Mischief La-Bas
- workshop
Public and Private Performance
The workshop
Introducing the various approaches to performance undertaken by Ian Smith and Mischief La-Bas, the programme of the workshop will examine the ‘Public’ and ‘Personal’ aspects of performance.
Both have different dynamics and effects on performers and audiences, and participants will examine the ‘potency’ of the various experiences.
The workshop will include illustrated talks, exercises in developing new work, and the presentation of several performances in public and private spaces.
The Workshop aims to give participants a taste of the irreverent experience that comes from performing in the streets and creating a temporary reality, exploring the preparation and execution of routines as a ‘gang’. In addition they are designed to accommodate the more intimate aspects of sharing a personal performance with strangers. Combined, these experiments explore exactly what gets given, and what gets taken, by a performer in the public realm.
‘When we come to Brussels, we hope to form a new gang with our participants, have fun, and engage with the city in two ways. The first will be quite humorous, visual and bold, what we like to think of as ‘interfering with the public’ …and the other, perhaps more sensitive and vulnerable, where the public might ‘interfere with us’. Your mother probably told you not to talk to strangers, but where’s the fun in that?’
Ian Smith
Mischief La-Bas in Brussels! from CIFAS on Vimeo.
Ian Smith & Mischief La-Bas
Mischief La-Bas are an interactive performance company based in Scotland. Their mission is to ‘Gently warp the underlay of the fabric of society’ and they usually achieve this by interfering with the public in public spaces. Since 1992 the company has created hundreds of ways of doing this, always with an irreverent and often humorous style. Projects range from small groups of ‘walkabout characters’ to large-scale international touring projects. At the moment they have been trying to build a full-sized Art Zoo.
Artistic Director Ian Smith also has a parallel career as a solo performance artist, and has recently been concentrating on intimate and personal performances as a balance to the large-scale public projects.
The Mischief Team on this occasion are Ian Smith, Angie Dight, Andrew Blackwood and Paddy Bonner.
