Machine Project: Return to Forever House

A blacked out window of a shopfront in the trendy Echo Park area of Los Angeles stands in front of me. The words ‘RETURN TO FOREVER HOSUE’ have been pasted to the window. I wait outside, six others wander up, and we begin to tentatively talk to each other – How did you hear about the show? Have you ever done a locked room before? We’re going to have to work together…

A man arrives, we’re briefed (the fire extinguisher is the only thing that’s not a prop – we should use it if there is an actual fire!), and we’re ushered into a pitch black space. I touch the walls – soft and furry… A voice emerges from behind us and a giant mouth appears in the black, furry wall. The mouth tells us the sad tale of Forever House – a glorious TV show that was cancelled, trapping its characters inside this building for all time. And that’s where we come in – it’s our job to help release them.

We sneak through a dark tunnel into more blackness. The lights flash on in an instant and we find ourselves in a light grey box room. The fenced gate is slammed shut behind us, we’re padlocked in. Our team rush for clues – a small pink sofa reveals a mouth with hidden treasures under the cushions, we pad the walls searching for a magic doorway… and the lights go out again.

It would be remiss to reveal the details of our escape route tactics; the performative game relies on us discovering as we go linking clues to keys and characters’ needs to opportunities to gain more keys. The Machine Project team, led by Patrick Michael Ballard, have created a wickedly funny and brilliantly crafted game. We meet a series of surreal characters through holes in the wall – low and high – in the ceiling, and through hidden doors. Pushing a ball through a hall erupts another appearance and more clues; we pull roses out of the wall and drink the sacred tea that will reveal the ‘true’ secrets.

It’s as absurd as it is complex; like a mix between Sesame Street, The Crystal Maze and a Dali painting. The puppets are performed with precision and humour – I’m still puzzling as to how many performers there actually are. Mad-capped and offbeat, it’s a treat worth searching out if you find yourself in the city of angels.

O Supergirls: Project O X 2

Dorothy Max Prior sees Project O twice in two weeks: their first work, O, was presented at the Marlborough Brighton, whilst latest work Voodoo premiered at Chelsea Theatre as part of the Sacred season

Zebra Katz’ Ima Read blares out, and two figures on all fours – androgynous, anonymous, head-to-toe in black – work their rear ends back and forth. Ima read that bitch. Beneath them is a pink fake-fur rug. Yoga for the modern girl. The rug is pulled out to reveal a ‘mat’ of books. Proof-read that bitch. Simone de Beauvoir. Germaine Greer. The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage. The books are kicked across the floor towards us. Gonna take that bitch to college.

PROJECT O, O. Photo Paul Blakemore

The black garments are removed, the bodies revealed. Female bodies. A dark brown-black body. A lighter brown mixed-race body. I mention this because they do – Project O I mean, in their publicity material for the show: O is a dance duet about ‘being female, black, and mixed’.

Over 50 exhilarating minutes they explore, celebrate and subvert every cliche imaginable of the black/mixed female body. Luxuriant vanilla-dressed tresses. Afro curls. Shaved heads. Covered heads. Veiled faces with smouldering harem eyes. Strong and sporty in black lycra vest and shorts as Grace Jones’ Walking in the Rain plays out. Go-go dancing wildly in pink and red nylon wigs. Twerking against the back wall, topless in lurex hot pants. Lap dancing amongst the audience. Or lap sitting, anyway. Various people are silently pulled in to the stage action. They sit and watch, they help to ‘black up’ the dancers’ bodies, they get invited into the dance… The performance space is filled with boogie-on-down-ing bodies.

Project O: Voodoo

Two weeks later I’m at Chelsea Theatre for the Sacred season – the premiere of a new show by Project O, Voodoo. Which also invites its audience into the dance, but is a slower, cooler affair. Voodoo explores time, which is waiting in the wings. It speaks of many things. ‘If all time is eternally present,’ said TS Eliot, ‘all time is unredeemable.’ There is no point in speculating on what could have been, because it couldn’t. Have been, I mean. I paraphrase. Eliot said it more eloquently… The Four Quartets is quoted by Project O in their programme notes; Eliot’s reflection on the nature of time – his last major published work before his death, and the catalyst to winning the Nobel Prize, informing the content of the show (we presume).

As we enter the theatre space and take our seats, we are watched by two tall still figures dressed in long white gowns, standing quietly before an opaque screen made of thin black material. A relentless roll of facts and dates scrolls down the screen. Malcolm X murdered. The Millennium Bug. Jamila’s mum caught in the Brixton Riots. The words are faint, greenish white traces, a little difficult to read.

The ghosts of past persecutions, present realities, and future possibilities are embodied in these two figures who are both themselves and all of us, simultaneously. They move slowly towards the people in the auditorium, gently touching, burying heads in shoulders. They retreat behind the screen, which continues in its relentless scroll of facts and figures, and emerge carrying great bunches of black balloons, held aloft. Happy birthday. Happy deathday. In memory of.

One figure takes to the decks, DJs, the other dances. We’re invited into the dance, verbally, through the mic, over the PA. But they are in the performance space and we are sitting in theatre seats, so the take-up is a little slow at first. Just one man joins them and dances. We watch. They stay cool, calm and collected. The invitation is repeated, and there is a sudden movement of bodies as many of us leave our seats to ‘lay down our defences and dance’.

Eventually, the door opens. We are invited to leave, and new people arrive. This is a four-hour long piece, but we don’t get to see how the next three hours play out – although perhaps if we really wanted to, we could?

It is interesting to reflect on the difference between these two works, seen within a fortnight of each other. O is an established piece – the first ‘conversation’ made by Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small. And although there is a serious intention – to highlight the assumptions made about the gendered body, the body of colour – it is nevertheless a feel-good piece, full of joy and humour, and bursting with fabulous and fun dance routines. There’s no getting away from it – it’s a romp.

Voodoo is brand new, and presents itself cautiously. It’s subtler, more nuanced. The dialogue between the two women is harder to break in on, the intention harder to unravel. Why have they chosen these particular historical happenings, these points in time, to highlight on screen? What is this slow and measured physical contact with some audience members about? Why are we being asked to dance with them at the end of the hour? Joining up the dots feels more difficult here – although I am happy to just allow it all to seep into me, without feeling that I completely understand. ‘Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.’

Project O describe Voodoo as a work of science fiction. And as we know, SF is always about our present realities, it just purports to be about the future. Or an imagined past. Or a parallel universe present time. A time that cannot exist, or cannot have existed. There is only now: ’Here, now, always’. Thanks TS. Amen.

Project O: O was seen at the Marlborough Theatre Brighton on 4 November 2015.

Voodoo was seen at Chelsea Theatre Sacred season on 17 November 2015.

See www.acontemporarystruggle.com

Simone Aughterlony, Antonija Livingstone, Hahn Rowe: Supernatural

Chop, chop – who’s there? Supernatural is at once hypermodern and as old as the hills. The terrain is a mash-up of made and found, natural and fabricated, objects and beings. Flesh, wood, axes, rope, clothing, moss, electronics … It’s a fairytale land for the modern age. Wilderness versus civilisation? Have both!

The smell of pine – or is it cedar? – hits us as we queue outside, passing a log-pile to our left as we enter the performance space. Inside: hot pink lino covers the floor, and our ears are assailed and entertained by Hahn Rowe’s musique concrete, as gold foil paper is wrapped around a microphone to create a foley of fiery crackles and windy wooshes; or an electric violin is tormented with whatever inanimate object happens to be lying nearby. I find myself watching Rowe (a renowned musician who has worked with Yoko One and Antony and the Johnsons, amongst many others) a lot as he fiddles and tweaks and bows and rattles. Such wonderful sounds emanate…

Meanwhile, Simone Aughterlony and Antonija Livingstone act out a Brokeback Mountain lumberjack fantasy of hard and fast physical action within their ‘forest’ of logs and branches. Gender perceptions are played with most delightfully: the women – both with what once might have been called ‘boyish’ haircuts; one in a leather jacket, one in a vest showing off her bare muscled arms; both sporting cuban-heeled boots – swing their axes and bring them down purposefully on the big logs. Later, one lies topless on a pile of logs looking at the other work. She might even be chewing a straw. Later still, both are engaged in a naked tussle with a large branch, their bodies aping the rise and fall of orgasm. Slowly, clothes are retrieved – or new items found and donned – and the whole cycle starts up again…

There is a lot to admire. All three performers are highly skilled, truly proficient in their art, really owning the space –and we never doubt that we are in good hands as we are taken on this rollercoaster of sounds and images. There is a great deal of humour and joyfulness.

But I have some reservations. The first is in the staging. End-on feels all wrong. Supernatural feels like it ought to be presented in the round, or on three sides at least. I’m longing to be upfront, to sit close; and to have the freedom to move around to observe and listen from different angles. The piece, at 90 minutes, feels too long – but that could be because of the staging. The cycle of activity repeats three times (although every time is different, it is a repeat of rhythm rather than an exact replica of activity), which would be fine if it were a durational performance-installation, and you could move about, but sitting in seats, staring ahead at the performers, doesn’t quite work. We feel excluded from the action, not invited in.

Also, and I’ve tried to resist this thought, but it won’t go away – I realise I feel uncomfortable witnessing a performance in which the women onstage get naked whilst the sole man stays resolutely clothed. That shouldn’t matter – I wish it didn’t – we should have moved on to a point where the gender (or indeed age, fitness) of a naked body doesn’t matter, but it still does – the body itself is political, no matter how much gender stereotyping is played with and subverted in the performance. Listening to comments in the post-show discussion, it was clear that for some audience members, gender was transcended. For me, this wasn’t the case.

These reservations aside: the images created are wondrous, with references to fairytale, folklore and the contemporary myth of the great outdoors tumbling out one upon the other. The physical performances from both women dynamic and robust, the soundscape created enchanting. A beautiful and thought-provoking performance.

Theaster Gates: Sanctum

It’s late afternoon on one of those early November days when it’s as if the sun has decided to stay in bed under the covers. It’s unseasonably warm, the air is damp and a few leaves hang on the trees like decorations. I’m on my way to Sanctum, Theaster Gates’s first public project in the UK, produced by Situations and MAYK as part of Bristol 2015 European Green Capital. In a purpose-built temporary performance space in the bombed out shell of Temple Church in Bristol’s Old City, Sanctum offers a continuous programme of sound for twenty four hours a day over twenty four days, sustained by more than one thousand performers, musicians and bands. ‘Hear the city like never before,’ says the publicity.

The programme is a secret. You turn up and it’s pot luck. It might be the Salvation Army. It might be a vocal group. A rock band. A performance poet. I spent several hours in Sanctum, and this is an attempt to capture that experience.

–

People wander in and out, sit or stand, still wearing their coats and hats. Some chat, some study their phones, others hold paper cups of coffee in their gloved hands or eat from foil wrappers. One woman has brought her knitting. On one of the low wooden dais to the side of the area where most of the sound happens, a young man is changing a baby. His partner appears at his hip, slips her arm around his waist and kisses him on the head.

I’m sitting on the wooden floor, tucked under the eaves. Constructed out of reclaimed materials from across Bristol, it’s a beautiful space that feels at once new, but also like it’s been here for a long time. Whilst not heated, it nevertheless feels warm, its slender rafters and sturdy joists lit with the colours of autumn. And it is fragrant – there’s an earthy, aromatic cedar wood smell on the air. Out of the slanting panes over my shoulder I can see the arches of Temple Church’s bombed out windows, and beyond them the latticework of trees against the sky. At its edges there are signs of its recent construction and of the outside having made its way in – sawdust, stray screws, leaf litter. It feels interior, an underside. It feels like we’ve come through and into somewhere and something.

Sleepdogs are on. Stooped over their gadgets and almost off stage, they’re live-mixing something like a score that’s mutating and scattering. I think I hear the whinny of a horse and the blast of a machine gun, but I can’t be sure. Jump cuts, arrhythmia, skipped beats. An image comes to me of a colourful bird, frightened up into the air with feathers flying. Sounds layered on sounds, images on images. In the distance a celebration or a riot.

People come and go, stay as long as they can or as they want, choose to be here for a time. Just outside the tall double doors one of the production staff wearing a big jacket and a woolly hat is shifting from foot to foot and forking around in a pot of something hot.

We’re on the coast, in the city and in a forest. It’s like hearing in all dimensions at once and it’s like finding the music in sound. It’s sound like life going on somewhere else right now. The film it gives you is all your own.

People enter, bright-eyed from the outside, look curiously about and settle just inside the entrance, their arms folded or their hands in their pockets.

Next up is spoken word artist Akashic Roots and I struggle to make the adjustment to hearing words. Sometimes language can seem so intent on telling, when sound prefers to suggest. The compulsive internal rhymes, self-interruptions and re-qualifications which are the spoken word artist’s stock in trade present one of those jolting juxtapositions in which Sanctum specialises. He cries: ‘Scream out loud because you’re an animal,’ and people do.

Audrey and Sarah give us acapella folk songs in two-part harmonies. They say: ‘We enjoy singing for our own pleasure.’ Dressed all in black and slightly nervous, they smile at each other as they find their way through their songs, their bodies swaying as they breathe into the melodies. They clear their throats and swig from plastic water bottles. They make no promises and we have no expectations. It seems like this is a place where performer and audience are the same thing; everyone brings themselves and that’s enough.

Stereocilia is one man and his electric guitar and lots of pedals. He says ‘Stereocilia’ once before he starts and then ‘Stereocilia’ once more at the end of his set. His brow furrowed, he rocks forward and back on one foot, working closely at the strings, endlessly looping his strumming so that it becomes a massive echo chamber for itself. It’s all swells and reverb and it feels like his own intensely private experience. Meanwhile to one side of the stage the next act, still wearing their coats, are setting up a drum kit and assembling a pair of saxophones.

The chipper, fresh-faced frontman of Schoolboy’s Death Trio bounces into the space wearing a kind of academic gown in gold, red and black. It’s sort of punk Harry Potter. There’s an alto sax round his neck and his long hair is in a rough ponytail. His bandmates on drums, bass and tabla are wearing armbands emblazoned with ‘SDT’. They play funk crossed with spoken word and all the songs seem to be called things like Sex Blood Money Power.

People enter, settle for a few minutes or longer, stay.

People come and go and some come back.

–

It’s complicated, if you think about it, to decide to go and see a show or go to a gig. There’s all this stuff to navigate: where it is, what times it starts, how much it costs – let alone who’s performing, where you heard about it, how it’s described, etc… It seems to me that part of the effect of Sanctum is to disrupt all these things – let’s call them cultural trig points – with the result that we are able to think anew about how and why we choose to engage with the public manifestation of each other’s creativity. But to what end?

For me, the removal of these conventional frameworks has the ability to subtly but radically alter how we’re present at, for instance, a gig. A week ago I went to see Theaster Gates at St George’s, a music venue in Bristol. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Everything advertising the evening kept its cards close to its chest. In the event, we were presented with a performance by Gates, in which he sang all the hymns he could remember. It was challenging, and some people walked. If they’d stayed, they’d have heard Gates go on to resist attempts to elicit from him what Sanctum was ‘about’ and make a plea for keeping things complicated. It seems to me that one way to experience Gates’ performance was in dialogue with what was happening across town at Sanctum. Sanctum’s achievement, it seems to me, notwithstanding the extraordinary logistical feat it represents, is that it quite explicitly invites reflection on the gift exchange of expression and attention that occurs when we commit to time in each other’s company at a performance, and it asks us to allow for the possibility that this experience – wherever, whenever and with whomever it occurs – might be much bigger and more powerful than we can imagine.

Sound of the City: Sonica Sings Out

Michael Begg surrounds himself with sound at Sonica in Glasgow

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

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

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

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

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

Robbie Thomson: The New Alps

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

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

Jompet Kuswidananto: Order and After

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

MortonUnderwood: Contra

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

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

Kathy Hinde: Tipping Point

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

Olivier Ratsi: Onion Skin

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

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

Wintour’s Leap: Helmholz

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

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

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

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

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

Total Theatre