Holly Williams attends church to check out arts collective Mercy's site-specific show.
St. Leonard’s Church again plays host to Mercy’s evening of music and poetry. It’s artistically decked out: tiny glass bottles, swathes of fairy lights and plastic hang from the ceiling while clusters of white umbrellas form unusual screens for projections of birds, smoke and flames.
After a rather naff bit of immersive physical theatre (some ethereal young ladies wind their way through the audience before pushing a man down the aisle in grinding slow-mo), co-curator Nathan Jones begins the evening with a poem. Opening by asking repeatedly "when will he come?", his long, dramatically delivered piece goes on to ponder what the world will be like when ‘he’ does come, from profound concerns ("what will love be like?") to the everyday ("when we’re on a train, will we still feel like we’re going backwards when the train next to us departs?") He’s accompanied by Sarah Nicolls, a pianist who plays with, as well as playing on, her instrument. The front of the piano is removed, and she scrapes and plucks at the exposed strings.
Next up, Salena Godden begins her performance poetry set with an abrasive litany of ‘fucks’. The poem – entitled ‘Fuck Tea. Fuck Toast.’ - develops into a self-mockingly tender not-quite-love-story, before ending on a few more expletives. Godden’s next offering is hardly chaste either; entitled The Good Cock, she introduces it as "kind of about baptism – if you like showering in sperm." This crowd is hardly likely to be offended however, and her material, with its chatty and casual delivery disguising a close control, is well received. Unfortunately, the “song-y, poem-y thing” she chooses to finish on is disappointing, not really excelling as either.
“No church service would be complete without a PowerPoint presentation,” declares Ross Sutherland. His ‘presentation’ doesn’t exactly treat texts as sacred – the first poem is a re-write of Little Red Riding Hood, where every noun and verb is replaced by the one 23 places below it in the dictionary. Sure, it’s a show-offy form of poetry but with lines like “Oh, Great Britain, what big eye-witnesses you have!”/“All the better to segregate you with”, it’s also rather entertaining. Ultimately more impressive however is his poem The Three Stigmata of Pacman, which takes a silly subject and finds a seed of narrative within it to explore and tackle seriously, a trick which Sutherland pulls off nicely.
Ross Sutherland
The first half finishes with a performance by Eugene McGuinness and the Lizards. His voice, swooping between suave, deep tones and a distinctive high-pitched mew is compelling, but this art-pop doesn’t feel quite right at this point in the evening, when we’re all still sitting orderly in rows.
The second half features poetry from David J, whose style slides into beatboxing and hip-hop, as he creates his own vocal rewinds, echoes and scratching. At times the effects feel overused, but David J is a compelling performer, with a confident command over his style and technique. The content is pretty sharp too: one poem is delivered first-person in the voice of a controlled substance, cocaine (J looks the part in white suit, tie and hat), while others berate governments for their hypocrisy and the public for its apathy. His concern for social justice burns through each line, although staying just on the right side of preachy.
Mercy commissioned Sutherland to adapt an existing text as a play for the event. Sutherland chose his CV circa 2007: a minimalist, Brechtian tragedy, apparently. It becomes a musical, with Eugene McGuinness taking on the role of Sutherland. Silly? Yes. A cute idea? Yes. Well pulled off? Sadly no. Although some of the songs were smart and funny, as a whole it felt baggy and underehearsed, and ended up losing its way.
The evening was rounded off with a set by co-curators Wave Machines. After a curious, enjoyable dance routine by girls in white boiler suits, the front of the church filled with enthusiastic audience members, twitching and bopping along to Wave Machines’ infectious, falsetto-delivered synth-pop. It winds up an enjoyable, if slightly hit-and-miss evening. But one of the joys of WIYRT is its mix-it-up approach, and it’s great to be part of a crowd that goes with whatever is presented to them rather than sitting back sneeringly. May the Lord have Mercy on us again soon.
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