Lewes Arts Lab

It is not often in this day and age that an arts event is considered ‘too experimental’ to be performed at a particular venue. But this is exactly what has happened in Lewes this week with the debut of the avant-garde project “Lewes Arts Lab” (which has eventually found houseroom in the Market Lane Garage). So why is it so controversial? It seems the first crime is by historical association. “The first art lab was set up in 1967 by a guy called Jim Haynes in Drury Lane”, says organiser Tom Mugridge. “He had been involved in setting up the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and worked for the alternative publication The International Times.” The Arts Lab soon became something of an underground phenomenon (launching the career of Steven Berkoff). “It was all about getting different people together and creating a subcultural space”, Tom tells me. “The events were more like ‘happenings’ than specific performances - sort of subcultural drop-in centres.”
A modern-day advocate of the tradition is Lewes-based Andy Saunders, who alongside Richard Wolfson was involved in the band Towering Inferno. In the early ‘90’s they toured the large-scale multi media show ‘Kaddish’ - ‘a dream history of Europe in the wake of the Holocaust’. Tonight in Lewes’s own revival of the tradition, Saunders takes to the stage again with his own composition for bagpipes and fuzz guitar. He will be joined on the bill by the Brighton based group Hamilton Yarns, experimental filmmaker Nick Collins, ‘radical folk’ performer Dirk Campbell and a one-man show from Mark Robertson. ER