Author Archives: Michael Begg

About Michael Begg

Michael Begg is a musician and sound artist based in East Lothian, Scotland, from where he runs his label, Omnempathy, and studio, Captains Quarters. He collaborates regularly on theatre sound design, most notably in an ongoing relationship with with Moscow’s blackSKYwhite, and writes regularly on sound and theatre. This written work has appeared in The Scotsman, The Quietus, Paraphilia, Sound On Sound, Adverse Effect, and in translation for the Polish Soundscape Institute.

Faux Theatre: Torn

Torn invites the viewer into a private place. A place where madness is close, but will never be called such because this kind of madness is, perhaps, common to us all, and remains contained in moments of loneliness. There is no witness to call us mad.

Though here, in Francisca Morton’s intimate exposé of one woman’s journey through loss and isolation, we find that there is a witness in the form of the plain view presence of foley artist Barney Strachan whose work simultaneously amplifies the sound of a figure simply being alone in those nocturnal moments of loneliness and sensitivity, and disassociates the body from its effect on the immediate environment – both familiar components of psychological pressure and depression, and a singularly elegant production device.

The woman at the centre of the piece lives deep within the memories of a relationship now ended. For the most part, these memories, visualised as neatishly arranged and classified piles of paper, are held close as a comfort. They attend her when she is watching movies alone late at night, they envelop her like a warm bath as she bathes shamelessly in the recollection of passed times, she neatly visits the memories one at a time, pressing them flat, airing them on lines to keep them fresh and clear.

Unfortunately, inevitably, loss itself asserts itself and the weight of memory becomes overwhelming. Order slips, repressed feelings come steaming and bubbling to the surface, and she becomes lost once more, helpless and needy as a baby bird in a nest of torn and twisted scraps, calling with agonising tenderness to be lifted from this lonely place.

Given the subject matter, it is a testament to Morton’s control – and that of her two directors, Shona Reppe and Ian Cameron – over the work, that Torn plays out as much more playful and self deprecating than one might anticipate. One could almost come away with the feeling that this piece with all its pain and all its articulation of unusual behaviours is, in itself, a memory, viewed from the safe distance of time – in which we can hopefully suppose that the character has found repose.

Julian Crouch & Saskia Lane: Birdheart

Sometimes, simple is best. Julian Crouch, however, is not the first name that comes to mind when considering simplicity in the theatre. From the bawdy excess of his Shockheaded Peter collaboration with those dank, camp darlings of underground cabaret, The Tiger Lillies, to the playful opulence of his designs for the Metropolitan Opera, the Brooklyn based director/designer/puppeteer seems comfortable inhabiting a certain sumptuous excess.

There is no surfeit of any kind, however, with Birdheart. Along with collaborator Saskia Lane, Crouch’s offering to this year’s Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival is a compelling lesson in economy and invention.

An egg sits in a tray of sand atop a simple wooden table. With no pretence towards blackout invisibility, the casually dressed Crouch and Lane step forward and engage directly with the invention springing from their hands. It is likely no mistake that the scene looks as commonplace as a sandpit in any nursery. What follows arises from a rehearsal workshop exercise in which participants are invited to find a common language from minimal materials – commonly a sheet of paper – the focus is on pure invention – the kind of invention that we like to assume is a natural component of childhood that we are subsequently condemned to spend the rest of our lives referring back to in wonder.

A crumpled sheet of brown paper is teased from the egg and becomes a sail. Once upon the shore the sail becomes a figure. With delicacy and poise belying the prosaic raw materials, fleeting scenarios emerge and fold into one another. There is no real narrative to follow, only our empathic reaction to the curious and lonely movements of this fleeting creature, scrabbling in the sand.

Because there is no blackout providing the illusion of unaided autonomy, Lane and Crouch are free to interact in plain sight with their invention, entering often into a richly nuanced choreography, never more sensitively executed than when Lane tries to assist the suddenly aged – though stubborn – creature in pouring tea from a teapot into two cups at a table set for two. The eloquence of this and other moments seem all the more remarkable given that Lane’s profile is predominantly as a musician. Here she shows herself as a puppeteer of exceptional sensitivity and composure.

Crouch has said of the work – a VisionIntoArt / National Sawdust commission – that it asserts the case that we are nothing unless we make something. Birdheart is a quietly powerful, utterly compelling articulation in miniature of the idea that the whole of life can be conjured from sand, sticks, paper, and the will to imagine.

Sound of the City: Sonica Sings Out

Michael Begg surrounds himself with sound at Sonica in Glasgow

They are a form of theatre. They are compositions in space that effectively pull one into a sense of something other, another time, place, dimension. There is often a narrative waiting to be interpreted. Often, too, there is scenery and sound, and some form of dialogue. When successful, they form eruptions opening into parallel possible worlds, inviting us to consider the familiar in new light, or the unfamiliar in first light.

The installation is more seductive, less confrontational than its sibling the performance art action. There is seldom any performer commanding your attention, let alone your reaction. There is only the work statement, the evidence of a proposition made manifest in place and time left to do its thing, left for you to do your thing to it, left for you to make what you will, take what you will.

They are a form of theatre, but the fourth wall is more likely to arise between yourself and your neighbour than the pair of you together against the work. It is a very intimate form of theatre, because you are, when engaged fully, a practitioner.

For 21 years, Cryptic, in the tenacious hands of artistic director Cathie Boyd, has pursued a singular vision of the Art House, producing, commissioning, nurturing and touring works that resolutely fail to sit within recognised borders; performance and spectacle; sound, music and light; technology and craft. Sound – experimental, electronic music, in particular – becomes more of a specific focus of this border breaking activity within Cryptic’s Sonica strand.

The biennial festival, this year in its third iteration, manifests over 11 days as a city-wide combination of performances and installations. The installations arise from commissions, residencies and through the Cryptic Associates programme for emerging artists and are, on occasion with inspired verve, sited in a range of venues including the Centre for Contemporary Art, the Glasgow Science Centre, The Glue Factory (which is what it says on the tin though has now been re-imagined as a multiform creative space), and Govanhill Baths which similarly is re-awakened from its original Edwardian purpose to live again as a community focused cultural hub.

Robbie Thomson: The New Alps

Govanhill Baths, mostly emptied of water, though still featuring walls slightly verdant with damp and, on account of the roof needing some attention, subject to an occasional drip in inclement weather, plays host to two very different responses to human short sightedness, folly, and self-determined capacity for ruin. Robbie Thomson’s The New Alps speaks to our propensity for imposing monstrous interventions upon the planet, which are then abandoned to become man-made landscapes of wreckage and ruin that outlast our individual lives.

Stepping down into the partially drained pool, one walks among Thomson’s kinetic sculptures, comprising cables, wires, pistons, rusted sheet steel: the kind of detritus immune to decomposition to be found littering every landfill and urban vacant lot. Here, in Thomson’s obsessive machinations, we find sound making machines of this tangled wreckage, locked into their small repetitive movements and generating noises ‘emulating purpose in repetition’. Small spouts of water accompany rattling metal mechanisms, and cyclic piston rushes, and all the intricate devices seem somehow to be gathered around a stark, black monolithic representation of a power station; silent, sentinel.

Jompet Kuswidananto: Order and After

Next door, in Order And After, Indonesian visual artist and member of Teater Garasi, Jompet Kuswidananto, juxtaposes minimal symbolic objects to cast a deep shadow into telling moments of Indonesian history. A recorded singing voice projects fragmented melodic notes and texts including the testimony of a wrongfully imprisoned soldier and the presidential apology for military violence, as well as more recent intonations of the threats posed to religious freedom following the fall of the Suharto regime in the late 1980s. Three red rags lie inert, like pools of blood on the floor of the pool, half hidden in the brightly illuminated fog. Periodically, the flags arise, bright as new hope, and strong gusts arrive to blow the smoke away and allow the flags to dance in the air. But again and again, all too predictably, the currents of air die and the flags collapse once more.

MortonUnderwood: Contra

Further north, in the tank room of Glue Factory, a similarly cold and neglected space relocating its purpose through the efforts of committed communities of artists, one finds MortonUnderwood – the duo of instrument makers David Morton and Sam Underwood – with Contra, a site-responsive installation of their Giant Feedback Organ.

The organ utilises grain pipes, mics and active speaker cones to refine and tune low frequency feedback. Walking through the space, pulling on cords to activate individual tunings, one becomes quickly aware that sound, particularly at these sub bass levels has a certain viscosity. The sound does not uniformly fill the space. It alters in relation to where you stand, the shape of the overall space and how it meets soundwaves emitting from other sources. One can find oneself, therefore, met by solid walls of deep tone that resonate sensually within one’s chest cavity, then pass through standing waves of sound to be party to both simple and complex rhythms as soundwaves strike each other and fold in and around each other. Here, the visceral impact of sound as tangible, sensual substance finds its counterpoint in the stripped industrial space – all tiles, concrete, grime and smears, thick with the historic smell of boiled glue.

Kathy Hinde: Tipping Point

Elsewhere, in the more refined spaces found within the Centre for Contemporary Art, where Cryptic maintain their offices, one finds a cleaner, altogether more cerebral aesthetic. Kathy Hinde’s Tipping Point, on the other side of the door – yet a thousand miles away – from the CCA café bar, is a fragile beast. Part software innovation, part realisation of the potential of glass as a performance tool, Tipping Point offers a balanced ecology of cause, effect and consequence. Islands of light in a blacked-out space each contain a mechanical contrivance containing balances, counterweights, and glass tubes containing microphones into which controlled measures of water – controlled, that is, by each container’s temporal alignment to the same activity occurring in the other tubes – drip down, creating feedback. Find a seat in the dark and there is much to be gained from allowing your attention to slip away and be carried off into abstract reflections, held aloft by the delicate, measured interplay of glass, water and electronics.

Olivier Ratsi: Onion Skin

Upstairs, Olivier Ratsi’s Onion Skin could not be more different to Hinde’s work. Propelled forward on a relentlessly motorik rhythm track, the gaze becomes transfixed on simple geometric planes of light tightly synched to the 5.1 surround-sound system which are projected onto two walls connected at right angles to each other. Over time, of course, the light and sound, excluding all extraneous connections, becomes hypnotic and what was plainly geometric shapes shrinking and growing on flat planes becomes persuasively suggestive of new spaces, twisting tunnels burrowing suggestively towards the promise of new dimensions.

I end my festival with a 45-minute walk in driving wind and slashing rain, through the architectural chaos sprawling along the south side of the Clyde. Retail malls and leisure park eateries cower meekly in the shadows of the motorway underpass, the derelict and crumbling warehouses, the cleared and forgotten fields of barren concrete, the brief architectural burps of new-build homes sharing busy street space with bars that you really don’t want to find yourself in and penny arcades. Then, into the twin blisters of modernist steel housing the Glasgow Science Centre. A thousand screaming Glaswegian children and their sleep deprived parents and guardians seeking refuge and stimulating distraction from the squalid day.

Wintour’s Leap: Helmholz

So, through all this noise and chaos, down into the basement one finds, tucked away in a corner between the main staircase and the toilets, a most singular island of peace and repose. Wintour’s Leap offer Helmholtz. In a curious echo to MortonUnderwood’s Contra, Helmholtz seeks to make sound visible, and in doing so, assist us in evolving an understanding of the differences in how various sounds navigate and claim space. A low hanging array of small lights, suspended at chest height from individual wires, occupies a space of around 50 square metres. The space remains in darkness until you speak, or cough, or clap, or sing – all of which you are encouraged to do. There is even a piano which has been left in the space for you to try. So, in playing small melodic lines in the dark, whispering into individual lights, or calling to a friend standing against a distant wall, the lights crackle into life as clouds, corridors, sheets, and fast moving waves. Like the best interactive, or reactive, applications, the success of the experience is completely dependant upon what – and how much – one personally puts into generating that experience.

Throughout the festival I became increasingly aware of the role played by the city itself. Sonica successfully occupied such a diverse range of spaces, and engaged so richly with the social and cultural fabric that a certain sense of optimism pervaded the activity. Similarly, the time and distance involved in negotiating the way from one event to the next invited a framework for reflection onto which the sights and sounds – very much the sounds – could not help but become entwined. That is the great achievement of Sonica, Cryptic and Boyd. The achievement reverberates through their 21 years of staging every possible size and shape and fashion of experience, and is most acutely tuned in Sonica. It is the living embodiment of what Alasdair Gray, in Lanark, proposes as the city becoming great through the capacity of its artists to imagine itself as great.

Featured image (top) is Wintour’s Leap: Helmholtz

Sonica Festival was presented by Cryptic in Glasgow, 29 Oct – 8 November 2015.

Sonica will stage a weekend programme at Kings Place London in February 2016, showcasing the work of Mark Lyken and North of X, as well as installations from Kathy Hinde, Sven Werner and Robbie Thomson.

A Blank Canvas / Jabuti Theatre: In Her Shadows

Churchill referred to it as something other, something outside of himself that followed him, haunted him and, on occasion, consumed him: the black dog. Stephen Fry has publically implored us to consider that there is nothing other about depression, that it is simply, incurably, a periodic aspect of personality that is simply there. There are entire movements in literature, theatre, and visual art that seemingly exist to represent the anxieties and exaltations of depression’s torment, often with the condition projected as the only legitimate response to a world grown unacceptable to the mind. There are others who simply cannot lift a hand or speak a word when struck down.

Depression is, like any aspect of mental health and illness, necessarily personal and individual. This can be problematic for forensic and societal frameworks, driven as they are by their need for broad representation, or generalisation. It is too easy to frame a response that patronises or, worse, alienates individuals impacted directly by the issue being addressed.

In this sense artistic expression is as much at risk as medical or cultural policy makers, with the same consequence that in attempting to be sensitive to as broad a constituency as possible, the singularity of intent is lost in the well-intentioned sensitivity.

In Her Shadows, performed here within the Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival, in Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, announces itself as an examination of the complexities of depression and a challenge to the stigmas with which it is surrounded.

The piece invites us into the mind of Amy, a young woman returning to Scotland who is thrown into the torment and chaos of depression. Debbie Robbins and Rachael Macintyre, the two aerialists heading up Blank Canvas and Jabuti respectively, examine the territory through silk, rope, and ring work, as well as dance and movement.

Under previous Total Theatre Award Winner Cora Bissett’s direction the pair offer snapshots from a fractured narrative that highlight the internal conflicts, the struggle, and the rare moments of harmony that offer Amy a glimpse of respite. It is in these latter moments where the performers most impress. Working within the limited airspace of Traverse 1, and further constrained by the aerial hoop they share, the pair execute some beautifully touching shapes and movements: feet interlocking, heads flung back and torsos spinning, fingertips painfully short of reaching each other. Whilst there still seemed to be room for tightening up the skills there was enough here to realise the potential of aerial theatre as a mode well and lyrically suited to representing depression: the removal of solid ground, the restless spinning, the struggle to fool gravity and weightlessness into some kind of balanced repose, the beautiful forms that can suddenly emerge from knotted silks and tangled limbs. There is, at heart, a struggle to produce something of elegance from unlikely materials, and this, perhaps, speaks to the body of art that continues to arise from depression.

Robbie Thomson, Cryptic associate, and soon to be seen giving his penchant for kinetic installations and robotics full flight in Glasgow’s Sonica festival, provided a flexible and sympathetic production design comprising appropriately tensioned wires, supporting a stretched membrane onto which film loops, animations and texts are projected. One visual event deserving of singling out is an affecting, brutal sequence of texts illustrating the steep and savage void created by brief simple statements delivered via a medium that celebrates immediacy, whilst simultaneously supporting a means to become detached from all empathy.

Despite being clearly a labour of love for the two performers, there have been many hands brushing against this work in its development, including Grid Iron’s Ben Harrison and the aerialists, Paper Doll Militia. There have been lots of ideas thrown into the pot and not all of them appear to be resolved yet. It is still a sketched pot of ideas, still bubbling, still trying to find its unified flavour. A chair is tried out briefly, where depression snakes around the chair legs to stealthily ensnare her quarry. A shopping trolley makes a similarly brief, almost inexplicable appearance and is then discarded.

With much of the unity of the performance somewhat lost in the format of episodic fragments it came to the recorded recital of Jenny Lindsay’s poem Today to provide the genuinely raw core of the show. In a painfully concise descent the quality of passing days is measured from 10 to 1. We, the listeners, the witnesses, are helpless and can offer nothing as the quality of life thins out, the sense of cohesion disintegrates, and the eruptions of anxiety into an equally unstable manic high break apart the foundations of identity. One leaves the show with little new insight, and I was not aware of any particular stigma being challenged, but there was a renewed sensitivity to this universal condition that touches all, engulfs numerous, and, sadly ruins many.

Making Better Memories: Robert Lepage

Ex Machina’s 887 at the Edinburgh International Festival sparks fond memories and new resolutions for Michael Begg

My good friend Dimitri sent me a line from Moscow two nights ago. It was in response to a letter I had sent to him indicating that I had some difficult decisions to make. Decisions involving employment, and safety nets, and courage. He said: ‘If we could tell what the future held, it wouldn’t be the future, by definition.’

This is not a review. It is a memory. It is also a contrivance aimed at connection. Theatre is all about connection, a shared moment, or as Robert Lepage would have it, an occasion for friends to use the firelight to make tricks and stories emerge from the shadows.

Some things I want to remember. I want to remember because the older I get the more I realise that the well-tended memories that arise in text, in performance, in conversation, are the most tangible things in our lives. The only works of substance. Transient for sure, but we are transient. Our voices, through which we announce our very existence and our individual identity, are thin as air and escape the body in order to be heard.

Here is a memory from over twenty five years ago. I am in the company of a young film-maker from Toronto called Peter Mettler. He is here attending the Edinburgh Film Festival with a film called, I think, The Top Of His Head. Whilst here in Scotland he is continuing to work on a new project. This project is to capture performance elements, and some supporting context footage from around the country, in support of a theatre project by his fellow countryman Robert Lepage. The show was called Tectonic Plates, and I have vertiginous memories of books piled on a floor being transformed into a city skyline at night reflected in water, and also of two grand pianos dancing with each other, folding into neat alignment, drifting away from each other, becoming continents right there on the floor of Glasgow Tramway.

I am thinking to myself: Where does that show now exist? The film was released in 1992 but I have never seen it. Anyway, it would be a different artefact. A different memory. Anyone else reading this remember the show? What moments do you recall? Can we get together and compile this collective memory into a single representation of the show? Who would direct? Who – in film terms – would get final cut? And once complete, would we recognise it?

Robert Lepage Tectonic Plates. Photo Claudel Huot

After Tectonic Plates, Lepage founded Ex Machina and has, since then, continued to pursue a path of often astonishing vision. Seeking to fuse the vocabularies of cinema and theatre, bridging outré experimentalism with the open-hearted dedication of the traditional storyteller, dualism, juxtaposition or constant realignment of seemingly incompatible phenomena are always close to hand. In Tectonic Plates it had been the music of Chopin and the drift of continental plates. In The Geometry of Miracles it was the life and work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the philosophy of Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff. In 887 the shape shifting and volatile configuration of francophone and anglophone influences on his Quebecois upbringing.

Lepage informed my sense of story. These days, I cannot begin any work in earnest until there are two or three seemingly unconnected voices. From those voices the work emerges to find me. Then, and only then, is the work real.

Central to his expansion – expansion seems most appropriate for an artist who has successfully taken on Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the Metropolitan Opera and whose Lipsynch production runs to nine hours – is his full on embrace of technology and craft. His production company, Ex Machina, harbours a community of set designers, computer graphics experts, technicians and multimedia artists with scripts commonly arising not so much from a writer’s pen as from the exploratory sandpit of hints, sketches, dreams, and technological proposals, nurtured democratically from this multi-disciplinary group.

Lepage informed my sense of loneliness, and cast a light on my feeling of theatre as the best place for an artist not to be alone. My work is lonely. I work, when I can, in theatre to escape that loneliness.

Other memories stir. Memories of huge casts, and rolling mirrors that present a multiplicity of possible scenes, possible stages. The copyright attribution, in the published script for Ex Machina’s The Seven Streams of the River Ota, 13 names. The show ran over by two hours. But at least it ran. Elsinore, Lepage’s one-man take on Hamlet, buckled beneath the collective weight of its numerous technical difficulties and failed to run in Edinburgh.

Lepage informed my sense of failure. He somehow assured me that it was unfortunate, but valuable. Necessary, even.

Robert Lepage | Ex Machina 887

In 887, Ex Machina’s formidable mastery of scenic transformation, lighting, and technology is placed in the service of Robert Lepage’s memory. Having witnessed, as a boy, his grandmother fall victim to Alzheimer’s, Lepage is keenly aware of the fragility of memory, and so here he is accorded the indulgence to build his memories – apartment blocks, his father’s taxi, his apartment kitchen, a room by room walkthrough of a childhood Christmas home, a library, whose collapsing shelves reveal other rooms in another home, a detailed – absurdly, beautifully so – representation of his taxi-driving father’s favourite soda bar. What a luxury, one reflects, to be able to take wood, paper, paint, photographs, news clippings, and physically construct memory. Only, of course, to further reflect that the expense, time, invention and energy applied to the task are ultimately in the service of a theatrical performance that will exist only for 2 hours and beyond that merely in stills, and the memories of those who attended.

Lepage worries that his cold-cut – the prefabricated obituary written in advance of a celebrity’s death in order to facilitate immediate publication – will do little to recognise his contribution of almost four decades to theatre. Why? Because theatre is a connection made live between people in a shared space in a shared moment. There is taste, smell, the immediacy of emotion and the thrill of invention and magic. That kind of memory lives in the mind. It cannot be boxed conveniently, literally or figuratively, or digitally. There is very little filmed and recorded evidence of his output.

‘If a tree falls in the wood and there is no-one there to film it on their iPhone… Does it really fall?’

All of his family photographs, all of the family records, packed into five boxes, would take up 1% of his cell phone memory, he offers. As if to illustrate the irony that there is nothing tactile about the handheld, he lifts the lid on a box with the handwritten scrawled label ‘Nöels’ and uses his phone camera to swoop us down into a tour of a childhood Christmas, moving from room to room in the lovingly crafted dollhouse, individually wrapped presents, costumed and painted figurines gathered around a pipe-cleaner tree. He finally appears as a giant head peering into the front room of his own childhood.

We do what we can to keep important memories alive. And that goes for collective, social and cultural memories as much as our individual histories. Lepage weaves his own childhood development into the complex and volatile fabric of the collective Quebecois consciousness. Such is the process by which Lepage picks into the tensions that framed his youth between separatists and federalists.

The victor writes the memories, and in the case of Canada, the victors – or those who sought to protect their own self interest first and foremost; who got to determine the flag. So, what was originally a poetically realised embrace of diversity and geography (three peoples – anglophile, francophile and indigenous – represented by three maple leaves, bordered by two blue oceans) became a harshly realised statement of oppression and victory – a single anglophile leaf in a field of English red.

Speak White, Michelle Lalonde’s incendiary damning of linguistic oppression at the heart of the separatist movement looms large through the show. As clear an example of creative act as resistance as one could hope to find. And one that lives on in print and in commemorative readings (and also on film here if you’d like to check this precious recording made in 1970).

Lepage has, I think, offered us an act of resistance. Resistance to the fallibility and frailty of memory. But more than this, he recognises the limitations of a theatrical mode that cannot be archived authentically, or held up for future posterity, and he announces loudly, clearly and in the most protesting terms possible that this is, nonetheless, what he does, this is what works, and in the instance of the performance passing into the audience to be carried forward in the privacy of their own memories, it’s all that matters right now.

For my part, he is the kind of theatre maker that I want to tell my kids about. He makes the moment at hand precious, vital. He honours tradition, craft and discipline whilst endlessly pouring new processes, new approaches, new vitality into the craft. ‘I am an ephemeral person,’ he has said. ‘I will be a forgotten theatre person.’

887, transitory as it is and has to be, rebellious in nature, substance and form, an elliptical beast that views a piece of technology as common as a smartphone more in terms of what it can offer to a live happening than as a feeble prosthesis for diminished and undervalued memories, is a show that I will remember, cherish even, for as long as I can.

Dear Dimitri, Late last night I made my decision. I kissed each of my children in their beds, said goodnight to my wife and went downstairs to pen my resignation to the academy. I pasted a photograph of Robert Lepage to a sheet of paper and wrote: ‘From Michael Begg, aged 49. I am leaving now, because this is what I want to do when I grow up. I want to make better memories.’

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina 887

The European premiere of Ex Machina’s 887, written, directed and performed by Robert Lepage, played at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 13–22 August 2015. See www.eif.co.uk