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

Dan Canham: 30 Cecil Street / Augusto Corrieri: Musical Pieces

Placing Dan Canham and Augusto Corrieri’s work together on one bill was evidence of a canny bit of curating by The Nightingale’s Steve Brett: both artists are young men trained in contemporary dance who create performance works that sit somewhere within the dance, theatre and live art triangle – clever, entertaining and curious (in all senses of that word) works that show an obvious love of the trappings and traditions of ‘theatre’ whilst still exploring and usurping those traditions, each in a very different way…

Dan Canham first. His solo, 30 Cecil Street, was a great success at Edinburgh this summer – one of the must-see shows at the Forest Fringe that this reviewer sadly didn’t get to see! It’s a truly delightful piece, a kind of eulogy to an abandoned building and a conjuring of its ghosts. We start with an empty space; a reel-to-reel tape machine sat on a plain wooden table, downstage left; one chair; and the performer Dan Canham (whose previous work has included appearances with Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, and DV8), a charismatic presence onstage, even when he’s just standing still. The tape machine is switched on and we hear Irish voices talking, amidst the sounds of the clinking and clattering of a busy bar. As we strain to hear what’s being said, the sound switches from the small machine’s speaker to the main PA system, and we start to work out that there’s a conversation being had about a place of entertainment – reminiscences and reflections on performances over many years, and events and incidences onstage and off. We are in Limerick, and the story we are hearing is of the now derelict Theatre Royal.

As the voices murmur on, the performer recreates the rooms of the building as a (mostly) 2D architect’s model, using white masking tape on the black floor, with an occasional line taken onto a wall, or over the little wooden table, creating a surreal ‘almost-3D’ effect. It’s reminiscent of the minimalist marked-out set in Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville. When the space is mapped, Canham activates it with a series of gestural movement vignettes that are somehow both beautifully contained and gloriously expressive. At times, he looks terrifyingly young and vulnerable; at other times as old as the hills and twice as knowing.

In its conception and execution, there are parallels with Improbable Theatre’s first show 70 Hill Lane (in which a house and its occupants are conjured with little more than human voice and a roll of Sellotape), but 30 Cecil Street is its own good self – an evocative and soulful piece that, like one of those dreams that eludes you in the morning, evokes sensations that seem somehow just out of grasp, and stirs up emotions that you can’t quite place. Overwhelmingly, there’s an odd feeling of nostalgia for something that you never knew.

Playing with notions of the visible and the invisible, concealment and revelation, Augusto Corrieri’s Musical Pieces starts off-stage, with the sound of someone testing the mic with a little tap-tap of the hand and the obligatory ‘one two, one two’. When Corrieri appears, the sounds continue, but we never see him voice those words: he turns his back, or places an arm or a leg across his mouth as he moves through the space with the mic and its stand, often exiting through a door to the side of the stage and re-entering in all sorts of convoluted ways. The punchline comes when he faces us and we finally get to see his mouth as the words are spoken – but he’s throwing his voice so that his lips don’t move. Well, hardly move anyway… in a very human and endearing moment, he ‘corpses’, and the audience laughs heartily along with him.

His second short section also plays with the sound-and-vision relationship – this time by creating surreal contradictions between what we see visually and what we hear aurally. The shutters on a (real) window upstage are pulled back, and we hear the sound of a downpour, but can clearly see that there is no rain. A violin is taken out of its case, and placed on a chair – sitting there silently unbowed whilst the sound of strings soar through the space.

Both pieces are witty and thoughtful provocations that explore the play between the ‘real’ and the ‘pretend’ and show a fascination with the tricks and turns of theatrical tradition. As a kind of coda to the two pieces, Corrieri presents a deconstruction of the post-show talk, in which he interviews himself, using pre-recorded reflections on the nature of the work. It’s the weakest part of the evening: clever in a too-knowing way, and somehow squirmingly old-fashioned in its postmodern playfulness.

That aside, a truly entertaining evening from two talented and intelligent dance-theatre performers with something interesting to say for themselves, and the ability to communicate meaningfully with an audience.

www.stillhouse.co.uk / www.augustocorrieri.com

Handspring Puppet Company: Woyzeck on the Highveld

Handspring Puppet Company are best known in the UK for their key contribution to the multi-award-winning NT production War Horse. Their earlier production Woyzeck on the Highveld – here restaged by director Luc de Wit, produced by a international conglomerate of festivals, and presented here under the auspices of UK Arts International, Puppet Centre Trust and Barbican’s BITE (amongst others) – is a very different kettle of fish…

Georg Büchner’s unfinished drama dealing with the dehumanising effects of medical science and the military on a young man’s life is, in Woyzeck on the Highveld, transposed to South Africa in the 1950s, and specifically to the exploited and depressed mining communities of Johannesburg. Where War Horse is a ‘suitable for all the family’ war drama, dealing with ‘difficult’ subject matter in a way that celebrates the human spirit, creating an emotional response in the audience without dragging them down into the depths of despair, Woyceck on the Highveld is definitely adult fare, pushing deeply into a depression that envelops all in its dark cloud; exploring the murky territories of mental illness, medical abuse, sexual jealousy, misogynist murder, and the terrible way that men are used as fodder (for armies, by doctors, down mines).

The mood of the piece is oppressive, the story played out under low ‘straw and steel’ lighting, to a backdrop of monochrome film of intensely, almost angrily scratched illustrations of bleak landscapes. It is not easy viewing, although the horror is alleviated a little by the introduction of the delightfully larger-than-life character The Barker (Mncedisi Shabangu) as a boisterous guide to the story who, megaphone in hand like a fairground caller, steps outside of the action to reflect rather gleefully on the terrible events unfolding, adding a welcome dose of Brechtian alienation. And, as always, having terrible deeds enacted by puppets does also lend a sense of distance.

William Kentridge, the director of the original 1992 production of Woyceck on the Highveld, and the creator of the beautiful black-and-white etching/animation work that is key to the piece, apparently was enamoured of his collaborator Handspring’s work from the very first, commenting that ‘each day of rehearsal has brought revelations of the things that puppets can do better than their living counterparts. Try training a rhinoceros to write or an infant to fly on cue.’

A rhinoceros – a very lovely raw wood construction – does indeed write, and an infant fly, in scenes in which the puppets, puppeteers, and onscreen action are in beautiful harmony; and it is these scenes that I enjoy the most. The doctor’s control of Woyzceck’s eating habits is a key chapter in the dark story (he is at one point ordered to eat nothing but peas), and there’s a very wonderful supper scene that mixes live action (puppets and visible puppeteers) and animation most beautifully, with the stark emptiness of the real table before us, laid with a white cloth, an empty glass moved round with a despairing lunacy by Woyzeck, whilst the chaos of a messy feast and spilled drinks erupts onscreen.

Other scenes played out between the puppets, on a raised platform upstage, in which the puppeteers are not visible, I enjoy less, and feel a little distanced from (literally and metaphorically), although I readily admire the enormous skill behind the work.

If there is a criticism it is that the story is often told in a kind of ‘shorthand’ that I think would be hard to follow for anyone unfamiliar with the original. Although it could perhaps be argued that Woyzeck is so beloved of contemporary theatre-makers that it might be hard to find an audience member who hadn’t encountered some version of the tale in recent years…

So yes, a good solid production, with outstanding animation work from Kentridge, excellent puppetry (of course!), and a marvellous performance from The Barker – but, for me, the piece as a whole is lacking the wonderful energy of War Horse, created with Tom Morris, and missing the gorgeous intimacy of Handspring’s most recent UK work, Or You Could Kiss Me, created in collaboration with Neil Bartlett. I’m becoming very aware that Handspring’s work is defined by who the company collaborates with. It is of course no bad thing for companies to revisit old work and remount productions, but personally I’m more interested in the future, and really looking forward to seeing where they turn next!

www.handspringpuppet.co.za

Big Daddy Meets His Match

It was a chance remark from a friend that started me thinking. We were discussing the dilemma for contemporary ‘liberal’ parents in choosing whether to send children to private school or to throw them to the sharks of state education in the inner London boroughs, and this somehow moved on to a discussion about the number of people in positions of power in theatre who have been educated in the public school system. (And if there is anyone reading this who lives outside the UK I should explain that ‘public school’ in England refers to a network of respected private schools, as opposed to ‘state schools’ which are for everyone – or everyone else, perhaps, is a better way to put it!)

So is this really the case? That we are ruled by the same elite that make up the majority of politicians, the ‘privately educated’? Even in ‘alternative’ theatre? Apparently so. It was something I hadn’t really thought about previously, but a few minutes of conversation on the subject brings forth the realisation that many of our bastions of non-conformity are run by men (and it is mostly men) of a certain class and education. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that to be a successful producer, venue director, or booker, it helps to have some sort of financial stability to fall back on, otherwise how on earth could you forge a path in this precarious business?

Of course artists also take enormous financial risks all the time – just look at Edinburgh, awash with theatre-makers who have poured their meagre savings into hiring a venue, then spend all day flyering in the rain to bolster audience numbers – and it could be argued that although it is painful to witness this terrible drain of money, it is still the case that taking a show to Edinburgh as either artist or producer is a privileged option, and perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the Edinburgh-in-August demographic is so resolutely ‘white middle-class’.

What is clear in Edinburgh is that someone other than the artists is making the money. Every single spare room in every single available building – from university lecture halls and student union bars to freemason lodges and community centres – is requisitioned for the month of August, hastily turned into a ‘venue’ and rented out at an exorbitant cost.

Some artists have, in past and recent years, decided to try to do something about this, and to provide an alternative model. Famously, the Aurora Nova festival-within-the festival, set up by performer/director Wolfgang Hoffman with the support of the Brighton-based Komedia Productions, offered Edinburgh something rather different: a venue that provided the opportunity for larger-scale ensemble companies from all over the world (mostly those making physical and visual performance) to bring work to the Fringe. And the collective ethos of the venture meant that everyone was expected to muck in with the cleaning and caring of the space; there were shared meals daily; and all takings from the venue were split between companies, so those doing well at the box office shared their winnings with those doing less well. It all lasted for a good run of around seven years, then was no more.

In more recent years, we’ve seen the arrival of Forest Fringe, which is based at the Forest Café, a year-round community-led space, but which also spills out onto the streets and into other public spaces, offering artists the opportunity to present work for just a day or two, even just a one-off performance, or to ‘scratch’ new work – all very much against the usual Fringe model of the month-long run which you build by constant flyering and desperately courting journalists for high-starred reviews. Forest Fringe took the decision to step outside of the Fringe Society completely, with none of their activities listed in the official brochure (which has become a monstrous telephone directory-sized publication that is too heavy to carry around with you in any case!). Forest Fringe also break the mould by offering many of their events free or on a pay-what-you-want basis.

This year saw the arrival of another new venture – Summerhall – which I’ve mentioned a few times in my Edinburgh blogs: homed in the former veterinary college buildings of the University of Edinburgh; a warren of lecture halls, dissecting rooms, studies, halls, and stairways that have been cleared of their remnants (animal and otherwise) and converted into the temporary home for a group of companies, at the heart of which were Zecora Ura whose all-night adventure Hotel Medea was the most talked-about show of the festival, winning a Herald Angel and being shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award (and I’ll put my cards on the table and say that in my opinion it really should have won a Total Theatre Award!). Summerhall has been a haven for most of the festival, although personally I’ve found that the arrival in the last week of the copious number of events as part of the BAC programme and the numerous short-stay British Council Showcase presentations has changed the vibe considerably at the venue.

Well, I say ‘venue’ but at a discussion held at Summerhall last week, its co-founder/supporter Richard Demarco was insistent that it wasn’t a ‘venue’, it was something far more: intended as a year-round school/laboratory/place of theatrical investigation where ambitions projects such as Hotel Medea, and the 25-strong student ensemble that created Traumatikon, could be hosted, and where artists could be in residence to develop their work. Yes, fair enough… although I would like to point out that as things currently stand, Summerhall is a ‘venue’ for the Fringe, nothing more yet, and although a wonderful initiative, there are other supportive venues offering an interesting range of work, including work from overseas companies, such as Remarkable Arts at St George’s West/ Hill Street, strongly featured on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist with shows such as Audience, Leo, and White Rabbit, Red Rabbit; and Universal Arts at New Town Theatre, who presented Total Theatre Award winning shows Turandot and Sailing On.

The discussion also flagged up the fact that so few Edinburgh artists were involved in the Fringe – but although some good points were made here, I felt a little uncomfortable with the disparaging tone towards Edinburgh’s artistic community, with the implication that there wasn’t really a lot going on year-round. I found myself wondering why none of the renowned ‘beyond August’ Edinburgh-based artists, companies, and festivals were there to defend their territory. Where, for example, were the Manipulate Festival of Visual Theatre (who last winter programmed 1927’s The Animals and Children Took To The Streets, long before it came to the Fringe)? What about Chloë Dear, producer with Iron-Oxide, who works year-round to present Scottish-made circus, physical theatre, and street arts work? Richard Medrington from the acclaimed Puppet State, who also works with the Scottish Storytelling Centre? What about The Arches – Glasgow-based but presenting work in Edinburgh? Or Arches-supported artists Al Seed and the Total Theatre Award winning Adrian Howells, both of whom were presenting work in this Fringe? New Territories, again Glasgow-based but with a knowledge of the Scottish scene? And where were Jon Morgan and the Made in Scotland team? Had any of these people been invited to take part, and if not – why not? It seems extraordinary that none were there, leading me to suspect that they perhaps weren’t invited? I was keen to raise this point at the discussion but sadly the event was so poorly chaired that the only people whose voices we were allowed to hear were the Big Daddies: those older men of a certain class and bearing who were used to dominating discussions. A woman festival producer from Beirut was asked to offer her view of Edinburgh – then was interrupted and patronised when she spoke. It was all too, too awful.

Which brings us back to this dominance in theatre of what someone I know calls ‘The Society of Bald Old Men’. They are everywhere, and their dominance is rarely challenged.

But that is not the whole story…

There are women movers and shakers in contemporary theatre/performance, and they should be heralded. For a start, let’s hear it for producer Jo Crowley who has been taking care of and championing both 1927 and Hotel Medea for all of August, and year-round looks after the likes of Kazuko Hohki and Ridiculusmus! The aforementioned Chloë Dear too; and let’s note that within the street arts and outdoor performance network (which is, in its very nature, a more egalitarian world) there are numerous strong female voices, including Anne Tucker from Manchester International Arts, and Maggie Clarke of X.trax. Back indoors, there are of course such luminaries as Rose Fenton and Lucy Neal, co-founders of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), still going strong after all these years; and Jude Kelly, currently director of the Southbank Centre. In the live art field, there is New Territories director Nikki Milican; Lois Keidan, co-founder/director of the Live Art Development Agency; and the posse of gorgeous women who run Home Live Art. Then, there is the wonderful Helen Lannaghan, co-director (with Joseph Seelig) of the London International Mime Festival, and co-founder, three decades ago, of Total Theatre (or Mime Action Group, as it was called then).

And we really can’t forget Judith Knight – co-founder of Arts Admin, and longterm nurturer of extraordinary artistic talent, with a roster of artists under her wing that includes Curious, Bobby Baker, Geraldine Pilgrim, Lemn Sissay, Ann Bean, Stationhouse Opera, Chris Goode, Rajni Shah, and La Ribot.

It was therefore wonderful that Judith Knight was chosen to receive the Total Theatre Award for a significant contribution to theatre. There have been no female recipients of this Award for many, many years (I can, off the top of my head, only think of Nola Rae and Monica Pagneux as female previous recipients, and they were both a very long time ago), which on one level seems extraordinary, but considering the dominance of those theatre patriarchs, perhaps not so surprising.

So congratulations Judith… good to see Big Daddy wrestled to the ground for a change!

Look Left Look Right: You Once Said Yes

Ever had the sort of day where you just set off down the street with no agenda, and find yourself talking to all sorts of strange (in all senses of that word) people, and losing yourself in all sorts of odd, interesting, and sometimes hair-raising situations? Look Left Look Right use this rather lovely starting point to create You Once Said Yes, a one-on-one theatre show set in the streets, cathedrals, bingo halls, graveyards, and bars of Edinburgh.

Audience/participants set off at ten-minute intervals, so are always alone – at least, alone until met by a succession of characters, some of whom are seemingly under the mistaken impression that they know you – ‘Hey, Max!’ they call across the street, beckoning you over and embroiling you in some complicated story that you are apparently part of – whilst in other cases, you are treated as a chance encounter; someone who has just happened upon them, or crossed their path.

It is the latter premise that works far better. The hits for me are Coco, the lady clown who needs help carrying her balloons across the Royal Mile; Ben, the completely believable stockbroker-turned-gardener who offers you tea from a flask as you stroll amongst the graves; Tom, the homeless man, who plays the jerkily nervous beggar with a terrible past with such wonderful authenticity that you leave him blinking back the tears; and Emily, a café worker who just starts chatting to you casually when you enter St Giles Cathedral. Less successful are the more ‘theatrical’ moments: a car heist story; an appearance at a law court; an invitation to buy into a deal to convert a scuzzy bingo hall into a lush strip club, although I did love the opportunity to go into the bingo hall on a rainy Friday afternoon, and to encounter a posse of real-life characters so extraordinary that you almost suspected they were company plants (floozy lady bingo players in pink nylon; hard-faced grans on the one-armed bandits; a wheezing man in stained trousers defiantly smoking in the hall). In these latter cases, it is not so much the slightly hammy larger-than-life performances (I can live with that!) but the fact that it just doesn’t ring true, no matter how readily you suspend disbelief, that you could possibly be the person they think you are.

But this gripe aside, it really is a very lovely piece: the Edinburgh sites chosen are a varied and interesting mix; the research has been done thoroughly, and this research translated cleverly to performative situations; the route has been planned meticulously, so that ‘accidents’ are unlikely. Unlike other works of this kind, the audience is really looked out for throughout the journey, the transfers from one performer’s zone to another’s really carefully handled, and the ‘what if’ moments catered for (we are issued with a fluorescent orange rucksack that contains, amongst other things, a mobile phone and an envelope that states ‘only open in an emergency’, so we know that we have help at the end of a phone should we need it). I also like the idea that each person’s experience will be, of course, completely subjective, and will be enjoyed in very different ways – I mean, wearing a red nose and helping a clown make balloon animals felt quite normal to me, as did flirting with a young lady with butterfly eyelashes over a glass of wine – and being dressed head-to-toe in charity shop garb is hardly an unusual occurrence in my book! But I don’t usually get into cars with strange young men…

Look Left Look Right describe themselves as a ‘documentary theatre company’ who create work that starts with recording conversations with people about significant incidences in their lives. Previous Edinburgh success Caravan(2007) took the English floods of 2005-2006 as its subject, and Counted?explored the 2010 elections. You Once Said Yes is a great new addition to the company’s repertoire, and of course will be different wherever it is played, so a constantly renewing work. And despite my longstanding relationship with Edinburgh, which I’ve been visiting for over decade, I was taken to little corners of the city that I hadn’t visited before, so feel thankful for that experience.

www.lookleftlookright.com

Quarantine: Entitled

Let’s hear it for the technicians, those anonymous, uncredited foot soldiers of the performing arts who, dressed in black, with bowed heads, put in the cables, the leads, the woofers, the tweeters, the mixing desk, the amp, the mics, the floods, the cans, the spots… Quarantine’s Entitled puts the technicians centrestage, using the usually hidden choreography that creates the performance environment as the subject of the show.

It is, I suspect, a ‘Marmite’ show. Taking the form of a get-in, then a get-out, it invites a love-it or hate-it response. I hated it. I could try to temper this very raw subjective response, but let’s get that response out of the way upfront! As someone who does get-ins and get-outs all the time, I just despaired of what I was witnessing, and failed to understand why anyone would think this would make interesting viewing. Apart from any other criticism, it was pseudo-realistic rather than realistic – and I found that even more irritating than the basic concept. By the time they got round to putting down the dancefloor, I had my head in my hands. When it reached the point where I realised that the get-in was going to be followed immediately by the get-out, I was close to despair.

In situations like this, I start to imagine how I’d feel if I invited someone who was intelligent and open-minded, but unversed in contemporary performance trends, out to see this work. What would it tell them about ‘performance’ as an artform? I think Entitled would confirm many people’s prejudices of ‘performance’ as a forum for self-indulgence. What, I wonder, is the purpose in creating work that that can only be read by people versed in the form? There’s a smug knowingness to it that makes me itchy with irritation.

That said, if you take away all of the above – the physical/visual narrative of the get-in/get-out – there is another, interweaved ‘offstage’ story not about objects but about the people who perform: the musicians and the dancers (and indeed technicians) who have lives beyond the limits of the footlights. I enjoyed some of the (presumably) autobiographical-confessional texts reflecting on the role of the dancer/musician/technician, the balancing of home and work lives, and the dictats of body image, abilities, and ageing. This, I felt, was a far more interesting line of theatrical enquiry than the ‘play’ around the soundcheck and tech run and whatever (which, in any case, I think was explored more successfully, and with more wit and vim, by Forced Entertainment in Bloody Mess).

I should add here that I have enjoyed Quarantine’s work immensely in the past, and indeed that I saw this show on the same day as I went to the Quarantine installation The Soldier’s Song, also presented at Summerhall, which is as beautiful and moving a work as I could have hoped to witness…