I think we're alone now

Two shows at the Kilkenny Arts Festival represent the tender and the darker side of one-to-one theatre: but which is which?

SEVEN YEARS ago, the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed decided to break the rules. If traditional theatre audiences were immobile, the audience for their new show would be invited to sit in wheelchairs and then be moved around the space. Instead of viewing a performance, they would be blindfolded, asked instead to rely on every other sense. Rather than applauding, their hands would be bound. And, crucially, instead of attending as a group of spectators, they would experience this show alone.

The resulting show, The Smile Off Your Face, has been winning over audience members, one at a time, since in began in Ghent in 2003. It has travelled throughout the world scooping rave reviews and awards from Morocco and Holland to Sweden and Australia, providing a fresh jolt to festivals from Edinburgh to Adelaide.

It now arrives at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival, with a further appearance at the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival in September as part of Ontroerend Goed’s trilogy of similarly intimate works, where it stands not only as an international success but as the cornerstone of a movement. Some call it intimate theatre. Others call it one-on-one performance. Some call it a reinvigoration of the theatre. Others call it a novelty, or even a sham.

"I'm certainly interested in work that brings the audience and the performer closer together," says the theatre curator of Kilkenny Arts Festival, Tom Creed, who has programmed theatre that puts real life on the stage, such as Una McKevitt's Victor and Gordand Quarantine's Susan & Darren, together with The Smile Off Your Faceand Adrian Howell's Foot Washing for the Sole, both performed for individual spectators and which count as a model of exclusivity.

“In a way,” Creed says of his programme, “presenting real-life material and one-on-one shows are two sides of the same issue in contemporary theatre: how to make work that is absolutely alive and in the moment, which is real rather than realist.” The question of what counts as genuine intimacy and what is simply a representation of it tends to intrude on the companions of a one-on-one performance like a creaking third wheel.

In Ireland, recent works such as Aideen McDonald's Madame Butterflyat last year's Absolut Fringe – which involved both foot-washing and blindfolds, incidentally – and Pan Pan's 2005 show One: Healing with Theatreforegrounded the conceit of one-on-one encounters, both in private and in public performance, while playing games with the culture of therapy. Adrian Howells, however, sees little artifice in his performances, which for over 10 years have depended on ever more intimate gestures.

In Salon, for instance, Howells washed his participant's hair and gave them a head massage. His performance Heldbegan with him holding their hands across a kitchen table while asking personal questions and making confessional revelations, then progressing to the sofa where conversation continued with his arm around their shoulder, and culminated in the bedroom where performer and audience member spooned in silence for 30 minutes.

Howell's most recent show, The Pleasure of Being, pushed the contract between performer and participant as far as he is willing to go, by bathing ticket-holders naked, cradling and feeding them. ( Foot Washing for the Solemarks a much less intimidating invitation to the audience.)

“One of the reasons I decided not to be a conventional performer doing more traditional work is because I hated that situation where there’s no spontaneity in the work,” Howells said. “It becomes this repetitious routine.” When we spoke, Howells had just returned from 12 consecutive days of foot washing in Munich – about 190 performances, or 380 – and it seemed hard to imagine his routine was any less repetitious. But Howells considered any performance without full personal engagement and honest rapport a failure. “If I’m not absolutely present, really engaging, really giving all of myself, then in some way I’m cheating the person of the experience they should be having,” he said.

Such unflagging personal investment seems unsustainable and I wondered to what extent Howells performances were an illusion of intimacy. “No, I think it is genuine intimacy,” Howells responded. “And I know that’s problematical to talk about in a performance framework: how can it be authentic?”

Inspired by his reading of Christ washing the feet of the apostles at the last supper, and informed by his visit to the Middle East, Howells’s gesture is not exactly symbolic. “In some ways it’s really like a service,” he said at one point. Howells’ method of performance, though, redresses a modern condition. “In this contemporary age, with its particular focus on technology, there’s a huge irony that the more we are connected, the more disconnected we are becoming from ourselves and other people. Nothing can be a substitute for the nourishment and the nurturing of actually being with another human being, face to face, eye to eye, flesh on flesh.”

People attend Howells performances for a variety of reasons; either compelled by their extraordinary context, treating them as a personal dare, but sometimes as a form of therapy. Howells is not a therapist, he carefully acknowledges, and his work is vetted by an ethics committee in Glasgow University where many of his pieces have originated as part of a creative fellowship. Yet participants have dissolved into tears in his presence, such as the obese 52-year old woman who had never before been naked in the presence of a man, or the strict Nigerian Catholic, almost unaccustomed to physical contact, who said it prepared her for the beginning of a relationship.

Howells, who is given to self-examination, was alive to the fact that intimacy and tactility in a performance could have darker connotations. “I’m very aware of the parallels between what I’m doing and what a sex worker does,” he said. And though Howells’ approach is so innocent and frank he seems like the more vulnerable partner in his encounters, those relationships begin and end with the performance. It is intimacy with no strings attached.

The trust necessary in a Howells performance depends on absolute transparency: you know exactly what you're getting yourself in for. With Ontroerend Goed's work, though, the less said, the better. Those who have partaken in The Smile Off Your Face, Internaland A Game of You, treat the shows like a hushed secret, even the reviewers. "One Moroccan guy said it was a massage for the mind," performer and director Alexander Devriendt recalls of The Smile Off Your Face. "I liked that one." A sensory experience in which unseen fingers stroke your hair, a candle may tickle your chin, questions are whispered into your ear and chocolate slipped into your mouth, it aims to rekindle the relationship between performer and audience, between reality and artifice.

Much like the exhilarating Once And For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, it achieves this by concentrating on the unique capabilities of the theatre.

“I always say this, but I mean it from my heart: I don’t like interactive theatre,” says Devriendt. “I don’t want the audience to be responsible for the content of the show. I don’t want people to buy a ticket and then have to provide the meaning. This is an unusual show, but it can only belong to the medium that I work in. The unique ability of being here and now is something that you can’t achieve in any other medium.”

The appearance of intimacy can cause complications, however, and when Internal visited Edinburgh last year it initiated a vigorous debate about the ethics of the show. It matches five audience members with five performers, who first pair off in private booths for confessional and seductive encounters, then reconvene for a quasi group therapy session. The show was guided by the question: how fast can you build up meaningful relationships with a stranger in 30 minutes?

"Even I was astonished that it could happen so fast," says Devriendt. "Although you entered through the makeup room and saw the five people exiting who had gone before you, people wantedto believe in it. Some people said to me: 'You're abusing the power of the theatre.' Now, I can't deny that I think that's magnificent." The troubling suggestion that genuine relationships might be as virtual, imagined or vulnerable as these facsimiles acquired a certain piquancy when the show overflowed into reality. One couple were said to have split up over a performance ("You weren't the reason," the woman told Devriendt, "you were just the catalyst.") while a previous participant became so besotted with one of the actors he was cautioned against stalking her.

“I love the fact that people still believe in danger in the theatre,” Devriendt says of the tension and risk of his trilogy, “but it would be a very stupid show if it abused them. The performance is about giving the power to the audience.” For Tom Creed, Ontroerend Goed and Adrian Howells represent two approaches to one-to-one theatre: “One is all about tenderness and generosity and the other is a darker, stranger and more thrilling version.” But it’s not always clear which is which.

For their part, neither Howells nor Devriendt reject the social aspect of theatre, or the collaborative participation of a crowd. “Intimacy is just one aspect of the theatre,” says Devriendt. “The social experience is another.” More recently, Howells even came to question the politics of his practice. “I feel a bit of a responsibility to return to a more collectivist experience,” he told me. “A performance experienced as a community has huge benefits, potentially, and I’m wondering to what extent the work I do encourages an individualism.” He agrees, though, that even in addressing his audience individually, he is creating a burgeoning community of people who have experienced his work, much as Ontroerend Goed’s visitors linger around after performances, not singly but in battalions. They seek each other out, trade reports and swap recollections, while meaning is made and interpretation advanced as an ultimately shared experience. The final irony of one-on-one performance is that it is not something you want to keep to yourself.

The Smile Off Your Faceruns until Aug 10 at Rothe House and at the Dublin Theatre Festival (Smock Alley Theatre) from Sept 30; Foot Washing for the Soleruns from Aug 13 to 15 at the Hole in the Wall at this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival