Charlotte Spencer Projects, Is This A Waste Land?

Charlotte Spencer Projects, Is This A Waste Land?, Larkfield Bus Depot, Glasgow, May 12

Louise Tanoto in Charlotte Spencer Projects’ Is This A Waste Land? (photo: Pari Naderi)

“Cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash – all of them – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered in rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountain of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.” – John Steinbeck

Sited on a former bus depot that has since been razed, we’re aware that there are histories in play; where once buses came to rest for the night, to be repaired and re-fuelled, Charlotte Spencer Projects invites us to inhabit a land and question its former and future use. Armed with headphones and protective gloves we are offered a choice of industrial detritus to carry with us. Is This A Waste Land (ITAWL)? begins with a set of straightforward instructions delineating the boundaries of space and rules of engagement, and then we stop and fill our eyes with the landscape and fill the landscape with our 40 bodies. Instructions begin and we become the temporary workers invited to toil and till the land.

Building upon Spencer’s previous immersive headphone work, Walking Stories, ITAWL? uses six additional professional bodies who work with the site and its contents on a larger and more choreographed scale. The audience is split into three streams indicated by a different coloured LED on their headphones; sometimes we are one, sometimes one mass and at other times broken down into smaller working parties to fulfil particular tasks. Neither Walking Stories nor ITAWL? leave room for dissent; if you want to be an outlier or renegade there is little space for that and it is clear where the power lies. With each member of the audience isolated in their headphones, it is Charlotte Spencer who is in control.

I feel like a doozer from Fraggle Rock as the fetch-carry-and-build endorphins created by using my body in the performance leaves me feeling giddy and engaged; the questions asked in our ears are all achievable as the objects of our labour differ in weight but all bodies can move them. After 10 minutes of building we feel rewarded with a driving soundtrack nestling under the calm invitations to participate and a constant stream of small words of praise reward our behaviour irrespective of whether the task is complete or whether we’re satisfied with our wall of detritus, rope and stick pen or towers of waste creation. The omniscient voice is happy and we must progress on to the next task leaving no time to dwell.

“He who works with his hands is a labourer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” – Saint Francis of Assisi

The six performers (alongside Charlotte) operate inside the work with us; they too are fellow assemblers, preparing scrap teepees and dismantling objects that have come before. However, their tasks are a little more adventurous and pre-meditated, there are clear moments when the focus shifts from the self to them and we must watch them perform a rehearsed set of actions on the site. This creates a divide, a them-and-us, and it is clear they are existing outside the instructional landscape we’re inhabiting. We the participants can be called upon to do remarkable things when instructed, as when we feel against our back the weight of a giant elastic tensile rope in a 30-metre diametric circle we are leaning into and letting it take our weight. The world has been set up so we experience the same place at the same time, we share tasks together and silently encourage each other; if we as nodes were connected a little more often, asked to forge alliances, this would build an even stronger bond under a dwindling light as the city of Glasgow flickers to orangeade and shifts into night mode.

In the programme note there is no mention of the words ‘dance’, ‘dancers’ or ‘choreography’ – this is a work of assemblage and human cartography; individual journeys tracked and mapped onto a waste land as we inhabit it once more creating a new set of histories. Spencer builds and balances our labour and attention over the 90 minutes of the work to offer an analog nourishment to our human form. There’s a simmering of activist intentions to be found alongside a political bite questioning our collective privilege to land and our access to it; if this tone had been introduced earlier it might have coloured our earlier endeavours and how we viewed the work and our part in it. Triggering a set of alternative thoughts on waste as we are gathered together at the end I think about the natural passivity and physical wastage of audiences when work is performed in the theatre; here we may be intellectually or emotionally stimulated but ITAWL? invites us to absorb a work through our bodies as well, leaving us with a dust and physical residue embedded in our pores. Looking at the pattern of exertion between Walking Projects and ITAWL? the next performances by Charlotte Spencer Projects might ramp up the level of investment and industry. I for one would relish the shape of that labour.

“Our toil must be in silence, and our efforts all in secret; for this enlightened age, when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men would be his greatest strength.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula