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Super Dimension Fortress One.
The name sounds like a sci-fi adventure and the programme description doesn't shed too much more light on what quite is 'Super Dimension Fortress One'. How do theatre directors Steve Mayhew and Sam Haren get from a mainly pictorial email conversation to a performance?
"Can I just say from the outset that I don't think it's going to be much of a performance," says Mayhew. "We are not actors; you won't see me emote or even put on an accent," Mayhew laughs. "However there will be an overarching set of narratives that you can follow."
"Even though it's going to be idiosyncratic, I don't think it's esoteric or inaccessible. The associations are really clear and I think it will be easy for an audience to follow," pipes up Haren.
You have been warned.
Inspired by the tale of when music video director Michel Gondry wrote a choose-your-own-adventure-style story daily to his son via fax while overseas, the seeds of 'Super Dimension Fortress One' were sown when Haren sent Mayhew six images via email to begin a remote conversation. Rules developed around how these images were responded to, and a weekly email exchange ensued.
Haren elaborates: "The idea behind a lot of those rules was to make it like a conversation; in a conversation you raise something and there's a response and you respond to that response. And as it developed it became like a verbal conversation because you would also go back to something [an image] you were talking about earlier."
For Mayhew and Haren 'Super Dimension...' is the preliminary outcome for what they intend to be an ongoing project. Developing their email conversation into a Feast show is an idea that is comparatively recent.
"Sam and I have always been interested in the aesthetic language that queer art uses and sometimes doesn't use and we've always had interesting discussions over the years about what turns us on regarding queer art," Mayhew enthuses. "And when we both saw [Jason Sweeney's Feast show] 'Peculiar' last year I suddenly realised that it was using artistic languages which I completely understood and found totally compelling and I thought to myself 'bloody hell I can do that, so why don't I?' So it's all Jason Sweeney's fault and I'm sure he'd take great pleasure in hearing that," he laughs.
Whilst sexuality has not necessarily been in the forefront of themes explored by either director in their past separate work, both feel it has been implicit in their approach.
"Anything you do, particularly as a director, has a level of autobiography that you're not conscious of so you're always unconsciously making choices that present a portrait of who you are," Haren says. "If you look at our bodies of work, it's not an explicit discourse or thing that we work with as artists, but it's built into the way we view things."
"So it's just a matter of accepting that and running with it," Mayhew adds. "And I think we're probably running with it more than we usually would in our own separate work. I think the show is influenced by the fact that we've decided to put it into Feast, a gay and lesbian festival context. I think if we'd decided to put it into Fringe or some other festival it would be probably be positioned slightly differently... I've never been terribly interested in claiming that anything I do has a queer aesthetic but it does anyway. So anything that I do ends up being slightly... er, just a little bit... gay, really!" he laughs.
That said there are certainly themes of transformation and of sexuality as deviance in Super Dimension... but not in a naturalistic, 'coming out story' kind of way.
"I think of sexuality as on a long line," Mayhew states, "so no matter where you are on that line, that is where your normality is and everything else is deviant. So if you wanted to look at it in an extreme way... if you are a plush suit fetishist, which is someone who enjoys wearing furry plush suits, as in a bunny rabbit, that would be considered normal and everything else is deviant from that."
Plush suit fetishist?
"The plush suit stuff eventually came from the [beginning] photograph of the snowboarder in a bunny suit," Mayhew explains. "It's a very innocent photograph but it got bloody dirty and also incredibly funny... [There is also the] notion of transforming, the notion of when you are coming out, you are possibly transforming. And when you don't want to come out or be identified then what do you hide as? But there's nothing really hard in there about any of that; we've just found that there are some little themes in this part of the conversation that have gone that far," he elaborates.
'Super Dimension...' is promising to be an intriguing conversation ranging fromPlush suits to Optimus Prime transformers and Skylab...
Sid Eyers-White
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Super Dimension Fortress One happens at Leigh Warren & Dancers Studio in the Lion Arts Centre from Thurs 18 to Sat 20 Nov as part of the Feast Festival.
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