Lorna Irvine speaks with Gary Gardiner about the upcoming Neighbourhood Forum, part of this year's Behaviour Festival.
Gary Gardiner,
previous Platform 18 winner for Santa:
A Very Merry Businessman and general theatrical rabble-rouser, and
acclaimed actor/performer Murray Wason, recently seen in Untitled Projects' Paul Bright's Confessions of A Justified
Sinner, are two men who are on a mission: to consolidate all your
existing debts into one show, in their new collaboration for Behaviour at the
Arches: Neighbourhood Forum.
Inspired by the
debts, red tape and general political hassles we have to deal with day-to-day,
they decided to team up in order to make some sense of them and invite the
audience members into their domain to help with such problems. I made a few
enquiries of Gardiner ahead of the show.
If pushed, how would you best describe your work? It crosses so many disciplines: agitprop, performance art, community-based work, dance, theatre...
Performance
Art feels like a good overall term! Essentially, I want to make work that has
something to say, and that's usually starting with something that interests me
but then finding what I want to say and how I want to say it as part of a
researching process. Hence why the work often seems to sit in many camps. I
also really enjoy working with people and not knowing what the work will
become. But yes, I can't help chucking a bit of dance in just for fun, so
you'll likely see that in Neighbourhood Forum, too!
Your latest piece for Behaviour examines debt collection, bank charges etc. Will you and Murray be using some of your own experiences? Are you like a two-man Citizens Advice Bureau?
Yes, we both have a lot of experience, as everyone seems to have, with bureaucracy, and so we both wanted to find a way of exploring this in a way which highlighted the hoops that we have to jump through as human beings, stuck in a neo-liberal smiley-faced commercialised bureaucracy. A different type of bureaucracy than the traditional idea, but one nonetheless!
A two-man
Citizens Advice is exactly what it is, but we are aware that the idea of
bureaucracy could send people to sleep simply by reading the copy, so we have
tried to get to the heart of the problem whilst also giving us freedom to mock,
as well as have poetic freedom with our interpretation of the roles.
How does this experience differ from collaborating with a group, as with Thatcher's Children?
Whoever
you collaborate with always makes the process different. I am really enjoying
having a concept for a piece of work but not knowing what it's going to be—it
has to be about the energy to explore in the room, what we all bring to the
process, what's going on in the world at the time, how we respond to certain
ideas.
Speaking of Margaret Thatcher, where were you when she died last year?
This was
almost a year after the date when Thatcher's Children first
publicly performed (which included a fake Thatcher funeral as part of the
opening to the performance). I was running a workshop and received the message
from my partner (Lucy Gaizley, who was in Thatcher's Children). I
announced it to the group: it made me reflect a lot on her policies again and
that, although she had passed on, her legacy of privatisation, individualism
and business still lives on...
There are many artists and performers who reference their own experiences (such as Bryony Kimmings, Daniel Bye and Sabrina Mahfouz). Who/what has influenced you, in these terms?
Yeah, for
me it's really important that my own experience or opinion is a basis of the
work I am making, but I always want to find out more about it. This might include
traditional research, meeting with people to discuss and source various
perspectives, or even just to find out more about why I have a particular
opinion about something and what it relates to for me. This isn't always for me
about directly putting my stories in the live space (although this is always an
option) but rather that it informs my work and gives the energy of the work a
clear 'author's voice'.
When you work as a duo, who comes up with the initial ideas? Is it evenly split?
It
depends on the project. Santa: A Very Merry Businessman, Thatcher's
Children and Neighbourhood Forum were all my initial
concepts, but everything after that is about the collaboration. A concept is
just a concept without a process to realise the work!
Finally, did you ever get that call from Matthew Bourne to play the lead swan in Swan Lake?!? (Gardiner cheekily claimed in his Arches Live show He's The Greatest Dancer last year that he ‘played lead swan for Bourne and that is how I've maintained my dancer's physique!’)
Yes, I
went to see it again recently when it came back to Glasgow, and it's really
gone downhill since I left. Matthew keeps asking me to come back, but I'm too
busy fighting bureaucracy this year. Maybe next year, Matt!
Neighbourhood Forum performs at The Pearce Institute, Govan, April 29 & 30. It is part of this year’s Behaviour Festival.
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