Running with scissors

Output Arts went North to Manchester on Saturday (9 July 2016) to attend Word of Warning’s Hazard 2016 event. Don’t worry! It was a great deal more fun than the picture above suggests.

We saw the call-out for this event back in April and were immediately intrigued:

hÅb is calling for proposals from artists for Hazard 2016 — A micro-festival of incidental intervention and sited performance, blurring the boundaries between art and activism… cheeky, thought-provoking and sometimes raunchy sprees of eccentricity…

We are now looking for proposals of work for a daytime event in Manchester City Centre, using St. Ann’s Square as focal hub, with projects happening in, or radiating out from there:

• work that intervenes in public spaces in the city centre;
• work that is socially engaged, and/or conceptually motivated;
• work that is low- or no-tech and self-sufficient;
• work that is interactive and playful — which could mean anything from street/urban/pervasive games to playful spectacles
• we will give bonus points for creative engagement with the idea of hazard — chance, danger, risk, and/or use of yellow+black tape!

This isn’t really our usual thing. I mean, we like to be interactive and playful, but our work is typically not “low-/no-tech” and doesn’t involve games. Probably most importantly, however, we don’t perform. Still… something jumped out about the idea of playing with risk, so we put our heads together and brainstormed for a bit about what would be the ultimate in hazardous games. Then Andy said the fateful words: “running with scissors” — it’s the classic thing that children are told never to do. The piece created itself from that title; the structure of the event and the nature of the joke were obvious and perfect.

However, like turtles, the irony goes all the way down: it was quickly apparent that organised scissor races would actually be the most dangerous artwork that Output Arts had ever proposed. Anybody who has had to organise outdoor art of any kind will be familiar with the dreaded RISK ASSESSMENT FORM. Members of the public running around? Carrying sharp objects? It’s a public liability nightmare. The only way to make the work safe is to make it ridiculous, and the best way to be ridiculous is to be deadly serious.

So the scissors would have to be safe. Regular safety scissors weren’t going to cut it (sorry!), these would need to be cardboard scissors — and the larger and easier to hold, the better. Actually running would be a problem as well, since a participant might trip or run into someone or something, so we would have to devise a series of races that involved as little running as possible: polite racing, slow-motion racing. We would need to warn participants of the — crazy, but actual — risks and explain to them how to handle themselves safely during the races. This meant that a safety briefing would be required, but if you’re going to do a safety briefing then you might as well go all out on it. We even decided to distribute genuine items of safety equipment to participants: goggles, welding gauntlets, a cycle helmet, a first-aid kit…

We dressed in hazard suits, we wore hard hats, we had a loud hailer. We warned participants of the impending air horn to avoid anyone being startled. Our actual official risk assessment even stated that we would reduce the risk of injury by emphasising the “light-hearted nature of the event” and asking participants not to be competitive, which we duly did during the event. I even demonstrated how to safely run in slow motion.

It seemed fitting that the prize for each race should be a pair of scissors, so we got hold of some plastic kids’ scissors and sprayed them gold. However, even then we were still careful to warn people of the danger of using them when handing them out to prize winners and — as stated in our risk assessment — genuinely ensured that we didn’t give them to unaccompanied minors. The resulting artwork was a chance for the public to reflect on society’s approach to recognising and minimising risk, and a chance for us to just be properly silly for a few hours.

I’m not sure that I’d call us performance artists after this event, and I don’t see it as a change in direction for Output Arts, but it was certainly an opportunity to stretch ourselves with something different. We ended up holding 11 races over 5 hours with 62 participants in all. Sadly, on reviewing the video of the event afterwards we spotted one of the participants getting something in his eye during a race! It turns out that you can’t be prepared for every hazard…