After missing out on the first two nights, I was itching to plunge into some baffling performance at Friday’s installment of the Buzzcut festival. First up was Philip Stanier with Prologue (3 stars), a prolonged ribbon-cutting ceremony in which Stanier diverges from his grand announcement with a number of footnotes, redundancies and personal notes covering all manner of subjects, but vaguely connected by the impossibility of neatly defining the beginning or the end of a period in time. It’s rather like going on Wikipedia to look up Vince Cable’s early political career and finding yourself still sat at the screen four hours later reading about the taxonomy of Scaphiopodidae (the American spadefoot toad): often fascinating, but too long and demanding focus. Stanier describes this as a permanent work in progress, which seems apt considering the subject matter.

An interactive performance work in the bar from Chris Hall (2 stars) involved sitting down in front of a stranger and reading a short script to them, before they take the mantle and read it to the next person. It is a nice idea that needs much more intrigue to really grip the imagination.

The second main slot was Louise Orwin’s Humiliation Piece (3 stars), a game of dares with the audience reminiscent of Marina Abramovic’s famous Rhythm 0, in which Abramovic invited the audience to use a series of objects on her body. In this, Orwin invites us to dare her to perform gross and ridiculous acts using various birthday party-related items dotted around the stage, in exchange for which she gets to ask the audience member a question about her performance or herself. Orwin is superb at probing the uncomfortable idea of audience complicity – especially when she drinks six raw eggs and washed them down with the best part of a bottle of Lambrini – but unlike Stanier’s work, this is actually too short, and the dramatic graph too abrupt, which lessened the impact of some of the things she was being asked to do.

Another bar-based project is from Thom Scullion (3 stars), who attempts to crowd-source the completion of a video game, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which he describes as one of the most ‘unforgiving, unrewarding’ games of all time. The set-up involves having a go at the game and sharing tips on a wall chart to help future generations succeed where you have failed. Unfortunately, it’s too busy for me to actually have ago, so I can’t vouch for whether the game is the unholy bitch that Scullion makes it out to be.

Finally, we have Tom Marshman with Legs 11 (2 stars), a by-the-numbers autobiographical performance about his relationship with his legs. The centrepiece is the story of how he entered a Pretty Polly best legs competition and was up against 10 female finalists, and this is quite a good wee yarn. Marshman is very charismatic but there is very little to this piece and it feels like he is performing to his friends. It’s described as a work in progress, but aren’t they always?