BUZZCUT Sunday at Glue Factory – hours of live performance that ranges from quirky to gritty, unnerving to the delicately beautiful and all of it fiercely in the moment and potently ephemeral (albeit meticulously documented on camera).
It opens with Richard Layzell in mood pontifical, his impromptu pulpit in the tank room a reminder of this building's past processes and a cue to urge us to stick with it – it being whatever life throws at us. It's deceptively whimsical. Layzell's word-play carries profound reflections on the passing of time, the seizing of opportunities, the need to question and be open to what's around us.
A perfect incentive to plunge, blindfolded and trustingly hand-in-hand with an unknown companion, into Gate III, the latest interactive installation from All Eyes Wide. As you blunder about, not sure who's leading who or what the cloth-shrouded space holds, headphones feed a kind of directional soundscape – static crackles when you hit a wall, introducing a Pavlovian conditioning into the sensory challenge.
Meanwhile, the Glue Factory's Bar was jumping – and going for the burn – with Katy Baird and her sidekick Lucy Hutson as they demonstrated FIT, a decade-by-decade and stretch-by-squat foray through the workout routines fronted by celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Cher and more recently Davina McCall. FIT unstintingly sweats the myth that these celebs and their lucrative DVDs can really make us just like them ... only maybe without the royalties, the posse of make-up artists, masseurs and sycophants. Definitely a performance fit for purpose.
Imagination, daring, wit and wonderment all took flight in Harry Wilson's Death Jump, a solo homage to the brave (deluded?) souls who defy gravity and freefall from great heights. Wilson wove together facts, dreams, visual flair and a just a hint of naive hero worship in order to bring us – and himself – to the brink of why humanity longs to take wing and soar, unaided, through the blue beyond.
Elsewhere Peter McMaster anointed crumbling brickwork with a grouting of gold leaf, a healing metal in other times and other cultures. It glinted, like a charm in the gloom, as we reeled out of Lady Macbeth, ears ringing from the visceral clamour created by Black Sun Drum Korps as they mashed up Shakespeare's text with brutal, ear-shattering pulses battered out of that Glue Factory tank. There was more. More than could be seen in a day that was a self-contained triumph, a resoundingly fine end to Buzzcut 2013.
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