Ariel Watson: “Subterranean Transactions: Julia Bardsley and the SPILL Festival”

In the summer of 2007, if you made your way through an obscure door into the closed-off bowels of London Bridge station, you’d find a dank, bohemian bar.  Wander through the tables, under the dripping Vaults that gave the venue its name, and you’d come upon a series of theatricalized spaces.  In a claustrophobic theatrical environment that invites a tiny audience to sit, ritually, at a long dinner table, a Director silently prowls the space at the head of the table while at the foot a small television broadcasts tapes of her alter ego, the Actress, speaking at length on various subjects. Here is a set of potent dichotomies, between the manipulative freedom and notable silence of the Director on the one hand and the vocal expression of the Actress, bounded by the confines of the screen and the script, on the other.  It was but one event in the first SPILL Festival, a festival that consciously situates itself at the experimental boundaries of London theatre, and strives to transcend national and formal boundaries.  For the guests at her table, artist Julia Bardsley was performing her own trans-actions, crossing boundaries as she found them. The audience is strung between two poles of power and two means or media of representation (embodied stage space and the magnetism of the screen).  As the Actress’s narrative and the Director’s gestures grow more shocking and violent, the spectators are the awkward dinner guests at this familial struggle, craning their necks back and forth as at a particularly impressive tennis rally, and they are the disciples at this sacrament of sacrifice, asked to affirm their loyalties ritually at the night’s end over a glass of wine. Bardsley’s Trans-Acts is not simply about sketching dichotomies and pulling the space between them taut.  It, like the SPILL Festival itself, is concerned intimately and urgently with the transcendence of these boundaries between opposites. Bardsley’s trans-action and transgression are not only of the boundaries between the actor (bodily, spontaneous) and the director (distant, editorial), roles she inverts and undermines, but of the boundaries between stage and screen that are entrenched and affirmed by other festivals, venues and companies.  When she places these two types of performance (both acted by Bardsley herself), of space, and of time at each end of the table, she is asking us to suspend our loyalties between them, in both senses of that verb. These are subterranean transactions, mining and undermining, and new bridges go up while others are falling, falling down.