With a new live show, theatre piece, sitcom and documentary all in the making, Nina Conti is on a pretty tight schedule. This week, she heads to Mayrhofen for the skiing and comedy festival, and afterwards she’ll be in Leeds filming the final performance of her tour show, Dolly Mixtures. After bugging her agent for a couple of weeks I finally get the chance to talk to her. I ask Conti about Dolly Mixtures, Leeds, and how she engages with the audience.
“Dolly Mixtures”, Conti says, “is now in a space where I’ve got it right. I’ve been performing it for two years and I’m proud of it, so it’s time to record it and put it to bed. It’s quite poignant actually – this will be the last time I do it.” I ask her what we can expect from the show: “It’s based on characters in my life and situations that I’ve been in. It’s also just a series of comedy sketches. Each sketch has hugely divergent ways it could go every night. There’s very little script and each audience gets a slightly different version of the show.”
Monkey, Conti’s mischievous stage partner, is the master of ceremonies, perfect at saying the wrong things at exactly the wrong time. “Monkey is who monkey is,” Conti tells me. “He’s a character I’ve been working with for over ten years. It’s almost as if he will say what he wants to say no matter what the context.” Dolly Mixtures, like Conti’s previous tour Talk to the Hand, also sees her experimenting with a cast of puppet characters, including an owl, a grandma, and a child version of the performer herself. Expect, too, some of Nina’s now infamous audience participation: inviting people onto the stage, she straps a mask to their face and uses them as a living puppet.
photo: Claes Gellerbrink
Conti will perform two performances back-to-back, recording the shows for an upcoming DVD release. I wondered whether there was a reason she chose to film in Leeds. “I was on tour earlier in the year and City Varieties was by far and away my favourite venue. It’s nice to do something that’s sort of vaudevillian in that space. It really suits it.”
Conti has not always been this self-assured. In a profoundly confessional 2012 documentary Her Master’s Voice, she travels to the international ventriloquist convention in Kentucky, taking with her the bereaved puppets of her late mentor and erstwhile lover Ken Campbell. As Nina contemplates giving up ventriloquism for good, there is a palpable sadness that hangs over the documentary. I ask whether any of its residue has stuck with her. “It depends. I’ve explored that card in my other shows, certainly, but Dolly Mixtures is less sad.” Pausing, she corrects herself. “Although, there is a bit! Oh god, yeah, there’s a bit in this show that’s very sad.”
On the whole, though, Conti is in a happier and more confident place. “Yeah I’m really not apologetic in any way. I’ve found the comedy on my own terms. The documentary made a big difference to my confidence. Before then I felt like a poor man’s standup: I’m just the saddo standing in the wings with puppets. But that film explored the art form in a way that made ventriloquism vital; it’s a very unique way of expression. Now I can feel prouder with it. And Dolly Mixtures is bonkers. It doesn’t have the sadness of the documentary, where I’m alone in a room far from home talking to an imaginary monkey. The stage show is slightly out of control the whole time. The entire show is teetering higher and higher until I fall and splat. It doesn’t have the voyeuristic look of some of my previous stuff.”
One of the hallmarks of Conti’s style is her playful deconstruction of ventriloquism as an art form. When I ask her about it, though, she reveals that she might have been a bit hasty. “I almost deconstructed it too soon, before I had even constructed it. I would go on stage and make jokes about ventriloquists, undermining myself before anyone else could. I’d end the show by getting monkey to take over my body so that I spoke with his voice. Once you’ve done that you think: ‘I’ve done it. I’ve unpicked it, it’s unraveled, and now where do I go?’”
It’s clear that as Conti’s act has matured she has discovered new routes inside her art: “The truth is that you can encounter any topic with ventriloquism, you can create any character with it. Why is it any different from a pen and paper? You can do any content you like. It doesn’t feel limiting to me now. It did in the past because I was new to it and I thought things had to have been about a monkey or about me talking. I didn’t have the guys to play off script and really speak to the audience. Now I do, and it creates so much in the moment which is really fun to explore. Everyone ends up laughing about something that no one had planned.”
The audience play a key part in Conti’s act, and she’s always willing to push them in new directions. “I really trust that we will find something. I almost think: how can you not? If you’ve got the ingredients and everyone is in the room, then something is going to happen. It’s just trusting that you’ll find the joy in it. It’s a very playful medium. It’s really rare that you don’t find that joy – god forbid it’s in Leeds on the 15th.”
Can it – and has it – ever gone wrong? “Yes, but it’s wonderful and fun when it does go wrong. There’s always a joke in my failings. It’s about trust, confidence and paying attention.”
Nina Conti’s Dolly Mixtures comes to Leeds on 15 April, 19:00 and 21:00, tickets £13.
Dominic O’Key
