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Over the last few days I’ve walked on a mattress made of mirrors, dressed as an overweight fairy, hugged a giant lizard, dodged vampires, danced to Dusty Springfield and smashed the living daylights out of a yard full of scrap metal.
No, it’s not the latest form of therapy: this is Wunderbar, a new 10-day arts festival in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that promotes all the right touchy-feely things about audience participation and artistic interaction, and actually means them too. “Rather than simply viewing a piece of art or watching a performance, people have the chance to make things with the artists, and to be artists themselves,” explains the festival’s creative director Ilana Mitchell.
And so, by scribbling on a giant Newcastle street plan placed in the third-floor bar of Tyneside Cinema, I made my own artistic mark on Trap Street, a social game created by interactive theatremakers Sandpit, based on the little-known fact that cartographers sometimes invent fictitious roads to trap plagiarists. After adding our own truths and lies to the map, and guessing at the veracity of others’ contributions, it emerged that 11 players believed in the “Gateshead Were-rat”, while several more were convinced that Bath Lane was “the one place in Newcastle where you can’t see a Greggs bakery”.
Games crop up frequently on Wunderbar’s programme, with varying degrees of success. Search Party’s marathon ping-pong tournament at Eldon Square promised “new, unexpected narratives” in a “site-specific, durational performance”. Yet it delivered little more than an extra-long table-tennis session, in which the same player took on members of the public and played to a lacklustre, scripted commentary.
By contrast, Who Wants To Be …?, a slickly-produced gameshow with the corporate feel of a money-spinning television broadcast, provided one of the week’s highlights with a hugely liberating and spontaneous night of audience autonomy. After brainstorming, arguing and then voting on how to spend the evening’s takings (£1,000, as our 100-strong crowd had each paid 10-quid entry), we whittled the options down to nine favourites, ranging from an otter conservation project to placing a “toilet roll of tenners” in a public loo. By the end, nearly everyone had voiced an opinion, a village in Zambia was getting a generator, and faith in democracy was restored.
Money is a recurrent theme in the festival, with Wunderbar organisers keen to emphasise that creative juices needn’t stop flowing just because cash has. “We wanted to respond to the recession, so as well as many of the events being cheap or free, there’s a big focus on DIY culture and reclaiming disused spaces,” says Mitchell.
Hence the inclusion of Alastair MacLennan’s Coil to Met, a live performance and installation at a former bathroom showroom, an outdoor “housewarming” on the site of a stalled housing development in Byker, and a “skill-swapping session” where participants learn new talents for nothing.
But nowhere were Wunderbar’s ambitions for credit crunch-consciousness and active participation more fully realised than in Joshua Sofaer’s Tours of People’s Homes, in which local people invited members of the public for “unique experiences” inside their homes. At one front door in Gateshead, I was greeted by a six-foot orange caterpillar, and given a tutu and turquoise wig to wear. In the living room, I discovered five others dressed like me scoffing cake and watching the 80s children’s cartoon, Willo the Wisp. But that was the thin end of the wedge; other tours offered all-night curry and cat-cuddling, dinner-party food fights, and a brother and sister giving you a bath. At Pauline Frost’s Jesmond flat, we viewed our hostess urinating through a catheter that fed into her “second belly button”.
The last image sounds disturbing, but for Frost, the operation which rebuilt her “shrivelled walnut” of a bladder after years of pain and disability has been a lifeline. Her story of degenerative illness followed by miraculous healing, which she told with humour, openness and tremendous strength of spirit, was the most powerful moment of the whole festival. It helped that she kept it simple; a bit like Goh Ideta’s mesmerising installation at Vane Gallery, Reflections, where hundreds of mirrors project firefly-like lights as you move across them. Not so with Rajni Shah’s performance piece Dinner with America, which, though interesting in some of its individual elements, tried to do too much at once, and has lost its relevance in the post-Bush era.
Overall, Wunderbar has done a solid job of achieving its desires for participation and inclusiveness. Yes, many attendees were hip twenty- and thirty-somethings, but an encouraging number had never been to anything like it before. The Haircuts by Children project, for instance, drew in youngsters from inner-city primary schools, while staging events in central shopping areas allowed pensioners and non-arty types to be involved, too. It’s a project that has managed to be both innovative and engaging without being intimidating: I’ll definitely be back for more next year. (The Guardian)
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