We heard something was afoot at the Shunt Vaults in London Bridge. It sounded sinister, so we sent our very own vicar correspondent Jennie Hogan to investigate.

Art has forever tried to represent reality. Trouble is, artists get bored with reality and often prefer to escape it. At Shunt on a recent Saturday night, we ventured into the mysterious, olde worlde vaults under London Bridge for a performance by the BAC and the Young People's Theatre. It soon became difficult to tell the difference between art and reality and punter and performer. London is now so cool that everyone there could or should have been a performance artist. I turned up, as ever in best clericals, and was stared at like a magician’s exhibit. Someone was even brave enough to ask me if I was part of the performance. Of course, I couldn’t let them down…

Within each dank, dark, vaulted crevice there was some sort of activity going on. A fat bear-man practiced his ballet moves. A solitary girl-child amused herself alone, as if the boredom were making her mentally ill. Two girls sat silently on a shelf under an eiderdown looking like terrified chicks in a nest. A waif stared endlessly at herself through mirrors that she may well have shattered herself.

Some installations were interactive - I walked into a Wendy House full of sparkly, girly objects and a pretty young girl called Alaska handed me a lipsticked square of paper. It was an invitation to her 18th birthday party at 10.30 that night. I couldn’t tell whether she liked me or was just desperate for some new friends. One room had a long table set for a tea party. Another contained a pool table and a piano. When I wandered in, a chap in a trilby was playing funky jazz. Was he was part of the performance or a chancing musician keen to show off his talents to the discerning crowd?

The vaults are so enormous that you can wander, drink in hand, from one place to the next. And as I meandered I saw more intriguing detail. Hanging on the wall was a sculpture made of shoes - bent, scuffed, once loved and later discarded. It looked like all the shoes that one teenage girl had ever owned. Round the corner another sculpture was made of toddlers’ training shoes. They both had a macabre air about them, as if they were the soles of the young dead. Or perhaps it was just the eerie atmosphere of the building that was making me morbid.

If the performances seemed static at first view, they came alive during the tours that took place at regular intervals. These were led by artsy types; one a curator type trying to give pseudo-meaning to the art; another a suited bore complete with clipped accent and clichéd umbrella. These performances brilliantly mocked the art establishment. And so as we passed, the chubby ballerina talked to us about his art: “I didn’t choose ballet, ballet chose me.” Well I suppose he had to have an excuse. The girl in the mirrors talked manically about her disgust with her body. She spoke for all the silent anorexic teenagers of the world.

The whole event seemed to me to be an exploration of childhood and youth. There was little milky-bar-white wonder there though - no rose tinted remembering of days gone by. Most of the art explored the weakness, the horror and the vulnerability of smaller times when days were longer and people did things to us…

We were handed no programme or explanation when we arrived. Maybe some people were there just for the bar. We were invited to decide for ourselves what was going on. Shunt is a fascinating concept and venue.

Shunt is now closed until 8 January 2008. Make sure you visit one of London’s most intriguing venues when it reopens. Be prepared to queue, it is satisfyingly busy.

Check out the upcoming schedule at:

www.shunt.co.uk

Photographs by Anna Inglis Hall