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.

Seth Kriebel: A House Repeated

A House Repeated is a video game stripped down to its framework of commands and voice prompts. But these are described and narrated by Seith Kriebel and a female performer, who personify a virtual and specific site, revealing a fantastical imagined world based on Battersea Arts Centre itself. The duo divide the audience into two teams who sit opposite each other in a minimally dressed studio. Running two stories in parallel, the audience (who never leave their seats) visualise their tour with the guidance of Kriebel’s concise descriptions. Each performer takes turns to offer their team a description and three options to navigate a journey until they find each other in the same room and are transported into a re-arranged plan. The battling teams then shift to share the narration with Kriebel, playing with the second performer who becomes our protagonist in the hot seat. As an audience of immersive theatre, indulging in vivid descriptions – from a witch’s hut to a man in a tower with a hundred eyes who never sleeps – becomes quickly over-shadowed as the piece turns into a fast-paced game. The descriptions themselves are rich and inconsequential, forming a diversion from the journey towards a mysterious goal that half the audience seem to already understand.

Moving from description to question to command, there is little time given to establishing the framework and language needed to access this work, which is disorientating at the start. Those in-the-know are those who are familiar with early computer games and for whom choose-your-own-adventure stories mean something. After being instructed to talk to each other before choosing one of the options outlined in a series of multiple choice questions, audiences become divided by ‘gamers’, who in turn divide themselves into subgenres and the rest into non-gamers. Watching this piece with three friends who access the form with surprising determination enlightens my experience. They make a shared community of gamers, analysing others’ responses and placing value on interpretations based on a language that is foreign to me. The rigid framework of options to navigate the imagined space is frustrating for me and liberating for them. Kriebel’s clever and complex responses to our answers draw on extensive preparation and improvisation and overturn notions of audience accessibility by using a language whose meaning shifts depending on how it was engaged with (and by whom).

As a piece of immersive theatre, I missed opportunities to actually walk the space. Over all too quickly, I half expected to be led on the journey we had just created. Instead, afterwards, I wandered the upper level, checking door signs and trying to decipher the journey that was sometimes vividly and sometimes abruptly illustrated. Looking more closely however, A House Repeated does more than simply reconstruct a game into another medium because in doing so, it becomes an embodiment of game, site, and audience agency. All three aspects are released from the video, repackaged within a new medium and a repeated set of boundaries. This allows audiences to experience the concepts of the game and of exploring site in an entirely new way, whilst altering an experience of theatre by conceiving it through the framework of a video game.

Descriptions of rooms rearranging, of promenading into existing spaces and discovering objects, intertwines brick and mortar with fantastical architecture and biography of space. It taps into the extensive rebuilding programme quintessential of BAC’s identity as a centre for play and creativity. After a history of campaigning to save the building and the recent setback of the fire in March 2015, BAC is fully engaged in its rebuild based on a long term research programme that works on their creative concept of Scratch. Rewriting or rebuilding the whole or sections of the centre as part of the creative process for performance work, ushering a new era of collaboration between site and show. Drawing longer term solutions from these interpretations places this architectural concept of ‘Playgrounding’ as creative catalyst for both show and site. A House Repeated parallels this innovative process by deconstructing and reinventing its theme and site together with every prompt, decision, and description in the piece. It takes apart and rebuilds Battersea Arts Centre, adhering to the same concepts of creative play that underpin artistic director David Jubb’s and architect Steve Tompkins’s creative architectural concept of Playgrounding. Stripped bare of production and technology this piece is complex and challenging through its minimalism, firmly establishing itself within BAC’s identity and pushing the boundaries of immersive theatre in alternative directions.

Platform 4: Memory Point(s)

Six audience members – no more, no less – are led through a side entrance of the Queen Elizabeth Hall: a Jenga tower of concrete blocks piled between the Southbank and Waterloo Bridge. We are informed that our tour of the building will be the last to see the Purcell Room as we know it, which is already closed for refurbishment for two years. Platform 4 is the last company to present work here in a fitting celebration of the past and how we hold on to it, in promenade installation piece Memory Point(s) (intriguingly, the show is itself the subject of memory having previous been presented here in 2014).

Having spent many an interval in the shared foyer of the Purcell Room and QEH, there is a definite sense of the grandiose in its monumental features. The complex, designed by Hubert Bennett, is imposing, formed mainly of wood, concrete, and marble. It is made grand by its austerity, all clean lines and minimal embellishment. Memory Point(s), which is addressing one challenge for site responsive work by touring a production first made for a very different place in 2012, overturns this heavy brutalist architecture by relocating pockets of the personal and private into the QEH’s blunt interior.

Tonight a tiny corner of the foyer is home to somebody’s living room, perhaps my own, perhaps not. I have a designated leather chair and headset. It could be my postcards and sea shells in the cabinet before us but the photos speak their own story. Portraits of another couple, another tine, another place. With composer Pete Flood’s (Bellowhead) richly evocative soundscape filling our ears, we are guided through the building’s darkness and desolation to pockets of warm, inviting mini-habitats created by designer Su Houser. My winding journey towards a celebratory hiatus has moments of wonder and agency as I dress up in frills, choose sweets from a seaside doll’s house made out of an old wooden desk, and unlock a locker full of tiny installations like a post-modern Joseph Cornell exhibit. The dressing of the sites, performers, and audience is sumptuous, perfumed and wonderful, like the holidays in the photographs and postcards that I rifled through in the desk.

A 50s female and a chap in a tailcoat play a dual role of leading us through the building and through what appears to be their own memories together; their jollity is comforting but perhaps unnecessary, and as the tour progresses their function becomes less clear. They weave together content created from the experiences of a variety of people affected by dementia (the show has been produced in collaboration with the Alzheimers Society). Montages of disparate memories collected from members of the Southampton and Eastleigh Connections Club and Singing for the Brain are constructed in dressing rooms, through windows, on staircases and emergency exits. Each creation is set apart from the next and separated by the time it takes to get there as our tour guide pretends to forget the way or leads us down dead ends – a lovely spatial metaphor for misfires of memory. There is, however, room to add more content here and consider how one scene might transform the experience of the next. There is also potential to drop the guides altogether and allow the audio in our headphones and the live soundscape of the piece to interact more directly.

The reconstruction of memories dislocates them in place and time and effectively disorientates the viewer both in terms of narrative and geography of the space. A reconnection with the building about to be lost is achieved via a clever depiction of a memory revisited in varying pieces and details. It is of a moment on holiday, under umbrellas, with cabaret singing and a musical act. I hear the music from behind glass, I see a musician. I observe a photograph of the scene in what I am sure is the auditorium here but I can’t be sure until I find myself there under those very umbrellas creating the memory for myself. Blurring the boundaries between original fittings and installations is where the piece is at its most interesting.

Memory Point(s) explores unobserved lives and places and situates us directly within the narrative – the installations create pasts and futures that incorporate the audience fully. However, the work is at risk of being overshadowed by the gravity of the QEH. Thought this is site specific immersive theatre, there is space for Memory Point(s) to take more risks and bring itself up to date with contemporary explorative site work. Allowing the space greater influence on the physical, and therefore artistic, journey would empower its potential for transformation – of itself and us. Memory Point(s) begins to do this but leaves a sense of emptiness, a sense that both the QEH and the authors of the memories have more to say and perhaps this is a symptom of re-working a site responsive piece into a new place after its conception and run at The Point, Eastleigh.

After we all dance on the stage with a merry band of frolicking musicians and pose for photographs, dancer Hayley Barker unfurls and hangs from the lighting box ladder and treads the wooden façade of the boundaries of the auditorium. Rebounding back and forth like a pendulum in a flurry of emotions and turning with an invisible partner, Barker ends the show as it is just beginning. Her emotive expressions embody a sense of loss, heightened in its contrast to the nature of the rest of the work where images one step removed – held behind glass, in a frame, shrunk into a tiny dolls house or locked in a locker – dominate. Even when the fourth wall is entirely broken and we prepare to make our costumed debut on stage there is a surreal disconnect between audience and performer. An effective metaphor for the disassociation of fragmented memory, perhaps, but it is a welcome relief here when Barker finally breaks this with an honest and human response, walking away to leave me wondering who she is and what she means to me.

Max Richter: Sleep

Max Richter’s groundbreaking night-long lullaby is experienced from a camp-bed on-site at The Wellcome Collection Reading Room by Rebecca Nice, and from her own bed at home via Radio 3’s live broadcast by Dorothy Max Prior

Rebecca Nice writes:

British contemporary music composer Max Richter’s latest project Sleep formed the afterhours highlight of BBC Radio 3’s Why Music? weekend, physically uniting live performance with site in The Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room. Why Music? saw a myriad of performance, forums and free events given at this multi-disciplinary centre for medicine, art and life which paralleled Radio 3’s broadcasting in current debate on neuroscience, psychology, language, memory, wellbeing and their relationship to music.

Sleep is an eight hour piece of music composed by Max Richter in consultation with neuroscientist David Eagleman. It is designed around a full eight-hour sleep cycle and was performed from midnight to 8am the next morning as a world premiere, the first time the ‘lullaby’ (as Richter describes it) has been performed for the full extended eight hours. Sleep is both a product of, and a catalyst for, an exploration into states of consciousness and sleep and how the mind in its various states interacts with sound. As the Radio 3 presenter warns Richter not to ‘fall victim to his own sleeping draft’, I consider that perhaps this music is about more than merely sending people off to the land of nod.

In quiet anticipation and careful consideration of people and place, a community of ‘Sleepers’ formed by competition winners, press, Wellcome and production staff tiptoe into the Reading Room. Twenty uniform camp-beds dressed with a white pillow, a blue sleeping bag and an eye mask for each Sleeper are arranged in rows amongst the bookshelves, relics and installations of the Wellcome Collection’s Reading Room. Wandering through the eclectic mix of installations, past a 1920s x-ray machine, to a bed set before two pre-programmed keyboards and a Trident dental station, it becomes clear that the lines between exhibit and viewer, performer and audience, doctor and patient, scientist and subject, are not just blurred but entirely broken.

As the Sleepers settle into place, and onto display on our demarcated camp-bed plinths, Max Richter enters with five musicians to inhabit their lair of instruments. Steve Morris and Natalia Bonner (violins), Reiad Chibah (viola), Ian Burdge and Chris Worsey (cellos) are framed by the grand red carpeted staircase leading up into the gods, and single soprano Grace Davidson in the gallery above. Richter sits at a grand piano surrounded by keyboards and electronic equipment. He briefly states that listeners’ are ‘interacting by inhabiting it’, to the Radio 3 audience catching it live from their bedrooms all over the country.

It soon becomes apparent that rather than inhabiting it, the piece inhabits me. By laying myself vulnerable to the soundscape and landscape of the site, my body reverberates with the same waves as its surrounding architecture. I become a small part of an enlarged speaker that throbs in the centre of the building, a vessel through which sound travels. I am grounded, quite literally, by its vibrations.

12.00 I sit up, marvelling at the spectacle of a music concert at the foot of my bed and notice the connection between Richter and his musicians, counting and cueing each other through their own system of signals. I share their satisfaction as they connect and smile and their anticipation as they overcome situations with timing, unpredictable instruments and noise pollution from the world outside. Chords of steady dinosaur steps lead me on journeys as top notes take me around corners and over hills.

12.05 Muffled piano notes are all encompassing, the air inside and out of my body is filled, a siren reminds me how comfortable I am inside my sleeping bag even though I have the sense of being watched. Strings accompany the tortured souls in the paintings to my right. Grotesque figures thrive and grimace in the 18th century oil painting A Blacksmith Extracting a Tooth. But I seem to float like Marc Quinn’s sculpture Free, a baby that hovers on a plinth below.

12.15 Three musicians descend the stairs like gods from Olympus or angels from the highest level of an altar piece. They are visiting, working their miracles on humanity as we sleep. A steady even beat, a reverberating pace is constant, safe and comforting.

12.20 Tremors build in intensity, a chorus of sleeping bags rustle. I succumb to the sway to Richter’s upright back, he is my conductor, I lay down beneath his command and occasional gaze.

12.40 A horizontal audience startles at an angel humming from the gallery above a she treads the names of the greats: thirty physicians and scientists from Aristotle to Paracelsus, listed by Henry Wellcome.

12.45 I seem to hear pipes, through my ears, through my bed into my bones.

12.50 I am overcome with weight and tiredness, time slows down. The sound feels the same but different, a constant of variations and repetitions.

01.30 The sound is so loud that there is no escape. I can feel an entire orchestra through my skin, my muscles, my body.

I sleep sporadically, I see in: 02.15 02.40 03.20

04.00 My brain is pierced by a whisper up in the gallery behind, so cutting, so insulting. I realise that my sense of hearing is so heightened during sleep that I am acutely aware of every breath, turning page, click of a camera in the room.

05.00 06.00 07.10 The sound is the same but different. A new sky, a new world outside tells me more significant time has passed. A glowing pink and golden sky matches the glow of Richter’s sheet music under his lamp. I am reminded of the golden haze created in cathedrals assigned to God’s spirit. And a musician becomes a deity.

08.00 The same but different, the pulse of the night reaches a quiet crescendo. A sleepy minority miss this entirely but the majority are ready if not yet alert. I am spotted by a musician, as I it up bleary-eyed, dishevelled and transfixed. This feels increasingly intimate and yet I have been beneath this gaze all night.

My night is chaotic and intense with moments of bliss beside moments of invasion as my sleep-deprived body searches for a way through the noise to unconsciousness. On my way back from the bathroom I make my discovery. Walking down an isle of sleeping figures, watched over by what felt like a choir of angels surrounded by a golden glow in the dark was a moment of peace, bliss and awe. Returning to my bed I embodied the darkness, noise and torment of a beautiful sound in overabundance and incredibly high volume.

There is a placement and separation of our roles as clear as a religious Renaissance painting. The inner sanctum of Richter’s musicians circled by instruments are central and form a channel of intercession between the Sleepers and the gallery. The grand, wide staircase frames and leads the musicians to the gallery of angels’ voices above where the soprano soloist hovers. Rows of camp beds circle the core with a sprinkling of artefacts, and in turn are surrounded by an outer circle of officials and photographers in constant orbit. Through immersive performance, a reciprocal relationship between Sleeper, Musician, Invigilator and Photographer is made and developed. Each role in this performance watches the other, either officially or unofficially. How and whether the Sleepers slept was watched and documented and in turn the Sleepers focused entirely on Richter’s soundscape which protected us under their gaze. For all who enter the Reading Room there is no escaping an enveloping, encompassing experience transformed by the various levels of immersion in both the site and the Sleep experiment. How we measure or quantify a subconscious mind remains a mystery but I wonder what spell Max Richter’s dark lullaby cast as my strange abstracted night turns into morning.

Dorothy Max Prior writes:

I often fall asleep to Radio 3 – I rarely see out Late Junction and usually ending up turning the radio off in the middle of the night. So Saturday 26 September saw nothing unusual in my bedroom. By 11pm I was snuggled under the duvet, with the radio on fairly low, listening to the showcase of works by new contemporary music composers that preceded Sleep. As is my wont, I fell asleep before midnight – so I missed the start of the Max Richter piece, it just merged into the previous broadcast in my dream state.

I was rudely awakened an hour or so later by a high-pitched cry. I’ve raised three children – all breastfeed longterm, so I was the main carer at night for a decade – and for a moment I was thrown back into those memories. We are programmed to respond to high-pitched sound – the mother tuning in to the sound of the small creature’s cry, whether she is asleep or awake, a strong part of the survival mechanisms for any mammal. It took me a minute or to to realise that I was listening not to a baby but to a soprano female voice – a high, angelic note. Lullaby? I thought grumpily – I don’t think so. Reports from the live experience at The Wellcome Collection seem to chime with my experience – the entry of the human voice into the proceedings causing a new alertness to many who had just dozed off. Richter is an intelligent man, knowledgeable about the power of music to affect people, and working with a neuroscientist, so I can’t help but feel that he knew this would happen!

I shuffle to the bathroom, return to the bedroom and go to turn the radio off – then realise I mustn’t, so turn it down a notch. The voice stops. The music becomes more ambient, consistent tones without highs and lows. That’s more like it! But then I’m awake again – a melodic piano line is too invasive to sleep to. It subsides into a pleasant drone. I doze. Time passes. The voice comes back. It wakes me up again, and I remember thinking it sounds like a mournful ghost trapped in the machines. It goes away. The ambient mode returns, for which I’m grateful. I doze. I sleep. No doubt I dream, but when I wake I can’t remember my dreams. Which is odd, as usually I do. I feel very tired, and suspect that I haven’t really slept much at all…

I wake fully at 7am, which is usual for me. I listen to the last hour, and enjoy it, but am a little puzzled. I’d have expected 7am to 8am to be a waking-up cycle, and it doesn’t strike me this way. The conclusion of the piece feels very low-key, rather than something that brings people back into wakefulness.

If providing music appropriate to different states of mind at different hours of the day and night was the intention, then Richter would have done well to listen to the Indian Ragas created for specific hours (a 7am raga would be quite upbeat!). It should also be noted, from the site-responsive perspective, that Sleep, although a record-breaker for live music broadcast, is not the first artistic sleep-over that puts its audience to bed. Duckie’s Lullaby is that very thing (presented at Circus Space at least a decade ago, and revived at the Barbican in recent years). And around about the same time, Fevered Sleep created a lovely piece called Once in a Blue Moon, staged at Battersea Art Centre, in which parents and carers got put to bed whilst children roamed the arts centre, which had been transformed into a magical world of talking bears and ice sculptures…

On reflection, I feel that Sleep was an interesting experiment, but if it was indeed intended as a lullaby, a glorious failure. It was impossible to sleep through, with its changes in tone and pitch, and its marked highs and lows. It stimulated and roused the brain, rather than soothing. It is impossible to separate out a critique of the music from the staging of this live event and broadcast – and indeed, if it wasn’t staged and broadcast live in this site-responsive manner, its audience invited to sleep through it (either there in person or in their own beds), Total Theatre wouldn’t be covering it.

I’ve listened again to some sections since the live broadcast, and I like the piece a lot better from the perspective of an awake, responsive listener than I did as an at-home Sleeper. The music itself, as an eight-hour cycle reflecting artistically on the process of sleep and dreaming, rather than being something to sleep to – does stand up. It is, ultimately, a piece about sleep, not a piece to sleep to.

Footnote:

Sleep was performed live in the Wellcome Collection Reading Room by composer Max Richter (piano, keyboards and electronics) , Grace Davidson (soprano), Natalia Bonner and Steve Morris (violins), Reiad Chibah (viola), Ian Burdge and Chris Worsey (cellos) beginning at midnight on Saturday 26 September 2015 and ending at 8am on Sunday 27 September. The single continuous piece was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. This was the first time the piece had been performed in front of an audience, and it has been announced that this event has entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music.

It was presented under the auspices of Why Music?, a partnership between BBC Radio 3 and Wellcome Collection. Asking the question Why Music?, leading musicians have been joined by authorities in the fields of neuroscience, music therapy and music psychology for the three-day programme of live and recorded broadcasts exploring what makes music a vital part of being human. Why Music? broadcast live from BBC Radio 3’s popup studio at The Wellcome Collection, 25-27 September 2015.

The Wellcome Collection in London’s Euston Road is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health.

Geraldine Pilgrim: Well

Well is a major commission by Creative Barking and Dagenham, the local Creative People and Places cultural regeneration project initiated and supported by the Arts Council, alongside the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, SOG and the Broadway Theatre Barking. It builds upon Artistic Director Geraldine Pilgrim’s reputation for transforming buildings, established through the site responsive work she has pioneered over 20 years, to take over and animate a disused factory building in East London.

The former chemical manufacturing Sanofi Factory in Dagenham East is both the location of Pilgrim’s latest piece Well, and the heart of a private and personal, public and national identity. After 79 years of production, the factory closed in 2013. Geraldine Pilgrim re-opens its doors to reveal a biography of people and place with a series of light, sound, and performance interventions that respond to the architecture of the factory, its materials, machines, temperatures and smells, its functions and meanings to the communities who worked there. The nexus of relationships between its daily inhabitants of cleaners and factory packers, scientists and machinery, and the human role of producer and consumer, pokes and prods at our own relationship to medicine from a personal and historical context.

An early room’s museum-like display sets up this idea for the audience by arranging artefacts that reveal the factory’s history on a central table, circled by the history of medicine around the walls. Connections between the two are introduced which become a running theme throughout. Each audience member seems to find their own little nugget of information and a growing sense of the scale of this building’s contribution to local life is carried with us from room to room.

Sound designer Connor Mott creates a hive of productivity as the walls buzz and hum with the vibrations of activity, eerily calling us around corners and down staircases. The minimalist drones or catchy songs juxtapose the human and mechanical whilst delineating space but permeating its boundaries; calling and warning, inviting and intimidating. As each small audience group is lead through a series of installations, they create powerful responses – of admiration or reluctant repellence. Dark hospital quarantine scenes with masked doctors emphasise through contrast the relief of a compelling wind farm installation consisting of a single girl circling on the spot as I circle her, never losing eye contact.

Chahine Yavroyan’s lighting design takes particular effect as the audience promenades an expansive nave bathed in blue light. The piece peaks here at a climax of beauty and poignancy. Layers of harmonising voices are breathtaking. The a capella soundscape is created by rows of singers in white coats pouring liquids between three glass bell jars. The striking colours of blue, red, and green liquid pierce a sparkling monochrome scene. The long drawn out notes of a futuristic chemical choir create a sense of worship, awe and spirituality quite different from the tangible grinding of pills, humming of machinery, and physical making of a product in the greenhouses below. This starkly highlights the very human relationship we have with medicine and the complexities of the interconnectedness between science, health, and spirituality. As the choir is durational and constant, the pouring of their liquid comes to no conclusion and hints at the darker, never ending pursuit of alchemy underlying this heavenly scene.

With themes, content, and relationships so rich and abundant in this piece, the idea of making, grafting, crafting and creating something larger than the sum of its parts connects both the human and historical narratives. The piece is alive with local performers and contributors whose lives enrich the ethereal narratives of the factory’s past, and new narratives evolve with each audience member’s step through this beautifully dark maze. With a cast of 170 performers including former Sanofi employees, Well makes well the sense of loss at Sanofi’s closure by celebrating experiences that particularly appeal to those with a personal connection and creating anew that connection for strangers.

Well avoids the spectacle and increased audience agency that has been pushing boundaries in immersive theatre. What it does is sophisticated and subtle in its approach; the piece stays true to its heart – the people of Dagenham – creating grand narratives while celebrating local communities and individuals. On arrival we were a disjointed group formed on the grass, of friends of performers, local residents, couples, and one or two from afar, but on exiting we were all silently connected by our experience of this mysterious place and its context within the history of Dagenham and medical history as a whole. I wander back to the tube clutching my white paper bag with its blue and white pill rattling inside and muse over the anonymous prescription and its potential transformation via the cumulative experiences revealed step by step in my journey around the Sanofi.

Tables, Tracks and Suitcases – Hat Fair 2015

Rebecca Nice is there for the 41st Winchester Hat Fair

Hat Fair 2015 sees a new artistic director Michelle Walker for its 41^st annual street theatre festival – and a new initiative, the Hat Fair Fringe. The fringe showcases and provides professional development for student and emerging artists, alongside the traditional Hat Fair programming of international, national and local companies.

In précis: this year’s programme, running 3–5 July, consisted of several Without Walls commissions including Gandini Juggling Company’s 8 Songs, Cathy Waller Company’s Louder Than Words and Stopgap Dance’s Bill and Bobby, (also seen at Greenwich + Docklands International Festival, reviewed here). An additional Without Walls commission, Southpaw Dance Company’s Carousel, formed the Saturday night finale that ran into a street party. (The evening before, Co.LABse’s A Table for 2 had transformed Winchester’s shop fronts into a moveable feast.) Sunday, as is the tradition, took Hat Fair to Oram’s Arbour, a large green set apart from the historic city centre, where families follow a series of Hatting artists busking for their earnings on four pitches, alongside a reduced Hat Fair schedule for the town centre that included Wet Picnic’s Suitcases, presented in the Cathedral outer close…

Graeme Miller: Track

Historic Winchester comes alive with festival fever for the Hat Fair weekend. Gourmet food stalls, strawberries and flowers pop up around the town, and Winchester Cathedral runs a BBQ in the outer close to feed the many visitors and artists that bring a buzz to Winchester over the three days. The Medieval city’s layout, with its old pubs, crooked alleyways and narrow streets, frames performance spaces and contains audiences quite naturally within the designated sites. Around every corner is a new space, from the back of Waterstones to the Cathedral’s buttressing. The Great Hall and Cathedral’s outer close provides larger areas for multiple acts, offering backdrops of gothic architecture, law courts, or leafy graveyard.

Turning the corner to the right of the Cathedral’s west front along Curle’s Passage, the music, laughter and crowds are left behind, and a sun-filled oasis of calm ensues as a thoughtful and informative performer explains Graeme Miller’s Track, whilst a small queue forms for this site-adaptive installation. It consists of a track installed on the uneven paving, in this case along the outside wall of the cathedral, beneath the buttressing that forms a series of arches under which the piece promenades. Participants lay on a small wooden surface and as they do, a relationship of trust and care develops between them and their personal gondolier, who watches over them and their journey. The sensory environment becomes the focus of the piece as the horizontal becomes the vertical and the perception of the surroundings become a series of noises, smells and visual fantasies. The creaks and clunks of the tracks, a cathedral side door opening, the shapes of the gothic tracery, the sensation of movement at a slow and methodical pace, create a visual otherworld that is hypnotic. On disembarking and walking back along the path just travelled, it is hard to connect the two worlds. The simplicity of Track, should not be underestimated. The personal interaction between audience member and gondolier combined with the transience and beauty of the view from the track creates something more complex that separates participants from the atmosphere of the rest of the Fair just metres from them.

Wet Picnic: Suitcases

Wandering back into the Cathedral outer close, Wet Picnic – graduates of the University of Winchester (which now offers a degree in Street Arts), and subsequent supported artists of Hat Fair – return to base to warn happy picnickers of the dangers of the internet. True to form, Suitcases is a raucous affair of live song, accurately sourced Britney moves, and 90s jazz dance, with a running commentary that both humiliates and worships a scientist displaying his emotional baggage over the internet. Highly visual and colourful, the world of technology is turned on its head by its reinvention in tangible form, with a stream of tweets pulled out of the performers’ mouths and the Twitter symbol turned into blue-feathered love birds. As I am pulled into the performance area, to play the scientist’s one true love, I manage to form a series of tableaux with the actors as they subtly direct me whilst throwing gag after gag. Plans to develop this cabaret-style vignette will allow the narrative to develop into a full-length piece. Wet Picnic’s narratives and themes are well thought through and current; but more importantly, they provide a framework to highlight the charisma and passion of the company’s energetic and hilarious performers – it almost doesn’t matter what they are doing because they do it so well. The choreography of each raised eyebrow and quivering lip demands attention, and prompts empathy and laughter in equal measure.

The Abbey Gardens by the Guildhall allow more picnickers to watch acts amongst the flowers, and a mobile library provides an unusual setting for an outdoor festival piece. The Quiet Volume, by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells consists of a podcast designed for two with a series of readings and instructions, prompting participants to read, observe and consider notions and functions of site and the body in the moment. Settled at a desk in a van surrounded by books, the prospect of reading for an hour is thoroughly daunting, particularly as the festival entertainments can be heard outside and the possibility of missing something makes the choice to take part somewhat risky. The time flies by, however, and the noises and reflections of people in the library van window allow participants to remain a part of the Fair whilst the piece creates a new site and function at a desk, evoking an original site with a similar function in a library. This transformation and layering of site and its function is combined with the notion of the body in space and what it means to read. By being told what to think and imagine, when to read and how to move, audience members consider what it is to be alone with your thoughts, but united to a stranger through the podcast instructions. The layers of connections and disconnections with the outside world and the visual text and observation of the body give this piece significance whilst the joy of reading and consideration of text make the delivery unusual and cerebral.

Southpaw Dance Carousel. Photo Dan Prince

Without Walls commission Carousel, by Southpaw Dance, saw a large company of dancers perform on a constantly revolving stage. High in energy and physicality, the piece was enjoyable – evoking a rather old-fashioned ‘fairground gypsy’ theme, and comprising a movement vocabulary that mixed contemporary dance with a dash of breakdancing, folk dance, and tango – but felt a little lacking in terms of choreography and narrative. This finale act of Hat Fair on the Saturday night was well attended and created a carnival atmosphere, but artistically was eclipsed by Co.LABse, who provided the finale on Friday night – the company’s stunning aerial work, clever use of props, canny collaboration with local businesses, and inventive use of several Local Authority buildings combining to create a great event.

As the evening draws in, Winchester’s crowds move in to the Broadway and regroup with the night-time drinkers. Co.LABse take over the frontage of the council building just round the corner. They use the levels of the building to portray different scenes in a fictional restaurant, and a large and growing audience view the antics inside through the windows. Tableaux images and recurring jokes work to draw in the audience, who after a lengthy introduction are fully committed to finding a new restaurant after the chef blows this one up. A sense of camaraderie and togetherness comes through as what seems like the entire population of Winchester marches down the street, following a trail of furniture carried high above the performers’ heads. After taking over shops and pestering traders, the performers settle at the Guildhall. A kitchen is delivered by a van driving directly through the audience. Music cues alert you to each change of scene whilst chaos reigns in multiple areas. From the dressing of the waitresses below, to the Chef’s kitchen deflating; there is even a Champagne launch led by a waitress dangling down from the tops of the building, suspended against the neo-Gothic windows: she empties her bottle over the crowd who have been given umbrellas in preparation. A Table for 2 encapsulates Winchester’s identity with Hat Fair. It is a festival loved and supported by residents, artists and businesses alike – and Co.LABse brings this community together in appreciation of a perfectly-pitched piece of outdoor theatre.

coLABse A Table for 2

Hat Fair took place in Winchester 3–5 July 2015. Featured image (top of article) is Co.LABse A Table for 2.