Ian Smith was among a new breed of performance artists to emerge in the 1970s – an era that saw the likes of Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott begin testing the non-traditional theatrical waters, along with companies like Forkbeard Fantasy. Like Crouch and McDermott – who collaborated in the ‘90s to form Improbable – and to an extent, Forkbeard Fantasy, Smith’s work is winning increased recognition and becoming more and more popular as audiences and events seem more willing to embrace the ‘quirky’ than they may have 20 to 30 years ago.
But Smith has always found theatre in this environment in Britain a little restrictive, often tending to engage some kind of important message or political undertone. He finds the European way of working more liberal, and in his own work and that of his Scotland-based company, Mischief La Bas, embraces this. He just wants to make stuff that looks good, that has the ‘wow’ factor.
Over the past 10 years since establishing Mischief La Bas with his wife, Smith has certainly created some spectacular ‘happenings’. The company is now infamous for ‘crashing’ a space rocket into a Glasgow market for the Millennium Hogmanay.
‘It was an instant myth…a totally ridiculous thing to do!’ Smith says, jubilantly. But, he adds, an expensive one. The company installed the rocket on the eve of the Millennium so it would be discovered the following morning. The 45-foot high rocket appeared to be embedded in the fabric of a railway bridge, with huge gas burners steaming out of the rocket’s jets. Employing about 30 performers over a 24-hour period, the company staged anti-alien and pro-alien demonstrations around the installation, joined by a fake police force, military and television crews. At midnight, the rocket cracked open and a host of aliens emerged – to play a gig.
‘I just wanted people to be astonished, and I think they were,’ Smith explains.
He adopted the same philosophy for the company’s newest touring show, Painful Creatures, which takes the form of a guided woodland walk past various sideshows relating to the theme of pain. In the early planning stages, Smith was struck with inspiration for one of the installations as he walked through the wooded site.
‘I was walking through the site, and I saw this tree, and I thought: “That would look great with a car crashed into it!” Says Smith. ‘Then I thought again, “Well, that’s fairly obvious, let’s crash a galleon into a tree”. And then we built a galleon’, he says, matter-of-fact. ‘And it was purely because I knew it would look great. No one was wandering around the woods going, “well, why did you do that?” It was just like, wow, a galleon! In the middle of the woods!’
The show recently premiered at the Big in Falkirk festival, renowned for its large-scale outdoor performances. Smith points out that ‘there’s usually been quite a healthy dose of humour in our work and it’s always been quite accessible’, but an occurrence at the premiere surprised even Smith, after 25 years in the business, and would have gained the interest of funding bodies promoting ‘social inclusion’.
‘At the premiere there was quite a large contingent of what we call NEDS – non-educated delinquents,’ Smith jokes. The place in the park where Mischief La Bas was performing, he recalls, was encroaching on the gang’s area. But over the period of setting-up and presenting the show, the youths got ‘right on board’.
‘It was handshakes all round at the end,’ Smith says, clearly delighted. ‘They were actually thrilled that we were more crazy than they were!’
‘And’, he continues, ‘we were doing it for free, for them…we actually kind of changed their whole place, magically, for a few days. I think they appreciated that.’
In the middle of all the chaos of the premiere of Mischief La Bas’ new show, the company was also being considered for a major grant that would allow the show to tour Europe.
A new pan-European group of producers, In Situ, had been established, comprising six companies from France, Spain, Belgium, Austria and the UK. The network managed to secure three years of commissioning funds worth about £700,000 – and awarded the first grant of £75,000 to Mischief La Bas.
The funds will go towards the creation of a show that can be performed in other cities. Smith explains that on the one hand, this will mean adapting the installation so it can be set up on any surface, as well as neatly packed into a kit for ease of transfer. The other side to the project will involve him inviting artists from the European cities where Painful Creatures will be presented, to join the project.
It means the work will get bigger again. Smith is now confronted with the challenge of focusing on the new European project while ensuring his company – his ‘bread and butter – continues to run smoothly.
But he admits, ‘it’s a nice problem to have. Our whole world is changing.’
‘Our motto is to “gently disrupt the underlying fabric of society”,’ he adds. ‘And we’re looking forward to doing that throughout Europe!’
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