Serial Killer Ted Bundy was eerily charming, handsome and gentle; Greg Wohead’s performances were often described as lovely and nostalgic. Wohead wanted his practice to reflect more than his sunny side; he also couldn’t stop listening to Bundy’s confession tapes. Now his show The Ted Bundy Project is about to occupy the evocative space of the Shoreditch Town Hall's Ditch.

If a performance about a serial killer makes you tingle uncomfortably, don’t worry – Bundy is just a means of exploring the dark, morbid fascinations we all have: the kind that result in live-blogs of high profile murder trials and turn millions of people into podcast fans overnight. You read about the gory details, and soaked in intricate crime narratives: now it’s time to confront this strange lure.

Run Riot: The Ted Bundy Project stemmed from your fascination with Bundy’s confession tapes. How did this personal curiosity turn into a performance?

Greg Wohead: My experience listening to the tapes was a private one—I came across the tapes on YouTube one night when I was by myself. I think this is often how we experience indulging in morbid fascination, either alone or maybe with others who we know share the interest. The nature of it is often furtive or connected with shame, at least that’s my experience. It felt appropriate to make a performance, taking what is normally a solitary, private experience into a collective, group context.

Run Riot: This performance also brought a darker hue to your work. Was this a deliberate change of direction?

Greg Wohead: It was certainly deliberate. Before The Ted Bundy Project, my work was often described as ‘nostalgic’, ‘lovely’ or ‘charming’. I was aware that when I looked at the responses to my work, I didn’t always recognise myself. Being a solo artist who often pulls from my own autobiography in some way, it felt dishonest to put only warm fuzzy work out into the world. I certainly don’t feel that’s all there is to me, and more than that I don’t feel that’s all there is to anyone.

I didn’t just make The Ted Bundy Project so that I could do something different (although there was a bit of that). There’s an aspect to Ted Bundy and his persona that interestingly confronts the idea of charm, how we perform our own personalities and how we use that performance to get what we want. In a sense, I recognised some of the strengths in my previous work—the fact that people considered my onstage persona charming and were able to trust me—and saw an opportunity to use those strengths to take the audience somewhere very different. In some ways, the show is structured like a Ted Bundy murder.

Run Riot: Serial and The Jinx put real-life crime storytelling in the spotlight and raised questions about manipulating gruesome events to create suspense. How did you approach the dramaturgy of the documentary?

Greg Wohead: So often in stories involving murder, whether fictional or nonfictional, the focus and interest is on the murderer or the accused. This especially seems to be true when the victim is female and the aggressor is male, which is often in our dominant cultural stories, fictional and nonfictional. In putting together the ‘real’ material for the show, which is made up of the confession tapes themselves, objects that were found in Bundy’s car when he was arrested as well as an account of one specific instance of rape and murder, my priority was to lean into the humanity of both the victim and the aggressor. This means portraying neither as completely demon or completely angel, and involves inviting the audience to acknowledge things we don’t know and will never know about either person or the circumstances.

For me, the dramaturgy for the show involves leaving a lot of space; physical space for the audience to fill in with imagined bodies and objects, temporal space to fill in actions and sonic space to fill in speech or music. This means there is a huge importance on framing that space with documentary material and imagined scenarios.

Run Riot: The Ted Bundy Project is starting its spring tour in Greece, far away from America where Bundy has become part of the offbeat pop-culture cannon. Does the show work differently the further away you take it from where those confession tapes were recorded?

Greg Wohead: I think it probably does, although I haven’t yet performed the show in America. I developed the show partially in Amsterdam, I’ve just finished performing it in Athens and very soon I will be performing it in the UK again. In most of those places, some people have heard of Ted Bundy and some haven’t, though there are always a few people who approach me after the show to talk about Bundy and to share their interest in him. In America, Bundy is much more part of the culture. I would be surprised if an American were to come to the show never having heard of Ted Bundy. I can’t even remember when I first found out about him because he’s such an embedded cultural reference there. It’s like I’ve always known about him.

In that way, Americans would bring their own knowledge about who he was and what he did, rather than learning about him for the first time in the show. In some ways I’m sure it would add different textures and points of connection with the show, in other ways it doesn’t really matter because the show is about much more than Ted Bundy himself. So yes, my hunch is that it would probably work differently in America than outside it, but you certainly don’t need to know anything about Ted Bundy to connect with the show.

Run Riot: What is it like to be an American in England, making work that features America so prominently? How has the distance influenced the way you consider Texas or the entire country?

Greg Wohead: I never set out to make work intentionally featuring America, but having been born there and lived there for the first 22 years of my life I guess it was inevitable. It’s where my main references come from. I lived in Texas until I moved to London 10 years ago at age 22, and it was certainly one of the most (if not the most) valuable and influential experiences of my life. It made me reconsider any sense of cultural absoluteness and instead embrace and seek out multiplicity, difference and maybe instability, which is also related to the way I see my work.

Run Riot: You are currently developing several new projects; is this a conscious move or the reality of production processes? What does this parallel devising bring to your practice?

Greg Wohead: It is a reality of getting things done, especially working as an independent artist when you have to piece together bits of money, support and performance opportunities from different places. It’s also something I embrace for my artistic processes. It helps me see my body of work as a whole rather than put unnecessary pressure on any specific piece to say or be everything I think is important or interesting.

I like seeing how different pieces of work can talk to each other. It’s also why I love going to see work by other artists, especially when I’m in the midst of working on something myself. It’s difficult sometimes to hammer out an idea when it’s the only thing I’m doing. Instead, I’ll often be working on one thing and have an idea for the thing I was working on the previous week. It’s sort of like tricking myself into having an idea. I also just enjoy making new work so I try to do is as much as I possibly can. It’s how I get better at it.

Run Riot: One of those in-progress shows is Story #1, a collaboration with Rachel Mars. What’s the experience of co-creating been like after years of solo work?

Greg Wohead: It’s something I’m really enjoying. In some ways the process is more focused and fast-moving when we’re in the studio together than when I’m alone. When I’m by myself my process is sometimes deliberately slow, but the process with Rachel so far has been more active. More material and ideas are generated in less time. Story #1 revolves around ideas of narrative, fiction/nonfiction and the hard graft of story construction, so generating lots of stories for and with each other seems necessary to think about how it all works.

Rachel and I have been friends for awhile and are very familiar with each other’s solo work, so our collaboration is about our individual processes meeting and hopefully making something that’s different to what either of us make on our own.  Many years ago I used to work as a more traditional actor, so I have performed with other people before, but that was very different to the work I make now. This will be the first time I have performed with someone in this way, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that dynamic works.

The Ted Bundy Project

Shoreditch Town Hall

6-9 May