I'm back in the beating heart of alternative London, Battersea Arts Centre, and we’re in one of the performance spaces I’ve never seen before, The Member’s Bar. As we wait to go in, each audience member is handed a rain poncho which is both alarming and exciting. Blood Show is a “cyclical feat of endurance and precision” that uses 75 litres of blood. I can disclose that only my trainers were harmed during the performance of this show and I am now keeping them as a sacred memento.
After the performance, Ocean, the creator and lead performer, told me that the blood is entirely custom and developed by a specialist company. A show I mistakenly thought was called Blood Bath, turned out to be just that.
The performance begins, almost imperceptibly at first and then undeniably and quite literally, smacks you in the face. It’s a work of genius. Chillingworth and Hambling are formidable, daring and outrageously cheeky. Tim Bromage, the third in this trio might possibly go down as history’s greatest ghost, certainly he has outshone the ghost of Hamlet’s father, arguably theatre’s most famous ghost.
The timing, the precision, the subtle humour makes this a choreographic masterpiece.
Image by Kirsten McTernan
Having praised Naomi Kuyck-Cohen’s design for previous productions, I’m here to declare that she has done it again. Along with Joshua Gadsby, they have created a minimalist heaven that turns into bloody hell. A carpeted white island, a fake tree, plastic cups, all obliterated. It’s havoc, a personal vendetta against order and all that is pure in this world.
Whilst there is an ‘official’ narrative, you can take what you need from this show. For me, it’s a visual delight, sleek yet lavish, apocalyptic and brazenly trivial. Effortlessly transcending culture and language, it raises questions around gender and identity.
There’s a wider conversation to be had here about the role of performance art and its rise into the mainstream. This work is far from typical and requires an open-minded audience or those inclined to cherish the more radical experiences, but it seems to be gaining popularity in less avant-garde spaces. Perhaps this work never went away but certainly there is a hunger for it now, with young audiences hunting out something experiential and daring. What’s most captivating about this kind of work is the way in which it breaks all the rules whilst adhering to every single one. When you see it, you’ll know exactly what I mean…
Words: Elizabeth Huskisson
While we were kindly invited by Abstrakt Publicity to see this show, we were not paid, and our opinions remain entirely our own.
