In advance of their show this month, Glasgow based sound/art/performance collective 85A talked to Central Station about Cargo, Camera…Action!…

In a video about Cargo, Camera…Action! Dom Hastings describes the art scene in Glasgow as “DIY & grassroots.” How would you describe it?

There isn’t so much commercial presentation in Glasgow. There’s only really two commercial galleries. I’m sure a lot of artists would like to have more opportunities in that way, but for us it becomes more of a breeding ground for different artists getting together to create different types of events, heavily inspired from the music and arts scenes mixing.

It’s a way of getting things done and learning from each other, even from other people’s mistakes. There’s such a huge arts community with loads of people doing things and that’s really inspiring. Even if you’re not necessarily part of it, you’re friends with everyone and there’s a supportive community in what you’re trying to do.

Cargo, Camera…Action – Photo: Eoin Carey

How did the collaboration with Glasgow Film come about?

The first collaboration was Jan Švankmajer for the Glasgow Film Festival in 2013 at the closing party. Glasgow Film approached us. That was the first official commission that we did. It was a matinee to an evening performance with ten mini-cinemas in it. We were screening Švankmajer’s early animations, his short films and made an immersive environment that people could walk around in. It was a mixture between more focused theatrical sit-down performances and then just stuff that you could stumble upon. Everything was bespoke to the film and we responded to his films to create a cinema environment.

The audience had to interact with the performance, for example if they wanted to watch this one film they had to be led around by a grim reaper with a chain. You had to go to a restaurant and book your table and when you got served there was a big slab of meat with a screen in it. It brought a new audience to Švankmajer as well as bringing out the older audience. Those films are nearly twenty-five years old so we were bringing the Surrealist out from under the rug and mixing the visual arts and film audiences.

From there, they approached us. We also had some ideas about doing something for the Commonwealth. The commission came about from that, from being on the scene and doing lots of film-based works. Their brief for the commission, was to transform underused locations along the River Clyde and make them into bespoke cinemas. That’s what we’ve done consistently; take over disused spaces and make them into cinemas.

85A & GFF present Jan-Svankmajer – Photo: Neil-Davison

So if you could use any disused space in the world what would it be?

Chernobyl? There’s a few spaces in Glasgow we’ve got our eye on discovering. We don’t necessarily go out looking for spaces. Usually, something finds us. Either we stumble across a space and we all respond to it or someone gives us a space. Things are corrupt, decayed, industrial. When we’ve been asked to do something, like recently with Dark Behaviour in the Arches in a nice space, the first thing we do is go ‘where’s the rubbish, where’s the stuff?’ We make a space look messy. There’s not really any shortage of places like this. We’re quite easy on the requirements and pre-requisites.

Last year, we made ourselves a community interest company. That means we’re able to go to businesses and parks and ask for disused warehouses and are able to get rates relief. It’s a good deal because there’s an exchange which isn’t monetary. The more people that go in there, the more it keeps the place alive a little bit instead of this massive space sitting empty. That’s Glasgow, isn’t it? You just get given spaces if you start looking! We’ve never paid for a space ever and that’s been ten years of working in buildings.

How do you go about creating a performance? What’s your creative process like?

Torturous! We have brainstorming meetings and drawing sessions at the very start. It’s all heads together and then we maybe naturally split off and develop things and bring them back to the group constantly. Because we are unfunded and most of our work is commission based, we have to apply to make work. So we have to devise an answer to a brief and come up with something before it gets made and get the concept sketch. It’s accepted, if you’re lucky and then we decide to do something totally different!

It would be pure luxury to have paid rehearsal times throughout the year for different things, but it just doesn’t work like that. It comes together in a more organic way of whoever is working with whoever and creating something. Life is the stage. We get paid from our other jobs.

A lot of things start as casual conversations between a couple of people and then it’s just like ‘ that’s an amazing idea!’ and you get a call ‘ alright, we’re going to do it like this!’ It has been a real treat over the last few months, we’ve got a studio, an HQ with a rehearsal space and a warehouse. It’s where we will build our stage; a full-scale 20 metre deep, 20 metre wide stage. We can practice all the kinetic elements on set and with all the props. With the show, we’re effectively performing it five times in one day and we’ve got different music acts for each one. There will be a tempo change within that so we’re going to bring the musicians in to do rehearsals.

With such large performance elements, how do you go about rehearsing?

In Glasgow we’re blessed with big living rooms and big bedrooms. So we work like this or we work on site when we’ve built the show. On one occasion we had the workspace in The Glue Factory one week prior to the show. Right towards the end you can find a space somewhere.

Cargo, Camera…Action – Photo: Eoin Carey

What should audiences expect from Cargo, Camera…Action?

They’re totally vital to the performance. If they don’t show up, the film is not going to be complete! We’re filming the last scenes of a film that we’re making and they’re the extras of the film. They’ll have some quite important jobs to do in making the film resonate and come to life. They should expect lots of music.

It’s a promenade experience with a café and the backstage crew bar, but really since the audience are the extras, it’s for them. It’s an all day wrap party. There’s talent scouts and mobile make-up station to prepare our extras. Then they’ll come for the shoot and they’ll have to do what the director says.

We stumbled across an article in the Scotsman back in February with the title ‘Cannibal Rats in Ghost Ship head to Scotland.’ This is the film that we’re shooting the final scenes of. We’re making a big cargo set. We’ve got cannibal rats.

85A & Glasgow Film Cargo, Camera, Action! Launch Event.

Durational performances are quite long, what are some of the challenges you face when performing?

Not enough hours in the day and not enough energy drinks to go around. It’s like giving birth, really tough at the time but afterwards you forget how hard it was and you look at what you’ve created. That’s what theatre and live performances are. It’s the adrenaline people feed off. A lot of it is down to the people that come to work with us as well. It’s not for the faint-hearted!

The real challenge is making a living in between shows. Once we get to the point where there’s a week until the show, we’re in familiar territory. With a long lead-in like this one has, it’s making sure that you can be available to do the work and the devising can be tough as well. As we’re getting more established and recognised, there’s an expectation that we need to come up with another good show. Then there’s pressure and the dynamics of a big group. It’s the big family syndrome of all of us trying to get along with each other and be fulfilled creatively. As you grow or become more recognised, there are challenges that come with that; making new work together whilst maintaining an income.

Cargo, Camera…Action! is our biggest show to date in a lot of different ways. We like to make it so that each person who comes to our shows has a good seat. When you go to these big events and there’s an aerial performer 200 feet away from you and this massive crowd, you feel like nobody. That’s why we’re doing the same show five times instead of doing it just once because then everybody is going to get a good seat.

We’ve taken down the amphitheatre’s capacity quite considerably to make it more intimate. This has always been so important throughout the history of all of our work. Our cast for this show is up to thirty. So it’s thirty to three hundred. We think that’s a good ratio. People call us mad for this, saying that it won’t last, that it isn’t sustainable. We think that’s what makes this special.

See 85A in Cargo, Camera…Action! on 26 July at the Clyde Amphitheatre. The event is free but some parts of the events are ticketed. For more information see the Glasgow Film website.  For more Cargo, Camera…Action! see our featured event. Want more 85A? Read our first Q&A with them here.

Photos courtesy of 85A and Glasgow Film. Interview by Madeleine Schmoll.

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Ahead of their next performance Cargo, Camera… Action!, Central Station caught up with the Glasgow based sound/art/performance collective 85A.

When did 85A start?

Our first event was in 2008. We didn’t have a name until 2010. There’s been nineteen shows we’ve done together. We have a problem saying no…!

When we make work, especially with Chernozem, the film we made, the idea comes from a few people and then expands. In that case, we expanded it to make a theatre performance before the film had finished. Then we screened the film with another theatre performance around it. It’s almost like a season or something. Our audience gets really excited. They can see it and then come back and participate with it again. It allows them to experience the story or the thematic content in various ways by physically being part of it or watching it.

How did you come up with the name 85A?

It was on the submarine in one of our early shows. We were doing a show about a submarine and then we decided we needed a name and we looked no further than the name on our submarine. It’s the submarine’s ident.

Looking back, what do you think inspired you to start a collective?

We’ve never had so much time for reflection. We keep moving forward. Things just get thrown our way that are too exciting to say no to. It’s been consistently less shows and bigger shows but still about five a year. We do a summer season and we work on a London based circus each summer as well. So that’s another project we do together and we live together in different shapes and forms. It’s a family now!

How do you describe yourselves and what you do?

That’s a big question. We’re a multi-disciplinary artists collective. We work across disciplines and there’s generally, in no particular order, music, puppetry, masks and audience interaction. We like to work site-specifically and put on our own events. We work with film as well and a lot of us have a visual arts background but a lot of us have been moving gradually away from it in multiple directions.

We combine the forces of visual arts, design and music to create performative event based works that could almost be seen as durational. Often, they roll into a party so we can have a more focused performance which would then turn into a music event towards the end.

You often work with masks, costumes, and other disguises so how does anonymity relate to your work?

There’s a freedom to it and also a reaction to a lot of the current climate of arts, business and personal hype. Everything is attached to a face. People as well as artists seem to really be in a look-at-me phase, sharing everything and getting everyone to take a look at themselves. Often behind the mask or image, there’s not much. We’re trying to make a counterpoint to it, where we‘re a lot more secretive about who we are and the way we do things, but when people come to our event, there’s a lot of us. We’re very generous and there’s a lot of us to be with!

On the same note, you often ask your audiences to wear masks. How does this add to the performance?

It blurs the lines between the crew and the audience. The audience start to feel like they can act up, like they’re crew. Because you’ve got that anonymity, wearing a mask allows you to be something other than the face that you project. If you go to quite a lot of art shows or the pub, you can’t really relax. You have to keep this pretense up. If you have a mask on, you can do whatever you want and nobody can see it’s you. There’s a certain freedom within that.

Dark Behaviour looked like so much fun, can you tell us a bit more about your experience making it?

We’ve done about five masquerades now so it’s almost like we’re developing a bit of a scene. Each time, people experiment more with their costumes and masks and movement. We’ve really noticed the effort that people go through, especially the last two masquerades. People probably dress like this for other things, but now they’re really finding out about what we’re doing and using that as a platform for their own costume. The masks were great at Dark Behaviour. In Edinburgh the costumes were really good as well.

Do you have a core group of people you work with?

There’s twelve of us who are in an e-mail thread with each other. When we come to do projects, our numbers go up. We also have associate artists who we’ve been working with for about five years now who are growing with each project. We’ve been headhunting other artists that we want to work with, performers or people who can build etc. We’ve never advertised or asked for volunteers. We just kind of find people. You get fed if you work with us, and you get a patch or a t-shirt!

On your website, you call yourselves ‘cultural agitators.’ How are you disrupting the norms related to visual and contemporary art practice?

We’ve successfully removed ourselves from it. Before 85A, quite a few of us were involved in a gallery called Lowsalt, where we would organise group exhibitions. We were asking artists to collaborate with one another, to share a space, and we would always encourage a performative element on the opening night and really play to the event. Within that, we found each other as a group. Through being a gallery working mainly with solo shows, we got a really good response from the Arts Council and funders in general. We did GI a few times. We always gave too much, we would be given some funding and put on three giant shows, one gallery based, one all around the city, and then some inflatable sculptures which was also city wide.

We decided we wanted to work together as a group anonymously. Then suddenly, we were getting turned down from funding and we felt that the new direction we had chosen for ourselves wasn’t fitting with what was on offer for artists. We just decided to take it somewhere else and haven’t really looked back. We’ve ended up getting permission from so many other organisations whether it be NVA who asked us to create something for an urban food festival, or Govanhill Baths to do a music festival, music festivals outside of Scotland, film festivals.

There are a lot of multi-disciplinary visual artists in the fine arts scene, but their work is only multi-disciplinary to a point. That’s where a collective is different because there are people within that who themselves are working multi-disciplinarily and you’ve all got a different base or background and that allows the work to shape shift and become malleable. All of these elements create something that we’re quite happy to feel is outwith the bubble of visual arts.

We’re also independent in the sense that we are in control of all the logistics. We have vehicles, we can take over a space. We have all the equipment to put on a show, sound, video, lighting. We’re a production company so in that sense, it’s beyond multi-disciplinary.

85A’s Voltage and Vitalism at The Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow 2012

A lot of inspiration seems to come from German Expressionism and Victoriana, is there a reason you have a particular affinity to these and/or other periods?

Expressionism has been a big player in the aesthetics of a lot of our work which is down to one of our members who does all our graphics. It’s been a big influence. There’s a kinship beyond the stylistic element with the Weimar Republic and the Constructivists and times of political upheaval. There was a lot of interesting art being created back then.

The Victoriana theme of the Kelvingrove event was scientific times. That show was about electricity and the inventions were really exciting. They asked us to be part of an event that already had that overarching theme. We were making work to poke a stick at the ideologies that are so celebrated, like imperialism and make some work that was brought these quite interesting or slightly backwards thoughts to the forefront.

It’s not all about the past though. We’ve got other influences and they’re quite diverse. Industry, maybe in music or in film. It goes a bit beyond that. It’s not just artistic influence either. We’ve been working in festivals quite a lot, music festivals and arts festivals in the outdoors. You do see quite a lot of something on another scale that mixes all of that and that’s another influence. People who are travelling and parties have brought in autonomous elements like subcultures that have taken hold in the festival scene in the UK.

Do you have specific emotions or reactions that you’re trying to invoke from the outset?

There are elements within each show where sometimes there might have been an undercurrent from the start or they might protrude later on as quite an obvious statement that you could read something into but it’s never been forced.

We think of ourselves as the audience and what we would like to do. Whether we’ve been whizzed around on a ghost train or ‘yeah! let’s get crushed by some kind of god of the party’. I think we come at it from a participant’s point of view and through devising it, you feel it.

The drama and the emotion happens. There’s ten of us talking like this. You feel the emotion in the room. You feel the response. If we’re talking about something like The Orzel, it equates to a certain chapter in history, World War II. This is not really the kind of message that we feel passionate about more than any other. We like the story and the treatment and we want to stay true to the intention of the piece. We pick up the emotions as we go along.

We do say something like, “we’re going to do a rain or shine show and it’s going to be for everybody. All Ages.” There is a difference but within that you can still have a somber emotional context. We think about our audience, whether we’re given an audience or we’re going out to find one. There are emotional political elements within everything we do because that’s the kind of people we are. We’re not going to not say things but we maybe will say them in a different way to a family audience. We’re not going to put them through some horrific experience if there are children there. We’ve always kept hold of that.

Even when we’re at a festival and it’s fun during the day, we’re still crushing people, we’re still sacrificing people because that’s the humorous grotesque stance we have. It’s about not taking everything so seriously but it is about having something to say. There’s an absurdity in what we do. I think that’s there as well and sometimes it can be really dark but tinged with humour so it’s never overwhelmingly dark. We’re not just jesters, we’re serious in our absurdity.

85A’s The Crusher at Secret Garden Party Festival in Cambridge

With so many different elements going into performances, how do you control them when the performance is underway?

There are roles that are formed within that. We stage manage each other and people will head up departments for props or costumes or food, driving. Experience of working together also builds that and working with so many people.

We’ve experienced madness and anarchy. When you’re at a party, a festival or a demo or self-organised you become familiar with the crowd’s reaction. You want to encourage people to let go but you want to keep things safe. These are the rules and regulations of such spaces and technical things that you should or shouldn’t do. At the same time, you know that you need to be able to get your audience to feel that it’s totally mad but really it isn’t. You need to have experience of both worlds, the entertainment industry and the world of total chaos and seeing how far you can connect the two and have them coexist in one space. If it’s mega official and everything has got to be done by the book, we’re really good at doing risk assessments now and knowing regulations. Some other place they might not care so much and we can do the same show with four times less effort because there is less paperwork.

We work a lot with performers where we’re improvising.I think a lot of that comes through trust and practise together. If you can improvise together and discuss and have a laugh and say stupid things and then party together and then create work, there is a trust. Yes, you have an overall direction or scene but within that there will be a few improvised elements that you kind of give to people and they do great work. That’s why we all work together.

Stay tuned for more from 85A next week when they talk about Cargo, Camera…ACTION!

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Photos courtesy of 85A. Interviewed by Madeleine Schmoll.

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Cargo, Camera…Action! is an outdoor celebration of the Clyde and its history that will take place on the banks and bridges of the River Clyde on 26 July. Created by Glasgow Film as part of the Commonwealth Games Cultural Programme, the event is based around the moving image and the history of Glasgow and will offer film, theatre, music and more. Theatrical Collective 85A, will take-over the amphitheatre space at Custom House Quay presenting hourly theatrical concerts throughout the day on a custom-built ocean liner. A mocked-up film set will offer participants the chance to have their moment of glory in front of the camera…if the director allows it. Minty Donald and Nick Millar explore the Clyde in a film work while Eilidh MacAskill goes back to Victorian times, performing Bicycle Boom, a piece about the bicycle, the Victorian woman and emancipation. Enjoy new cinematic works from filmmakers Chris Leslie and Torsten Lauschmann exploring the shipbuilding history of Govan’s playground games and songs.

Cargo, Camera…Action! will take place on 26 July. The event is free but some parts of the events are ticketed. For more information see the Glasgow Film website. Keep your eyes peeled on Central Station for more Cargo, Camera…Action! themed features including an interview with 85A.

GFF14: Cargo, Camera, Action…! The Launch Party

Images courtesy Glasgow Film.

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