Are you psyched for 2011? Either way, chances are you'd be better off after a bit of Jackson!

He returns with a marathon tour of London venues, from West End to site specific (including your living room!), playing 26 venues in 26 consecutive days, the performance equivalent of the 26.2 miles of a marathon. Will Adamsdale’s Perrier Award winning life coach character undertakes his most ambitious project yet to bring his gospel of self-help to the people of London city, stressing how in these uncertain times we can reach happiness by Pushing Through with Intensity (PTI), intricate towel work and performing 'Jactions' in his footsteps like a Meaningless-ness Messiah. Run Riot caught up with Will (and Jackson) on the eve of the tour.

Competition: Have Jackson perform in your living room! Details at end of interview.

Run Riot: Jackson's Way premiered in 2004 as your first solo work. It gained great critical acclaim, support from fellow performers - most notably Stuart Lee - and you were awarded the Perrier Award for Comedy. You were thirty years old when that happened. How did you spend your twenties?

Will Adamsdale: In my twenties I was an actor who didn’t really write, or at least didn’t show the things I wrote. Actually that's not totally true. I performed a series of sketches with my friend Luke Ponte - together we were ‘The Cobras’. Our sketches included ‘The truth behind the demise of the Bloomsbury set’ in which the aesthetes overdosed on soup. When I worked I did quite conventional plays with sets, or on telly as a soldier in the background. I kept thinking I should write and perform but was too lazy and scared. I had always felt compelled to work up performances of one kind or another, at school i co-wrote a sketch about 2 giant rabbits (with the other future Cobra), at uni in Manchester I performed Tom Waits’ ‘Step Right Up’ to a confused audience and sung mournful self-penned protest songs about my privileged life.

After a year as a waiter in Putney and the Costa del sol I went to the Oxford School of Drama, which was a good course. The benefit of this was I took performance more seriously and realised you couldn't just be late and smoke and drink coffee all the time. But taking performance seriously is all very well but - it seems to me -  performance is, on one level, about a lack of seriousness. I think I was a bit in thrall to acting theories and the printed word. All the messing about side of performing, which comes from the same place as a good story in the pub or kids’s dressing up, went into a hole and didn't come out till I started doing stuff at the brilliant BAC.

Eventually I joined some friends in organising a cabaret night (at the Horseshoe Pub in Clerkenwell) but come the day I had done bugger all. At the time i was doing a childrens tv job in bushey in which i played a harry potter-figure whose main objective was to help children’s spelling (with his spells!). I was sitting in a dressing room, drinking coffee in my magician's cloak and glasses, thinking this wasn’t necessarily how I imagined my acting career panning out and worrying about my lack of an act for that evening WHEN I had a brain wave! What if I was to take the polystyrene cup I was drinking coffee from to the Horseshoe Pub and explain to the audience what I had done, forcing them to really consider the futility of this gesture (a futility i was feeling in the face of the deadline and, perhaps, my life in general)!*  This collided with a memory I had of watching Tony Robbins, the super-man life coach, in an infomercial  one night at a hotel I was staying in while filming an educational video. So that night, above the Horseshoe Pub, a Robbins-esque man talked about moving polystyrene cups around London and it was a nice clash.

* I appreciate this may not link in with everyone’s idea of a ‘brainwave’.


RR: In the latest incarnation, re-titled as The Jacksathon you'll be performing at 26 venues consecutively (matching the 26.2 miles of the marathon runner). This is an incredibly ambitious project that deserves credit at the very least for the sheer will power, and mental and physical stamina required to deliver. This begs the question - despite Jackson mocking a certain type of self help, do you secretly employ 'motivational methods' to 'get you through'? Have you dabbled with Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) or any of those other thingymajiggs? And for our readers with a lethargic bent or are allegedly smug and content, they may ask - why bother?

WA: I should make it clear this is not a new show. It is the method of delivery, a tour of London, that accounts for the title 'The Jacksathon’. The show itself, give or take a few things, is ‘Jackson’s Way’, the same show I developed in Edinburgh in 2004. The 'labyrinthinity' of all this starts to match the inpenetrability of the structure of Jackson’s own motivational system with its multiple levels, workshops, talks, talk-shops, shop-talks. It’s all a front for having nothing to say. Or only one or two things. For Jackson that is.  I, his creator, have at least 3 things to say. I’m saying the third thing now.

Also my aim with this show isn’t to ‘mock’ self-help. It’s just that the only way a madman like Jackson could get a mouthpiece for his theories would be through the ‘down to earth’, empirical approach that this industry espouses. You dont need qualifications to say you're a life coach in this country (actually there are attempts being made to create some right now). So you could be a wise tramp and become a successful life coach. Maybe that’s what Jackson is. Or maybe he's a stupid tramp. Ask him.

Jackson:  I am neither a wise nor a stupid tramp. I’m not a tramp. I have recently published a successful book. Do you see many tramps with a rack of books? This man Adamsdale is an idiot. Don’t listen to him.

WA: Sure, sure. Anyhow what I'm saying is the only way to showcase the megalomaniacal wisdom/stupidity of Jackson would be to make him a life coach/self help guru. He couldn't be an academic. Anyone can say they're a life coach. And then they are. Making him a self help guy just provided a good platform to talk about futility and randomness, which the show’s about too. There is some piss-taking of all the jargon of self help but that’s kind of a muster-station for the audience to bond at (‘oh yeah we know those guys....’) before the show takes you through a stormy sea of madness and delusion, and back. Except for Jackson who remains in his own, particular universe.

Jackson: Can it Adamsdale? Sold any books recently?!

WA: I dont think the self-help industry is to be uniformly mocked. There's plenty of good stuff probably, though there are also quite a few snake oil salesmen. I kind of respect them in a way. For playing our credulities to perfection.

Of course it does have it’s flaws; I mean, for example, it’s not actually that difficult to become motivated, or motivate someone, but it’s also not that difficult to become de-motivated. In fact this takes about the same amount of time it takes the motivator himself to leave town. You may watch the first five minutes of his dvd a few times but eventually it will start the gradual journey from back of a cupboard to bag in the spare room to charity shop. You’ll remember a catch phrase or two. Maybe you’ll get a promotion. Or maybe you'll influence people a bit more, or lose weight. But you wont be able to say for sure if the motivation led to these things.

Do I use motivational techniques? Well I haven't done a course. In fact the only experience I have of a life coach is that one infomercial I saw at the four pillars hotel in oxford in 2003, and the sound wasn't on.

Do I employ ‘motivational methods’ to get through? I'm sure I do but I can't think what. I find the prospect of having a group of strangers staring at me, expecting a good time, pretty motivating. That’s why I do this I think, it’s one deadline that you can’t shirk. You cant say ‘listen I've got this thing about a life coach but I haven't bought his clothes yet, and he doesn't really have any lines as such but uh....’ So you’ve gotta get something together. Having said all that the show does have that dreamlike quality of arriving at a big event and finding your legs have turned to straw or something because Jackson’s theories are clearly pathetic and below sub-standard if you want to get on. He suggests filling a room with pens for example and going to places you have no reason to be in and ‘just being’ there. But that's a choice. I like to run up and down before the show. I write a lot of lists to avoid doing the things on them.

Jackson: I have never considered using any motivational techniques except my own. There is a distinction to be made here between motivational speaker and life coaches. A life coach doesn’t necessarily have to ‘motivate’ in that kind of mindless/hysterical (perhaps) American way. He/she looks at your life and your needs and then says, ‘try this’. That suggestion may in fact be to DE-motivate a little (that’s what I’d suggest for Will Adamsdale, who appears over-motivated and a big talker). None of this matters that much to me as I am one of the few workers in the self help arena who isn’t bound to the idea of helping. I find this idea unhelpful.  In fact I tell my students that if they are helped by my work that is an accident. I am trying actively not to help. Unfortunately this can end up liberating them somehow and actually helping. Which is why I get them to sign contracts before the workshops where they agree that any help resulting from my work has nothing to do with me. You see helplessness is kind of my USP.

RR: We all appreciate no performance is the same, but usually the differences are subtle. However, under the PTI method (Jackson's bespoke method, Pushing Through with Intensity) do you anticipate a severe dramatic development from the first to the last performance?

Jackson: I‘ll take this one. No. Or at least not in the words I say. There was a time when I experimented alot with SDD (severe dramatic development) but now I prefer to concentrate on very small changes in delivery and phrasing. However what I receive from the audience is often wildly different. You just can not predict what humans will do or say, especially when faced with the type of content I unleash in these presentations. So I often have SDD forced on me by the unpredictability of audience reactions. I welcome this. It keeps it alive. None of the audience interaction is in any way humiliating or difficult by the way. Or at least for you guys. For me the show is a little humiliating at times.

The part of the show I do definitely want to develop dramatically is ‘moving things’, an interactive ‘game’ where small, mid and large-scale objects and trash are moved around the stage by the audience and me. I am excited by a game that i hear was once played on the radio here called ‘Mornington Crescent’ whose rules are roughly similar.


RR: Out of the 26 locations 'Your Living Room' is among them. Please could you tell us how this might work and what the idea is behind it?

WA: This show will be performed in a room at the house of the winner of a ‘best Jaction’ competition - see below for the details. A Jaction is a futile act whose futility makes it transcendent. An example would be moving a cup of sand between two beaches.

RR: Being January, the time of resolution, what 'Jaction' would you recommend to our readers to really get 2011 off to a cracking start?

Jackson: I would suggest taking a London bus to somewhere beginning with ‘P’ (if you can get to Penge that is especially good), getting out there, breathing the air of this place you were never supposed to be, taking a photograph of yourself by the first thing attached to the ground you see and sending this photograph to me at jacksons-way.com. This is a variation on a Jaction suggested by Georges Perec many years ago. It wasn't called a Jaction then though.

Hey just doing anything pointless right off the bat is gonna help you at the start of 011. It just really helps to stamp out the temptation many of us feel to create unrealistic ambitions that just make us feel terrible by January the fifth when we start failing. You're all just great, failing, beautiful disasters and the world is a strange mistake. Performing a Jaction will help you realise that.
COMPETITION - HAVE JACKSON IN YOUR HOME!
We are offering one lucky winner the opportunity to have Chris John Jackson perform Jackson’s Way in their front room during The London Jacksathon!

Competition entrants need to email info@fueltheatre.com providing the below details:

- Your email, contact telephone number and address
- Availability from 12 – 30 January for a daytime performance of Jackson’s Way
- A description of your best ‘Jaction’*

 
*A Jaction or Jackson is an act or action which is pointless. Notable Jactions include trash exchange (replacing one piece of trash with another) and trying to place your hand in two places at once. Chris Jackson tells us “The most exciting audience Jaction to date was taking a bag of sand from one beach to another.”

Any questions about the competition? Ask info@fueltheatre.com

Jackson's Way: The London Jacksathon runs from 5-30 January 2011 at 26 London venues consecutively. For the full listings visit Jackson's website, or Fuel's website.

Produced by:
Jackson's Way: http://www.jacksons-way.com
Will Admasdale: http://www.willadamsdale.com
Mobius: http://www.mobiusindustries.com
Fuel Theatre: http://www.fueltheatre.com