What BAC means to us: Arthur Smith, Emma Rice, Stewart Lee and others
|
Version 0 of 1. Emma Rice When I first made The Red Shoes in Cornwall with Kneehigh, I dared to think that it might be something special, and dreamed of taking it to London. I put photos of the show in brown paper, tied them up with red ribbon and sent them to every theatre I could think of in town. Only one replied: BAC. David Jubb journeyed down to Heligan Gardens, sat on a hay bale, looked at the stars and booked the show. Related: Battersea Arts Centre: the show goes on We have returned to BAC ever since, knowing that this is a place where you can be free, be brave, be supported and be encouraged to make the best work you are capable of making. BAC is home. It is where I grew up as an artist and where I return to when I need to be reminded of who I am. It is precious, it is irreplaceable and it is vital to the health of British theatre. Arthur Smith BAC was one of the first theatres to offer me a spot when I was in a revue show back in the late 70s. I subsequently did my second play there, not to mention numerous standup gigs. Last September we tried the new long-form version of my Leonard Cohen show first at BAC. There is an agreeable woody feel to the rooms and an audience that is open to new ideas. The redoubtable staircase that greets you as you enter the building feels elegantly at odds with the shows it whisks you up to. It’s like some benign school. Stewart Lee When BAC’s funding was threatened a few years ago, many leaped to its defence citing the successful transfer of shows it had developed to the West End, or to more commercial areas generally, inadvertently falling into the kind of logic that Conservative culture mavens use to validate the arts, as if they were nothing but another branch of business. The work of BAC was justified as a kind of test bed to produce shows, performers and ideas that would go on to make wealth-generating art. But BAC has always provided, and hopefully will always provide, space for artists to make work which seemed inherently worth having a go at, whatever its financial potential. Sometimes this inherently worthwhile work would make money, often despite the fact that it may have looked obtuse at first. Sometimes it wouldn’t. But this is the purpose of (increasingly rare) places like BAC; to pursue ideas because ideas in and of themselves are valuable, and to do so in co-operation with a community. Having appeared to survive shifts in social attitudes and government policy that don’t necessarily chime with this approach, it’s tragic that BAC was consumed by something as straightforward as a fire, which as far we know doesn’t have its own political agenda. Richard Thomas A call came from BAC artistic director Tom Morris some time back in 1999, asking if I was still up for performing the psycho-opera Tourette’s Diva that I’d been banging on about, drunk, in the BAC bar the year before. Tourette’s Diva was my first show and is an unrepentant outpouring of bile, vitriol and (surprise) love. It’s also very funny. But we didn’t know how funny it was until Tom let me perform in front of a crowd. Tom said he didn’t need to hear any music or read any script and was happy for it to be performed in any state. Tourette’s Diva stormed it. This tiny little show garnered some press from a few broadsheets and I can honestly say turned my career around. Tom then asked me what I wanted to do next. I told him: Jerry Springer – the Opera. “Great,” he said and booked it in the diary for that summer. We had no idea other than the idea and that seemed to be the whole idea. Tom used to play trombone in meetings and loved the music of Tom Waits. I used to do a Tom Waits impression with five cigarettes. Ah, Battersea nights... Toby Jones I’ve been visiting BAC ever since I first wasn’t earning a living as an actor. In 1992, just out of drama school, we’d formed a theatre company and (like all the companies we dreamed of becoming) we headed to Battersea to try and get a gig. In the various bars and meeting rooms of the old town hall we all praised, envied and slagged each other off and felt we were part of a community. One part of me has never left that bar. Nowadays artists, poets, theatre companies and performers can go there with a whiff of an idea and step on a well-trodden ladder of development. They can eat and dream up a new theatre (there are artists’ bedrooms to sleep in) without the commercial pressures that will later come to prey on their vision. Battersea has managed to hold true to the radical tradition of its town hall by nurturing , defending and promoting all kinds of performance. We need to get the roof back on it as soon as possible. Tim Etchells Ramshackle, idiosyncratic, confoundingly maze-like, too small and too large, yet somehow ideal and in any case endlessly changing and mutating its decor and dimensions, BAC is both a theatre/arts centre and at the same time clearly almost nothing of the kind, stuffed full of people watching intently or laughing like drains and discussing like wise fools or drunks or tomorrow’s intellectuals on a night off, half full of really slick, sharp and beautiful performance; and at the same time half full of really unfinished notes-in-action towards a performance; or else a space spilling over with a vivid set of fragments and scenes presented out of order, as work-in-progress; and at the same time half full of people looking for the bar, or for the creche or the kids group or a workshop or meeting; or else looking for a black cat called Pluto last seen padding across the mosaic tiles down there beneath the stained glass dome, or else just killing time on a piano that has somehow washed up in the foyer sometime, from somewhere, no one knows quite when, how or why; and at the same time half full of historical echoes, traces and reflections, the trials of conscientious objectors, the daily grind business of the Town Hall, the early meetings of the Communist Party of Great Britain; and at the same half full of questions, statements, arguments, propositions about theatre and the future of it (some more likely than others); and at the same time apparently more than half full of people loading out the remnants of an old set, or costumes, equipment and curtains from some previous thing; or else traversed by a self-organised search party scouring the whole entire building for a particular chair or lamp that’s gone missing, probably walkabout all on its own, lost somewhere in the labyrinth; and at the same time seemingly full, almost entirely full of hot air, full of possibilities, full of futures, full of love, attention and thinking and what you might think of as diverse forms of “necessary gathering”; joyous and alternately sombre or fractious, Battersea Arts Centre doesn’t stand alone – there are places of a similar heart, heat and vitality in Berlin, in Essen, Brussels, Antwerp, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and, Lisbon to name just some – but it is the one that is on so many minds right now, and for all kinds of reasons, it’s a really important, hugely valuable part of the performance scene in the UK and much further afield, a place that Forced Entertainment and I have been more than lucky and very happy to call home for the last chunk of years, presenting works great and small, from performances to neon signs; and a place that I’d really love to see thrive, go on, turn around, vibrate, shimmer, walk tall, keep moving, change and continue. |