Labour: Participation, Delegation and Deregulation

Abstract

In 2010 artists Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd opened the original London version of the deeply immersive theatrical event You Me Bum Bum Train (YMBBT) in a disused building in Bethnal Green.¹ Individual audience members started out at timed intervals on journeys that took them through dozens of carefully produced immersive scenarios where they were the only audience, they were invited to perform and they became ‘the star of the show’ (Hemming, 2011). Bond and Lloyd request that volunteers, audiences and reviewers keep the scenarios secret so that future audiences can be surprised, but some of the scenes have gradually been disclosed: a kebab shop; a chat show, where the audience is the host; and an American football team’s changing room, where the audience is the coach (ibid.). Financial Times reviewer Sarah Hemming revealed,

By the time I reeled out, elated, I had delivered a sermon, burgled a house, given a pep talk to a team of American footballers and been thrown down a chute with the rubbish sacks …. In a typical journey on the You Me Bum Bum Train, every scene is fitted out in precise and loving detail, down to the institutional lighting in a job centre, the oily car parts in a garage or the smell of a football changing room.

(2011)