It Felt Like A Kiss - terror and revelations in a Manchester office block

It Felt Like A Kiss –How an insight into US culture, your pack mentality, human suggestibility and blind terror can be a great Birthday present.

It Felt Like a Kiss (IFLAK) was one of the stand out events of the Manchester International Festival. A collaboration between film-maker Adam Curtis (The power of Nightmares), Punchdrunk ( A theatre group specialising in walk-through theatre experiences) and Damon Albarn (the man whose breadth of creativity Noel Gallagher wishes he had ).It's officially over now and was originally slated to be a one off, although now it is rumoured to be travelling to London and Moscow?!? Because the more you know about the performance, the less you get out of it I shall keep this part brief. IFLAK is a similar to a walk-through fairground ride, which will just like Curtis's films shoot ideas past you at a rapid rate. At the centre was a 35 minute showing of Curtis's film, a documentary on late 50s/early 60s America and the power and falsehoods of dreams. The spaces you walk to to get to the film, reflect fragments of the film. These spaces are incredible in detail, innocuous discomfort or blatant fear manipulation. After the film (as you are warned at the beginning) and as you progress through more spaces connected to the film you begin to see the dream become an nightmare. And what was naggingly uncomfortable before becomes a terrifying assault. Your role as spectator changes slowly to participant and you find yourself assaulted with just how suggestible you are and how much you will obey. And after 2 hours of creeping about, with growing paranoia, it's a lot more than you think. IFLAK wants to show you that you are not an individual, that you are the same as everyone else and as you dash gasping and possibly screaming into eventual daylight and see the rest of the audience doing the same, you take the point to heart. Not bad for 'art'.

After most theatre/gig trips you can find yourselves dissecting the performance over a pint, maybe relishing a few choice memories for a couple of days. Post IFLAK most people sit in the pub, gently shaking, convinced the barman isn't real and desperately trying to process the ordeal. You won't forget IFLAK, infact most people will be having 'nam style flashbacks for weeks. I managed to get very alarmed by an empty corner of my bedroom at 3am following the show. With such a resounding impact, I recommend the performance to anyone who relishes a new experience, enjoys having the boundaries between exhibition, play and film blurred and can handle a gentle transition from spectator, to active participant. Go and experience IFLAK, sell your horror movie DVD collection, psychology, self help and history books. You'll get a more intimate understanding of yourself and your fellow man in 2 hours of IFLAK than in any of them.

It Felt Like A Kiss: The spoiler version

My more detailed re-cap is below. Obviously spoilers, don't read if you think you will ever get a chance to go.

The It Felt Like A Kiss performance took place in a completely bland 70s office building. So innocuous was it, we struggled to find the entrance and with entry limited to groups of 6-8 every 20 minutes, there were no handy queues to show you the way. Innocuous on first inspection yet disturbing on the inside was a recurring theme for the next 2 hours. Fear is all about expectation and IFLAK is a masterpiece of building it. From the moment a very nice steward gave us severe warnings about unsuitability for people who are pregnant, have heart conditions or have a nervous disposition and reminded us about wearing sensible enclosed footwear (They weren't kidding on the last one), to the rooms that connect by ominous black corridors, or ominous music, to the time later on when you are issued an classic horror movie adage of 'Don't split up', expectation is a fundamental part of your experience. Hence my heart-rate was already rising as I entered the lift with 4 strangers, all of us indulging in a terribly British jokey banter to calm our nerves. By the time the lift opened to nothing but darkness and a yawning clown's face, I was already telling myself 'It's just a show'

IFLAK's walk-through sections shoot ideas, objects, sounds and fragments past you at a rapid rate,just like Curtis's films. We crept through some rooms and sauntered through others. They key is to feel, smell, touch and hear rather than to process. It really is a walk through movie. I barely noticed Albarn's soundtrack, although I knew it was manipulating my mood, just a a good soundtrack should for a film. You could touch anything except the dummies which occupy some spaces (at least you hope they are dummies and trust me you ask yourself that every time you come across one). I felt a frisson of spy like pleasure as I nosed through the CIA's filing cabinets and an unknown family's book shelves. The rooms smelled authentic and everywhere TV screens showed fragments of the documentary, often strangely at odds with your apparent location, sometimes in perfect keeping with it. For example Tina Turner's 'Mountain High', was wildly appropriate and inappropriate when wandering through a dystopian rubbish dump. At one point I thought I was George-W style seeing a young Saddam Hussain everywhere (pinned photo to a notice board, Saddam moustaches in the props department, on the bedroom TV). The rooms and the documentary have something to say about any number of social and economic points and sometimes it felt like an unprocessable deluge, so many connections were there to be made as the documentary and the 'theatre' rambled through them. It was almost frustrating to not be able to make them all. I found later that I struggled to remember a lot of these moments and connections as the events after the documentary (the nightmare) somewhat assaulted and then clouded my memory. A mistake or another way of saying 'You noticed the nightmarish fallout, but you didn't see all the signs leading up to it did you?' The film itself; an 'experience', a whirlwind of ideas and questions that was designed to feed some other part of your brain than the one Panorama normally takes up, left a strange after-taste. Certainly a desire to see it again and try and process but also a sense that maybe the message you found was just for you, More art than history lesson or political point.

You know the ending to the Blairwitch? Run up and down some empty stairs and see someone in the corner of the room. I laughed when I saw that. I didn't laugh when I was stuck in a strobe lit corridor with a dummy in the corner. Why 6 adults scuttled past something they outnumbered, but couldn't see well in the lighting, is a testament to how easily we are willing to play our part [1]. Have you seen many films where the body in the corner disappears, the CCTV shows you that something is behind you or the 'dummy' moves when you glance in the opposite direction? Dumb jokeworthy cliché perhaps but really quite scary when after 2 hours of paranoia inducing 'entertainment', you are creeping with a group of strangers, along a maze with no destination other than the one in front of you. That you have just filled out a psychological questionnaire[2] about 'freedom' and been warned that people have accidentally died in ghost rides just adds to the effect.

I always comment on how a logical person would handle a real life horror movie. (Find a makeshift weapon, pull out your mobile, refuse to enter a maze, climb things that got in your way instead of going where the resident nutter wants you to go) and in IFLAK I did none of those things. I was disappointed with myself, until afterwards when I took a good look at what motivated me. At one point I was stuck with 7 other people in a room waiting for the lights to go on in the next, so we could move on (or face a grissly chainsaw death). I didn't barricade doors or make weapons, because I knew it wasn't the point. I was on a ride, it wasn't real, there was surely worse to come but it would be terrifying, not life threatening. And I suddenly felt re-assured about my own competence but implicitly aware that I was following someone else's rules and feeling what they wanted me to. Naturally 'sticking together; didn't happen and eventually we were forced to be alone. Except I wasn't, having gotten jammed in a door, my grand moment of terrifying epiphany was shared with a very pleasant equally scared stranger. I feel awful that I missed out, that I didn't finish my ordeal properly, but also kind of proud that I did eventually buck the system (by accident). My eventual exit from IFLAK was inelegant, filled with relief, exhaustion and a desperate need for a pint and some form of group counselling.

So I refused to take a mystery pill, or put a gun to my head, but when asked to pick a door or am jostled and yelled at to 'run' from a chainsaw wielding maniac, I do it. Not the individual I thought I was. How depressing, how awesome a revelation in such an unexpected way. How badly do I want to go again?

[Edited for my grammar, which is always appalling :( ]
[1] Apparently David Dimbleby was in one group. As a true journalist and presumably used to real terror he tried to interview one of the dangerous and scary things that he came across. Everyone else ran.
[2] I didn't. It seems I have a very modern view of privacy of information irrelevant of my 60s, fascistic hospital surroundings