Apocalypse 2.0: Andy Field presents Zilla

Despite the vaguely pastoral overtones of his name, London-based live artist, curator and self-identified ‘maker of unusual things’ Andy Field has long showcased a mild obsession with two far less bucolic themes in his work: the sprawling modern metropolis, and societies on the brink of catastrophe.

These two preoccupations dovetail perfectly in Zilla, the sequential trilogy of installation-slash-performance pieces he’s about to bring to Manchester in its entirety for the first time. Subtitled ‘a three-part disaster movie for the stage’, Zilla repeatedly switches perspective on the viewer, offering contrasting but consistent views on a conurbation in the shadow of imminent meltdown.

Part one – featuring a rotating cast of Lego characters, a giant street map and a pair of fuzzy-toed monster slippers – sees the audience assume the role of godlike observer, choosing where and how their ant-like subjects are dotted around a top-down cityscape prior to the onset of their own mini-apocalypse.

Parts two and three unfold, respectively, as a sort of twisted PowerPoint poem based on Google Street View images of the city it’s being performed in and, finally, as a take-home card game in which each of us gets to continue and personalise the story in our own back yards. On consecutive nights in Manchester, parts one and two will be offered in sequence either side of an interval (with part three being what happens at home), with viewers able to experience all angles in a single evening, or choose standalone snippets of Armageddon to fit their hectic urbanite schedules.

Taken as a whole, the show is by turns funny, sad, hypnotic and ridiculous – a scaled-down epic that thrusts our cities and our dreams of them into stark yet oddly consoling relief.

“I guess the best analogy I can think of,” Field suggests, “is that Zilla makes you aware of the stains and marks on the window, rather than just looking through the window at what’s on the other side. You notice the act of the story being told as much as the story itself – which is sort of how it’s tended to work with disaster movies, because they follow such a familiar format. Whether you’re watching The Towering Inferno, Earthquake or The Poseidon Adventure, you know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s right up there on the poster – the movie’s called Earthquake, and there’ll be a picture of rocks breaking and people screaming and subway trains derailing… and yet, as an experience, there’s something weirdly comforting about that.”

A quick rifle through the lengthy roster of genre classics suggests he’s right. Despite our long-standing obsession with disaster movies, particularly during their 1970s heyday and a notable revival in the early 2000s, a consistent feature is how little they really attempt to engender any actual sense of dread or foreboding. Instead, we’re left to watch it all unfold, passively, as though peering through the glass of a formicarium. This is arguably key to their appeal – as Field notes, “Something like three of the top five films in 1974 were disaster movies, and you just don’t achieve that level of popularity by simply bumming people out. There’s definitely something else going on here, something between morbid curiosity and cosy reassurance.”

Zilla generates precisely this air of doom-flecked complicity – an atmosphere, almost, of macabre play – that, by its conclusion, feels very much like an audience piloting the show headlong towards its own event horizon. And, in the relative safety of the performance space, why not? After all, it’s been suggested by more than one scholar that modern disaster films are effectively an updating of the Frankenstein/Prometheus model, based on our mass suspicion that technology and progress might have taken us beyond the point where we’re ever fully in control.

“I think there’s a lot in that,” Field agrees, “because a kind of grotesque hubris always seems to be a contributing factor somewhere along the line. In many ways it can be quite cathartic to just look on from a distance as all that comes crashing down.” If you’ve ever fantasised about having one foot in a fuzzy monster slipper when it does, Zilla might offer precisely the sort of catharsis you’re looking for.