Guest Blog: Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth: 'We are all networks of blood'

Described as "a raw, euphoric choreography between 3 figures and 75 litres of fake blood" and "a cyclical feat of endurance and precision", Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth's Blood Show is coming to the Battersea Arts Centre from 12-23 November. We asked this artist to fill us in on what they found fascinating about the red stuff. 

Blood Show’s main character is blood. Or, more precisely, fake blood. I was always struck by the famous image from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining of blood flooding out of the elevator and cascading down the corridor; there’s something so brilliant about that image because we all know it isn’t real human blood and it isn’t even pretending to be. Not really. It’s being the image of blood. Of wild excesses of blood. Fake blood does, I would argue, almost the same job of representation as real blood: we can’t see fake blood without thinking (and feeling) about real blood, mortality, our own bodies, pain, birth, power, life. We experience ‘the thing’, even though we know it’s not ‘the thing’. This kind of doubling of a moment - a problem which we feel in a real way while also expressly being told or shown it is not real - is one of my favourite energies on stage. 

For ages, I’ve wanted to write the image of blood as large as possible on a stage. Larger than I could ever do with real blood. More playfully than I could ever do with real blood. More confrontationally than I could ever do with real blood. Blood is disconnected from the cause-and-effect equation in Blood Show. When the show starts, I’m already covered entirely in blood before any violence has been enacted; uncannily, though, my shortsleeved boilersuit remains untouched, sparkling white, on top of my blood-drenched limbs. The blood isn’t behaving like real blood or proposing to be produced from the body the way real blood is. 

In this production, blood is not the result of anything. It’s the given, basic, foundational condition of the show, just in the way it is the given, basic, foundational condition of humans. We may all be different from each other, but something that is true of all of us, is that, just under the surface, we are all networks of blood. I think often the function of real blood when it’s used in performance depends on flow: its flowing proves to us all that we are here, we are now, we are alive (but we will die) and this moment is actually happening in real time. While I love this material in performance and consider myself a proud member of the live art family. But I also love that, with stage blood, it’s the opposite. It sits ready in bottles, in vats, in pellets - and it is essentially paint. Highly charged paint. In Blood Show, we make its largest design gesture with 75 litres of stage blood nightly. We commit to turning the white carpeted set completely red every night, as the set itself seems to tear its own skin off and euphorically bleed. From a stage management perspective, that’s a nightmare of course!

For over ten years, I’ve wanted to see someone totally covered in fake blood onstage. In 2012, I made a show called Big Hits with my company GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN. We worked with guest performer Craig Hambling whose entrance onto the stage was bare chested, his torso covered in fake blood, apropos of nothing. Another of the performers had previously warned the audience that Craig was a ‘bit of an attention seeker’. His entrance was a gag and he was only on stage for a short while before the others told him “You can take the blood off now, Craig”, at which point he started a long process of cleaning it off with wet wipes. There was a joyful, cheeky, wrongheaded ‘too muchness’ about the use of blood in that moment, its fakeness, the use of it for effect, it existing as image and image alone. 

I knew I wanted to come back to this, build on it, find the show that grows from this image and here we are with Blood Show. And happily, I’m joined again in this piece by Craig. Craig is a fight director and has choreographed all the stage violence in Blood Show. The beautiful thing about stage fighting (just like stage blood) is it has to be resolutely not the thing, in order to look like the thing. Stage violence is extremely unviolent. It is utterly based on trust and communication. Don’t get me wrong, it’s exhausting. It does cost a lot from the performers’ bodies, not in the creation of violence, but in the creation of the illusion of violence. And so we end up back at my favourite real bodily fluid to put on stage, under all that blood - sweat, sweat, sweat.

Blood Show will be at the Battersea Arts Centre from 12-23 November.

Photo credit: Claire Hough

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