In 2001 FoolishPeople was re-emerging from the chrysalis, after an extended break of six years (when I attempted to ignore the scream of my own personal truth.) My first son, Finn had just been born and I had a powerful realisation in that I knew I didn't want him to have a father that I didn't even recognise, a man who had become bitter and twisted because he wasn't brave enough to confront the creative fire that was burning him alive internally.
In this year zero I completed 'The Singularity'- FP performed this successfully at 'The Barn Theatre' in Welwyn Garden City and I was attempting to find a venue for FoolishPeople to show this work in London. I sent out a proposal for the project to a number of London Fringe Theatres, and had received an invitation to meet with the Artistic Director of a very well known fringe theatre.
When I was shown into the office of the Artistic Director, I noticed his office looked like a hoarder's flat. He moved a mass of papers, offered me a seat and started leafing through the script to 'The Singularity' which I had sent him. Not saying a word, but just sneering as he reminded himself of the work.
He turned around, got himself a drink, and gulped it down, (offering me a drink wasn't even a consideration), he probably received hundreds of scripts a week, from playwrights all attempting to get him to stage their work at his theatre. I was, to put it bluntly, the shit on the shoe of his day.
He broke the silence by telling me he'd read 'The Singularity' and it had some things he liked and others that he really didn't like. He didn't at all understand the concept of the immersive nature of the theatre I wanted to create- why did I need to use the stairs as well as the black box theatre at his venue? He laid it out in meticulous detail and defined what was expected of my work and my protagonist and why the immersive theatrical nature of 'The Singularity' wouldn't work. He told me that if I would change the work to a traditional play and could pay for the hire of the theatre, there could potentially be a way I could stage 'The Singularity' there.
In that moment I could feel the fear rising and his negativity threatening to extinguish what was a new beginning. It felt like a dangerous moment, where my life and work could turn and travel a path that would take me right back into the heart of despair. I sought out one single reason why he wasn't right, that I shouldn't listen to him and let him banish my ideas and dreams and in turn define the parameters of my art and ritual himself.
In that moment I remembered Les Tucker, who had taught me writing and devising at North Herts College. He'd introduced me to Artaud and encouraged me in the creation of my first written work, when the musical theatre material we were pushed to perform wasn't what he or I were really interested in. Les loved the horses, he always carried a copy of the racing times and he always defined his own path. I can never thank Les Tucker enough for the impact he had on me and the creation of FoolishPeople.
With this in mind, I explained why punk values were so important in FoolishPeople's work and demonstrated by showing him my middle finger.
There was a moment of shock between us both. This wasn't within the parameters of how a meeting between an unknown playwright and a well known fringe Artistic Director should go.
Polite English theatre is a myth, there's nothing polite in English theatre, it's still as bawdy and rude as it ever was. The essence of theatre just got better at hiding its truth, for fear of banishment.
Without permission I had ushered us both onto a new, strange path by my rude gesturing. A new story unfolded where anything could happen.
We got CPT the next week and The Singularity was shepherded into London under the stewardship of Chris Goode, who was the best mentor I could have asked for. Chris as an artist also defined his own parameters and I recognised Chris as another outsider. He completely supported the immersive theatrical ritual that was 'The Singularity' at a time when there was little to no other immersive theatre taking place in London. He recognised the power of these new parameters that were being offered to the audience from their immersion within a story.
Out of all of the auditions I've run for FP, the one I most remember is a lady who took a large knife out of her bag with her right hand and stared at us across the audition room like she was going to kill us all. She then retrieved a lettuce with her left hand from the same bag and hacked it to pieces. That was her audition. She took back the power from the audition process and from me as director. She redefined what was possible and because of that I'll never forget the experience until the day I die. It was truly amazing.
I'm not suggesting that in every exchange you should set out to redefine what is possible or expected but I think it's vital for art to exist within new parameters, outside the confines of what is safe and acceptable and this is one of the reasons why I think FoolishPeople's work still after twenty years remains outside of larger recognition. Society has mechanisms in place to reject that which is both very new and very old, whilst reinforcing the terrible nature of now, always now and never tomorrow or yesterday.
With each day that passes new parameters are emerging for artists. The tools exist today for you to develop, produce, shoot and distribute your own feature film yourself. Artists no longer need to rely on galleries to exhibit their work, there are empty spaces everywhere, offered up by the failure of the parameters of Capitalism. There's no one way, no simple solution on how to develop your ideas. Only you know the parameters and it's up to you to communicate and act as an advocate for your work and your own personal truth. You just need the will and tenacity to complete each stage of the process and do all the work necessary to manifest your art.
This is of course the very essence of the Fool archetype.
Like the Fool, there has never been a more dangerous, exciting or rewarding time to define your own parameters.
Most of the time we don't really think about moving. We just do it, and the motor functions and muscles do the rest for us out of habit. It's automatism at its finest, muscle memory that works faster than thought.
But we've all been there when you're thrown into an unfamiliar situation; that moment when your frame of reference has shifted so mightily that everything seems unpredictable.
If we feel negative towards it, often the experience will seem threatening - we'll want to do everything we can to turn back to what we perceive as the status quo. But then again, there's a creative angle to such things - an inescapable newness that may inspire a sense of vast possibility.
Because there's now the chance that the simplest, most ordinary of things can and will assume a new meaning for you. Because the unfamilliar, the unusual, the strange, and the uncanny forces you to re-evaluate, to fire up those faculties that you used to make sense of things.
Those same engines that were idling, merely ticking over before now, as awareness starts becoming important, because anything can and will happen. Because you're in a new situation, a new world where things work differently.
Your most ordinary of motions become infused with strangeness, and that's precisely what John was talking about in his last post on the Power of Nostalgia - the sense that you hang upon a precipice, or that the barriers, boundaries and screens which lend definition to your world are actually paper thin.
The fact that those very things you count on to make sense are fragile and subject to change is the reason behind the conservative urge, in the apolitical sense.
The Great British - or English if you prefer - Strangeness with which Foolish People work is, in a sense, precisely about nostalgia in the melancholic Homeric sense. A kind of unease which permeates our work, illustrating the rhythms which exist in spite of human society.
An urge to return to an imaginal home where ritual and shape may once again connect us to what it means to be human. To violate strictures of linear perception and immerse oneself in the deeply weird.
In that sense, it's unsurprising that the seventies and eighties in Britain were profoundly haunted; the spectre and the apparition may appear from nowhere. Antedilluvian spaceships may be unearthed amidst the concrete and modernist architecture. Ancient pagan rites emerge, fused with the insatiable curiosity of modern science. Atom bombs and athames, astrology and particle physics, nuclear power and telepathic children.
And this is the heart of Strange Factories - a story told in a pagan landscape. A landscape and place that is uncivilised, as the Romans named the countryfolk outside, in the provinces. There is a heretic heathenism to it - a journey down strange roads, with natives that do not obey the mores you know.
Perhaps calling Strange Factories cult cinema is far more accurate than it appears. Like the cult that surrounds Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man, FoolishPeople perform rites and acts which may at first seem bizarre and occult in nature to outsiders.
But these rites and performances are at the heart of cultic practice, a shared excperience that bonds people and their environment together. The relationship one has with experience, with environment and culture, and with other people, is subtly altered.
That experience can break and reforge bonds in new ways, so that you may never see things quite the same again. In that sense, it is the nostalgic ache for the long-forgotten, dimly half remembered, that we seek to give you. For though you may not be able to ever go home, to go back, the very ache, the very strangeness provides you with a new awareness of youself and your origin.
The strange crooked roads are lonely and haunted, yet you will find many companions along the way, odd though they may be, and weird their ways. The Hum of Strange Factories is all around you, but its origin, and how you relate to it, is yours and yours alone.
Before I started work on the Strange Factories script, I knew I wanted to explore nostalgia and the stories that affected me so profoundly as a child. Their themes and the content of the dreams they instigated were so wondrous and deeply creepy.
Children's television for those of us born in the seventies in Britain, who grew of age in the eighties was deeply strange. For lots of reasons. It seems the layers between the truth of the fairytale and the power of the myths that haunt these isles were still close to the surface, calling to us from stone tapes and faces hidden in the wall.
The strongest current within children's television programming of this period for me as a young boy was the infusion of disquiet and unease amplified by the loss of my father, grandad and nan in quick succession.
I spent a great deal of time alone with only my imagination and gravestones for company. This overlapping nature of this architectural uncanniness helped open doorways that have never shut.
The loss permeated the stories I watched, it was already there waiting for me.
As a child I was scared of everything, my mother was deeply religious and after losing my father she retreated to the safety of various forms of religion. The children's television of my childhood offered no safety. The characters never told me things would be ok or alright in the end, they showed me that only the weirdest had the skills to survive the onslaught of apparitions and shifting realities, that bathed a generation in the odd irradiance, creating tomorrow's people.
These threads showed us the day after, awful futures we didn't want to live in, fictional narratives that threatened to obliterate the real.
These stories sent my friends and I to bed with true horror in hearts, many a playtime was spent dissecting the apparent doom that grew closer every day, reaching out to us from the television screens. Nuclear Armageddon was such a real and profound fear, its poison seeped deep into the reservoirs of dreams our imaginations held, causing tides of toxic dreams.
Saphire and Steel is a programme that fills me full of dreadful wonder even today. It relentlessly refused to open its world completely to its audience, it treated us as equals, expecting you to interpret and investigate the cases just as its two agents.
No easy answers, no simple solutions. This journey must be endured, for it is in the experience of the geography of these narratives that we learn the shape of our own imaginations, reflected deep in the landscapes of their characters and worlds.
Televison of the 70's and 80's arrived wrapped in nostalgia, even as you watched it for the first time you felt a deep longing, that turned young eyes into old and vice versa.
Bagpuss, probably one of the most fondly remembered British children's television programmes was about forgotten and lost toys, left to experience fleeting moments of what once was.
Strange Factories, is born of a type of nostalgia. A longing that you can't verbalise, that connects the marrow in your bones to worlds that only exist when you dream of them.
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.
If you'd like to experience FoolishPeople's 'Theatre of Manifestation', see our work in a live context and can't wait for the 'Strange Factories' tour, FoolishPeople's new immersive event 'Virulent Experience' opens at Conway Hall on the 6th of August and runs until the 31st of August 2012.
FoolishPeople are currently inviting submissions from artists working in all mediums to create artworks and installations for our forthcoming exhibition, Virulent Experience, a unique collaboration between Conway Hall and FoolishPeople.
This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase your work to a wide audience in an historic Central London venue throughout August 2012.
Virulent Experience explores the evolution and devolution of ethics, morals and the impact to the mind, imagination and free will of humans via a fictional future version of London on the eve of the 2040 Olympics.
FoolishPeople will transform the historic Conway Hall – a landmark of London’s independent, intellectual, political and cultural life – into The Museum of Virulent Experience, housing the entire banned index of thoughts, emotions and desires in an age where Information Prohibition has begun.
We are looking for artists working in any medium to create a series of works that exist within the narrative and fictional world of the Museum of Virulent Experience.
We will also accept proposals for completed works that fit within the context and are pertinent to the piece.
All artists featured within the Virulent Experience exhibition will be included in the exhibition book published by Weaponized, this further explores the themes and context of the project. Please contact [email protected] to obtain the full artist’s brief.
London 14/5/12 Announcing – A unique collaboration between Conway Hall and FoolishPeople, Virulent Experience is an immersive theatre and art event that explores the evolution and devolution of ethics, morals and the impact to the mind, imagination and free will of humans via a fictional future version of London on the eve of the 2040 Olympics.
FoolishPeople will transform the historic Conway Hall – a landmark of London’s independent, intellectual, political and cultural life – into The Museum of Virulent Experience, housing the entire banned index of thoughts, emotions and desires in an age where Information Prohibition has begun.
John Harrigan – Artistic Director of FoolishPeople and writer of Virulent Experience comments:
“I am immensely proud to be working with Conway Hall. Their work has never been more important; providing a space for free thought within society is imperative if we are to be brave enough to imagine potential future utopias, where shared ethics and morals are vital to humankind. With Virulent Experience, FP will continue the work we started with Dead Language and transport our audience to one of the many possible futures we may inherit if society and populist culture continues to attempt to alter the perception, imagination and free will of the human mind."
Dr Jim Walsh – CEO at Conway Hall says:
“I am delighted that Conway Hall is working with FoolishPeople on this hugely important and innovative project. The ethical issues that Virulent Experience will explore, and provide an immediate focus for, can no longer be overlooked. It is vital for all us to come to terms with, and start to question, where the ever increasing flow of information will lead and at what cost. The creativity that FoolishPeople bring to this issue is second to none and I am overjoyed that Conway Hall can play its part in this unique and World class endeavour.”
Virulent Experience opens on Monday 6th August 2012, and runs throughout August.
London 2040, society is crippled under the weight of a population addicted to novelty and impermanence. Nothing lasts when every dream or nightmare imagined can be crafted and created. To stem the loss of reason in a post-real world, time and access to the ever expanding human experience is restricted. New forms of experience are policed by the Ministry of Information, in a last ditch attempt to control a world that is eating its own meaning.
Experience of that which is categorised as NOVELTY is monitored under the Human Emotional Experience Act of 2032, where total access to information is strictly limited within a monthly data plan and the most virulent forms of experience and knowledge are banned.
The age of Information Prohibition has begun.
Forced back into the real world, language devolves into hybrid forms, to cater for a generation who only understand meaning when communicated in hash tags and status updates.
Yet there is one place where all you can eat reality still exists and every banned emotion, experience, dream and nightmare can still be made real: the Virulent Museum of Human Experience, housing the entire banned index of thoughts, emotions and desires.
Now, on the eve of the opening ceremony of the 2040 London Olympics, Eliza, a certifiable Experience Junkie, who has spent a lifetime imprisoned by her out of control desires has come to the museum. There, she must convince Socrates, hoodie and outlaw philosopher, a living novelty born of the 2011 London riots, to help her release a secret hidden deep inside the museum. A machine which may save Eliza from her own mind and offer the human, a wayward animal, a method with which to regain the truth it has lost.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
ABOUT CONWAY HALL Conway Hall is a non-profit venue hosting a variety of lectures, classes, performances, community and social events. It is renowned as a hub for London’s independent intellectual and cultural life.
ABOUT FOOLISH PEOPLE FoolishPeople create and engineer immersive events, theatre, collaborative live art, books and film. Over a number of years, we have developed a practice Theatre of Manifestation that transforms entire buildings into dreamlike worlds that living characters inhabit.
FoolishPeople has collaborated with hundreds of artists worldwide and produced work in conventional theatres, galleries and site-specific venues throughout the UK, also touring to America and Amsterdam. Our work has been sought out and commissioned by organisations such as the BBC, Secret Cinema, Arcola Theatre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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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