Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Dance, Dance, Dance

Dorothy Max Prior sees four shows presented at Dance Base for Ed Fringe 2018

There is most definitely a different vibe at the year-round Edinburgh venues – go to The Traverse or to the Scottish Storytelling Centre or to Dance Base, and you feel you’ve arrived somewhere welcoming; somewhere with a sense of itself, somewhere that has decided what it will programme in the Fringe and why. Innovative new writing – the Trav. Family friendly shows, often featuring puppetry – the Scottish Storytelling Centre. New directions in dance and movement theatre – then of course, Dance Base. All of these venues welcome audiences from around the world – it is the Fringe after all – but you’ll hear more Scottish accents at these venues than at most of the pop-up spaces that rise like Brigadoon at the end of July and disappear into the mists in early September. It is also true that each of these venues also has a strong commitment to supporting Scottish artists.

Limosani Projekts and Al Seed Productions: The Spinners

The Spinners is a good example – a Scottish/Australian collaboration three years in the making. The show is the result of a longstanding exchange, research and collaborative process between Scottish physical theatre supremo Al Seed and Australian dancer/choreographer Lina Limosani, who met Seed whilst they were both working on the David Hughes’ show The Red Room.

Three dancers (Limosani herself, together with fellow Australians Tara Jade Samaya and Kialea-Nadine Williams) play the three Moirai or Fates of Greek mythology: Clotho who spins the thread of human fate; Lachesis who dispenses it; and Atropos who cuts the thread, thus determining the individual’s moment of death. This is represented very literally onstage with a recurring scene of a long thread drawn from one dancer’s mouth, then woven into a cat’s cradle choreography, and eventually formed into a funny little corn-dolly type string figure which is then cut and hung up with its companions on to a screen panel strung with lines that is one of the two main physical focal points on the stage – the other being a gold pulpit cum font which comes into its own later in the show…

Beautiful images abound: here, a six-armed goddess, there a pop-eyed lizard, and now a tangled weave of limbs that moves even beyond the animal into something completely mythical. The soundscape is great – another wonderful creation by Guy Veale, who has worked with Al Seed for many years, and whose trademark wall-of-sound design is a strong feature of shows such as The Factory and Oog. The costumes are a bit of a puzzle: plain blue dance leggings / tops that seem a bit nondescript, although perhaps that is the point – the programme stresses that the show aims to relocate the Fates to a modern-day sweatshop, and that is perhaps the logic behind this choice. But to me it reads as ‘dancers’ not as sweatshop workers. Anyway, that aside – sound ideas, solid choreography and direction, and an engaging soundtrack make The Spinners a strong piece of work which doesn’t wow me in the way that Al Seed’s solo work does, but is highly commendable nevertheless.

Roberta Jean: Brocade

Weaving also features in the work of another Scottish artist programmed by Dance Base – Roberta Jean, creator of Brocade – although in this case, the show is presented off-site, in the glorious setting that is the Edinburgh City Chambers. It is not a site-specific work, but the piece resonates with the site in an interesting way. Here we are in this place of traditional patriarchal power: the dark wood panelling, stained glass domed ceiling, the big iron fireplace, the oil portraits. But now, at the end of the room, framed by a window that looks out over Waverley and Princes Street Gardens at sunset, are four young and feisty female bodies, simply dressed in what could be a school sports uniform of black shirt and shorts and shoes, skipping from side to side in rhythmic harmony. They break away and hop, skip, gallop or scutter along the inside of the traverse lines of chairs, then go behind us, round the back, to appear in a different formation for another pattern – in twos, in fours, solo. The only sound is the percussive note of their feet on the floor as they mark out the stitches in this ‘loom of movement glosses’. Machine women embodying the labour of generations of weavers.

Eventually, there are other sounds. Violinist Angharad Davies, who has been sitting as a silent witness so far, stands and scrapes a few small sounds on her violin, this building into full throttle. Roberta Jean removes herself from the dancers to create a looped vocal soundscape. Lovely though the vocal sound is, the dramaturgical logic of her removing herself from the ‘machine women’ ensemble bothers me a little – her taking herself outside of the uniformity of the four-strong ensemble seems to rather oddly shift her role. I also find Angharad Davies being drawn into the dance similarly ‘not quite right’. It is, though, a very strong work, with the decision to place it here in the City Chambers a stroke of genius.

Tijmur Dance Theatre: Varhung – Heart to Heart

Overseas artists are also well represented at Dance Base. For example, in 2018 it plays host to some of the works in the Taiwan Season, which is becoming an established fixture of the Edinburgh Fringe. Varhung – Heart to Heart, by Tjimur Dance, a piece for three dancers, two men and one woman. The Paiwan word ‘varhung’ literally translates as ‘heart’ but, as is the case also in English, the word has various metaphorical meanings as well as its literal one – in this case, ‘an expression of internal affections and feelings caused by various emotions such as joy, anger, sadness, and happiness’. The piece explores the interplay of human relationships in the workplace, specifically the lives of Paiwanese shell-ginger pickers, who often live and work together for months, not returning to their homes until the picking season is over. At the heart of the work is not only the life of the heart but also the traditions of specific four-step dances and workers’ songs – these transposed by choreographer Baru Madijin into a contemporary movement language and soundscape.

I can’t comment on how the choreography relates to its source material, but the movement work I witness is fluid and emotionally resonant. I see friendships developing, possibly illicit love affairs. I see people supporting each other, working together; and people stepping forward to voice personal angst or happiness. The merging of live song and movement work is joyful and uplifting. It is not a life-changing show for me, but its gentle but strong energy is appealing, and I feel a window has been opened to invite me to look in on a culture I know very little about.

Dance Base programmes some shows for the whole of the August festival season, but it also hosts many companies for just a week or so – making an appearance at the Fringe more do-able for the artists. Brocade, for example, was presented for just four dates, 13th to 17th August; and The Spinners ran from the 3rd to the 19th.

Jungle by Pink Mama is a cracking piece of dance-theatre that also ran just for the first two weeks of the Fringe. The show’s Polish choreographer Sławek Bendrat is (with Dominik Krawiecki) this Swiss company’s co-artistic director, and the cast is a multi-national one.

Questioning what colonialism means in a ‘post-colonial’ world come a cast of four: Charlotte Mclean plays Vicky, a rather sporty Instagram-obsessed British feminist; Valentin Markus Oppermann (also the show’s sound designer) is Billy, a traumatised American soldier; Izabela Orzelowsk is Theresa, a lost Victorian missionary; and Tomek Pomersbach is Carmen, a Venezuelan trans-woman.

Actually, the colonial theme of Jungle is of less relevance than the exploration of gender, sexuality, identity and desire that is at the core of the piece. The four bounce on as if contestants in a dance marathon, stepping together with boundless energy. The rhythms and moods shift and change – there is a beautifully tender encounter between Billy and Carmen; and Vicky infects Theresa with her freewheeling liberation, resulting in a gorgeous hair-shaking duet. The show is rather oddly imbalanced, with some characters more explored than others – Tomek Pomersbach, for example, gets to dance a very long and beautiful solo towards the end, as Carmen removes wig and skirt to reveal and revel in the masculine body underneath.

I later find out that the show (at 40 minutes) is presented here in Edinburgh at half its usual length, and thus is more of a showcase piece than a complete show. But an inspiration, bursting with ideas and energy – I’d love to see the full length show. I struggled to fully understand how the exploration of colonialism was playing out, other than in the angst of the young soldier, and a scene in which the missionary was seemingly attacked and intimidated – but perhaps all becomes more apparent in the full piece. But even in its shortened version, with these puzzling aspects of its dramaturgy, Jungle was the Dance Base show that stole my heart – not least for the vital and inspiring performances by its cast of four.

Pink Mama Theatre: Jungle

For full information on all shows in their Edinburgh Fringe 2018 programme, and for more on Dance Base: Scotland’s National Centre for Dance, see www.dancebase.co.uk

V/DA & MHz: Void

‘Marooned on a traffic island we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.’ JG Ballard

The set is a white dance floor – a rectangle, not the whole space – and attached to it, an upright wire fence with a white screen behind it. A fixed, limited space. House lights down, sound up – the immense roar of traffic at high speed. Monochrome projections imply, rather than realistically represent, images of vehicles racing by. Where are we? It could be any big city. Mexico. Sao Paulo. London. Let’s say it’s London. Next to or under the Westway, say.

Crash! Splintered, fragmented sounds. The noise of breaking glass and twisting metal, amplified and distorted, worked into the harsh electronic soundscape. A figure crashes into the space, landing with a great bang on the ground, at first just a bundle of limbs and clothes, black patent stiletto’d legs sticking out at an awkward angle.

The sound is intense, menacing, piercing right through us. Ever-evolving patterns of projected light startle us. The marriage of intense sound and image is reminiscent of the work of Ryoji Ikeda – it is in fact a creation of MHz, Bex Anson and Dav Bernard. The monochrome patterns of projected light are now sometimes slashed with harsh, sickly colours.

The body, in its black coat, and shiny black leggings, twists, turns, stands on its head, legs waving wildly in the air, giving it an odd insect-like appearance. It becomes more definitely a ‘she’ as she turns her distressed face to us, letting out roars of anger and panic. A woman. A young, Black woman. Yes, the gender / age /ethnicity is important to mention. She’s circled in acid yellow and electric blue. She gets up, slipping and sliding and keeling over. She reaches out to the roaring traffic and howls. Eventually, exhausted, defeated, she curls up into a foetal position and sleeps, clutching her handbag and shoes.

Up and at it: the coat is off, the black-and-white checked suit underneath (the pattern cleverly mirroring the wire wall; the suit another symbol of oppression) means business. The shoes are off, and are used to hammer the wire fence, then dug in, lodged into the wire, used as anchors to lever her up into an odd, distorted aerial dance. The colours are now a psychedelic kaleidoscope, indigos and greens and oranges, constantly evolving and changing, stripes, checks, a matrix of lines intersecting.

The electronic noise abates; now it’s beating drums, a jazzy, African edge to the soundscape. A shift in energy. No longer seeing herself as trapped victim, marooned in this abandoned space, the woman has accepted her fate and taken charge of it. She has wrapped a scarf around her head, re-arranged her dreadlocks, stripped down to a black bodysuit, limbs bare. She manoeuvres herself around a big red circular moon projected onto the wire wall, surveying her queendom, looking out at us, fearlessly…

And it is indeed a fearless performance we witness. Dancer/ choreographer Mele Brookes (founder member of the three-woman multidisciplinary collective V/DA) takes no prisoners in her breathtaking interpretation of the metamorphosis from victim to ruler of their own land, as experienced by the architect marooned on a traffic island in JG Ballard’s 1974 novel, Concrete Island. This is not a ‘version of’ it is an ‘inspired by’ – it is by no means a literal interpretation, and knowledge of the book is unnecessary for an appreciation of the show, which stands alone as a brilliant metaphor for isolation and exclusion from mainstream society, and for the taking back of control for the excluded one.

In Void, Ballard’s white, male, middle-aged, successful architect Maitland is replaced by black, female, young, aspiring architect Angela (not that she is ever named in the piece, just in the programme notes). The piece retains Ballard’s original central themes (outsider status, being marooned, fighting to be seen by the world whizzing by, coming to terms with ‘otherness’), layering them with ideas drawn from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercurrents, a study of ‘fugitivity and blackness’.

The result is a an intense, Artaudian theatre of the senses, that reaches out through the bombardment of eye-boggling images and bone-juddering sounds to our intellect and imagination. Would Ballard approve? I like to think he would, very much indeed.

Void is presented by V/DA and MHz in association with Feral, and is part of the Made in Scotland programme at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018.

Chaliwate Company/Focus Company: Backup

The North Pole. 4am. A van is travelling across the tundra. We see this enacted in an exquisite sequence of object manipulation. A human body forms the snowy landscape and the little van pops up on the undersole of a foot and travels along the body. Tiny lights and miniature houses complete the scene.

Switch. The point of view is now close-up on the occupants of the van, three reporters. The van is a 2-D door held up as the three bounce along. One is smoking a cigarette out of the window of the van, the window going up and down. It is touches like these that really make the performance – excellent, finely detailed physical theatre work from the three co-creators, Julie Tenret, Sicaire Durieux, and Sandrine Heyraud.

Switch. They’re now out of the van, on the tundra. (They’ve moved in front of the puppetry table, in very close proximity to the audience.) A TV crew, we presume from the cameras and boom mics being wildly swung around and repositioned. They are clambering over each other, sitting on each other’s shoulders as the ice makes menacing cracking noises…

Switch. Point of view is now what the camera sees… relayed onscreen in one of the cleverest integrations of live and screen work I’ve seen for a while.

Switch: The camera is nestled beneath the paws of an enormous polar bear. Cue a very beautiful puppetry section, the three performers now manipulators, and proving that they are equally skilled in this department. And then – it ends.

Boom – 30 minutes of gorgeous physical and visual theatre, then gone. There’s something of a delight in short-form shows for Ed Fringe audiences – allowing people to pack in even more in a day. And it’s good, as an audience member, to leave feeling you want more. In a way it works narratively – think of it as a short story, perhaps. But I leave feeling unsatisfied with the brevity of the piece – this offset a little by the company’s announcement at the end that they are working on extending the piece. Well thank goodness for that!

I do want to see what the company make of the challenge to create a full-length show, and hope that the work does eventually come back to the UK in its finished form. In the meantime – bravo! Quality physical and visual performance, and practically word-free, delivering narrative through image and physical action.

It is a delight to see such skilled puppetry, object manipulation, and comic physical performance wrapped up tightly into such a neat bundle. Backup is a sweet little tidbit that whets our appetite for more.

Nina’s Drag Queens: Alma, a Human Voice

A person (male body, female presence) enters the space with a suitcase. Clothes are laid out ceremoniously – a white silk kimono, a pink satin dress, a tasteful 1920s style blue sequinned number. A sweet little black velvet hat goes on: the performer now seems most definitely gendered as female. A mid-2oth century push button telephone is pulled out of the case, the handset on its wire dragged across the floor. The light is ‘garish’. It is, says our storyteller, a ‘mediocre’ crime scene.

The phone rings. Hallo, Hallo? We only hear one side of the conversation, the actor’s voice segueing into a recorded voice that may well be Ingrid Bergman: this nameless woman driven mad by love is the subject of Jean Cocteau’s poetic drama La Voix Humane, and Bergman played the role in one of the many film versions. Is there any difference between a man waiting for a call and a woman? The actor muses on how to portray ‘waiting’ in a theatrical rather than ‘psychological’ way. Smoking would be the obvious answer, but s/he doesn’t smoke…

But there is another woman in the room. Alma – Austrian composer, wife of musician Gustav Mahler. She was also the lover of artist Oscar Kokoshka, and it is his crazed love for her that is the other major thread of this story. The two demented and desperate lovers – Cocteau’s woman waiting for the call from her lover, and the artist Kokoshka – vie for attention over the next hour, in what is a beautiful piece of solo theatre that wears its thorough research of the early 20th century European art milieu and its intelligent exploration of what it is to be artist and muse, lover and beloved, with beautiful bearing and panache.

Presence and absence are key motifs: the nameless woman’s lover is never heard – we only get her voice. Alma is not represented in any sort of naturalistic way – she is viewed through other’s eyes, either the storyteller’s or Kokoshka’s. The clothing placed on the floor or chairs takes on the role of the absent ‘professional muse’. She is brought to life through writer/performer Lorenzo Piccolo’s drag queen homage to her. There is an extraordinary and truly wonderful story – can it be true? – of Kokoshka commissioning a giant doll in the image of his lost love. ‘Inside this doll is no soul but all my art’. The doll is conjured beautifully by the performer donning first the pink satin dress, teamed with white shoes and a curly wig – but then, as Kokoshka’s relationship with the doll deteriorates into murderous hatred and resentment, swapping in to a pink net tutu and ultra-false white furry breasts to dance manically to the Italian kitsch pop classic Bambola. Alma (and doll Alma) also appear to us in shadow theatre form on the back wall, a beautiful visual image created using the dress and wig, on and off of the human body.

So another key motif is the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’, as befits the artistic journey of Nina’s Drag Queens, a company dedicated to creating theatre using drag queen aesthetics and characters. Most obviously, ‘real’ woman versus ‘fake’ woman (doll, drag queen, fantasy lover). A male actor unpicking femininity may ring alarm bells to some in the current climate of complexity around gender issues, but as a self-declared femme feminist, I’m delighted by what I see here: a very clever and beautifully realised exploration of the tropes of ‘woman as victim of love’ and ‘woman as muse’.

Rosy Carrick: Passionate Machine

Time travel! Yeah yeah yeah. Sci fi. Hang on, just think about it. That note on the fridge: Buy Milk. It’s an instruction from a past self, time travelling into your present reality. And when you fell asleep last night and slept a straight eight hours – isn’t this a kind of suspended animation, allowing you to hurtle forward in time from one day to the next? Every time you open an old diary, or read a letter you wrote decades ago – isn’t that a wee wormhole back into the past? Don’t we all time travel all the time, at varying speeds?

And so Rosy Carrick eases us in gently to the notion that travelling through time may be something other than the wacky quantum physics /sci fi territory of Steins Gate theories, black holes, and tachyons. Oh but having seduced us in, she then gives us the quantum physics alongside a declaration of her love of Bowie and Rocky and every film ever about time travelling, and a delightful exploration of how we can all learn from our path selves, and project optimism and hope to our future selves…

Rosy is a highly personable host, and the calm confidence and smart humour of her storyteller is exactly what you need to to be brought onboard the good ship time travel. There is no acting required or involved (thank the Lord) – hers is an embodied performance mode that presents this Rosy here before us, and the many other past and possibly future Rosies we meet in this thrill-filled hour, without the artifice of over-emoting, or stepping into the shoes of other characters in the story. Frankly, it’s a relief – so many solo autobiographical theatre pieces struggle to find the mode of storytelling most effective for the telling of the tale, and Rosy gets it just right, leaving us delighted to have heard so much about her life, rather than squirming in our seats, embarrassed about the over-sharing, as is too often the case with this genre of work.

She’s a very clever and resourceful young woman, having (amongst many other achievements) written a PhD on the work of the Russian poet Mayakovsky, and overseen the translation of his work into English – but she wears her learning lightly, and the Rosy who gets too drunk too quickly and sends sick selfies to her friend James is just as important a character in the story, as is the Rosy who got pregnant when still a teenager and raised a daughter as a single parent, and the Rosy who became obsessed with the CERN Large Hadron Collider… cue Nick Cave’s Higgs Boson Blues.

All of these Rosies live out their parallel lives in the multiverse that the Rosy in front of us creates so elegantly on stage. Her setting is a simple one – a suitcase, a video screen, a table. On the table, a laptop, on which Rosy exchanges emails with a mysterious stalker Year Solver; books, including a precious gift from Mayarkovsky’s daughter, herself a wormhole allowing Rosy to experience early 2oth century Manhattan (Rosy steals some of her hair in the hope of one day cloning her); and photographs (another form of time travel) of the people that have inspired her, these portraits turned over one-by-one throughout the show. Mayakovsky, of course. And David Bowie, whose lyric line ‘Oh no love, you’re not alone’ pulls her through difficult times long before she has even heard of Bowie – first encountered as scrawled graffiti on a wall outside a public library when a 7-year-old Rosy was sexually harassed by a much older boy. Cue Bowie’s Rock n Roll Suicide.

Letters written to yourself are the key motif of the piece – these taking many forms. A very young Rosy’s promise to ‘always look after you’ written to her future self is heartbreakingly beautiful. There’s a clever, twisting story weaving through the whole piece about a letter that might possibly have been written by a future Rosy who’d time travelled back to just before Mayakovsky committed suicide to contact the present Rosy…

So, on this stage in which past, present and future collide, Rosy cleverly manages to unite all these threads, solve a few mysteries for us, and even to dance on the steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum featured in Rocky III. Who wins? Rosy!

Featured image (top): Photo by Sharon Kilgannon