Punchdrunk: Curtis & Barrett on It Felt Like A Kiss
Sunday, June 28th, 2009Stand by for a slice of audio with Felix Barrett and Adam Curtis on the new Punchdrunk show: It Felt Like A Kiss. In the meantime, here’s a feature on this ground-breaking event that ran in the Daily Telegraph but never made it online:
It looks like the sort of office-block Manchester’s answer to David Brent would work in: a rectangular mass of concrete slabs - very Sixties. There were plans afoot to raze it to the ground but then the recession struck, so there it still stands – upstaging its gleaming new glass neighbours in a regenerated city-centre square through sheer anomalous ugliness.
This nondescript location – still partly occupied - is busily being refashioned inside to become the home to one of the highlights of next month’s Manchester International Festival programme: a new show from genre-busting theatre company of the moment Punchdrunk.
For those not yet au fait with the Punchdrunk phenomenon – and with Kevin Spacey backing Tunnel 228, their recent catacomb of installations beneath Waterloo station, they now have a vast army of aficionados – the essential thing to know is that they do promenade happenings in a massive and meticulous way. The immersion of the audience in a totally realised world is everything. The show that first got everyone talking was Faust (2006), performed across five storeys of a Wapping warehouse. The follow-up was the Edgar Allan Poe-inspired extravaganza The Masque of the Red Death (2007) which inhabited every inch of the Battersea Arts Centre. All eyes will now be on It Felt Like a Kiss, their first substantial work since then, to see if they can pull off a hat-trick of hits.
And that’s one reason why, no sooner have I infiltrated Punchdrunk HQ, than its artistic director Felix Barrett, 31, is politely ushering me outside again, through darkened corridors pulsing with the sound of drills, and out past the front-door security guard, lest I pry too far. The one thing that’s faintly impossible – and practically forbidden – to say about a Punchdrunk show in advance is what will happen in it. Surprise is of the essence and Barrett, a far more genial, chatty type than his perturbing, adrenalin-inducing creations would suggest, has no intention of spilling any valuable beans.
What he will declare straight off, though, is that in terms of feel and intellectual ambition, It Felt Like a Kiss represents a major departure. For one thing, it kisses farewell, for the time being, to various familiar Punchdrunk elements. ‘It’s going to be very different,’ he explains. ‘We don’t have a cast as such and we’re not applying theatrical rules. The audience won’t be wearing masks and they won’t be allowed to roam about freely.’ They will be processed, nine at a time, through dozens of rooms over five floors - a fast-paced journey that will expose them to a mass of film drawn by Adam Curtis from BBC archive material.
Curtis, 54, is an acclaimed documentary-maker whose best-known work this decade was the Bafta-winning BBC2 series The Power of Nightmares which, in his words, ‘argued that a serious terrorist threat was being magnified into an apocalyptic threat to the detriment of our civic structures’. His films tend to argue things but in a non-linear, non-ploddy kind of way; they’re full of arty, visually arresting, provocative details.
Sitting beside Barrett with a serene, critically attentive air, much like a boarding-school head beside a prize pupil, Curtis outlines the mission: ‘We’re going to interweave my film and the space together. The show will take you into the past, roughly the period 1959 to 1965. This was an apparently glorious moment in American history but was full of uncertainties which you begin to sense in the places you visit and the detail of the film. You go from a state of dream-like consensus into a world of modern individualism.’
He warms to his theme: ‘Our sense of identity today is an American idea. Just as much as they used to talk about Soviet man, the American ideal was based on this idea of radical individualism. Both of us’ – Barrett nods – ‘are interested in the modern obsession with the self. We’re going to indulge it. We’re going to play with it. And we’re going to have a go at it because we’re going to show how frightening it can be to be on your own. It can be very lonely and disempowering. That’s what the story is all about.’
Much more than this the pair won’t divulge – although one of the biggest treats in store has already been publicized: Damon Albarn, the maverick, mockney-voiced singer-songwriter who got the MIF off to a flying start two years ago with his opera Monkey has taken time out from the reformation of pop darlings Blur to compose a special score, utilizing the Kronos Quartet. How did he get involved? ‘When he heard what we were up to, he asked to be part of it,’ Curtis says. ‘The audience will hear a lot of pop, and we asked him to counterpoint it with something along the lines of early 60s Stockhausen.’
‘Have we told him enough?’ Barrett asks. ‘Have we told him too much?’ Curtis adds, slyly. ‘The Beatles don’t appear, Marilyn Monroe isn’t it, we do have animals.’ He smirks. ‘It’s certainly not going to be a happy trip down memory lane.’ It’s more like a haunted house, proffers Barrett, suddenly confessing: ‘There have been moments when we’ve worried that we’re going to go too far. We’re looking at fear. It’s definitely not for those of a nervous disposition - but we won’t really know what we’ve got until we’ve let the audience in.’
