An old man with a Buddha statue, the three-man ski team with one ski each, two people with the shades off of old street lights, both compelled to put them on their heads, and me, with my padlock.
We embark in a single file line to an empty plot in the shadow of East London’s high-rise neighbourhoods, the London Stadium and an M&S. The concrete stage is punctuated with weeds and piles of rubbish if you choose to see them that way, but Charlotte Spencer’s cast will challenge you to see them otherwise. Our headphones tell us the performance has already begun, and so the challenge begins.
Narrated through headphones and ‘performed’ by the audience, Is This a Wasteland? takes a disused space and asks the audience to make of it what they will. This begins immediately, as you are invited to pick out an object from the ‘object shop’ of abandoned, broken and recycled relics of the tip. I don’t know why I picked up my padlock but I did, and then worried if I’d made the right choice, unsure what I would have to do with it. Many others were in my same predicament, swapping and changing their objects, seeing what they could be used for, sharing an instinct to put them on their heads. Once we had made it to the ‘stage’ the voice in our headphones tells us to abandon them; to just leave them with the other rubbish. That’s when I felt silly for pondering so long over my decision.
