Author Archives: Hannah Sullivan

About Hannah Sullivan

Hannah is a performance maker and freelance producer based in Bristol.

John Moran: The Con Artist

The Con Artist is a new work by New York composer / theatre artist John Moran. One ongoing feature of John Moran’s work makes portraits of peoples and places in sound through the careful arrangement of everyday utterances and conversations. After visiting Mayfest previously with the semi-autobiographical John Moran + Saori (…in Thailand) he has been asked back to reveal his latest work.

Moran opened this premiere of the show by telling us it wasn’t finished, naturally putting us into doubt, but followed this by charming us with a range of excuses and stories. This informal opening appeared to offer some insight into his life, the life of a composer: travelling between countries, and dealing with floods in Bangkok and drug-infused procrastination in Amsterdam.

The difference in this work to Moran’s previous sound portrait pieces is the focus on the men in his life, as opposed to the women. The portraits are composed from natural, everyday sounds of men speaking, walking, sitting, drinking. As he plays us these carefully arranged scenes, Moran mimes his characters’ behaviour and gestures, keeping in time with the sound. This task is very engaging to watch – getting the action right on the note is satisfying. His work brought us sonically to a waltzing Italian man, a ten year-old boy, and an English gentleman, each embodied with great physical precision. These portrayals were woven in with a portrait of Moran himself trying to finish this very piece of work – a humorously self-referential touch that shows us his struggles to focus on work.

Halfway through Moran stopped to ask us, ‘Do you hear the music yet?’. He went on to explain how everything is in seven beats, asking us to concentrate on the complexity of the sounds. As he mixes up the portraits and repeats them relentlessly, a tight and absorbing choreography emerges and we enter into a blur of characters and situations.

Moran’s relaxed presentation encourages attention on the melody and lyrical nature of everyday sounds and the particular intonations of different people. Though he might have felt it was ‘unfinished’ I found this an intriguing and enjoyable performance that warmly draws out the uniqueness of every personalities as defined by our own personal sounds and rhythms.

Anne Bean / Poshya Kakl: The Un-knitted Lives of Young Girls

The Un-knitted Lives of Young Girls is part of a long collaborative relationship between visual and performance artist Anne Bean and young Iraqi performance artist Poshya Kakl. The performance was a screening of Kakl’s film Knitting Iron on two large screens hung on either side of a long industrial space in Birmingham’s AE Harris factory. The film documents Kakl visiting an Iraqi prison where women who have refused arranged marriages are imprisoned.

The film shows Kakl bringing bags of colourful wool to the prison for the women to decorate the fence that both imprisons them and makes them feel more safe. The women talk as they knit: love stories that quickly spiral into injustice are told, and accompanied, on screen, by musicians and singers. They weave the fence into a beautiful carpet on either side of the audience. In the performance at AE Harris a fence had been erected in the middle of the room which a small group of volunteer participants, costumed in dark eye make-up, decorated during the screening, starting from the bottom and working upwards, so that the fence became engulfed with soft woollen displays.

As one of the participants, I found the experience of the show affecting – the performance felt particularly profound as it nudged me to attempt to form a connection with these women who are so distant from myself and my lifestyle. As my hands worked the wool between the bars of the cold metal fence, I tried to imagine a different life for myself, to find empathy. I think this was Anne’s intention, to create an empathetic place in which we could receive Kakl’s work. At the same moment Kakl was performing a piece using the same film in Iraq. Through this action we connected to places without the complication of crossing borders and acquiring visas. The work of Anne Bean had particular potency in light of BE Festival’s multinational context and ethos of crossing borders.

The film is extremely powerful and the live action of decorating the fence enhanced this, but at times the action felt over dramatised by its use of calling voices and by the out loud repetition of subtitles – I found this distracting and it removed me from the intensity of the issues raised.

www.annebean.net

cieLaroque/helene weinzierl: THINK FISH part I

THINK FISH by the Austrian company cieLaroque/helene weinzierl was the final performance of what had been a tense Friday evening at the BE Festival, and so its light energy and easygoing comic style was well received.

CieLaroque/helene weinzierl are described in the programme as Austria’s most prolific dance touring ensemble, demonstrating BE Festival’s success in importing exciting European talent to Birmingham. Helen Weinzierl, a tall blue-eyed woman in smart shirt and trousers presented a welcome, gentle face. She playfully led us through a choreographic sequence that culminated in us, the whole audience, following instructions to turn our heads to the side, close our eyes and imagine we were a fish.

The performance critiqued (mis)communication, and particularly communication through contemporary dance, becoming hilariously self-referential, critiquing and brilliantly undermining itself, as the two performers whipped their way through a sequence of obscure, agile movements. The second performer, a man sporting tie, shirt and sleeveless jumper, acted as a sort of silent clown and devil’s advocate in the piece, never doing what he was told and eventually exposing his bottom to the crowd. Weinzierl, mortified, tries to soldier on, but the piece increasingly breaks down as it demonstrates the absurdity of power structures and the innate limitations of our attempts to communicate transparently through movement or other means.

For me, the show’s highlight was the unexpected appearance of a fish from Helen’s mouth, provoking much post-show debate about whether or not it was real. The BE Festival audience really seemed to appreciate this performance of heavy duty, self referential, contemporary and comic dance: it felt very muchfor us, which I think was down to the attentive and charming presence of Weinzierl as host.

www.cielaroque.at

Sleepwalk Collective: As the flames rose we danced to the sirens, the sirens

A lone woman in a blonde ‘Marilyn’ wig and slick black dress stands at a tall microphone. She speaks to us directly but with an accent that’s hard to place and poetic text that, like a dream, starts in one place and ends in another. The blonde woman talks about black and white movies and how she wants to be the ‘take all of me’ woman, so she stands completely still for a minute so that we can do what we like with her. No one moves.

This new performance from Anglo-Spanish company, Sleepwalk Collective (currently based in the Basque Country), is edgy and playful, referring us to this strange world of cinema, and using the particular liveness of performance to enact what is only pretence on screen. Quirkily performing various filmic stock scenarios, she announces ‘tie me to the tracks!’ and lets a toy-train run into her mouth. She drinks many glasses of wine as ‘a woman in love’ – or is it as ‘a man seducing a woman’, or ‘someone drinking to forget’? The piece builds to a scene in which a projection of a black and white movie covers the back wall and runs in a loop, showing a woman continuously fainting into the arms of a man. Our blonde lady then dances and falls across the image to loud electronic music: ‘she’s looking for a room full of strangers whose arms she can fall into,’ says the blurb.

I found the work interesting as a comment on the filmic character of the ‘damsel in distress’ who, when put on stage, is somewhat callous, desperate but still charming, resonating with the vulnerable relationship of a lone female performer appealing to a live audience. The work makes use of performance art devices in a theatrical frame, working with the very live moment to negotiate ideas with an audience, seeing how far they can be pushed when, for example, watching the ‘girl cut in half’ trick acted out by a woman sawing her own sides with a small saw. This heavily text-based work felt brave in the context of BE Festival’s cross-border programme (although performed in an English version and not the original Spanish), but the filmic references translate across linguistic barriers.

www.sleepwalkcollective.com

Kulunka Theatre: André & Dorine

André & Dorine, by Basque company Kulunka Theatre, was a mask theatre performance with an impressive set design – an offering that appeared gleamingly polished among BE Festival’s mixed programme of work-in-progress and finished pieces. The full-face masks were very impressive and endearing, depicting an elderly couple with caricature large heads. An old man sat at his typewriter while an old lady sat with her cello, the piece establishing a routine before a tiff sees them interrupt each other’s work. But the work’s light-heartedness soon tumbles into despair as the elderly woman’s state of decay becomes clear and we realize she is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

The subject was very affectingly handled, bringing tears to the audience’s eyes as the suffering woman did not recognise her son and her elderly husband becomes increasingly desperate in his attempts to take care of her. The tone is leavened by jumps into flashback that are hilarious, and poignant, mini-plays of the couple’s early years of seduction and foolery.

Company founders and performers Garbiñe Insausti and José Dault outline their ambition to develop a ‘language that transcends the word’ and the accomplished physicality, mask work and music created an example of the ‘universal language’ that the festival programming sought to find. This version of the show, as for all BE performances, was only 30 minutes long, but the company have already toured the full-length (one hour) production internationally to great acclaim and it was easy to see how André & Dorinecould win audiences all over.

http://kulunkateatro.blogspot.com

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