Thoughts from a body-bag

One hour inside a white plastic body-bag, lying on the cold slab stones of Piccadilly Circus, just outside the tube exit, supposed to be a dead body.

An hour was quite enough; you begin to understand, in this curious position, just how Edgar Allen Poe's buried alive character might have felt, if it had not been foe the coffin and the weight of the soil.

Oh, well I suppose I could ays that once again I am fulfilling my destiny, that is to act the corpse.

And yes, once again at the behest of Belarus Free Theatre.  If ever you've seen them you'll know why I was happy to get up at 6am and cycle to central London to be one their bodies.

And if you haven't, read this BBC article on Belarus for an introduction to the techniques of a government which seems not to have noticed the passing of Joe Stalin.

It was meant to be warm today, but at 7am there were low clouds and an icy east wind buffeted central London The coldest place of all was at ground level.

 I couldn't quite fit into my small to medium body bag. It felt like a useless sleeping bag, too short and too wide and too thin. But, as the marvellous Belarus Free Theatre's Fenella said, the main thing was that they were breathable.

Not that it would've made much difference to me, as half my face was sticking out into the freezing air.

Apart from that, each bag really made a little cocoon for each of us  - the 10 or so volunteers, at this location, many more in the more high-profile spots, Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square -  who for whatever reasons had chosen to lend our bodies to Belarus for a couple of early morning hours.

Last year, we gave our bodies, naked on the ice-cold concrete paving of Hammersmith's Riverside Studios for Fuck Realpolitik.

This year, we were part of the Belarus give-a-body-back campaign.

Our carcasses were there to represent the bodies of  Belarusians who had died - no, who had been executed - in Belarus, and whose bodies had never been returned to their families.

Each time I meet or see or listen to any of the BFT people, who are always so delightful and friendly and appreciative - but I se in their eyes that there are dreadful,  urgent matters to be dealt with, they are driven - they are driven because in many cases, their friends and partners and lovers and family and colleagues and neighbours have already become victims to what is now (again thanks to BFT) widely known as the last dictatorship in Europe.

By comparison, being a corpse for an hour was easy stuff. Or so I thought.

The trouble was, once zipped up in your bag, you could see nothing but the vaguest shadows of passing people. Voices came and went. In the first few minutes, loud male scorn seemed to be pouring in - "oh dead bodies, but are you really dead?" "you're going to get very stiff  mate - watch out for piles", they said, on their way to god knows where.

After that, a strange silence descended - punctured ever few mintutes by the voices of our supervisors, trying to interest passers-by in the demo. Sometimes you'd hear the clip-clop of high-heeled shoes getting closer, and closer , and about to stamp on your face - and then they'd pass. Office boys and office girls on their way to work, gasping on their last fags before the working day began. Lost tourists failing to meet he people they'd wanted to meet, phoning, texting, cursing. A few vaguely amused arty types on their way, perhaps to some gallery or auction room. "oh my god, dead bodies! Cool!".

Then again just you and your aching, freezing body. It is June but there is a cold East wind coming in over the back of my head and my legs are about to walk away from all this on their own.

 Feels like it's blowing all the way from Minsk, just for us.

Have I been here long now? Is it half-time yet?

Then - amazingly, the voice of our friendly organiser: "Volunteers! Ten minutes more."

The last 10 minutes seemed much longer than the first 50 - nothing but white and grey shadows to see, and disembodied voices to hear. And then, oh thank god, the 9am call, the tricky unzipping, staggering back to vertical, staggering past Eros to reach the bit of the square in sunshine.


 www.freebelarusnow.org/bodies.

#GiveABodyBack

The hands and the knees

My career as a life model never really happened, did it?

The failure to become a naked corpse on a mortuary slab, my failure to audition for RAM, my failure to respond to the invitations of artists in Barnes and Vauxhall, all point to one - that I do not have the bottle.

True, you did strip for Belarus, on one of the coldest January days of 2012. But who, who would really want to look at and draw a naked, skeletal 60-year-old stringbean for hours on end? It would be too distressing, too odd. I think they prefer a nice cheerful middle aged chap with a bit of a beer gut and a head of curly hair.

My one paid job does not in fact require nudity. Quite the reverse, in fact, for I am being the hands and knees double for an eminent academic whose portrait is to be painted for a national collection.

For this work - I cannot reveal the subject or artists' name yet - I have to dress up rather than undress, wearing a selection of lovely tweedy suits and ties - and for one, later rejected pose, a beautiful corduroy overcoat.

It's not terribly exciting and surprisingly difficult to model someone else's hands - even though they look the same, my knuckle-joints are not as flexible as his. The amount of time spent arranging my extremities, trying to hold them still, changing the light, moving the toes an inch back, tucking in the shirtcuffs, is an eye-opener. He endlessly photographs, and then seems to do it all over again, and then again.

But the artist is a charmer, young but steeped in the traditions of portraiture. His studio easy to reach and the pay very fair. How can I complain?

On being part of the "F" and all of the "T" in "Fuck Realpolitik"

It was not as cold as Minsk, perhaps, but it was still bloody cold, and who but a mad fool would be lying naked on the Hammersmith Riverside terrace as an icy wind ripped off the Thames and straight up your body? Who? Well, as it happens,

 anyone who had been moved by the story of Belarus Free Theatre.

It happened so fast - the chance glimpse of the post on Time Out blog, the rash email to jagged-edge emily, the damp cycle ride to Hammersmith. And then there I was, naked on the ground, with a dozen other naked men and women.

To explain - I have now added a new skill to my portfolio.

I am now a proud member of the never-to-be-established society of human letter-parts. An anthropo-typographic operative.

Last week for a short time I was part of the letter "F" - the descender, or perpendicular bit, you understand - serif or not I am not sure. That is "F", as in the first letter of "Fuck".

And then, I had the even greater honour of being a "T".

A rather good "T", someone said. The "T" that sits third from last in that potent word, "Realpolitik".

The finished product - a montage, as you can tell, as several people appear more than once. 

Anyway, whether we made good letters or not, we shall see when we see the photographs. If we ever do.

There were 20 of us letter-parts in total - not quite enough to spell out the message required by our hosts, the Belarus Free Theatre. The slogan chosen by the Free Belarus Campaign - "Fuck RealPolitik" - would need around 40 people to form its 15 characters convincingly.

So it was shot in three takes - "Fuck", "Real" and "Politik".

It was quite cold during the prolonged rehearsals, so our delightful supervisors - Emily, Natalia, Nikolai, Fenella - had us run in circles around the Riverside terrace. A chill wind was gusting across the lead-grey River Thames, a few yards to our south.

"Now we jump in and swim!"

It was Natalia who said that - Natalia Koliada, the co-founder of the BFT six years ago in Minsk with her husband Nikolai Khalezin, also here today, pony-tailed, smiling, taking photos, art-directing us all with great charm and gentleness. Natalia, intense, slight, smiling a lot, and yet, and yet, you could tell that she had personal experience of the full horror of this last European dictatorship.

The photos were taken by a leading theatrical photographer, Simon Annand, a quiet and quite posh guy with specs, thinning hair and a moleskin coat. At first I thought he was maybe a critic or a producer.

He was a charmer, and had no trouble persuading us to line up against a whitewashed wall and remove all our clothes, and look straight in front of us. OK, so the shots of vodka also helped.

I kept looking up to the planes as they dropped towards Heathrow. And then I looked at Hammersmith Bridge, and could see the bright yellow jackets of two or three policemen, looking our way.

And then we went, in a sort of mad euphoria of relief at last to be naked in front of each other, to take up our positions on the concrete terrace.

For both "F" and "T" I was lying flat on my back, arms at my sides. I can only imagine that viewers of the photographs will see a rather emaciated and depressed looking naked old man with shrivelled genitals, trying rather hard not to notice some of the beautiful naked people all around him. I sort of worry I will spoil the shot, to be honest.

While being the "F" in Fuck, I spoke to the young woman next to me (without looking, you see) about how cold it seemed. It was 8 degrees C, she politely corrected me, but said in Belarus it had also been a warm winter, that normally it would be minus 20 now. In December 2010, when dozens of citizens protesting at Lukashenko's rigged election victory had been arrested and forced to strip naked in the Minsk winter, and were then tortured and beaten, it had been that cold.

Our self-inflicted ordeal was, almost literally a piece of cake - well, literally it was actually a large paper cup of hot soup, the best possible thing of all, home-made by Fenella of the BFT team - and then another vodka shot.

I think everyone found the experience rewarding. At one point a young guy two letters down from me got a call from a friend, giving him the chance to say: "Yeah, it's great, I'm half of C!"

The lovely Jamie, the bearded Viv Stanishall lookalike who works as a clown in children's wards, summed it all up, really, when he told me why he was there: "Because they asked us to come. They asked us to give them our bodies for a short time. How could we not?".

For much better accounts of this strange January morning in west London, listen to Fiona Mckinnon's audio-blog on BBC Radio London's podcast site, and read Danielle Goldstein's report for Time Out. Then Google the Belarus Free Theatre.

Not surprisingly, nothing ever came of this strange event. There was no exhibition of the photos, nor any publiciation, so far as I can see. Just as well, perhaps - but who knows, we never saw the results.

*UPDATE MAY 2013: Seems I was wrong. An email from BFT informs that there's to be an exhibition of the FuckRealpolitik affair at the Young Vic, starting on 6 June. Same day I have pledged to do a second thing for BFT involving lying down on cold ground - but this time in a body bag. Will report back on both these soon.