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.

Hiroaki Umeda: Haptic / Holistic Strata

A black box becomes a white box then fades to grey. A blue line appears across the centre, dissolves, then reappears stage front. Into the shadow comes a figure, in silhouette. Hiroaki begins to move, isolating limbs, electronic beats behind him. He seems to emit energy. In this new twenty minute piece, there is much to marvel at and savour. The technique, a mixture of Butoh and breakbeat is seamless; he is like a shape-shifter. At one point he holds a position with the heel of his left foot off the ground, as if mid-stride. I try this later myself – it is fiendishly difficult. Whilst watching, I realise that I don’t know what haptic means. Hiroaki says: ‘what I want is to transmit sensations, rather than messages, to the audience’. He does this, and the sensations are great. Haptic means non- verbal forms of communication, such as the Japanese custom of bowing and not touching. Hiroaki uses his body to touch us and the piece has some emotional drive to it; it is no way cold. At the end, the soundscape fades out and we hear his footsteps and breath in the dark. Through his incredible control, sense of rhythm, use of space and light and sound, he embeds Haptic into the communal memory.

Holistic Strata starts with a casual stroll on stage and a twist of neck, then boom! – all is plunged into blackout except for Hiroaki. He has become light, a TGI figure, morphing from human to something other. Planes shift as streaks of flashing light move across and perspective dissolves. It is a thirty minute assault of the senses. A woman in front of me audibly gasps a couple times as the effects become more extreme, the auditorium seeming to revolve at one point. In the centre of all this visual noise Hiroaki dances on, his form like liquid mercury. The sound becomes overwhelming and I would have liked more harmony or contrast, but as a spectacle it is very effective and the choreography is as compelling as in Haptic. There are echoes of Saburo Teshigawara, and I am reminded of Akram Khan’s combination of Kathak and contemporary dance. Hiroaki came quite late to dance, having studied as a photographer. He has certainly brought all his knowledge to this piece. Mesmerising stuff; and he didn’t leave the floor once.

www.hiroakiumeda.com

Dan R Martin: The Black Dog and Other Influences

A newcomer to Brighton’s range of intimate spaces for intimate theatre, The Dukebox nestles at the back of the Iron Duke pub and is a good setting for Dan R Martin’s text-based two-hander.

Billed as a black comedy about manic depression, The Black Dog and Other Influences is a fast-paced exchange of ideas, scenarios and characters. A splintered conversation between therapist and patient, it teases the audience’s expectations as the actors swap roles, break through the fourth wall, discuss the making of the play, and somehow manage to give a pretty good overview of the life of a manic depressive.

Actor Roger Kennedy gives a great and understated performance; he has natural warmth and switches from comedy to attack convincingly. Less successful is Dan Martin, who could take his performance down several notches in volume and physicality.

Simply staged with two chairs, directorially there is just some getting up, walking about and sitting down. In bare feet. Further consideration of where the performers’ eyes should be focused needs a bit of attention; it would help delineate between the actor/character shift in this meta-theatrical language. Limitations of space require more creative thinking.

The strength is in the writing. The Black Dog and Other Influences interweaves the process of writing a play with that of undergoing therapy in a script that is sparky, full of good contemporary references and a fine sense of fun.

Philippe Decouflé Company DCA: Panorama

First came the whistles, then the drums. Seven assorted-size dancers marched through the foyer twirling batons, looking very pleased with themselves in orange majorette outfits and unnecessarily high furry busbies. Cameras flashed as coats and drinks were gathered up and a happy throng followed them into the auditorium. Pity the poor folk in the upstairs seats who missed a great opener; lucky us in the stalls.

Decouflé is a master of the big stage picture. He has shown his versatility and range in the opening and closing ceremonies for Albertville Winter Olympics (1992) and more recently with Iris for Cirque du Soleil. His defining show Codex (1986) launched his career as a choreographer with an exuberant visual awareness and curiosity; since then his use of video has become one the defining characteristics of his performances.

For Panorama, Decouflé goes back to basics. He takes some very early works and re-stages them with a new company, different costumes, and a fabulous range of music created by six composers. It is episodic, much like the circus he so loves, and overseen by a Master of Ceremonies – Matthieu Penchinat.

The stage set is a big arching grid, a visual echo of tent frames, with the dancers changing in the wings by fairy lights. It’s informal, unpretentious and playful. There is so much variety of movement and style it is hard to pinpoint a ‘signature’ choreographic approach, other than to say it is sinuous, acrobatic and quirky with often gravity defying leaps.

Stand-out moments include a fantastic riff on computer games with human sound effects, a beautiful and funny aerial duet on bungies, and a heart-stopping solo by a dancer in huge antlers.

There is exquisite use of shadow puppetry melding into life-size cartoon characters and an all too brief taste of Codex with its surreal mutant beings.

Panorama ends with a tableaux of the company clicking imaginary castanets to Orlando’s Hideaway. The precision is absolute, the costumes (Philippe Guillotel) are again shades of orange; it is simple and sublime.

If Vague Café, for which Decouflé won the Bagnolet competition in 1983 and which has not been re-staged since, seems tame thirty years on, there is much to celebrate. I missed the film wizardry a little, but what a journey he has had and what a joy for an audience to see these re-envisaged pieces.

Gary Kitching and The Empty Space: Me and Mr C

Gary Kitching is a direct, warm and welcoming chap. He establishes an easy audience rapport as he sets up the guiding premise of his show, Me and Mr C. We are to lower any expectations we might have for it, he tells us; he’s made it in order to have a one-man show as an actor rather than a comedian, and the whole thing will be improvised. Thus various audience members are allotted tasks that will assist this process, and the setting for the play is described so we can visualise it. Mr C is introduced – the rather alarming 1960s Chinese vent doll that features in the publicity photographs.

Twenty minutes or so in, the ‘play’ begins and our playfulness is taken on a darker, more complex journey. Gary’s character is exposed as a man suffering the fallout of his girlfriend leaving him, with no one to help him through these feelings of grief. His one friend is a silent dummy. To challenge himself Gary is advised to have a go at stand-up comedy. The audience has been primed to heckle and to not hold back.

In between his disastrous attempts at stand-up are visits to his therapist, on this occasion ably played by volunteer Tom, who reads audience questions and nods sagely when prompted. Gary brings in his improvisation skills in answering these questions; some riffs work and others fall flat.
Persevering with the stand-up he gradually loses it and here the piece balances on a sharp-edged knife. The audience on this occasion was still heckling cruelly as Gary went beyond comedy to a place of rage and despair. I felt he intended to take us with him, for us to be forced to stop being frivolous, stop playing, start listening.

The ending, in which Gary and the dummy swap roles is perhaps overcooking the subtext, but on this occasion it did make the audience realise that Me and Mr C was more than an invitation for it to raise its own voice.

Guilherme Leme: The Stranger

He seems a decent sort, this man Meursault, present at his mother’s funeral but not overwhelmed with grief. They had had an understanding and neither needed nor expected anything more of each other than they had. She had been at a happy point in her life, content in the place she lived and with a new male friend.

But by his inability to follow normal codes and modes of behaviour, Meursault becomes a victim of a society that cannot accept his philosophy or his way of living – his lack of belief in God, his seemingly heartless response to his mother’s death, and the naivety which leads him to kill a man and show such little remorse.

With echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, Camus’ L’Étranger presents an outsider who gradually comes to terms with his situation and his difference from others. He finds a release prior to his execution in a confrontation with the prison priest and his final wish for the crowd at his beheading to be full of hate.

This adaptation, by Morten Kirkskov, highlights the French/Algerian context. The life of the Arab comes cheap; the viciousness of Raymond, the ‘real’ villain, towards his Arabic mistress is seemingly accepted behaviour.

The story is told in a powerful and tightly controlled performance by Brazilian actor/director Guilherme Leme. The stage design is simple and striking in black and white. A central chair, a suit of clothes, beams of light, the sound of the Muezzin. Good use is made of these few forces, evoking the heat of the beach and the containment of a cell. Concentration does not wander and audience focus is complete throughout; we hang on the words needing to know more, convinced and somewhat spellbound.

Meursault remains a morally ambiguous and troubling figure, out of time, hard to like but with a fierce sense of righteousness. We are left with room to think as his final cigarette burns in the darkness.

Total Theatre