Preview: What Does Stuff Do?, Tobacco Factory Theatres

One of the acts in 2018’s Best of BE FESTIVAL of theatre from around Europe, juggler, water-bender, and part-time deep thinker Robin Boon Dale presents the full-length edition of his award-winning show.

A co-production with Bristol’s Circomedia, where Robin also trained, What Does Stuff Do? is a TED-Talk-esque performance about the relationships between people and things, which pivots between absurdity and profundity.

Guiding you through his mind and body of research, Robin uses insights from his circus training alongside ideas borrowed from object-oriented philosophy, to offer new ways of thinking about the physical world.

With a curious array of communicative tools including liquid manipulation, performance ping pong, and a motivational speech delivered by a man in swimming trunks, this eccentric renegade philosophy lecture flourishes into an astounding circo-odyssey.

Here is Robin to throw some light on the show.

Juggler and part-time deep thinker: tell us about these two long-term interests of yours and why they are so closely linked for you. How do juggling/circus and deep thinking/philosophy interconnect?
Circus and philosophy became closely linked for me when I was studying on the Circomedia BA course. Circus training provides intimate contact with really essential parts of our world – gravity, rhythm, cooperation, attention, awe etcetera – which are deeply meaningful in other parts of our lives.
It was really exciting to me to find that philosophy could be a practical pursuit. You use your conceptual knowledge to add depth to your training and performance, and the rigour and insight of your training to refine your ideas. Your body works and your brain works. Now I actively try to create theories and structures around whatever practice I’m doing so that my skills and ideas grow together and feed each other.
In What Does Stuff Do?, circus is the Trojan horse that I use to sneak philosophical ideas in. Skill, spectacle, and comedy are all effective ways of communicating, and also broaden the reach of the ideas, because by using immediate visual examples you can engage a lot of the people who are not easily engaged through essays or straight-up lectures.

“a TED-Talk-esque performance about the relationships between people and things”: tell us more. Does the show suggest that we have a different, more complex relationship with the things around us than most of us are aware of?
Yes. The main through-line of the show is that the nature of objects transforms depending on the other objects in the environment and how we conceptualise them as a system. We spend most of our time around objects and user interfaces which are really well designed to tell us how to interact with them without us noticing. By paying very close attention, and thinking (and juggling) out loud, I try to build up a series of templates for thinking about the ways we affect and are affected by objects, and seeing what those relationships can tell us about ourselves and our relationships to each other.

“a motivational speech delivered by a man in swimming trunks” – sounds brilliant. Without giving too much away, what’s the essence of the speech and why is it delivered in swimming trunks?
The trunks are omnipresent in the show for practical reasons. The speech is the culmination of the show’s journey, in which I present my ‘findings’, and tie together the threads of theory, practice and philosophy which have run throughout. It’s all very satisfying (and quite silly).

What do you hope to send audiences away thinking and feeling? What of your own wonder about the world do you hope to pass on?
I want people to leave surprised, smiling, and thinking. I try to offer templates or structures of ideas that people hopefully fill in with whatever is important to them at the time, and maybe go away with a new way of thinking about something in their life. A more general takeaway is that our physical world is rich and rewarding to pay close attention to. I hope to inspire enthusiasm for ideas, and a healthy disregard for disciplinary boundaries.

What Does Stuff Do? is at Tobacco Factory Theatres from Apr 3-6. For more info, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/what-does-stuff-do

Top pic: Jonny Fuller Rowell

Read more: Preview: I Went to a Marvellous Party, Ashton Court, March 23-24