Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Mini-DRIFT in Cardiff

Jade Image For Urban Dolls

Mini-DRIFT Cardiff, the latest strand of the ongoing Drift Project, is run by Zecora Ura & Persis-Jade Maravala (Brazil/UK) in partnership with National Theatre Wales, and will take place 13–15 November 2012.

Participants are encouraged to collaborate with each other, without the goal or pressure of a performance product, but with an open environment for work to be shared. It offers a model of process and community building that aims to provoke and inspire different ways of thinking about the participants’ practice, and different contexts through which ideas are exchanged. These will include: training, performing, nightly sharings of process, feedback, one-on-one sessions, and insight into artists’ own practice.

Participants are invited to articulate their practice, interests and their ‘idea/project’ which will be used during the mini-DRIFT.  This is an opportunity to engage in dynamic dialogue with a number of other artists and their practices, as well as a chance for new collaborations to emerge in preparation for the following day.

Mini-Drift Residency leaders Jorge Lopes Ramos and Persis-Jade Maravala are joint artistic directors of Zecora Ura (Brazil/UK) and the Hotel Medea trilogy. As joint leaders of the Cardiff mini-DRIFT they will be mentoring artists through performance and coaching methods in the fields of audience participation, artistic vision and project management as well as performer training.

For further details, please get in touch with Abdul Shayek onabdulshayek@nationaltheatrewales.org or call 07545 915 185
Drift participants will selected through a shortlisting process.

Critics Take to the Hills (of Tuscany)

Yael Karavan and onlookers scompiglio

The three Cs: creator, curator and critic. How do these roles relate and interact with each other? Is the fact that so many performance artists and theatre-makers are also curators (of projects, festivals, events) a uniquely contemporary phenomenon? If the roles of theatre-maker and critic cross over does that diminish or enhance each role? Is there an argument for the critic maintaining distance, a step away from the making and doing of creating theatre or art work? These questions are an ongoing interest and concern for me – perhaps because I am (or have been) all three simultaneously, and indeed often wear many other additional hats simultaneously (dramaturg, choreographer, teacher – and as is often the way in live performance, absolutely any job that is needed done on show day).

And of course Total Theatre was founded by artists, and exists to give a voice to artists – so most of our contributors and reviewers are themselves primarily theatre-makers or performance artists, and we have an ongoing interest in promoting the idea that the creator can be a critic, and the critic a creator. And indeed that both or either can curate – in the fields of practice that Total Theatre focuses on, such as experimental theatre, live art and streets arts, it is common practice for artists to take responsibility for presenting their own and other artists’ work.

So it seemed logical to develop my interest in these questions into an informal lecture, which I’ve been taking to various people and places around the world. I’m always intrigued by the difference in response from place to place – but almost universal is the cry that ‘we really need something like Total Theatre here!’

Most recently, I had the pleasure of travelling to Italy to visit the Tenuta dello Scompiglio, an extraordinary arts centre cum organic farm and vineyard that is the ongoing project, passion – obsession, even – of artist and theatre-maker, Feldenkrais teacher, and curator extraordinaire Cecilia Bertoni. The purpose of the visit was to deliver the above lecture and to run workshops with a group of young Italian art critics, gathered together to explore notions of cross-artform practice (‘transversality’ seems to be the current preferred term). My time spent at Scompiglio also gave me the opportunity to see (in the first week of the residency) the same works that the young critics were seeing and writing about: which included a concert that was part of an ongoing celebration of the centenary of John Cage; and a landscape art commission called Portals, which awarded three prizes for landscape art, and commissioned a quartet of performance artists (including the UK’s Yael Karavan) to create an intervention / response to these three works and an animation of the journey through the site.

The group were a mixed bunch, although there seemed to be something of a swing towards graduates in Art History – some were practising artists as well as critics, and some were curators, but many had lived exclusively in the world of research and critique. The groups had all seen a number of artworks together – the afore-mentioned John Cage concert in the nearby city of Lucca, and the inauguration of Portals on-site at Scompiglio – and our first formal meeting was an opportunity to discuss the works seen – and indeed to talk about the pitfalls of critiquing work.

Naturally enough, most of the common critical concerns and pitfalls emerged throughout the conversation itself! These pitfalls included the tendency for a group of critics to start to have one collective opinion (on some aspects of a work, anyway) – the hotel bar drink after the show syndrome, we could call it! Then there is the danger of previous knowledge: if you know what the artist’s intention is, what you ‘should’ be witnessing, that will affect your response: most of the group were surprised to learn that I don’t read programme notes before seeing work to review – preferring to experience the work with an innocent eye first. I also noted (and commented on) a tendency for critics to respond to a non-existent artwork or show that the critic thought ‘ought’ to have been, rather than what was actually presented!

We also discussed the importance of accepting, as the absolute base starting point, the artist’s chosen artform or mode of practice. This might seem obvious enough, but believe me, I once read a review (by a critic on a national newspaper no less) who queried why a puppet-theatre company chose to use puppets rather than actors…

Other interesting issues that arose in discussion included: the ways in which an audience changes a live event from one day to the next; the way audiences respond differently to an indoor, seated environment (such as a music concert) versus an outdoor promenade performance (such as the commissioned live ‘interventions’ and performances placed alongside the Portals commissioned work); whether it helps if a critic interviews or shadows an artist before seeing the finished work; and if the work being presented is not original but an interpretation (as in the case of the Cage work), if the interpreters ought to remain true to the artist’s intention in its staging.

On another day, after the Three Cs lecture presentation, the discussion focused more on the nitty-gritty of reviewing, with the discussion including a reflection on the need to open the heart and feel what is being presented as well as thinking about it; the importance of being a good witness rather than just a conveyor of opinion; and the need to overcome the fear of ‘not understanding’ – particularly in cross-artform or ‘tranversal’ work, as we will all as critics be more informed and knowledgeable on one aspect of the work than on another. And yes, whilst we can all – whatever age – continue to amass knowledge and experience on as many artists and as many aspects of art-making as possible, we will none of us ever know everything.

Ultimately, my advice to these bright and shining young Italian critics was that if they were always willing to learn, always open to new knowledge and experience, and always ready to admit publicly to their strengths and weaknesses, their areas of expertise and areas of less experience – and to remember that it is fine to say ‘I don’t know’ – then they’d do alright!

Just to bring home the importance of constantly learning, and constantly shaking up what we know and how we work, we spent the next day on the use of creative writing techniques as a tool for critics – with the outcome some very lovely pieces of writing  (fiction, poetry, criticism, and some things that were hard to define!) And that came after a morning of energetic theatre games, on the grounds that if you shake up the body, you shake up the mind…

Dorothy Max Prior presented her lecture The Three Cs: Creator, Curator, Critic and her workshop The Creative Response at Trasversalita della Critica, held at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio (which very loosely translates as the Retreat of the Trickster) 14–28 September 2012. The indoor spaces at Scompiglio, theatre and art galleries – will be inaugurated on 27 October 2012.

Contact Dorothy Max Prior at: max@totaltheatre.org.uk

For more about Scompiglio see http://www.delloscompiglio.org/

Forced Ents BAC Blitz!

From love and death to sex and laundry, from shipwrecks to falling snow ~ personal anecdotes rub shoulders with imaginary movies, and half-remembered novels bump into distorted fairytales in Forced Entertainment’s latest show, The Coming Storm, reviewed here by Total Theatre earlier this year. Trademark black humour, a collage of arresting images and an anarchic performance style… Find full tour dates here: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/page/3020/Tour-Dates

The run of The Coming Storm at Battersea Arts Centre will be joined by three nights (in November) of Artistic Director Tim Etchells’ piece Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First… a long free-associating monologue that tumbles from topic to topic to create a vast, failing iteration and explanation of the world, performed by GATZ actor Jim Fletcher. See both on Neon Friday and evening of performance, neon signs, cocktails and readings from Tim Etchells new book Vaccum Days. Find Full details here: http://www.bac.org.uk/whats-on/neon-friday/

Sacred Season at Chelsea Theatre Launches

Shabnam at Sacred Chelsea Theatre

SACRED, Chelsea Theatre’s exploration of live art and contemporary performance, launches this October for an exciting new season extending to February 2013.

SACRED’s launch week kicks off with So Below, from Chelsea Theatre Associate Artist Karen Christopher, (Formerly part of Chicago’s Goat Island) and Gerard Bell on 19 and 20 October at 7.30pm, followed by a week of shows that includes an evening with celebrated poet and author Jeremy Reed, who will be reading from Piccadilly Bongo, which he co-wrote with Marc Almond, on 22 October at 8pm.  Shabnam Shabazi (pictured above) performs Body House (Vers. 2), an exploration of physical and psychological displacement, on 24 October at 7.30pm, and on 25 October at 8pm Dominic Johnson examines a secular approach to disaster and catastrophe in Departure, with live tattooing from Alex Binnie and featuring special guests Mouse, Jamie Lewis Hadley and Traumata.

Following this action-packed opening week, the SACRED season continues throughout the winter months with an eclectic mix of established and emerging artists which includes a joint SACRED / BAC presentation of Tim Etchells’ Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First (see here for more details).

Chelsea Theatre is at World’s End Place, London SW10 0DR
Tel: 020 7352 1967. For further details and to book, see www.chelseatheatre.org.uk

A response to Aqui e Agora / Here and Now

A response to Os Bem-Intencionados / The Well-Intentioned, Brazilian company LUME Teatro’s new work in progress…

We are called into the ‘green room’ at the Sede de LUME – the company’s rehearsal and workshop space – and see a number of tables furnished with lime green satinette cloths, arranged in a circle around a dancefloor. In one corner is a trio of musicians, and in another a cocktail bar bearing a jumble of bottles and glasses. The bar has something of a late 1960s/early 1970s look. LUME actors are in the space – some in character and dressed accordingly (with that 60s/70s look also coming through into the costumes, which have something of a psychedelic vibe), some in a half-dressed state, and neutral mode. I am directed to a table near to the musicians, and sit down to watch the arrival of the other ‘dancehall guests’ – at this work-in-progress run it is only members of the immediate LUME family who are attending. As the band strikes up a lively dance tune, and the actors circulate, greeting us and placing beer bottles and glasses on our tables, we eagerly await the start of the night’s entertainment.

It is Monday 21 June and I have just arrived in Barão Geraldo – I have come from Rio where, by coincidence, I have just presented a show that is also an interactive piece set in a mock-dancehall – so I am very keen to see what LUME have done with a similar starting point. Inevitably there are crossover points, in particular in the breaking down of the actor-audience divide and the play on dancehall stereotypes, influenced in my case by the film Le Bal, and perhaps in LUME’s case by the Brazilian film that similarly investigates a dancehall’s life, Chega de Saudade – and we can note here that Os Bem-Intencionados will premiere in the glorious União Fraterna dancehall in Sao Paulo where that film was shot.

But Os Bem-Intencionados is essentially a very different beast to these other dancehall investigations, not least in its central preoccupation with the question of what it means to be an artist – our seven LUME actors playing a bunch of dancehall regulars who each have aspirations to artistic recognition and stardom. Collectively, they are a group of well-intentioned wannabes. They have missed out on the big time, but haven’t given up yet – their moment may yet be to come. Os Bem-Intencionados explores the desperation of the obsession with fame that pervades our current times; and ironically reflects on what it means to be a performing artist.

The show is very different to other theatre work I have previously seen by the company, and is presented as a collaboration with director and dramaturg Grace Passô. I am pleased to discover through this and subsequent viewings that despite being (in some aspects) a departure from familiar territory for LUME it is, no doubt about it, a LUME Teatro show…

The piece has a fair amount of spoken text which, with my limited knowledge of Portuguese, I struggle to understand – but it is a work rich in physical action, visual imagery and music, so plenty to appreciate. And I would also argue that much of what we understand about a given character or situation, in real life or in theatre, is perceived as much through the semiotics of vocal tone, phrasing, and gesture than through the semantics of the spoken language. So I feel that even without seeing a translation of the script, I have really experienced the work presented.

And so, on with the show…

There’s some minutes of general ambience and scene-setting, the music playing and the dancehall regulars (LUME actors) circulating – inviting guests in and making them welcome. Then, a change of tone and Ricardo Puccetti takes the floor. There is a man, he says, sitting here at a table in the dancehall (he points to a bare space), who is raising his arm to attract the waiter’s attention, impatient but perhaps too self-effacing or nervous to really insist that he gets this attention. Jesser de Souza skids across the floor bearing a table aloft, places it in the space, and with a flourish adds a tablecloth and a chair. Ricardo is still in storyteller mode, holding his arm aloft in an illustrative manner, but at some point over the next few minutes he dons a multi-coloured chiffon shirt and a wig to become that tall and lanky and somewhat nervous man with the raised arm, Márcio Martin. Meanwhile, Jesser’s character Gonçalves Rodrigüez – an over-cheery friend-to-all-the-world who desperately wants to have a good time, but is harbouring an inner melancholy – juggles a flurry of thrown bottles to set upon the table. He wears a red suit and a rather loud shirt, and also sports a wig. Márcio and Gonçalves, so different in size and stature, make for a comical pairing, played upon with a clown-like intention by the two actors.

One by one the other dancehall regulars arrive to sit at the table. There’s Nataly Menuzes (Ana Cristina Colla, resplendent in a curly blonde wig) for whom ‘beleza e tudo’ (‘beauty is everything’). She’s a wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, curvaceous lady who laughs loudly, gesticulates wildly, and flirts madly with all and sundry. Maria Alice Elise (Raquel Scott Hirson) is a girlish woman for whom the word ‘kooky’ could have been invented – a scatty whirlwind of a person (dressed in shades of pink and purple, with hipster shorts and halter-neck top exposing her bare midriff, a jaunty cap on her head) who is constantly checking her mobile, talking in a simpering sing-song voice, scoffing chocolate bars, and tossing her shoulder-length locks petulantly.

Maria Alice’s friend Melice-Z (Naomi Silman) gets dragged onstage prostate, by her legs – as it would seem is often the case, she is too incapacitated by drink and drugs to get there under her own steam. Having arrived just about in one piece, she is propped up on a chair only to almost instantly collapse in a heap, an elongated arm trailing from the chair, with a cigarette dangling from between her fingertips. It’s hard not to think of Amy Winehouse. Rodrigo Omett’o (Renato Ferracini) is another wigged man – a rock-n-roll wannabe, tight-trousered, furrow-browed and brooding, eying up the ladies with what he hopes is an alluring come-on. A little apart from the rest of the group is Dagoberto Leão (Carlos Simioni), an older man, handsome and aloof, dressed in a white suit, flowered shirt, and Panama hat. Dagoberto seems to pride himself (like the lion he is named after) on being king of the pack, but chooses for the most part not to get too drawn into the dancehall shenanigans. He often stays at his own separate table, reading a magazine, ignoring his colleagues. It would seem that for him, his own fantasy world (be it sexual, or the lust for fame) is more important than the sordid realities of daily life. Dagberto has a mic in front of him, and he soundchecks his voice, asking us if we can hear him. He reflects on the eccentricities of his colleagues, and sings us an opening song. We are readily drawn into the world of the well-intentioned, where fantasy and reality collide with a bang…

The show is divided into two halves, with an interval (or perhaps an ‘interlude’ or even a false interval – more on that later!) dividing up the two very different ‘acts’. In part one, spoken text plays a larger part as scenes are set and characters explored – although as I reflected earlier it is arguable what proportion of any ‘story’ is learnt through the language of words. For my part, there is a little too much text – and I am willing to accept that it may well seem this way because I don’t understand enough of the language spoken to really appreciate the words, but I do also feel that often the physical actions, gestures and visual images are doing the job well enough anyway. Part two sees a stronger reliance on the more ‘usual’ LUME non-verbal languages of movement and ensemble physical theatre. In both sections, the live music and song provides a throughline.

On this first run that I see, I find myself drawn most strongly to the Márcio and Nataly characters (as played by Ricardo and Cris). Their stories seem to be at the heart of the action – and without offering any ‘spoilers’, the traditional Aristotelian theatre requirements of conflict, denouement, and resolution seem most clearly played out in their journeys.

I get to see a second run on the following night (Tuesday 22 June), and it is interesting to note how different the show feels on this occasion. Partly of course because any live show or rehearsal is very different on successive nights; partly because the actors are now more in the flow of the work (Monday’s run was the first after a long break in rehearsal schedule); partly because interesting changes have been made, including to the ‘interval’ dilemma – which I am coming to, I promise; partly because I am sat at a different table, so have (literally) a different view; partly because I now have some knowledge of the piece, a grasp of its overall shape, so am taken by different aspects. So on Tuesday night, I find myself – for whatever reasons – drawn most strongly to the enigmatic machismo of Rodrigo (Renato’s character), and the flighty Maria Alice (played by Raquel).

Melice-Z (Naomi) and Gonçalves (Jesser) are consistently strong presences on both nights – although Jesser’s Rodrigues is on particularly good form on Tuesday. Simi’s Dagoberto is hard to grasp as a character – he is, in any case, pitched as someone a little apart from the rest of the dancehall regulars – yet is obviously the ‘glue’ that holds the piece together through song and commentary, and whose own personal journey is perhaps the most tragic (although bathos and pathos might be more appropriate terms than ‘tragedy’).

There is a wealth of imagery to reflect on after the runs. On night one, I am sat at a table at which a wild massacre of a bunch of roses occurs – on the second night I take voyeuristic pleasure in watching someone else jump in terror as a knife flashes past them. I enjoy the way objects are used in the piece – that knife has many and various roles: chopping the flowers, drawing a sinister outline round a fallen body (itself a repeated visual/physical motif), and stabbing a polystyrene wig-head holder with venom. Mirrors, large and small, are important to the piece, as are shoes, handbags (and their contents) and jewellery. And those wigs are used almost like masks – donned and doffed to put on or take off a character; to play with notions of the real and the artifice; to explore notions of exposure and embarrassment. Drinks bottles and glasses (tall, small, plain and coloured) act as more than props, becoming players in the action and signifiers of the characters’ states-of-mind and intentions. They also act as conductors, relaying energy between the worlds of the actors and the audience: the beer bottles placed on our tables contain real beer (or even cachaca for one lucky table!), and we are encouraged to drink throughout the show; bottles are thrown and caught, crashed into and broken; characters play out their pensiveness with circling fingers that set the glasses singing; and a very lovely scene exploring Marcio’s social inadequacies is played out with a bottle of champagne, in an interaction with a female audience member, who is cast as the object of his desperate romantic desires. Inevitably, the flirtation backfires as Marcio screws up, the wrong words escaping from his lips – a moment of desperate humiliation that sets him on course for an explosion of pent-up frustration…

As for the physical language of the piece, there is much that would be familiar to LUME audiences and some that is perhaps less familiar! A scene that depicts some of the characters at some indeterminate point in time in the future, uses costume and props (a terrifying Botox-faced transparent mask, a back-to-front jacket with shortened arms clutching a pair of champagne flutes, a large woven basket thrown over a head, a veil covering a bent-over body) in a beautifully stylised dance depicting ageing bodies, fading glamour and the endless repetition of this hedonistic lifestyle (’You’re are so repetitive, so repetitive, repetitive!’ screams Nataly at an earlier point in the show – setting up an interest in repetition as both dramatic theme and theatrical device).

In other scenes the familiar LUME physical theatre ‘toolbox’ is employed to great effect – the use of different levels in the space (a woman on top of a stepladder; a woman crawling along the ground); the ‘panther’ roda or circle as things go a little too far, and one character is stripped of her dignity by a grunting and growling herd; the use of the ‘hero and chorus’ technique, for example in a scene where Raquel’s character receives an important phone call offering her an interview or audition, and the whole group shuffle round her, agog for more information. Gestural movements are repeated and enlarged upon from one section to another: that desperate and hopeful raised arm; or a baying laugh exposing wolf-like teeth; or a stifled Geisha-like giggle with hand to mouth). Popular dance moves – from samba and rumba bolero to tango and tap – are deconstructed and stylised, with one delightful moment being the terribly-tall and lanky, high-heeled (and inevitably unstable) Melice-Z (Naomi) and the dapper and fast-footed, but far shorter, Gonçalves (Jesser) dissolving to the floor in an undignified heap, as what should have been a passionate Rudolf Valentino style tango oversway goes a little wrong…

The music is a key element: the trio of live musicians (keyboard, accordion and percussion) keep things moving with a swing, under the expert leadership of musical director Marcello Onofri; providing accompaniment to both the physical action, and the torch songs sung by Dagoberto – which include a rather splendid rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

Oh and that interval question! It was reflected on after the second run, and also in a rehearsal I attended the day after. Apparently, in an earlier incarnation, the company had played with the idea of two separate acts in this 120-minute show, with a clear-cut interval (announced by the band leader). For these two runs, this had been abandoned in favour of a more fluid sort of quasi-interval, with some of the actors staying in the space, but the audience free to leave (to smoke or use the bathroom). The outcome of the discussion and reflection would seem to be that in its next incarnation, the company will play with the notion of a ‘false interval’ or interlude, in which the band take a break and recorded music plays, but actors and audience stay in the space, with the actors/characters exploring a different relationship to space and audience in that interlude.

Sadly, I will not be around to see this next stage – but I return to England happy to have at least witnessed the story so far, in both the very early rehearsals I sat in on in late March, and these far more advanced ones in late June. I have been very glad to have had the privilege of attending these rehearsals and runs – and to have played a small part in the development of the show by providing a few short dance classes in ballroom dancing and tap!

Rehearsals have stopped for now, the company and director busy with other projects, but on 12 July they resume work. And on 27 and 28 July 2012, Os Bem-Intencionados will premiere at that aforementioned beautiful old dancehall in Sao Paulo, before settling in to a two-month run throughout August and September at SESC Pompeia (also in Sao Paulo).

One of the things I felt seeing those runs on two nights in succession is that this is a show that could well be seen a number of times. The different viewpoint depending on where you sit, and the small personal interactions between actors and audience that change from night to night, make for a potentially radically different experience of the show. And there is so much to take in that just once is not enough. So if you have the opportunity, I urge you to go and see the show not just once, but on more than one occasion! There will be plenty to entertain you as you drink in these stories from the frontline of frustrated romantic intention; plenty of food for thought in the reflections on thwarted artistic ambition; and plenty to nourish your heart and soul in this expose of the fears, failures and frailties of these seven characters.

We are all, we realise, like them – all well intentioned, all doing our best in this dance of life, despite the obstacles on the path. And we all, ultimately, do it ‘our way’.

http://www.lumeteatro.com.br/