Abstract
This chapter discusses the cabaret nights at the Tower Arts Centre in Winchester, Hampshire, the UK, between 1981 and 1984. The acts included performance poetry, clowning, mime, improvisation, stunts, and rock music. Acts performed across the entire venue, including the car park, so there is a focus on space, scenography, and spectatorship. The chapter argues that the cabarets were distinctive in that performers mainly came from the local performance culture, including Attic Theatre, whose street theatre festival, Hat Fair, was influential. Other local performers included visual performance company Forkbeard Fantasy, clowns Zippo and Company, and members of a Youth Training Scheme, Eye to Eye. Performance archaeology is used to reconstruct a double act in which the author, Richard Cuming, performed with clown Graham Newton as a parody punk poet.
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Notes
- 1.
If you have been reading carefully you will remember that I referred to Rancid Tommy the Raving Skinhead earlier. I can’t remember which I used to be honest.
- 2.
In Note 1, in Theory for Theatre Studies: Space, Kim Solga writes, ‘The relationship between the linked terms “place” and “space” is contested. “Place” is often used to denote the local, or the idea of being located in a specific site with clear particularities, while “space” is the larger, more abstract marker’ (2019: 160). I refer to ‘spaces’ in the sense of the specific places which were used inside and outside the Tower.
- 3.
This discussion of Rancière draws on my unpublished paper The Family Outing Caravan Holiday: Playing with the Fictional in a Durational Performance, given at the 2018 TAPRA conference, Aberystwyth University, 5–7 September.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to all those performers who helped me recover my intermittent and fading memories of the cabarets through their conversations, memories, and comments. Thanks also to local critic and rock producer, Oliver Gray, who sent me documentary material from his collection. Thanks to editors Oliver Double and Sharon Lockyer for patiently answering my questions and giving me the opportunity to become a performance archaeologist.
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Cuming, R. (2022). ‘A Local Show for Local People’: Alternative Cabaret at the Tower Arts Centre, Winchester, UK, 1981–1984. In: Double, O., Lockyer, S. (eds) Alternative Comedy Now and Then. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97351-3_4
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