Response: Soldiers' Song, One on One Festival at BAC

Step into the inauspicious crate in the foyer of the Battersea Arts Centre and you’re confronted with a quiet dilemma: to sing or to listen. The dominate feature of Quarantine’s soundproof booth is a microphone stood in its centre. The far wall houses a screen, on which appear videos of six different servicemen and women singing a song, karaoke-style directly to camera. At the bottom, the lyrics appear. Beneath is a menu of six buttons, each labelled by both performer and song-title. The choice, as in karaoke, is ours.

It is, I suppose, an issue of respect. These men and women cannot be seen detached from the regulation kit they wear and, accordingly, the danger in which they place themselves. At one level, the set up invites you to join in with the soldier, as if an experience of solidarity. The actual effect, on account of the recorded nature of their singing, is to drown them out. It is to be more interested by your own performance than theirs. To listen and watch, however, is to feel the pull of the microphone, as if you’re leaving them hanging. In a way, it encapsulates a central problem of one on one or interactive performance: how to interact honestly without feeling that you might be derailing the performance as constructed or intended?

Beyond that central conflict, however, there’s little to Quarantine’s piece. By allowing you ten minutes to wheel through different on screen options, a certain amount of channel-hopping dilettantism is encouraged. While the impulse to see some of it all, rather than all of some – stopping one performance midflow in the process – is interesting, I wonder whether more might be achieved by limiting us to a single song, allowing one soldier to stand for all.

Ultimately, though, the piece can’t overcome the limitations of its own mediatised status. There’s only so much responsibility one can feel towards technology. Can you really ever offend or respect a video recording? Can you call it an experience, whether sharing or shunning, when your opposite number is so defined by their absence? Besides, thus alone, there’s no one but yourself to witness or judge your actions within. In the end, Soldiers’ Song doesn’t really make any demands of you, beyond those you project upon yourself.