Naima Khan samples some of the best experimental theatre around in the One on One Festival at Battersea Arts Centre.
The One-on-One festival at Battersea Arts Centre is nothing short of a theme park of theatre. It's a concentration of some of the most important developments of the form. No matter how familiar you are with participatory productions, there are still so many new experimental events that you are guaranteed to find something you'll love, something you'll hate, and something you've never experienced before.
The programme is both full and vague, but this is by design. A distinctive element of the joy is not being able to anticipate what will happen. We're given the basic logistics of the events and told what kind of person would most enjoy it, e.g. someone inquisitive, someone adventurous, curious, ponderous etc. And it's not worth going to the festival unless you're at least one of these.
I'm handed a schedule on arrival and my first performance is I Vow To Thee My Country by Kings of England, headed by Simon Bowes. I'm fortunate to start with this show as it sets the tone for the way I approach the rest of festival. A crucial element of One-on-One is that what you take away from this festival is down to you. You get back what you put in, so invest well.
Programmed into my schedule is time to explore the events that don't need timetabling. One of the best of these is The Changing Room by Coney: a wonderland of the Alice variety complete with smells in jars and cryptic messages from strangers. The discovery element of the festival is brilliantly realised but the reflection aspects are not always well executed, and after The Changing Room, I end up wasting time at a bland installation trying to make an effort but not really seeing how.
One-on-One's most striking shows are so effective because they draw on what the audience already knows at a far higher level than traditional theatre. But sound artist Melanie Wilson introduces her audience to something that will be new for the vast majority. To get to her show, The View From Here, I'm guided into a cranny of the BAC attic where a nurse from the '50s gently explains what she's going to do to me using bandages and headphones. Before long I'm immersed in the world of a blind, bed-ridden patient trying to make the most of her limited existence. Wilson's sophisticated skill with sound is haunting and her performance fittingly eerie.
Of all the creative minds I meet at One-on-One, Christer of Lundahl & Seitl is by far the most memorable. Rotating In A Room of Images, the show he's created with his partner, has the typical elements of traditional theatre: characters, script, costume, and narrative, but they're presented with an indescribable ghostly grace that pulls you through a range of unsettling emotions while keeping you for the most part in complete darkness.
Lundahl & Seitl are interested in what we don't know about our own minds and how we can trick them. They draw on physics and express what they learn so cleverly in their art, that their theatre is truly one of a kind. Go to One-on-One for this show alone and you'll find a host of brilliantly bizarre events well worth your time.
One-on-One Festival runs at BAC until 18th July
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