Installation art and pop-up theatre.

...Or, how to make brilliant use of empty, desolate spaces.

So.  For a little over a week I’ve been involved with Secret Cinema as a volunteer, helping to transform...a space…into the set for…the film (I signed a non-disclosure agreement).  On my first day I was helping the site team which meant guarding a construction site barrier.  As boring as this sounds, sitting in one place meant I got to speak to the people doing far more interesting things and watch what was going on.  I’m the sort of person who loves the technical rehearsal for a show where others hate it, because I get to see the mechanisms behind the façade.  There’s a great sense of honesty about it.  My favourite part of that day was watching the set from the actual film we’re showing being unloaded from a lorry.  It looked so fragile, so basic, nothing like what you see on screen.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors, all smoke and mirrors.” said Adam, a member of the site team.  He told us a story about a film he worked on where while they were shooting a scene, he had to hold up a piece of set to keep it in place.  When he watched the film with a group of friends he pointed to where he was lying down, just out of shot.  

The set for Secret Cinema was prized from its cardboard boxes and laid out in a loading bay.  Some people said, “Oh, it’s all made from MDF?  I thought they’d use, you know, steel or something.”  The project manager, who is incidentally renting a room in my flat, smiled at how much money he was saving the company.  A pot of paint and clever lighting can make any material look how you want it to.  I helped out the art department one day and our first job was clearing out a space of all the materials we didn’t need.  One of the artists pulled out a sheet of wood with an acrylic effect on the facing side and said, “No.  We’re not getting rid of this piece, I like it too much.” To the average pedestrian passing by the skip, this was just a sheet of wood.  But I felt that he was prepared to defend it with his life.  Because, it is the lack of obvious significance of these pieces is what is so raw and honest about them.  It is up to the artists to harness that and make it into something spectacular.

There’s another old, empty building opposite the one we’re using.  I have passed by this building every day that I've lived in Camden, thinking how beautiful it is, and asking why is it boarded up with ‘no entry’ signs and hazard warnings.  It’s gothic looking, like something from a Charles Dickens novel, with an overgrown garden round the back and the eeriness of broken windows.  Another installation artist working at Secret Cinema had noticed this building too: she wants to turn it into a haunted house,  and that’s what got me thinking.  for a while now I’ve been looking at boarded up buildings and wondering, what will become of them?  We don’t need another supermarket, coffee chain or block of flats.  How can it be made into something worthwhile?  I’ll admit, I never even considered turning it into art.  

I read an article in Time Out recently about a pop-up art group, Theatre Delicatessen.  Not only do they make great use of these spaces brimming with potential but left to ruin, blanching the face of a city’s high street, but they utilise the space to put on theatre and therefore, turn that space into money. 

In economic terms, apparently this is the worst recession we’ve ever had.  In the last recession people turned to theatre and entertainment to brighten their spirits because it was a worthwhile expense for the little money they had.  This, pop-up theatre, is even better: the Arts can take over the spaces rendered derelict by a company under administration and turn it into something that can be enjoyed by everyone for quite a small amount of money.  You can go to your production of The Lion King and pay £60 for a ticket as well as £1 per ticket for a restoration levy.  Alternatively, you can spend £10 on one of these productions knowing that all of your money is contributing to the renovation the company has given to the space.  In this and in Fringe theatre, you will see the honest, aching underbelly of what art can really achieve and that is not to say that commercial theatre doesn't, there's just something quite charming about a set built out of a skip. 

(I can now reveal that the film was Prometheus, the set was from Pinewood Studios and the venue was on Hampstead Road, London.)

Charcoal Rose.

On the skin of your left arm

Between your wrist and elbow

Is a place where a needle struck.

Where you envisaged pain,

But artwork first.

A charcoal rose

Of fallen beauty and the elegance

Of dirt rubbed into a wound.

Bleeding through your claim

To being human.

You roll up the sleeve

Of every jumper you wear.

Turn up the cuffs of your t-shirts

And share a smile with me,

Without meeting my eye.

But that rose on your arm

Is never so shy. It stares

Into empty spaces

That you pound your feet in to,

Trembling alive with a strange anger.

I press my wrist to yours

And I suffer the sting of your thorns

Beneath the petals of the rose.

Soft skin.

Mine is your hand to be calm in.

Silk.

In the folds of my dress I smell your deceit.
On the edge of your bed, on the brink of despair,
Just a body. Justifiable. You did not cheat.

I hold my knees to my nose, feel the cold of my feet
And repress a shiver in the morning air.
In the folds of my dress I smell your deceit.

I pull at your duvet retrieving the heat
Of your skin against mine. Fingers through hair.
Just a body, justifiable, you did not cheat.

I hope that you'll turn and smile something sweet,
Pass me the night, acknowledge I was there.
But in the folds of my dress, I smell your deceit. 

I admitted defeat.
You brandished your sword with a gentleman's flair.
I'm just a body. Justifiable. You did not cheat.

Holding the door, you show me the street.
Turning I leave and you stand and you stare.
In the folds of my dress I smell your deceit.
Just a body. Justifiable. You did not cheat.

Earthquake up in here.

There’s a song that seems to play continuously on the radio at the moment by Labrinth called ‘Earthquake’.  When this song comes on, I am a very excited person.  It’s brilliant to dance to, and if you look around a club, you see people stepping onto the dance floor rather than walking off, shouting the words that they don’t really know.

I was recently one of those people mouthing nonsense, happy that the music was loud enough that no one could hear me singing, “ba bum something”.  But this morning, I thought I would look up the lyrics, just out of intrigue.

Now, I wasn’t expecting anything comparable to S.T Coleridge or William Blake in terms of refined lyricism, but I expected something a little more inspired than this:

“We got the bass banging
From here to buckingham palace
They're all moving
Hey Simon
We're fucking them up
Turning 'em psycho
Everybody rock”

 And, my favourite part of the song:

”'Cause we throw bombs on it
Throw bombs on it
Just smash something
Yeah, mosh for me
(Hey) Yeah”

I was dumbstruck.  When I listened to 50 Cent as a teenager, I knew that the lyrics were stupid, but I could merit what he was trying to achieve (usually entice a bathing suit into his hot tub).  But this?  I would love to hear Adele or Ben Howard do a Radio 1 Live Lounge cover of this song, wind it down to something soft and acoustic, and then see how much everyone loves it.  I soothed my blinking, horrified eyes with Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’.

“Earth has not any thing to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This city now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

…All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.”

It is confusing for me that they are describing the same city.  So, what happened?  Modernity, that’s what happened.  Two world wars, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.  The technological age, advances in music production that, if I’m not mistaken, a lot of traditional music lovers are particularly loathing of.  We are content to go out on a Saturday night, drunk on bottles of wine bought in a 3 for £12 offer in Sainsbury’s, wearing plastic shoes and polyester shirts, spending two thirds of the night in the toilet queue (unless you’re male) and shouting at the bar maid because they don’t take card, forgetting this argument within a second because the DJ has put together a clever remix of two of your favourite songs...with lyrics from the likes of Labrinth, Will.i.am, Tinchy Stryder…and we enjoy it.  Unmistakably, these temporary hits all serve a purpose.  But I remember being eighteen years old and at the end of the night, falling into my Dad’s car where he was playing Leonard Cohen, The Manic Street Preachers, The Cure - and knowing that this was real music.  He could never stand the rubbish I listened to but I always loved his music collection, which I have now added to my own.  Of course there are other artists today who know how to write beautiful lyrics as well as a seamless melody underneath, such as Laura Marling, Two Door Cinema Club or Snow Patrol, and I hope that this is the stuff that will last. 

But since when did the words become the least important part of the song?  When we remember music as an art form, we recognise the problem here.  A novel falls apart if it lacks a critical element of the conventions of its form.  A poem, a painting, an article in a newspaper, too.  What if we opened today’s Guardian and all that was inside were the photos and captions?  You might still glean something from it and enjoy the sheer novelty, like club music with no more meaning than "Say yeah", but for the sake of the form as a whole, it is doing nothing. 

But, I guess I should ask, must everything serve such a longstanding purpose?  Or is this class of music actually saying something more about the modern world by its very temperament?  Is there a gap in our own sense of integrity, a hole where we once had a soul, a loss of favourability towards what’s wholesome, real, raw?