Author Archives: Miriam (Mim) King

About Miriam (Mim) King

Miriam King is an Artist/Choreographer/Dancer/Live Artist/Filmmaker born in London , living in Brighton , working internationally. With an art school background, her professional performance career commenced in 1984. Moving from theatre through to dance, and to live art and film, her most significant training was with Anton Adasinsky's company DEREVO at their former studio in Leningrad, Russia in 1990. Miriam's work is influenced by Butoh dance. She has been creating her own unique performances since 1992, taking her to dance and live art festivals and artist-in-residences around the World. Her award winning dance film work has been shown at Lincoln Centre/ New York , Pompidou Centre/Paris, ICA/London, the Venice Biennial and at the Sydney Opera House, Australia and in every continent (excluding Antarctica ). Miriam has a continuing performance relationship with Gallery Kruh, Kostelec nad cernymi Lesy, nr Prague , Czech Republic which commenced in 1992 and an ongoing performance relationship with SoToDo Gallery , Berlin & the Congress of Visual and Performance Art.

Kabinet K: RAUW/RAW

Kabinet K is a Belgian contemporary dance company founded and run by choreographers Joke Laureyns and Kwint Manshoven, who also bring a background in philosophy and design. The company’s performance works are intended to connect with both young and adult audiences: likewise in their work, children and professional performers work side by side as equal artistic partners.

RAUW/RAW commences with a dim, dark stage, and an ambience full of trepidation revved through and racing with the pulse of live electric guitar. Dust spills down, greying up the space, and settling onto a floor smattered over with a scattering of small rocks. From the shadows, a small child scampers in, grabs a rock, and dashes away. Another child rushes in, grabs a rock, hastens away, then another and another, their fretful pace accompanied by the frenetic guitar. They run, pause, leap; bright eyes piercing the luminous grey half light, rushing in and dashing out until every scattered rock is gone. They have great poise and sharp timing and are pretty little, some of them, leading me to think, ‘Shouldn’t they be in bed?’

Soon they all rush on as a pack, a gang of seven prepubescent children (five girls, two boys) in t-shirts and shorts, full of leaps and bounds, and the urgency dissolves into a playfulness; a scampering of jumping and catching, bounding leaps and flowing hair. There follows a tussle over a weathered old mattress between a small girl and a virile-looking bloke, who ends up chucking her around. It’s initially challenging to watch, yet dissolves into a duet about control, oneupmanship, rough play, and the elation of abandonment to physicality. Another adult enters the space, tinkering with kettle and camp stove. She’s an older grey-haired woman. The children eye her every move, she performs a ‘grasping at a kid’ duet, pulling at a girl’s arm and sleeve, pulling the little one to her in an awkward manner. The kids all sing a ‘yea, yea, yea’ sound to accompany another ‘clumping about’ duet.

Like a fury, a little girl chases and confronts the fit-looking bloke. All the kids chase him. Water streams down the rear wall’s torn, tatty, raggy grey backcloth. The dust on the ground gets stirred up. The children nest and rest on the soiled old mattress. A disused water tank cylinder at the rear becomes a sanctuary. What kind of wasteland playground is this? Kids of the dump? I was fortunate to be accompanied by my 15-year-old neighbour. She tells me RAW so resonates with her, as it completely reminded her of her own childhood, a childhood clambering about on scraps of forsaken land, where broken tiles she collected became treasures of varied patternings and colours. She climbed on broken furniture and made an imaginative world from dumped oil drums and mattresses. That was just five years ago back in Turkey. Play, in a way that children have always played, and always will, if given access to some unoccupied space.

Upstage, a girl balances precariously on the water container drum, in the foreground a bare-chested girl sits on the older woman, grasps, studies, and plays with her submissive form, her hand, her face, examining and placing her own hand on the aging older forms. Empty cans are thrown out from the water tank. Relentless guitar from the sidelines jangles my nerves a bit, relieved by one child’s soundscape of piggy grunts and gasps and raspberries. The kids play with matches, one busting open a tin can and handing out amongst themselves the meagre sustenance of tinned sausages. A girl skilfully treads a revolving can. The kids are a combination of robust bodied, wonky kneed, and lanky limbed, straggled haired and fresh faced.

RAW is…. odd, and a touch uncomfortable to watch. Little kids are grabbed at by adults, little girls being chucked about like fleshy rag dolls isn’t comfortable viewing. The show brims with contrasts and changes of dynamic. Vitality and vulnerability. Fearless ferocity and fragility. Pint-sized yet full blooded. Who has the upper hand? Who is in control? What and where is common ground? The littlest girl in the company, in her T-shirt that states ‘ME OH MY’, is a real powerhouse and comes across as being the most formidable. All the children’s performances are raw and essential, the adults less so, a little measured. Both wild yet skilfully precisely choreographed, the timing and ensemble work is beyond par. Full-throttle energy, response and focus. Heaven and hell surges through their diminutive frames, these glorious unfettered dancing souls emanating their hopes, dreams, fears, and resilience. RAW has sincerity. Immediacy. Care contrasted with anarchic abandonment to the moment. Life on full beam. Glances that cut right through. ‘Here I am. Here we are’. An eternity of yearning and searching for adventure, discovery and inventiveness, for comradeship, for rest, peace, and place in the world, that is inside all of us.

Edit Kaldor: WOE

Three teenagers casually address the audience. They have something to tell us, something they have no words for. One asks what we want to know about, and if it’s possible to come close to someone else’s experience. Can we ever really understand? Can we remember what it’s like to be a child?

A high frequency sound is played. Only some of us can hear it. Not me. The hearing cells in our ears are fragile and break down with age. Can we remember the friends we had when we were sixteen? Trying to figure things out? Questions like does fate exist or is it all random? A question of luck? Apparently the grey matter in the brain is flexible. Experiences that are strong and close up carve into one’s senses, like remembering what it was like looking at the scabs on your juvenile knees. Are we different now? Can we remember being in gym class, and your kit and body aren’t clean? On a screen we see ‘street view’ of a local street, a street and a house where our protagonist lived. Can we now remember being a seven year old child? A YouTube clip of a baby being born is shown. A tiny human coming out of another human. How is it to look after that tiny vulnerable life? What if the mother doesn’t know how to do it? Doesn’t ever know how to do it?

And thus we’re led into imagining, sensing, and to some degree feeling this story. This life. A child under stress, the brain cells cannot grow to make so many connections like a ‘normal’ brain. A feeling like a disaster is going to happen, and you’re the only one who knows. With scientific representations and brain scans shown on a large screen we learn how a brain can become conditioned to fear. A fear that never goes away. A fear that becomes core material within the brain. Imprinted there. Information about what happens in the body and the brain during stress and abuse is mingled in with subjective experiences, memories, fantasies and dreams.

WOE is so direct. Director Edit Kaldor has made a show that is intelligent, personal and profound. Conveying the inner experience, these three young people (aged 16, 17 and 17) invite us to imagine these situations. Plumbing our memories and emotional imprints. Gradually the usual images of childhood are replaced by images connected to the experience of neglect and abuse. Of hunger. Of no one home when you arrive back after school. Where do go? How would you feel?

It’s tense, it’s bare, it’s gently and unsensationally delivered. Bearing witness, being listened to and really heard changes things. As an audience, being together and directly spoken to is powerful. Both confronting and comforting. It’s important, vital experiential work.

Peeping Tom: 32 Rue Vandenbranden

We’re washed about by the sound of a whistling, chilling wind. Darkness lifts to reveal a snowy landscape and a couple of opposing rickety trailer homes gazed over by a huge sky. A hunched female figure in heels steps onto the vast white and hesitantly halts. Blue plastic bags breeze across her path like polythene tumbleweeds. Acrid lights snap on in the trailers. It’s cold. It’s dusk or dawn, it’s certainly desolate. A baby cries, the tiny bundled body is cradled in snow and tenderly shoved out of sight under the trailer. The crying diminishes. It’s odd and I know odd. This is unsettlingly, odd. Teamed with an equally desolate and eerie soundscape, there follows an extraordinary bending-over-backwards duet.

Founded by Gabriella Carrizo and Franck Chartier, Belgium-based Peeping Tom’s style is to work with a hyperrealistic aesthetic allied to a realistic set and themes of isolation. Peeping Tom’s 32 Rue Vandenbranden is so filmic, crisply cinematic… it’s a kind of hybrid of David Lynch and Korean horror. One of the inspiration sources for this work was Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama.

Gazing at forlorn and frightened characters looking out from their thin windows, we catch and snatch glimpses of their contained lives that spill out onto the no-longer-pristine snow. A large walrus-like lady slips and takes a tumble on the snow, and gets suckled one breast at a time by two snow-frolicking young men. She goes off and returns with a shotgun and an extraordinary mezzosoprano voice. Someone taking a pratfall onto their face can be slapstick-funny, but it’s perverse to laugh when that body is heavily pregnant. It’s uncomfortable. There then follows more extraordinary solos, duets, dialogues, and ensemble physical exchanges of which I’ve not seen the like. Warping, waxing, melting movement. Fluid plasticine bodies and ghoul-faced dances.

I’ve seen a lot of things and I’ve never seen anything like Peeping Tom’s disturbingly sexually charged action of dysfunctional neighbours living in homes that are scant shelter against the cold. Nor do they seem to be wearing anywhere near enough clothes, which is only another reason I get goosebumps! Their isolation leads to an unconscious world of nightmares, fears, and desires. Set in white, we view the dark side of a community, where borders between what happens in reality and what they believe happens become blurred. They are both lost and trapped. A community of remote lives lived alongside each other, which through enforced proximity sadistically or tenderly collide, tarnish, and imprint upon the snow, grubbying it up with a wrangling physicality of suffering and celebration and anguish. Yet ultimately their hopes and dreams are bleached out by the final taboo of their shared loneliness. It chilled me.

Eldarin Yeong Studio & Normal Love Theatre: Normal Love

Twilight. In the semi-darkness I can make out the still silhouette of a cellist, sideways on. Perhaps one other figure consumed by the shadows. A male voice, like a heartfelt Bulgarian chant, breaks into the silence and so commences Normal Love. This is a show by Eldarin Yeong Studio and Normal Love Theatre, directed by visual artist and theatre director Zi Ling. It’s a physical exploration of the darker side of love, inspired by the paintings of Francis Bacon, performed by three men and one young woman, and two male musicians; one exceptional acoustic guitarist and one cellist, who in certain scenes, physically performs in the movement vignettes.

The theme of Normal Love is tried and tested male-female relationship angst. The woman portrayed here appears to be a bit of a minx, manipulating her choice of fella while tying herself up in tangles and knots. Eleven scenes of love, desires, jealousy and passions include the woman controlling a man by (real) near-invisible threads, gently guiding him this way and that way, wherever her whim desires. There’s a floppy doll-like rolling on the floor piece, where the man cannot gain any worthwhile purchase on her limp and unresponsive body. Going out for a drink with a man, and the bloke malevolently spitting his alcohol in her face and her responding by dribbling alcohol repetitively down his shoulder. There’s a scene where she dances wildly, constantly falling over and getting up and falling again and again whilst under the sideways-on stare of all three very composed men. I enjoyed her rapidly unravelling a spool of white cotton, while a gent’s hands fluttered about to rapid guitar, all accelerating faster and faster. The minimalist set is simple and versatile: a metal spine-like coil, with a formidable ability to cast bold shadows, divides the space and both arcs and frames the performance area which itself is on a platform with capacity to turn 90°.

For a show that aims to “create a world that is saturated by violence and governed by distorted desires,” exploring “love and all its dilemmas in a surreal and heightened world,” Normal Love has something very clean and tidy about it. Beautifully designed. Performed with great commitment and passion. Magnificent, occasionally jarring music. From time to time I closed my eyes as the live soundscape was so strong that I wanted my own, perhaps more raw, images to manifest behind my eyelids, as at times I found it to be a curious mixture of both twee and tortured. Normal Love, a bold collaboration between visual artists, actors, musicians and designers, is successful in showing us, in a refined way, the games that lovers play, of manipulation and frustration, of hope and desire.

Worboys Productions: Mrs McMoon & Signor Baffo

We enter to a sleeping Mrs McMoon all cosy and comfortable in her spotty housecoat, dozing snug in her red polka-dot armchair. We’ve time to observe her and her environment; a kitchen come livingroom, complete with cuckoo clock and cooker. As she startles and briskly jumps up to answer her ringing outsized phone, we’re immediately introduced to her homely larger than life character! All fast paced and cheery, there follows chaotic banana eating and name guessing of the audience and even a few moments of lap sitting! Before we know it, and whilst the audience are still finding their seats, we’re well and truly warmed up into the lively grandmotherly world of Mrs McMoon.

We’re here because we’re each personally invited to her tea party. Not only us, other guests are coming, and coming soon! She needs to make her highly reputed scrumulumptious biscuits and requests our help. With song lyrics such as ‘crack the eggs and wobble your legs’, and lively actions, we’re treated to biscuit making Mrs McMoon style – it reminded me a little of the Rocky Horror Show Time Warp.

Courtesy of some backstage sleight of hand the biscuits ping into existence quick sharp. Various guests drop in, and, each time, whilst Mrs McMoon is out of the room (of course, as solo performer Katie Grace Cooper plays all the parts), various disasters befall the biscuits. We meet local lad Gilbert and his sniffing-nosed, hungry puppet pet. We meet Jill, Mrs McMoons Ab Fab style sister, and her singing flowers Charlotte, Sabrina and Bruce. And finally Rosie, Mrs McMoon’s granddaughter who likes jelly. Those poor biscuits get scoffed, used as soil and unceremoniously spat out! Each time we enthusiastically watch our homely heroine, with a song and a dance, make another scrumulumptious batch.

Mrs McMoon is a cheekily lovely engaging character. The songs are gorgeously well sung, and the compact design of this show is excellent. Children were completely engrossed in the fast paced plot, yet the story is performed at a rhythm for young ones to register the action and, with gleeful responses, to enthusiastically join in and feel part of the occasion. Interactions between Mrs McMoon and the audience of children were strong, bright, spontaneous, and never patronising, with a genuine depth of warmth and cheeky humour. I loved it, as did other adults in the audience. Fun, colourful and warm, bright and well paced. And I was given my own scrumulumptious biscuit and tea in a proper china cup at the end!

An hour or so later and we return to the basement space to meet Signor Baffo – a gentle clowning show for young audiences forming a comfortable double bill with Mrs McMoon. Cleverly transforming the cramped, homely kitchen counter cum living room of the former show into a cartoonishly equipped and brightly coloured chef’s kitchen (replete with a drawer promisingly labelled ‘Sausages’) we are transported into the old fashioned world of a kitchen boy buffoon who gets his day in charge. This is in many ways more conventional kids’ theatre: it’s a cosy solo show that develops through a series of set pieces with much clowning and audience interaction. Our hero arrives on a tottering partially-pretend bike, his overused hard hat in lieu of a red nose. The logic is firmly childlike – this is the sort of vision of a kitchen children might imagine from Disney films and the downfall of our hapless fool is similarly, joyfully, recognisable from the top. The show pulls out all of performer Oliver Harrisons’s tricks: there are little bits of puppetry, acrobatics, and juggling; Paul Harrison’s brightly coloured formica-styled set holds some intriguing tricks and surprises.

Harrison establishes an easy rapport with his young audience and the increasingly substantial bits of audience participation, which build to a very funny sequence featuring ‘pancakes’, mess and false moustaches, are really well managed. This is a gently traditional show that’s done nicely and with real warmth – there are no surprises here but the intimate audience are gleefully entertained.

Review by Mim King & Beccy Smith

Total Theatre