Author Archives: Lisa Wolfe

About Lisa Wolfe

Lisa Wolfe is a freelance theatre producer and project manager of contemporary small-scale work. Companies and people she has supported include: A&E Comedy, Three Score Dance, Pocket Epics, Jennifer Irons,Tim Crouch, Liz Aggiss, Sue MacLaine, Spymonkey and many more. Lisa was Marketing Manager at Brighton Dome and Festival (1989-2001) and has also worked for South East Dance, Chichester Festival Theatre and Company of Angels. She is Marketing Manager for Carousel, learning-disability arts company.

Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze: À Bas Bruit

On stage is a large wheel and a low platform with a moving travelator. There is also a thunder-board and a slatted screen, some boxes, some lights. They are there as tools rather than a set; there are lights around the walls, cables, projectors. It is a casual affair.

We are given a page of translated texts with our programme. It has four extracts on it, three of which refer to solitary walking, as a way of experiencing the landscape and people, and of enhancing creativity. Two male performers enter the space, one goes to the wheel, the other passes a lamp-light over the slatted screen and releases a film, crackly and atmospheric. The walking begins…

Mathurin Bolze is one of the leading lights of French contemporary circus, last seen at LIMF with Du Goudron et des Plumes (2011). This year’s MIme Festival offering, À Bas Bruit, ‘explores what happens when feelings and ideas rebel against the established order of things’, and is inspired by the work of avant-garde film-maker and anthropologist, Jean Rouch. For the first time, Bolze directs without himself performing in the piece.

À Bas Bruit features three performers, Elise Legros, Cyrille Musy and Mitia Fedotenko – all, as you would expect, very highly skilled acrobatics and dancers. There is clever, fluid work on the travelator (which, along with the ‘hamster wheel’, perhaps represents the treadmill of life). There are duets and throws and catches and leaps. The films are projected on to different surfaces and generally feature people walking amongst autumnal scenery. There is a nice scratchy soundscape and some songs to provide a human voice. The lighting (Jeremie Cusenier) is magnificent; and the staging (Frederic Marolleau) and sound design (by Goury) are impressive. It is an accomplished, well-produced and layered piece. The audience can relax and enjoy the physical expertise on show.

For those who seek a bit more than entertainment it is less satisfactory. The relationship between them and us is distant: there is a lack of character, no emotional pull.

There are a couple of very odd segments which do make you sit up. Mitia Fedotenko suddenly goes into a good clown routine. It is the first time there has been any contact made with the audience. It springs out of nowhere and bears no relation to anything that as gone before. It feels shoe-horned in to demonstrate ability and add variety. Elise and Cyrille have a jokey routine on the travelator, then Elise gets battered for being a bit irritating. The male-female dynamic is incredibly stereotyped throughout.

Eventually all three take to the wheel, building up tremendous speed, and then reach a point of total stillness. This would have been a great ending, with just Mitia’s head in a golden light. Instead, the cast shifts boxes around and prepare other surfaces onto which photographed faces of many ethnicities are projected, in homage (we presume) to Jean Rouch’s work on African ethnography.

The title translates as ‘low noise’. I wish it had made its propounded ideas of rebellion and mass movements a bit louder.

Ivo Dimchev: Lili Handel

Let’s hear it for transformation. There is a slow tottering walk on stilettos, the body quivering in its shag-pile jacket and beaded thong, the head bejeweled, bald, white. On the sound system the slowed down groan of Nat King Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and then the words: ‘Hello, I’m Lili Handel, let’s have a party.’

Quite who, or what, Lili Handel is is one of the main conundrums of this astonishing piece of performance theatre, by a man totally subsumed by his creation. Many have taken Lili to be an aged diva, and, in the hoarse whispers and tortured opera arias, there is more than a whiff of Baby Jane in this character. But to me it seemed less gender specific, almost more animal than human.

Over the course of an hour, Lili was playful, malicious, provocative and needy. It was rather like watching a precocious, talented child doing whatever the hell they wanted. Whether scampering about slapping the buttocks squealing delightedly ‘stop it, that hurts’ and checking to see how pink they were getting, or doing elephant impressions with a battered horn, Lili was constantly surprising. The interruptions – ‘we definitely need some good poetry now’ or ‘this is too exhausting and doesn’t make a lot of sense’ – demonstrate that beneath the apparent buffoonery is a layer of questioning about performance itself.

Ivo takes this further by asking an, in this case, unfortunate audience member if he’d like to go to the pub and have a chat, or stay with the show and provide some motivation (Lili’s motivation has gone). Sadly the chap is stuck for words and it gets a little embarrassing. Similarly, auctioning a vial of blood isn’t as lively as it could be. ‘I got £50 in Bristol,’ Lili murmurs. But what’s the right price for an artist’s blood? What would Bryony Kimmings say?

The show is all about the body and Lili’s love / hate relationship with it; ours too, as viewers and voyeurs. It is a willful, shape-changing thing; the flesh pale and solid but vulnerable. Throughout the show Ivo’s physical skill is magnificent: look how he arches backwards over the chair with a seemingly rubber spine. There are some stunning movement sequences – an odd running motif while sat down wearing a battered sort of Stetson, or twirling a ribbon to make us relax and enjoy the beauty – and everything is elegantly choreographed. Vocally too his range is extraordinary, from a conversational back of the throat mutter to the howl of a wild beast, and proper operatic technique.

Some have found this show baffling and boring. The Brighton audience appeared wooed by a performer so at one with his creation, who knew his craft, created magic, kept us guessing and made us think. Lili Handel is an old piece and Ivo has made many others since, but this is the only one that gets booked in the UK. Programmers! Please bring him here again, I think there is much more fun to be had.

LipService: Inspector Norse (The Girl With Two Screws Left Over)

Winter is cold in Sweden. You need to wear a warm sweater. You need to learn how to walk with sticks. You need to know how to construct flat-pack scenery. Thus with minimal fuss the stage is set for an anarchic romp through the Swedish TV crime genre, involving four-piece pop band Fabba, an alarming amount of roadkill, community knitting, and a streetwise moose.

Involving the audience from the start (in order to provide ‘meaningful engagement in the arts’), playing with dramatic devices, and sneaking in some meta-theatre, Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding are delightfully batty and assured performers, whether in character or as themselves. And what great characters they have created. Sandra Larsson, the sweater-wearing detective who doesn’t do small-talk; Erik, the lugubrious cop with his wavering accent; Freya, the brunette out of Fabba – or is she?; and, my favourite, Sven from Fabba, slightly pervy with his plastic playmate and hot tub. It is less bewildering than it sounds – the pair excel in doubling up, and subverting form: ‘I’m going behind the set to change because that’s professional,’ announces Maggie with a flounce.

LipService obviously have a very loyal audience. Much of the ingenious set has been provided by knitting groups on the tour. We happily help to decorate the tree to recreate spring, make our ‘sporklers’ for a firework effect, and do all the sounds effects requested. Filmed excerpts by Vita Fox both support and supplement the story. There is original music and songs (Oliver Vibrans and Malcolm Raeburn).

If it seemed a little small on the Theatre Royal stage, Inspector Norse was a refreshing change to the usual theatre on offer here. There are echoes of Spymonkey in the absurdity of it, and of Forkbeard in the inventiveness. From its lovely ‘humanette’ effect, to crispbreads as foley (they make great crunching on snow footsteps) and the unnecessary plot-point of a knitted spanner, LipService are masters of their material and performance. Skol!

Nicole Beutler: 1:Songs

The stage is bare apart from five microphones on stands at the front and a blurred projection on the far wall. Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti enters. In silhouette, she is a dramatic sharp-edged shape whispering hello to us. Gradually the sound and light build and a tune begins: melodic piano, gentle singing (music by Gary Shepherd). The projected image gains clarity and starts to move, very slowly. It’s a scene from Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma, Città Aperta, the moment when Anna Magnani runs forward, falls and dies. This provides the theme for the series of songs, speeches and movement phrases that follow. Death is always at the door; the protagonist is a tragic figure.

As the show progresses, a variety of women’s stories are sung or given form through movement. Ibelisse is constantly arresting and an excellent all-rounder. Less satisfying is the structure and content of the piece, which became a confusing mismatch of the profound and trite, its style veering from loud to extremely loud to quiet. Whilst the flyer notes that all the women are tragic victims, there seemed to be no interrogation of why, no context to explain their behaviour – particularly pertinent in the case of Medea. Without more substance, 1:Songs lacked impact beyond the physical and technical fireworks.

Reckless Sleepers: A String Section

Four very different looking women, four different styles of black dress, four different types of black shoes, four different dining chairs, and four saws – all the same. From B&Q.

Holding eye contact and draped elegantly over their chairs, like classical musicians summoning a muse, the quartet slowly pick up their instruments and begin to saw at their chair legs.

There is no music other than the sounds they make, human and mechanical. There is no mood lighting and no clear subtext. They are doing what they are doing. All four are dancers so there is a consciously fluid and shapely quality to the movement and they are self aware, complicit in the ridiculousness of their task. Within its loose structure there are bursts of frantic action and moments of still reflection, a rhythm. They are timing themselves by a clock on the wall. We begin to see different personalities and approaches: the cheeky one, the flamboyant one, the sedate one. It’s almost like a girl-band.

As the chairs reduce in height, and saws flail about, and legs go akimbo, the audience giggles and sighs in turn. When will they stop? Chainsaw anyone? But end it does, the women sweating demurely, the task completed to their own satisfaction.

This is a curious piece. It is totally open to interpretation. For Maddy Costa, writing in the Guardian, it was a powerful reflection of the role of women in society – she saw in it the harshness of domesticity, a statement about pornography and the birth of her two children. It did not affect me so directly, but thoughts bubble up over the 45 minutes – it’s like a short durational piece. Do women compete like men and was their technique occasionally rubbish on purpose? Are they in control or being coerced? Are we all failing and falling and doing purposeless things to fill our days? A String Section poses questions, and that is the aim of Reckless Sleeper’s Mole Wetherell’s work; he puts it out there and lets us make of it what we will. Devised by Leen Dewilde, and performed by her and three others, it was an interesting experience, and very watchable.

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