The first footage from Strange Factories was screened alongside the release of our trailer.
In April, Lucy Harrigan, my wife and FP Producer and Performer gave birth to Ethan-James Harrigan on Sunday 15th at 4:59am in our home.
Ethan is one of the greatest rewards this path has bestowed upon me. As some of you may be aware, Lucy and I met during the thirteen month Dark Nights of the Soul ritual at the Horse Hospital. Ethan would never have been born if it wasn't for the art we created together though this magical working that brought us together.
A week after Ethan's birth, I began writing the script to Virulent Experience, a collaboration with the South Place Ethical Society and Conway Hall with FoolishPeople's share of profits going towards the post production costs of Strange Factories. Rehearsals began in July, 7 weeks before the production opened on the 6th August.
Poster Design by Simon Allin
To date, Virulent Experience had the largest cast of performers and actors of any FP project and featured 17 artists, whose work was exhibited throughout Conway Hall as part of the Index of forbidden Novelty.
Virulent Experience was well received and this was due in no small part to Jim, Sid, Zia and the rest of the staff at Conway Hall as well as the hard work of the actors, artists and production staff.
FoolishPeople would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone involved with the project- we were extremely lucky to work with so many talented actors and artists.
Post production work on Strange Factories has continued throughout the year. Stephen Baysted, our Director of Sound, his team and Rich Aitken at Nimrod Productions have created a truly unique musical score and sonic environment for the film.
On July 23rd we had the first screening of Strange Factories at the Charlotte Street Hotel for the cast, crew and a special invited audience. As I sat with the audience, sensing their response to the film, I vividly remember reflecting on how it was one of the most special moments of my career.
In September I locked the final cut of Strange Factories.
I'm happy to say that we'll be announcing the release date and sharing further news early next year on the next chapter of the Strange Factories ritual and its phantasmagoric theatrical release. Those of you who have supported our film from the very begining via our Indiegogo campaign will be the first to experience the live event and receive a special copy of the final film.
On 1st December FoolishPeople moved into its first non residential office space after many years of creating, writing and planning work in any space that was available to us.
Last week we began the final planning for the Strange Factories release, and I'm currently working on the outline to my next film, whilst editing the Virulent Experience footage shot by Will Wright and Mark Cadwell for release next year.
The work schedule this year has been relentless and has asked more from me than ever before. I will be honest there have been times when I thought I couldn't continue but I've learnt that if you have the patience and fortitude to endure, you will be rewarded. Life and art are a perpetual flux and Magick requires we continue to undergo change, however violent it may be to find the truth beneath the surface. 'Solve et coagula'.
FoolishPeople is very proud to announce that Craig Slee is joining us as a Writer and Creative Content Developer. Craig will be developing and writing the next cycle of the Strange Factoriesradiograms, which are an important element of the world we are building. In its final form the story will spread out from the film and exist within radiograms, books and of course the FoolishPeople event. All components of the machinery that power this ritual.
And what of you?
You are the most cherished and sacred aspect of our work, the most powerful force: the audience. It's within your mind that every possibility ever imagined takes place.
Thank you once again for sharing the ritual space with us on this long, wondrous journey.
So, here we are on the 21st of December, at the end of the Mayan calendar and the end of one world.
Time ends, every second counts down the possibilities of what once was.
Consider a world beyond the tyranny of time and what is thought and accepted as possible and then perhaps we can manifest a future bright with every possibility.
This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the previous article here.
Afternoon skull examination by Benedictine monks at Einsiedeln Abbey, Switzerland.
But the game's worth all the candles, since now they're burning at both ends, and that's fine: the chips are down. -Alain Jouffroy
Tens of millions of people worldwide practice theologies which contain an overt element of the eschatological. Such "Armageddon theologians" have even made it into the White House. It is not a requirement of such views that one is religious but fear not, I've quoted Zizek once in this series already, I'm not going to do it again. According to Norman Cohn, eschatological beliefs and mythologies are not exclusive to our time; such beliefs have reared their heads repeatedly throughout history, particularly in times of mass disorientation or anxiety. (Is there any other kind of time?) Across two volumes on the subject, Cohn poses the question as to how and where such expectations of annihilation and consummation developed. As his groundbreaking study unfolds, it dawns on him what a bunch of suckers we all are and have been for quite some time, since Zoroaster, in fact. What's more, the end (of this idea) is not nigh, for as he proclaims, "who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it [the eschatological tradition] may generate in the forseeable future?"
So let's rattle through the history lesson. Cohn argues that until around 1500 BC Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Indo-Iranians, Canaanites and pre-exilic Israelites were more or less united in their world view; that in the beginning the world had been organised and delivered from chaos by one or more gods. To displease a god would be to risk the divinely ordained order of things, for the opposite of order was primordial chaos, a dangerous force which seeped into the earthly realm under the guise of plague, famine and invasion. The Egyptians knew this divine principle of order as ma'at ('base'), the social and political embodiment of which was the Egyptian state, or rather, the Egyptian monarchy, which comprised human heirs to the throne previously believed to have been occupied by the sun-God Ra himself. Periodic regeneration and rejuvenation through upholding ma'at on the personal, social and political planes was key to understanding the Egyptian ideal. The best any pharaoh could do would be to restore the feted order of the past, re-establishing the ultimate conditions experienced under the rule of Ra, 'in the beginning'. This continual reaffirmation of ma'at, this endless return to 'the first occasion', the notion that order is always teetering on the brink of chaos, which must surely be reigned in and always is, leads Cohn to describe the Egyptian world view as "static yet anxious".
According to Cohn, sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC such ideas were turned inside out by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra, better known as Zoroaster, who espoused the controversial idea that all existence was "the gradual realisation of a divine plan". He proposed a dualistic cosmology of the spirit of good, Ohrmazd, and evil, Ahriman, between whom man is free to choose. Cohn argues that Zoroaster's prophesy was inspired by the Iranian version of traditional combat myths, whereby a young hero, blessed by the Gods, keeps chaos at bay by winning a great battle against an embodiment of evil, most likely a form of the feared 'chaos monster', and is rewarded by being appointed ruler of his kingdom. By adopting such a mythology, Zoroaster provided his followers with a view of the world which was forward-thinking and vitally comforting in its optimism. He foretold of a final battle, in which the supreme god and his supernatural allies would defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and destroy them absolutely, leaving the divine order to reign without conflict or obstruction for all eternity. Mental and physical distress would be banished forever in a world which basks in total security and peace, unchallenged by chaos or evil. History would effectively cease. This was to be known as 'the making wonderful'. And for Zoroaster, it was going to happen very soon.
In the sixth century BC Zoroastrianism became the religion of the first Iranian empire.
Of course, in order to function as the primary religion of a successful, well-established empire, it was essential that Zoroastrian eschatology be modified to suit the needs of such an empire. Unsurprisingly, immediate and total transformation of the world was not necessarily an imperative when times were good, riches were abound and new temples were being erected. Therefore the 'making wonderful' was postponed, officially, to a remote future, thousands of years away.
Whilst numerous empires withered and collapsed, Zoroaster's proclamation lived on. In particular his notion of the great cosmic war to come had a deep influence on certain Jewish groups, particularly the Jesus sect. Whilst the particular political situations which prompted Zoroaster's proclamations faded into history, the ideas seeded in his prophesies lived, taking the form of a convenient social myth which had the ability to both console and fortify those with uncertain futures. Through its own malleability, Zoroaster's eschatology was reformed, regurgitated and adapted, surviving many attempts to kill it off for good.
'The Last Judgement', Rogier van der Weyden, (1445-1450 )
Even when quashed or driven underground by the regimes of the time, the idea would rise once again, years later, in distant and disparate areas where overpopulation and social change, war, drought, plague and famine assured that the cosmic war, in the form of (in the case of Protestant millenarians, for example) the coming of the Antichrist , was tensely awaited. A great deal of fraternity was to be found in such beliefs throughout the centuries, from the early Jews and members of the Jesus sect, to Protestant millenarians and even today's evangelical Christians.
One Big Happy Apocalypse? I think not.
Whilst dreams of revelation and collapse foretold are doubtlessly comforting, Cohn reveals over the course of his study that they are ultimately nothing more than a social construct, an illusion. Whilst Cohn pursued his conclusion out of fear, fear of the extremities of action justified by such eschatological yearnings, his understanding of the readiness of people to adopt such social myths is great. But perhaps we would do better to free ourselves of such myths or at the very least, to consider a few exciting alternatives.
Richard Lester's absurdist comedy The Bed Sitting Room (1969), scripted by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, goes beyond the apocalypse in search of meaning, envisioning life after the collapse of civilisation, post- the lifting of the veil. As in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), there's an awful lot of rubbish lying around. And nothing makes much sense. In fact not an awful lot has changed since the End Times were over, prompting the question, what if, as Evan Calder Williams claims, the apocalypse just wasn't apocalyptic enough? As Calder Williams explains, "you aren't post-apocalyptic because the apocalypse happened, the film stresses. You become post-apocalyptic when you learn to do something better, or at least more morbidly fun, with the apocalyptic remains of the day."
To be apocalyptic is to be in waiting. You might as well be one of the undead. To be post-apocalyptic is to be alive, by the skin of your teeth. Ok, so there's a lot of rubbish piling up everywhere but isn't it high time we stopped fantasising about pearly gates and great consummations due to take place on some date unknown but possibly long after we're dead, and started making the most of the remains of the day? There's a lot to be learned from decay, rubble, ruins, dirge and toil. Earlier in this series I linked the hyperreality thesis to the omnipresent fear of death ("those fantasies of death and apocalypse harboured in every bedroom across the world...) and the un-therapeutic unveiling of atrocities by filmmakers such as Noe and von Trier. Neither filmmaker is fearful of bombarding us with disease, decomposition and other images traditionally greeted by us with disgust. If disease is as inevitable as death then why shy away from it? Why turn from what you MOST NEED TO KNOW? To turn from death and disease is to shy away from life itself:
"Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone...The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healty people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air". (Roberto Bolano, 2666)
To survive modern life is, to adopt Calder Williams' thesis, to become a "salvagepunk". Part of what we are salvaging is our right to death. As contemporary society grows ever more riddled with incurable diseases and cancers, Western life expectancy remains mystically high. On this planet, nobody is allowed to die. Our fear of death has contorted life itself, our contemporaries and elders rot in hospital corridors, their lives strung out by the latest life-saving technology. As in The Bed Sitting Room, there's a lot of junk lying around. Our bodies are no longer our own. And if we don't own our own bodies then we certainly can't lay claim to our own deaths. And if we don't own our deaths then how can we possibly assert the rights to our own lives? With the licensing of every new cutting-edge cure, death is pushed yet further away and our sicknesses and maladies only increase in their virulence. Meanwhile, Eugene Thacker points out that yet another zombie movie has stormed the box office...
Proximity to the ruins of our existence, then, can be the only prescription.
In August 2012 FoolishPeople performed John Harrigan'sVirulent Experience, a thirty nine cycle ritual at Conway Hall in London which took fear of death as the basis for a work which also functioned on the levels of both contemporary political satire and gnostic exploration. On an even more personal level it was, for me as a performer, a means by which to transform personal experiences of cancer and loss into the form of a mythical narrative which would enable me to reach a new understanding of myself, my life and the world which I inhabit through repeated catharsis; three eschatons a night, for thirteen nights.
FoolishPeople's work in theatre and film runs parallel to the hyperreal projects of Noe and von Trier, drawing upon ideas inherent to both the cinema of attractions and the theoretical work of theatre practitioners such as Artaud. The purpose of such work is always to confront ourselves with ourselves, to reveal the ways in which reality can be as illusory and abstract as hyperreality. Or unreality. To question whether such a thing as the 'self' even exists. As a means by which to redefine freedom through a direct attack upon all oppressive structures, institutions, habits and chiefly thoughts, the work of FoolishPeople lies firmly and proudly in the surrealist tradition, of which Andre Breton wrote,
"Everything leads me to believe that there exists a certain point, a state of mind in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. It would be useless to seek in Surrealist activity any impulse other than the hope of determining this point".
The 'certain point' which Breton refers to is the personal apocalypse, or eschaton, which can take place hourly, daily, over and over again, should you so wish. This is the work of life. Human beings are highly succeptible to mythologies, Cohn has revealed that much. The project of FoolishPeople is to explore such mythologies, to live them and to smash them, to build new ones, better ones, worse ones, real ones, fictitious ones. Life and death, past and future, fact and fiction. The manifestation of whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Minute by minute. Nothing is certain except death. Once you've faced that, the rest is up for grabs.
"Your journey into the mid 21st century will take you from the museum’s basement to the roof, and past a dizzying array of disturbing art and challenging performances...I found ‘Virulent Experience’ both confusing and exhilarating in equal measure, the most intense theatrical event I’ve attended this year – believe me, it is way, way out there!" - Londoneer
"An intelligent and quick-paced piece of theatre...at times it feels similar to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. FoolishPeople are dangerous and exhilarating." - Eye Spy Theatre
"Fans of twist-laden dense drama like The Prisoner, Lost and Fifty Shades of S&M will want to dive into new immersive theatre show Virulent Experience at Conway Hall...There are no plot holes, just unseen episodes, so go explore and find areas and scenes you may have missed the first time around" - Londonist
"The acting was slick and powerful and seamless....This show blew my mind and I can’t really explain why or what or how it did it...but that you should see it for yourself as it is too good to miss" - Art and Exhibit
Thank you to all candidates who have entered the Museum so far. Your dreams, visions, emotions and desires have now been added to the INDEX. The Museum of Virulent Experience opens again this Thursday at 7.30pm. Gain access here.
Virulent Experience runs until the 31st of August. FoolishPeople will then begin pre-production on our next feature film, so be sure to take this rare opportunity to experience FoolishPeople's live work first hand.
"the computerized metropolis appears as a vast, barely disguised penal colony, in which each social system, just as each individual moves in passageways strictly differentiated and regulated by the whole. A penal colony made transparent by the computer networks that keep it under constant surveillance. In this model, metropolitan social space-time mimics the schema of a predictable universe in precarious equilibrium, unbothered by its forced tranquility, subdivided into modular compartments inside of which each worker labors, encapsulated within a specific collective role-like a goldfish in a bowl. A universe regulated by apparatuses of selective retroaction dedicated to the neutralization of all disruptions to the programs system established by the executive. [ . . . J Given the absurd and unsustainable communication in which everyone is inevitably caught, as if ensnared by the paradoxical injunction- that in order to 'speak' one must give up 'communicating,' that to 'communicate' one must give up speaking!-"
As a historian I've always been fascinated by the pre-Sure Heart years. The more I delve into our nation's history the more assured I become as to the inherent rightness of they way in which our country is developing, year by year, as Sure Heart infiltrates all areas of our lives and consciousnesses. Technology, I see it, is a gift that we have finally learned to harness for the good of our society. Our ancestors overvalued freedom. Freedom does little but induce anxiety in citizens; forcing the burden of choice upon their incapable shoulders. As a government historian I've had unprecedented access to first hand accounts of the atrocities for which freedom has repeatedly been to blame. Sure Heart serves to relieve us of this great burden. Of course, there are sacrifices to be made. But those sacrifices, I hope you shall understand, are made in the name of righteousness and above all, justice. I can think of nowhere I'd rather live than in a society as right and just as ours. Citizens, be grateful and proud. We have much to be thankful for.
To be perfectly honest I can't remember a time before Sure Heart. But I've been told that I was something of a disagreeable child, a directionless child and that my parents were unable to control either me or themselves. I don't remember my parents very clearly but that is unimportant as Sure Heart remembers children long after their parents have forgotten them. The most miraculous thing is that despite my background, I have succeeded in achieving my full potential. I'm a true moral rags to moral riches tale. Who would've thought it? I work for the Ministry now. My parents could only afford to have one child but I am a proud father of four, such is my social standing. Safety, Sanity and Sense have saved me and if you put your faith in our nation's system, they can save you too.
The Ministry would like to take this time to wish you a very happy Summer Solstice.
To celebrate the beginning of our Great British Summertime we would like to invite you and your loved ones to participate in your local Government sanctioned jumble sales, fetes, fayres and SureHeart sponsored street parties. A full list of authorised events and Summer Bandwith packages are available to download directly from Blake. These are fun-packed, safety-first events which pose no risk to you or your family. Relax and enjoy this special time in the knowledge that the Ministry are invigilating your safety, sanity and sense.
Here at the Ministry we know that having a good time is a valuable reward for our dear citizens and a requisite for a stable and positive mental attitude. We believe that traditional festivals and events lie at the heart of the fabric of every community. So whip up some cream for those strawberries and have a jolly good healthy time. This is an excellent opportunity to show the global community the ways in which our glorious nation shall prove to be the exemplary Olympic host.
My parents don't have enough money to take me on holiday and I suppose that since neither of them work then every day is like a holiday for them so they don't realise that when school's finished for the summer I want to be like my friends and go away somewhere nice for a change of scene. I've been on the SureHeart Summerscheme every year since I was six. This year I've used some of the money I earned from my SureHeart placement in our local supermarket to put a financial contribution towards my place. There are about fifty of us in my group and we go away to the seaside with our SureHeart advisors. This year we're going to Bridlington in Yorkshire. There is some time for fun but mainly we do other stuff like social role play games and we discuss and evaluate how our parents are doing and whether we think they could do better. Some of it's made me realise how my parents do have a tendency to fail me and let me down but thanks to SureHeart's intervention on my part then I definitely notice an improvement year on year. I don't belong to my parents anymore. I belong to SureHeart. And SureHeart always act in my best interests. I do like to be beside the seaside, don't you?
It's rather hard to imagine now, but everything I am today, I owe to Sure Heart. I have Sure Heart to thank for my life. I was born into a "troubled family". Living in Deptford, the child of unemployed parents in a chaotic community rife with drug abuse and decay, there was little hope for me. My elder brother was imprisoned in the aftermath of the 2011 London riots. Darned right, I think now. Darned right. Sure Heart made sure I cut him out of my life. In a way, I cut them all out of my life. I feel purer now. Pure of intent, sanitised of all negative interference and utterly removed from the Novelty which I have witnessed breaking homes, destroying lives and leading the weak down the garden path and into the murky depths of Virulent Experience. I wave my Sure Heart credentials, my status as an Original, high in the air, like a flag. It's a flag of HOPE. I truly wish all could be as lucky as I have been. Eventually, I believe, all will be. We shall all, on that day, be blessed by the pervasive goodness, safety and sense of the Sure Heart way. None shall escape the clutches of this blessing.
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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