Chez Kay
Andrew Kay mounts a bike and bares his soul to an inquisitive computer
The start of the Brighton Festival hit me full on like a runaway train. It always does, so I have no idea why I am taken by surprise. The preceding weeks are filled with excitement and more than the usual amount to write as we preview so much of what is about to happen.
Then wham; you’re off on a whizzing rollercoaster of cultural ups and downs. I try to keep an open mind, but as a hardened old art lag it’s difficult not to enter into things with preconceptions. I have a great passion for good theatre and I love technology. But all too often the technology swamps the art. Anything bearing the word ‘multimedia‘ fills my heart with a dread chill. What? More slides and computer wizardry, more lights and myriad speakers? I prefer audience participation to the electronic witterings of some artless geek.
“I was that monkey, riding and confessing like a person riddled with guilt and angst”
That said, I like to be surprised, and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke certainly surprised me. There was technology, in the form of a tiny computer monitor, a set of headphones and a microphone. I boarded the velocopede and headed off, following the instructions of the mellifluously toned lady in my ear. Ride and then hide, I rode and I hid. I logged on, chose a name and then the questions started. Soft at first, gently gently catchee monkee. Before long I was that monkey, riding and confessing like a person riddled with guilt and angst and with an increasingly sore bottom from a saddle that was less than forgiving.
I hid and she probed: ‘‘Tell me what keeps you awake at night, tell me about your father, talk about a time when you wanted to run away from something, did you run?’’ On and on she went and the more she asked the more I confessed. I talked about my mother and my father, an exlover who was married, all manner of things, and somehow it was painless, lacking in embarrassment because I was talking to a bicycle.
I’ve always shied away from the idea of therapy. I have little faith in people who set themselves up as being able to guide me through the quagmire that is my life. What do they know? This was so different, so revealing, moving even.
Oh and if you want to know what kept me awake that night it was two things: Scrabulous and a sore bum from riding a bike for the first time in six years.
