"Face your fears. Come inside and play," is the strap line for BAC's One-on-One festival, which sounds unnervingly like the sort of invitation you might get from Chucky. But actually there's plenty that is gentle and engaging in this festival, in which the audience is a collaborator in a series of encounters that take place between you and the artist, you and yourself – or even you and the sky. Patrick Killoran's Observation Deck invites you to recline on a wooden panel so you can push your body halfway out of a window. Suspended between heaven and earth, it feels as if every sense is more alert as you commune with the clouds and passing aeroplanes.
There's quite a lot of lying down involved in the One-on-One festival. In Sheila Ghelani's Nurse Knows Best you play the patient and she and a colleague play the nurses as broken hearts are sewn up and troubled spirits soothed. Rendez-Vous from Villanella and Hanneke Paauwe is a date with your own death, which takes place with you lying in state in a coffin. The cues offered to help you contemplate your own life are perhaps a little too emphatic. Me and the Machine's dislocating When We Meet Again uses technology cleverly to give you an entirely different world view.
The festival's aim is to make one-on-one work, which often has an exclusivity tag, available to a wider audience. Everyone who buys a ticket will get a chance to see several shows over an evening. If I were to recommend something, it would be Barnaby Stone's aptly named eight-minute piece A Little Bit of a Beautiful Thing, a tiny transformation involving history, real skill and work, and a gift to take home with you. Small but perfectly formed in every way.
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