- Venue
- Arcadia Missa
- Location
- London
Thursday 8 March, the first public performance at Arcadia Missa. The militants have been sleeping in Arcadia Missa for four nights. Arcadia Missa is located in a railway arch, trains thunder overhead all night and the temperature has been unusually cold for March (as low as minus 2).
A crowd gathers and around 6.45pm the first performance starts. Thomas Bresolin, the project leader, repeatedly punches a seated girl (on international women’s day) in the face for a full five minutes while the audience looks on in silence – something he had subjected himself to while he was a student at Goldsmiths (watch it here). Lit from a single spotlight you can’t help but think of interrogations. Of course it is uncomfortable, but it gets more uncomfortable the longer it goes on.
The second performance, There is a kettle in our heads and it must be destroyed, led by fellow militant Alexis Milne, takes a more comic approach. Milne, like all the militants participating in this project, is wearing his grey tracksuit – he is also wearing a badly fitted homemade balaclava and holding a megaphone. He attempts to chart a history of dissent from the 1960s linked to length of hair before participants are invited to dress themselves in high-viz vests and don masks of riot police, dogs and horses. You can get an idea of what this looks like from Rehearsing Dissent – a previous performance Milne made last year in Edinburgh. With the “police” mounted on the shoulders of the “horses” and the dogs on their hands and knees, the audience are supplied with masks of famous revolutionaries and revolutionary writers. Milne has been telling us for some time about how we have an inner policeman in our heads and how the police have “become a kettle”. Encouraging us to become one with the kettle Milne commands a police charge on the unsuspecting masked audience before, much to everyone’s surprise, the police breakdown into a dance-cum-mosh pit while punk rock blares out of a stereo. You are left with the knowledge that much more has just occurred but through the chaos, comedy and bewilderment some of it was inevitably lost, or confused. This reminds us that police testimonies in the middle of protests and riots cannot be 100% reliable – indeed confessions cannot be reliable.
More perforamnces will follow at Arcadia Missa for the rest of the week.
