This November, Irish theatre company Pan Pan are bringing four shows by Brussels-based American artist Davis Freeman (of company Random Scream) to Dublin. The shows (Investment, What You Need to Know, 7 Promises and Karaoke (ART)) form part of Pan Pan's ‘One Time Season’, a mini-festival of theatre based in Project Arts Centre. Here, regular DRAFF contributor and theatre maker Dick Walsh speaks to Davis and Pan Pan director Gavin Quinn about investing your money ethically, imminent environmental collapse, and the decline of Elvis on the karaoke circuit.
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Davis Freeman: It’s hard to describe the kind of work I have been busy with, which is trying to find a way to engage the audience, but I really hate audience interaction, so trying to find a way to engage with them, stimulate them, make them a part of the piece and kind of put themselves into a kind of fantasy with the shows. And Investment is one where, it plays on the… I dunno, the drunken games that you have late at night. What if I won the lottery, what would I do. Would you completely change your life, would you buy a theatre, would you buy a sports car. And very simply, we take these proposals, we concretely give the audience a lottery ticket, where they really can win – the pot now is 9.8 million euros…

Dick Walsh: The Irish lottery?! Wow.

DF: Yep… and we kind of throw out all the things you can invest in, like some of them are quite obvious, you would probably need to give some to a charity, right, or maybe… we are already in a theatre, maybe you’d like to invest in dance, so we give a small snippet of a dance piece you could invest in, show some possibilities on the stock market. But then ethics comes in - if you knew that you could make money on it, would you invest in a gun company? And we do some theatre too. And what’s interesting about the theatre piece we chose, is it’s a debate between art and politics, it’s about a famous composer that stayed behind during the Third Reich, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and he said you can separate art and politics, and I say you can’t. And then it’s kind of an overall question about the whole show: is it art or is it politics? And at the end we go to investing in yourself, which is completely plausible and alright.

DW: So you operate as kind of a sales man giving a sales pitch? I mean, as far as I thought… I don’t know why I’m asking this, but it seemed like you were going to show us the mechanisms of the market, or like how...

DF: I think that we have a certain kind of… we have a certain kind of humour and seduction in the way that we perform. Gerry [his co-performer] and I bat it back and forth and we both have different styles… I wouldn’t ever say that it’s ironic…

Gavin: It’s more charming…

DF: But I think that we really put out the things there are to invest in – and you can invest in helping save people from starvation, or you can invest in, em, saving bunnies, saving animals from abuse. And a lot of people do, they make those decisions. And the RSPCA gets 9 billion per year to support their campaigns. So we put these all out there and you get to choose.

DW: So do you have stocks yourself?

DF: Do I have stocks myself? I don’t… Not yet. [laughter] I keep waiting for somebody to win the lottery from one of the shows and come contact us.

G: So you buy every audience member a lottery ticket? And that costs you…

DF: 5 euros actually. This time.

G: So you don’t have stocks yourself, but as you were researching it, did you become tempted to buy stocks? If you had the resources…

DF: My god, no whatsoever, I have no money to even fantasise in that way…

DW: The last stupid question is: do you think the market is a good thing?

DF: Wow. Do I think the market is… I don’t have a lot of understanding of the market itself. Em. I’m just watching it go up and down. We made this show in 2008, when it was really at the bottom. But now we can see how volatile still the markets are to this day, with Trump, with Brexit… but the show’s really a reflection for your everyday life, what do you invest in, your time, your money…

DW: Ok, so the next show…

DF: What You Need To Know. As we’re surrounded by so much violence, I come out with three dancers and I give them a tutorial on how to use these guns… it might just happen that one day, one of these guns happens to fall at your feet, and your life or the lives of your friends and family, depend on that you know how to use it. It’s a worst case scenario, I hate guns. So it’s like an anti-gun piece using guns. It’s not the NRA’s stance. I’m against that, because having a gun leads to more violence and more accidents. But I think if it fell at your feet and they were shooting your family in front of you, you might wanna know how to use it… The show ends with an explanation about the pistol and the last option I give the audience is to shoot it themselves, shoot the dancers that are on-stage. So again, it puts you in the same position, like Investment – would you do it, or not?

DW: Have you ever shot a gun at anybody yourself?

DF: No, I haven’t. Once on a firing range… but… It’s interesting that the woman always gets shot first…

DW: In your show?

DF: Yes, in the past performances.

G: It’s a coincidence…?

DF: Well, I dunno… Every time… In this version of the show, there’s a Polish woman, an Israeli boy and an Arab man.

G: So it’s deliberately a mix of people.

DF: It’s definitely a mix of people.

DW: Pick your minority…

DF: Maybe. Or maybe it gives you more of a sense of understanding of circumstances that they represent.

G: Have you had any negative response to it – a show about violence using violence?

DF: It’s definitely on the edge, I dunno if it’s even possible to play it in America, it’s so sensitive that…

​G: You’re allowed have a gun but you’re not allowed make a play about a gun.

DF: Yeah, it’s a moral issue. And It’s a very fine line, what is too much…

DW: Is it about maybe where the theatres usually are in America… is it a liberal versus conservative issue? So if you’re in the conservative deep, deep south, would they have an issue with you using guns?

G: Because most of the theatres are in the liberal cities…

DF: Yeah, I think that it’s the kind of show that has this fine line that some people find it horrifying, but I imagine that the people in the deep south, with the way politics is going, they’d be like ‘damn right, this is a good show!’
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DF: Next show is  7 promises… in which we try to find a way to talk about climate change, but it’s so boring - I fell asleep when I saw Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – doomsday scenarios also don’t work – it doesn’t motivate people. So we were trying to find a strategy… we don these evangelical preacher vocal patterns: [speaks in quavery preacher tones] We’re gonna SAVE the world, we’re gonna do it, RIGHT HERE and RIGHT NOW, and we’re gonna do it one vodka shot at a time… and we talk for 50 mins with a musician doing live church music on keyboards. We propose seven promises, and for every promise that you make, right there in the theatre, you come up, you write your name, you get a button that says ‘I made a promise’ and you get a free shot of vodka.

G: Again, an exchange.

DF: Again, putting yourself in the position – would I do it or not?

G: So you’re saying the world is not hopeless – little things can mean a lot?

DF: You have to have some activism, some movement… I’m not completely hopeless about the world.

G: Because it is such a big problem you have to really force people to think what they can do… What’s the point of a small country like Ireland, everybody turning the lights off… unless it happens in China too, there’s no point…

DW: So it is a bit like Masonic lodges, you go in, you sign up, and you have a little ritual – yours is drinking vodka, theirs is sucking chickens or something, and em you make, you know, ways you’re going to behave from now on in. You’ll always shake hands in this manner… different rituals you agree to, to be part of a gang.

DF: I guess you could call vegetarians a gang too, to a certain extent, but one of the promises is: I promise not to eat meat for one month.

G: And people actually carry that out?
DF: Usually whenever I do this show, I become vegetarian for a month. And I’ve had people come up to me a year later and say ‘I’m a complete vegan now – I didn’t want to do it, I did it to try it, and my life changed.

G: So there’s an element of preaching…

DF: There’s preaching, there’s an element of community… But this is information people need to know – 70% of global warming is accounted to the meat industry, one steak is equivalent to 17 vegetarian meals… and even if you don’t make the promise there and then, maybe the next time you eat meat you’ll think of it…

DW: If it was lampooned I wonder – if somebody came in who was actually drunk – I’ve been at interactive shows and people come in, with trouble in their eyes,  and they lampoon it. Like, how fragile is the ritual?

DF: The ritual is very casual… I’m not sure if people are really fulfilling their promise afterwards. Maybe they are just coming down to grab a few drinks. We’ve done it on the street with 500 people. We couldn’t deliver the whole text, but… you go as far as you can, you just throw it out there. But what it does turn into is a party – there’s a DJ and everyone comes on stage… and everyone tries to get laid, it’s good.

G: And then the last show is Karaoke (ART).

DF: It’s more of a curation and giving artists opportunities to do something they wouldn’t normally do. I picked out the 25 most popular karaoke songs around and then I wrote to video artists I really respect and asked them ‘would you be willing to choose one of these songs and make an original artwork for it?’ – and we have Turner prize winners who did it, Palm d’Or winners… and it’s a great mix between political videos, conceptual videos and slightly subversive videos…

G: Is it an ’art by stealth’ project? Making a party atmosphere to exhibit video art?

DF: Completely. I premiered it in Holland for 300 people, and 90% of the people had never seen contemporary art before. So they were really quite intrigued, shocked, and excited by what they saw. And after everybody gets a booklet, and they get to learn more about the artist. I’m not really a great fan of karaoke, and right now the singing is not at the forefront. Actually, the whole room sings along.

G: And is every song sung?

DF: No, it depends what songs are chosen. Elvis is not really chosen any more…

DW: [sounding crestfallen] He’s gone down in popularity? Elvis has gone down in popularity.

G: And you made a video yourself?

DF: Yeah, I did - I shot it from a secret window in Salzburg.
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Investment opens tonight at Project Arts Centre. For details of the other shows in the One Time Season and to book tickets, visit projectartscentre.ie. Images: Silvano Magnone