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.

Old Saw: Meadow

Packed into the Warren’s smallest studio are signs of organic life. A tree’s branches reach up toward the rig and from the floor wild grasses are sprouting. It’s a relief to enter this world as we pile in from the busy playground of the Warren’s ambitious, astroturfed Edinburgh-style courtyard. The carefully crafted set whose materials do seem drawn from nature, the sighs of the wind and birdsong, seem to conjure up breathing space amongst this hubbub. The young audience (the show is for children aged from just three) are immediately entranced.

Meadow is the antithesis of the sort of children’s theatre that rushes towards its audience, singing, juggling, crying out for audience participation. Like a wild animal, it requires your gentle attention, unfolding its treasures shyly and quietly. With a rustle of grasses, the first creatures reveal themselves. They are not here to tell us a story; we are seemingly peeking into their everyday lives. One by one we meet a flock of delicate butterflies who dance in the dusk; a pair of frisky rabbits; a family of foxes exploring their world; a majestic owl who soars across the landscape and other, more mysterious creatures. There are enough touches of the figurative (a pack of giggling haggis-type animals) and silliness (a rabbit who, cartoon-like, nearly slips as he tries to impress, his feet pedalling the air) to sustain the young audience through what is rather abstract storytelling. Or perhaps I’m not giving them enough credit: it’s been newsworthy of late that children are too divorced from their environment, that we are raising a generation of children whose main connection to the natural world is through a screen, but the young audience here seemed to respond to the ‘animals’ instinctively, revelling in working out the actions and motivation of the emerging menagerie.

The puppets all are crafted from the material that makes up their world: dried grasses; broken branches; rusted old bits of farm equipment – which feels like a clear and lovely metaphor for the interweaving of the environment and those animals which make it their home. There’s a backstory, I learn afterwards, of a post-apocalyptic future where the meadow itself remembers and recreates the creatures who lived in it from the materials left behind. This is powerfully poignant but completely opaque in the performance and frankly unnecessary: there is wonder enough in seeing the creatures brought to life and returning to the inanimate – the sense of an elegy for a lost or disappearing world is already there in the show’s form.

The animation is first rate: Old Saw have assembled a stellar cast of puppeteers for this tour whose careful, detailed puppetry is vital in bringing these occasionally abstract creatures to breathing, believable, and compelling life. Their work duets with a haunting score by folk musician Paul Mosley which develops theme and atmosphere for each animal. Soon the tiny theatre is alive with glowing, swooping, leaping, loving, and curious creatures: it is a truly magical experience whose theatricality is managed with a deft touch. The small space isn’t able to actually magic itself bigger, of course, and there are some sequences that are curtailed by the crowded wings and low rig. The show would also benefit from a steeper rake. But touring puppetry has its own very specific demands and this is the nature of Fringe – the show’s overall heart shines through. Take your kids, sit at the front if you can, and enjoy an enchanting puppetry safari.

Art of Disappearing: The Last Resort

2016 seems to be the year when binaural technology really starts to find creative traction in theatre making. The Last Resort is the third show this month I’ve experienced that plays with the possibilities offered by its spatial reconstitution of soundscape, so that sound appears to materialise in specific physical relationship to your head: shooting past like invisible cars, whispering just over your shoulder. It creates an experience that is more bodily (as explored in Reassembled, Slightly Askew) and absorbing than regular stereo. Perhaps that is one of the reasons it feels more difficult to fully appreciate in The Last Resort, where we are also being asked to negotiate a strong site, various objects and two rather dense narrative fictions.

We are brought to an unloved, flyblown corner of Portslade beach, round the back of the port. It’s a place charged with bleakness and artists Rachel Champion and Tristram Shorr excel in its sensitive excavation: it really feels as if the creepy, industrial flavour of the story they unfold is generated from the site. The story, like the soundscape, is multilayered: there’s a frame set in the future about tourist trips back here to an abandoned earth; there’s the sci-fi biography of the theme park site they have concocted; and there’s another story flickering underneath, breaking through the subtext and the static, about what’s really been going on.

It’s richly worked and deeply thought about yet doesn’t entirely coalesce as it should. The simple physical instructions we’re given to work through in our exploration of the site on foot recall Shorr’s work on Charlotte Spencer’s Walking Project in 2014 where they hinged more effectively between real place and recorded sound because the body and our consciousness within it was central to the piece’s subject. Here, the tasks can feel a little thin – too specific for their fictional justification on our virtual tour yet complicated enough, as we fumble with the oddly anachronistic technology of laminated cards, to distract from the sophisticated sound design. The futuristic concept and necessarily somewhat obscured nature of the rides described on the tour also make for an abstract technological soundscape whose binaurual powers are harder to appreciate. When, in The Encounter, we hear a jaguar growling behind us, the effectiveness of the technology is empowered by our recognition of the sound, of the thrilling impossibility of its presence where it appears to be. Too often in The Last Resort, the fantastically worked score is used to recreate an almost impossible-to-imagine feat of future science and technology, and so its power to bring story to imaginative life through sound loses impact. It’s a relief when we hit moments of musical lyricism or clear and simple ‘sound effect’.

There are lots of thoughtful and clever moments in The Last Resort which add piquancy to this macabre bit of science fiction and the work is hugely detailed in its imagination and sensitive in its discovery of site. The form – of both the audience experience and the thriller-style narrative which drive it – want some development, but for all its growing visibility, this is a technology whose theatrical uses are only just starting to be understood.

Pursued by a Bear: The Lamellar Project

The Lamellar Project have saved the world. Their genetic reconstructions of species subject to mysterious and ecologically catastrophic mass extinctions have rejuvenated failing food webs. Who’s to begrudge them the odd tweak here and there – to improve nature’s pattern where such improvements can now be identified? Yet of course, with modification comes commodification: ownership. And if you own nature then you haven’t just saved the world – you’ve taken control of it.

As science (fiction) this feels all-too-plausible: an account of the weaponisation of the genetics industry just a babystep from our contemporary experience. As theatre it feels less convincing. Played out through the deteriorating marriage of eco-activist Michael and his wife and Lamellar geneticist Carys, who performs via internet from Philadelphia and so appears on screen throughout, the conflict is deadened. The staging and storytelling is weighed down by this device – there are only so many ways you can watch a man interacting with a screen – and a glossy gauze cube, whilst brilliant for some snazzy digital projection, serves to reinforce the static nature of the dramaturgy.

The best sections are Ben Kalina’s short films, which intersect the ‘live’ scenes with poetic descriptions of the grim experiments in hybridization undertaken by the Lamellar Project. Their downstage focus and vivid, nightmarish descriptions bring Carys’s character more vividly to life than the rather wilfully un-self-knowing postures she is forced to assume throughout much of the marital drama, and the poetry in her accounts of the Caligarian creatures she has unleashed on the world is memorably disturbing, albeit unjustified by her characterisation.

There’s huge ambition and a raft of partnerships behind this project and many aspects – the design, the light, the digital work, the complexity of live streaming a performance – are realised to a high quality. Yet its technical ambition seems to have overshadowed thinking about dramatic essentials: character development, a script that varies in tone or shifts in rhythm and any sense of surprise are palpably lacking. From the moment the first scene unfolds it is clear where the story is going to end and the characters have to be written as well below any convincing intelligence for a pair of professional scientists not to see it too. It’s intriguing to see the ways live action can intersect with digital work in this way and the world it attempts to bring to life is nastily believable, but to make it interesting theatre the stagecraft needs such careful working too.

Creative Acts

Beccy Smith sees Me, Mother at Circusfest, prompting a reflection on new adventures in motherhood and the arts

It was in a theatre that my experience of motherhood finally began, after two days solid of warm-up acts. An operating theatre, sure, but an environment whose concentrated gaze, lights, transformations and undeniable drama were qualities that felt recognisable, through the epidural haze, from my professional work. I’ve been a theatre maker for nearly 15 years and a mother for just one, yet it’s fascinating and challenging to discover just how mutually exclusive these creative acts, which share so much common ground, are seen to be. Culturally, I was struck after giving birth by the paucity of representation or discussion of this process and of the lived reality of motherhood in novels, film and the visual arts (an ellipsis that must contribute to some of the fascination exerted by shows like One Born Every Minute). In theatre, the challenges of creating work in this evening-centred industry are practical as well as cultural. Yet by missing out the experiences of mothers in the theatre, we are denying audiences as well as artists. There are a growing number of practitioners starting to focus on redressing the balance.

Matilda Leyser

Since 2014 when her son was two, aerialist and trapeze artist Matlida Leyser has been holding Open Space (following the Devoted and Disgruntled model, a company with whom she is associate director) meetings for mothers and carers of small children who are also attempting to sustain a creative practice. These go under the name Mothers who Make.

Issues arising at the meetings highlight both the very real practical (financial and time) issues in which this problem is steeped and the significant emotional issues faced by highly creative and competent people, mostly women, who face crises of meaning and identity when unable to pursue their established careers due to motherhood. Through the meetings, which initially ran over the course of a year hosted by BAC, a clear need was articulated whose momentum has followed through into satellite groups being set up in other cities around the country as well as the launch of a national campaign – Parents in Performing Arts [http://www.pipacampaign.com/] – launched last October. This initiative is supported by industry-wide partnerships and spearheaded by inclusive theatre company Prams in the Hall. So far it’s been a conversation and a campaign, but now Leyser has placed the subject creatively centrestage in the first stages of a new production called Me, Mother which brings these experiences vividly to life whilst itself acting as a demonstration of the rich contributions mothers (of course!) still have to offer the industry.

As a practice, circus feels like it sits (or flies? Swings!) at the more extreme end of antithesis with motherhood: at the form’s heart are physical feats which no pregnant woman would (we imagine) risk, and which no soft mother’s body could achieve. Yet of course circus artists get pregnant and of course, after becoming mothers, undergoing that great transformation, they remain themselves – practitioners who need to work and artists with the skill to express in this form.

Me, Mother: Marianna De Sanctis and her daughter Mae Lestage

In Me, Mother this dichotomy is placed at the core of the performance. Five circus performers, four of them mothers and the fifth with motherhood on her mind, share deeply personal stories, scientific and historic fact about birth and motherhood, whilst populating the compact stage of the Roundhouse Studio with an array of circus equipment and lo-fi performance (casual slack rope walks; exercise routines on the trapeze). The performance has been created after just a week working together in a room, sometime with their children present, and its contingent quality is reinforced by the scratch score created and mixed live by musician Elizabeth Westcott. The improvisatory elements of the show, which moves through a handwritten structure Leyser has pinned to the wall, also serves a dramaturgical point – mothering creativity is often snatched and solutions (in both art and parenting) determined by the available space and time, or made up on the spot. This kind of open dramaturgy, where artists support one another and reach mutual decisions live about what is to be shared and how, feels inclusive and non-hierachical. It is at its clearest in the opening sequence, where the performers vie to share illustrative stories about one another. Leyser and her company create a very warm, generous atmosphere in which their stories can be shared which create a community with the audience – they are there with us not for us.

There are times when this quality can also feel too loose. As seen on its opening night, there were moments of too much tentativeness which distracted – energy dropped. Moments of potential felt suddenly stifled by a lack of follow-through which limited some of the transformative possibilities of the inspiring acts and stories on display. The hour-long performance is prefaced with an installation sharing interviews recorded with these and other circus mothers about their experiences. It’s an inclusive opener to frame the field (and also to situate the performance in the context of the wider research project of which it forms part), but in juxtasposition with the show, it is a reminder of how statistics and anecdotes are no stand-in for the artistry and vulnerability of live performance. There are magic moments in this show, and they live largely in the powerfully crafted stories shared by some of the performers – of birth, of pregnancy and of returning to work. There’s still more to discover about how to incorporate this content to the circus forms its discusses rather than placing them alongside one another (hardly surprising after just a week’s work), but nevertheless, when the transformations occur the crafted storytelling of human experience holds us in a powerful moment of connection and in these moments we see how art paradoxically transcend the artist’s immediate circumstance as well as being viscerally empowered by it. Of course there are some battles for which we need politics – affordable childcare, the possibility for flexible working (although as I found out when producing the all-female team of Three Generations of Women recently, simply agreeing set finishing times, and sticking to them, made a world of difference) but, when it works, it is the art itself that offers everyone a deeper imaginative understanding of just why this is all worth fighting for.

Me, Mother: mother and baby rehearsals

Another artist interested in fully incorporating the experience of motherhood to creative practice is Duska Radosavljeviḉ through her Mums and Babies Ensemble – a manual for which was published with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) last year. The idea of the Ensemble is quietly revolutionary – to look for models that allow the incorporation of babies to the rehearsal room, not as problems to be solved but as creative contributors to a piece of work. The inclusive ethos underpinning the idea underpins a publication that aims to disseminate the practice by acting as template for other theatre parents to create their own versions of the experiment. Structured as a list of ingredient components, the books offers plenty of very straightforward, practical problem-solving devising suggestions (A table which illustrates, ’this is what you will plan to happen, and this is what is likely to actually happen,’ for example). This sort of approach begins to broaden out the publication’s relevance: here we find not only useful sensibility for the recreation of the process, but helpful attitudinal understanding about devising in general, and parenting too. And once again I am struck by the relevance and connectedness of parenthood and creativity. I now feel confident that my creative vision as a dramaturg and writer has expanded and nuanced as a result of the experience and continues to grow. I am more honest, more dynamic with my time. The question remains, though, will I be supported in the capacity to turn this new potential into work?

Of course the problems discussed here are not reserved for the theatre industry: parents of every ilk face profound challenges and difficult decisions about how to combine necessary work and/or meaningful careers when attempting to integrate with them raising children. Yet it is arguable that the representation of mothers as makers and the portrayal of the parenting experience within our cultural conversations is an essential step in making the case for the political work that needs to follow. Because when mothering and art are rendered mutually exclusive the vital realities of these experiences are made invisible; and what’s more, as well as undermining legions of inspiring and talented women, our cultural life becomes poorer and less representative by this exclusion.

MES: Me, Mother, directed by Matilda Leyser., was presented in Circusfest at Roundhouse, 21 April–23 April 2016. It was seen by Beccy Smith on 21 April 2016.

The Mums & Babies Ensemble: A Manual, written by Duška Radosavljević, Annie Rigby, Lena Šimić and babies Joakim, Nina and James, is published by the Institute for theArt and Practice of Dissent at Home, Liverpool, 2015, and can be purchased online from Unbound http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/products/the-mums-and-babies-ensemble-a-manual

See also The Mother by Dorothy Max Prior, published on Total Theatre Explores: http://totaltheatre.org.uk/explores/reflections/mother.html

The Total Theatre Explores research project was undertaken between 2003-2005. The Explores legacy lives on in its dedicated website, hosted within the Total Theatre site, which is intended as a permanent resource set up to celebrate the work of women practitioners of physical and visual performance, give insight into a diverse range of working practices by women artists, and provide information of use to anyone interested in women working within physical and visual performance.

See www.totaltheatre.org.uk/explores

Lois Weaver: What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex

Ex-country and western singer turned lesbian performance artist, Tammy WhyNot is the alter ego of veteran performance artist Lois Weaver, who has been making projects that explore direct experiences of social issues for the past six years. This bouffant-wigged, kitten-heeled persona is outrageous enough, yet identifiable enough, to invite confidences. As Tammy, Weaver collaborates and converses with a range of participants (here older people’s groups and assisted living community groups in Brighton) before bringing her findings together in a highly inclusive performance format, that shares public experience of a range of issues, where the social meets the personal.

Here our subject is sex. Specifically, sex for older people (as self- or societally-defined): the ways desire and intimacy can morph within more mature relationships (casual or long term) and the impacts these changes have on private lives. It’s a taboo topic, though this only becomes really clear to me in the feeling of liberation I discover as more and more audience members open up around me about their experiences.

Weaver has developed a lovely formula for producing genuine sharing and discussion – moving between audience members with a changing, unpredictable selection of well thought through questions that kickstart conversation. She clambers in amongst us, up close and personal, with prompts that are just open enough to allow multiple interpretation, just cheeky enough to invite confidences if you want to share. As a facilitator Tammy is a brilliant interlocutor, warm and kind with a fine judgement in just the right follow-up questions, and fearless enough to carry us with her curiosity.

The project’s collaborations with local community groups are also highly effective. Tammy greets many of the audience as we arrive as old friends, opening out the sense of inclusivity to include the whole room, and the small backing group she’s put together from her outreach participants who shyly provide choruses and choreography to the inevitable country and western set pieces are completely charming. And it’s when WhyNot invites them to share some of their remarkable views and experiences she has discovered that the show really comes into its own. Their idiosyncratic perspectives, honesty, and courage are really profound reminders of the uniqueness of each of our life stories. In these moments, the audience fractures into a warm community of individuals: the show succeeds in celebrating the beautiful differences between us.

This is a hybrid performance, whose structure incorporates detailed character work, live singing, music videos, confessions both live and rehearsed. The more generic and staged sections – a phone call Q & A to a doctor, songs about shopping and celebrity – felt less carefully placed in this intensely personal context; perhaps hangovers from earlier What Tammy Needs to Know productions, although they set a tone. The evening ran long, and I wished for a slightly tighter focus or perhaps greater confidence, in the interest of the public material and conversions that made up its vivid heart.

But the experience overall remained uplifting, and felt like a genuine conversation that succeeded in animating the audience and heightening the sense of real connection between us. A touching and profound piece of work that left me hoping that whether or not I’m still doing it in my 70s, I’ll remember that my experience remains valid, valuable, and interesting.