A seductive Sarah Johns crooned to me in the shadows of a candlelit room. Wonder Nurse took me back in time, way back to those sweet childhood memories. I was placed inside another body by Me & The Machine. Two characters from the current media storm surrounding the bouncer-gone-Taxi-Driver-mad, Raoul Moat, offered their view on things in Headlines. Live cinema, Stan’s Café from 1998 was… very 1998. In Kings of England I pledged to never deny a stranger access to my toilet, a glass of water, some food, or spare change. And the folk singing in Folk In A Box nearly charmed my socks off. But only nearly.

Currently, Battersea Arts Centre presents an elaborate menu of one-on-one performances. You make your selection and walk from room to room, performance to performance.

Many times I found myself in a situation where I did not know how I was meant to behave, or if it mattered. A lot of the time I was busy trying to please the performers by playing along with them, something that made me extremely aware of my own performance (and bad acting). But if we are all performing, then for who is this performance? I realised that with one-to-one work there is a fine line between what is a performance and what is an experience of performance.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to experience any of the pieces by Ontroerend Goed from Belgium, The View From Here by Melanie Wilson or Etiquette by Rotozaza, so I might have to go back for a second helping of these intriguing, intimate performances. I did, however, get a chance to have a one-on-one chat with Richard Dufty, one of the producers.

How did you go about selecting works for this programme?

Some of the artists were ones that we’ve had a long term relationship with that we know kind of specialise in making one-on-one work or intimate performance work, like Adrian Howells who’s made a new piece where he bathes people, holds people and feeds people, and a number of artists like that who’ve got a good track record making that sort of work.

So we approached them about either reviving pieces that we’ve seen or presenting new work, but then in other cases we took risks and approached artists that we thought were good but tended to make larger scale work, work for regular audiences in kind of black box spaces and we said ‘hey this is an exciting challenge for you’ basically.

We also wanted to present a microcosmos of what BAC does, so we got international artists in the mix, we got world renowned British based artists and we’ve also got local artists, artists who’ve just emerged from our youth theatre programme, like for example Three Blind Mice they’re very young artists and they’ve literally just come out of our youth theatre programme. And we’ve got our beat box academy also presenting work here, so as well as the hot shot artists, within a certain world, we wanted it to be for new artists as well.

So those were our approaches and we were just interested in all sorts of different approaches to the notion of one-on-one. Some of the pieces really kind of interpret that idea quite liberally, others are very strict about it.

Were there any works you wanted, but that you couldn’t programme?

There are a number of pieces that we would have liked to put in the programme but for all sorts of boring logistical reasons and availability in finance, it wasn’t possible. But we are talking about reviving this in some form in the spring next year, and this year we got a number of pieces from Europe, but there are other European works that couldn’t come for financial reasons, so we are hoping to bring them next year, whether that’s a one-on-one festival or some sort of smaller festival of intimacy.

Who for example?

There’s an artist called Roos Van Geffen and he’s made a piece called WE, which is this carousel in a big wooden structure. We wanted to locate it in the Asda car park down the road but in the end, we couldn’t get the right permission so we’re hoping to bring that next year. Also we were talking to an artist called Dries Verhoeven from the Netherlands who’s a fantastic artist, he’s also been presenting work as part of LIFT but again it was about availability, so yeah all boring stuff, but there are a number of pieces that we couldn’t get.

Did you feel the need to censor any of the works you did get?

I don’t think we’re in the business of censoring, I think if we thought that something wasn’t… yeah appropriate for our audience then we wouldn’t invite it to come, we wouldn’t ask an artist to change what they’re doing. There’s some challenging work here, that won’t be for everybody and is pushing people’s boundaries, whether that’s nudity or the sense of loosing control or having to take ethical responsibility for your actions, there’s all sorts of things that might be difficult or challenging for people, but there’s a sort of level of care and respect for the audience, it’s not just about pushing stuff in their face and prodding them about for the sake of it.

Has anybody cried yet?

Oh yeah. People are crying all over the place. Yeah, lots of weeping.

From having experienced any particular performance?

I think that often with one-on-one performance if intimacy with a stranger isn’t a massive part of your everyday life that already could be something that affects you quite strongly. But we’ve had people crying in Adrian Howells' piece when they’ve been bathed and held like, you know, they maybe wish their mother had held them when they were a kid. And there’s another piece where you get into a coffin and you’re asked to think about dying and some people have found that devastating, others have found it uplifting. It’s a gentle piece, it’s not aggressive, but you are lying in a coffin.

What’s your mission?

Most theatre is really boring isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of theatre, cause that’s my job, and very little of it sort of stays with me afterwards, and I suppose with this sort of intimate performance I think very often there’s more of a chance that you’ll remember seeing these pieces, you’ll remember where you were when you saw them. Still, of course some of it will be good, some of it won’t be good and won’t always stay with you.

It is also about the live experience – reminding the audience that this is live, that if they weren’t there, it wouldn’t happen. It’s not like a movie, it’s not like a radio play, the audience member has a role, is a participant. And with all of the work at BAC, we struggle for that.

ONE-ON-ONE FESTIVAL, 6-18 July 2010 Battersea Arts Centre