2012 by Bill Aitchison

Grassmarket in the Old Town, one of the busy squares in Edinburgh, the wind is blowing away a pile of slides and creating chaos on Bill Aitchison’s temporary stage. During the Showcase, Bill Aitchison performs on the street, no matter how much rain, sun, wind, or noise, he is ready to present his apocalyptic one-man show 2012. He tells us how he arrived to the illuminating lecture on Mayan Astronomy, the war on terror, dog cloning, Saddam Hussein’s novels, why we should ban the 2012 Olympics and the end of the world. Interview by Canan Marasligil. Photo by Peter Empl.

Where does the idea of writing about conspiracy theories come from?

I’ve started working on the performance after having heard friends talking about all those documentaries made after 9/11 on the internet saying “it’s not what you think”. I’ve watched them and found some good and bad things in them, and I was also quite amused by one or two of these authors who are writing these types of material. I found that a lot of these conspiracy theories have something theatrical about them. They don’t take a very rational approach to making arguments, they construct things in a highly theatrical manner. I was reading quite a lot of these theories and trying to find connections between them, to find a structure to this way of thinking. And this led me to thinking it would be nice to put a number of them together, to make an anti-conspiracy conspiracy, one which goes around in circle and traces the outside of this way of thinking, and one that is a way of trying to get rid of it. This way of thinking seems quite inevitable. So it was very present in my mind.

What was the process like to achieve the current version of 2012?

I wrote a first version of the performance which I developed through different events, galleries and theatres. The theatre version premiered in 2008 in Manheim in Germany, which was different from the one I do here in Edinburgh. Essentially they are five strands of conspiracy thought, different topics. One of the topics was the war on terror, there was another topic about dogs, some of them were more serious, some of them less. But even when the theory is less serious, I try to hold the structure of a serious argument, and to present it in the same way.

What are the major differences between the theatre version and the one you are showing this week in Edinburgh?

I have a more complex editing system in the theatre version, in which I edit up between the theories very quickly, like surfing on TV, to catch two minutes of this person talking, two seconds of that. Also, I will include new parts to the next performances I will do in Germany and in the Netherlands, based on my experience in China. In April and May I had a one month residency in China, and I thought of the kind of conspiracy theory people in China were busy with. You take these theories to a completely different place and you see that people have a completely different set of thought and references.

Do the audiences respond very differently to conspiracy theories?

It struck me that this sort of conspiracy thinking is something that people are busy with in China as well for instance. It’s not an isolated phenomenon. And when you hear people talking about UFOs and Atlantis, it doesn’t matter if they’re from China, Mexico, Great Britain, Italy or South Africa. They can be from anywhere. It’s almost this international strand of thought. I think that people can identify with this very easily.

How flexible is your work depending on the venue you work in? 

On the formal level, the work does change depending on where I perform. Expectations change depending on the venue, in a gallery you have a gallery expectation, on the street it is more like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, one of my favorite places in London where everyone who has a theory wants to share it with everybody else, and most of them are mad. Again that’s a very theatrical place. In a sit down theatre you can play with a different set of time and rhythm, people are more likely to consider it in a different way.

You seem to quite enjoy the unexpected and interact successfully with the audience.
I have to admit I enjoy chaos and I like to see people finding solutions on the spot, like it happened here when the wind blew all my slides away. And in a controlled environment like the theatre, you apply the creativity into a different frame. Although the piece is structured, I do try to create space for improvisation within these different corners. It doesn’t completely become a script even inside a theatre.

Bill Aitchison will tour in Germany and in the Netherlands this autumn.
For more information visit: www.billaitchison.co.uk