Don't Leave Me This Way
Franko B in collaboration with Kamal Ackarie
Don’t Leave Me This Way marks a challenge in Franko B’s performance practice, formalizing his recent departure from blood-based work. In Don’t Leave Me This Way Franko’s body is presented naked and unpainted. The piece is being developed in two formats in which Franko is seated on a raised plinth or altar, either in front of a mass audience or in a one-to-one encounter. A bank of bright lights will flood the audience to the point of averting their gaze. Carefully choreographed with well-established lighting designer Kamal Ackarie, this blinding technique will mimic the effect that Franko’s bleeding body has on audience members, while opening up a new range of emotional and bodily responses.
With a collective audience, Franko is allowing them time to look at his body and approach it as a sculptural form. His body is not a ‘universal’ body: it is heavily tattooed and scarred, and is voluptuous in shape and size. It is an unusual entity and lends itself well to the gaze, a tendency that the artist encounters daily in public and which he has exploited to great effect in live performances, over a period of fifteen years.
The notion of blinding the audience plays on the ambivalent allure Franko’s body holds, in that the glare of floodlights will repeatedly illuminate his form beyond vision, while also returning the gaze in a way, by illuminating the other as spectators. Moreover, the aggressive lighting will (safely!) play on the idea of burning his image onto the mind’s eye, his outline momentarily existing in each viewing body, in the event’s corporeal afterglow. Franko B’s performances have always left metaphorical marks on the psyches of vulnerable spectators, moving empathetic viewers with the visceral charge of the prone body. If the ways in which he can exact this effect through bleeding have perhaps been exhausted for the moment, Don’t Leave Me This Way will continue the scene of wounding in the realm of the metaphorical, inscribing his form in painful vision, in a new and unexpected way. Once the viewer’s sight has had time to reacclimatize, the bright lights will shine again, creating a suggestive rhythm in the cycle of visual pleasure, aversion, discomfort and seduction. The one-to-one performance would enact the same concept, but would be shorter, condensing the effect to one flash, after which the spectator would be forcibly ejected from the performance space.
Don’t Leave Me This Way will stage the point at which ‘performance’ is hardly taking place, in whose place a stream of unexpected effects will flood the encounter, as if to fill the scene.
Special thanks to Dominic Johnson and the Queen Mary, Lois Keidan and the Live Art Development Agency, and Manick Govinda, Frances Scott and Gill Lloyd at ArtsAdmin. The research and development of 'Don't Leave Me This Way' was made possible with the kind support of the Arts Council of England.