Author Archives: Rebecca JS Nice

About Rebecca JS Nice

Rebecca worked as a dance teacher, lecturer and choreographer for eight years specialising in tap and jazz. She has a background in Art History and is currently training further in medieval history and contemporary choreography with a particular interest in live art. At the early stage of her dance writing career, Rebecca reviews and analyses theatre and dance performance and is working on a papers for publication.

Marta Navaridas and Alex Deutinger: Your Majesties

Your Majesties throws into a cool blue light Barack Obama’s Nobel Lecture held at the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony in Oslo in 2009. The work maintains a cool minimalist ambience which allows audiences to consider and interrogate the text. A complex choreography of everyday gestures that flow between the surprising and the mundane illustrate, unpack, poke fun at and expose the text as a carefully orchestrated pantomime.

A man and a woman use movement to illustrate language – the relationships between friends and lovers, the relationship between a president and his people, between war and peace, between a wave and a lunge, are thrown under the microscope. This exposure of social etiquette throws up inconsistencies, by altering the connection between known signs in both speech and movement. Both performers’ backgrounds in translation inform this exemplary work of semiotics that is timely and poignant in the current political climate.

As Deutinger deliver’s Obama’s speech, his movements become bigger, more exaggerated and grotesque whilst his delivery of the text remains perfectly poised and clear. Navaridas performs the same set of movements mirroring him. She is placed on a plinth in the audience who have to strain to watch her and can never fully view both performers in one glance. There are a series of disconnects here that highlight a dislocation between politics and society. Navaridas’ movements are tender and flow with ease, they form a dance that compels us to watch. Deutinger mirrors these movements with an awkward style that throws into light the choreographed nature of speeches. Navaridas becomes a puppeteer who’s dynamics and expression does not fully translate into her puppet. The juxtaposition of their movement styles, of the two views offered to the audience and between Deutinger’s words and postures begin to deconstruct the speech.

The satirical content, is abundant with nuances and movements that expose, undermine, question or support a word, a sentence or a sentiment. With a multi-faceted vocabulary, Your Majesties will pique an interrogative mind and every political interest. From whistling, rolling around holding their bare feet, to gurning, particular sections are chosen to be undermined in particular ways. A series of coloured cards are held up by the silent, female referee, from yellow to red – and it is time for the blue one. A monologue satisfied, a dance complete, the words of this speech still linger as the pair exit their brief political tenancy.

Your Majesties can be heavy going at times, but it will appeal to the thinker.

To Build a Home

Building blocks and planks, towers of people and pianos, guardian angels, and a street show featuring a bag lady – Rebecca Nice enjoys a weekend of sunshine and showers at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival

2016 marks the 21^st birthday of Greenwich+Docklands International Festival, which kicks off on Friday 24 June with The House, a late-night spectacle using music and projection to bring the National Maritime Museum alive with light and sound. The House is conceived and directed by the festival’s artistic director, Bradley Hemmings who has been awarded an MBE for his direction of the 2012 Paralympic Games opening ceremony and his ongoing work at the helm of GDIF.

Greenwich Fair runs for the first weekend in the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College and the Cutty Sark Ship, followed by a week of work across East London, culminating in Dancing City at Canary Wharf on the final weekend, with a finale show at the Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich on Saturday 2 July, The Clash of Drums, as part of the Arts Council’s Global Streets programme.

GDIF showcases spectacular circus, theatre and dance from all over the world and from communities closer to home, over its ten day span. Deaf and disabled artists are championed, from DJ Chinaman’s Deaf Rave to Candoco Dance Company’s collaboration with Arlene Philips in You and I Know, performed with disabled artists Joel Brown and Laura Patay.

Many of the British artists featured in the festival are supported by Without Walls, a consortium of eight festivals of which GDIF is a member. Without Walls commissions include Block, a new collaboration between Motionhouse and NoFit State Circus; New Art Club’s first outdoor work, Campervan of Love; and Miss High Leg Kick’s Audition Project, a participatory event in which people are invited to learn the dance steps from the audition scene from the 1985 film A Chorus Line. Each performance is filmed by Richard DeDomenici, who will eventually include it into his ongoing Redux project. GDIF 2016 also sees the premiere of the new Whalley Range All Stars’ show Ye Gods, which features a model village animated by three performers; and Home, a GDIF commission that brings together slapstick comedy with aerial circus and acrobatics in an interactive performance for all ages exploring ideas of home and homelessness.

International artists at this year’s festival include Teatr KTO with masked theatre production Peregrinus, the legendary Teatr Biuro Podrozy (also from Poland) with the dark and disturbing Silence, and Ulik Production’s Robotik Drumshow (from Germany), performed entirely on the arm of a robot used in the car making industry.

the-loneliness-street-cabaret1-credit-kerrin-kokot.

BeautifulMess: The Loneliness Street Cabaret. Photo Kerrin Kokot

This year, GDIF’s annual ‘festival within a festival’, Greenwich Fair features a rich and diverse weekend of work presented in parks and streets.

Winding through the crowds along King William Walk, a noisy woman with mad hair and a running commentary of the fair finds her spot and starts her piece. The Loneliness Street Cabaret, by Lambeth based company BeautifulMess, prides itself in addressing socially relevant themes and performing in deprived places and areas of gentrification to highlight the tension in their messages about love and loneliness in a society dominated by earning money and being absorbed in technology. This woman (played by BeautifulMess founder Kati Francis) roams the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College all afternoon, as a bag lady slash DJ, cleverly making her presence unmissable. She gradually builds up the entertainment in her spot enticing passers-by until the area is jam-packed with viewers. Wearing purple shoes and carrying a guitar, she pushes a buggy occupied by a stuffed baby, and makes quick changes in full view. The cabaret is a great singalong for people who have no qualms about joining in. The Italian business worker nicknamed Spaghetti (played by Andrea Foa) is the butt of the jokes as he is made to play the guitar with the music taped to his feet and his bottom stuck in a dustbin. The content focuses on the unhealthy structure of the 9-5 office day and the office workers’ dislocation with the people around them. This is a well-worn theme which BeautifulMess struggle to interrogate deeply, but as a piece of family-friendly street theatre it is a great success. The slapstick and silliness, wacky wigs and characters getting stuck in dustbins enthral the younger members of the audience, who are as noisy as the performers. By escaping his suit, the Italian businessman feels free and liberated in his pants and string vest encouraging all of us to join him as the performers sing and dance together in their underwear: if only escaping gentrification and a society built on overworking and unhealthy structures were as easy to escape.

Cimate Guardians: Shoes for Hope

A spot of wing making is next on the agenda, with six or seven elegant women in white sporting wide-spanned wings. They are majestic angels whose visual attraction works well with their political message. They are guardians of our planet and of future generations. Their Wing Making Workshop is combined with Shoes for Hope, where festival goers are invited to leave their shoes for a short while to create a moment of solidarity in the wake of climate change, and in support of the cause to help maintain the planet. The guardian angels protect the shoes as they stand in protest for us. With dark black thunder clouds looming over this busy team of beavering angels, a sense of urgency, of time passing and transience, make the work of peaceful activism ever more poignant and ephemeral. Scattered by the rain, the angels disappear to the elements reminding us how fragile and at mercy to the elements our time on this planet is. All the materials for the wings are recycled and children and adults create a vision in white as they disperse into the crowds. Originating in Australia, their message runs worldwide as the Climate Guardians campaign internationally with their manifesto for change around renewable energy and a response to climate change.

Far From the Norm : H.O.H. Photo Stuart Mayhew

And so the rains came. Saturday’s festival becomes as damp as the giant squid whose dismembered human sized tentacles hover on sticks above the crowds (Puppets with GUTS’ Citizen Squid). Its bulbous orange body bobs about in the oversized puppetry parade as a metaphor for the displacement and dislocation of people in society. Surrounded by heavy rain and the heavy hearted, Far From the Norm company pull out a show stopper just in time in H.O.H. (House of Hooligans) presented by Far From the Norm. Audiences are reduced somewhat to a sea of umbrellas and heads poking out from the Tiger Moth Pub or the Cutty Shark Ship, but the energy ranks up and up. Huge smiles, bright colours and big voices declare ownership of the Cutty Sark Gardens the second the beat drops. Carefully choreographed floor patterns and well-timed phrases delight in this feast of hip hop and breakdancing, a style that can often fall behind in terms of choreographic form and structure. H.O.H is more than a break battle; it is a series of dances incorporating satire, speech, and political characters in tableaux and moving formations. From CCs to Suzie Qs, Charleston to Lindy Hop, the team of football supporters even manage a few windmills in the downpour. Refreshingly, their grasp of footwork means that they don’t rely on the spectacle of power moves to please a crowd – their complex choreography certainly hits the spot. The narrative and speech was not always clear in the downpour as the politically charged piece speaks out against football violence. However the message hovering over everyone’s lips that day is the momentous EU referendum that has shaken up the nerves, content and futures of the programme’s international performances. Subtle references, messages and acts of protest pop up throughout the work at the Greenwich Fair this weekend.

In one last bid to fight the weather, Circus Katoen tiptoe out beneath the dripping trees for a tale of domestic games and intimate interaction. The couple appear to be a dainty flowerpot man and woman, but with the strength and cunning to walk on their hands and throw wood blocks with their feet. They back flip and balance a plank of wood and each other in precarious positions as they build a little home together. Ex Aequo is charming and compelling with risky balances and tricks that are embedded in a sophisticated form. Unfortunately the downpour cuts the piece short and the Fair’s final stalwart attendees scatter. I take my sodden self home, determined to start again tomorrow.

Motionhouse / NoFit State: Block. Photo Dan Tucker

Sunday’s sunshine makes the previous day’s festival follies a distant memory as the Cutty Sark ship floats in a sea of people rather than a sea of rain water, as Motionhouse and Nofit State Circus perform Block. This is a mighty performance centred around twenty large, grey polystyrene blocks. They feel monolithic, like a contemporary Stonehenge. Performers evolve from crab-like upside-down creatures, to predatorily aggressive dancers, to human beings, as they inhabit their monumental blocks. The monoliths subvert expectations with their lightness. This allows them to be constantly moving, rearranged, reordered, disordered, piled, stacked, tilted and collapsed. One minute they are supporting an acrobat balancing upside down, the next they are tumbling into disarray.

Both blocks and humans are flipped, tumbled, and rebuilt as one. Scene after scene of towers and shapes marvel spectators with dancers flying from great heights, jumping over barriers, and shooting through voids. Dancers are tilted off blocks, falling into continuous movement. The composition on stage is in constant flux: there is always a tableaux forming as one dissolves, with dancers free-running, balancing, somersaulting and tumbling. The work is a kaleidoscope of continuous acrobatics which only takes pause for breath at the highest of heights, with a handstand on top of a vertical block on top of a tower. A loose narrative hangs six sections together. The upside-down transition from animal to human open and closes the work. A building and surveying of territory is followed by the sudden expression of emotions and relationships with the exclusion of one from the pack. A negative, unproductive consequence emerges and a positive team effort to rebuild the blocks into a magnificent tower presides. But the narrative is tenuous and sometimes clunky, with a disconnect between physical form and human emotion. Acting scenes jar against the flow of continuous tumbling and rebuilding and sit at odds with the highly physical, formal aspects of the piece.

Motionhouse aims to integrate the skills and circus tricks of Nofit State into a dance vocabulary. This results in a highly physical, fast-paced style that encompasses the expansive, jumping, tumbling and travelling dance vocabulary with that of the spectacle of circus. This collaboration does it with magnificence, strength and finesse. Motionhouse however, struggles to find the individuality and musicality in the expression of finely nuanced gestures and complex isolations that dance has to offer. A tiny gestural section stood on perpendicular blocks doesn’t go anywhere. The penultimate section where characters come together in a natural play and banter to build a tower together is the strongest section. Dancers create a tower or an office block, scaling its sides and swinging out, in and around their creation, diving through the voids. This reveals the personality of the performers and the cracks in the physical and metaphorical structures that society builds. It is fast moving, funny, daring and death defying, whilst the tension between humanness and city life prevails.

D’irque & Fien: Sol Bemol

Thoroughly wowed and satisfied, it’s time to settle down with my Portuguese street food from Greenwich Market before two wooden cranes, set in front of the grand Corinthian capitals of the neo-classical Old Royal Naval College. D’irque & Fien are a Flemish company who tour internationally with their work that infuses aerial skills with piano playing. Cascading keys illustrate an ascension of both human and piano that surprises in its tenderness and elegance. The content and structure of the set of Sol Bemol derives from sailing, as is fitting for its naval situation, but is taken beyond a representation and abstracted in order to interrogate the creative potential of the set. The cranes that resemble masts support a vast fabric awning that is sometimes a sail, sometimes a vast ocean, and at others a napkin or wine glass. The manipulation of the bellowing fabric allows for people and props to magically emerge and disappear whilst the cranes suspend this sail, along with humans and pianos, who all take their turn to take flight.

A tale of travel and discovery is derived from the play of objects and the intimate relationship between Dirk Van Boxelaere and Fien Van Herwegen that emotionally engages the audience. She plays the piano while he bumbles about, juggling, climbing and sawing above her. Their relationship with the stage handlers cum sailors subtly places them in and out of the piece. Two pianos become three as they precariously balance one above the other. When a fourth piano appears, a gasping audience watches the tower of full-sized pianos grow once more as all four characters climb to play their keys. This is a wonderfully thoughtful, musical piece that has a calm and graceful tone that sets it apart from the explosive colour, energy and noise of other acts. The vignettes and narrative makes the emergence of a piano suspended by ropes from a crane completely plausible, and the loveable characters of the duo delight throughout.Joli Vyann collaborates with choreographer Florence Caillon in the Without Walls production Lance Moi En L’air. The work is about ‘compatible contradictions’ which ebb and flow in a relationship. The couple grow, breathe, sleep and awaken each other. Their pas de deux catapults, catches, supports and nourishes each other in turn. Incredible strength and skill allows Olivia Quayle to stand on Jan Patzke’s head, to spiral around his body and to hover, half in flight attached to him like blowing leaves around a solid and safe great tree trunk. The style and ambience of this piece is of abandonment and sensitivity, with control, strength and momentum coated by a relaxed sense of release that maintains an intriguing tension throughout. The title, which translates as ‘launch me in the air’, captures the support, catalysts for change, interventions and safety exchanged in a relationship of risk and balance. Joli Vyann’s sophisticated style means that tricks are embellished and altered by choreographic nuances, and the piece works as a mesmerising whole, stripping back the spectacle and leaving great sets, props and robots to others. Two people draw their audience into a melodic duet that is ever churning, undulating and flying. The choreography shows incredible strength, skill and precision as they balance upside down on various limbs and tumble out of the air, whilst a tenderness to their style makes Lance Moi En L’air truly unique.

The House, opening GDIF 2016

GDIF 2016 took place at various sites throughout Greenwich and East London, 24 June to 2 July 2016.

Rebecca Nice attended the Greenwich Fair, part of the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, 25 & 26 June 2016.

Greenwich+Docklands International Festival is supported by Arts Council England, the London borough of Tower Hamlets, the Royal Borough of Greenwich, and Royal Greenwich Festivals.

www.festival.org

Andrew Schneider: YOUARENOWHERE

Created by Brooklyn based artist Andrew Schneider, YOUARENOWHERE has toured internationally to great renown. Its UK appearance is a collaboration between Gate Theatre, Shoreditch Town Hall and LIFT 2016.

YOUARENOWHERE is exactly how I feel right now. Fingertips poised above the keyboard trying to articulate a response to something out of this world…

At the start of the show, a lone male performer bundles about, blurting out introspective musings, memories and facts. I pick up love and death as revolving themes that are tangled in the nexus of time, reality, parallel universes and the theory of relativity.

A hairy chest, droplets of sweat, sparkling eyes seem at odds with the degrading white makeup and battery packs strapped to his arms. The cold, stark space, often flooded with blue or white light, heightens his humanness, his flesh and blood. A foot-wide square of LED light hangs centrally and offers a window, or perhaps a loophole, into this strange mechanical no man’s land. He sings and jokes as he contemplates love, death and science. The audience is bombarded with facts and thoughts chopping and changing in tone and tempo. We are plunged into this other world, disorientated by fast changing, frantic speech and sudden and terrifying changes in lighting states with soundscapes that rumble our chairs.

Schneider is often stopped in his tracks by an acknowledged stage manager and tech team somewhere up in the gods. Linear narrative begins to be deconstructed as he is told to speed up, or flooded in darkness, blacking out himself and re-entering his monologue at new moments or new physical places on the stage. As the show progresses, and the technology takes an alarming precedence, it feels like Schneider, the show and the audience are at the mercy of some higher being.

A video demonstration of simultaneity is sped up and played in two frames creating a diptych is sped up and played in two frames, creating a diptych. This constant challenging of the audience with speed, information overload, and the questioning of our knowledge is applied to every element of the work. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity is cleverly used to pose the notion of multiple realities.

If a man watches a moving train struck by lightning at the front and back, and a woman watched the lightning from the inside, the man will see both lightning strikes at the same time, and the woman will see one before the other. The result of special relativity demonstrates that from different reference frames, there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events, and thus both interpretations are correct.

This concept sets the premise for us to legitimately consider that time and reality are not necessarily as we know it. We are emotionally engaged with Schneider and open to the idea of experiencing multiple realities. We are now putty in his hands. The team are meticulously precious about spoilers for the next section, so I will carefully skirt around it. Primed for new realities and parallel universes, the audience and Schneider are confronted by a new presence, which is unsettling, dark and subtly threatening beneath the humour that unfolds. Key moments in life and death and near-misses that change the course of history are explored. The revelations reinforce the already established emotional engagement between Schneider and the audience. As an exercise in timing, cues, and stage-teching the work is an impeccable demonstration. At one point we are advised that ‘it easier if you don’t think of time as being linear’, I heed that advice for my befuddled brain, grappling with the idea of being ‘nowhere’ and ‘now here’ at the same time.

Repetition of image, and dislocation of time is abundant and in every detail. From the LED window reflected in eyes that are like a gateway to the soul, to the increased tempo of the timer displayed, counting down towards a crescendo. Speech is played backwards and memories projected forwards. Everything is the same but different.

You will laugh, you will gasp, you will question your existence, you might even cry as you realise that everything works towards a given point, but not a given time. This point marks the end.

YOUARENOWHERE straddles art and science in theme and form. Schneider is a true artist, he challenges the human condition simply by asking questions and exploring the ‘what if’s’ within the framework of science. He also challenges theatre by doing the same. Evolving from playing with stage tech and its capabilities, he applies his mastery of technology to the making process, finding intuitive and emotive content that he can make possible with those tools. Moments where blackouts make you jump, to a starscape that brings tears to the eyes, truly exemplify how much can be achieved with lighting and sound.

You might be left with the lingering thought of everything working towards one single point in life – death. You might walk away trying to unravel how each feat in technology and each surprise was accomplished. You might contemplate whether that lightning bolt was meant for two people at one time who are destined to find each other on their journey. However you engage with YOUARENOWHERE, it will be long lasting as you continue to interrogate your experience of the show after you leave the auditorium.

Dávid Somló: Mandala | Dog Kennel Hill Project: Our True Feelings

Now 16 is a five-week programme of weekly double bills. Interrogative, multidisciplinary works that combine a physical movement or dance vocabulary with speech link the themes of week three of Now 16 Festival with the festival’s opening shows.

Dávid Somló’s Mandala, veils week three’s double bill with a sense of mystery and uncertainty as the audience is divided upon arrival at The Yard. Ten selected members are given a set of brief instructions and a diagram of a floor pattern, (matching one chalked on stage), and all are left wondering how Mandala will be encountered. The simple map consists of a series of overlapping shapes; circles, triangles, rectangles and lines. The tentative selected few take up position in the floor space, each holding a round speaker collected from their starting point. A mixture of men and women, strangers and friends embark on long, slow journey together as they begin to walk along their pathway. Nervous eyes either dart about or remain steadfastly focused on the floor. Once everyone has settled down into repeatedly walking the perimeter of their assigned shape, the constant meandering of bodies in space with sporadic subtle surprises becomes meditative and pleasant. Interesting moments are when bodies overlap or block pathways. This forces the anonymous audience members cum performers to become human. Some jump over the join, others reverse, some giggle and others say thank you. These are tiny pockets of personality that emerge often but irregularly. Responses to navigating these barriers begin to reveal social etiquette and a tension between breaking social rules and the rules of the piece begins to emerge. Each person carries their own speaker, some hold it in front like a precious offering, rest it on a shoulder, or swing it, seemingly nonchalant. The minimal soundscape is soothing and gradually rises and falls in volume. There is an expectation of a play of sound in the space, with particular noises and scores becoming prominent and disappearing as their carriers travel past. There is no ebb and flow, no sense of immersion or surround-sound experience, and the relationship between the soundscape, the figures in space and the audience is not made clear throughout. This work feels like an exercise, a creative task that is rich in content to analyse and develop. For those who take part, the experience is certainly immersive and unusual for those who are not from a performative background; however the potential to alter and develop the work outweighs the experiential work as it stands.

Dog Kennel Hill Project tackle what they describe as the ‘dirty subject of emotion’ in what appears at first glance to be a dry non-emotive and starkly scientific response to the theme. Our True Feelings cleverly sets up this tone in order to break it with a sophisticated awareness and hilarious wit. It pokes fun at the science and at the society that creates the stigma surrounding emotion by exposing its stilted language. Our True Feelings is the final work of a trilogy called Etudes in Tension and Crisis and uses cognitive psychology as a language through which to explore states of emotion. The piece takes the form of a lecture by Henrietta Hale, with Erik Nevin and Helka Kaski placed on white plinths following her command with small movement phrases or etudes. Like the use of etudes in music, these scores are didactic; short phrases that require technical skill and work as an illustration of Hale’s text. Six emotions are categorised: happiness, sadness, distrust, anger, fear and surprise. They are broken down into five levels of intensity and divided between facial and bodily movements. Nevin and Kaski robotically droop their mouths, scrunch their brows, clench their fists and openly gesticulate as each level acquires accumulative movements. They are grotesque creatures that switch abruptly from trembling with fear to standing neutrally with not a trouble in the world. The process dehumanises them as they lose autonomy and a disconnect is discovered between facial and bodily expression.

Separating the physical manifestation and felt state of emotion forms the core of the inquiry and creates a contemporary parallel to Russian practitioner Vsevolod Meyerhold, who called for the use of physical etudes to provoke the corresponding emotional feeling within the actor. Like Meyerhold, Dog Kennel Hill Project form their own series of movements assigned to emotions but set about deconstructing their own vocabulary. They do this by tackling complex composite emotions and their interpretations reveal opposite emotions in face and body mistakenly read as their matching counterpart. This feeds the quest for something authentic rather than constructed and questions the science used to explain this throughout. Our concept of what is felt and what is communicated is further distorted as Nevin and Kaski begin to live out their own emotions, abandoning their plinths and performing a duet that expands the constrictive vocabulary demonstrated at the beginning into an awkward dance of social interactions and physical responses.

Hale surprises the audience by rolling about the floor or dropping her pants for seemingly no reason as she continues her straight-faced formal lecture. Between bursting into laughter, the audience is prompted to contemplate the tensions and barriers that both confuse and enable emotions to be felt and communicated. This is a work in subversion that is effective in unsettling its audience, making them laugh and posing quizzical notions that get everyone involved. Not sure whether the search for a fully comprehensive understanding of true feelings will ever be achieved, this comprehensive survey exposes the intangible, what it is to feel, with an enquiring and comical awareness.

Featured image (top): Dávid Somló’s Mandala

Now 16 at The Yard ran 12 May to 11 June 2016

Laura Burns & Emma Frankland: NOW 16 (Week 1)

Laura Burns: WISHBONE

The Yard Theatre’s annual festival for contemporary theatre, NOW, runs a weekly programme showing a new double bill each week for five weeks. This gives artists time to develop work via repeat performances and to firmly establish a relationship with the theatre, the site, and their paired artist. This year, Week 1 opens with WISHBONE, created by Laura Burns in collaboration with Jo Blake Cave, Jo Hellier and Simone Kenyon, followed by Ritual for Change by Emma Frankland.

In WISHBONE the four women on stage use voice, text, and an illustrative movement vocabulary to process thoughts around and embody animals and materials that could have formed part of their previous lives. The piece is clearly structured into sections so that the audience can anticipate it evolving. A minimal group section breaks out into individual explorations with speech and either object play or dancing to accompany them. A final group oral section, first of dialogue and then of extended notes, calls, or harmonies, brings the work to a hiatus which feels spiritual, magical, and all-encompassing.

Four monumental figures stand tall, edging between swaying and rocking on the cusp of momentum. Their eyes occasionally sparkle, their expressions are of intent, subtle excitement, and anticipation. Changes in posture or focus and gradual coos and hoots pique the overriding sense of stillness and quiet. This first section cleverly strikes a balance that highlights silence and sound, the individual and the flock, the human and the abstracted, the woman and the creature.

Laura Burns’ solo is an accumulation and articulation of both thoughts and movement. An inquiry into her past lives manifests in short phrases of speech and movement repeated and extended. She is articulating, thinking and expressing an attempt to define who we are, what we are made of, and where we came from. Mimicking a rhythm of thought streaming and reoccurring, her speech is assertive with a sense of poetic urgency. Trying to ‘get under the horizon line,’ ‘underneath the London clay,’ she is physically pulling at a thread that she can see but not grasp, that links the centre of the earth to us in the here and now. Her gestures are as fine as feathers but with strength in their dynamics. Pats, slides, catches, and tremors lead from the tips of her fingers as Burns grabs at something invisible, making something indefinable almost tangible. Her style is something quite unique and individual within the group and this section parallels the piece as a whole, it is a process, an accumulation, an awareness of not quite knowing.

A later section sees each performer complete the sentence ‘and underneath that’ over and over in differing ways, digging us deeper and deeper. It connects the silly and scientific, memories and facts, a biography of time and place. As their speech becomes faster, louder, and enthused with unconstrained thrill, the group jump over and over as the energy and tension builds into an eruption of sound. They feel like they are actually going to take off like a rocket as the sound vibrates through our bodies and the intensity implodes, this feels amazing, I am giggling along with them. The binding feature of this piece is its soundscape, created by the performers’ tuneful voices, speech, and an abstract recording. It is gently layered with different types of noises and notes and builds to high volumes and disorientating intensities and falls to silence. It is gentle, melodic and airy with ebbing and flowing repetition punctuated by staccato surprises. These sounds feel like a language, a call, but not completely human or completely animal. They express the embodiment of creatures of past lives and they speak directly to the audience. WISHBONE works, it carries its audience through its highlights and climaxes and it interrogates and questions with thoughtful and intellectual vigour. The team of four independent women conjure up an energy that actually feels like it comes from the centre of the earth that they describe: it bubbles and simmers and emanates via sound to our very cores making a piece that is spiritual and cerebral.

Rituals for Change is performed by Frankland who made the piece in collaboration with Eilidh Macaskill and Myriddin Wannell. A transformative use of objects is at its core which describes and illustrates a process of change, exploring the indefinable nature of being transgender. The space is dressed with a central pile of earth supporting an axe and woodblock. Individually made clay pots, a record player, a set of bowls, plaster, and a pile of metal scaffolds surround the bed of earth. Each object is an ingredient or a tool, integral to the mix that transforms Frankland’s identity and her surroundings.

Frankland inhabits a haven of bits and pieces which she organises and uses like a chef in their kitchen, or an artist in their workshop. The set is a combination of an installation and a home, and the objects are constantly being used, moved and replaced throughout the performance. A bird’s eye projection displays the artist-cum-alchemist’s work on the backdrop behind as this world grounded in garden earth expands higher, as a scaffold tower representing ‘radical change’ is constructed. This evolving set parallels Frankland’s narrative of change: it expands, as does her horizon, her vision, and our own minds.

The theme of making, particularly of moulding clay, stems from Frankland learning how to throw pots at the same time as beginning to take the oestrogen pill. Ingredients such as water, find their way around the set and in speech, linking our bodies, ‘we who are water,’ to each other and the earth. A bag of water is hung on the tower, punctured and collected into a bowl. It is used in two smaller bowls to mix with the earth and mimic a dripping, not quite solid, layer of breasts. It is later used to make a tangible, malleable layer of clay breasts that Frankland sculpts around her own growing chest. This transformative process works by its steady division into mini rituals that prepare space, object, and body for the next step.

Well-used exercises in the creative process such as completing the phrase ‘we are…’ and ‘you will…’ form a simple and effective text-based structure and allow the audience to focus on reflecting on the visual metaphors created by the manipulation of objects. The speech works best when it is conversational or when jokes are shared between Frankland and the audience. This relaxed style could be applied to the narrative which often feels laboured or over emphasised on its subject of an individual’s mental and physical change as they take the oestrogen pill. Although autobiographical, it appeals to everyman by placing the audience as those who are outsiders judging her own identity and more accessibly as those who have experienced growth and change themselves. It is beautiful in its frank honesty, organised mess, and the dirty concoction of ingredients, with an overall ambience in a state of flux like its creator.

Both WISHBONE and Rituals for Change make a strong start to a meaty line up of works for NOW 16. Their concerns with the social and philosophical context of their subject matter and their manipulation of object, text and voice are sophisticated examples of multidisciplinary performance.

Total Theatre