BLED EDGE  
Performance/Installation for EDGE '88

19th - 23rd September 1988
6:30 am - 9:30 pm daily at prison cells under Kingsway Princeton College, Clerkenwell, London, England
and
9:30 pm - 6:30 am daily around the site + North Burgh Street (one hundred and eleven hours non-stop)

* * *

Performance art on tour

Deanna Petherbridge
Financial Times (London) Friday, 30th September 1988

[...]
An earlier visit to Alastair MacLennan's continuous performance at the Kingsway Princeton College had been a thought-provoking experience. MacLennan, who lives and teaches in Belfast, had appropriately selected to work in the evening in the disused cells beneath the college, which had once been a prison and the site of an explosion in 1867 in an attempt to free Irish prisoners. The entrance is screened by sacking curtain, and until one's eyes have adjusted to the deep gloom, there is a sensation of real fear and panic. Within a barbed-wire enclosure, hung at both ends with what appear to be torn flags, MacLennan moves relentlessly up and down, wrapped in deep alienation. The flags are slings for carrying some object - a stone, a piece of wood, - a dead baby which he moves from one end of the cage to the other, crushing charred wood and debris underfoot during his inexorable progress. Most gallery performances depend on an act of complicity which one is not always willing to make. In this piece, one is unquestionably both participant and spectator: it is art on the cutting edge of reality.

Edge 88 is on tour in venues in the North - Manchester, Newcastle, Hull and Sheffield - until end October. Details from AIR 6 and 8 Rosebery Avenue ECI, (Tel.. 01-837-5294)