Deptford High St Treasure Trail

To celebrate the unique strength of Deptford having very few large corporate outlets along its High St, I put together a kind of treasure trail to take an audience from Deptford Properly Cafe over to the Mindsweeper boat. I wanted to use the rich visual aesthetics of some of the small independent shops down the high st and really pull people into different places. To bring people into the basements of pubs for a puppet show and into shops for a chinese harp performance, I hope made for a renewed experience and celebration of these shops, which in the present climate of redevelopment, are presumably seen as worthless. The fancy dress, fireworks glasses and balloons aimed to make the audience part of the piece and make their participation part of the performance. I tried to pull in an underlying element of suggestion by bringing in all the many mannequin heads along the high st into the walk overtly and covertly. The very first stop at Deeplex, had the basket of fancy dress right next to an array of wigs on the heads and at Cafe Bianca the window next door had a display of the same kind of heads. At Sharpes, the audience were led right into an amazing array of different wigs covering two walls with a mannequin that I had placed in amongst them, preparing them for the later grand finale of appropriated mannequins over Ha'Penny Hatch. All in all, I think the adventure was light and fun and a real celebration of the High St and it's independence, just in the very fact I was able to speak directly to the owners and get their permission (apart from Quicksilver, I really tried but could never get through to the right person, so we just did it anyway, it's actually a really great example of why these faceless chains are blocking people's desire for such things i.e. human contact and communication). I hope you enjoy.

Steve's Day Out

I had a great day out in Canary Warf. That place is great! So organized and everything. Confused about that bank situation though.

Dog Bubble Colour

This is an experimental film which has been played in underground cinematic dens all around London. It was me trying to really get free with what you can actually do with a heart beat, reaching out as far as certain sensibilities would let me. The journey took me into the West End of London and I tried to cram my face with a big fat lump of the neon colourful lights. It involves webcam girls from the internet as well as some of the other actors. I think the film scrapes like a heavy wet sack of fleshy sugar lumps across diamond sand (inside each diamond is an angular wooly spider jumper that's red and yellow).