Blood.

It’s one of those things that makes people with more socially acceptable career paths avoid live art. There’s been rumours – about how it gets splashed all over the audience as if it was one of the 12 thousand liters of water delivered daily at Singing in the Rain. They needn’t worry any more. jamie lewis hadley has contained his blood in a medically approved way, and while there is some splashing, it happens at a distance: a safe distance.

lewis hadley’s new piece, Analogue to a Blunt Trauma, is contained in many ways – not least of which formally. He extracts a bag of his blood as if he was donating it, with the help of a medical professional and actor, Dr Belinda Fenty; there’s alcohol for disinfection, disposable needles, and constant, although quiet interrogations about how he feels. Most of all there’s a clash between the built up expectations that surround the piece, and what actually occurs. A considerable amount of tension is brought about when both lewis hadley and a chunky golden gun make an appearance, but from then onwards the atmosphere takes a surprisingly benign turn. Instead of typical blood-work, what is on show is an institutionalised, well-mannered, intimate act of giving blood – a commonly known, universally recognisable, medical, sterile and potentially chilling procedure, that has little potential to shock but is rich with connotations for everyone.

This inversion of genre expectations does not however happen when lewis hadley aims at and shoots the suspended bag of blood he has just let out. Instead of a deafening sound of a gun firing over and over, and thick red liquid exploding, the barely present noise of the kind of bullets you shoot out of a toy gun pierces the bag politely, allowing a tiny stream of blood to gently sip out. Health and safety issues aside, while it might have been a tad too obvious to reproduce the kind of effect and noise implicated, what’s really missing here is an everyday action inherently connected to guns – their possession, use, abuse and politics – that would relate to weapons in the same way as a simple medical procedure brought on a wealth of connotations to blood.  Instead, what’s on offer is a very theatrical presentation of what might have been – if only there was a way to do it. This pushes the piece away from the overwhelming genuineness it starts with and places it in conflict with the earnestness usually associated with live art. The considerable number of neon lights smashed thereafter don’t help resolve this issue of sudden, enforced theatricality.

In amidst the artificiality and full on ‘naturalism’, Analogue to a Blunt Trauma does manage to evoke thoughts on how action movies’ two favourite props, guns and blood, might be connected in a way that’s not strictly causal. The ritual of giving blood or letting it to release tension (ancient medicine style), is explored, not as a prelude, but as a commentary to violent outbursts, personifications of guns and their idealisation. There are a lot of arguments, ideas and notions that might follow on from that initial one – but this piece seems to only propose a question to consider, rather than dwell on it.