CHEMICAL WEDDING
Chemical Wedding plunges you into a world where the multiple meanings of AIDS are contested. From the Black Death to the movies of paranoid Hollywood this promenade performance explores the viral nature of ideas; how do distortions and half truths spread and how do we escape the burden of outmoded thinking?
In an open environment of flickering electronic images and layers of quadraphonic sound Chemical Wedding is a "passionate, earnest exploration of ... ideas and subjectivities: panic, surveillance, attack" [Hybrid]. Using direct interaction with the audience the piece climaxes with two performers in a pulley system desperately trying to fill buckets with sand which gradually lift them off the ground.
THE IDEAS
Chemical Wedding is an attempt to grapple with AIDS and the ways in which meaning is constituted when such an unprecedented attack on our preconceptions takes place.
In particular it is an examination of paradigms: the philosophical systems that we use to make sense of the world. The piece shows how the creation of a new paradigm is reliant on existing ones and thus how the future is bound to the past.
When AIDS first appeared there were no frames of reference for it, no precedents. Gradually, fragments of existing knowledge about everything from cancer to sociology were drawn upon to create the highly contested pool of knowledge that we have about the virus. Even for a completely new phenomenon we turn to existing models for help. Do the mutating, blossoming statistics of the AIDS virus lie ready prepared in ancient vaults, in paradigms first explored by Senator McCarthy and Edgar Hoover?
"Blast Theory are one of the most refreshing performance groups to have emerged in Britain in recent years. If there is any young performance group creating work that is accessible and relevant to a new generation of audiences brought up on pop music, TV, rave culture and the harsh realities of our times, Blast Theory are it." Lois Keidan, Director of Live Arts, ICA
