Fresh! Festival, 21 South Street arts centre, Reading, Saturday 22 April 2006. While visiting an arts event at South Street today I've peeped into a fridge and found a man staring back at me, I've sorted out a basement, been showered with popcorn, lured into a bed, read a poem aloud as part of someone else's piece, and stuffed with crisps and Toffifee….it could only be the Fresh! Festival at South Street. Reading is becoming increasingly tolerant of art outside the framed visual art arena…its music scene is bustling and the recent-ish opening of the Marksman Gallery gives the town even more opportunity to access contemporary art and its makers. Since the appointment of John Luther as Arts Coordinator at South Street, we've also been blessed with more opportunity to access contemporary theatre and performance. Opening this venue up to the Fresh! Festival on Saturday steps up that commitment to new work by offering emerging and more established local artists and makers the very rare of opportunity of showing their work in a recognised space. At last…no more need to hock myself up to London, it's right here on my doorstep! The event itself I felt was very well organised; there was always something to see in a rolling programme of projects throughout the day. This is where marrying set theatre pieces with durational projects you could dip in and out of worked extremely well. It also saw a much welcomed (for me!) encouragement of artists who hone their skills in 'live art' practises…aaaaaaaargh what's that?!!!! For those unfamiliar with this movement it's more often than not likened to 'performance art' although this is a limiting term for something that shapes itself on evading any notion of a boundary between art-forms. At the festival this was most effectively demonstrated in the ritual performance/installation Rite of Passage? by artist/collaborator Ann Rapstoff and Beautiful Creatures a durational performance piece by a new collective based in Reading, Danielle, Nikos, Heidi and Dan. These pieces were flanked by interpretive dance performances by Aime Hansen and the extremely promising premiere of Equaldoubt's '3' staged in the theatre. Invariably a performance is most engaging when it's economic, and Equaldoubt certainly did an awful lot with very little. Set in, well, 'somewhere', 3 performers find themselves facing their own in/sanity on the edge of survival. If Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to write his famous 'No Exit' about people living rather than dead, he would probably be writing for Equaldoubt. For those of us that wanted to test ourselves in a 1-2-1 performance rather than merging in with the crowd, there was the ever so cheeky Jenny Edbrooke with 'Stay If You Think I'm Sexy'. Trussed up to the fruit on her head like Margharita Prakatan, Jenny lured unsuspecting and slightly nervous hangers-around into her 'boudoir' (read, South Street's dressing room) where she laid you on her bed and played with your own personal boundaries. The very clever Eitan Buchalter charmed us with his 'Cellar'...open a big upright industrial fridge and there he is! That's it. The art possibly being more in your reactions to it (which are caught on camera), rather than the thing itself. Genius. The very lovely thing about the festival as a whole was how well the festival used every nook and cranny of space that South Street had available. The programme rounded itself up with film showings in the green room by Montserrat Rubio, Eitan Buchalter, Jessica Hazel, James Wyness, and Zev Robinson and research and development of future work conducted by Michelle Reader. More performances by Glas(s) Performance and Jumbled transformed the McDevitt's bar, and the eternally engaging resident at the Arches in Glasgow, Al Seed, (my own personal favourite), gave us his one man show 'The Factory'; a blasting, blistering piece of physical theatre incorporating circus skills and elements of stand-up comedy. After having reached half way through the cabaret set up in McDevitt's after 9pm I was exhausted, excited, full to the brim on crisps and Toffifee fed to us by the compere Jim Bowes and, as a local artist finding my own way, inspired. This is just what the town needs, and I can't wait for the next one. ***************
Young reviewer Daisy Cleall, year 10, Blessed Hugh Faringdon: This show was part of the "fresh" festival which started at 2,o,clock and continued late into the evening. What was so good about this was that no matter what time you turned up there was always something just finishing or just starting. When I arrived, a lady was performing a performance called Rite Of Passage.
She slowly massaged oil onto her feet, which left footprints in the sand covered floor that she walked across, she then walked over rocks on a table and rubbed them in her face. This was then followed by her walking on feathers and rubbing them into her body and so on and so on...... Ann Rapstoff who gave us this performance was very compelling to watch and I felt totally transfixed by her strange rituals and ceremonial acts. After she had finished people were invited to ask her questions, but I was offered the chance to look into a room to view some art work, so being naturally intrigued I opened the door to find a fridge which my friend told me to open. As I did I nearly jumped out of my skin as this straight faced man was staring right back at me. My friend and I were in hysterics and continued opening and shutting the fridge door until eventually we made him laugh.
This was a fantastic mish mash of human art and I loved it. This was South street at its best! | 
