Guest Blog: Owen Calvert-Lyons On Ovalhouse's Demolition Party Season

It's 10am and the walls of Ovalhouse are reverberating to the sound of a kango hammer. A team of builders have been on-site for the past two days performing what might appear to be the ultimate sacrilege for a theatre: they are smashing a 2m-deep hole through the middle of our stage. We are preparing for the Demolition Party.

This will be the final season of performance in our theatre in Kennington, which has existed on this site for over 85 years. To mark this, we have commissioned artists to collaborate with structural engineers (Conisbee) and builders (Galliford Try) to destroy parts of the building through performance.

We want to create a season of work which recognises that is not the walls of this building that have given Ovalhouse a unique position in London's cultural landscape, but the artists who have filled it with acts of revolution and the audiences who have witnessed the birth of cultural movements.

For the first of these productions, Emma Frankland has brought together a group of kickass trans women and femmes from all over the world in order to create We Dig, which will open The Demolition Party season. In total, there are about 30 trans artists collaborating on this production, which gives you a sense of the scale of this project. The play centres around the actual excavation of a giant hole - a literal representation of a queer community needing to bury itself for protection.

We felt that there was no more symbolically powerful space for this hole than the middle of our stage. A stage which has been both a shelter and a beacon for countless artists throughout our history. So now a builder in a high-vis jacket is busy drilling through that floor, breaking up the wooden stage, smashing through the concrete to get to the soil beneath the theatre. It's unnerving. There is an alarming brutality and finality to this process.

But this is by no means the end. This is part of a larger vision for the future of Ovalhouse. We are building a brand-new £15 million theatre in Brixton, opening Spring 2021, so this demolition is not marked with sadness. Only by demolishing this building and selling this land can we afford to build our new venue.

Our current site, built in the 1930s, is no longer fit for purpose; large parts of it are inaccessible to wheelchair users, and other parts have long ago given up the ghost. Our new building will provide artists with the very best resources to make their work: seven light-filled rehearsal rooms, wheelchair accessible lighting rigs, and two auditoria capable of seating double the number of audiences as our current home.

It is the natural order of things for destruction to proceed new growth, and so our Demolition Party season is deliberately a destructive force from which a new Ovalhouse can grow. A new theatre which provides artists with the very best environment in which to make radical and urgent performance for the next generation of Ovalhouse audiences.

Find more information on Ovalhouse here

To post a comment, you must register and login.