Lautes Licht: Underwater(loo)

This Saturday (the 21st) the Lautes Licht team will be working in the tunnels under Waterloo Station for the Old Vic's "Red Light Night." This is a 4 hour arts club immediately following the Tunnels' much-touted "Dark Carnival." It will be a loud and raunchy extravaganza of Red Light District themed-and inspired art, performance, music, and more.

For those familiar with my interpretation of the piece, you may not be surprised to find that I think this could not be a more ideal niche for the show. Lautes Licht is the most disturbing PG-rated piece I've ever created--an opportunity to manipulate and exploit other human beings in an eerily non-sexual way. The cast will be clad in frumpy and comfortable pyjamas and trainers while the audience will likely arrive in corsets and fishnets. This works in my head, in a funny sort of way--hopefully it will come across well for the viewers and operators too. Here are these free people willingly clad in the constrictive, restrictive, and frequently bondage-inspired garb of the sex industry, pulling the puppet strings of perfectly ordinary people in attire usually reserved for Buffy marathons.

Except the performers are actually all professionally beautiful people under the t-shirts and flannel trousers, while the audience is actually comprised of ordinary folks with sensible jobs out breaking the monotony of their daily lives for one deviant night. Audiences are out to be entertained, to escape themselves, and debauchery-themed club nights fill a vital role to that end. If these leather-clad Lady Marmalades were like this all the time everyone in the office would be driven to distraction. Everyone knows they're playing dress-up. But sometimes even your friendly and helpful receptionist needs to glam up and indulge her trashy side in a loud, dark place. It's edgy. It's dangerous. It's a well-researched, medically-endorsed cathartic experience.

Art clubs provide a space for responsible adults to look sexy, think with their genitals, and be bad in a supervised and controlled environment. They're a place to have all the dirty fun you imagined the cool kids were having when you were a teenager, except with less risk of getting caught by your mum, arrested, or pressured into sneaking off with that popular guy who expects a blow-job but thinks pleasing a girl is disgusting and degrading.

The point is, you go to the art club knowing full well that, after spending Sunday nursing an expensive hangover with burnt toast and instant coffee, you'll put your tie on and go back to your real life--the same old responsible, upwardly-mobile you.

It is an ideal place to bring a piece of theatre that requires an audience that is willing to manipulate and unapologetically jerk on willing strangers. Particularly when they get a good look at them and realize that they're being handed beautiful, talented willing strangers to command. Not beautiful like a painted prostitute in a picture window, but beautiful in that wakes-up-with-dribble-and-hair-plastered-to-her-face-and-she's-still-hotter-than-you-with-a-makeover-on-a-thin-day way. Beautiful, in short, in burlap.

They're wearing pyjamas to distinguish themselves from the audience, and to showcase the way manipulation is always disgusting, even when it's in completely mundane ways. And these people you're playing like an accordion? They volunteered for this to show you a side of yourself you may not want to see. But the jammies may serve a more sinister purpose, as a reminder to the false-eyelashed audience that for some, even real life is sexy.