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

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…

www.qtine.com

ShadyJane: Sailing On

Somewhere in between ‘missing’ and ‘presumed drowned’ is – what? The limbo of the ladies’ loos, that’s what. So here we are, six of us (ladies and gents, the gents looking somewhere in-between embarrassed and intrigued), and as always there’s a queue, with two of three cubicles occupied – one by Virginia Woolf, and one by Ophelia. Well, of course.

ShadyJane plug every single water analogy they can get away with in this clever little show that is, for once, completely appropriately sited outside a theatre space. It’s set in a toilet and that’s where it needs to be! So the core story is that here, lurking out of sight most of the time, live our two victims of watery death, the intellectual Virginia and the emotional Ophelia, kind of washed up through the sewer system from the rivers in which they perished to this new home, the ladies loo, which they haunt in a Harry Potter Moaning Myrtle sort of way (there’s even a book that disappears into the bog!).

And the ladies’ loo is the place that women come to think, and to sob, and to share secrets, and to wash away the tears – so they are there to comment, and sometimes to confront, those who share their space – and occasionally, someone comes by who can benefit from their cathartic presence. The ‘someone’ who happens by whilst we are there is a young woman called Romola who is burdened with a submerged (oops) story of a suicidal mother drowned at sea, the drowning witnessed from the end of the pier by Romola as a young child.

All this we learn in a fragmented narrative that emerges through a series of living pictures created in the cubicles, mirrors or sinks – a hanging raincoat, a handful of floating rose petals, an abandoned red glove, a cascade of water, a suicide note written in lipstick – and through films and projections (of rippling water; of the well-dressed mother fiddling with her red gloves; of the view from the end of the pier, in gorgeous Kodachrome colour) that are played onto walls and ceilings.

Once Romola’s story is resolved (a little clunkily with a block of spoken text that summarises everything we’ve learnt through other means in a rather unnecessary way, as in: ‘my mother committed suicide when I was…’ etc, etc), she scrubs up, fixes the smudged mascara, and departs – and our two ghostly presences revert to form, with Ophelia’s cubicle transformed into a bower of roses; and Virginia settled down on her loo with a good book.

It’s an ambitious show, but ShadyJane, for all their youth, live up to the challenges they’ve set themselves. The dramaturgy is, for the most part, sound; the multimedia aspects are well integrated; the design a united aesthetic that shows an awareness of the power of scenography to drive a piece; the use of object animation well-integrated, with a lovely ‘puppetesque’ quality to the whole work; and there are strong performances from the three-woman team.

All-in-all, a very commendable show, a worthy winner of the Total Theatre Award for an Emerging Company.

www.shadyjane.co.uk

East End Cabaret: The Revolution Will Be Sexual

Femme fatale Bernadette Byrne and half-man, half-woman Victor-Victoria are here to ‘educate and entertain the masses’ with a heady mix of sex, gin, and communism. Their feisty and ferociously funny cabaret show pulls together an enticing mix of self-penned tunes and covers of whatever takes their fancy or, as they put, it ‘shamelessly appropriated tunes from Brecht to Britney’, all mixed and mulched into a fizz of frenzied skits and turns that manage to be simultaneously sexy and a satirical debunking of our sexualised culture.

Victor-Victoria (or Victy as s/he is known) is a talented multi-instrumentalist who keeps the music flowing, moving from keyboards to accordion to musical saw with ease; and Bernadette sings her little heart out, pausing only to entertain us with an impression of ping-pong-ball-popping from, er, intimate places; or to tell a sorry tale of a hot-wax S&M session gone wrong; or to haul a poor innocent young man out from the audience to quiz on his fantasies of an ideal date with the diva herself.

In this sketch, Victor-Victoria plays the jealous lover adroitly (‘I’m Just a Jealous Guy’) with a series of put-downs muttered sarcastically in retort to Bernadette’s questions and the poor lad’s responses (Bernadette: ‘You seem very young.’ Young man: ‘Er, yeah.’ Victy: ‘He’s about 12.’ Then: ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m a student.’ ‘Of course you are!’ And then: ‘Of what?’ ‘English Literature.’ ‘Oh, he can read!’). And not only are the audience brought to the stage, the stage goes to the audience: Bernadette flinging herself with gay abandon into the arms of a man third-row-from-the-back (see, you are not safe just because you didn’t sit in the front row!) with a cry of ‘my yoga guru!’ – the ‘guru’ then serenaded with a madcap musical saw version of Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’.

And so it goes, one saucy interlude or salacious song leading seamlessly to the next – and should anyone be feeling that they might stray from the path of licentiousness, then the Little Red Book is here to help them back onto the path of sin…

It is of course all a delicious construct: Bernadette and her erstwhile lover Victy are assumed characters, but the pretence is carried through all of the duet’s public-facing activities (performances, PR, website) with meticulous care and attention to detail.

Thus, we learn on the website how ‘a mysterious incident involving her music teacher, a Bruce Springsteen song and a piece of percussion triggered some drastic physical changes in the teenaged Victoria’s appearance’ and that Bernadette ‘bought a one-way ticket to Europe the day they graduated from high school, and left in the dead of night [acquiring] many friends who were lovers, and lovers who were friends, willing to stand her a drink or two in return for a quick plink-plonk on her ukulele’. All marvellous stuff…

And apart from their immeasurable musical cabaret talents, the two artistes look absolutely fabulous. Valiant Victy carries off her sexual ambivalence with panache, and Beautiful Bernadette looks a bit like David Hoyle does Louise Brooks: all eyelashes, bob, and luscious lips.

A very seductive mix indeed! And at just 45 minutes long, a show that scurries by chock-a-block as it is with witty and well-executed vignettes. A success, a grand success!

East End Cabaret

Shortlisted!

So, where was I? Ah yes, autumn in Edinburgh – although these past few days it’s been almost like summer. There are cricket whites on the Meadows, and hippies blowing giant bubbles – but there’s also a rustling in the trees, and the odd leaf or two falling just as a warning. On the edge of the Meadows is a café with a board outside announcing: ‘Sun? Rain? Hail? Ice Cream!’ Can’t argue with that.

But for some of us, there’s no loitering in the park, it’s off to the theatre – 11am or earlier till 11pm or later, day in, day out. Not that I’m complaining, not really…

I think I reached my lowest point of tiredness and overload on the day I came back to Edinburgh after a long weekend ‘down south’ – having had a few days wearing a completely different hat as dramaturg on Ragroof Theatre’s Gloves On at the National Theatre’s Watch This Space festival, then a late night train back to the Burgh, this all leaving me more tired than I realised.

But I’ve rallied round, and this past week started with three days of fitting in as much as I could see, then a whopping six-hour Total Theatre Awards assessors’ shortlisting meeting on Wednesday eve.

Of course I can’t divulge what was said, only that it is a painful process; a democratic process involving twenty people inside the room, plus other outside advisers, and of course there are always personal favourites that don’t make it through…

The ‘ones that got away’ for me this year include Blind Summit’s The Table,Free Time Radical by Frequency D’Ici, Tim Crouch’s I Malvolio, Il Pixel Rosso’s And The Birds Fell From The Sky, New Art Club, and The Two Wrongies. Great shows from all of the above – so I would heartily recommend them, even though they didn’t make the shortlist. I also loved TEAM’s Mission Drift, and Dance Marathon, both of which closed early so couldn’t be judged.

So, that’s what’s not on the shortlist – what did make it through? It is a very interesting mix, reflecting the diversity of work that Total Theatre supports. There are just three categories: Emerging, Innovation, and Physical/Visual & Devised. Under Work by Emerging Artists/Companies there are two shows inspired by ‘feminist’ fairytales (Bluebeard and The Girl With Iron Claws) which take very different approaches to the telling, one with a vaudeville vibe and one in more traditional storytelling mode, but both using music and object animation in interesting ways; a quirky cabaret show (East End Cabaret); a devised piece set in a toilet, Sailing On, which I haven’t yet seen; and a gorgeous solo live art performance/multimedia piece, As the flames rose we danced to the sirens, the sirens (winner of best show at BE festival).

Under Physical/Visual & Devised Theatre, there are a good few circus or circus-theatre shows: a one-man equilibrist-meets-multimedia show, Leo; Circ La Putyka from the Czech Republic; and two shows from Scottish artists,Uncharted Waters, and Snails and Ketchup. Then, there’s a classic (and perfectly executed) ‘total theatre’ show by Told By An Idiot, The Dark Philosophers; a wild Kantor-esque music/visual theatre extravaganza that won my heart, Turandot; a completely different approach to the point where music meets theatre by site-specific gurus Grid Iron, What Remains which is a one-man piece by the company’s longterm associate, composer David Paul Jones; a beautifully crafted wordless mask theatre piece by Lecoq-trained Theatre Ad Infinitum, Translunar Paradise; and expert shadow puppetry from Canadian company Bunk Puppets in Swamp Juice. Also in the running are: a comedy dance show, The Ballet Ruse; a clown-comedy crossover, Dr Brown Decaves; and something that almost defies description – The Technodelic Comedy Show, a Japanese mime/animation played as a kind of live computer game, to give you some idea.

Over in Innovation, there’s a whole load of shows that are questioning the traditional definitions of theatre, pushing boundaries, and/or challenging form. These include the notorious Audience by Ontroerend Goed, which has managed to keep Edinburgh chattering for the past two weeks; and the overnight sensation, in both senses of that term, Hotel Medea. There are two pieces from artists based in, or heralding from, the Middle East – and both, in very different ways, question notions of personal freedom taken for granted in the West. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a play written for an actor who has not yet seen the script, and an audience invited to join the game; Maybe If You Choreograph Me… is intended for an audience of one – and is ‘for men only’.May I Have the Pleasure…? is the latest from the master of interactive theatre, Adrian Howells, who invites his audience to join him at a wedding reception;You Once Said Yes is interactive in a very different way, played out on the streets of Edinburgh (and sold out; I am still trying to get a ticket!). Also in this group are Orkestra del Sol’s Top Trumps, live music with a twist, and The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik, a very sweet solo show featuring puppetry and animation.

Additional to this rather long shortlist are some shows that opened late, and come highly recommended by members of the judging or advisory panels, so are also being considered for an Award. Working the Devil by Dog Kennel Hill Project will be considered in the Physical/Visual & Devised category. Then there are a whole swathe of extras under Innovation: The Animals and Children Took to the Streets by 1927 (previously seen by Total Theatre Magazine at BAC, a gorgeous interweaving of live action and animation); Quarantine’s Entitled; every minute, always by Melanie Wilson and Abigail Conway; The first moment I saw you I knew I could love you by Curious (a very clever and beautiful reflection on memory, ageing, and our relationship to our bodies and our health/sanity); 3rd Ring Out – The Emergency by Metis Arts (a global warming SF game played out in a shipping container); andWatch Me Fall by Action Hero.

Looking at the above lists, there are definitely some patterns to notice and comment on. The first is just how many of the shows above are being presented at Edinburgh’s brand new venue Summerhall, which has emerged as the epicentre of all things experimental. The Hotel Medea overnighter is played out here, as is As The Flames Rose…, as well as most of the ‘late additions’ above (opening shows in Edinburgh later because it is a British Council Showcase year, which means that a lot of the world’s bookers and producers are in town for the last week only). Summerhall is an artist-led venture, supported by both Battersea Arts Centre and the Demarco European Art Foundation, and is certainly the must-go venue of the 2011 Fringe. There is talk of Summerhall being made into a year-round artist-led centre for residencies and performances, but that is just speculation at the moment. If I learn more, I’ll report back.

Other venues or producing houses with two or more shortlisted shows are: Universal Arts at New Town Theatre; Remarkable Arts at St George’s West; Dancebase; Traverse Theatre; Zoo Venues; Underbelly; and Pleasance. Forest Fringe, Laughing Horse Free Fringe, C Venues, and Assembly at George Square come in with one each.

Other patterns? Lots of interactive/immersive work of all sorts on the Innovation shortlist, which reflects the trend in contemporary performance; the high number of circus shows on the Physical/Devised shortlist symptomatic of this as a growing artform; lots of puppetry and animation either shortlisted or seriously considered for shortlist; numerous shows that are sited outside of regular theatre spaces; a lot of work using spoken word in interesting ways (mediated and otherwise); a continuing interest in deconstructing classic fairytales witnessed in the shortlist and in numerous other shows considered for the Awards; a number of shows investigating flooding due to global warming; and many shows manifesting an interesting use of music, and/or with narratives driven by music.

So, there you have it: the shortlist. I’ve set myself the task of seeing all the shows on the list before the judging meeting on Thursday 25th – wish me luck!

Adrian Howells: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding

A swanky hotel room, tasteful decor, immaculately clean linen. A warm bathroom, a bath full of bubbles and rose petals, candles in glass jars. An assignation with a new lover? A weekend break to revive a tired marriage? No, a theatre show/event/experience (it’s hard to name it!); a one-on-one with Adrian Howells, one of two shows he is presenting at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011 as part of the British Council showcase (the other is his new work, May I Have the Pleasure…?).

You are invited into the room not by Adrian but by an assistant, who shows you where to get changed, and invites you to read a few lines about the show. You read that you can wear a swimsuit or be naked, your choice. That, regardless, your genitalia will not be touched. That you can speak, share thoughts and memories, or not – your choice. When you have undressed and donned a crisply laundered white robe, you knock on the bathroom door and Adrian invites you in. He helps you disrobe, takes you by the hand as you step into the water. He asks that you close your eyes, and immediately your other senses – touch, and smell, and hearing – are enhanced.

I feel an odd sensation on my face and chest, I’m expecting water but this is dry. My eyes open slightly for a second. Oh of course, rose petals falling! Then there is water, a gentle stream, then soap and the washcloth. Face, body, arms, legs. Ears. How odd to have your ears washed, I think. I just ignore mine most of the time, I say. Toes. I’m about to apologise for the chipped nail varnish, then decide that I don’t care. Nothing matters. ‘It’s all alright,’ says Adrian and I believe him. I’m washed, dried, wrapped in fluffy towels. I come to sit with him in an embrace, eyes closed, snuggled in. I hear the fan humming in the room, the cars outside, the hotel lift doors opening and closing. I say nothing, but the thoughts flow.

I remember washing my mother’s hair, a day or so before she died. She was off to hospital for a hip replacement, looking forward to being mobile again, and she hadn’t had time to go to the hairdresser’s, so I offered to wash her hair for the first and only time. It had felt strange: I remember thinking that this might be the first of many hair-washes, that as she got older and more infirm, I’d be doing this more often, but that’s not what happened – she didn’t get older, she died within hours of the operation.

I remember all the years of bathing children, and how when they were little all three of my sons would squash into the bath together. I remember their soft skin, their long girlish hair trailing in the water, and the damp little heads on my chest afterwards. I remember the shock when the eldest got to be eleven or twelve and started locking the bathroom door, shutting me out. These memories float by, but I say nothing.

Snuggling in feels easy, normal, familiar. The calmness and quiet feels unfamiliar; the lack of any sort of agenda, the freedom in being looked after, of surrendering any responsibility to ‘do’ and accept just ‘being’. I stop thinking.

The Pleasure of Being creates a space into which narrative can unfold. Everyone’s story will be different, defined by past experiences, associations, memories. The experience is facilitated by a theatre-maker who knows his stuff: we are in safe hands, boundaries between performer and audience held in a delicate balance. Despite the intimacy of the situation, our roles are clearly defined. The theatre is in the framing of this place, this time, as a shared experience. It happens, and then it’s gone. And it is, truly, a pleasure.