Flâneurs

Prismatic, restrained, humane and with all the spare beauty of a Haiku, Flâneurs, a new work by Edinburgh-based Live Artist Jenna Watt, is a meditation upon the bystander effect. Watt created the piece after hearing of a brutal attack on a close friend. What shocked her was less the attack itself, than the fact that no-one did anything to help.

Watt is a narrator of quiet delicacy and warmth. From the moment she begins to the surprising twist at the piece’s conclusion, Watt shows herself able to keep an audience’s attention without ever seeming to try. She never raises her voice – she has no need to, as the audience hangs onto her every word.

Using only subtle lighting effects and an overhead projectory, Watt creates artwork live on stage. In one particularly memorable scene, the audience listens to a recording of the friend who was attacked describing the injuries he sustained. All the while Watt kneels by the projector and lets red ink from a pipette drip onto its screen. The effect is to make the white-washed walls of Summerhall’s demonstration room seem to be blossoming blood.

A flâneur, according to Watt’s definition, is an urban explorer, someone who will investigate the crevices of a city. And although Watt never quite manages to draw all the strands of her work together, her audiences emerge as flâneurs of their own psyches. It would be impossible to leave the performance without having asked oneself: would I walk by?