Don’t Leave Me This Way
Franko B
Arnolfini, Bristol
14/12/2007

You will, of course, be very familiar with sleepdogs, even though you might not know their name (unsurprising, given that I just made it up.) Sleepdogs are the whorls of colour and light that you see on the inside of your eyelids as you slumber. They’re the residual retinal images that, later in the night, will flower into full-grown dreams.

Franko B’s Don’t Leave Me This Way begins by presenting the artist as a sleepdog. His voluptuous, naked form sits unmoving in the darkness, illuminated so subtly and with such a barely perceptible inconstancy that you could easily consider his presence a trick of the mind. Kamal Ackarie’s mercurial lighting design only gradually filters in the details of Franko’s many tattoos, the dome of his head, his width and girth. For quite some time the artist’s face - and any expression he may be wearing - are never fully revealed.

It’s not as if there’s any great mystery as to how Franko B appears amongst us: before the show, the audience has filed into the Arnolfini auditorium and has parked itself on raked seating, chatting, before a raised plinth upon which a nondescript chair is positioned. It’s pretty obvious that once the houselights dim and we’re plunged into near-total darkness, Franko has ascended to his seat and is waiting, whilst the hammering, stuttering squalls of a post-industrial electronic soundtrack bounces threateningly from speaker to speaker around us. The noise is disjointed, mechanical, repetitive but random, like a gargantuan malfunctioning robot repeatedly and unsuccessfully bolting itself together. For me, the tangible unease comes not from the sheer volume of this noise, or the optical trickery alone, but the fact that it seems to play with our location – there’s an unspoken danger to theatrical spaces, so much buzzing and barely controlled electricity, so many suspended lights, the threat of sudden heat, shock and collapse all around… and the brutal, unforgiving soundtrack seems to emphasise the raw power around you, generating a palpable techno-claustrophobia. Combine this with the sensation that Franko B’s presence feels a bit like a mental glitch, a naughtiness of the cortex, and you’re tempted to blink repeatedly, in a vain attempt to re-set your surroundings to something a bit more comfortable.

Then lightning strikes.

Unheralded and intense, a massive burst of white light floods the audience, and is gone. My eyes water instantly. Another burst, then a dual burst, and finally, a wash of overpowering light holds over us for about 10 seconds. Franko B is lit completely and profoundly, but you can only look at him by adopting one of several strategies – squinting, angling your head oddly, or raising a hand to your eyes. With my neck bent as though I’m an incredibly tall man in a very low-ceilinged room, I try to look at Franko. Tears are streaming down my face. From what I can tell, he seems to be smiling. But then we’re plunged into darkness one last time, and there’s another morphing, sleepdog-pass of dark blue light over the artist’s familiar figure before the houselights rise to reveal an empty chair.

Franko B is perhaps best known for the blood-based practice that has dominated his live work for the past 15 years. In I Miss You, for instance, he falteringly paraded the length of a long, thin, strip of canvas whilst bleeding constantly from wounds in his arms. Many audience members have testified to the sensation that through simple actions like these – which ostensibly seem lonely, artful, maybe even shocking – Franko has “taken them by the hand” and guided them through the difficulties and differences of his practice with the gentle touch of a friend or lover. Despite his shift in practice away from bloodletting performances (you can imagine anyone getting tired of having to sign contracts which stipulate you guarantee to “bleed as part of the performance,” and “from both arms”, otherwise your fee is forfeit) Franko B’s work is still wonderfully, beautifully unapologetic about its brash sentimentalities: it’s about Franko, it’s about you, it’s about letting go, it’s about loving, dying, needing, wanting. The pop song titles say as much.

Most Hollywood movies would kill to be able to tap into the hopes and fears of its audience with the simplest of abstract images, but somehow Franko B manages to do just that. So Don’t Leave Me This Way will be about many things to many people… but for me it was about dying. It was Franko holding your hand as you fade, fighting inside but doomed, sinking into oblivion, into the mystery. How did it achieve that? I don’t know for sure. No, let me re-phrase that: I quite simply haven’t a clue. Read the first few paragraphs above, it’s all there. That’s what Franko B did, moment by moment, as best I can describe it. Where precisely the circuit connected, and how the hell the light went on? That’s another matter.

Tim Atack

www.dontleavemethisway.net
www.franko-b.com
www.arnolfini.org.uk