David Shrigley/Brett Goodroad, Brighton Festival review - showcases puncturing the medium's pretence

★★★★ DAVID SHRIGLEY/BRETT GOODROAD, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL Democrating the artistic process

An exhibition and an event that both seem keen to democratise the artistic process

In his 1991 novel Mao II, Don DeLillo called the literary medium “a democratic shout”. His oft-quoted claim is that any man or woman on the street could strike it lucky, find their voice, and write a great book. Not only does everyone carry round a novel, but those novels are potentially brilliant. Well, it’s not a Pulitzer nomination but in Brighton right now, any ordinary Joe can walk in off the street and find their art put on the wall at the city’s foremost gallery.

Problem in Brighton, Brighton Festival review - comic but patchy rock show

★★★ PROBLEM IN BRIGHTON, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL David Shrigley's 'fun musical event'

David Shrigley's 'fun musical event' succeeds about half the time

Problem is Brighton is down in the Festival programme as an “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, with actors involved and the inference it’s some sort of musical featuring “instruments specially created by David Shrigley for the performance”. This turns out to be seriously over-selling it. In fact, Problem in Brighton is a rock band put together to play an hour of songs created in league with the maverick artist and Festival Guest Director. Putting any expectations aside, it’s a patchy show.

The band – four men, two women – initially arrive on stage one by one, in regulation black cowboy shirts with white piping, lining up, side by side, po-faced, riffing. The guitars are also black-and-white, designed by Shrigley, with varying quantities of strings. They start in what will be their default setting throughout, Krautrock garage rock akin to The Fall. Two of them – keyboard-player Craig Warnock and drummer Ben Townsend – soon return to their own instruments. At the front, singing and performing, are Scottish actress Pauline Knowles and German actor Stephan Kreiss, both deadpan but the latter given to persuasively underplayed clowning.

Shrigley’s sensibilities are naturally to the fore in all the lyrics

The set has no narrative arc or general concept, the word "problem" written large behind them apparently an irrelevance. The songs are akin to musical versions of David Shrigley’s one-frame images, using surrealism, dry observation, mundanity and juxtaposition to create an often humorous effect. At first it doesn’t really work, although the venue is spotted with Brighton’s self-regarding bearderati who guffaw knowingly, keenly hip to every abstruse gag. As dryly smart songs about shoes, dancing and digging holes go by, it initially reminds of film director Wes Anderson’s least likeable work, in that it’s self-consciously kooky but to no particular end other than its own smug smarts.

However, it moves up a gear with a very funny song wherein Kreiss bemoans his mother’s attempt to join the band. It has a great sing-along chorus and is the evening’s most immediate number. Shrigley’s sensibilities are naturally to the fore in all the lyrics, especially in a song that keeps saying “Hey, huge man”. He has a wry way with a line. A ballad, sung by Knowles, is about a guest, possibly after a party, seeking a bed. “Don’t sleep in the entrance hall, there’s a drunk sleeping there, and it’s a fire risk,” she intones.

There are a couple of props brought on to entertaining effect, such as the exhaust pipe used as a didgeridoo (main picture), some projected images and film of Shrigley’s work, and entertaining digs at the Tories and the Queen. Sensibly, for something so lightly conceived, it does not outstay its welcome.

The musicians and actors deliver the whole thing well. They’re tight. But, in the end, possibly due to prep time issues, possibly for other reasons, there’s a sense that Shrigley bit off more than he could chew; that when it came to creating his “alt-rock/pop pantomime” (with moshpit!), he actually dialled it back to something else entirely.

Overleaf: watch a trailer for Problem in Brighton

The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, Brighton Festival review - a dynamic dedication to an artist's muse

★★★★ THE FLYING LOVERS OF VITEBSK, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL Kaleidoscope of colour, sound

and the perfect love story

They say that behind every successful man is a strong woman. The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk is as much – if not more so – the championing of the unsung hero in this story of the famous early modernist artist, Marc Chagall. His wife, Bella – early muse, sharer of world views and buckets of milk and mother of their daughter Ida, is paid tribute to, for her devotion and dedication to her husband's art.

Hofesh Shechter Company: Grand Finale, Brighton Festival review - politics, percussion and powerful choreography

★★★★ HOFESH SHECHTER COMPANY: GRAND FINALE, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL Politics, percussion and powerful choreography

Physical chaos and classical music make for a strong show

There is a sense of loyalty from the Brighton audience awaiting Hofesh Shechter’s new work.

IOU Rear View, Brighton Festival review - imaginative odyssey around town

Mind-massaging travelogue of theatre, poetry and site-specific visual experience

Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.

Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style restaurants and bars. It 100% confirms the prejudices of anyone who thinks money can’t buy taste. Today, however, this large, Dutch houseboat-style barge is a funny little oasis of artiness amidst the plastic, high money tat. Our group, is herded into a life-drawing class, which gradually, via means it would be spoilsport-ish to reveal, leads to the main event.

Aboard the bus, we strap in and put on our headphones, which play a soundtrack of ambient piano seguing into chilled, occasionally spooked electronica. The form the event takes is a 40 drive around west Brighton, stopping every now and then so that the show’s solo performer, playing a 65 year old woman looking back on her life in poetically wrought stanzas, pops up somewhere on the roadside and talks directly to our headsets. At one point she continues narrating as she's driven along behind us in a blue Fiat. Mostly, though, she finishes then disappears. The mind cannot help but wonder at the logistics of whipping her around ahead of us so efficiently.

The show is co-written by Jemima Foxtrot and Cecilia Knapp who take turns giving the performances. It is the turn of Foxtrot when theartsdesk attends. Clad in a plain burlap-style cotton dress, she has a precise northern enunciation, a touch of the child about her voice which suits the story she weaves. It’s impressionist prose-poetry that touches on a tattoo, a song, a lost love, letters and events of long ago, emanating nostalgia and wistfulness.

In itself, in a small venue, it might pall quickly, but the way it blends with everything going on around, as Foxtrot stands at a bus shelter, in a café and so on, brings it to life. At one point she delivers a monologue right next to a very active motorbike workshop with amused geezers looking on, occasionally revving their machines very loudly (possibly on purpose!), drinking tea and chatting in the lush afternoon sun. The din adds to what Foxtrot is doing, as it’s supposed to, making the viewer genuinely start thinking about the nature of the planned experience versus the random in art, bringing to mind the ideas of Tristan Tzara, John Cage and other restless creatives who've pondered the matter.

Greater than the performed show itself is the experience of moving around, backwards, the world receding before our eyes all the time, cut off from the noise around in our soundtrack bubble (background sound is only audible during the acted sequences). The busy bank holiday streets are filled with people pointing at us, seated in rows in our bulky headphones. They wave. They take camera photos. We are on view. We are part of the experience. It is a flash of narcissism, there we are and then gone, a happening, with the lovely weather only adding to it all somehow.

Everything the eye takes in, with that soundtrack playing and the constant movement, becomes akin to a dream sequence in a film. It really does. That, for me, is the best bit about IOU Rear View. It’s a trip, in the best sense, and one well worth taking.

Overleaf: Watch the trailer for IOU Rear View

NoFit State Circus present Lexicon, Brighton Festival review - a wild eye-boggling jamboree

★★★★ NOFIT STATE CIRCUS - LEXICON, BRIGHTON FESTIVAL A wild eye-boggling jamboree

Vivid big top action makes a hugely enjoyable opener to Brighton Festival 2018

When an acquaintance heard my first review of the Brighton Festival was a circus event they snorted, “Oh dear.” It’s strange; for a couple of decades there’s been a default setting among broad swathes of otherwise artistically-inclined Boho sorts: that circus is embarrassing and naff. Think of all those sniping jokes about jugglers at festivals and circus skills workshops. It’s all rather bizarre, especially pondered in the post-performance glow of Wales-based collective NoFit State Circus’s fantastic new show Lexicon. It’s hard to see what could possibly be naff about the human body doing things that seem impossible, beautifully lit, with vibrant live band accompaniment, amid a wild, carnival sense of spontaneity.

To start with, Lexicon takes place in an actual big top on Hove Lawns, by the seafront which, given it’s a gorgeous sunny day, is a great start. The big top itself is initially underwhelming from the outside, not a bright Victorian-style, fairground-themed affair but a giant, grey, domed nipple. Once inside, however, that’s irrelevant, with the performers mingling, doing walkabout theatre, hyping the atmosphere.

Things begin with the whole troupe sat at three rows of desks set on rails, naughty schoolchildren throwing paper about to a mesmeric Philip Glass-ian soundtrack provided by a band set to one side. That is until “teacher” arrives floating over them in a green housecoat. From there things quickly turn to anarchy as the desks float off into the air, like triple-headed sky-sledges, their inhabitants throwing more stuff about. The tone is set.

Over the next couple of hours, the eyes are soundly boggled. The show balances wild silliness and clowning with slower, more balletic acrobatics using silks, ropes, swings and one performer walking elegantly about on a pair of metal plates with handles that act as walking stick controllers, which he then hand-stands on and gives an astounding display of strength and balance.

It should be added that the word “clown” is used to encompass the skill set rather than any It!-style figures with white face-paint and red noses. Chief among these is a wildly curly-haired fellow in braced-trousers (to my shame, I’ve no reference programme to tell you names) whose energized antics are vitally dynamic, especially when clambering and flipping up and down a tall steel pole in the most outrageous, dangerous-looking fashion.

A high octane swing act towards the end may be the most viscerally nerve-wracking moment but there are multiple acts that defy belief. Chief among them are a female performer who, playing drunk, does a stunning balancing act on what looks to be a slack washing line, and the unicyclist Sam Goodburn whose trickery and skills are beyond anything this writer has ever witnessed in this vein. All the wacky antics involving NoFit State’s ensemble of demented bicycles is euphorically fun.

If pushed to critique Lexicon, small muffed moves and errors seem not to matter as they’re built into its earthy, anything-goes spirit, but the first half does seem more dynamic than the second, which is a curious way of doing things, and the second might even benefit from a trim. But these are truly minor quibbles. Overall, Lexicon is as delight. I've taken away a multitude of deliciously surreal memories, such as two performers playing chess on a single moving bicycle followed by a bobble-hatted servant on a unicycle worriedly trailing after them bearing a lamp to light them. It’s not the sort of thing you see every day, and nor is Lexicon.

Overleaf: Watch a trailer for Not Fit State Circus's Lexicon show

Picks of Brighton Festival 2018 by writer-director Neil Bartlett

PICKS OF BRIGHTON FESTIVAL 2018 Writer-director Neil Bartlett

The playwright and novelist on what's making him head for the Brighton Festival 2018 box office

Director, playwright and novelist Neil Bartlett has been making theatre and causing trouble since the 1980s. He made his name with a series of controversial stark naked performances staged in clubs and warehouses, then went on to become the groundbreaking Artistic Director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 1994. Since leaving the Lyric in 2005, he’s worked with collaborators as different as the National, Duckie, the Bristol Old Vic, Artangel, and the Edinburgh International Festival. 

Four of his previous Brighton Festival shows have been at the Theatre Royal: his Oscar Wilde homage For Alfonso in 2011; his one-man show What Can You Do in 2012; The Britten Canticles with Ian Bostridge in 2013; and his play Stella in 2016. This year he is collaborating with performer Francois Testory and electronic sound-artist Phil Von to present Medea, Written In Rage (26th May), a tour-de-force solo reimagining of the classical legend .

“The Theatre Royal is one of my favourite venues in the country," he says “It's a real sleeping beauty of a building, and somewhere you can create a real rapport between the performer and the crowd. Medea is a pretty spectacular piece - big frock, big sound, big performance - but it's also very personal, very intense, and I think the stage of the Royal is going to be ideal"

A Brighton Festival regular, then, Neil's picks of this year are as follows (all dates are in May).

The Myth of Sisyphus (11th, Grand Central): “Camus is a writer we could all use to pay attention to right now - he's all about how to live in impossible times. And what a great idea this is. Simon is a terrific performer - so go for the day and really get stuck in.”

Yomi Sode’s Coat (10th-11th, Brighthelm Centre): “I cut my teeth making solo out of stories that nobody was hearing at the time, and I'm fascinated to see how a whole new generation is right now using solo performance to tell a whole new set of stories. Plus he's dishing up stew!”

Britten’s War Requiem (12th, Dome): “I love the way the festival is unafraid to let the great voices of the past ring out for new audiences. The Requiem is a masterpiece of political rage and yearning, in lots of unexpected ways. It’s going to make  an amazing companion piece to Hofesh Schecter's Grand Finale. And I have to say that with those three soloists – blimey! - you're never going it hear it sung more beautifully or with more personal commitment.”

Joan (13th -14th, The Basement): “This was one of my favourite shows of last year when it toured - punchy, funny, in your face. Drag King Heaven.”

Ursula Martinez (14th, Old Market, FREE ADMISSION): “Takes solo lady-performance and really weaponises it. There are a lot of great queer voices in the festival this year, and I think Ursula might be the one who's going to be showing us all how it's done.”

Brownton Abbey (25th, Dome): “With that title, how can we go wrong?  This looks like being the party that really brings this year's festival to the boil. Expect fabulousness.”

Ezra Furman (26th, Dome): “A major new voice, perfect for those who like their rock'n'roll really wrecked. And being one myself, I can never resist a man who wears pearls.”

Songs of the Sea (13th, Glyndebourne): “If you know these artists already, then you'll need no persuading; but if you think the classical music programme is maybe not for you, then this might be the show to change your mind. In particular, pianist Julius Drake can make a keyboard speak like nobody else does. In the perfect acoustic at Glyndebourne, his playing is going to be like being given a new pair of ears. Plus those standing seats are only £10.” 

Nicola Barker and Nick Harkaway: Future Perfect (13th, Brighton & Hove High School): “When I'm not making theatre, I'm a novelist. My last one, The Disappearance Boy, was set in Brighton in 1953. These two writers are all about trying to find new ways of writing the right now and the just over the horizon. I reckon the conversation will be fascinating for anyone who's thinking ahead about how words actually work these days."

Overleaf: Neil Bartlett and Francois Testory talk about Medea: Written In Rage

Brighton Festival 2018 Preview

BRIGHTON FESTIVAL 2018 PREVIEW Highlights of the south coast's premier arts festival

Theartsdesk celebrates its media partnership with the south coast's premier arts festival

This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s theme, in honour of Brighton Festival guest director David Shrigley, is “Paintings”. Thus every school in the area has been assigned a famous painting on which to base their parade presentation. The results are guaranteed to be an eye-boggling public showcase.

After the success last year in taking the Festival to outlying areas of Brighton, Your Place returns in 2018. This means that, once again, local groups and committees in Hangleton and East Brighton have joined forces with the Festival - its artistic and theatrical resources and contacts - to put on a raft of events and activities in those areas. Much of this will be happening later in the month on the weekends of 19-20 May and 26-27 May.

Elsewhere its art a-go-go from the start with a free exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery from Californian painter Brett Goodroad, whose figurative abstract work is attuned to the subconscious, and David Shrigley’s Life Model II, a free interactive piece wherein visitors can contribute their own visions of his nine foot tall female sculpture.

Shrigley will also be putting on his own “alt-rock/pop pantomime”, Problem in Brighton, which will surely be worth a look, and giving a talk (“numerous rambling anecdotes but will not be in the slightest bit boring”) later in the festival (23 May).

Others involved in interviews and talks include novelists Rachel Cusk and Rose Tremain, local Green MP Caroline Lucas, London psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, children’s author Michael Rosen, and musicians Brett Anderson and Viv Albertine. In fact, this year’s Festival is particularly strong on contemporary music, with performances by Ezra Furman, The Last Poets, Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, Amanda Palmer, This Is The Kit, Joep Beving, Les Amazones D’Afrique, Jungle, Xylouris White and others.

All the above, of course, only skims the surface of Brighton Festival 2018’s hive of activity. There’s also a feast of theatre, circus, classical, children’s fare, dance and hosts more. It’s a very good time to hit the south coast.

Overleaf: Watch a 15-minute guide to BSL-interpreted, captioned and highly visual performances at Brighton Festival 2018

10 Questions for Artist David Shrigley

10 QUESTIONS FOR DAVID SHRIGLEY This year's Brighton Festival guest director reveals all

The provocative artist talks festivals, moshpits, Google and much more

David Shrigley (b. 1968) is an artist whose work has become broadly popular via a wide range of formats. At first glance, his stark pen-on-paper drawings seem akin to humorous newspaper cartoons – and, indeed, he’s contributed to The Guardian for years – but there's another layer to his work, something odder, slyer, psychologically attuned to the relationship between the subconscious and the ruthlessness of the human condition.

As well as a long series of books and multiple exhibitions all around the world, including forthcoming ones this year in Shanghai, Stockholm and on the Greek island of Hydra, Shrigley has a strong track record of working with musicians. He has directed videos (Blur, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), designed cover art (Deerhoof, Malcolm Middleton, etc) and taken part in music (Worried Noodles, Music and Words, etc). He also created a strikingly bizarre mascot for Partick Thistle football club in 2015 and had his “thumbs up” sculpture Really Good on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth until earlier this year.

Based in Glasgow for almost three decades, Shrigley moved to Brighton three years ago and is this year’s Guest Director of the Brighton Festival. His new book Fully Coherent Plan is published on 3 May 2018.

THOMAS H GREEN: What is your relationship with Brighton?

10 Questions for Artist David ShrigleyDAVID SHRIGLEY: I moved here in 2015. The festival’s been a really great thing to become embedded in the arts scene, a really nice social thing in practical terms of being an artist. My studio’s based here so I stay put in the mornings, unlike a lot of unfortunate people who have to go to London. I’ve enjoyed the Festival ever since coming here. It’s nice to have an obligation to see almost everything. Some years you end up wishing you’d been to things but never quite getting round to it, or they sold out.

How has your involvement been?

I think if I hadn’t chosen to make the performance I’m making [“alt-rock/pop pantomime" Problem In Brighton] it’d probably be pretty easy but actually making a new piece where I’m out of my depth, having a hand in directing music, that’s quite exciting, something I really wanted to do. If I didn’t do it now I wouldn’t get round to it. Everything’s a bit fraught. We start rehearsing in a week [this interview took place in mid-April] so the actors are living in my basement, in my studio.

Why are they in there?

Because otherwise we’d have to pay for them to stay in a hotel. We’re trying to spend the budget wisely so everyone gets paid.

It’s a musical with a mosh-pit, right?

Yes, I suppose it’s really up to the audience whether a mosh-pit is involved.

Presumably some of the music is designed to that purpose?

It’s a bit moshy, yeah, so the fact it’s a standing gig lends itself to a bit of movement. We’ll see. We’ve got that in mind.

Which events at the festival have you particular emotional investment in?

I guess, like most people, I’ve read the brochure and press release. You have to see a few things before you find that one thing that’s an absolute gem, but you never really know what that’s going to be until you’ve seen everything. Last year we went to see ten things, probably none of which we had any prior knowledge of. Swan Lake at the Dome was the thing I really enjoyed last year [Irish dance/theatre company Teac Damsa’s Swan Lake/Loch na hEala]. I really wouldn’t have anticipated liking that. You’d think a modern interpretation of Swan Lake set in urban Dublin, gritty realism meets a ballet… no. But it was fantastic. You have to make the effort.

How did you persuade singer-songwriter Malcolm Middleton to perform at the festival? I thought he’d given up doing shows with his acoustic guitar...

[Laughing wryly] I guess he feels he owes me. We’ve become good friends over the years and he knows I’m a big fan of what he does. I think he’s making a special exception for me. In general, with his music he’s restless creatively, always wanting to do something different. There’s the [experimental] Human Don’t Be Angry stuff, the collaboration we did [Music and Words], then there’s Arab Strap as well with Aidan Moffat. He just doesn’t want to have to do the same thing again and again in order to make money, because you’ve got to still love it. If you don’t, it makes it difficult to do it. I understand the predicament he’s in, but I do love his acoustic stuff. I love that performance, just him and his guitar.

Which of your works are you most often asked about by journalists and humans in general?

10 Questions for Artist David ShrigleyIt varies. I used to get asked a lot about the Fourth Plinth but that’s over now so that conversation is complete. This year I get asked about the Life Model II piece (Shrigely and Life Model II, pictured right). Because it’s a giant female I get asked about gender politics. So I should really try and figure out what my spiel is right now before I embark on the dialogue. Suffice to say I wasn’t thinking about that. It wasn’t a statement about the representation of gender but a statement about drawing and the representation of things rather than people. You hope that nothing too contentious raises its head. The discussions will be interesting and inform the work and your opinion of it. It’s a work in progress. People are asking me a lot about A Problem in Brighton but I don’t know what to tell them because we haven’t finished it yet. That’s a problem for the marketing department. As soon as I’ve got some material, I’ll put it on Instagram. We’ve got to sell tickets. It’s hard to sell tickets for things where you don’t really know what they’re about!

There’s a lot of really juicy music at the Brighton Festival this year, but if you could curate an epic Glastonbury-style green field affair, with money no object, who would be on?

I wouldn’t go to a green field festival. I hate festivals. I’m a bit of a germophobe. I don’t like chemical toilets and I need to wash my hands under running water. I’m a bit of an armchair traveller. I spent my entire childhood on camping holidays and by the time I’d got to 16 I was completely done with holidaying under canvas. That’s another thing I don’t like, the trek to the toilet block in the middle of the night. I gave Brighton Festival a list of things I wanted. I really didn’t expect them to get it all together. Deerhoof is quite a disparate group and Ezra Furman is from the States as well. There was a plan to get Mogwai to play at the Dome but they were busy. Certain acts work at festivals but perhaps don’t work so well at one-off gigs. I always think Sleaford Mods are a really good festival band because somehow their presentation of sound seems to work wherever they play because it’s so sparse and abrasive. In a dream scenario I’d quite like to see Slayer. They’re one band I’ve never seen in my life, although I’m not a particular speed metal aficionado.

I Google Imaged your name and your drawing Drunk Again (pictured left) comes up top – what does that say about anything?

10 Questions for Artist David ShrigleyI’ve pondered Google Image many times. I’ve no idea. I certainly don’t feel it’s a seminal image in my oeuvre, put it that way. The thing that annoys me most about Google Image is it turns up pictures you haven’t done that are attributed to you and there’s no way of getting rid of them.

Do you have a favourite colour?

I think it’s probably a very vivid rose pink. It’s the colour that I seem to use a lot when I’m making paintings, a very vivid magenta. There’s a colour you can get called perfect pink that I think probably isn’t very archivally sound, meaning it will fade over time, but, yeah, I’d go for perfect pink.

Where is the oddest place art has taken you?

Aspen, Colorado is a pretty weird place. It’s a small town in the mountains where rich people go skiing. It has a population of 8,000 yet they have an art museum there. It’s like St Moritz in Switzerland which is another place on the art trail. The reason why you end up going there is because rich people live there, so you’re there to hawk your wares to the people who are responsible for the terrible economic situation we’re in.

How do you find having to describe your art to people like me?

I guess it’s become normal. My first moment in the sun was more than 20 years ago now. When you are an artist, you’re constantly having conversations with people who don’t know anything about art. They might ask you, for example, to tell them what conceptual art is – and I think I should be able to tell them. If you’re a professional and involved in the art world for your entire adult life, as well as your education, you should be able to have those conversations and be comfortable. More recently I’ve started to spend a lot of time in East Devon. My wife has a little house there, so we go there and hang out in the village pub. They’ve cottoned on to the fact I’m a well-known artist, looked me up on the internet and say, “That’s rubbish! What’s that all about?” So you have these conversations with people. You can’t insulate yourself from them. Ultimately it’s valuable to talk about the work: the context is half the work.

Overleaf: David Shrigley introducing Brighton Festival 2018

10 Questions for Performer Seth Kriebel

10 QUESTIONS FOR SETH KRIEBEL Rising star of the interactive theatrical experience

Rising star of the interactive theatrical experience explains where he's coming from and what he's up to

Seth Kriebel, 45, is a performer, much of whose work involves audience participation. He is bringing the show A House Repeated to the Brighton Festival 2018 between 6th and 11th May. Of American origin, born and raised near Philadelphia, Kriebel moved to the UK in 2001 and, over the last few years, has achieved increasing profile and success with shows such as Beowulf, The Unbuilt Room and We This Way.

THOMAS H GREEN: Was your background in the States arts-orientated?

SETH KRIEBEL: This is always difficult to try and contextualise for a British audience. Where I’m from is roughly equivalent to Lancashire, in that it’s full of straight-talking working people, so mine wasn’t a particularly arts and culture household, but it wasn’t anti that either. The arts just didn’t figure that much.

What pushed you in the direction your career went?

I should clarify that I don’t in any way consider myself to be an actor. Actors tend to pretend to be other people. They play a character whereas the first thing my co-performer, Zoe Bouras, and I do when we walk on stage is announce, “Hello, I’m Seth, hello, I’m Zoe” so we’re performing but we’re not acting. This particular show came out of the fact I liked games when I was a teenager in the early Eighties. I liked computer games before the era of graphics so it was all text. All of the action and environments happened in your imagination. It was very much like reading a book, but it was interactive and the consequences of your decisions would unfold. The show I’m bringing to the Brighton Festival is very directly an attempt to capture that experience live.

When you were in the States, were you also involved in performative arts?

Not so much. My training was actually in film, so I was in film and television. Then I met my wife, moved over to Brighton with her job, phased out the film and TV and moved into the arts. For nine years I ran a company, Rules and Regs, which produced residencies for artists, so they could develop and try new things. It tended to be towards the performance side, whether visual art or a painter doing whacky experimental stuff. That kind of crossed me into doing my own stuff.

What are your thoughts on Brighton?

I love it, a great place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the UK. There’s always lots of energy and lots of stuff going on. It doesn’t feel huge and overwhelming like London can, but it’s close enough to London so you can access all the world-class things London has. Locally we have loads of amazing things too, but it’s still a place you can walk across in about an hour, and you’re always bumping into people you know so it has a neighbourly feel, with the energy of a city.

How many nights a week do you hit the town, then?

Zero, because I have a child.

A baby?

Not any more, she’s actually shockingly old now. When I look at her I go “[SHRIEKS]” and say, “When did you grow up?” But I’m, just sort of emerging from that younger child cocoon.

What was your favourite vintage video game?

I knew you were going to ask that but I don’t have one because I always played these games at my friend’s house. I didn’t have a computer, so I don’t remember the names of these different games. I just remember that feeling of looking at live glowing green text on a black background and how that could evoke such an amazing world to explore.

There were also books where you could choose your own story, weren’t there?

Yes, I had loads of Choose Your Own Adventure books which I loved dearly. They gave you a slightly different sense of interaction. They gave you a choice of A, B and C, whereas in the games you could type in anything and only some would get a response in terms of advancing the narrative. It was really up to you to figure out what you were going to do. I must warn you against using the term Choose Your Own Adventure too freely. A few years ago a theatre used that phrase to promote a different show I was doing and got rapped over the knuckles by the American company who own the copyright. It’s a trademarked phrase.

If you could work with anyone on the planet and money was no object, who would it be?

One of the central ideas behind the company Rules and Regs was imposing restrictions on all artists and then finding creativity in working your way around those restrictions. Restrictions breed creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention. So in my own practice I’m very much a cut-my-coat-according-to-my-cloth kind of guy. Having said that, Brian Eno, a previous Guest Director of the Brighton Festival, is very interesting in that he was one of the architects of Oblique Strategies which is a restriction system where you pick a card and then let that influence your artistic process, so he’d be quite fun to try something with.

You say you’re not an actor but your performance bears relation to stand-up, right?

Yeah, it’s not dissimilar to that. There isn’t a culture of storytelling outside of that for children. So I try to avoid using the word “storyteller” which, in a way, is what a stand-up comedian is, except all their stories are skewed for laughs. When we view something live that’s not comedy it tends to go into this narrative tradition – “I’m going to pretend to be a soldier” or whatever – so somewhere in that cultural gap I tend to sit, storytelling not for children. Like any story it depends very much on the audience. I’ve formalised that. Instead of just tailoring my delivery I actually ask the audience, “Ok what do you want to do now?”

The word storytelling also has connotations of hippies at festivals…

This is why I avoid that word, because it either conjurs a nice guy who’s going to really entertain a six-year-old, or kind of “Hey, man, let’s all sit cross-legged in a circle and just work things out”. Cool if that’s what you’re into but this is something completely different.

So what is it?

A House Repeated is one of those things that makes perfect sense when you’re there. It’s super-easy to understand, but whenever I do any press or write publicity copy it’s difficult to communicate quickly. Without trying to be pithy, here’s how it works. Zoe and I are standing on a bare stage between two banks of audience, so the audience is seated traverse, one half of the audience is facing the other half, and we’re in the middle. After the intro and all that, I turn to my half and I describe a place: “Imagine you’re standing outside. In front of you is a building.” That kind of thing. Then I give some options about where they might go and ask them what they’d like to do: “You can go through the door; you can go upstairs?” Go upstairs. Turn to another another member of the audience: “In that room you’ll find this.” Maybe there’s a bottle on the table, what do they want to do? They can interact. Zoe’s audience are also giving her instructions as to how to explore this imaginary environment. Now, as they navigate their way through, maybe a narrative or an implied narrative starts to unfold. Two different audiences are each controlling a different explorer, an avatar, and might see what the relationship is between them. That kind of thing. It’s hard to get that down in less than 50 words for a brochure.

What was the last thing you saw at the theatre?

Last night when I was in a show! Actually, it’s been a very busy beginning of the year where I’ve been performing a lot myself so the last thing I saw was A Christmas Carol at The Spire in Brighton, a church converted into an arts centre. My family were over from the States so we all went and it was a really enjoyable seasonal thing to do.

Subscribe to Brighton