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

Ontroerend Goed: All That is Wrong

Girl, 18. She’s dressed in a loose pink jersey and skinny jeans, limp blonde hair falling over her face, no make-up. There’s an echo of the Corinne Day photos of the young Kate Moss in her cool and loose prettiness. She’s sitting on the floor next to a young man, and they’re talking in a relaxed way as the audience enters.

A slide projector is switched on: images clunk by, amused laughter from the audience as standard teen maxims and Facebook faves whirr by: ‘The Kids are NOT Alright’ and ‘Fuck the Pope – but use a condom’. Amongst them is one with rather more resonance: ‘Protect me from what I want.’

Next, a word chalked on the floor: ‘I’. From that one tree-trunk word grows branches and offshoots. First come the factual details (girl, 18, mother, sister, father on Sundays), then the more subjective statements: ‘skinny, not anorexic’, ‘don’t sleep well’, ‘will study languages’. From there it spirals out and out, from the personal to the familial to the communal, the imagist word-pictures and statements becoming more and more focused on what is wrong with the whole wide world: racism, too many people, Shell, Starbucks, superficiality, sweatshops, homophobia, capitalism, waste, abuse, rape, porn, pain…

As the chalk mapping grows and grows, amendments are made, qualifiers are tagged on, new things are added (‘the Batman shooting’ and ‘Do I want children?’ and ‘I will try not to buy Coke’), and with this we hear a mix of sampled soundbites: a stock-market dealer bragging of his abilities to profit from recessions; a first-person account of genital torture; an allegation that in India people are mutilating their kids to make them more efficient beggars.

Oh, the terrible, terrible pressure of being 18 years old and feeling responsible for changing this whole wide world of injustices! Yet there comes a moment of immensely mature reflection: ‘I can’t understand everything,’ she writes.

All That is Wrong is ultimately a piece about writing and about the power of words. Words surround us, chalked on the floor, written with a pen and projected via OHP onto the walls, sculpted in clanking metal letterpress forms. Words are read aloud from emails and Facebook comments, and broadcast via laptop and PA. Words pile upon words. We may not be able to understand everything, we may not be able to change everything – but through words we can understand more, change more. Here, writing is a presented as a visceral, physical activity, not merely a cerebral process.

This show is the third in Ontroerend Goed’s ‘teenage’ trilogy, preceded by Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, andTeenage Riot, which were both presented at the Traverse in previous Edinburgh Fringe fests. It is a powerful body of work, capturing the changes through the teenage years with extraordinary precision and insight – from the just-on-the-brink kids caught between childhood toys and adult pleasures that we meet in the first show, through the ‘I want to be understood but not by YOU’ boxed-in horrors of the mid-teen years, to finally the dawn of young adulthood with a new mantra – no longer ‘you don’t understand’ but now ‘I want to understand’.

It is a pleasure to watch young writer and actor Koba Ryckewaert (who appeared in both of the previous shows in the trilogy, the youngest in the group) in her first show with Ontroerend Goed as an adult artist. Her co-performer Zach Hatch is the perfect foil, and their onstage relationship is relaxed and convivial. The piece is structured beautifully, so all credit to director Alexander Devriendt and dramaturg Joeri Smet.

As for Koba, she will write, she will write – how perfect that she finds her writing voice in public, in the Scottish venue dedicated to discovering and promoting ‘new writing’.

www.ontroerendgoed.be

Clout: How a Man Crumbled

In How a Man Crumbled, Lecoq trained Clout Theatre invite us to dive head-first into the absurd and violent world of Russian poet Daniil Kharms. They tell their tale with a great deal of panache, using a provocative mix of dark clown, slapstick and surrealist imagery, and the end result has something of the feel of a Mikhail Bulgakov story retold by The Three Stooges.

As we enter the extraordinary space that is the Summerhall old veterinary school’s Demonstration Room, there leaning – hung, almost – from the bleak, peeling whitewashed walls are three steampunk bouffons. Their coats are brushed with the whitewash, and they sport the dust of aeons; their trousers or dresses are patched in a hotch-potch of fabrics and embellished with hemp and string. There are oddly-shaped hats; there is distressed make-up. As they move from their wall and around the space there is the echoing scrape of metal-tipped shoes across the concrete floor.

What follows is a kind of live version of an Expressionist film, all done with hand-held and cone-shaded lamps, the live action paired with projected slides, resulting in a kind of low-rent 1927 effect. We meet The Writer, an arrogant and possibly insane young man who wonders ‘what’s all the fuss about flowers, it smells much better between a woman’s legs’; The Old Woman, a kind of batty babushka; and a plethora of other characters, both male and female, played by the third performer. Roles, though, chop and change – at one lovely moment we have three old babushkas in headscarves staring out at us, chewing on their gums.

Terribly violent deeds occur, including assault and battery with garden vegetables, and inevitably there is a body in a trunk that needs transporting on a train – cue a horribly funny sketch of opening lids, escaping limbs, and disappearing bodies.

It is a delight to see the traditional Lecoq skills of mime, clown and bouffon used by a young company with such evident relish and pleasure in the creation of their work. The projection work could be improved, and the integration of performance and projection needs looking at, so for me although this is an interesting show, it isn’t (yet) a great show. But the ideas are there, and the performances are full of vim and vigour, so this is indeed a company to watch.

www.clout-theatre.com

How It Ended Productions: You Obviously Know What I’m Talking About

Meet Winfield Scott-Boring. He lives all alone and never goes out. His little flat is piled high with old copies of Sea Angler magazine (he doesn’t go sea angling, he just likes reading the magazines), and he works in his pyjamas, ‘fixing the unfixable’. At night he goes to bed with a Californian self-help cassette tape (old technology is important in Winfield’s life) telling him soothingly that ‘you are in control’, and we soon learn that he’s in love with the lady across the way who he sees watering the flowers in her window-box.

The oddly-titled You Obviously Know What I’m Talking About was a surprise. Something about the title of the piece suggested a hip, experimental, possibly multimedia production by a young company, and only that last epithet – production by a young company – applies. What we have presented here is an endearingly old-fashioned piece of ensemble comic theatre with song, reminding me of companies that were the mainstay of the devised theatre world of a couple of decades back (Théâtre Sans Frontières, Brouhaha, Theatre Alibi, et al). The show is supported by Escalator East to Edinburgh, and although it is not really breaking any new ground, it is certainly a competently produced and well performed piece of theatre.

There is a lovely set – all wonky door-frames, asymmetrical photo-frames and little lights sparkly in the miniature apartment blocks seen through the window – designed by James Lewis and built by Tin Shed Scenery. There are feisty performances by our team of four actors (two men, two women), who in their multi-role, all-singing, all-dancing gung-ho enthusiasm remind me somewhat of Little Bulb. There’s some ironic use of popular song (‘Come Fly With Me’, ‘Stormy Weather’). There’s a very lovely rocking-horse that acts as the conduit to Winfield’s freedom, and is one of many objects used very cleverly in the production. There is also a moment in which we watch a kettle boil in real time – perhaps a stage first!

Although I very much appreciate all the small visual, physical and verbal details that make up this wacky world in which Winfield has trapped himself, I am not greatly taken with the story itself – although it does all resolve itself in a very satisfying way. However, as a young company they get the benefit of the doubt – it’s a jolly good hour’s worth: well-executed, entertaining and gently funny.

www.howitendedproductions.com

Dancing Brick: Captain Ko and the Planet of Rice

Behold Captain Jane Ko and her trusty robot sidekick Stark, going where no woman has gone before, into the land that time forgot. There are fossils and relics and remembrances of things past. There are new discoveries that seem worryingly familiar, forgotten quests, and retrod paths.

Captain Ko is a triptych of short pieces by the ever-resourceful Lecoq trained Dancing Brick company that references and plays upon every single ‘philosophical’ sci-fi film you could care to mention, from Tarkovsky’s Solaristo Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; Ridley Scott’s Alien to Duncan Jones’Moon.

Part one is cheery and clownish and has a kind of Star Trek meets Forbidden Planet vibe, our trusty space adventurers clad in Pierre Cardin-inspired Swinging 60s versions of spacewear – duck-egg blue suits and white booties. Using film very nicely as a backdrop – samples of sci-fi classics, countdowns, moonwalk footage – we see our two lost wanderers moving in endless circles as the millennia tick by.

In part two, there’s a sudden switch in mood. Stark disappears, Captain Ko takes off her helmet and jacket, dons a beige cardigan and glasses, and she’s now an old lady. There follows an excruciating fifteen minutes or more as she silently repeats a series of mimed actions from everyday life – reaching to get a cup from the cupboard, pouring a drink, forgetting what she’s doing, starting again… and so it goes on. And on. I learn a day later from someone who managed to get a programme (there were few to be had!) that the whole work was developed from a research process into the effects of Alzheimer’s. But without this knowledge there is no way to understand this scene, nor to appreciate the ‘lost in space’ scenes as a metaphor for dementia. I would also say that there are surely ways to present the notion of mindless, boring repetition without being boringly repetitious. Many audience members had their heads in their hands at this point.

The third part is much stronger – here we are presented with the story of Sergei Krikalev, who holds the honour of being the man who has spent the longest time in space. He was dubbed the last citizen of the USSR, spending ten months aboard the Mir space station from May 1991 to March 1992 as the Soviet Union fell apart, meaning that, although he was of course monitored, no one was too interested in him – there were bigger concerns back home. Thomas Eccleshare drops his Stark persona to become Sergei (and again, without the programme notes I really didn’t understand this at the time) and the other half of Dancing Brick, Valentina Ceschi, keeps him under surveillance with a very nice use of live feed video that cleverly gives us the impression of Sergei in zero gravity, drifting aimlessly you could say. I’m very taken with this narrative of the cosmonaut abandoned whilst life on earth goes off in all sorts of new directions – and of course being left drifting in space whilst the world moves on is a pretty good metaphor for the terrors of old age, so now I’m aware of this over-arching Alzheimer’s theme things make more sense than they did whilst watching the show.

Ultimately, I felt that although there were very many marvellous moments, what I was watching was a series of provocations – ideas towards a show rather than the show itself. Also to say that if, in a piece of predominantly physical and visual theatre, we need programme notes to understand the content of the show, then something has gone wrong.

There is work to be done, but hopefully there is a good show in here waiting to emerge eyes blinking into the daylight.

www.dancingbrick.net

neTTheatre: Puppet. Book of Splendour

‘You shouldn’t expect a story’ says someone at some point in Puppet. Book of Splendour. Well no, of course not. NeTTheatre’s latest work to make it to the Edinburgh Fringe is not afraid to tackle big subjects – the Kabbalistic tradition of Jewish mysticism, the struggle between existence and oblivion, the all-encompassing breadth of Judeo-Christian culture, history, philosophy and religion – presenting them with director Paweł Passini’s usual flair and daring. What we get instead of ‘a story’ is a multiplicity of stories, ideas and images about life and death, creation and dissipation, ein sof (no end) and the finite, weaving around and through each other and us in an exhausting but exhilarating hour-and-a-half of sensory onslaught.

A Rabbi quotes from an ancient text in the Torah, an artist in a black beret (reminiscent of Tony Hancock in The Rebel, it must be said) waves his brush in the air in an anguished state, before collapsing exhausted on a bed. Is he God? Is he the architect of the world? A naked couple – Adam and Eve, we presume – struggle into a shared white shirt, keen to cover their shame. A strange black beast with a body of shiny leatherette prowls across the stage. From the mouth of babes: a child takes a book (probably a sacred book, perhaps the Torah) from a shelf, reads from it in a voice full of awe and wonder (‘he understands nothing, but he loves it’), then later gets on a tricycle to ride around the performance space in endless circles. The words Mercy and Justice and Kingdom and Paradise are broadcast from an upstage screen, and a host of white bubble-wigged angels pop out of a cabinet to serenade us. English, Russian, Polish – a babble of languages envelop us. Books and words, and words and books. And the Word was made Flesh…

NeTTheatre’s Turandot won a Total Theatre Award in 2011, establishing the company on the Fringe as makers of complex and multi-layered visual, physical, visceral theatre in which music plays an important part. Puppet. A Book of Splendour similarly uses an extraordinary mix of live music and heightened visual imagery from high and low culture – and everything in-between – to create a glorious onstage stew of sounds and moving pictures. The Jewish myth of the Golem is a key theme in the show, and the notion of the ‘puppetesque’ is explored repeatedly throughout as dolls, mannequins, masks and animated clothing are used to create a series of effigies that appear and disappear (like the clay Golem of legend) – brought to life from inanimate matter by the human hand, a triumph of will and faith, only to then dissolve back into materiality.

Kantor – always acknowledged as an influence on the company’s work – is more directly referenced in this show, both in the stated desire to investigate and explore Kantor’s theory of a Theatre of Death (‘and its unexpected neighbour, childhood’) and in much of the physicality – there’s a nice overcoats-and-hats knees-as-feet shuffle dance at one point that is a homage to a scene in The Dead Class. The physical work – solo, duet, trio or ensemble – is of a very high standard throughout, and a word of praise here for the extraordinarily talented child-actor who held his own in this talented ensemble of eleven actors and singers.

The stage area is rather too small for this large ensemble, and is additionally crowded out with towers, screens, beds, cabinets, tricycles, chests, mannequins and whatever else. I am sure that it is all intended to be a glorious mess, but I would have thought a mess that needs some space to expand, rather than exploding out from the audience’s feet with nowhere to go. It is very difficult to read the surtitles from the front rows – and the words are obviously an important element in this production. It’s also extremely hot in the Summerhall main space, and the 90 minutes of the show drags a little. I am happy to concede that this is a ‘Fringe’ problem rather than something intrinsically wrong with the show – performing/watching a longer-than-average and complex show late-night in a crowded, unsuitable space is not ideal.

What the answer is for shows of this quality and complexity and how they can fit into the Fringe format is obviously a question for future Edinburgh presentations by neTTheatre and other enterprising and adventurous companies of this calibre. Regardless, this is a show that has stayed with me – one that I would dearly like to see again as I feel I have only scratched the surface of experience and understanding.