This is an Easiwork baking counter from 1929, which I had the pleasure of seeing for myself yesterday at The Museum of Domestic Design. If you haven’t been, you must go. Linked to Middlesex University, The Museum is a fantastic educational/cultural resource exploring all things domestically-designed.

Apparently IKEA have made something similar to the Easiwork baking counter; this doesn’t surprise me in the least as whatever you think of IKEA and its contemporary, Swedish, mass-produced lines, they are truly the kings of modern storage.

I imagine I will be quite given to making camp observations on domestic details over the next few weeks, as Bobby Baker’s book is proving quite an influence. Throughout her works she employs a self-aware, comedic camp in her stage/performance persona, adopting the pose of a competent, maternal, TV Chef or food-presenter. Her book is utterly gripping and I am awed in reading about her work, at the sheer bravery of her activities. I’m just about to begin a chapter entitled ‘Risk in Intimacy,’ which I believe to be a very befitting title for any exploration of her work as she consistently takes the risk of exposing herself in making work that is often in, yet alone about, home life. She talks throughout of the use of abjection and redemption in her work; how she is always somehow sullied or spoiled by the food-products that she employs in her performances, and yet always in control and always redeemed. Humiliation and abjection combine with moments of hope in her work and one never feels it is either too contrived or totally out of her control.

This is reminiscent, for me, of some of the strategies another performance artist employs: If you are in Oxford tonight, don’t miss the fabulous Edward Rapley of The Licensees presenting a revised and longer version of his brilliant one-man show. 10 ways to die onstage will be showing as part of tonight’s Jumble it Up programme in the Burton Taylor Studios. In the version of this show that I saw, Rapley had appropriated, revised and contemporised the idea of the clown to brilliant effect. Rapley’s stage persona blew up balloons, tipped water on himself, ragged with the audience and threatened to jump off a ladder into a tiny little blow-up children’s paddling pool. When I saw 10 ways to die onstage this wild-haired actor performed the show I saw in plain t-shirt and jeans with no red nose, and yet was the most sincere and accomplished ‘fool‘ I have ever seen performing live.

Lively and versatile, Rapley flips between joy and dejection rapidly and skillfully and the effect is intensely engaging and intimate. The line between auto-biography and devised theatre performance seem blurred and the confessional, actor-bares-all quality in the work is totally convincing. The only thing that makes me think it is devised rather than completely improvised, is the evident skill in the timing and the imagery used throughout the work. In this piece we are subjected to the nervous ramblings of a terrified actor, the tragicomedy of a balloon being blown up and deflated to great emotional effect, the impishness of Rapley threatening to pour water on the expensive electrical equipment surrounding the stage and many other spectacles that are funny, discomforting and sometimes terribly sad. Rapley’s emotional navigations only feel tricky or awkward when that is intended; which makes for paradoxically uncomfortable and comforting viewing. It is comforting to be sheltered in the dark, anonymous audience and not up on the stage, and yet uncomfortable to empathise (as one inevitably does) with the somehow terribly naked portrait of flawed, fragile humanity presented before us. The lone figure on the stage is an isolated yet triumphant figure, embodying perhaps that defiant spirit of humour which I described in yesterday’s post. The control and timing throughout the show is excellent and Rapley himself is utterly engaging to watch. A redemptive show; you will laugh until you cry and will feel more human somehow after seeing this man apparently lays wide his great clown heart before you.

I loved it and am sad that I won’t be able to make it along myself for a second round of Rapley.

In knitting news: well, given my recent preoccupation with the clown and the use of comedy in performance works, it is only befitting that I am working on knitted banana peels for a commission I got a long time ago.