Response: Just For A Moment, One on One Festival at BAC

Three Blind Mice are a company born out of the Battersea Arts Centre’s YPT (Young Persons’ Theatre) scheme. Just For a Moment, therefore, ought not to be judged alongside the work of professional practitioners. As such, the following may seem unnecessarily harsh, but, in keeping with the exploratory nature of the festival, it is an interesting point of reference when trying to understand the mechanisms behind a format. Please read accordingly.

The physical manifestation of a daydream, Just For A Moment suffers from its clarity. When we’re stripped of sight, the world should be disorientating and unfamiliar. Three Blind Mice, however, reduce it to little more than a series of signs to be decoded. The formula is too legible: sand underfoot + canvas chair + heat + seagulls cawing + the smell of suntan lotion + pina colada = beach. The situations that one drifts into are too everyday and stock: pubs, clubs, crowds and chambers of hands.

Just For A Moment pitches you at a bar and leaves you waiting. A phone goes and – once you finally realise that you might need to pick it up (my hands had to be led towards it, having assumed it part of the soundscape) – a male voice apologises for the delay and explains that he’s en route. From there one drifts in and out of the bar, whisked away by soft, guiding fingers. Most of these moments, however, is established in order to come to nothing. You sit or dance or jostle or wonder quite how old the hands running over your body are before being returned to your bar stool and waiting flat pint.

The curious thing is that, for all the banality behind the piece’s thought-process, it still felt like a personalised gift. Despite finding it uninspiring and unoriginal, I still enjoyed the moment by moment experience. To judge from the comments left by previous audience members, most people do. That, surely, must be marked down as the format’s success. The question is why?

I suspect that it has to do with trepidation. Narratives are best when we become wrapped up in their unfolding. They succeed by engaging us in a story to the extent that we want – no, need – to know what comes next. Where we become the subject of our own narrative, the centre of our own story, that comes as standard. Narratives told or portrayed must make us care about others. Here, we cannot but care. It matters because it’s happening to us. The anxiety of not knowing what’s in store for us (here, emphasised by being blindfolded) ensures that we remain engaged and on guard.

That, I think, is what makes one on one work such an exciting format, but it also leaves it susceptible to accusations of empty titillation. Just For A Moment cheats us because it leaves very little in its wake. It is an experience without reverberations, exciting and pleasant but ultimately toothless. Experiential theatre cannot afford to rest on its laurels. No artform can. It must guard against providing experiences for the sake of it, because when artists can give us any experience, any old experience is not enough.