Shiny Nylon was a collaboration between Deborah Levy, Kristina Page and Anya Gallaccio. Billy Cowie composed a mournful string score, punctuated with hypnotic bubblegum pop songs. Three performers took centre stage in a huge abandoned warehouse – the S-Shed in the Royal Victoria Dock. Billy Boy, Sean Tuan John, and Girl Babe, KristinaPage, whirled and tussled around the vast concrete space to the part-sung narration of Bombay, singer Jennifer Potter, relaying themes of inner-city loneliness, messed-up relationships and suicide or American celluloid fame fantasies gone bad, laced with gruesome visions of sex and violence, as one Evening Standard reviewer reported.
At one end of the warehouse hung Anya Gallaccio’s set: a pair of red velvet curtains that were used to manipulate the space dramatically as they swept across its length, over the head of unsuspecting audience, huddled in old cinema seats, shivering wrapped in blankets, clutching hot water bottles.
Every project I’ve ever done was mad, Jules Wright said. With Shiny Nylon, there was no public transport get you to the docks. It was in the middle of winter, it was freezing cold. How were people going to find their way to West India Quay in the middle of winter? You could hear people coming before you could see them, because the entire place was shrouded in fog. It was cold, it was snowing, but they came.
