Big Finish by Figs in Wigs. Photo: Rosie Powell, Battersea Arts Centre, 2024.
by Diana Damian Martin
The end is a string quintet sat on wearable chairs, playing an instrumental version of My Heart Will Go On whilst a metal tube slowly releases foam against an increasingly loud shipwreck soundscape, again and again, until it is time for something else to take place.
The end is five human-crabs dancing on sand in perfect synchronous choreography.
The end is also the beginning,a long long time ago, when golf-outfitted latex dinosaurs and lizards drive a cart around whilst an AI voice recounts when the Earth was filled with humans who are idiots who slowly pushed the moon away and the sun to turn everything red.
We had so much sand and we made so much stuff and now there is not enough sand and the moon is going and even with all this time, we still can’t get our shit together, they say.
The end is a series of five toasts to the reasons for the end, and an inventory of props, costumes, and other performance items donated to the only cultural venues that might still be around, like a tarpaulin for Shakespeare’s Globe, because let’s be honest, they need it.
The end is a physical booth where the winner of a musical towels game on a polluted beach gets to try and catch some pounds in what used to be a toilet serving shit coloured ice-cream, or is just shit.
Of course, it is not the end, but the end was imminent from the beginning, and even now, it’s hard to know if it’s the end for some and not for others, but it is clear something is ending, or at least sinking, and some of us seem to be going with it.
The end is Figs in Wigs self-periodising in their own performance, to frame what of this work, this material, messy work, this silly work, this clubnight work, this queer work, this live art work, this work for main theatre foyers, this I’m-not-so-sure-what-it-is work, might fit in the end as the end is unfolding but it’s not the end for all, it’s just the end for some.
Big Finish is a performance of structural, artistic and ecological ends, one of interconnected collective events of many scales, in queer time, that have led us to this version, that can no longer simply be held by ‘precarity’ or ‘instrumentalised’ or other adjacent economies of collapse, exclusion or erosion.
Big Finish holds for me: a lot of joy and laughing at the state of things, and clowning and beautifully precise routines and visual captures of atmospheres of extinction, and an attempt to grapple with local and planetary moments, and the relation between failure and opportunity, and the impossibility to disentangle many-headed attacks at already an unstable artistic ecologies through the journey of one collective.
Big Finish works slowly, gently, against the tug of narrativizing collapse or crisis, refusing nostalgia; but it is also in resonance with the ambiguity caused by intersecting crises. It’s a queer-gothic-horror-game-show-live art-satire performance, but really, it’s a work about what it’s like for those (still) trying to do something with performance, something less legible and neat, something messy. It brings the structural into the formal.
I was thinking about the end because this performance reminded me of my own relation to writing alongside performance. And here I am. Writing with Figs.
Figs in Wigs’s Big Finish was on at Battersea Arts Centre from 14-27th March.
Something Other 