My feet can’t believe their luck. They’ve been washed, massaged with oil, saluted in Arabic and Hebrew, and tenderly kissed.
My head, as you might imagine, is having a harder time. What is this? An intimate encounter with a bilingual fetishist? Some bizarre religious ceremony with a latter-day, floor-bound Jesus? And if I’m Muslim on the one foot and Jewish on the other, is there a bit of me threatening war?
No. This is Footwashing for the Sole, Adrian Howells’s seminal example of one-on-one theatre, theatre that’s so experimental, it isn’t sure if it’s theatre at all. In the coming weeks, the curious, the incautious and the increasingly confused will be able to sample an unprecedented number of one-on-ones, as some 34 companies descend on venues across the capital from the Gate to the Barbican, BAC to the National.
Dance to your choice of tune with an unknown partner, join a group-therapy session or speed-date a glamorous stranger, throw a left hook in a boxing ring or sing karaoke with a soldier currently serving in Afghanistan. In one-on-one, anything goes. You might find yourself in a coffin, a bath, or dangling from a window, four storeys up. This is front-line theatre with no rules.
“One-on-one is the most direct, pure, transformational theatre there is,” says David Jubb, the artistic director of BAC, which hosts the first major UK festival of the form next month. Felix Barrett, the founder of the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, agrees: “In terms of real immersion and not being influenced by other people, one-on-ones are the purest Punchdrunk theatre,” and are embedded within every show it stages, currently The Duchess of Malfi with ENO. “If I could, every Punchdrunk show would just be one-on-one.”And why can’t he? “Economics,” he says. “It’d have to run for two years straight before breaking even.”
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Some companies rely on volunteer actors to balance their books. Jubb’s response was to raise ticket prices slightly and host a festival of playlets. On entering BAC, audiences will be handed an appointment card with at least three one-on-one dates. Every cranny of the building will become a performance space, with assistant nurses ferrying folk to their destinations.
“This work is extremely complicated, ethically,” Jubb says. “Most one-on-one walks a line between what’s acceptable and what isn’t.” By way of illustration he cites Ontroerend Goed, the Belgian collective, which brings a trilogy of multi-award-winning one-on-one work together for the first time. Internal, which plays with the conventions of therapy and speed-dating, reduced some audiences to tears at the Edinburgh Festival last year. “It generates trust and then contains a moment of betrayal. But that’s the dramaturgical turning point; we have to do that,” the founding member Joeri Smet says. “Internal tells you something about yourself. It is risky. But I think it wouldn’t be interesting without the risk.”
The risk isn’t just for the audience; the performer is also at risk. Ed Rapley, a 28-year-old performer from Bristol, brings three shows to BAC. In one, The First Thing, he opens his eyes and says, yes, the first thing that comes to mind. No matter what. Fat? Acne? Deeply unfortunate looking? “Yes, sure,” he says, “though it’s often more surreal. And yes, it has occurred to me that I might offend someone so badly that they seek immediate physical redress. They haven’t yet, but they might.”
Not all one-on-ones are out to shock. Beloved, part of the London International Festival of Theatre (Lift), offers audiences 14 random “acts of kindness”. Rotozaza’s Etiquette at the Gate is a performerless piece for two who enact a “play” by responding to verbal cues over a headset, a device that eliminates every trace of stress, the company claims. And Stan’s Café’s Its Your Film is an entirely unthreatening, exquisite gift, a live mini film that plays with cinematic conventions using Victorian theatre techniques.
But most sit on the knife edge of your comfort zone. The 48-year-old Dutch performer Hanneke Paauwe’s Rendez-Vous offers BAC audiences an intimate date with their own mortality. “It is challenging and confronting,” she admits, “but it’s good that art provokes something, a thought or an emotion. I don’t mind if people cry or get angry. I feel completely responsible for that.” But, she adds, “it’s not at all frightening or aggressive. I don’t see the point of that.”
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Perhaps the most challenging show that BAC is hosting is Howells’s. His new piece will be available to only about 20 people, and no one will be allocated it without prior warning. Entitled The Pleasure of Being, it invites audiences to submit completely to Howells’s care, get naked, be washed, fed and held in a series of embraces. Where does he draw the line? “Sex,” he says. “I’d never have sex with someone.”
According to Howells, the intimacy and emotional connection that these shows foster is responsible for the wildfire popularity of one-on-one theatre. “When I started ten years ago, hardly anyone was doing it. Last year you couldn’t move in Edinburgh for one-on-ones. The more reliant we become on technology to communicate, the fewer flesh-on-flesh encounters we have. Human contact is being eroded. And nothing can substitute for that.”
Yet proponents of traditional theatre argue that collective, live experience is at the heart of theatre’s radical, transformative power. One-on-ones foster the cult of individualism at the expense of shared experience.
According to Jubb, the festival format answers this criticism. As many as 2,500 people will sample shows, and the building itself will function as one vast auditorium, he says. “And our bar will be the buzziest place in London,” he claims.
But, with its reliance on visceral response and surprise, is it really theatre? “It is the very heart of theatre,” Jubb insists. “It’s about the relationship between performer and audience. And when I talk to people who don’t like theatre, this is what they want to see.”
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You Me Bum Bum Train, the Barbican’s latest one-on-one, was its fastest-selling show of the year. The winner of the Samuel Beckett Award this year, it was created in 2004 by the artists Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd. In fact, it’s a one-on-about-200 show, in which individual audiences are pushed in wheelchairs through a series of seamlessly realised scenes, many of which don’t offer audience participation; they demand it. Such as finding yourself a bullfighter in a ring or a translator at a UN conference.
“We love giving people that adrenalin rush,” Lloyd says, “Every time we do this show, the demand for it gets more insane. We are riding a zeitgeist moment. There’s something brewing in the general consciousness.”
So is it the future? Despite mounting The Black Maze at the National in August, Stan’s Café is dubious: “Financially, it’s only going to get more difficult to do this kind of work.” But Jubb disagrees. “It is the present,” he says, “and that’s more than enough.” Audiences, he claims, will be voting for this radical new theatre with their feet in the coming month. And with such sweetly revelatory experiences as Howells’s to tempt them, mine can’t blame them.
BAC’s One-on-One festival runs from July 6-18 (020-7223 2223). Etiquette is at the Gate Theatre, W11 (020-7229 0706), July 19-30. Beloved is at Rainham Hall, Havering, as part of Lift (020-7093 6340; liftfestival.com), July 14-18. You Me Bum Bum Train is at the LEB Building, E2, (020-7638 8891), July 6-24. The Black Maze is at the National Theatre (020-7452 3000), August 4-8. The Duchess of Malfi is at ENO (0871 911 0200), July 13-24