I’m in bed at half ten, in Birch Selsdon. It’s an old golf course that has been rewilded, and an old manor house attached. I’m in a room overlooking the car park. I met the staff today with a panda head on – me not them – and now I have a good sense of many of them in terms of how playful they are. I’m back to doing one of the things I’m best at – encouraging people to drop their barriers. I can’t do it without a mask, but with as mask I’m a ninja at it. How dare you suggest I don’t like my real self enough to do it without a mask! Why would you ever consider such a thing? Nonsense. You shouldn’t have brought it up as now people might think it’s true…
I’m in a brightly coloured room with a panda head on. “What are you going to say to them?” asks the artist’s PA and I’m honestly not sure. “Depends on them,” I say, knowing that you can’t rehearse a conversation with a stranger. Still there’s a lot of uncertainty…
It’s called JoyMart, and the space is dressed up like a store. People are encouraged to fill a basket and then bring it to the counter. I then extract a playful price from them. But the buzzkill is that there’s nothing replaceable here. “Which items are there enough of that I can send people away with?” “None.” “Oh.” Nobody can take anything away that isn’t made up.
Enter Panda’s mother. I couldn’t think of any other way. Mister Panda has a shop full of lovely things that he wants to give away in exchange for play. He doesn’t want money. Pandas have no use for cash. So he refuses every transaction offered for a genuine thing because the installation cannot sustain it. If it gets hard to explain this in character, his mother rings him up on the phone in order to remind him not to let people roll over him and take his things.
People are getting exactly what they desire in mime form. It seems to be working ok. I’m no Marcel Marceau, and this is just my emergency adaptation of an improv warm up game called “I’ve got you a present!” It works well, as I can create the thing they’ve asked for, give it a quality, and then pass it to them and see how it affects them and how they play with it. “As it happens, I’ve got a World Peace in a sealed test tube just here. It’s very very volatile and it could explode and burn up entirely at any moment but since you’ve asked for it you’re clearly the one to be trusted with it. Careful now. As soon as you have custody of it, my hands are clean if it blows up everywhere! And if it doesn’t blow up, perhaps you’ll know where to put it so it starts to be effective.”
So yeah, I get to be silly with people and try and get them to be silly back. This is a special skill of mine, but it is hard for me in such contexts not to create a silliness vortex. I can only see out of a gauzy window the size of a postage stamp, and the more I encourage people, the crazier it gets. Plus the lazy grown up assumption that bright fluffy things are only for children. We tried two hours this evening and, even though this is aimed at adults it was The Lord of the Flies crèche after about an hour.
I’m curious about tomorrow. I’m dreading tomorrow. I’m off to bed.
AlBarclay 