Battersea Arts Centre has a long history of engaging with the local community, from building takeovers to family and community projects (shows such as The Good Neighbour, which returns this December). Following on from the success of their ONE-ON-ONE festivals that brought together a range of intimate and challenging new work for one audience member at a time, Battersea Arts Centre takes this in a new direction with London Stories, a reflection of London through the eyes of its inhabitants. It’s a different form of engagement that places personal narrative and the authenticity of storytelling at the heart of the audience experience.

It’s impossible to wholly represent a city through its inhabitants, but not through its storytellers. In that sense there is something theatrically apt in the specificity of individual tales in London Stories. As with almost every Battersea Arts Centre show, nuance is at the heart of the festival- both a celebration and polyphony of voices. We spoke to Richard Dufty, Senior Producer at Battersea Arts Centre, to find out more about how London Stories came about and what makes it a unique experience and curatorial project.

Run Riot: London Stories seeks to present the tales of those who make up the fabric of the city; it takes a curatorial approach towards enabling these stories to occur in intimate encounters, and builds on the previous ONE-ON-ONE festivals at Battersea Arts Centre. Can you tell us a bit about the ethos behind the project, and why London became a focus?

Richard Dufty: For a while at Battersea Arts Centre we have been interested in the quality of intimacy in the projects we develop. That interest was at its most focussed in the ONE-ON-ONE festivals that happened here a few years ago. In those festivals, the performances were all based around having one performer in the space with one audience member. London Stories is a twist on that concept as there will be one storyteller and two audience members in the space at the same time, and, in the main, those audience members will be strangers. So one of the things that lies behind London Stories is an interest in exploring the potential of very intimate performance; looking at the dynamic between individuals within a small audience and the dynamic between audience and performer. How does it feel to ‘go through’ these stories with someone else – what sort of bond might be created? What sort of responsibility is shared with that other person? Does it dilute any sense of intimacy with the storyteller having someone else there or does it create an exciting and very intimate sense of community?

Apart from using our building with all its nooks and crannies as an exciting context to explore intimate performance, London Stories is about celebrating the power of people telling their own stories, speaking from the heart about what they really feel. In this sense, it is about an interest in honesty, immediacy and authenticity. Of course, we are not naively asserting that all the stories are somehow not ‘performed’ – we all know that our behaviour in everyday life, such as the stories we tell our friends in the pub, are on some level acts of performance – but because they are true stories, there is a sense of stripping away some of the theatrical artifice that keeps the audience at a distance in lot of theatre experiences. This hopefully contributes to a sense of closeness, of live-ness and of connection with the other human beings in the space with you.

The ethos of London Stories is about giving people from across London the chance to share their life experiences with others, for us to ‘pay homage’ to those stories, to learn from them and for the storytellers and us to remind ourselves that we are not alone. In some ways, it builds on the genre of the one-person autobiographical performance, which is such a feature of the devised theatre scene. It’s a chance to hear autobiographical stories from a broader range of people – not just the minority who call themselves professional artists. It is a chance for important stories to be heard which wouldn’t otherwise.

‘London’ isn’t a heavy theme running through all of the stories, but the idea of London and of the stories you hear somehow speaking of this city and the people that live in it, is what is important. Many do not mention specific locations and the events have sometimes happened elsewhere, but all the storytellers live in London or have a deep connection with this city – they are the people you see every day on the bus or Tube. We want people to leave the festival, get back on the Tube and look differently at the stranger sitting opposite them – perhaps imagining what their story might be.

Run Riot: The emphasis of London Stories is on the diversity of voices, as well as the power of storytelling, and seeks to engage with the identity of the building itself, as part of Battersea Arts Centre’s programming. Can you tell us about this combination of site and form, and what London Stories brings to the mix?

Richard Dufty: The Old Town Hall where we are based is made for intimate performance because of all of its small rooms. And it is made for this sort of ‘anti-theatrical’ experience as well, since none of our spaces are purpose-built for theatre – they are just rooms. Hopefully, this will encourage a sense of intimacy and a connection between storytellers and audience. We are doing away with sets, costumes and a lot of the electric light we are used to in theatre. We are interested in allowing the building, as well as the storytellers, to breathe and to speak. The whole experience will be candle-lit. This is about creating of a sense of intimacy– candles create a ‘round the camp-fire’ atmosphere. They remind you of the timelessness of oral storytelling. They also hint at something tied to religious rites, paying homage and pilgrimage perhaps.

Run Riot: The stories were a result of an open call for Londoners, and curated as part of the festival. What was the curatorial process? What were you looking for in the stories, and what did you find surprising or unexpected in the process? Was there a development process for the stories (and storytellers) involved?

Richard Dufty: We tried to get the call out as widely as possible. We had about 120 people applying with their stories. It was a hard job choosing which to include because they were all interesting. A lot of our selection process was about gut feeling – the stories that moved us in some way, whether they made us cry or laugh or feel uncomfortable or hopeful (some of the stories did all of these things!) And of course we wanted to get a variety of types of stories – we wanted to create a mix of textures, moods and flavours. Having said that, the overall mood has very much been set by the dominant tones of the stories we were sent initially. There were quite a lot of sad stories that we were sent and so there are quite a lot of sad stories in the festival.

All the storytellers have had three workshop/rehearsals to help them get used to telling their stories in the context of the festival, and also to help them form a mutually supportive network.

Throughout the process, we have been struck by just how much many of our storytellers really want to tell their stories. A number of them have said that they have been waiting for an opportunity to tell the world or to get something off their chest. Many feel committed to spreading the word about their experience, and through it, to help others as well as themselves.

Run Riot: If the ONE-ON-ONE Festivals sought to create an intimate, sometimes challenging experience for one audience member at a time, through different frameworks- from a menu of performances through to surprise theatre, London Stories is presented as 1-on-1-on-1. What is the development in its relationship to the audience and the source material? What have you found when curating such engagement with theatre and performance for audiences, and what of that are you bringing into London Stories?

Richard Dufty: Our experience of the ONE-ON-ONE festivals is that audiences enjoyed a sense of being an individual with agency in the space with the performer. They liked that they mattered – the performance couldn’t happen without them there. So they had more power than usual in some sense. Shows with large audiences can seem a bit like watching a film – if you get up and leave, the show will probably carry on much as it did before. In intimate performance like this, that is not the case. You have greater power and probably greater responsibility – I think that sense of responsibility is accentuated in this festival because the storytellers are putting themselves in a vulnerable position by sharing their own experiences with you.

Run Riot: Did you encounter any risks in engaging with work from such a large community of people? Where do you see your role within this process?

Richard Dufty: There are loads of risks in this project. We have done a lot of thinking and planning and coaching but nothing can really prepare us for the experience of the festival proper. The storytellers all understand that they will have to tell their stories multiple times each night and they are all excited about that, but we don’t know how this will feel in practice. We also don’t know quite what the experience will be for the audience going from one story to the next and having to deal with the very different emotions that each one throws up. So there are lots of risks, lots of unknowns in this festival, and it might not work perfectly. But, as long as we mitigate the risks and do everything we can to make sure that people are ok, this feels like the sort of risk, the sort of experiment, that Battersea Arts Centre should be engaged with as it tries to explore what is possible in ‘theatre’.

London Stories
Battersea Arts Centre
16th - 28th September 2013
bac.org.uk