Author Archives: Edward Rapley

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About Edward Rapley

Artist, actor, performer, and writer. A proud member of residence.org in Bristol. Trained at Ecole Philippe Gaulier. He has had the good fortune to be supported by Arnolfini, Bristol Old Vic and The Basement in the creation of some of his four solo shows. In his writing for Total Theatre he attempts to met each show on its own level and respond to the thoughts and dreams it sets off in his head.

Ross Sutherland: Standby for Tape Backup

Ross Sutherland - Standby for Tape BackupThe ability to see patterns is the ability to create a story: a narrative, however simple, explaining the world we witness. Sometimes this ability turns against us and we see patterns where there are none, sometimes, as in this show, we can overwrite old stories with new ones; through our imagination we can transform and subvert old images, experiencing them afresh.

Delivered through spoken text and an old VHS tape, this show could be simplicity itself, however its performer beautifully overlays his understanding of the world onto the contents of the video through which he loops and skips.

Thus the famous opening credits of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air becomes a fractured hymn of loss. The cheesiest of adverts a litany of anger and frustration with the Sisyphean horror of the working week. The show is a vast pop culture re-imagining where the past pours forth and crashes on the banks of the present.

The delivery is present and authentic, vital, and imbued with intelligence and playful humor. From wiped hard drives to stoic stupidity in the face of death, this show with its vortex-like circularity draws us in with an irresistible force. A exploration of meaning and memory delivered by an artist at the top of his game.

Reverend Billy: Honeybeelujah!

HoneybeelujahReverend Billy creates a church, a congregation, this is true preaching, saying what needs to be said. Finding the words in the moment, so that what might be pastiche in less potent hands is delivered with the full force of conviction, with the urgency of the need to save us from ourselves. Only this is not a moral salvation in the hereafter but a practical call to stop killing the planet on which we live. Because we are all dying together and we are not doing what needs to be done. Painting a far-reaching image of humankind’s toxification and destruction of the biosphere, with song and the spoken word Reverend Billy challenges his audience to rise from apathy, to see the situation in its dire entirety, and act, act now.

Touching on the necessity of biodiversity, the lessons present in the escalating temperature of the planet, and focusing on the effects of neonicotinoids upon the honeybee. These potent insecticides are linked to colony collapse disorder and present the terrifying possibility of the loss of the honeybee, which would devastate human agriculture and the natural world in equal measure. Expounding on the mysterious and fascinating abilities of the honeybee, they are made a symbol for every necessary link in the self-sustaining web of life. Chemico-physical communication through the waggle dance, wherein a single bee precisely triangulates plant, hive, and sun, accounting for the rotation of the earth: such wonders draw us to the fabulous unknown, that ephemeral territory where knowledge ends and wonder begins.

Celebration and provocation, joyous, righteous, full of the life and love so strongly present in their activism: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir deliver an irresistible call to action.

Ellie Stamp: Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Ellie Stamp Are You Lonesome tonightWhichever way you add the numerals of your birth date together they will come to the same thing. You add and add until you reach a single digit. That number is you, you are that number. This is fate, this means something, the day you were born sets you on a path. Thus the laws of mathematics take on an arcane symbolism they were never designed to hold or perhaps that we have forgotten.

Mixing conversational direct address, skillful musicality, and a gently playful interactive quality Ellie Stamp has something to say about delusions, about meaning and madness, and just how perilously, chemically close those two states are.

Triggered by a family member’s delusional belief the show examines the neurological explanation for certain forms of mental illness, the social and medical construction of a diagnosis, and the way in which a label comes to override all other concerns.

The grand cipher of Elvis (the subject of a delusional belief himself, with 8% of the citizens of the USA still believing him to be alive) stands at the heart of the work, around his undeniable charm and significance it is easy to come to the wrong conclusion. This person who is very nice and good at music, well it only makes sense that they should be related to Elvis because he was very nice and good at music and he had a sense of humor. Did you know that? Did you know that Elvis was a funny guy? What you think you know is only a thin slice of what is really true.

We construct truth moment by moment, all the things we think could be swept away, as they are by trauma or progressive illness, by hereditary conditions or the force of circumstance. Skillfully executed and resonant Stamp has created a work which needs to be seen by anyone wishing to understand better the subject of mental health that is so easily dismissed or deemed taboo.

Looking for Paul - Photo Steven A. Gunther

Wunderbaum: Looking for Paul

Looking for Paul - Photo Steven A. GuntherA cheerful woman is driven into a baleful rage by public art she cannot escape, the company enters the stage to sit and read through all the emails they sent regarding their residency in LA, and finally they present the show they have been working on. This is the potted synopsis.

Every moment of this show contains the seeds of a thousand thoughts. This is the perfect, irreducible complexity of truly great art. We see the insane workings of cultural production; the gulf between Europe and the US; the fractious personal relationships and the absurd intellectual elitism of high art; the personal cost of artistic failure; a process of creation collapsing into itself; the cost of art, public and personal, financial and emotional.

Suffused with the bleakly practical humour of the Netherlands, the text produces peals of laughter and pained recognition. A company in supreme control of the stage, they create entire worlds only to pull them out from underneath you. An approach to the very business of being before an audience that is only achieved by the best of companies, those whose continued mining of new forms and ideas, of creating shared vocabulary and understanding, allow them work at a pitch which far surpasses the tired linear forms that dominate our experience of the theatre.

Layer upon layer: discard the onion metaphor and think a hundred thousand years of sedimentary rock. There is the artist, the person behind the art, the art itself, the world which consumes and demands, the institutions, the art of being an artist; there is the understanding of the audience, the work in and of itself, appropriating meaning and stealing another’s kudos, cleaving the cache of context where the stage you work on is part of the show: look at us in the Disney theatre!

Then the switch and in a final tempest everything is released: violence, insecurity, abuse, fear, attacking and suffering, disgust, sex, revulsion, and annihilation. This is a piece of work which plays with reality itself.

 

Looking for Paul presented as part of Big in Belgium, Richard Jordan Productions in association with Summerhall and Theatre Royal Plymouth

MurleyDance: Object of My Affection

MurleyDance - Object of My AffectionMurleyDance present three distinct pieces of choreography, performed by highly trained ballet dancers. There is the sublime precision of line you would expect, just as there is control and exactitude in the execution of the smallest elements of the work.

Ballet, like any activity refined beyond the realm of normality to the height of its own definition, is perverse; it is a world unto itself governed by history and guided by a singularity of style. It is a powerfully heightened state of being on stage and as such it rather struggles to express the mundane. As if the subject matter itself could not live up to the form. Thus the first two pieces crash painfully against the boundaries of the art itself. The intense visuals and excellent production values cannot prevent a sense of the work being hollow behind the stunning visuals. The constraints of the pallette of movement felt too apparent.

You either fall towards a work like this and are consumed, or you are left outside of its scope. Thankfully the final section is utterly incredible and allows for exactly this overwhelming experience. With Into Decay by Richard Chappell we see finally these bodies whose stillness is fuller than normal stillness, whose will is so present in the smallest motion, move in deeply satisfying ways, putting into action what cannot be said. The use of the full company allows for a symphony of point and counterpoint to cascade from the stage. Moving as a company they are sublime.