cw: contains discussion of fascism and white supremacy, and presentation of physical violence

“When working from a ladder, you should maintain three points of contact with it at all times. This will keep you safe.”

But the bulb needs two hands to be unscrewed. And you need to hold the nail before you can hammer it. And sometimes, to get a job done, you need to ignore how you’ve been told to do it. And you might need to break ‘the rules’.

The Safe Use of Ladders and Stepladders is a performance about using physical violence against the far right. It asks if this is the best way to deal with such an issue, and it asks what happens if it’s not what we ‘want’ to do.

It was created as the ‘culmination’ of a practice-as-research project in my final term studying MA Contemporary Performance practice at the University of Salford.

The project’s inquiry centered around finding the best way to communicate tacitly understood, personal politics such as my own around violent antifascism.

I also made a zine which was given to everyone who came to see the performance.

Some findings from the process are detailed in my (quite long) complementary writing.