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

Sleepwalk Collective: Amusements ¦ Photo: Bárbara Sánchez

Sleepwalk Collective: Amusements

Sleepwalk Collective: Amusements ¦ Photo: Bárbara Sánchez

A lecture theatre painted womb-red. Headphones and an instruction sheet – we’re going on a journey, welcome onboard. An empty stage, populated by a pair of lady’s shoes and a pair of rather brief briefs. The lights are dim, there’s a hum in the air. We await instructions.

Headphones on, and we are taken on an aural rollercoaster ride that pitches the thrills of the fairground against the rush of sexual excitement, the crash of the waves into our bodies as we enter the sea, and the adrenalin surge of the moment before crashing in a car or a plane. The words are poetic, rhythmical, resonant. The voice is sensuous, soporific almost, with a purr that would do Eartha Kitt proud. We are lulled, we are seduced. There are moments of total blackout that allow us to momentarily drift into other worlds. ‘This is not real,’ she says, ‘but your body doesn’t know that.’ The electrical charges are the same, the hormones pumped are the same. It’s a provocation that intrigues us: from a cognitive psychology perspective, how do we know when we are experiencing ‘reality’? We’ve seen The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we’ve played video games, we know about Artificial Intelligence. Now we are sitting here, ruminating on the fact that storytelling has always, from the dawn of time, been about transporting us to other times and places whilst we sit in the dark listening; and that theatre has always been about suspending disbelief. We are here and now, but we are also there and then.

As we come out of one such blackout, we see the shoes on the stage space have been occupied. A lone female performer, a woman in a red dress (Sleepwalk Collective’s Iara Solano Arana) is standing stock-still, speaking into a mic and smiling at us. We see her mouthing the words, and we hear the words in our ears. She toys with us, sending sound from the left to the right earphone. She dares us to look at her, really look at her. She paints us, sitting there with our headphone wires linking us together, as a multi-headed beast, there to devour her. She offers herself to our gaze, plays with the sexuality of the situation, then makes us uncomfortable with suggestions of a story of sexual abuse.

Amusements combines powerful performance, poetic writing, and daring scenographic choices to great results. It’s only the second show by this enterprising new company (and a word here to the offstage half of the equation, Sammy Metcalfe, co-creator of the company’s work) and it confirms that they are rising stars in the ‘total theatre’ firmament. A beautiful show.

www.sleepwalkcollective.com

Penny Arcade: Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

Penny Arcade: Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

Penny Arcade: Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

‘There are lesbians in this room; there are gay men in this room; there are heterosexuals in this room; there are bisexual people in this room, are there not? There are transsexual people, asexual people… There are at least five kinds of gay men in this room and they don’t agree with each other about anything! There are people in this room who don’t identify with any particular group in this room. We need a new language to communicate our truth to each other – a language that doesn’t come from academia or politics, because a political language is a language of debate, and in a language debate someone wins and someone loses…’

This call comes towards the end of Penny Arcade’s seminal show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!. Written and performed by Ms Arcade, created in collaboration with dramaturg/designer Steve Zehentner, and first performed in 1990, it’s a play that takes no prisoners – but in the best Stonewall / GLF tradition, the polemics and the partying go (sequin-gloved) hand-in-hand. The 2012 version, presented in London at the Arcola Tent for a month-long sell-out run in July, with a triumphant move for August/September to the Old Vic Tunnels, contains some additions and amendments to its core text, but remains in essence faithful to its original message – proving that although much has changed in queer art, theatre and politics over the past two decades, much else is ‘business as usual’.

The night starts, as perhaps all good nights out should, with a bevy of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed go-go dancers (male and female) performing both in the auditorium and on the stage. Then, our hostess arrives with a ‘Hey! My name is Susana Ventura but since I was 15 and raised by gay men, I’ve been called Penny Arcade.’ Intros over, we get a number of skits and sketches in which Penny plays a succession of female characters eking out a living in the sex trade – the phone girl at a massage parlour with a rapier tongue (‘What’s the difference between the half-hour and the hour? Thirty minutes, John.’); a conservative prostitute called Charlene who claims it’s all a question of economics, not sex (‘Honey, the sexual revolution did not do one thing for women in this world, except drive down the price of sex’) – before we move into a series of scenes in a more confessional-autobiographical mode that mix personal anecdote with radical perceptions.

Penny explains that being ‘raised by gay men’ doesn’t mean outings to the opera with her out father and his lover – ‘that’s a purely post-70s phenomenon’ – but rather that she was ‘taken in by a tawdry band of drag queens and their minions’. To Penny, she is what she is because of them, and ‘queer’ will always be something other than merely ‘gay’. She shares with Germaine Greer, David Hoyle and other pioneers of radical personal politics a belief that the goal is not acceptance into the establishment, but a constant querying of the sexual, social, political status quo. Like Jean Genet, she knows that the fear of the gay man is most often a fear of the feminine, and in particular the frivolous feminine.

She rails against what she calls ‘white-collar feminists’ who disapprove of striptease, burlesque and drag. There is a brilliant scene in the show in which a naked Penny (a voluptuous and beautiful 50-something) delivers a rant against a media that allows children to watch horrific scenes of war or torture on film or TV whilst censoring images of sex or nudity. What are we scared of, she asks. We’ve seen it all before, ‘there are no new holes’! The long speech ends with her saying: ‘Well, I guess by now you’ve probably forgotten I have my clothes off.’

Childhood confessions of illicit sexual behaviour with other children; reflections on the joys of being a bisexual faghag (a noble occupation); coming to terms with a relationship with a domineering mother; stepping away from an abusive working-class family suspicious of anything it deemed different or ‘other’; the horrors of the AIDS-ridden 80s; why so many lesbians prefer talking politics to having sex… the subjects come thick and fast, presented with an almost-Brechtian approach of seducing us into a exposé of a serious subject through song-and-dance and a vaudevillian staging.

There are, of course, costume and wig changes galore. There are the aforementioned go-go dancers, flashing lights, glitterballs, a specialist pole-dance interval scene and the feel-good disco music – Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, almost inevitably, is in the mix, as is Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing. There is a scene on secrets set in the dark, and a cameo appearance on film by the legendary Warhol superstar pseudo-priest Taylor Mead. There are the occasional topical additions – a reference to the ‘cyanide in the Olympic Torch’ urban myth, for example, and some surreal suggestions that eels from the Thames could be fried with rosemary and Marmite. There’s overall a kind of feisty optimism for the world, and in particular a cheer for multicultural London in which people ‘eat each other’s food and hear each other’s language’. Penny’s philosophy is ultimately one of the power of the bright lights, big city mentality to combat old-world peasant intolerances. There is also a touch of Julia from Orwell’s 1984 in her claim that the establishment ‘doesn’t want people to fuck, because people who fuck – think!’.

Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is a celebration of femininity, of eroticism, of polymorphous perversity, of the power of personal politics. Its message, twenty years on, rings out loud and clear: we will survive, we won’t sit down, we won’t shut up, we won’t go away – we’re here to party for a world that believes ‘there is just one unity’. And yes, while we are all very different from each other, we are still, ultimately, overwhelmingly similar.

www.pennyarcade.tv

Third Angel / mala voadora: What I Heard About The World

Third Angel: What I Heard About The World

Third Angel / mala voadora: What I Heard About The World

Somewhere in the world is a radio station tuned to silence; a couple so dedicated to their virtual child that they allow their real-life baby to starve to death; a bus-load of girls who are all called Natasha who cross the border to serve men’s sexual needs; a zoo that paints its mules black-and-white to pass them off as zebras; a country where only five types of male haircut are allowed.

All these stories are true. And meanwhile, the Maldives are sinking – no, stop, the Maldives aren’t sinking, the sea-level is rising – and so obviously we can all help by suppressing our gag reflex and drinking a litre of sea-water a day, as demonstrated by Chris Thorpe whose litre of tap water has had 35 grammes of salt added to it before our eyes. And that, says Chris, is equivalent to ‘a fuck-load of crisps’. And if drinking salt water kills off a few of us – well, that’ll only help things in a world so overcrowded, don’t we agree?

Chris, when he’s not puking salt water into a bucket, turns his hand to a bit of heavy-rock singer-songwriter stuff wielding an electric guitar. Also on stage is Third Angel’s leading light, Alexander Kelly, and Portuguese actor Jorge Andrade of mala voadora.

Together they’ve devised this gorgeous piece of theatre that investigates the whole question of ‘storytelling’ and its place in theatre. Media of all sorts infiltrate our every waking moment, and we find ourselves constantly swimming in a sea of stories from around the world, trying to keep our head above the water. What stories are we drawn to, how are they transmitted to us, and what do we do with the information they give us? When do we ignore things, when do we panic like a rabbit caught in headlights, and when do we act rationally in response?

Korea, Alex points out, acts as a kind of safety-valve for weirdness for us, our prejudices summed up by ‘they eat dogs’. We can relax, bask in our sanity, because all the really strange and horrible things – like people allowing their real baby to starve as they care for the virtual one – happen ‘over there’, to people who are not like us. Or are they?

The extraordinary stories pile up: a 24-hour marriage in Iran, smuggling Snow White costumes through the Gaza border, flat pack Dads in America. The stories are told verbally, physically, musically, visually – always with a visceral punch. As our three performers tell their tales they sit, stand, play, sing, and lounge around their odd junk-shop-of-the-world living room, in which there is a turquoise brocade moose, a fish tank, a large pharmacy green cross, a stuffed ferret, a coat-stand, and a couple of mismatched sofas. There’s a harrowing, yet darkly funny, climax in the re-enactment of a massacre, played out with plastic sheets, a white coverall forensic investigation suit, and a water pistol loaded with fake blood.

And meanwhile, that family in Israel are off to bed to the sound of silence coming from their radio – a very special sort of silence, a loaded silence full of possibilities.

Third Angel have made a name for themselves bridging the gap between ‘new writing’ and ‘live art’. Great to see them supported by Northern Stages, and a pleasure to witness such a thought-provoking and entertaining show. Makes you think about the world, makes you laugh about the world, makes you glad to be part of the world in all its madness – what more could you want?

www.thirdangel.co.uk

Cristian Ceresoli / Silvia Gallerano: The Shit / La Merda: The Disgust Decalogue #1

Cristian Ceresoli / Silvia Gallerano: The Shit / La Merda: The Disgust Decalogue #1

Cristian Ceresoli / Silvia Gallerano: The Shit / La Merda: The Disgust Decalogue #1

What better a setting for a rap on female insecurity about the body, sexual insecurity and fear of being judged than this? There she is – exposed, naked, sat on a high stool under harsh spotlights –  in the demonstration room of an old veterinary school, a bleak white-walled space with onlookers sat on a steeply-rising bank of wooden pews overlooking her. And our specimen of the day is: Italian woman!

The absent ‘other’ which all things relate to is Big Daddy – variously, our anti-heroine’s own suicidal father; the casting director she has to charm in order to get work; and, on a more allegorical level, Italy itself – or more specifically, patriarchal Italy, a country that has only been unified for a little over 150 years (an occasion marked with the creation of this show).

Subtitled The Disgust Decalogue #1, and with a debt acknowledged to the artistic rage of Pasolini, The Shit offers a stream-of-consciousness poetic rant that is part personal story (being apparently loosely based on autobiographical material) but which also doubles as a portrait of, and commentary on, contemporary Italian society, and in particular attitudes towards women. This is, after all, a land governed by a man who makes his money manufacturing media fodder for the masses; a man who spends his spare time cavorting with call-girls young enough to be his granddaughters.

The language of this almost-breathless monologue veers from the mock-naturalistic (worries about her ugly thighs), to fabulist (stories from the deep of octopi that eat their tentacles) to surreal (maybe she could problem-solve by eating her own thighs?).

The words have been wrought together (‘written’ seems too tame a word to describe the process here) by actor Silvia Gallerano and the show’s writer/director Cristian Ceresoli. Despite the fact that English is a Gallerano’s second language, her delivery is faultless. The work divides up into four or five ‘movements’, to steal a musical term which feels appropriate here, and each rant or rap is interspersed with a sip of water and a shifting of position on the stool. In the pauses, the lights cast a triple shadow across the ceiling and for a moment, as she sits hunched and ready to restart her howl of indignation, she seems to be a puppet waiting to be animated by words.

A truly electrifying performance that will leave you reeling and gasping for breath.

Faye Draper: Tea is an Evening Meal ¦ Photo: Oran Milstein

Faye Draper: Tea is an Evening Meal

Faye Draper: Tea is an Evening Meal ¦ Photo: Oran Milstein

Breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, dinner, supper… Well, at least we are all agreed on breakfast. But what does ‘tea’ mean to you? A brew with biccies or an evening meal?

There are around twelve of us gathered around a nice old-fashioned kitchen table, a decent solid pine-wood table, not one of those lightweight things from IKEA. We are welcomed by Faye, who’s wearing a neat little blue dress and apron, with a hostess trolley for her bits and bobs. There’s a hotch-potch of teapots on the table, including a cheerful spotty one, and a metal one with electrical tape on the handle (to make it less ‘burny’, as Faye’s Gran said when she lent it to her). So there’s tea, and milk in jugs, and sugar bowls, and plates of Bourbon biscuits and Custard Creams (Britain’s favourite biscuit!).

As we take our tea, the table acts as a conduit through space and time. Mixing autobiography, true-life stories, and gentle philosophical musings, solo performer Faye Draper bring us an endearing show built around an immersive ‘British tea-time’ experience.

The tea-time theme broadens out to include other tables and other meals – and we are cast in a variety of roles. Look, there’s Grandma at the head of the table (where Grandad always longed to be), and over there little Mark, aged 8, who is playing with his peas, and on this side Aunty Selina. So it must be Christmas, because Aunty Selina only ever sits down on Christmas Day – she’s about to announce the start of the meal, cautioning everyone to have their party poppers ready, and she makes her usual health-and-safety announcement about not ‘popping’ too early because of Grandad’s pacemaker, and someone always does, and Grandad always fakes a heart attack, on cue. Oh and now we are in a restaurant, and we wonder who the man is who always sits alone, no phone to distract him, no book to read. Joe’s mum is here in the restaurant and she accidentally leaves her new-born baby in his car seat under the table, panicking when she gets to the car with no baby in tow.

The teapots, jugs, mugs and biscuits now morph into a wedding party, with Faye struggling to sort out the seating arrangements: ‘he can’t sit on that side of her because that’s her deaf ear’.

And so you will have gathered that what we have presented here are tiny tales of everyday life – nothing epic, nothing more dramatic than a baby misplaced for a matter of moments, or someone inadvertently sitting at the head of the table when they shouldn’t – but it all makes for really engaging theatre. Everything is just so – it is a deceptively clever piece in its dramaturgical structure. Themes are circled round and returned to, small pieces of text repeated again and again to give a poetic rhythm to the piece (Mark and his peas become something of an anchor point!).

If there is a small quibble it is on the integration of a section in which the audience are given salt cellars and asked to draw dinner settings, and then each given a place to reference. These places – Bristol, London, Devon, Newcastle, Blackburn – are obviously places of significance to Faye, but exactly how and why is glossed over, which given the care and attention to every other section is a little puzzling. That said, it was great to get to draw with salt, and to look afterwards at a table covered in salt plates sporting salt sheep, shopping trolleys, bridges and Big Wheels!

Beautifully written (by Faye and the show’s co-creator, Alex Kelly of Third Angel), beautifully performed – a very lovely and loving reflection on lives lived ‘up north’.

www.fayedraper.wordpress.com