Venerable Bristol street theatre pioneers Desperate Men are celebrating their 30th anniversary with a whole festival dedicated to desperation. Steve Wright pounds the pavements.

The street is a great place to raise contentious issues. Mummers’ plays, political pamphleteering, soapboxes, Speakers’ Corner – there’s a tradition of free speech on the street, and street theatre belongs firmly in that tradition.” The speaker could hardly be more steeped in the tradition of which he speaks. For he is Jon Beedell, co-founder of Bristol’s ever-topical, ever-watchable Desperate Men.

The Desps have now been making entertaining, unusual, provocative and often political street theatre for three decades, in Bristol and way beyond. And, to celebrate the dawn of their fourth decade, they’ve planned an almighty feast of outdoor theatrical shenanigans this coming weekend. The judiciously named Festival of Desperation will feature some 190 performers from across the globe, performing all manner of spontaneous, site-specific, colourful and provocative street theatre, indoors and outdoors across town.

Toy-toting popster Kid Carpet, dance troupe Champloo and perennial Harbour Fest faves Stickleback Plasticus are among the local acts filling the streets with intrigue on the Friday and Saturday. A Friday evening cabaret at the Attic Bar on Stokes Croft, meanwhile, will feature myriad bizarre delights from Bristol and beyond – including ace, dark-tinged puppeteers Pickled Image, comic genius Angus Barr and Mischief La-Bas, an interactive walkabout performance company devoted to “gently warping the underlay of the fabric of society”.

A bit of history, then. Jon and fellow Desperate Richie Smith formed the company in a Berlin dance studio back in 1980. By ’83 the duo were back in the UK, performing at alternative cabaret nights in the capital: two years later both were cast in Vivian Stanshall’s inimitable comic opera ‘Stinkfoot’ on board Thekla. After five more years of touring, Jon and Richie settled in Bristol in 1990: they’ve since acquired a musical director (Shirley Pegna) and a creative producer (Richard Headon) and mounted a string of groundbreaking shows. These have included 1993’s ‘Fountain’, premiered in the goat paddock at St Werburghs City Farm; ’94’s arms-trade show ‘In the Arms of an Angel’; ‘The Lighthouse’ (1997-9), a comic street opera celebrating 300 years of manned lighthouses; and 2008’s brief-history-of-evolution ‘Darwin and the Dodo’.

Desperate shows have always been strong on content, storytelling, ideas and issues. “We are not strictly political but we do tend to do shows that are about something,” Jon continues. “I do think that quite a lot of street theatre isn’t really ‘about’ much – it tends towards entertainment, rather than provocation or political theatre. Somebody who used to work for the Arts Council remarked that they were getting fed up with ‘fluffy chickens on stilts’. That phrase has stuck and become part of street theatre parlance.” To be used somewhat witheringly? “Can be. But then there are companies who do very good fluffy chickens on sticks. If you like that kind of thing.

“But the street is a great place to deal with contentious issues and topical stuff, because of its egalitarian nature. The whole philosophy of street theatre is to reach people who don’t normally get to see that sort of thing, aren’t usually provoked in that way. And I think theatre at its best is always provocative and ‘disturbing’ in the wider sense. Theatre that doesn’t disturb your thinking processes, or make you think in a different way or take notice of something you wouldn’t normally, isn’t really doing its job.”

But how to get these provocations across in an engaging way? “Use humour – and don’t talk down to people. Find a hook, something that will engage people in an emotional narrative they can connect to, and then feed in the stuff you want to talk about. Be interested in audiences: don’t expect audiences to be naturally interested in you.”

Bath’s Natural Theatre Company are an interesting point of comparison. “I love the Nats, and they were an inspiration when they started the Bath Arts Workshop in the early 70s,” says Jon. “I’ve heard Ralph [Oswick, Natural’s head honcho] describe their work as visual poetry. I think perhaps we do provocative poetry. They can be provocative too, but they have a very visual, colourful, surreal aesthetic that works very well. We tend to be a bit more maverick, off the wall, and jump from one thing to the other. We don’t have a strict form we stick to – we find something we’re interested in and tear it to shreds.”

“A lot of our work is commercial suicide,” is Richard Headon’s interesting addition. “Recently, Glasgow’s Merchant City Festival asked us to do a piece responding to the Paris ’68 student uprisings. So I came up with the idea of the Pigpen Riots – a kind of rioting for the Coalition generation, where we approached people on the street and asked them what was bothering them. They’d write it on a board, then we’d give them a riot helmet, air horn and whistle, tape their mouth up and put them in a pen where they’d riot for five minutes before we hosed them down with a water cannon. There was a range of stuff, from ‘legalize cannabis’ to ‘no more bedtimes’. We’d made polystyrene bricks for them to lob out. We’re never going to get booked for shopping centres, let’s face it!”

So, gents. How has street theatre changed in those three decades? “The big difference is that today’s street performers don’t only have access to the street,” Richard reflects. “Companies in Bristol now have access to buildings and spaces that we never had. At best, there was a café in the evening you could do stuff at, or places like [Portland Square arts commune] the Red House, or the Western Star Domino Club. The Naturals said that they started performing on the street because they couldn’t get into theatres. Now, you can connect with the Council and get access to empty shops and buildings. Hats off to Artspace Lifespace for their sheer enthusiasm and energy in that regard.”

Richard points to September’s street theatre bash The Bristol Do as a sign of the changes. “The Do is the first time we’ve had a designated street theatre/circus festival – it was always a bit of an add-on at Ashton Court Festival. And over half the work for this year’s Do was made in Bristol. There’s a real buzz about Bristol, and an immigration of circus and street performers here.”

But has street theatre got less socially engaged? “Social engagement has changed,” Richard reflects. “Street theatre has almost become accepted into the mainstream. Its value has been recognised by the Arts Council, after 20 years of banging on their door. It engages with communities, it’s accessible, it’s egalitarian. It’s been absorbed by the status quo – which happens to all radical things eventually. But there’s still a lot of radical stuff going on out there.”

The philosophy for this weekend’s festival is to mix street theatre’s old guard and new wave. As part of the celebrations, the Desps asked 11 young artists to come up with ‘Acts of Desperation’, to be performed around the city centre (and beyond) on the Friday and Saturday. Resulting acts include a pole-dancing Jesus, an actor wandering around inviting audiences to supply him with dares, and an interactive, theatre-punctuated journey down the Severn Beach rail line.

“While celebrating the past we are very much looking to the future,” Jon explains. “We want this festival to be a meeting place for the old lags of street theatre and the new generation doing ‘outdoor arts’. The timing couldn’t be better for a celebration of all things desperate. With big arts cuts just around the corner both locally and nationally, this is not a swan song – it’s a call to arms!”

THE FESTIVAL OF DESPERATION TOOK PLACE AT VARIOUS VENUES AND STREET LOCATIONS ACROSS BRISTOL FROM FRI 15-SUN 17 OCT. 
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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