Author Archives: Edward Taylor

About Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor is one half of the Whalley Range All Stars – a street theatre company he formed with Sue Auty in 1982. www.wras.org.uk www.edwardtaylor.pictures

Studio Eclipse: Two Sink, Three Float

A small pontoon stage floats on the water of St. Peter’s Basin in Salford Quays. It has its own window box of reeds. Small floating bundles of red twigs mark out a performing area in the water.

The audience looks down on this scene – in the background trams pass by and customers park cars to go and eat in one of the franchise restaurants that populate this part of town.

A dancer clambers onto the stage from underneath. She has long hair which the water mats down so it covers her face entirely and she moves in a way that isn’t entirely human.

She bends over to look in the water and a second dancer appears as her reflection. As she moves round the edge of the stage the reflection follows her. The reflection climbs onto the pontoon – her wet hair fused onto the head of the other dancer to make them look like a weird Siamese twin.

The two dancers’ hair gets dramatically flicked around as they prowl around on the stage in unison. The images they create and the way they move create a rich vein of associations. They are like something from that folk story you can never quite remember.

A third male dancer appears and the associations multiply as he appears to attract the women, then hunt them and then control them. The women’s attempts to get back in the water are reminiscent of seals on dry land. They all bend over and submerge their heads in the water for such an uncomfortable length of time that you begin to wonder whether they are human.

Much is made of the figures (costumed in light grey) being visible and living under the water – when one of them leaves a scene they are not visible ‘offstage’. At one moment all three release a bright green dye into the water. The 30 minute long show is not so much telling a story as creating a world where these aquatic half-humans dwell.

As with all good site-specific work you earn your luck. Here a vivid double rainbow and an endlessly, restlessly circling swallow skimming the surface added to the show. It also poured with rain making it possibly the only show Belgium-based Studio Eclipse have done where the audience were as wet as the performers.

www.studioeclipse.be

How Things Change: 30 Years of Whalley Range All Stars

We (Sue Auty and Edward Taylor) first met touring with Horse + Bamboo (from Lancashire) and Dogtroep (from Amsterdam) in 1981.

The approach and attitude of Dogtroep inflamed our imaginations and we formed the Whalley Range All Stars in 1982 to realise ideas that we couldn’t do elsewhere. We didn’t want to be just like Dogtroep, but we liked how open they were to creating work in a variety of situations.

To begin with we made work for rooms above pubs, a garden centre, a tennis pavilion, the streets, and nightclubs, and even an exhibition for a vegetarian café. Anywhere that would have us. Payment for the work was scarce, but in those days jobs were scarce so it was possible to sign on without any pressure being applied.

Eventually the Tories got embarrassed about how many unemployed there were and created the Enterprise Allowance scheme. You created your own business and got a year-long equivalent of the dole to try and sustain that business. We went from a few cardboard boxes in the corner of my bedroom to a workshop in the rough end of Manchester which would not have been out of place in a Tarkovsky film.

Most of our early shows were one-offs and we were burning through ideas. At the same time a nascent circuit for street theatre was starting to develop so we began to pool some of the ideas we had and created touring shows for that circuit. Our first street theatre tour of sorts was in 1984 and we met many groups who are still active today – Bob + Bob Jobbins, Desperate Men, Avanti Display and the Grand Theatre of Lemmings.

Warner Van Wely (one of the artistic directors of Dogtroep) advised us to keep funders like the Arts Council aware of what we were doing, so we sent them reports every year. When we first went to North West Arts (before it all got centralised) we were told we were not a touring company. When we went to the Arts Council in London we were told, ‘Go away – what you do isn’t even an artform’. We got scraps left over from the funding table, but our first properly funded show was in 2000.

We’ve now created over 70 different shows, events and installations and toured to 23 countries over five continents. Festival programmers in France used to put the phone down when I told them our name, now they have heard of us and will even attempt a pronunciation. Our last show, Imaginary Friends, had ten people in the cast and saw us collaborate with Babok from Amsterdam (with whom we share the same roots). We collaborate with artists of the calibre of Clive Bell, Matt Wand, Bryan Tweddle, Andy Plant and Steve Gumbley. We are now an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation and this year have appointed our first ever administrator. It’s a bit of a shock.

It would be tempting to rest on our laurels, but outdoor/street theatre really isn’t the place to do that. You are only as good as your next show. The joy of working outdoors is that you can relate to your audience in so many different ways. There’s still a lot to do.

Next year we are planning to turn a disused shop into a peep-box with a large plant bursting through the windows on the first floor and workers excavating for food amongst the roots on the ground floor (visible through peep-holes in the blocked-up shop windows). The food will be processed and sold to the public.

Generik Vapeur: Waterlitz

Generik Vapeur are one of France’s largest street theatre companies. Their show Bivouac (the one with oil drums being pushed down the streets by a tribe of people in heavy blue make-up and grey suits) is a masterclass in how to whip up an audience and create a powerful, if temporary, experience. The set-piece ending is a bit daft but the parade that precedes it is joyously anarchic.

Sadly Waterlitz was more like the set-piece ending than the unpredictable parade.

The show’s focus is a huge man made from shipping containers, some stood on end to make his legs and one smaller one that swivels around and makes his head at the top. He’s a modern day version of the Wicker Man.

A rock band takes the stage and it all kicks off. We’re going to get a run-down of history and man’s place in history. So to start things off a pterodactyl puppet mounted on a crane flies overhead. The puppet is quite well-made but it comes in flying backwards because, it seems, no one has bothered to solve the problem of how to stop things hanging by a thread from twisting around.

Images are projected onto the man and aerialists abseil from him. A bagpipe player is lifted up high on a cherry picker. A nicely made Bleriot plane swings round on the crane trailing glittery confetti as does a mini with, God help us, a Carnaby Street punk singing God Save the Queen. Robin Hood made an appearance as did several other entirely clichéd English stereotypes. The containers that formed the man’s belly opened up to reveal passengers on deck. The Titanic appeared on a crane to warn us about where this was all leading.

It’s easy to be cynical but it was difficult to detect any connections between the various images. I used to see the People Show in the 70s who had a similar approach – a collective of artists coming up with a theme/location and jamming as many different ideas into it as possible. The difference being that the People Show had interesting ideas and generally knew how to connect them together. The gulf between the enormous production costs and the paucity of the content in Waterlitz was jarring.

www.generikvapeur.com

Quay Brothers / Leeds Canvas: Overworlds & Underworlds

Overworlds & Underworlds was a large site-specific project for the Cultural Olympiad created by the Quay Brothers working in collaboration with Leeds Canvas, a consortium of local arts groups. It mixed installation, sculpture, film, dance performance, and, above all else, atmosphere.

The Underworld part of the event took place in Leeds’ Dark Arches, an amazing subterranean space where underground rivers run below brick-lined gothic arches which stretch into the distance. The subtle lighting emphasised the fact that it was difficult to see just how big the space actually was. You walked from arch to arch, and they contained a mixture of dance performance and small installations by the Quays. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice hung heavily in the air.

The Quay Brothers’ contributions were lovely – an evocative series of small exhibits in glass cases which featured an insect which a malignant sea-anemone like parasite had just burst out of, twisted seed pods which might have supplied the parasite, and a small almost vegetal figure whose sexuality was ambiguous at best, as well as excepts of a trademark black and white film where sensual changes of lens focus and lighting provide the narrative.

However, I wondered how much of an artistic overview they really had on this? It looked like they made their bits independently, supplied the ideas for what they wanted and left it with a production company to put it together.

The dance pieces exploited the spaces and looked like out-takes from the Quay’s Instituta Benjamenta feature film, but would have been more magical if the aluminium scaffolding used to hang the lights had been integrated more effectively into the surroundings or indeed completely hidden from view. Rock and roll packing crates lying around the place don’t help transport you to an alternative world either.

One dance piece demonstrated that what might look good as a short inscrutable stop-motion animation film where very little is going on bar flickering camera movements and changes of perspective don’t translate well into performance unless a lot more thought is put into it.

The Overworld part of the event took place in the pedestrianised streets and featured marching silver bands, dance, and shop window installations.

The mass dance piece accompanied by a local silver band was very effective. The costumes were austere and it looked like an age-old ritual as much as a modern piece of choreography, helped by the overall informal presentation.

The large sculptural boat in Briggate was awful. I can imagine that the maquette that the Quays supplied was exquisite but scaling it up and rendering it in different, inappropriate materials made it look like something from a Kinder egg. If they are going to attempt that Royal de Luxe imaginary realism approach where the object has smashed into the pavement then at the very least the flagstones displaced by the impact need to match up to the real flagstones on the pavement. It looked like what it was – a quick visit to a skip whose contents had been dumped on the pavement underneath the boat.

It was the same with the big pylon protruding out of one of the built-up waterways threading through the city centre. It’s all very well letting the metal rust a bit, but if the bolts holding it together are still shiny and in several places are too long for the job it just looks like a theatre set rather than a mysterious intervention.

The Quay’s films and installations show a great feeling for and sensitivity toward materials; these large sculptures didn’t. Their films create obsessively imagined worlds where nothing is left to chance. Much of this event revealed too much of what was behind the scenes.

One installation in a shop window just looked half-hearted and done the night before its jokey, flimsy and feeble content emphasised by the heartfelt blues song by Charlie Patton it was supposed to be a response to.

With the Arts Council pushing its ‘Great Arts for Everyone’ agenda down our throats and encouraging groups to work outside, I fear we are going to get more of these projects which contain good moments but which overlook the attention to detail which makes outdoor work really come alive in the public’s imagination. The public are far more perceptive than elements of this project gave them credit for.

www.overworldsandunderworlds.com

Pierre Sauvageot: Harmonic Fields

You wait for a coach outside the Lanternhouse in Ulverston, which takes you twenty minutes out of the town and onto the hills overlooking Morecambe Bay – quite a spectacular place and a view to die for. The hills overlook Windscale so it’s a view you quite possibly could die for.

Here you discover Harmonic Fields – a huge sound installation created by Pierre Sauvageot, who has a long track-record in creating music on the streets: peripatetic choirs, orchestras where the audience play the ‘instruments’, brass bands who accompany the monthly testing of sirens in Marseilles.

Harmonic Fields presents a wide variety of instruments that rely on the wind to play them. The installation covers a large area of ground and it’s arranged in different categories of instrument. There’s a walkway with large bamboo poles on either side. Each bamboo pole has had notches carved into it so that they sound like flutes as the wind blows through them – a subtle and, at times, unearthly sound.

Further along are a patch of Balinese scarecrows – bamboo bird-table style structures on poles where the wind catches a small wheel which then causes a little figure to bob up and down hitting the table surface. In the strong Cumbrian winds the figures are bobbing up and down like the clappers; many have in fact been blown to bits by the strong gusts.

There are a series of drums salvaged from kits that you can put your head inside. There is a long wire connected at either side to drums which act as a sound box for the wire which is being whipped around by the wind. Membranes vibrate, sticks on wheels blow against bells, violins amplify their breeze-agitated strings. There’s nothing digital here, just a development of age-old instruments like Aeolian Harps, wind-chimes and bull-roarers.

Visually it looks terrific on the hill-side. Lots of wheels rushing round, things on tall poles and subtle sculptural interventions to the basic shapes of instruments. The instruments are placed in different sections and each section is named after a different type of wind. The quality of the wind (dry Mediterranean or strong Pacific) giving an extra level of meaning to the sound contained in the section.

In addition there are several guides in wide brimmed hats holding stout poles, slowly patrolling the area. They offer advice when asked and add a low-key, calm presence to the space.

Unearthly sounds, unexpected instrumentation, and an artful installation set in a beautiful landscape. What more could you ask for?

Total Theatre