BAC's 30th Birthday

This spring, we celebrate our 30th birthday with two events that reflect the wide role that we have played in ‘inventing the future’ of British theatre during the last three decades. Kneehigh’s award-winning production The Red Shoes returns, as does our ONE-ON-ONE Festival.

We are also looking to raise money for our new Artist Bedrooms. We will work with artists to create six new one-on-one performances for the ONE-ON-ONE Festival each set inside a new bedroom space specifically designed and created for the festival. After the festival is finished the bedrooms will provide a legacy for our building and enable artists to live and work here.

Read more about our history and our plans

A special 30th Birthday Party will take place on 24th March from 7pm, hosted by BAC patron Dame Vivienne Westwood, to raise funds for the Artist Bedrooms. The evening will include a performance of The Red Shoes - find out more & book.

If you can't come to the Birthday Party but want to help us raise money for artist bedrooms, then sponsor a bedroom.

Set of pillows and cases £30
Bed, bedding, books and bookshelf £30
Bedroom with plumbing and evervthing £3000

Cheques can be made payable to BAC and posted to David Jubb and David Micklem, BAC, Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5TN

Twin Peaks & BAC

I can remember exactly what I was doing on Tuesday 23rd October 1990 at 9pm. Twenty years ago almost to the day I sat down to watch a television programme that would change me in ways I couldn’t have imagined, altering the way I look at TV, at art, at the world. From the opening chords of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack and the shots of a native bird and the smoke stacks of a timber mill, I was hooked. I had never seen anything quite like Twin Peaks. 

That evening BBC2 served up the start of a series that inspired artists everywhere, altered television forever and now, twenty years on, still bubbles in my sub-conscious and in the minds of a generation who watched those shows. This was like nothing that had gone before on TV. The narrative was complex and multi-layered, the characters idiosyncratic, the mood both haunting and darkly comic. It frightened me in ways I find hard to explain. It was painterly in its cinematography. The music was rich and evocative. The series blurred reality and dreams. It played out at the edges of nightmare. It suggested an American Dream turned sour – a dark vision of a community with horror at its core. Looking past the beauty of the American northwest, beyond the Douglas Firs and the local high school, behind the net curtains and the white picket fences, there was the suggestion of something hideous. Something dark and mysterious, ugly and violent.  Something that perhaps lurks within us all. 

I can never look at red velvet curtains or a picture of an owl or listen to the wind in the trees or enter a room with a ceiling fan without thinking about the world that David Lynch and his collaborators created. Twin Peaks taught me to look differently at the ordinary, to be comfortable with things that don’t quite make sense, to relish a fragmented narrative.

Yes it was only a TV show. But in many ways Twin Peaks changed my life. It taught me to read art in a different way, to be comfortable with ideas that perhaps didn’t neatly tie up, to revel in a sense of being unsettled, to explore my subconscious and the power of dreams to influence thought. And I know I’m not alone. Twenty years on and I work with dozens of artists who still refer to the influence of Twin Peaks on their practice. Either overtly or on some less conscious level, the world that Lynch created and the way he created it continue to influence theatremakers and their experiments.

So, on the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast, BAC is celebrating the ongoing influence of Twin Peaks on British theatre. We have invited artists to contribute responses to the series with works commissioned across our building. We are welcoming theatremakers, visual artists and musicians to reflect on the ongoing influence of Lynch’s work. And we plan to introduce a new generation of creative individuals to this landmark television series with a 30 hour screening of all 27 episodes in a one-off event in BAC’s Grand Hall.

Twenty years on and Twin Peaks is as fresh and rich an experience as it was when first broadcast. It is a show that operates somehow out of time – it was made in the early 1990s but looks like it might have been born in the 1950s. And because of this it is both nostalgic and utterly contemporary. It is post modern and gothic, heightened in its emotion and self-referential. The show has spoken to artists and audiences over twenty years and we hope by celebrating its influence to introduce a new generation to the world of Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks was first broadcast in the UK on BBC2 on Tuesday 23rd October 1990 at 9pm. The first episode gained 8.15 million viewers, which was BBC2s largest ever audience.