Author Archives: Beccy Smith

About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.

Bunk Puppets: Slapdash Galaxy

‘There are monsters everywhere!’ gleefully intones Mr Bunk into a colour changing torch uplighting his face at the top of his show. Mr Bunk, aka Jeff Achtem, is a properly charming performer, with whom it’s a pleasure to spend an hour. As he leaps, runs, trips and laughs around the stage operating his homemade shadow puppetry machines (including a brilliantly simple projecting book and pleasingly adapted smoke machine) his enthusiasm and glee are completely infectious.

The show, like its predecessor, 2012 Total Theatre Award Winner Swamp Juice, is a celebration of puppetry’s low-tech magic, demonstrated in the hands of a master. With a distinct nod to Star Wars and a comic book aesthetic, the story follows two brothers on their rocket-powered quest to find a new planet to call home. Coat hangers, cardboard and fluff are all animated by a vivid spirit of invention in a joyful piece of storytelling that appeals to adults as well as children: audience participation is managed with aplomb and when Achtem invites one audience member up to ‘come play’ the offer is immediately and warmly accepted. The show succeeds in creating a sense of shared involvement, of complicity, with the audience, effortlessly. There were a few narrative steps I missed, such as why the alien animals were able to save the day, and the occasional moment when a scene seems overlong in its desire to show off a puppet’s particular function rather than driving the story on – an impulse common to many puppeteer-makers.

Achtem conjures theatrical effects, including shadows in 3D, effortlessly and joyfully, and all are presented with an open hand so we can marvel at the inventiveness that transforms his bits of cloth, card and plastic into clear expressive images on stage. It’s a wonderful introduction to the magic of puppetry and, even if the ending lacks some of the wow factor of previous effects (perhaps because we can’t see it being made?) this is a hugely enjoyable hour of theatrical adventure.

Clout Theatre: The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity

Shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award in the Emerging Artist / Company category at last year’s Fringe, Clout return with this truly surprising experiment in tone and form. Is it a clown show about suicide? A live art piece playing with endings? Physical theatre exploring the violent urges shimmering just below the surface of tea drinking society? Whatever it is it’s thoroughly engaging and laugh out loud funny.

The young trio of performers are never less than compelling as they present a series of detailed, believable and utterly distasteful characters examining the causes and moments of their apparent deaths. It’s stylishly prepared, making the very most of the eerie atmosphere of Summerhall’s Dissection Room with a floor to ceiling plastic sheeting that very much sets the tone, and a brilliantly off-key palette of acid yellows and fluorescent pinks in everything from socks to milk.

Each scene is lovingly and thoughtfully crafted and skilfully executed. The content is animated by the absurd, and the company shows a real instinct for creating and plumbing moments that powerfully articulate relationship and identity through weird actions and images that disturb and remain (a collection tin and stair ladder are both put to especially good use). I occasionally wanted the company to articulate their ambitions a little more clearly: there’s a strongly original vision behind this work but I needed a few more explicit offers to fully grasp it. Yet this is the first time in a long time that I’ve spent an entire performance edgily wondering what might happen next, and it’s a real thrill.

Inne Goris: Once Upon a Story / Long Grass

The one strand of programming for children and young people in this year’s Manchester International Festival programme is a collection of four new works for different age groups from Belgian cross-disciplinary (dance / theatre / performance art) director Inne Goris. Goris’ work is experimental in form, always with a strong musical presence (from composer collaborator Dominique Pauwels). The programme revives her earliest show, the adaptation of the much loved children’s book ZigZag ZigZag, which toured to primary schools around Manchester, as well as the sound installation Daydream, presented for audiences 3+ in a container outside Manchester Town Hall. Also included were the hard-hitting child soldier themed installation Long Grass and the premiere of a new creation, Once Upon a Story.

I saw the latter two of these four shows, and struggled with both in different ways. Once Upon a Time is framed as a mash-up of fairy stories for audiences aged 3+, which sounds engaging enough, but in reality there simply weren’t enough toe-holds for any young audience member to gain purchase on the material. Performed near wordlessly by dancer Lisa Gunstone, the fragmented fairytale tropes – the ever dancing red shoes, the wolf in the forest, something obscure about farmyard animals – remained too abstract to draw us in. The intellectual exercise of ‘spotting the story’ is of limited interest to youngsters when we don’t have enough of a sense of character or story to care about the image and movement sequences presented, even when they are beautifully lit (by designer Johan Vandenborn). The staging too was underwhelming – a series of IKEA inspired yellow blocks ferried about the stage that never offered any real surprises (no, propping them up to overlap one another to create a three-inch-high slanting platform doesn’t create an exciting landscape). According to the programme notes, the piece was inspired by the ways children play, but the overall effect felt far too quiet and understated, broken up by unjustifiably long scene changes that felt alienating. Although there were flashes of interest, such as the presentation of the wicked witch complete with curling gaffer nails, the show felt underdeveloped and unpowered: an adult idea of what’s interesting about childhood with nowhere near enough understanding of what its young audience actually needed (including the appalling policy not to allow anyone who had to exit for a toilet break back into the theatre).

For audiences 15+, installation piece Long Grass explores the inner experiences of child soldiers. We are invited to sit in a grid of stools, with screens and speakers on four sides. Here, Pauwels has created a choral score of child voices which is initially electric and really speaks to the gothic vaults of the chapel-like interior of the Town Hall room in which the piece is presented. But as the video kicks in and we’re presented with protracted sequences of children violently fighting with one another, of children seemingly being gassed, and of a young boy painstakingly dragging his mother’s body around their family home (all created by what is described as a collaboration with ‘a group of young people’), the presentation manages to feel crass and overstated. The whispered monologue text creates a terribly sententious tone and relentlessly rakes over every generalisation about child soldier experiences – about brutalisation, sadism and suffering. The monstrously complex set, with electric screens that rise to separate audience members, felt like an expensive overstatement – the same point could easily have been made by simply using lights and had already been repetitively iterated in the text. The piece merges the experiences presented: costume and pop in the films suggest a range of different time scales (the mum’s bod is costumed 1940s style and bathed in an ancient looking bath, but the house has plastic laundry bags and the children’s dress is contemporary styled). Aestheticising this material feels unjustified and uncomfortable: by making it non specific – cutting its connections to time or place – the material simply felt like voyeurism, and I couldn’t make out its purpose. Without any political context the piece only seems to reflect that being a child soldier must be pretty awful, but who didn’t think that already before entering the show? I would be the last person to insist that work for young people must have a moral or point to make, but I do feel that making use of material such as this to no identifiable purpose feels highly problematic, for both audiences and those whose stories are represented.

MIF has not in the past developed a major strand of work for younger audiences, and it seems clear that much more thought needs to be taken on exactly what it hopes to offer them if such an audience can be developed in future.

For more from Manchester International Festival see Total Theatre’s reviews of Tino Sehgal’s installation work This Variation, Maxine Peake / Sarah Frankcom’s Shelleyan poetry protest The Masque of Anarchy, and Robert Del Naja and Adam Curtis’ sweeping, potentially radical Massive Attack v Adam Curtis.

Derry-Londonderry: UK City of Culture

Ebrington is a huge and chillingly evocative reclaimed military complex turned new civic centre on the East bank of the river Foyle (and the destination of the EU-funded Peace bridge which now, stunningly, connects the two halves of the city, Catholic and Protestant). It is here that Derry-Londonderry City of Culture have chosen to stage a specially reworked version of Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother in a state-of-the-art pop up venue. As the audience stream across the new bridge in their hundreds, and local teenagers beat out a summoning tattoo on the city walls, this feels like a dance show that has transformed into a civic event. The pop-up theatre is more like a stadium: with space for 3000 in its cavernous arena plus a token rake of seating, for those traditionalists who prefer to sit for their culture, right at the back.

But Shechter’s particular combination of overwhelming sound and blood-raising light show, underpinned with identifiable dance languages, creates an experience that’s very difficult to take sitting down. In a gig-like staging with the 1200-strong audience standing to gaze up at the stage we are met with a three-tiered bank of musicians: an instrumental wedding cake of military snares, under classical string group, under thrashing rock band. Beneath and before them, dancers judder and chase. The overwhelming effect of Shechter’s choreography is achieved through its recurrent gestures, repeating and reforming in diverse contexts: gestures that resonate with feelings of desperation and powerlessness, supplication, transfixion. Set against this is the irrepressible impulse to move which bubbles up from the production’s heart.

For Shechter, dance is about feeling not thinking, about identity not politics. But of course, in Derry, identity is politics and the piece has an extraordinary resonance here. Witness the line of military men snapping snared rhythms in regimented style and the agonised cusp of a private execution. Our standing figures in the arena echo the dancers, who, with their backs turned, gaze in adulation at a rock-star turned dictator. There’s a tension here, with Shechter himself in the central role: ‘resist this tyranny’, he seems to be saying, at the same time as beating our senses into submission in this feat of auteur-ship, which he himself composes, directs and performs.

Political Mother isn’t, of course, a new show, having toured to great acclaim since 2010. It’s a new project in Derry, however, adapted by producing partners LIFT to be even more specific to the context for which it was already so apt. There’s a new section that Shechter has worked in – a shadowy Irish folk dance segment, met with glee by the local crowd, where musicians playing traditional instruments wander satyr-like around the stage in the dimmest of lighting states – that feels almost like it’s slipped out of a mythical netherworld. And the local resonance is further banked by the presence in the project of local young musicians, twenty of whom were auditioned to become fully paid-up members of Shechter’s band for the seven-week rehearsal and performance period. This initiative unites the social, economic and artistic ambitions of Derry-Londonderry, an area of alarmingly high youth unemployment, empowering both the show and the festival to really lay claim to the city’s imagination.

A further addition is the Shortcuts programme, wrapping around the show and around the city. On one wet Saturday afternoon five local community groups showcase a series of short responses to Political Mother – initially planned to take place in different locations across the city but due the weather under one roof – having worked for the past ten days with the company’s world-class dancers to translate the ideas and experiences of the show for its young participants and their families. As we huddle in the drizzle watching keen groups of young men and women from wildly diverse backgrounds rehearse the evocative postures and gestures from the show on their own terms, it’s possible to discern the scope of the festival’s underlying ambition – to transform the city not only transiently but by offering transformative experiences, especially for its young people, that might propose genuinely new perspectives. It’s the openness and resonance of Shechter’s imagery and movement that invites re-contextualisation, invites these participants to own it.

Derry-Londonderry young people respond to Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother

Derry was announced as the UK’s first City of Culture in 2011. Funded by the Department of Culture Media and Sport in a time of austerity and financial anxiety, when the arts sector as a whole is facing in-year cuts, the investment such a title represents is hugely significant. The strategic significance and visibility of the festival is hard to underestimate: it’s possible to read the programme here both as an experiment into the civic possibilities of culture and as a massive act of advocacy.

Nestled in the crook of the river Foyle, Derry is a town of just 115,000 and a site of long-entrenched conflict. The city walls which encircle it were originally built by imported City of London apprentices in the seventeenth century, but even these aren’t the most visible representations of the sectarian troubles that have racked this corner of Northern Ireland from that time on. Outside the city walls in Bogside (once barricaded as Free Derry), powerful murals and slogans still adorn the walls of houses, memorialising passionate strife. Inside the walls, most civic buildings are pockmarked by the debris of explosions that mark out this small, picturesque town as a site of battle. Derry was the context of the Bloody Sunday massacre, whose analysis was only concluded after two years’ of Enquiry culminating in David Cameron’s public apology in 2010. Yet this small town, awash with a bitterly contested history where even its name is in dispute (Derry to nationalists, Londonderry to Unionists), saw off competition from heavyweight cities such as Birmingham, Norwich and Sheffield.

The Festival’s response is to use both of these names, a gesture that encapsulates the approach of the programme as a whole – to bring together what has been divided, including artforms and experiences that might traditionally live apart. An unbelievably packed year of events includes large-scale new (or adapted) works from Walk the Plank, Theatre Mladinsko Ljubljana, and Boy Blue, to cherry-pick just a few of the theatre highlights. It also incorporates a range of fantastic local festivals including the Gasyard Wall Féile, the biggest community and arts cultural festival in the North West of Ireland, set in the charged settings of Bogside and Brandywell; and street theatre extravaganza the Carnival of Colours. Large-scale and community-led, high art and popular culture work together to re-vision a place so long defined by its troubles. Two key total theatre companies – Hofesh Shechter and Walk the Plank – form the centerpiece of the performance programme by creating large-scale events with the capacity to be both unifying and provocative.

Walk the Plank’s city-wide extravaganza, The Return of Colmcille, taking place the weekend of 7-8 June 2013, is a case in point. Its story transplants the historical first-century priest Colmcille, one of Derry’s most famous sons, into a journey across the vista of the city’s history. Colmcille – a man who, during the course of a long pilgrimage to Iona and, from this base, across Scotland, had an inspirational effect on Scottish nation building – is a unifying figure who embodies many of the values the festival seeks to promote. Placing the ideas he represents in dialogue with some of Derry’s history through the ages – including the surrender of German U-boats here during World War II, the flight of Amelia Earhart, and gigs with the Undertones – allows for a playful interrogation of the role such values may yet be able to play in Northern Ireland and the contemporary world. The script, by Olympic Opening Ceremony writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, will combine these elements, unfolding a pageant on the river and through the streets, and the project’s approach, in common with Political Mother, builds in significant contributions from local young people and adults who will perform and dance as various characters (such as Irish dancing shirt factory workers and nautical characters from Vikings to U-boat commanders) in themed segments. It is the cross artform inclusivity of Walk the Plank’s work, which combines large-scale spectacle and carefully crafted visual events with a witty overarching narrative and powerful choreographic segments, that promises to make the show broadly accessible and spectacularly inspiring.

The strategic roles ‘total theatre’ artists play in the programme (in Shechter’s case, the opening weekend; for Walk the Plank, on a central, half-term summer’s weekend when large numbers of visitors are projected) reflects the festival’s desire to curate iconic, cross artform events that can capture the public’s imagination. We might also discover in this a comment on the particular effectiveness of contemporary performance that spans theatrical languages to offer an inclusive and exciting experience for diverse audiences.

In a city of this size, the festival not only acts as a catalyst for new ideas and experiences but also has the potential to touch the entire community and to establish a different identity for a city known too-often only for its conflicted history. Derry-Londerry City of Culture is an exciting experiment into the scope and potential for artistic intervention on the social and economic, as well as imaginative, scales. And its going to be repeated, with competition already fierce (and somewhat heated) among cities wanting to host the 2017 programme. One inspiring lesson from Derry is the dynamic and effective role total theatre artforms can play in facilitating this vision.

Derry-Londonderry is UK City of Culture for the whole of 2013; for more on the events spanning the year see the official website. Political Mother: Derry-Londonerry Uncut ran 8-9 March 2013 at The Venue, while Walk the Plank’s The Return of Colmcille will play city-wide 7-8 June 2013.

Beckett Project Paris: Here All Night

Beckett was a writer fascinated by form. His plays and novels continually redefined literary and performance models in his attempts to ‘accommodate the mess’ of man’s place in the modern world. It is the writer’s commitment to form which has governed the Beckett Estate to guard so fiercely the staging instructions of his plays; one side effect of this has been that some of the more interesting explorations of his work on stage in recent years have worked with texts from his novels that aren’t so stringently defended. Ireland’s Gare St Lazare Players have established a reputation at the forefront of these theatrical reanimations of Beckett’s novels and prose, and in Here All Night their director Judy Hegarty Lovett is commissioned by the Beckett Project Paris (which exists to promote the writer’s legacy through artist-led projects inspired by Beckett’s work) to bring together a new ensemble taking this experimentation itself into a new form: music.

This is a formally experimental work in four acts. Fragments of the novels are performed by Conor Lovett whilst solo soprano Melanie Pappenheim, accompanied by a trio chorus of female voice, cello, violin, and piano, performs an original score inspired by the music in Beckett’s work and composed by Paul Clarke. The music feels minimalist in aesthetic and mirrors the folding and re-folding patterns of Beckett’s texts. The artistry in this collected team is powerful: Pappenheim’s folkish soprano is stunningly fragile. Conor Lovett has a remarkable affinity to the turns and dogged playfulness of Beckett’s prose. His performance makes the text feel like real lines of thought, stripping out the sense of artificiality and over-thinking that can sometimes get in between the readers/audience and the insight, wit and comedy in the writing.

Throughout, the balance of the folkish and high art – in the tension between Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh’s relaxed, virtuosic fiddling and John Paul Gandy’s exceptionally detailed grand piano noodlings – picks up on similar contrasts inherent in Beckett’s writing between the high and the low – the philosopher and the clown.

You feel throughout that you’re being treated to an extraordinarily rich meal: the ensemble are clearly artists at the top of their game and the quality of performance in both music and theatre is exhilarating. There are obvious affinities between Beckett’s writing and music: his almost mathematical approach to staging and his obsession with controlling cadences of voice have often led to comparisons with musical compositions, Beckett acting more as composer and conductor than writer and director.

Yet for all this I couldn’t quite discern the ‘why’ in the piece’s construction. It’s absolutely in the spirit of Beckett’s own approach to art-making to experiment with melding together languages of diverse forms in an attempt to fully express an idea. But as the company’s precise cadences animated words from his world, I found myself feeling alienated from the journey of this combination – what was the arc these four acts were tracking and what was the idea these exquisite fragments were attempting to express? To me, all of the pieces were elegant and beautiful in their parts, but never quite coalesced to elucidate the ‘mess’.