By James Hadley in London

Is the cutting edge of theatre moving closer and closer to creating lived/life experiences? That's the impression I got from attending works in the BURST Festival at Battersea Arts Centre recently.

Increasingly I get the sense of theatre artists creating an experience that isn't an entertaining escape from life, but rather a facilitation of engaging with an aspect of life more fully, or at least a facilitation of interacting with others.

Perhaps I'm projecting, but I think that the lack of social interaction within wider society - particularly in as stand-offish a city as London - leads artists to facilitate the kind of connections they'd like to see/experience within their work. For me, this is the area where the most exciting new theatre work is happening. And certainly some of the most influential theatre events in London recently have been experiential 'event theatre' productions like last year's 'The Masque of the Red Death' by Punchdrunk. It's now almost a year since this production (a promenade experience which used all of the various spaces in the old Town Hall which houses Battersea Arts Centre), and it's still the most frequently talked about theatre show. I can't wait to finally experience the company's work when I attend their new promenade show 'It Felt Like a Kiss' within the Manchester International Festival next month.

But getting back to the BURST Festival... This is an annual two week long festival of new experimental work at Battersea Arts Centre. It ranges widely from work presented by visiting international experimental peformance artists - like Reverend Billy and the Gospel Choir of the Church of Life After Shopping - down to a series of scratch performances where artists try out ideas for work in progress shows. I wrote last week about the stunning experiential piece for a single audience member at a time that was my highlight of the Festival - 'Rotating in a Room of Images' by Lundahl and Seitl. This week I'm going to tell you about the random(ish) selection of three scratch performances I attended at BURST on another evening.

The first of these was 'Mari Me Archi' by Melanie Wilson, an actor with a distinctively gentle presence whose recent work has had a fascination with the creative possibilities of soundscapes. In 'Mari Me Archi', you're given headphones through which your aural guide leads you on an exploration through hidden passages and quiet staircases of the BAC building. The surround sound on the headphones gives the impression of your guide walking invisiblAy by you, as you hear footsteps just a little ahead of you, or doors opening, which gives the piece a haunting quality.

Melanie's text has a poetic tendency that guides you to experience spaces in completely new ways through metaphor. As you stand in the position she's aurally guided you to, a metaphor will transform your perceptions and experience of it, so that a skylight becomes a mineshaft in South America. The ephemerality of presence and the ability to be in the same position yet momentarily transported through time and space are the byproducts of this sort of creative engagement. Gradually you become aware that you're not alone. If all things go well (and this being a scratch performance, it wasn't without it's technical teething problems), your path operates in tangents with another participant's. So you might enter a corridor to catch a glimpse of a person disappearing into a door, or stand at the top of a staircase and see a hand at the other end of the banister, which then disappears.

It's a lovely idea, as the low level anxiety of wondering when you're going to meet this mysterious stranger makes it feel a bit like a blind date. I eventually discovered the other participant was an ex-work colleague. Just another one of those coincidences which I hadn't thought would be as common in a city the scale of London.

It's a format with lots of potential, and the fact that things can easily go wrong, and that you're encouraged to give feedback to the artist afterwards, is all part of the scratch experience, giving you a nice sense of creative contribution to someone else's process.

Next up was a scratch by poet Malika Booker called 'Malika's Altar'. This was another experiential piece, but for a group of about ten participants. We were welcomed into a room with poetry by Malika on the walls, and a woman washed our hands, setting up a sense of ritual to the proceedings. Then Malika welcomed us into a domestic scale room with lit candles all around and an LP playing on a record player. We sat around just as you would in someone's lounge, and Malika read us some of her poetry. She explained that the piece was a tribute or wake for her late Aunt, and the poems were various responses to her Aunt's influence on her life. But it was celebratory rather than mournful, and commented on the fact that there are few social spaces in England to celebrate the dead. Malika talked about her experiences of the Day of the Dead / All Soul's Day in other countries, and this led a sharing of different people's experiences from their various cultures, and of people talking briefly of loved ones who had passed away.

The nice thing was that the piece had been conceived as a creative space where people could consider a departed loved one, and in celebrating their memory, contribute to an honouring of the poet's departed Aunt. We ate bread and drank water together, and not for the first time I was struck by the power a theatre artist has to facilitate connection and communication between strangers who would otherwise not lower their guard. The ritual ended with the opportunity to light a candle and/or ring a bell for our departed loved one. There had been more poetry reading, and it was definitely a time and space for reflection, but also very much a lived experience with room for personal resonance.

Finally, the third performance was called 'the Handbag Scratch' by Geraldine Pilgrim. This was held in the Grand Hall space at BAC, which is a huge space with a massive organ at the end of it - what used to be the main town hall for the area, but is now used for performances such as this. A small audience of about ten entered down one end of the space, and a woman in red entered on the stage at the far end from us. She put her red handbag on the floor then danced around it to nightclub music. Then another woman entered, placed her handbag on the floor, and danced around it. Then another, and another, until there were a staggering 50 or so women, ranging in age from about 20 to about 70, each dancing in their own style around a handbag that was individually distinct as they.

It was a fantastic idea, but unfortunately that's as far as the creativity of this piece seemed to stretch. the women left, one by one, until there was a room with 50 handbags sitting ownerless. Then a group of about 15 men entered, but they just stood there, posturing, and then left. What a missed opportunity! Where was their dance turn or contrasting interraction with the discarded handbags?

I had no problem working out what to say on my feedback sheet after this scratch. And that's the beauty of the process. You have no idea what you're going to experience from one experience to another, and some leave you fulfilled, while others leave you feeling unfinished. But you have the chance to engage and contribute to the continuing development, so the open-ended experience is innate to the process.