BabaFish: Expiry Date

Amid a stage jam-packed with wooden and mechanical bits and bobs, a grey-haired bearded man rests in the shadows. There’s graceful music, lights are low; a solitary red striped satin upholstered chair, elegant, alone, and magnificent, is lit glowingly. There comes the sound of air, of wind, meandering through the beautiful music; something forboding, trickles, crackles, subtly threatens. Warm lights illuminate a stage painstakingly arranged with large domino-like blocks, creating curves and causeways. The grey-haired man is more visible now, sitting comfortably, reflectively, at a small table. He’s writing.

The slim blocks fall, tumble, and set off the Heath Robinson-like contraptions. A large bulbous glass jar spills grains of sand, like an egg timer, time literally running out. The set, within its human constructs, has a life and character of its own.

Expiry Date, a union of circus and contemporary dance theatre, reflects the old man’s final hour as he grasps, grapples, and glowers with and through his scattered memories. The older man, Joseph (played by Thomas Hoeltzel) is joined by a younger man (Jef Stevens), who plays a remembered version of the same character, plus two young women: Laura Laboureur, who plays Joseph’s long-lost and much-loved wife; and Swedish-born circus-theatre artist Anna Nilsson,who is also the co-director, and founder of BabaFish. She plays a kind of wandering spirit: perhaps the ‘essence’ of the piece, a mixture of the characters’ wrangling emotions, or the mischievous body or illness that just will not behave itself? Ultimately, she is the spirit of death itself.

As the dominos fall, balls run down tracks, and pendulums swing, we notice Laboureur, inside one of the large contraptions to the rear of the stage, resplendent in a beautiful wedding dress, and singing like a caged bird. Meanwhile, Nilsson does a sinewy, contorted dance, seemingly naked (in fact, in flesh-coloured underwear), while Joseph watches, in his burgundy cardigan, hands in pockets. Her hair falls over her face, turning her into something other than human, as she scampers on all-fours, her body back-to-front. She twists and turns across the floor, her limbs making extraordinary shapes.

Next, Joseph watches as his younger self and his wife play out the struggles of love and marriage in an intense duet of pushing, pulling and wrestling. This builds into shouting (in a babel of languages), but is then resolved in a beautiful sinuous duet. Later in the piece, I enjoy the dynamic of a lovely arm-dance section, where all four performers are ‘stacked’ head and shoulders above each other, on and above the chair.

Throughout, there’s ample beautiful music, including twanging sci-fi sounds as Nilsson contorts herself across the floor; and an amusing and surreal live rendition of the Habanera from Carmen performed by Laboureur (‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle / Love is a rebellious bird’), plus some virtuosic juggling and white ball manipulation from Jef Stevens, which is both poignant and lyrical.

The show is created by Nilsson and co-director Sara Lemaire, and co-devised by the cast. The extraordinary set was created in collaboration with Jan Nilsson, Anna’s engineer father.

Choreography is by Hun-Mok Jung, who is known in the UK through her performance last year with the company Peeping Tom, in 32 Rue Vandenbranden.

There are moments of illumination and love. It’s these small, ephemeral flashes of ecstasy and beauty that make us alive, says Nilsson in her director’s notes. Do we ever at the time acknowledge the power of a moment destined to become a mere memory?

Expiry Date is very well crafted and constructed, yet somehow, never quite takes off for me. I watch, yet never quite enter into it. To be admired rather than loved.

Wildheart & Lyric: Wolf Meat

Ostensibly, Wolf Meat follows an all-too-familiar contemporary plot: an overbearing drug lord, a grandson seeking love at the expense of family, a harassed maid plotting the family’s downfall, and an undercover cop looking to take them all down. This, however, is where familiarity ends. The drug lord is an incestuously-motivated grandmother, her grandson, Wolfie, a repressed and hapless manchild, their maid a wild-eyed psychopath and the cop, a butch lesbian with her own theme tune, Dawn Taylor.

The link to Little Red Riding Hood is hard to fathom, the story bearing little similarity to the fairy tale and the characters referencing it in name only. Suffice to say that this play was not for children. The audience are led into the first act by Grandma who both directs and acts out the series of increasingly unlikely events in her Croydon sitting room, the play-within-a-play structure allowing for frequent stops along the way to drop in and out of character to explain, comment, or throw insults at the audience.

Although at first a few jokes seem to miss the mark – doddery old ladies and crude freeze-frame exploits – as the show gets going, the self-referential humour, bizarre tangents, and untold silliness build up to an explosive finale. Both characters and audience are swept briskly along by the plot which manages to hit every conceivable (and inconceivable) scene and trope along the way: musical numbers, drug-fuelled highs and lows, and one startling moment of full-frontal to name just a few. What Grandma’s play might lack in polish or finesse, it certainly makes up for in variety and ambition.

And therein lies much of its humour. Against the domestic and, frankly, libidinous aspirations of Grandma and Wolfie, the grand themes of drugs, murder, and conspiracy are comically out of place; comedy that increases significantly as they try desperately to fill their mundane lives in Hollywood cliché and educate the audience in sophisticated ways of cinematic discourse.

The biggest laughs of the evening, however, come from the interaction between characters and audience which are both frequent and playfully inappropriate. One audience member was invited to ‘quality check’ an unknown substance, while another was given the power of life or death over a character and subsequently made the wrong decision. With a small audience (only 50 or so per performance) any interaction implicates the whole group by association, and once brought into the world of the play, willingly or otherwise, the audience more easily laughs along with its silliness rather than at it.

The use of props, sound, and light throughout was clever and inventive with no opportunity for humour wasted – even their limitations proving a self-referential delight. In one scene Wolfie stops to assess the value of their most expensive prop (a solitary pot plant transforming living room into a park) with a view to returning it for a refund after the show’s run – amusing and potentially true?

Over the course of the hour, the actors keep the story moving with enormous energy with Carla Espinoza’s maid Luna providing the best moments including a hilarious and excruciating turn that would give Meg Ryan a run for her money in that scene from When Harry Met Sally.

Overall, Wolf Meat is a wickedly funny production; irreverent, absurd and very entertaining.

Ridiculusmus: Give Me Your Love

Everyone here is trapped. Welsh ex-squaddie Zach (David Woods) has retreated to a cardboard box. His wife Carol (Jon Haynes) is trapped out of sight, perhaps in her own box, perhaps upside down, certainly in an unforgiving marriage. Band mate and fellow war veteran Ieuan (Jon Haynes again) is trapped outside by the door-chain and by the demands of his bowels. It doesn’t take long, in this off-kilter world, for the audience to recognize its own position: trapped in a similarly dark box to Zach’s, on hard seats, in a cold auditorium. And hold on, aren’t the actors also hiding from us, literally, behind scenery and inside cardboard?

So the form matches the subject – Zach can’t find a way to escape the cage of his trauma – would mind-altering drugs help?

The story unfolds in Ridiculusmus’s signature style. We have two main quarrelsome characters, in a bizarre situation, struggling to debate a serious issue, this time about the use of mind-altering drugs such as MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Give Me Your Love is the second play of the company’s trilogy exploring the relationship between therapeutic innovation and mental health service users. The first, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland, was more ambitious in terms of staging and company size, but they share a basis in scientific research partnered with playful theatrical treatment. There are overlaps too in the way drama builds, and how catharsis has to be almost forced from the sufferer.

For Zach, ‘getting the trauma out’ is really hard. He’s tried Prolonged Exposure and it didn’t help. Does he need a therapist, like Ieuan had? Would listening to the Prodigy help? He understands that he can’t stay in a box for much longer, and if CNN said MDMA can help, and if they’ve tried it in Cardiff, then hell yes he’ll swallow the pill. But Zach is slippery. We can’t be certain that he has taken the drug, he invents a traumatic scene to get things moving, he says that his trauma is that he did nothing in the war, just sat on his ‘fat arse’. It’s almost as if his trauma is a fear of modern life; of doing nothing, being bored, feeling trapped. The language is classic Ridiculusmus, conversational and distinctive, slyly mixing the everyday with the metaphysical. An exchange about a Swiss Army Knife versus Leatherman leads seamlessly into a discussion on suicide; Ieuan drops in the line ‘keep them entertained, Zach’ acknowledging our presence.

If this sounds a bit grim, the performances and the writing prove otherwise. It’s almost an installation piece, this room with an animated box and choreographed motifs; Ieuan’s hands arcing gracefully through the gap in the door, Jon’s sudden appearance as a shell-shocked war veteran in white pants under a strobe light (lighting by Richard Vabre); the blatantly unnecessary use of a pulley as a dramatic device. The set, by Jacob Williams, looks like a cross between a condemned cell and a student squat, with a nod to a dirty protest. Having your actors either off-stage or concealed doesn’t help with audibility though, and some dialogue was very muffled.

The lack of physical presence does reduce the pleasure a notch for those who particularly enjoy Woods’s edgy explosive persona and Haynes’s dead-pan, slightly wheedling one. But Zach and Ieuan are well drawn despite being mainly invisible. We feel Zach’s frustration and readiness to try anything to escape his mental prison. Ieuan seems a bit of a chancer, but he is a proper friend and eager to help – even to procuring illegal ecstasy of dodgy provenance. I love that he doesn’t realize that Zach is in a box until very near the end. Carol, the off-stage wife, is beautifully sketched, perhaps with an addiction to painkillers and problems of her own. The action is punctuated with a fantastic sound design and music by Marco Cher-Gibard that underpins Zach’s emotional journey. The final coda, playing out in darkness, is wonderfully haunting.

There is no definitive point of view on offer here; the play rather skitters over its subject despite the in-depth research embedded in it. But as with many Ridiculusmus shows, the work is intrinsically dramatic. From Tough Time, Nice Time (performed in a bath tub), Yes, Yes, Yes (performed as two psychiatric patients) through to Say Nothing (performed on a piece of fake grass), Ridiculusmus continually reinvent theatre and speak with a unique voice.

Give Me Your Love ends with a glimmer of hope. Zach has had some kind of epiphany, however temporary. There is birdsong, a planned trip to the beach with an umbrella, the promise of an all-you-can-eat-buffet. But there is a sense too of hopelessness. Larger MDMA trials will start soon in America, but the UK is slow to invest in this form of therapy. So for Zach, and the one in nine soldiers that, it is said, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, the psychedelic trip-cure is still a long way down the rainbow-coloured road.

Ockham’s Razor: Tipping Point

Will the circle be unbroken? And is a better world awaiting in the sky? Ockham’s Razor breathtaking new show Tipping Point opens with the drawing of a circle, in salt and chalk, around the edges of the performance space, a square with the audience on all four sides. A safe space, a sacred space. May the gods and spirits guide and protect them. On the soundtrack, Tibetan bowls and church bells gently chime.

Long hand-held poles are carried in by the five performers, and a game ensues – Ockham’s like their playground games, they’re a feature of all their recent shows. There is teasing and running and jumping and swinging, as the poles are used to create constantly morphing shapes to move on or through – crosses and triangles and parallel lines. As the metal poles are swung around, they come very close to us – close enough to feel the danger, sending a tingle down our spines, and reminding us that in circus we are encountering the real, not just the representational. Eventually, the focus moves from the ensemble to the smallest of the five, Emily Nicholl. A pole becomes a novel sort of ‘tightrope’ that she balances along; two poles become an odd pair of wriggling parallel bars that she negotiates with a cartoon-like running on the spot movement, a cheeky grin on her face – the personal relationships played out between the performers here and throughout the show are theatrical in a gentle and low-key way. The until-now quiet audience bursts into a spontaneous burst of applause.

All change. Now there is just one pole, which is rigged from above the central point of the circle with a surprisingly quick click into place. (Any rigging or tethering and untethering of equipment is done calmly and methodically throughout the show as part of the stage action. There is no need to hide the process, we are entranced.) The focus is now on Steve Ryan, and we are into more familiar Chinese Pole territory – his smooth and fluid moves presented with elegant precision. Meanwhile, we’re looking at the four tethered poles at each corner of the space, outside the circle – as yet unused. Now’s the moment, and down they come. There’s a lovely choreography of raising and lowering, and the poles become dancing objects in the space. It’s lovely to see the show’s directors (Ockham’s Tina Koch and Charlotte Mooney) allowing the objects the time and space to be themselves, making patterns in geometric harmony. There’s a scene later in the piece where all five performers stand with the poles, which are attached at the top, swinging them to and fro, then climb to hang beside them from the truss, a gorgeous still image of vertical shapes; a landscape in which bodies made of flesh and poles and trusses made of metal co-exist.

More game-playing – lifts and drops and swings. Telma Pinto takes the spotlight, the strength and suppleness in her pole work (and elsewhere) is stunning. The scene shifts into a chase through the forest of poles, then into a toe-curling game of Blind Man’s Buff. There’s another major equipment change: the central pole gets detached from the top and clamped to a bar hung on bridles – so that the pole becomes a kind of see-saw or swing boat that can go a full circle (a little bit like a Wheel of Death without the wheels). Ockham co-director Alex Harvey and Nich Galzin are the daredevils who get to ride this contraption, flying through the air with the greatest of ease, two daring young men on a – well, not a flying trapeze but you get my drift. The pole is re-attached at the top, and Alex dons a sling for a beautiful cradle-style double with Emily, the other company members also basing from the floor, so that the scene becomes one of tender support, as Emily moves hand-to-hand from Alex in the air to the others on the ground and back again.

The piece comes full circle, to end with everyone on the ground, the lights shifting to intense violet to highlight the white of the salt and chalk markings. There is no great big grand finale, just a gentle winding-down that is mesmerising in its calm beauty; a spiritual moment, in which science and art unite to create a profoundly satisfying final image. You could hear a pin drop, and then – bang! – the house lights are up, and Ockham’s Razor get the standing ovation they so richly deserve.

Ockham’s have a great track-record in deconstructing and re-inventing circus equipment. Tipping Point gives us a fabulous exploration of the possibilities offered by the Chinese pole, which in their hands becomes the subject of an extraordinarily creative investigation. Perfectly pitched – their best show yet.

Tipping Point runs at Platform Theatre 11–23 January as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016. www.mimelondon.com

Kill Your Darlings

Dorothy Max Prior speaks to Alexander Vantournhout and Bauke Lievens about the creation of ANECKXANDER: ‘a tragic autobiography of the body’.

Is it circus? Is it dance? Is it performance art? Clown, even? ANECKXANDER, which comes to Jacksons Lane 22–24 January as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016, is all and none of the above. It is a collaboration between two extraordinary Flemish artists, performer Alexander Vantournhout and dramaturg Bauke Lievens, who tussle with the questions of what defines an artform, and how you can explore the gaps in between those definitions. Lest this all sounds rather cerebral, rest assured that their work together is totally embodied – physical, visual, visceral performance.

Bauke Lievens – who started work on this piece as dramaturg, but soon found herself in at the deep end as co-author and director – has a formidable reputation, having worked previously as dramaturg with Les Ballets C de la B, and Un Loup pour l’Homme, amongst many others.

Alexander Vantournhout is just 26 years old, yet already has an enviable track-record in contemporary circus. After graduating from ESAC circus school in Belgium, with Cyr wheel (a large single wheel that the performer spins in and around across the floor) as his specialty, he created his first show Caprices (2014), which was very favourably received. But this is only part of the story: he is also a graduate of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s PARTS school, so is also a seasoned dance-theatre performer.

Alexander Vantournhout. Photo Bart Grietens

ANECKXANDER is the first collaboration between the two artists, and it has proved to be a fruitful one. An early work-in-progress version of the piece won the prestigious CircusNext competition in late 2014. They then took what was a 20-minute piece and worked together to extend it into a full-length piece, which has been shown around 25 or 30 times throughout 2015, travelling from homeland Belgium to Holland, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia.

So acclaim in the contemporary circus world is theirs – but the question of whether or not they belong in that world is core to their artistic investigation together. Key to the resolution of that question would be to define the thing they are conforming to or rebelling against. So, what in their view, is circus? ‘A question we ask of ourselves all the time’ says Bauke.

Circus, Alexander believes, is ‘dance plus several specificities’, and it is in essence about the human body’s relationship to objects. ‘There is no circus without objects,’ he says, dismissing acrobatics and acrobalance as ‘not circus’ – although he adds with a grin that he feels that ANECKXANDER is also ‘not really circus’. (Shhh – don’t tell the CircusNext judges!) At another point in our conversation, he offers another definition of circus, inspired by Peggy Phelan’s views on the nature of performance art: ‘She talks of performance closing the gap between the real and the representation – perhaps the same could be said of circus’.

Circus, in his experience anyway, is essentially a solo endeavour – the person and their equipment – whereas dance, or dance-theatre at least, is in essence collaborative. (I think about asking where flying trapeze fits into this theory, but I resist.) It is very true, we agree, that physical objects play an important role in circus, contemporary or traditional. Alexander may have abandoned his wheel in ANECKXANDER, but there are objects a-plenty in the piece. Boxing gloves and platform boots, for example.

Alexander Vantournhout in ANECKXANDER. Photo Bart Grietens

In discussing the objects used in the show, Bauke talks about her interest in prosthetic limbs; and how the use of the chosen objects (the cumbersome gloves and boots) become something resembling prosthetic objects that both enable and inhibit the body’s movement. It is exactly this balance between restriction and expansion offered by the objects that interests her. Also, as Alexander is otherwise naked in the performance the objects both ‘compensate for and accentuate’ the vulnerability of the body. ‘We are trying to re-define objects,’ he says.

For Alexander’s part, he talks about the early stages of the work where his movement research centred around observing and measuring his own body: someone had once told him that his neck was rather long, so he set out to objectively observe his own physical form. His neck might be longer than average, but his legs are shorter – hence the decision to explore the donning of platform shoes to both ‘compensate and accentuate the vulnerability’. It was either that or high heels…

A more conventional circus performer might have settled for stilts, which similarly enhance and inhibit the movement of the legs, although of course in rather different ways – but Alexander is insistent that he ‘didn’t want to use traditional existing circus disciplines,’ instead choosing to bring a circus-informed approach to the exploration of ‘ready-mades’ and ‘entering the domain of a new language’. He says that his work is ‘non referential’ to other artists’ work, but is ‘self referential’ and ‘hard to situate within one artform’. We talk a little about the different ways that objects are used in performance, and how the same object – a stick, say – might be used by a juggler, a puppeteer, or a performance artist. Which brings us onto the topic of the real versus the representational: at the heart of theatre lies illusion; whereas circus, dance and performance art trade in the real. Bauke declares that ‘the circus object makes the body of the performer into an object’ and that conventionally in circus the chosen object becomes a tool to elevate the capacity of the human into the realms of the super-human ‘who is often seen as a freak’. Take away that tool and what do you have? ‘It is like Iron Man, worthless without his suit!’ Ultimately, the interest here is in ‘the person behind the tricks’.

So Bauke and Alexander are keen to explore what happens when you take away the safety net, so to speak, of the familiar circus object: the prop that holds you up (be it wheel or hoop or ball or rope). In ANECKXANDER, there is an interest in exploring the ‘handicap’ that these alternative objects offer – chosen for their functionality rather than for any meaning that they offer.

We talk a little at this point about the role of the dramaturg in the creative process – although both are quick to point out that Bauke quickly ‘lost her role as dramaturg’ in the making of ANECKXANDER as she become more and more involved, so is now a full-blown creative collaborator and co-author of the piece.

ANECKXANDER. Photo Bart Grietens

Another point of discussion is the subtitle of ANECKXANDER: ‘a tragic autobiography of the body’. The ‘autobiography of the body’ part is clear enough, having already learnt that the beginning of the process for the show was the detailed exploration of the measure of Alexander’s physical self and own ‘body proportions’. But what of the ‘tragic’?

‘Circus is a very tragic business,’ says Bauke, going on to give another definition of circus, which she sees as ‘ the promise of, and escape from, tragedy’. Yes, that makes sense to me: every time we see someone soaring above us, we know it could all go horribly wrong at any moment. This is not acting – this is for real. And every circus performer (and dancer too of course) is in a constant battle against age, infirmity, injury. She also talks of the tragedy of circus in terms of it as a form in which the artist is ‘reaching for a goal that always displaces itself’.

Alexander voices an interest in the relationship between the comic and the tragic, citing the writings on laughter by French philosopher Henri Bergson, and his view that if the tragic is repeated and repeated, it becomes comic (something well known amongst the clown community). He talks of the well-documented link between laughter and the release of tension; and the relationship between laughter and discomfort: ‘that’s really what happens in the performance…’ So Aneckxander, in its investigation of the tragic, is drawn almost inevitably towards the comic.

Another interesting aspect of the piece is its use of music – a composition by Arvo Part (a piano piece called Variations for the Healing of Arinushka) that is played on a keyboard onstage (by Alexander), then looped, and deconstructed – the left hand and right hand playing the same melody slightly out of synch. ‘The choreography is written precisely to this’ says Alexander, and he talks of how the music can create the story. Narrative is important to the work, says Bauke, although it is not a conventional linear narrative – and music provides a ‘tool’ for creating a narrative, an arc that takes us through the performance. Part of her role in the creation of the work was to help to build an ‘evolution’ between one movement and another.

Like many contemporary practitioners, both Alexander and Bauke express a desire to explore ‘presence’. Bauke talks of wanting a presence that makes the process clear, and shows the transition from one form to the next, rather than ‘presenting a series of acts,’ and of making visible the mechanisms of the performance, ‘to show that the performer is human, not superhuman’. They also talk of the specific situation of working in Flanders, which has a very vibrant and progressive theatre community in which definitions of theatre are perhaps a little different to those in the UK. ‘What we call theatre you might call performance,’ she says. Bauke speaks of perhaps being part of a theatre practice that is ’making palpable the gap between personage and performer,’ as opposed to conventional acting.

Ultimately, what they are both interested in is creating work that is very clearly ‘made by people not machines,’ noting that much high-level contemporary circus is missing the humanity. ‘Beautiful machines – but machines,’ says Bauke of Cirque du Soleil…

When I speak to them, Alexander and Bauke are in rehearsal, tweaking ANECKXANDER for its UK debut at the London International Mime Festival. They are also about to enter the research phase for the next show together – in which even the objects will be discarded, leaving just the body as object to play with. It will be a duet, and the second performer will be playing a dead body. The possibilities for both comedy and tragedy are endless…

ANECKXANDER is presented at Jacksons Lane 22–24 January 2016, as part of the London International Mime Festival. Book at www.mimelondon.com

Post-show discussion on Saturday 23 January, facilitated by Dorothy Max Prior.

For more on the work of Alexander Vantournhout and Bauke Lievens, see http://alexandervantournhout.be/

ANECKXANDER was created as part of Bauke Lievens’ 4-year research project, Between Being and Imagining (KASK, Ghent). Other aspects of the research will include masterclasses, writings which will be edited in their English version by Sideshow Circus Magazine’s John Ellingsworth, and a series of ‘encounters’, which comprise three days of structured conversations in different formats, the first in Ghent in 2016 and then subsequently in Bristol in the UK and in other European cities, 2016-2017.

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