Ian Smith Archive

The archive consists of material spanning 35 years of Ian Smith’s career across the various forms of performance, including music, cabaret, dance, master of ceremonies roles, and personas and voicework for TV, radio and film. The documentation includes video and audio recordings of performances, TV appearances and radio interviews, as well as photographic stills, press cuttings, publicity material and personal papers including correspondence, financial documentation and presentations. It also contains material relating to Smith’s artistic practices including his creative writing, scripts, sketches, and proposals for performance and TV, as well as documentation of his visual art and personal ephemera.

Ian Smith was an artist, performer and artistic director, founding the acclaimed Glasgow-based performance company, Mischief La-Bas, with his wife Angie Dight in 1992. Self-proclaimed ‘Art Gangster’ and mischief maker, Smith exploited and meddled with a multitude of art forms including visual art, performance, street theatre, dance, comedy, cabaret, compering, music and presenting.

Smith was born in Bexley, South-East London in 1959. Attending Ravensbourne Art College between 1977-1978, Smith went on to study Expressive Arts at Brighton Polytechnic, graduating in 1981. After graduating, Smith remained in Brighton and became an established figure in the local performance, music and cabaret scene. He was an integral part of the experimental Zap Club for cross-media performances, art, dance, music, comedy and cabaret. Originally a club night organised by Neil Butler and Roger Ely in 1982 with Smith invited as compere, the Zap Club soon established a venue by directors, Neil Butler, Dave Reeves, Angie Goodchild and Pat Butler. Smith was the permanent MC for Zap Club, a role he later employed whilst touring with the anarchic French circus troupe Archaos and for the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), compering the event for many years.

In the 1980s, Smith toured extensively throughout Europe and North America with solo performances, such as Cannibal! (1988-1989), and collaborated with fellow artist, Roger Ely, combining feasting and performance to produce numerous ‘performance banquets’. Smith also toured as the frontman for the band, Birds With Ears formed with Billy Cowie, and as part of the dance company, The Wild Wigglers with Liz Aggiss. During the same period, Smith exhibited his artistic creations known as ‘Pulptures’, described by Smith as ‘like sculptures but not as good’, in Brighton and Wolverhampton. Smith also directed the large-scale performance project The Tell-Tale Heart (1988), which invited artists to collaborate on a specific theme, an approach later revisited for projects, such as Bull! (1997-1998).

In 1988, Smith became involved in Streetbiz Festival, Glasgow before joining Circus Archaos, as ringmaster and artistic director for a time. Smith and Dight returned after touring internationally with the circus company and settled in Glasgow, setting up their interactive performance company, Mischief La-Bas. Mischief La-Bas started with a two-year nightclub residency in The Arches, Glasgow in 1992 and went on to produce a vast amount of large and small scale indoor/outdoor shows in public spaces, creating an accessible style of street theatre that interacts and engages with the public. Some of Mischief’s most notable performances and projects include BullBallet (1998), Project X (1999/2000), Painful Creatures (2003-2004), Montague Place (2006), Peeping at Bosch (2008) and The Zoo (2012), all evidenced in the archive. (Since Smith’s death in 2014, Dight has become the sole artistic director of Mischief La-Bas, continuing its mission, ‘gently warping the underlay of the fabric of society’).

Smith continued to create solo installations and performances earning critical acclaim for his work including Good Grief (2003) at the NRLA and My Hands are Dancing but my Heart is Cold (2010), which was nominated for Best Male Performance by Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS).

Smith also took on various radio, TV and voicework throughout his career, gaining media exposure for his performances, music and as the radio and TV persona, Monty Cantsin, who had a regular spot on the Fred MacAulay’s radio show. This coverage is reflected in the archive with videos of TV appearances, including recordings of Monty Cantsin, as host of ‘The Beatroom’ for BBC Choice.

The Ian Smith Archive is arranged into two series:

IS/1 contains material relating to Smith’s creative practice across performance, writing and visual art

IS/2 consists of personal documentation

The interconnected and in many cases overlapping nature of the material relating to Smith’s roles as performer, artistic director, master of ceremonies, recording artist, TV and radio personality, means arrangement by the different forms of creative practice is more appropriate and in keeping with Smith’s own order.

Ian Smith's digital archive material from cloud storage and harddrives has been arranged in keeping with his order with Professional and Personal material separated, as with IS/1 and IS/2. Professional material relating to each performance, maintains the original subfolders: Audio, Images, Video, Text and Project Material, within the newly created 'Born-Digital Material' file for each performance.

All magnetic tape was digitised and where copies were found, the best digital copy was retained. Duplicates have been identified and cross-referenced at item level. For all audiovisual material, a shot list is noted in 'Description', compiled by the AV Digitisation Officer.

The Data Protection Act (1998) may apply to some records.

Angie Dight

The Ian Smith archive, which was kept at Mischief La-Bas HQ, Glasgow, was generously donated to the Theatre Collection in 2020 by Ian Smith’s family. The cataloguing of the archive was possible thanks to funding from Creative Scotland.

None expected

UoB Theatre Collection - The National Review of Live Art (NRLA) Archive

Wolverhampton Arts & Museum Service Object No 589 'Pulpture'