Author Archives: 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

Richard DeDomenici, Pop Will Eat Itself: A Quickfire Response

‘Hello my name is Richard DeDomenici. People often ask me what motivates me as an artist. I often say something like: I want to create the kind of uncertainty that leads to possibility…’

So, here we are – The Basement on a Friday afternoon, embracing uncertainty and possibility: it’s a sunny day but we are underground in the almost-dark, gathered in the cool (in both senses of the word) main space of ‘Brighton’s buzzy home for avant-garde theatre’ as the venue was dubbed by the Independent’s Alice Jones.

We have the pleasure of Richard’s company and guidance for a Quickfire workshop – Quickfire being The Basement’s latest wheeze, a series of one-day workshops with an established artist which leads to a performance the next day at Supper Club, a once-a-month platform for live art and experimental performance.

The group stand in a circle a little warily, the ice not yet broken. It’s most definitely a mixed bunch: the youngest of the group is an 18 year-old who has just left school, on a gap year; at the other end of the age-and-experience spectrum is a 50-something actor with a wealth of experience on stage and TV and a producer of cabaret events. There’s a Laban-trained dancer with a strong interest in live art, a University of Chichester Ensemble Theatre graduate, a would-be stand-up comedian, and a student on the legendary Visual and Performing Arts course at Brighton University (the course that spawned Robert Pacitti and Marisa Carnesky amongst many other feted alumni). I’m there as a fly-on-the-wall, but I soon get drawn into the game…

After the usual name exchanges, we are given a five-minute intro to Richard DeDomenici’s work, onscreen and live – in effect, an extract from his latest show, Popaganda (which was also referenced at Supper Club the following night, and which I got to see in full when it was presented at The Basement in the week after the Supper Club appearance).

One of the characteristics of Richard’s practice is that he often cannibalises his own stuff – one project getting referenced within another in a kind continuously building body of work that incorporates all that has gone before. We could see his life as an artist as one great big ongoing game of Blob. Thus, previous projects such as his Unattended Baggage intervention (in which a seemingly abandoned suitcase is left in key sites in city centres; when approached, the suitcase grows legs and scuttles off), and his legendary walk down a Chicago street with head hooded in a plastic bag and hands tied behind his back, both find their way onscreen into the new show.

He notes (in his Quickfire workshop, at Supper Club and in Popaganda – so obviously an idea he is fond of!) that he has ‘shamanistically’ managed to pre-empt major world events, citing for example that the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture and abuse scandal broke just weeks after the Chicago performance work was enacted; and ominously his Attempt to Earthquake-Proof Tokyo, which featured the installation of bobbly strap-hangers in all sorts of random places, was enacted in Japan not long before the devastating earthquake of 2011.

Not only has it become a given that Richard’s shows will keep you in the loop about his previous works, but also that revisiting past works sometimes becomes a new aspect of the current work. But what with Abu Ghraib and the Japan earthquake – not to mention the unfortunate murdered-spy-in-the-suitcase scandal that has made him feel a bit uncomfortable about Unattended Baggage – there are some actions that it is getting hard to consider revisiting. He does, however, get to ‘check out the Checkpoint Charlie Museum’ in Berlin to see what happened to the Looking for Freedom exhibit he ‘covertly installed’ (well, stuck on the wall in plain view of anyone who might be watching, actually!) three years earlier. Apparently, David Hasselhof (I don’t watch TV and sometimes have embarrassing gaps in my popular culture references – he is apparently a pop singer who had a hit with Looking for Freedom, an anthem filmed on the Berlin Wall) had given an interview to a German magazine saying he found it ‘a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum’ and – well, Richard to the rescue. And yes, you’ve guessed, three years on Looking for Looking for Freedom reveals that it is still there where Richard stuck it – either because it hasn’t yet been detected, or because the museum are grateful to Richard for providing a necessary exhibit that they’d crucially overlooked.

The blurb on Popaganda on the Arts Admin website describes Richard as ‘a jetlagged litterpicker of the world’s cultural landfill’. He certainly does get around, but it’s not all exotic hotspots – he is often to be found in his hometown, Watford, or its arch-rival Croydon (a rivalry probably invented and most definitely nurtured by DeDomenici). There’s a lot about Croydon in Popaganda – the Destroydon project at the sadly now-closed Croydon Clocktower; and a very funny reflection on the use of Croydon as a film location stand-in for Manhattan, and how that notion can be subverted by making films about Croydon in New York.

Humour in general, and satire in particular, are paramount in his work. The humour verges from the downright silly (Swivelympics on office chairs, anyone?) to the ludicrously funny and daring – none more so than in his other Olympics-related project, DeDomenici Torch 2012 in which he toured the country running ahead of the official torch-bearers appropriately-attired and bearing a convincing-looking fake torch (the real ones are pretty fake looking, so they aren’t too hard to fake). One of the craziest aspects of this project was that even when people realised he was ‘fake’, because he looked like a real torch-bearer they wanted their photos taken with him. An interesting reflection on make-believe versus real-life that goes right to the heart of performance-making…

Which brings us back to the Quickfire participants and Richard’s workshop. As someone who most often makes work in public spaces rather than on stages, how was he going to approach leading a workshop that aimed to create three-minute staged performances? The answer to that was a well-held workshop that used a variety of techniques to give participants the opportunity to develop whatever forms of work they were happy with. Some Augusto Boal (via Larry Bogart) physical exercises; a creative writing section that moved from free-writing to sharing in pairs, to re-tellings to the whole group (raising all sorts of interesting questions about truth and fiction, owning the story, and the ethics of a storyteller’s poetic licence with someone else’s personal material); and later (after I had sadly had to leave the group to it) an outing to Brighton’s Poundshops (or 99p shops for those keen to budget their resources) to find the one object that would best serve as the vehicle for the storytelling when staged.

It was interesting arriving at Supper Club to witness the resulting three-minute Quickfire works, stories I’d heard in a raw state earlier now transformed into a series of performance pieces all loosely worked around the theme of ‘relationships’, using many and various forms and techniques.

Some were pretty close to the original pieces of writing – a story about a childhood den inside a wardrobe is retold sitting cross-legged on the floor, a hand-held torch lighting up the actor’s face. Others had undergone a radical process – a tale of shame at a boys’ football club becomes a carefully honed and cleverly choreographed series of physical actions and whittled-down words with a plastic football as a prop. One performer, with a story about her childhood hideaway shed being destroyed by her parents when she went off travelling, had obviously been encouraged to let out the anger she’d suppressed all these years – but found a way to do so that balanced outrage and humour, her parents’ cheery emails and photos documenting the destruction of the shed passed round the audience, with the mini-performance culminating in a plastic toy battered to pieces in a symbolic release of frustration. Of course these performances were raw, and of varying quality – but what Quickfire was offering was the chance to feel the fear and do it anyway. Whether you’re just starting out, or have 30 years experience, it takes guts to make a piece of work from scratch in just one afternoon, then show it the next day to a ‘real’ audience.

Richard DeDomenici was perhaps the perfect choice for the first outing of this new initiative – so much of his own work is about having the bravery to just do it, regardless of the outcome. And this bravado coupled with his trademark humour encourages a ‘whatever happens it’s all good’ attitude to audiences both of his own work and of anyone he is supporting or mentoring.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Quickfire series plays out over coming months, with sessions by Victoria Melody (Friday 2 November for Supper Club on Saturday 3 November) and Ivan Fabrega (30 November / 1 December) lined up.

For more on Quickfire and The Basement programme see here. For Popaganda tour dates see the Arts Admin website. For more on Richard DeDomenici’s work see his website and YouTube.

Mini-DRIFT in Cardiff

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)

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

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