversed and adults, en masse, obediently play along.

Mammalian Diving Reflex, the Canadian-German company and mobile ‘social acupuncture’ clinic founded as a response to End Times (in 1993, mind you!), is known for their ‘site- and social- specific’ work, bringing together people who otherwise wouldn’t be, and giving young people agency and presence. The name, of course, refers to the biological response humans have under submersion, what (founder) Darren O’Donnell calls a ‘metaphor for surviving difficult times’. As in their well-known piece, Haircuts by Children (what it says on the tin), Night Walks holds the appeal of risk: this awkward churn between childhood and adulthood is a potent time; I wonder what strange places we might go this evening.

So our leaders appear, and I am surprised because they seem quite young for what I think teenagers are. Or is it me? Some of them have pimples, so, OK, they must be legit. I join my fellow Olds in a single docile mass, to receive instructions from the bullhorn. They say: ‘We’re gonna show you how to have fun!’  And so we go: we dutifully form groups of differing sizes, jump up and down, run in formation down a leafy path, high-fi-i-i-ve each other like football players. The Olds have the advantage in numbers; there are maybe eighty to a hundred of us, streaming up the park trail. At something like a border checkpoint, we’re asked for our glowsticks, which only some people have been issued. Oops. Glowstick holders get to skip the queue and go straight to the hill – I prepare for questioning. Agents armed with waterguns are stationed with attitude along the path. The worst sport ever, I hurry along clutching my ‘adulting’ bag- the one I use to impersonate a grown-up at interviews. I’m hoping it doesn’t get wet.

After this the walk becomes sweeter. On the hilltop, beautiful doll-like girls sing sassy ballads on a toy ukulele; we are coached to dance along to music in choreographed steps (to the left! To the right!) that I recall from either summer camp or Mom’s gym-class aerobics. Around the bend, there are picnic blankets arranged, and on top of them candy, laid out like salt at a deer lick. We are to eat candy and share personal stories of heartbreak. There, that’s something universal! Or is it? A teenage boy tells us with disarming ease that his boyfriend broke up with him over text only days after using the L-word. The adults in our group are weirdly unforthcoming, share platitudes peeled off inspirational posters, and gaze awkwardly at what I’m sure is now a Tinder date, and the ground. Their approach feels close to Talking Down, I feel, which means the Olds are losing this round. I change some names and offer a remix of some of my latest disappointment stories, tell it to the teenager. Not sure if it helped. Some of the  adults are still wearing the face, I notice, from the lawn: the eager half-smile of half-participation. Sparklers are handed out; we light them together, passing on the flame from one slender metallic stick to the next, our corner of the park filled with sputtering pompoms of light. It’s beautiful; I imagine it would look pretty stunning in the dark. Except, mind you, it’s still mid-afternoon. Why is it still light out? No matter how much happens, dusk still feels hours away. Where is this night programme, this edge we were promised?

After our cleansing sharing we hold hands and weave around the streets of the East End in a long, ridiculous chain, catching and enjoying the ire of motorists and bystanders. This is probably the best part. A man trapped at the intersection yells out: ‘You know what? Time is the most valuable thing,’ and for a moment I wonder if he’s a plant.

The taste of public disruption in my mouth, I start to hanker for more: this can’t be the most dangerous, liminal thing we’re doing, can it? Holding hands, and holding up traffic? Weren’t we going to put hoodies on, spray paint something, sniff glue, smash a shopping centre, something? I was expecting piercing and sulking at the least. These children seem sweet, and optimistic, and innocent. (‘They’re not children!’ I remind myself for the ninth or tenth time, they’re teenagers!’)

I don’t do all this whining out loud, obviously, but find someone whose hair looks cut by a six-year-old, figuring they’re probably in charge. (I’m right.) I ask about the timing and am told the London version of Night Walks had to be set earlier than most others because of train schedules, and people studying for exams. I don’t ask if we will be blowing anything up; I’ve lost hope of that by now.

At the very end of our sunny sojourn, in the graveyard, we are given helium balloons, form a circle and release them all at once into the sky. Then, the kids (TEENAGERS) break even more cookies out for sharing – a different flavour than before. It’s easy to be seduced for a moment, mouth full of chocolate, the moment a fleet of brightly coloured balloons drifts off. But this doesn’t feel like utopia. It feels like fake ice cream nostalgia: actions symbolically associated with childhood, a confusion of  ‘carefree’ and ‘careless’.  What about the actual future: hypoglycaemia,  bad teeth, balloon shards being eaten by birds? Where is the vision or stake in the actual future? It seems like we’ve fetishised the function of youth not for its establishment of the future, but its avoidance. We had a fun day in the park, us Olds, with the kids, but I’d prefer to wait for the shadows and stumbling. In sum, I feel that sums up the evening as well as Night Walks – it just doesn’t feel dark enough.

 Featured image: Mammalian Diving Reflex: Night Walks with Teenagers. Photo Pavlo Kerestey

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