How to Kidnap an Audience

On breaking the spell of our training as consumers

Welcome to Writing Home where I puzzle through the strangeness of these times and bring together conversations about how to find your bearings and the work that is yours to do.

As those who caught the latest In-Between Video already know, I’m headed into the writing of a new book, so in the months ahead I’ll be mixing new essays with material from earlier chapters of my life.

Today’s offering started out as a talk in front of an audience of Swedish culture-makers. It was February 2022, a couple of days before I started work on the first draft of At Work in the Ruins, so this is a glimpse of where I was at as I started to write that book. I hope you enjoy it.

Teatro de los Sentidos, Heart of Darkness (Copenhagen, 2014).

One morning last spring, I was on a Zoom call with my friend Deepa. I could see packing boxes in her living room, so I asked her what was up, and she said, “I’m giving away all my books.”

Now, my eyes widened at this. What can I say? I’m a writer, books are… not something I’d willingly give away. I asked her, “Why?”

She said, “Didn’t you know, Dougald? I’m dying.”

And just for a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of conversation we were about to have. Then I saw the edge of a smile on her lips, and she started to explain about this programme she’d joined called A Year to Live, where a group of you go through a whole twelve months, living as though this were the last year of your life.¹

On the 12^th of January this year, I spoke to Deepa. She had four days left. It was one of those conversations where time slows down. We said the things we’d say if we were speaking for the last time. I don’t think I was ready for how real it would be. We haven’t spoken since, and somewhere deep in my heart and my guts, it’s like I know that she is gone.

So the next time I give her a call, I guess it will feel pretty weird.

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The theatre-maker Mark Ravenhill gave a speech at the Edinburgh Fringe a few years ago. He said something I keep coming back to. “To be a good artist,” he said, “you have to be … the most truthful person in [the] room.” When you walk out on stage, that’s your duty. It’s what earns you the right to ask everyone else to listen while you speak, or sing, or dance.

I was talking about this recently with another brilliant British theatre-maker, Luca Rutherford, and we found ourselves agreeing that there’s a world of difference between being “the most truthful person in the room” and being the person who walks into a room convinced that they are in possession of “the truth” and everyone ought to listen to them. There’s nothing artful about that way of entering a room.

What Ravenhill is getting at, I think, is that art has no room for calculation. If you’re a politician or a campaigner or a marketing strategist, then you can try to calibrate your message; there can be a gap between what you know in your heart and what you decide to say. But as an artist, that gap will kill you. It will drain the life out of your work. Because, when you walk out on stage, your truthfulness is all you have.

And it occurs to me now that this state of truthfulness has a lot in common with what I felt in that last call with Deepa. We could take Ravenhill’s words as an invitation to walk out on stage, or to have a conversation, or to give a talk, the way you would if you knew that this would be the last time.

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So much for the person who’s on the stage – how about everyone else in the room?

In the autumn of 2014, soon after I took the call from Måns Lagerlöf asking me to come and join the artistic team at Riksteatern, I was teaching at the Kaospilot school in Aarhus. One of the students said, on your way back, you have to go to this show that’s on in Copenhagen.

It was a show by a theatre company from Barcelona, Teatro de los Sentidos, “the theatre of the senses”. Their work is usually full of shimmering beauty, but this time they had been challenged by the artistic director of the theatre that brought them to Denmark. “We don’t live in a time of shimmering beauty,” he said. “Can you use your art to make something that explores darkness?”

So they had taken Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and turned it inside out, creating an immersive performance in which the audience is led into a destroyed landscape, drawn deeper into the dark, and the climax is an industrial ritual in which we are all complicit in the horror at the centre of the story. It was, for me, one of those artistic experiences that tears you open, that leaves you raw and tender.

And afterwards, I found myself alone in the theatre foyer. The friends who were going to take me for dinner were late. So I started talking to other members of the audience, asking them, you know, “How was that for you?”

And people were saying, “Yeah, that was cool!” “That was fun!”

And I wondered, is this just because we’re strangers in a theatre foyer and we don’t know how to talk about what just happened, or had their experience of that evening been wildly different to mine?

And here’s the thought that was planted in my mind that night in Copenhagen. What if those of us who go to the theatre, to the openings and exhibitions, to the rooms where art happens – what if we’re so well trained as consumers of culture that even the most powerful work going on in those rooms will struggle to break through, to get past our training, to go from an object of consumption to an experience that might tear us open, shake us, move us, leave us changed?

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In the months that followed, I couldn’t let this question go. To tell you why it had a hold on me, I need to rewind a bit.

Most of the work I’ve done comes back, in one way or another, to the role of culture in a time of crisis. When

Paul Kingsnorth

and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto, it was because we had a sense, as writers, that the literature of the early 21^st century was failing to face what we already knew about the depth of the mess the world was in. People would look back on the books that were celebrated in the Culture section of the newspapers and ask, how could you write this stuff when the world was on fire?

And you know, Greta Thunberg has said a lot of this more eloquently than we ever did. But when you see the placards that say “Unite Behind the Science”, I’m not sure that covers it. Because having worked with climate scientists, I’m convinced that there are parts of the story that science can’t help us tell and questions that science doesn’t know how to ask. This is where the work of culture comes in.

When art gets asked to respond to the climate crisis, most often this is an invitation help “deliver the message”. And we want to help, we’re as scared as anyone, but there’s a problem, because art isn’t really about delivering messages. That’s not what we know how to do. We’re not a cheap alternative to an advertising agency, or a sophisticated extension of the communications department.

So then you get projects that put a lot of hope in the imagination: we’re going to get people together and help them imagine a better future, a sustainable transition. And again, something about this never rang true for me, but the person who put her finger on it is Vanessa Andreotti of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. The futures worth trying to bring about, she says, are “presently unimaginable futures”.

For these futures to become imaginable, we would have to become other than who we are: we would have to lose our entitlements, our desires, the things we take for granted, our stories of who we are and where history is headed. And that’s a journey we can go on, a journey we can take people on. But it doesn’t look like assembling a group of us who are going to be, almost by definition, among the beneficiaries of the way the world works today, where we’re asked – in the words of Grist magazine’s climate fiction contest – “to make the story of a better world so irresistible, you want it right now.” Something more costly than that is called for.

It’s like the storyteller

Martin Shaw

says: “I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.”

And that’s what brings me around to the power of those cultural encounters that can break you open, that shake you and take you off balance. If everything was fine, then maybe it would be enough to make work that’s “cool” and “fun”. But everything isn’t fine.

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So it’s 2015 and I go to work at Riksteatern, still carrying this question: how do we make work that breaks through these habits, this way of consuming culture that leaves us untouched, where we don’t become vulnerable, don’t risk being changed by the experience?

And not long after I start, we have a conversation about – maybe we need to physically take people away? To create an event that goes further in time and space, beyond the comfort zone of a couple of hours in a darkened theatre space?

So I get excited and I write a proposal where what we’re going to do is we’re going to kidnap an audience. When you buy a ticket, you’re told to show up at such-and-such-a-station at this time on a Friday afternoon, and you know it’s going to last two days. We’ve chartered a train and you get on board and the announcements give you the impression of a long journey ahead. But then the train comes to a halt on a siding in the middle of nowhere, and everyone’s ordered off and into trucks.

I’m not going to tell you the rest of it, you probably get the picture. And it’s an absurd idea, the kind you get excited about for five minutes and afterwards you feel embarrassed every time you remember that you actually shared it with anyone. Or, you know, talked about it in front of an audience!

But part of what’s going on there is that, this was me aged 37, having done all my work up to that point with these tiny organisations that I’d been part of creating, where you could get everyone involved around a table and share a meal, and we’d created projects that caught people’s imaginations and got international attention, doing all this on a shoestring. So suddenly, for the first time, I’m inside a large cultural institution, and you go, “Wow! If we could do so much with so little resources, imagine what’s possible here?” And of course, it’s not that simple.

In fact, my advice would be, if you really wanted to kidnap an audience, the only way to pull off a project that wild would be to work with a small crew of collaborators who trust each other and don’t have the responsibilities of an established institution.

But if you want to kidnap an audience, my main advice would be, “Don’t!” Because what came home to me as I went on digging at that question was that there’s no value left in shock, it’s a bankrupt currency.

I mean, think about the kind of performance work that people were making in the 1960s and 70s, The Living Theatre or the Viennese Actionists. It’s not just that it’s hard to push things any further than the artists of that generation did. It’s that they were doing these things in an era when a British publisher had to go to court to challenge the obscenity laws in order to publish a novel that had the word “fuck” in it. The power of breaking taboos depends on the power of the taboos, and when you can get all the obscenity you can dream of on the phone you carry in your pocket, there’s not much power left in shock.

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So what is powerful now? What has the capacity to shift us out of the comfort zone of cultural consumption?

There’s not going to be just one answer, but my breakthrough with this came in a conversation with the artist Rachel Horne.

I was working on another idea involving trains. This one had more mileage in it than the kidnapping. It’s an idea for a rail-based touring network across Europe. It started from the question: how does culture travel across borders, when we can’t go on jumping on and off planes like there’s no tomorrow? We were talking about having these local nodes where people host an event once a month, and each month a different artist travels this circuit and is the guest artist at that month’s event.

So I’m telling Rachel about this, and she says, “Oh Dougald, we did this event last month, and it was like organising a wedding!”

And I knew exactly what she meant. Months of build-up towards a big day. And afterwards you’re all exhausted.

And I thought, weddings are great, but how many of them do you want to have in your lifetime? You can probably count the answer on the fingers of one hand.

And it hit me, as artists we’re good at “weddings”. It often seems like that’s the default form of a cultural event. But what is a wedding, really? Well, traditionally, at least, it was a special kind of service that happens in a church. And then I came across a passage from the theatre-maker Andy Smith, where he describes an event that happens in the village where he grew up:

Every week my mum and dad and some other people get together in a big room in the middle of the village … They say hello to each other and catch up on how they are doing informally. Then some other things happen. A designated person talks about some stuff. They sing a few songs together. There is also a section called “the notices” where they hear information about stuff that is happening. Then they sometimes have a cup of tea and carry on the chat.

And what he’s describing is the weekly church service, but what’s hit him is how close this is to the kind of space he is trying to create with theatre.

So the conversation I started having more and more with the artists – and the non-artists – that I work with is: what if the default model of cultural event wasn’t a wedding, a big production with a long build-up to it, but the weekly service? A gathering that happens regularly, where people keep coming back, where a lot of the work that goes into it can be done by the community of people to whom it matters, without anyone burning out, but it also matters enough that people are willing to support the work of those who need to be paid.

And once you start looking through this lens, you realise there are whole layers of culture that do work like this. I think of the folk clubs I grew up singing in when I was teenager, the small stand-up comedy club where I used to help out in my twenties. You’ll have your own examples.

Here in Sweden, I see it in the work of artists like Ruben Wätte and Per Hasselberg who are drawing on the traditions of folkbildning and the folkrörelse.

And it’s at the heart of what we’re doing with a school called HOME. Not least, over the past two years, in the strange space of Zoom, working with groups that gather week by week or month by month, and through that process of repetition there’s a deepening that happens, a deepening into trust.

Something I’ve heard a lot over the years, from the work we did with Dark Mountain to what we’re doing now with HOME, is people tell us, “I feel less alone because I found this.” When someone tells you that, you know that we’ve left the territory of consuming culture, we’re somewhere more vulnerable. Maybe somewhere there’s a chance of being changed by what happens to us.

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In the summer of 2020, I heard this question from the Inuit poet Taqralik Partridge: “What if the pandemic is just a warning shot?” Not the big event that changes everything, but the first in a chain of crises. Some days I can picture them, lined up like storms on a satellite picture of the Atlantic in hurricane season, rolling in, one after the other, to make landfall along the coastline of the future.

In a time of crisis, we can get focused on our own survival. People sometimes talk as though culture is this fragile thing, a soft surface layer over the harder social, economic and material realities, a high achievement that can only flourish when all the more basic human needs are met. But that’s not true: culture doesn’t come last, it’s there from the beginning.

Look through the archives of archaeology and anthropology, and nowhere will you find humans who don’t have some form of dancing, singing, storytelling, making images, symbols and meaningful objects, woven through their ways of living. The work of culture is not a luxury, it’s where we find and create meaning, and meaning is what makes the difference between going on and giving up when times are hardest.

And if you look at the work of culture through the lens that anthropology gives us, you see that human communities in all times and places have created experiences of initiation that involve a staged encounter with the reality of one’s own death, an encounter that leaves those who pass through it changed. When I think about the spaces of culture that seem worth making now,

Martin Shaw

’s line comes back to me: “I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.”

People get broken all the time, there’s no art in that, but there is an art in making spaces where we can be broken open with a chance of healing. Encounters that leave us changed, with a chance of becoming the people we’d need to be to bring about those “presently unimaginable futures”. That feels like work worth doing, in a time when the world is on fire.

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I was taken back to this talk because, three years on, we had a visit this week from Deepa Patel whose journey through A Year to Live was one of its inspirations. I’m glad to report that she’s alive and well and our conversations were as generative as always.

Thanks for reading – and especially to all of you who have chosen to join the Home Team and get more closely involved with my work. The contributions of those of you who are in a place to take out a paid subscription are what is making it possible for me to take the time and care I want to give to the new book that is slowly taking shape. If you’re curious to know more about the book, check out last month’s In-Between Video.

DH

1. The programme was based around Stephen Levine’s book, A Year to Live.