‘I like to bring people together who would never normally mix,’ says Ben Owen, the Edinburgh-based sculptor and filmmaker whose new performance series Voices In Buildings (co-produced with Dougal Marwick) will bring performance art and improvised music to unexpected places. Greyfriars Charteris Centre (a former church-turned-community hub) will play host to the latest instalment. ‘If you look at the audience at our first event, there was a really good mix there of visual arts people, folk into performance art, guys from the free improv scene, all finding common ground,’ adds Owen. ‘And there were also these little points of frisson and conflict that I find just as valuable.’

The inaugural Voices In Buildings event (for which Jennie Temple joined the team as graphic designer) was held in June at Dissenter For Space Studies, an artist studio and events complex based in the former headquarters of Royal London insurance company in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge. The site is one of dozens let out by an innovative charity, Outer Spaces, which offers abandoned or temporarily vacated corporate buildings for creative use. In an amusing twist to proceedings, guests entered through office-style glass security barriers after clearance from a doorman, like tired underwriters on a Monday morning. ‘I’m in awe of those security guys,’ Owen laughs, ‘because they’re letting us do some crazy things in there.’ The blueprint for Voices In Buildings is a bit like that of a deconstructed gig, with the band and stage broken up into their constituent parts and stretched out in space and time across the evening.

In June, it all unfolded in the former Royal London canteen, which featured a beautiful, fully removable interior design element by architects Woodcock-Ellis, including a cylindrical enclosure of curtains in the middle of the floor. This is where double bassist Seth Bennett kicked off proceedings with ten minutes of sinuous, jittery free jazz, before attention shifted to a separate corner of the room. There, sound artist Hannan Jones and percussionist Firas Khnaisser performed a graphic score with the Rhubaba Choir; audience participation was encouraged.

Things carried on in the same meandering spirit all night, with attention always toggling to a new spot: vocal soundscapes from Ceylan Hay, a performance-essay from writer and broadcaster Ben Kritikos (with an admirable touch of Hyde Park Corner mania, as he rose above some audience chatter) and delicate, scratched cello from Semay Wu. At one point she was interrupted by free-improv stalwart Ali Robertson, whose hilarious turn was delivered in character as Royal London’s pelican mascot (or rather, as his shoe-bill stand-in, courtesy of a trainer attached to the face). 

Each new ‘stage’ was secreted in a different place in among the pot plants, plush-cushioned snugs, and sleek service counter, with new segments timed to start just as the last ended (or, indeed, to overlap with it), creating moments of tense or comic dissonance. By the close of proceedings, a form of dialogue had developed between the different acts, with some performers choosing, at Owen’s invitation, to play or perform alongside those that followed, adding little peaks and troughs of emphasis from forgotten nooks and crannies. The effect of all this for an audience is exciting and disconcerting. We were constantly shifting viewing position. The front row became the back. People who had been sitting talking in an out-of-the-way spot suddenly find themselves at the centre of things. This, Owen hopes, will encourage people to think about the different ways in which they might experience a performance event, and to become active participants rather than passive recipients.

‘I wanted people to be able to walk around and experience the thing from different angles; that cubist sensibility,’ he states. ‘They can sit by the drum, or they can put their head by the violin, or they can look at the sound desk, or they can stand behind the curtain and hear everything muffled.’ 

There’s another layer to the event too; something to do with occupying a vacated corporate space to explore new ways of interacting and communicating with one another. If not politically subversive, there’s at least some deliciously anarchic quality in reinhabiting the kind of soulless noughties office environment many of us remember, in order to hear and participate in a weird, multi-faceted noisescape. 

A related quality of dissent and satire came across in Shona Macnaughton’s show-stealing performance, with Casey Miller’s unsettling improvised electronic accompaniment. Performance artist Macnaughton herded different segments of the audience around the canteen floor like a haughty dog-trainer, tossing chewed-up squeaky toys around while yapping at us to be more civic-minded, engage better with local and national government, but not to show our teeth. It’s a whip-smart takedown of the pseudo-economic jargon that pervades public arts funding.

What’s next for the Voices In Buildings series? ‘I want to keep taking this kind of thing into unusual, maybe even sensitive settings,’ Owen says. Let the din commence!

Voices In Buildings, Greyfriars Charteris Centre, Edinburgh, Saturday 11 November.