Site Specific

In 1993, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, the Women's Playhouse Trust commissioned a number of site-specific dance and theatre pieces around London. One of these, choreographed by Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs founder Lea Anderson for a group of local unemployed performers, was Dirt.

Dirt played for two nights in October, in a retired water pumping station in the East End: an unheated Victorian brick and tile edifice filled with looming cast iron engines, pipes, dials and valves; dank, dripping, echoey and freezing cold. The flyer warned:

They weren't kidding. Dirt was the first piece I ever saw where they not only served warming mulled wine from a makeshift trestle table in the lobby but actually provided the audience members with hot water bottles to stave off the chill.

WPT bought the building that year, and as far as I can make out still lives there.

The show itself was classic Lea Anderson, full of humour and energy and domestic detail: marigold gloves; stainless steel cutlery in the dancers' hair. They were good dancers too; I'm pretty sure some of them wound up joining the Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs afterwards. And, as often the case, I loved the music. All in all, well worth a trip out into the wintry Wapping night.

The second time I was handed a hot water bottle to get me through a show was part of the same WPT tenth anniversary season. It was 1994 by then, I think, even deeper winter, and the venue was an abandoned warehouse out in the wilds of London's Docklands, out where the tidal mouth of the Thames widens and deepens and draws enough for the cargo ships of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to cruise securely home, weighed down by exotic freight, low in the water and rank with the stench of profit.

Shiny Nylon was a collaboration between artist Anya Gallaccio, probably best known for her decomposing oranges; writer Deborah Levy, about whose brilliant plays PAX and Heresies I may blog one day; and choreographer Kristina Page, less famous perhaps, but current enough then for me to have at least seen some of her work. Their raw materials were three performers, a space big enough to park a 747, the soft furnishings of a derelict filmhouse and a bit of modern engineering.

At one end of the warehouse was the audience, crammed into threadbare flip-up velour seating ripped from the palace of dreams before the wrecking ball finally took possession. Maybe a hundred people squeezed into those, clutching hot water bottles and exhaling clouds; and before them yawned a vertiginous emptiness. Far overhead was some scaffolding, railings, a gantry; and a roof that had kept the rain off foreign trade for untold decades. Far away, at the other end of the warehouse, was a huge set of dark red velvet curtains, more cinematic salvage, moth-eaten and mildewed but still rich with tuppenny romance. In the space between, the dancers cavorted.

Which was all very well as far as it went. The space was astounding, the cramped audience quarters effective, but the dancing was dull as ditchwater, and it seemed as if, given these amazing resources, the creators had no idea what to do. The performance meandered on, and the audience tuned out, just a little; at least, I did.

To be honest, Shiny Nylon was no masterpiece. A lot of it was kind of aimless and tiresome... but it did have a moment of absolutely fuck-off brilliance, a coup de theatre the like of which one almost never sees; which lingers in the memory forever.

Audience one end. Dancers the other. Curtains. Gantry. And then:

Two of the performers take ropes, one either side of the curtains; the third dances in front. And they proceed slowly down the entire length of the hangar, walking, dancing, and pulling the curtains with them, along ceiling-high rails. It takes a few moments to even realise what's going on, and then it dawns; it becomes exciting.

The warehouse shrinks.

When they come to a halt, the enormous cinema curtains are mere inches aways from the front row of seating, dwarfing us all. The vast empty space has been transformed into one of oppressive claustrophobia, with that single dancer leading all the way. We sit there and think, where is there to go now?

And of course there is nowhere. The curtains recede, the performance continues. The performance ends. We applaud.

But we don't -- we can't -- forget that moment. The transformation, the shift of perspective, that heartstopping constriction of the world. Shivering in our cramped fleapit seats, clutching cooled hot water bottles, we aren't the people who came into the warehouse an hour or so earlier. Just for a second there, the world shifted; revealed a hint of its true geometry.

Then we hand back our blankets and hot water bottles and head off into the derelict night.
Posted by matt at June 28, 2005 12:45 AM