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

Tania El Khoury: Maybe if you choreograph me, you will feel better

Maybe if you choreograph me… starts at Forest Fringe cafe. The lone audience member is taken on a walk through the streets. Who is this person leading the way? Is she the artist? Has it started yet, you wonder, looking round at the busy, driven people scurrying by and the slow, dreamy people ambling along. You are led into a bookshop, up the stairs and into the Anatomy section. Behind a screen, by a large window, are two small tables holding papers, binoculars, a Dictaphone. You are placed facing the window and left. ‘You’ll know what to do,’ says the person who has led you there…

The performer, on the streets, wears wireless headphones. She’s dressed like any other young female in Edinburgh, nothing to make her stand out, but this is clearly her, you realise, as she walks back for a third time, awaiting a command to stop. The audience member, viewing here from a window at the top of the shop, speaks into a Dictaphone when asked to.

Live artist Tania El Khoury describes this work as ‘a relational piece that happens between one female performer and one male audience member’. (As a critic I’m allowed in as an honorary man.) Ostensibly, he dictates her every move. As the copy puts it: ‘He can choose to introduce himself to her or to remain anonymous. He can choose to follow a script or to improvise. Her choices, however, are less straightforward.’

Of course it is far less simple: she has sculpted and choreographed the work; she gives her viewer simple options of A and B responses. I feel, for the most part, that she is calling the shots. But I like the concept, enjoy the game. On herblog, Tania (I decide to name her Tania, then it becomes Tati as the show progresses – because I have a friend named Tania who gets called Tati) describes the work as ‘a shout against oppression’. The male viewer is a kind of everyman, an archetypal patriarch, representing all the world’s fathers, brothers, lawmakers, religious leaders, politicians. The men who dictate; and the men who rule by coercion. Tania is the archetypal female: the bride handed over, the girlfriend fought over, the sister whose honour is ‘protected’, the woman who isn’t allowed out of the house unaccompanied. All the women everywhere who have their choices dictated daily: wear a veil, dress smartly, wear heels, don’t wear heels, wear make-up, no make up, covered hair, big hair. It goes on and on, playing out differently from culture to culture. On one level, the piece references Tania’s cultural heritage as an Arab woman from Beirut, yet there are messages for all the men of the world about the control of women’s bodies, minds, souls.

So within the piece, the viewer is asked, from afar, to guide the performer’s actions: should she walk slowly or quickly? Should she cry or throw a hissy fit? Can she take a cigarette break now? He is asked to look at images and choose: how should a woman look? Like the glamorous, Westernised, Queen Rania of Jordan, or like the hijacker/freedom-fighter Leila Khaled, the so-called ‘poster girl of Palestinian militancy’? He is asked to read her a letter, a letter from him (archetypal/universal male) to her (in part universal woman, but with specific references to her biography written into the text).

Does it work? The ideas are bigger than the execution. There are times when I am speaking into the Dictaphone and the pre-recorded next request cuts in. There are physical moments that don’t synchronise as they should. As a long-term unreconstructed feminist, I find the sexual politics a little oversimplified. There are other levels it could go to. But I would rather, so much rather, a piece like this that is ambitious, thoughtful, challenging, interesting – if not quite there yet on execution – than something more polished with less to say.

Tania El Khoury is an artist whose work I will look out for in the future – I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from her…

www.taniaelkhoury.com

Doctor Brown: Becaves

An empty stage, house lights on full, three false starts, then a blast from Carmina Burana (aka the Old Spice ad music), and a great moving lump appears in the back-wall curtain, which is pulled this way and that, chairs and shoes and toilet rolls spilling out of the sides. The curtain is pulled down with a terrible clatter, and ‘Doctor Brown’ is thrown into the space. He’s dressed in an embroidered Chinese dressing gown, and is wearing one battered slipper. He has wild hair and a beard, and terribly compelling brown eyes that are almost snake-like, hooded. He stares at us with something that might be a smirk on his face, possibly a simper, his body not exactly contorted, but somehow misaligned, off-kilter. He adjusts his dressing gown slightly, tugging the front edges together. He looks as if he is about to start speaking, then changes his mind. He does this again. And again. And again. And again. The snake eyes wander round the room. By now almost everyone in the audience is laughing raucously. His eyes keep fixing onto one woman (seated next to me) who has an extraordinary, high-pitched laugh. This attention makes her laugh more, and makes everyone else laugh more. Ten minutes pass and nothing more has happened, but the atmosphere in the room is close to hysteria.

Doctor Brown Becaves is a comedy show, but it is physical comedy, delivered by a talented performer who trained with the legendary Philippe Gaulier, French master of dark and demented clowning. The classic Gaulier exercises, based on relentless repetition – repeat, repeat, and repeat until the audience gives in and laughs – are evident in his technique. What’s odd about it all is that the audience seem almost ahead of him; it’s a very knowing audience, and it feels as if most people in the room have seen his work before. So there’s no resistance to push against; everyone is putty in his hands.

With an audience already permanently convulsed in laughter, is there anywhere else to go? He moves off into a series of surreal physical/visual sketches. The odd-bod Chinese sub-theme running through the show is developed from a chopsticks gag, in which (inevitably) the inanimate objects fight back, to a mock Peking Opera skit, replete with plastic masks and torn paper parasol. An audience member is brought up to play the beloved. It’s amusing, but it feels like it could go further than it does.

Then there’s a costume change: from Oriental dressing gown to a blonde wig, frilly pink undies and a workwear green cotton apron, via a bending-over back view of bollocks dangling down, and apron strings pulled up between the cheeks. This gets one of the biggest laughs of the evening, but there again jiggling man-bits always do, it’s inevitable.

He then moves into the audience and stands next to the laughing girl, a notebook in hand. He stays there a long time. She laughs, and laughs some more, and so does everyone else. She thinks he wants her phone number; someone behind her twigs and offers an order for coffee to the ‘waitress’. Again, there could be more.

‘What do you want from me?’ He cries, just before the show ends. From this audience’s perspective, the answer seems to be ‘nothing more!’ An extraordinarily gifted performer, but I’d personally like to see him work outside the safety of the late-night comedy circuit. Apparently he also has a children’s show. Now, that might be very interesting!

Orkestra del Sol: Top Trumps

As we enter a very lively and packed Spiegeltent – one of a group of mobile venues that are in St George’s Square, the Assembly’s temporary home due to its usual HQ on George Street being requisitioned – we’re issued with Top Trumps cards. You remember those don’t you? Collector cards that pre-dated Pokemon and which usually featured things like racing cars and their attributes? My Orkestra del Sol Top Trumps card says: ‘Sincero Minimo – Soprano Saxophone’ who boasts a lung capacity of 8,500cc and ‘instrument length’ – no missus, please, no tittering – of 0.68m.

The band bounce onstage, a beaming posse of musicians male and female, clutching a motley assortment of brass and percussion instruments, and clad in fetching black and red outfits that range from the sporty to the smart to the eccentric to the downright loopy. There are hats aplenty! And off we go into a rip-roaring set that includes Gypsy jazz, waltzes, polkas, and other Balkan-ish beats.

The Top Trumps card idea is the theatrical throughline, in as much as there is one, with musicians competing against each other in the various rounds to establish who has the greatest lung capacity, speed, range, or instrument length (ooh there you go again, tittering…). It’s reminiscent of the mock-contests held by the likes of Fanfare Ciocarlia, who this year took on Boban Marcovic in the Balkan Brass Battle. All well and good, but I wonder where the audience’s cards come into all this, they don’t really get referenced much…

But Orkestra del Sol really come into their own when they abandon this funny little game and move into the territory they’ve made their own: really working the audience into participating in the dances. They get everyone joining in a simple routine, then manage very adeptly to get us all partnered up and waltzing. The whole place is heaving, and the band (on this their last night here in Edinburgh) get a rapturous round of applause. I’d say ‘standing ovation’ but we are all already standing – and most of us are dancing.

All jolly good fun, but I have a few reservations (purely from the ‘theatrical elements’ viewpoint, being as they were shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award in the Innovation category!)

The first reservation is that I feel that when it comes to embracing theatre within their work, the environment that works best for Orkestra del Sol is the street or park. I’ve seen them work their way through a crowd at numerous street arts festivals, and the way that they integrate the audience into fictional scenarios such as a wedding party waltz are absolutely beautiful, and far more genuinely theatrical than this rather corny Top Trumps game.

I’d also say that if we were really looking at musicians who are innovative in the integration of contemporary theatre/performance concepts into their work, then we have to hold up as examples such luminaries as Björk, Sufjan Stevens, Jonsi of Sigur Ros, or even the Dresden Dolls. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the band as failing to live up to a tag as ‘innovative theatre makers’ that they are perhaps not even interested in pursuing; but it was on that basis that I was there to see and to judge…

That said, if we are talking instead about a good night out dancing to cheery music played with passion and panache, well – Orkestra del Sol are absolutely fabulous! Long may their sousaphones sizzle!

www.orkestradelsol.co.uk

1927: The Animals and Children Took to the Streets

So here we are, in the beautiful big city where there’s ‘milk and honey in every Frigidaire, and muzak playing in the air’. But wait: every city has its dark side, and there are places that the tourist buses don’t take you to. I mean, who goes to London to see Tottenham, or Peckham, or Croydon?

The onstage projected scenery switches from an attractive blue-and-silver skyline to an earthy expressionist mix of browns and reds with jagged black outlines, the screen-painting meanwhile depicting a run-down apartment block, a crazy jigsaw of walls and elevator shafts and rubbish chutes. Welcome to Bayou Mansions on Red Herring Street, where it’s hard, so hard, to keep the wolf from the door.

Three little windows open to reveal three gossiping ladies in old gold dressing gowns and turbans: our guides in the terrible tale to come. Bayou Mansions, we learn, is a place rife with cockroaches (we see them walking across the screen and doffing their hats), where the rooms are too small to swing a rat. We are introduced to some of its inhabitants: a 21-year-old granny, the lonely caretaker, his nemesis Wayne the Racist, and an enormous rat-pack of renegade children who know that the city’s parks are not for the likes of them, especially since the weeping woman junky got replaced by a water feature. Pan out to the rest of Red Herring Street, a tangle of stripjoints and takeaway restaurants offering ‘pan-fried pussy cat’, and we meet a junkshop owner who is touting glitter wigs, cuddly toys and Torvil and Dean VHS videotapes (and this lady’s feisty daughter Zelda, a left-wing activist and local gangleader).

Red Herring Street may be down in the dumps, but there is hope! Enter Agnes Eaves and her daughter, Little Evie, who are different, cleaner, and on a worthy mission to save Bayou Mansion’s children with ‘love, encouragement, and a bit of collage’. A story of riots, kidnap, and political subterfuge ensues, and of course there is no happy ending, just endless misery forever, because there’s no escape, and ‘if you are born in the Bayou, you die in the Bayou’.

It is all played out by our three live performers (writer/storyteller Suzanne Andrade, physical theatre performer Esme Appleton, and pianist/composer Lillian Henley) augmented by the gorgeous animated characters, graphics, and projected scenery created by the fourth member of the company, Paul Barritt. Taking techniques explored in their first show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, the company push the possibilities of live and screen interaction on mightily – not since Forkbeard Fantasy’s debut has there been a company so adept at integrating live and screen action, and so interested in exploring the medium’s possibilities.

The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, only the second show by 1927, has toured extensively since its long development phase and premiere last year at Battersea Arts Centre, over which time it’s developed a delicious pace and dynamism. Yet there is something more adding an edge, and that is something the company couldn’t have predicted or factored in: the 2011 English riots. Suddenly, this satirical story of rioting children, with its ironic reflections on ‘art in the community’ versus wholesale sedation via ‘shadow nannies’ and the ‘granny’s gum drops’ that reduce them to blank-eyed couch potatoes seems suddenly horribly, terribly pertinent and politically insightful.

It’s visually beautiful, with animation that is cleverly integrated with the live action and technically honed to near-perfection, has marvellous live music, and a wonderfully witty script that is a shining example of contemporary satire. A lovely, lovely show. I saw more than 60 shows at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and I went back to see this previously viewed piece to check it was still as good as ever.

It was better, dear reader, even better! Editor’s choice for the best stage show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011…

www.19-27.co.uk

All or Nothing / Strange Bird Zirkus: Uncharted Waters

Billing itself as ‘three short stories narrated through contemporary circus and aerial dance’ Uncharted Waters takes a general theme of the nautical and seafaring. There are (as it says on the can) three pieces presented, these linked, or interspersed perhaps a better way to put it, by live song of a sea shanty nature sung by Dave Boyd, who accompanies himself with simple and effective percussion.

The first piece, Spokes, uses ropes and silks to explore everything that can be explored around the notion of masts and rigging. It’s all efficient enough aerial work, but to an old lag like me there is nothing here that hasn’t been done before with ropes and silks, and there are other shows that I’ve seen in the past that have used ropes to explore nautical stories a lot more convincingly. I am also not particularly charmed by the performance presence of the two women aerialists (Lucy Deacon and Jennifer Patterson). Or at least, not as manifested in this piece. I note that Grid Iron’s director Ben Harrison and composer David Paul Jones are part of the creative team, and although the soundscape is good, it is hard to see where Ben Harrison’s talents for ‘dramatic development’ have been put to use here…

The second piece in the trilogy, Youkali, is better. Moritz Linkmann’s Chinese Pole work is of a high standard, and the piece – a kind of sailor goes to shore and gets into drag vignette; perhaps a reflection on the masculine/feminine binary divide of seaman and cabaret diva within one person? – swings along nicely. I love the contrast between Moritz Linkmann’s muscled, overtly masculine body and the slinky lady-dress he dons, with pristine white y-fronts underneath exposed as he turns upside down. But surely the Kurt Weill/ Marlene Dietrich torch-song classic ‘Lili Marlene’ has been done to death? Was there a reason why it had to be this tune, or could another, less hackneyed, song have been used? Perhaps the cliché was the point, but I do feel I’ve witnessed an awful lot of drag versions of Marlene. Still, this section shone out in an otherwise mediocre programme of work.

The second piece is followed by a long interval while the space is re-jigged and rigged for the third section, prompting thoughts of how ‘big top’ traditional circus so often understands the form better than the contemporary makers: there really should and could be a way to move from one piece to another without this big long gap, which breaks the momentum. 1,2,3 here we go, a corde lisse solo by Jennifer Paterson, is OK, demonstrating able skills, but not really thrilling enough to warrant that long wait.

My favourite performer is actually the musician, Dave Boyd, whose robust tunes give an earthy balance to all that airiness. I feel a lot more needs to be done dramaturgically to make these three pieces hold together as one complete show; and I’m not convinced that the exploration of the nautical theme witnessed here is offering anything the world hasn’t seen very many times before.