Reporting from The Fringe, artist James Leadbitter, aka The Vacuum Cleaner, is determined to show how art can affect change
I’m at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to present my performance art piece ‘Mental’. The show is an autobiographical journey through my experiences of mental illness (which I’ve battled with since I was a teenager) and police repression (due to the art activist work I’ve made since I was 23). The show is presented in a secret location to a limited capacity audience, which is both an artistic decision and a marketing ploy.
I’ve never presented my work at The Fringe before but I was invited and offered Arts Council support to enable me to do it as part of Escalator East to Edinburgh. As a disabled person I need a fair amount of support to enable me to present my work, something the festival doesn’t offer and is shockingly bad at, so I am immensely grateful to the art council for their support.
The Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, which has pros and cons. If you do well out of it, you can do really well, getting more work and lots of press. Equally, if it bombs it really dies, the muck can stick. Performing ‘Mental’ isn’t easy or pleasant, every performance involves reliving traumatic experiences, but hey, they say you have to suffer for your art don’t they?
So why I am doing this, already feeling sensitive and vulnerable? It would be perfectly acceptable to not put myself through this but I have a strong belief that art can affect change. Bringing a show that deals with mental health discrimination to a festival that doesn’t support disabled artists feels like a small act of defiance.
The Queer Nation community have a saying “We’re here, We’re Queer, Get use to it.” I don’t have a slogan like that but if I did it would be something like “We’re here, we’re mental and we hate ourselves more than you hate us, so what you going to do about it?”
Mental runs until the 24 August. More details HERE
