Chris Goode and Co: Weaklings

The future will be confusing. This is how it ends – there are no answers, no conflict resolution. In this, it could perhaps be argued that Chris Goode’s latest work, Weaklings, is less a piece of theatre than a multi-artform installation of texts, sounds and images, inhabited by four performers who activate the space. But that wouldn’t be telling the whole truth, because Weaklings is brilliant, beautiful, and dramaturgically sound, theatre. A play, you could say, that playfully deconstructs the world of an interactive online space – writer Dennis Cooper’s Weaklings blog, a magnet for every outsider in the blogosphere – and somehow, marvellously, miraculously, reconstructs it on stage.

He takes everything we know about online space – the overload of information vying for our attention; the multitude of voices all speaking at once; the constant flow of images coming at us; the weird juxtaposition of cheery cartoon characters, pop videos, and porn all one click away from each other, whizzing past in fast succession; the mix of static and moving images; the interplay between text read and text heard; the anonymity and the exposure; the freedom to be whoever you want; the need to to be heard; the sharing and the shaming – and feeds it to us in a dazzling display of cut-ups and montages, all informed by a desire to move queer culture into revolutionary new territories. If William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were doing their thing now, this might be what they’d do.

The stage is set with an extended cage-like wire structure taking up a lot of the floor space, the site for the projection of texts, still images, and video. Three male performers move in, through, around, and in front of, this structure, sometimes alone, sometimes in relationship with each other. Their bodies (clothed or otherwise at varying points in the piece) become another site for the projections. There’s the intense intellectual one, played by Christopher Brett Bailey, who reads fast and furious tracts from his laptop. Nick Finnegan is blond and boyish, a picture of innocence, ripe for the taking. Craig Hamilton is a Joe Dellasandro for the modern age, flexing muscle, running, posing with hair falling into his face, a sullen come-on look in his eyes. Fantasies of bondage and rape, confessions of murder, harrowing tales of tormented childhoods, and heartbreaking pleas for love and understanding are played out by these three, augmented by onscreen contributions from actors and from real-life (whatever that might be) users of the Weaklings site (who contribute to the discussion forums using pseudonyms such as Tender Prey, Lost Child, and Atheist). My favourite is a very affable man called Thomas Moore, who I see as a portal or guide into the blog for uninitiated people like me.

Above all this, at a work station positioned on a kind of mezzanine level above the cage, is the actor playing Dennis Cooper himself. The instigator, the puppet master, the Deus ex Machina, the controller, the mediator. A reluctant god, we learn early on in the piece: he starts the blog at the request of his website visitors, having asked them what would most improve the site. A message board would be better, he grumbles, before devoting himself selflessly to the task of replying to every single comment with a religious devotion that takes up an enormous chunk of his life. As Dennis speaks, a large image of ‘his’ face is projected onto the front of the cage, so we see, simultaneously, the live and mediated image of the writer at work.

And here is the stroke of genius. Chris Goode has cast Karen Christopher (the enigmatic ex Goat Island performer) in the role. Having a woman – particularly such a talented and charismatic one – playing Dennis Cooper is perfect. In a show that is about mediation, about roleplay, about questioning what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fantasy’, this is just what is needed. Every time Karen speaks Dennis’ words, we are reminded that everything we see and hear – here on this stage, there on the internet, and elsewhere in the wider world – is only one version of reality. All life is a game, don’t take things at face value.

It is also great to have a strong female presence onstage throughout the piece – the easier decision would have been to have all-male casting, but that would make it something else, something less compelling. Inevitably, most of the site users are male – although we meet a couple of women onscreen. We also meet Dennis Cooper’s associate director Jennifer Tang, who confesses with complete honesty that as a ‘straight woman’ (her definition of herself), the site is not talking to her.

There are times when this reviewer also feels that she is meeting a world that is not hers. As I often have throughout my life, I find myself wondering why men get so hung up and obsessed by sex, which is (after all) only sex. And it is hard not to be disturbed by some of the extreme Slave and Master confessions regardless of whether they are pure fantasy or actually enacted in some way. In the post-show discussion, Chris Goode talks of Dennis Cooper as a ‘profoundly moral’ person, who again and again ‘stays with’ people in a vulnerable place, acting as a non-judgemental witness. This, I feel, is what Chris Goode has brought to the stage. He asks us to be non-judgemental witnesses, to be there for these often difficult and disturbing ideas and images.

Although occasionally alienated or disturbed (and that’s OK – these things are disturbing) I find myself drawn into a fantastical world of extraordinary and exciting words and images that jostle for my attention in the best possible way. Often, there is a beautiful contrast of speed and stillness between the projected texts and images, and the pictures created by the human bodies that stand frozen in the light, or move slowly and rhythmically in the space like living sculptures.

A word of praise here for designer Naomi Dawson, who has worked with Chris Goode to create a powerful scenography for the piece; and also for lighting designer Katharine Williams – the strong reds and blues, placed to the side and giving a suggestion of light from stained glass windows, and the sea of tiny red lights placed around the stage by Craig, suggest a sacred space. Original sound is by Scanner – although that is mashed in with clips, samples and soundbites galore.

This is the first outing for Weaklings, presented at Warwick Arts Centre (who co-commissioned it) as part of the Fierce Festival 2015. It is a technically complex work, and the performers all did a sterling job, working with the technology to create a cohesive whole. It could, perhaps, be slightly shorter, and there are a few odd lulls, and towards the end moments where it feels as if we are coming to an ending, then don’t. But this is all to be expected so early in the life of a show, particularly one as complex as this. Hippo World this ain’t…

Skipton Puppet Festival

Skipton Puppet Festival is a biannual affair run by the resourceful Lempen Puppet Company. Resourceful because over the three days the festival runs they manage to give the audience the full range of puppetry (for young and old, indoors and outdoors, national and international) in a town which isn’t blessed with obvious venues.

The street programme featured S.A. Marionetas from Portugal showing us a story about Don Roberto – the Portuguese version of Mr. Punch. I say story but basically it’s an excuse for Don Roberto to whack seven shades of hell out of a skeleton, a crocodile, and a bearded figure whose symbolism eluded me. He ended up marrying a fair damsel. The courtship involved a fair bit of mutual whacking.

The set was your basic Mr. Punch-style booth (covered this time with a floral pattern rather than deckchair stripes) on which perched a crudely painted (or very well-toured) castle with a turret. This gave Don Roberto and his foes two levels to appear on which they did with speed and in places and combinations which constantly took you by surprise. The puppeteer appeared occasionally to demand applause for a particular scene – sometimes his demands were met but often the crowd’s reactions sent him back to carry on with the story and earn the reaction he demanded.

What can I say? It was violent, simple and very funny.

Theatre Tof are yet another excellent Belgian export. Their show Bistouri is a classic and to this you can add Dans l’Atelier, the show they presented at Skipton.

The set is a messy worktable covered in tools, bits of crud and cardboard boxes. A figure made of a headless coat and gloves appears and sets about trying to rebuild its body. A cardboard box reveals a small polystyrene block which is impaled on a knife and stuck in the neck-hole of the coat. The hands scrabble around on the table and find a brush and pot of paint so that eyes can be self-administered. The two puppeteers scrupulously follow the logic of each development in the creation of the body.

Once the head is in place it needs to be sculpted into a more realistic shape. Like trying to cut your own hair in the mirror this is easier said than done, especially with the use of a big saw. The eyes get accidentally trimmed off. A smaller head is fashioned with the use of a fork stuck into the shaving with the eyes painted on it. The larger block is then placed in a vice so the coat can carry on in a more “artistic” manner.

With the appearance of a pair of trousers a whole body is assembled and in the process the figure changes from being passive in the hands of his animators to becoming a tyrant with bullying tendencies. This process is emphasised when he discovers the end of a small brush and fixes it under his nose to resemble Hitler. Eventually the puppeteers have to “kill” him. As he’s stuffed into a box he doesn’t go without a fight but a cordless drill finishes him off.

Over the 20 minutes the show lasts the company push the ideas to the limit. It’s extremely funny, shocking, and a brilliant demonstration of visual story-telling.

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.

Bristol Old Vic: Life Raft

It was difficult to watch Life Raft without being reminded of how a photograph of the body of a young boy washed up on a Turkish beach had just significantly shifted the conversation about how the world responds to the Syrian refugee crisis. In Bristol Old Vic’s powerfully resonant production, thirteen children are stranded aboard a lifeboat with tragic consequences, and while the circumstances might be very different, the challenge both scenarios present to how we understand our humanity is not dissimilar.

Based on Georg Kaiser’s 1945 play, The Raft of the Medusa, Fin Kennedy’s adaptation updates the context to a non-specific but recognisably modern-day world, where there has been war for as long as the children can remember. With no idea where they are, limited rations, and little prospect of rescue, they have to work out how to survive. A mute stowaway, named Foxy by the children on account of his red hair, takes their number up to thirteen and becomes the scapegoat during much of what follows.

Kennedy’s agile and sensitive writing brilliantly captures the moment-to-moment urgency of the dilemmas the children face and their varying responses. There are times when it’s very difficult to watch, not least because – as the protagonists are children – an adult audience feels necessarily implicated in the course the action takes. While the production is very much an ensemble piece, it’s the story of thirteen year old Ann (Amy Kemp) that we follow most closely. One of the oldest, and self-appointed second in command, it’s in her that the conflicts between instincts, ideals, and intellect are most effectively dramatized, and it’s the image of her grief and agony at the end, as she’s unable to bear living with what she didn’t stop happening, which stays with us.

Max Johns has created a beautifully desolate seascape, with an expanse of clear plastic sheeting that extends up the back wall of the theatre, shimmering and murky under Tim Streader’s atmospheric lighting design. The lifeboat itself is a precarious structure, represented by partially submerged chairs and crates, which are nimbly rearranged throughout. Director Melly Still has elicited some phenomenal performances from the young people – assured, nuanced and brave – and it seems important to note that while this is a play whose cast is predominantly under 18, it’s not headlined as such, representing a subtle but significant shift in the status conferred on work made in collaboration with young artists.

The show’s billing as part of the Bristol Green Capital programme is quietly provocative. Yes, it may be implicit that one of the reasons for the ongoing war of which the children are victims is a lack of resources; more to the point, however, would seem to be the idea that when we consider how we want to act in the face of ecological challenges, we should consider what we want our actions to say about our humanity. This compelling and affecting production connects us to what seems impossible about how we all might go on to survive together in this world, and asks us to have hope and to be strong.

Raucous: The Stick House

Knowing Bristol and its various performance spaces well, I felt excited by the prospect of visiting this hitherto unused, mysterious place – The Lo-Co Klub – underneath the Victorian passenger sheds of Temple Meads Station. As audience members we were initiated into what felt like a dark process: given Germanic names written on a piece of hardboard to hang round our necks, like aliens or criminals or soon-to-be-deported ‘others’; and then, on top of that, an invisible stamp to the wrists. What participation would the performance be asking of us?

We shuffled into the cavernous subterranean vaults guided by little lights on the ground. In the darkness there was a sense of immense volume, and the doors closed heavily behind us, heightening the feeling of threat. The Stick House then developed as a piece of site-specific, multimedia, reconstructed folklore. Within this unusual space the performances, enhanced by various technical devices, related narratives reminiscent of the original versions of the stories of Brothers Grimm. Costume and dialogue contributed to the feel of another age, another place: a concoction of medieval and Victorian worlds in stark contrast to our contemporary comforts.

The narrative centered on the plight of a young girl, Marietta, ‘lost’ at cards by her father, to some unknown, disembodied, male power. As soon as this is established we could only feel that things will not go well for her – but in what way? This story, enacted in this site, reminds us that the Victorians cut out the nasty bits in fairy tales but left them in, in real life, for most of the population. And, like reading a horror story those are the bits we feel most drawn to. The tale then touches on themes of the fragility of life, in particular for orphaned or abandoned children; social ostracization – witch hunting; sexual exploitation and rape; and the persistence of the power of superstition.

Changing the role of the audience from deportees, to voyeurs, to ostracizing villagers, was helped enormously by the full use of the space. Originally built as a series of interconnected, vaulted areas, the spaces between the vaults were lit as passages into other rooms, and used to move the audience on into the next section of the story. Lighting, projections, and sounds made us turn and walk towards the next scene or left us in complete darkness.

The technical wizardry was far more slick then a son-et-lumiere, and its aim clearly was to push a contemporary relevance onto the story’s themes (words like WITCH and BITCH flashed up in neon lights), but at times it distracted me from the aims of the performance and made me feel I was in a theme park of tricks; I soon lost focus or concern for poor Marietta.

Where I did feel strong engagement was with the character of Hobblehoy, the village ‘idiot’, in particular his direct address to the audience as he sits in the filth of a muddy field (a raised stage supporting him), inviting us nearer to hear his story. Here, the language is bright and moving – scripted by Sharon Clarke. One aim of the production was to touch on contemporary times – the resurgence of harsh values as a consequence of rising poverty – and this is the place it did it most effectively for me. At other times the character, beautifully played by Christopher Elson, moved among us and again drew us in with him. This simple technique was also welcome because, in places, our sense of journey in the promenade around the caverns was frustrated by the fact that you couldn’t see the action of some scenes for crowding. British theatre audiences are unused to close proximity – pushing to the front – except of course afterwards at the bar.