The One-on-One Festival is a coming of age ceremony, celebrating the graduation of the one-on-one encounter from experiment to bona fide artistic genre. That the symbolically removed training wheels are replaced surreptitiously with alternative support arrangements is not necessarily an admission of weakness: some art forms are at their best when leaning on others.
Take any one-on-one encounter on an individual basis and it's easy to see why the genre has been repeatedly accused of inherent exclusionism and insubstantiality. Encounters rarely last more than half an hour, and many little more than five minutes. For obvious logistical reasons, audience capacity is almost always severely limited.
But to consider individual examples in isolation is to be wilfully blinkered to the genre's unique qualities - qualities the people at Battersea Arts Centre understand well, having personally supported the development of a good few practitioners through their Scratch Festivals and Supported Artist programme.
Hence no individual work is made the centrepiece of the One-on-One Festival. Instead, 30-odd artists are installed throughout the building, and a ticket gets you a sort of charm bracelet of encounters, with three appointments timetabled for you by BAC and the chance to accessorise the experience by discovering hidden extras in the interim.
Whether or not the experience satisfies therefore depends on BAC's quasi-random allocation process, the skill of the artists and the adventurousness of the customer in roughly equal parts - which seems appropriate, given that the defining feature of one-on-one is an exchange between artist and participant.
Inevitably, with so many acts side by side, there's still an element of exclusion: no one can see everything, and discovering something exciting only to be told you can't experience it without an appointment is undeniably frustrating. But whereas the limited capacity of individual one-on-one works can feel unfair, like artificial scarcity calculated to drive demand, the issue here is that there's too much to see and too little time, which is easier to deal with.
Likewise, certain of the acts are still as whimsical and weightless as spun sugar. Patrick Killoran's Observation Deck, in which participants lie with heads and shoulders sticking out of a third-floor window for ten minutes, is something of a 'so what?' experience taken on its own, for example. But the One-on-One Festival experience as a whole can't be as easily dismissed - not when it also contains Ontroerend Goed's profoundly moving The Smile Off Your Face.
To demand that one-on-one encounters stand up to criticism when viewed in isolation is to approach them with a narrow mind. One-on-one is not theatre; the genre may have incubated in a theatrical environment but one-on-one encounters are not plays, or even necessarily performances, and it would be wrong to measure their success by theatre's usual benchmarks.
One-on-one is collaboration. It's exchange. It's intimacy. It's two people tied back to back, scaling the inside of a chimney: something neither one could do alone. Stop imagining one-on-one encounters taking place in theatres and start imagining, say, Folk in a Box installed at a music festival, or Franko B's You Me Nothing in a modern art gallery. One-on-one will not be pigeonholed. Stop trying.
Until 16 July