Imagine you’re at a club. You came to see the klezmer bands and dance to some music. Suddenly a woman grabs your arm. She’s talking in a Russian accent and what she’s saying seems at first to make no sense, but she appears to be deadly serious. Painted on her forehead, between two perfectly ordinary eyebrows, is a monster of a uni-brow, like some kind of runaway moustache once belonging to a swarthy Cossack in the hairy wilds of some long-ago Steppe. She’s trying to get you to do something, and before you know it you’re being tied into a bright blue cardboard flat-pack tractor and shimmying along duct-taped track lines after escaping cabbages.
This is the crazy world of The Friends of Gagarin: a world in which The Red Guard, as personified by a woman in a long red dress, dances the troika with astronauts and babushkas; in which a pair of severely booted-up cheerleaders with the heads of Trotsky and Rasputin take your hand and lead you to a dance floor frothing with boogying bodies, every one wearing the face of a bear named Mischka. Sailors in lipstick and lace-back pants are pelting a military-targeted moving albatross with baby seals; a sailor comes over and invites you to stroke one. It’s a stuffed white sock with eyes. Urged on by two sailors who promise to show you a secret Soviet technique, you find yourself loading up the catapult with a sock-seal who gazes beseechingly through a mouthful of black thread, and then because you’ve missed the albatross you have to try it again, and again until the air is full of flying baby seals like an explosion of soft fireworks. You’re limbo-dancing with a space dog. It’s the weirdest and most wonderful night out you’ve had in ages.
The Friends of Gagarin are a post-postmodern performance collective taking theatre back to the people and putting entertainment back into the avant-garde, and not a moment too soon. Frankly, it was about time that somebody did: we were all sick to death of the stuffy buttoned-up theatre-going establishment and the same-old same-old of the unchanging repertoire, and the artsy indulgences of embarrassingly earnest PoMo performance had been getting old since the seventies.
Then we got burlesque, nu-school cabaret, and contemporary circus; low culture was on the rise, and before long it seemed like you couldn’t go out dancing anywhere without having to stop throwing shapes four times in a night for some girl to do her star turn on a pallet-block stage.
The Friends of Gagarin are doing something better. It’s theatre, yes, but not as you know it. It’s theatre without the “fourth wall” separating the performer and the audience, boldly doing away with all notions of which behaviours are appropriate for either or both parties. The spectator becomes actor, in the strictest sense: forced to act, forced to be, to participate, to join in the spectacle by making a spectacle of themselves.
“We often don’t rehearse, as such,” says Zoe Klinger of The Friends. “We create spaces and set scenes in which possibilities exist to act out and get silly, both for us and for them.” And indeed, if you’ve ever been to a Gagarin night, you’ll be able to testify that it ain’t exactly Shaftesbury Avenue.
The Friends of Gagarin were born of a collaboration between DJ Max Reinhardt, who was starting a brand-new Balkan beats night at the Notting Hill Arts Club, graphic designers Adrian Philpott (of Philpott Design, best known for his graphic work on the Pixies album covers) and Cathy Gale, and actor-director Zoe Klinger, whose has a background in theatre and theatrical management.
This core team forms the nucleus of a greater-ranging and ever-changing collective of creatives, performers, musicians and rabble-rousers alike, and has grown from strength to strength, appearing at the Barbican and the Bracknell Arts Centre as well as at the Notting Hill Arts Club in the bimonthly club nights.
The club itself is billed as “a tundra melting mix of live music, digital DJ prowess, performance art, east European cinema, poetry, puppetry, poverty, latkes, blinis and vodka” and boasts a back catalogue of some of the best live acts in town, including Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz, Oi Va Voi, DJ Shantel, Sophie Solomon, Nayekovichi, Mukka, the London Bulgarian Choir and Ghetto Plotz. It’s a great night, but the “Marxist-Leninist alienation in the form of art/animation/video installations for the Proletariat from state artists [Philpott and Gale]” and the theatrical shenanigans of the Friends of Gagarin are what really sets the club apart from the rest. A quick browse through London’s Time Out tells you that every star in clubland is vying to be the weirdest and the most interactive-exploratory on the scene, and “experientialist” theatre collectives The Solvents and The King Kong Klub are rolling on the same meme with “theatre parties” and other interactive happenings. So what’s next for the Friends of Gagarin?
Well, they’re soon to be the subject of a documentary film, and they’re gearing up to “release” their first single as Baby Gagarin, an artrock supergroup who were “huge in the eighties.” The single release party will take place at the Notting Hill Arts Club on November 25th, to coincide with London Jazz week; there will be a human theremin and a musical cow, apparently, as well as “the most celebrated jazz kazoo solo this side of the iron curtain.”
Adrian Philpott, predominantly a graphic designer who would hesitate to call himself a theatre performer, believes that it’s the creative process that gives The Friends their anarchic magic. The precise nature of that process remains a protected secret, but this much we know: much of it takes place in pubs or at people’s houses with plenty of booze and snacks and several pads of paper.
“I was talking to a West End actor the other day,” said Philpott to Arts Hub, “and we were comparing notes about what we do. So he’s this professional theatre bod, but at the end of our conversation he just said ‘I feel dead…I feel like I’m not creating anything.’ It’s a set of very interesting processes which could be applied to any task and turn it to gold.”
http://www.myspace.com/radiogagagarin
http://www.philpottdesign.com
http://www.nottinghillartsclub.com/
