An Irrestible Itinerary
Image Courtesy of Christer Lundahl
Explode and (Anything) – an Itinerary
Participatory performance by artists: Lundahl & Seitl
Saturday 6 October 2007
Battersea Arts Centre, London
Explode and (Anything) – An Itinerary is one of ten special commissions by Battersea Arts Centre to be part of the sprawling installation performance of Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death. The massive Edgar Allen Poe experience fills every room in the Old Town Hall building, without skimping on detail; lighting, sound and decoration covers every inch. In the rich, atmospheric, Gothic, completely immersive environment, it is hard to believe the experience can be any more extraordinary. And then a figure in a white robe beckons you into a quiet room …
Lundahl & Seitl are very suitable artists to be embedded within Punchdrunk’s epic production. Their work creates eerie sensations of disembodiment through their uniquely designed whole-body experience, an unusually effective paradox. Explode... is uncanny, uncomfortable and provokes disorientation and dislocation of all the senses. While Punchdrunk holds up a guttering Victorian candle flame to three hours worth of terror and mystery, Lundahl and Seitl go one step further and plunge those who dare visit them into utter darkness for fifteen spine-tingling minutes.
The white-robed Lundahl & Seitl performers led us three apprehensive but excited participants into the white room. We took off our shoes, put on white robes and full-face canvas masks. We became sexless, faceless and identical; apart from our heights we were almost interchangeable. Wireless headphones blocked out noise and we stood waiting until a voice crackled in our ears. Take two steps forward. A simple enough instruction that required huge mental effort to execute when all certainty about our surroundings had been removed. The voice said it was watching me and I was to take its hand. A hand grasped mine and pulled me forward. For the next few moments, I moved around the unseen space, alternately repelled by and longing for the safety of this anonymous hand. I was beginning to relinquish all responsibility for myself, a euphoric sensation that was discomforting and enjoyable at the same time.
Explode… certainly knows how to push participants out of comfort zones and into something new and extraordinary. Through direct manipulation of the senses, participants are drawn into a world of strange, destabilising sensations: whose hand is holding mine? Who is speaking to me? Where am I? Am I safe? What is happening? In writing, it seems like the last thing any sane person would want to undergo but in practice it is an exercise of the lesser used senses and how certainties can reassemble themselves into multiple possibilities.
In Explode... Lundahl & Seitl have taken the single, definite set of environmental circumstances and replaced them with multiple imagined ones. With no way of comprehending what is in the immediate environment, every configuration was possible and the boundaries, the hard edges and certainties of space were removed. As I walked and moved with the voice gently instructing me, I imagined every possible sort of space and knew that all of them existed at the same time, somehow. The experience was an unsettling mixture of giddy liberation and dread.
The second part of the performance started when part of our masks were removed and we saw the room through a thin layer of gauze. It was a shock to have all my imagined settings collapse into this singular reality: a white room, small, with the other two audience members standing motionless. The voice told me to walk around the room, so I did. The other figures did too. We could have been reflections in a series of mirrors. I couldn't tell who had held my hand. It was eerie and bizarre. And then it got even stranger.
The voice said it was signalling to me as one of the other figures began to raise its arms. I was asked to raise my right arm. The other figures turned to look at me. It was my turn to be the embodiment of the voice. If we could all be one white-robed figure, we could also all be the voice. The multiple, simultaneous possibilities of what was real and possible crowded my mind – and then any remaining grip I had on a sense of who I was, what I was doing, where I was and how it all came to be was completely shattered.
We three white-robed figures sat in a circle facing each other, still anonymous, still interchangeable due to the gauze over our faces. The voice said it was standing behind me and wanted me to see myself as it saw me. Stand up and take two steps back, I was instructed, so I did. The lights flashed off. The lights flashed on again. Where I had been sitting, there was a figure in a white robe in exactly the same position. It was a performer being me – it was me. I was staring at the back of my own head. I was utterly gobsmacked. The other two figures remained motionless. Then the lights flashed off again, I was led back to the circle and guided into sitting down. When the lights came on again, my mouth was still open in amazement.
Explode... is an experiment for the senses and a challenge to the conceived ideas of self. Every moment in the white robe and mask with the disembodied, anonymous voice removes yet another certainty of space, of reality, of who you are, where you start and where you end. I left feeling free and light, as if I had been liberated from something that had weighed me down for so long, I was no longer aware of it until it was gone. In other hands, the blindfolds, the robes, the headphones and the constant physical touch could feel invasive and aggressive, with the challenges of such an experience occluding any emotional or mental engagement. With Lundahl & Seitl leading the way, being uncertain has never felt safer and Explode... is a thought-provoking, gentle and kindly journey into the unknown, innovative, original and utterly irresistible.
Written by Hazel Tsoi-Wiles
