Performance artist Bryony Kimmings spent seven days drinking vodka in a controlled experiment to see whether alcohol improves creativity.
During those seven days, she created a performance, which has been distilled into a theatre show called 7 Day Drunk. She was inspired to develop the show after questioning her own relationship with alcohol and after living with an alcoholic flatmate for four months.
To research the project, Kimmings called up on the Wellcome Trust to connect with a psychologist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and sociologist to help understand the effect alcohol has on the brain. Having consulted these experts, she came up with a set of constraints for her experiment, including the amount of alcohol she would ingest each day. She also recruited a GP and a couple of carers to monitor her health over the week that she spent in her studio in East London.
After one day sober, she started each subsequent day with a 10am dose of vodka. This started with one double shot, which took her blood alcohol levels up to 0.2 percent, or 0.2 gram of alcohol per 100 grams of blood. The carers would periodically breathalyse Kimmings throughout the day to check that her blood alcohol levels remained steady for seven hours. If they started to fall they would be topped up with small doses of additional vodka.
By day seven, her morning tipple was 10 shots of vodka, which she had to down in five minutes. After seven days, she had drunk a total of 5.5 litres of vodka. "By day seven I was so teary and depressed. I'd been told that I'd feel awful and in a state of depression, but when you are in that state you can't rationalise it," she told Wired.co.uk.
Under the influence of alcohol, Kimmings composed music on her laptop, wrote sketches, choreographed dances and read academic papers. She was filmed by a six different cameras and visited by her panel of experts, who she interviewed.
Once the week was up, she amalgamated all of the footage and distilled it into a performance that is part lecture, part song, part dance and part "glamorous cabaret". One female member of the audience is invited to sustain her day four level of drunkenness throughout the show, and is breathalysed by people in the theatre.
There are three songs based on a paper about alcohol and creativity called I Drink Therefore I Am. She performs the piece entirely sober, but "stealing patterns of behaviour" from her inebriated self. "You'll feel like you are drunk for a lot of the show," she told Wired.co.uk. However, viewers will find an interview with her alcoholic flatmate talking about her addiction particularly sobering. However, this might be counterbalanced by the point at which Kimmings dresses as a human mirror ball. "It's an emotional rollercoaster," she says. "Like a drunken night out."
The piece concludes with the results of the analysis by the psychologist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist, physician and sociologist. These reveal whether she did become more creative under the influence. "I don't want to spoil the end of the play, but I wasn't surprised by the results of the experiment. I think that the false confidence that alcohol gives you can be helpful for creativity but it has a cut-off point," she said.
Has it changed her relationship with booze? "This had definitely changed my views on alcohol. I try to drink less," she concludes.
7 Day Drunk is on at the Soho Theatre between 13 and 31 March.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
