Bum Bum Train/ Cordy House/ 20.12.08

Cordy House on Curtain Rd in Hoxton, is a spacious art-warehouse-space with an eclectic programme: it hosts a mixture of cross genre music nights, street art exhibitions inspired by squat culture, installations and for four Saturdays last year (Nov 29th - Dec 20th 2008) the installation-cum-ride known as Bum Bum Train, the brainchild of Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd.

The queue for the ride snaked through sculptures and installations that evoke props and the leftovers of set from a series of low budget 80s sci-fi horror films, nothing to do with Bum Bum Train, but retrospectively strangely complementary.

Helen and Laura and I, approached the queue for a doorway from which a medley of pop music blared. A knowingly ramshackle sign, which at one point came unstuck from the wall signalled entry to the ride. On as a table beside this door was a bowl of satsumas for the audience to gobble as they pleased.

Entry was regulated by a compere-stroke-door girl dressed in garish face paint and a shiny blue and purple outfit… she came across like a seductively deranged elf. Entry was one at a time and only acceptable by mounting her for a piggyback ride in order to be carried beyond the threshold. This regression to childhood experience and the destabilisation - both physical and mental which comes with handing over your mobility in this way led to gratifyingly knockabout visual and physical comedy.

The first entrant was a middle-aged moustachioed man who had attended with a woman who was most likely his wife, he was very big, the girl petite, he wasn’t the most agile of men and it took three or four attempts for him to get on top of her. I felt like I was observing the unsuccessful mating rituals of two incompatible farm animals; say a pig and a pony. Eventually she staggered with the guy on her back out of sight, through multi-coloured strips of fabric, the sort found in the doorways of tatty sex shops.

I mounted her in a single leap. A microphone is thrust in front of my mouth calling for spluttered and ill-prepared words over the PA system. She asks me my name, I’m announced like debutante at a ball to those in the queue further behind me. I'm asked ‘is there anything I want to say to friends and family?’ Why does she ask this, will I not return in one piece?The entry itself (unbeknown to us at this point) was to be a concise taster of the tone and flavour of what was to come: the cultivation of anarchy, chaos and uncertainty, being thrust unprepared into a situation that could potentially and simultaneously embarrass and amuse, a collapse of physical boundaries and personal space, a comic surreality and ludicrousness - presented with the makeshift aesthetic of Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind’s ‘sweded films’ or the dream sequences of The Science of Sleep or the sets and costumes in the Mighty Boosh TV series), not to mention a playfully libidinal atmosphere caked in and deflected by the cartoonish scenarios.

On the other side of the curtain the source of the pop songs is revealed to be a karaoke machine. A platinum blonde stands with a new romantic quiff wearing a black blazer, a DJ with over sized glasses is selecting various tunes, a woman in a bloated snowman costume and burlesque make-up, shimmies and winks taking up a sizeable part of the room, a man in a 1970s-style-checked-knitwear-tank-top makes cocktails… I’ve entered an eccentric but charming nightclub. Another microphone is pushed in my hand and before I know it I'm singing "Talking about my generation...why don't you all f-f-f-ade away?". This ragtag ensemble encouragingly eggs me on. I try not to think about my vocal efforts being relayed across the ground floor of Cordy House.

Helen who has gone in ahead of me, sits in a wheelchair, by a door which is occasionally opened and swiftly closed by an orangey-red-dyed haired bouncer, who every now and again pops his head in the room, surveys the party scene and disappears. I try to fathom why she is in the wheelchair while trying and failing to keep up to speed with the karaoke monitor. Eventually Helen is asked to rise by the bouncer and goes through the next doorway as Laura is carried in. I knew Laura was next because the piggyback-giving compere woman had told the DJ with with comic-franticness... “we have a special request! Find a song by the Smiths!” (and Laura loves the Smiths). Laura duly enters, i'm now sat in the wheelchair in which Helen sat, I’ve knocked back a couple of tequilas. Laura stands in the middle room, looking slightly shell-shocked before breaking into ‘This Charming Man’. I'm not sure if she has finished her song before the guy puts his head through the door and asks me to rise.

As I descend the stairway I am accosted by people lined either side of the steps, aching to get into the party from which I have just exited. They ask me how it was, they tug on my clothes, ask how I got on the guest list and if I’m coming back. I apologetically brush past them. (Immediately there is a playful reorientation of our sense of space having gone from the rain of outside, to inside a real club to only end up on the outside steps of a fictional club.) These stairs to lead to a bedroom. An old man is in bed in stripy pyjamas. Lit by a beside he lamp, with an absent minded air, he asks if I have some pills to relieve him from pain, he mentions some medication he was expecting, he mentions his wife. I’m uncertain if I have missed something, if something was supposed to be given to me that wasn’t given, I check my pockets, perhaps one of the people on the stairs slipped his medicine in my pocket? I can’t help him and wander on.

A woman in an elegant gown stands in front of an industrial lift. ‘Do you have the password for the VIP lounge?’ she asks, I stutter something about not having the password but could she let me in anyway? I wonder if I was told something at some point that I misheard, if I wasn’t concentrating enough? She tells me if I don’t know the password I should go another path and listen out for it. So I go on.In the next scenario I find myself in a non-descript office and invited to take a seat, I am taken through a questionnaire, health problems? Heart troubles? Asthma? The man asking the questions is dressed in generic office wear: white shirt and tie, smart trousers. No sooner are the questions answered I’m thanked and ushered on.

A police interrogation room: there are two uniformed officers one male, the other female (wearing strong red-lipstick). She pings her rubber gloves, in doing so quoting numerous ‘Carry on’ titles and police comedy films. I’m asked to put both hands on the wall, ‘Do I have anything to declare I’m asked?’ As they frisk me they discover my wallet, which they whip out my inside pocket. It has a 100 quid in it. I can’t afford for it to go missing. I end up wrestling the male officer for my wallet back, the other officer joins in. After much sweat and loss of breath I retrieve it, I offer my toothbrush and notebook instead - the pair reluctantly accept and put both items onto a grey plastic tray as some kind of forensic evidence.

Onward I go, I’m sat down in a dental chair. Given a thimble sized cup of mouthwash, a dentist peers into my mouth. (I squirm at this point, acutely self conscious of the terrible state of my teeth, I wait for several seconds - but what felt like an age for a biting assessment, instead he flips my expectations and announces the wonderful state of my molars). An assistant brings out a warm self-mouldable gumshield - I sink my teeth into it, anxious about their sensitivity, the texture of my mouth against the plastic reminds me of the ritual of preparing for Saturday morning rugby fixtures at school a decade ago.I’m now walking down a catwalk runway, fashionistas pout either side of it. Some are taking pictures. Others encourage me. I’m too engrossed in the spectacle of watching them to perform being on the catwalk myself, and neglect to discover the inner supermodel diva within.

The catwalk segues into a tunnel and I push myself through a trapdoor to find myself in a boxing ring. My opponent is bouncing in his corner, throwing jabs shadow boxing - I’m pulled to my corner by my trainer, he gives me a Mickey/Rocky style psych-pump speech, I nod vigorously. I’m on my feet wondering how much I’m expected to fight, how much my opponent is intending to fight, is he an actor playing a boxer, have they invited a ‘real’ boxer as part of the experience, how seriously is he taking this and how seriously should I? I decide to be defensive, and keep light on my feet - arms up and close together like a Victorian pugilist. I survive the bout. I remove my gloves and chuck the mouth guard at the boxer. My opponent lurches towards me. I escape into the white room of a medical ward.

A small boy lies in a hospital bed, there are beeps and whirs, a matron keeps watch over him, he sits up excitedly: ‘Usher!!!’ he cries, ‘Will you sign my autograph book?’ I smile and ask him his name, it is Nat, I sign “Get well soon, Nat. Usher.” The matron asks me to leave now, explaining the boy’s had enough excitement for the day.

I stumble on in to a living room, I sit down on an armchair in the centre of the room facing a television. Within a second it becomes clear this is no ordinary television but literally live television, the shell of a TV acts as a frame for the performers to stand within, at such a distance that are proportionally the ‘right size’ (the visual gag again revealing a fascination with the manipulation of our sense of space). I catch the end of a weather update, followed by some comedy ident but before I can really engage with the content of the show three men in red lycra bodysuits burst into my living room and whisk me out my seat, they are shouting ‘Move! Move! Get up! Come on!’ Their arms half dragging me from armchair to wheelchair. I’m now in a long white corridor with a slopping floor. Along the right side of the corridor, behind a metal railing are enthusiastic onlookers. I’m part of a sleigh team. They give me an almighty push, I whiz down the slope, high-fiving the crowd as I fly by.

As I slow down, a suited woman wheels me into a conference room. It’s some sort of press briefing, journalists sit inquisitively, cross-legged, bespectacled, pens twirling in air. An African man finishes a speech in a tongue I don’t recognise. The entire room swivels to me. At this point it becomes clear I’m the interpreter of a language I do not speak: I improvise something in English, which has the journalists fooled for a bit, but when it comes to translating the journalists’ questions into (what later becomes clear is) Swahili - staged pandemonium breaks out, the journalists cry: ‘He can’t speak the language!’, the African minister shouts something which to my ear phonetically sounds like ‘juju Swahili’ - I am hurriedly whisked from the room for my own safety.

I am parked in front of a Perspex fairground booth containing the kind of cheap items found in such machines. In place of a mechanical arm is a man’s hand which needs verbal control: Left! Right! Stop! Release! the hand opens. I collect the prize, recognizing the items seized by the police officers now sealed in Clingfilm.

I wander into a familiar room. I am back in the old man’s bedroom, he’s still asking for his pills, I still don’t have them – I apologise profusely with feigned concern. I ascend some stairs, past the same lot who were queuing outside, a couple of girls ask if they can come in on my arm, I more than fine with this we get to the door, but the bouncer won’t have anything of it. I pass through the karaoke party (the snowgirl still bobbing enthusiastically) and out through the doorway from which I came on piggyback.

It is the kind of experience that easily could have been animated fragments of the old man’s delirium. I cannot vouch with certainty that the scenes I have described happened in the order I described them. It was as tumultuous mentally as physically, its unstable actuality lends itself to unstable recollection. This dreamlike intensity was partly born of the sensory overload. Whereas cinema through the darkness of the auditorium might captivate the eyes and ears, here the entire body was literally propelled through space - along the way you were touched, manhandled, speaking and spoken to, you tasted, you were threatened, made alert and ready. It became dreamlike not through lulling and approximating the comforts of a bedtime story or inducing a close to sleep atmosphere, but oppositely by being hyper-real and excessively present.

Tension was racketed up by removing my control and knowledge: no sense of the duration, of the limits of the performers, the number of performers, the size of the space, it was like being flung in the shoes of Alice or Dorothy navigating her way through Wonderland or Oz, slipping from one madcap scene to another, each completely confident in the rationality of its hermetically sealed world, while being the very opposite to the outsider.

The anxiety of ‘not knowing the rules of the game’, proves far more stressful than the game itself, continually trying to psych yourself for being prepared for anything is playfully enforced upon the participant. These perhaps worked best in the meeting with authority figures, the imperious doorman, the office boss/interviewer - the police officers in the interrogation room. Yet the ‘train’ never strives for a single storyline, this allows for the collision of the unexpected, or a logic based on spatial reorientation, or even the collage of experience as one might juxtapose tickets and wallpapers in a 2d artwork. I.e. contrasting the experience of being passive with being active, or of spectacle to being scrutinized yourself, sometimes the links operate across scenes creating irrationality in one instance that becomes perfectly sensible in another. For example the dentist fitting you with the unrequested gumshield- prefigures the boxing match. However the inexplicability of the scenarios and their collision gives the sense of being in a pinball machine - ricocheting through an artificial landscape. Bum Bum Train not only recognizes but conveys experientially the speed and compression of everyday urban experience.

No overt judgement is cast on this expression of experience - but perhaps it is enough to generate this chaos, for it to be played back at you. All the same this rich humour seems to garland a bleakness of sorts: it is hard not to think of having being expelled from the reality game show that is life, being sat on a movable couch and allowed to re-experience your ‘best bits’ that last one time.