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

Teatteri Metamorfoosi: The Sauna

On the dimly-lit stage, a figure moves around, sits herself on a plinth with a bucket. An old woman, naked, empty hanging breasts, a long sad face. The sound of water trickling and dripping and sloshing. As the light increases (slightly) we note that the figure is wearing an – intentionally, we presume – badly-wrinkled flesh-coloured body suit. As she is also in a full-face mask, we can take the body-suit to be a kind of whole-body mask rather than a costume. The lighting stays low throughout the show, which is wordless and relies on a very lovely soundscape of unusual instrumentation (chimes, bells, atonal cello scrapings) mixed with live Foley sound (brushing, scraping, clanging, slooshing) to provide the anchor for the action.

Another figure joins her – young, slim, carrying flowers. Crone, meet Maiden. Later, after the Maiden disappears, a third woman arrives – middle-aged, with ample breasts, rolls of belly-fat, and a chirpy demeanour. Hello, Mother. We gather that these three are aspects of the same woman, who is sitting in the sauna (a solemn, almost holy space in the Finnish tradition) contemplating her life as death approaches.

The notion that our bodies are temples for the soul, rather than our intrinsic selves, is tantamount to the work. Anyone who has reached a certain age – 63, say – can testify to the fact that inside they remain themselves all their lives, even though the body changes unrecognisably as the decades advance. The body, therefore, can be seen as a mask that covers the essential being. This is explored playfully throughout the show as figures turn around to show the large zip running down the back; body-suits are pulled on in front of the audience; and in one particularly memorable moment, a face-mask is slowly removed and placed on the ground, so that it becomes a death mask – the earthly remains of a now-free spirit.

Another figure is sometimes present: a ‘puppeteer’ in full blacks, creeping unobtrusively or sometimes dashing obtrusively around the stage, setting off smoke machines, or animating strange shapeless white ‘babies’. We realise by the end of the show that there are three female performers multi-tasking: Rina Tikkanen, creator of the live sound effects (the excellent music composition is credited to Maija Ruuskanen); Ilka Hartikainen and Johanna Kutala playing the woman at various stages of her life. The ’spirit of the sauna’ is free-floating…

Looking on the young faces taking a bow, I have a slight query running through my head about the validity of representing older women’s bodies in this way – the elderly and middle-aged body-suits certainly evoked sniggers from some audience members. But I decide, in the end, that what was intended was a sweet and thoughtful reflection on the female body at every stage of maturity, and that the gentle humour of the representations is fine. If we can’t laugh a little at ourselves, then what is left in life?

The Sauna is a delightful piece of word-free visual theatre, with an enchanting soundtrack – and it’s so good to see the tradition of mask work embraced by young theatre-makers and put to use in an unusual way.

The Sauna is presented at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018 as part pf the From Start to Finnish programme.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

Beauty, Morality, Ageing, Power…

Theatre elder Dorothy Max Prior, young reporter/performer Ciaran Hammond, and – placed somewhere between those two – artist and writer Zoe Czavda Redo offer a three-way reflection on Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian)

‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dorothy Max Prior writes:

We have two days rehearsal. Two days! How is this going to work? This is a big show, in every sense of the word: a highly-regarded international company premiering a new work at the Brighton Festival; a cast of nine performers, three from Gob Squad plus six ‘local performers’; a whole load of kit, from large wheelie mirrors and revolving turntables to roving cameras trailing treacherous cables. Trust, we have to trust.

On day one, while the production manager Chris Umney, tour manager Mat Hand and the technical team of the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts (ACCA) do the get-in, we are down below in a small rehearsal studio. ‘Imagine,’ says Gob Squad-er Bastian Trost, as we three older performers step forward to to lip-synch to Dalbello’s kitsch hit The Sins of Dorian, ‘that this is where you’ll stand, behind a large mirror, but the space will be twice this depth…’ Hmmm, I’m trying my best.

Gob Squad Creation: Brighton cast

Some of us took part in the R&D stage of the process in late 2017, so have had a brief involvement in the devising process, and have gleaned some sense of the themes and intentions of the piece. Areas of investigation include: the nature and purpose of art; being on display; the human body as art object / a site of artworks; how we ‘frame’ what we see; self-image and identity; and – of course – ageing and how we deal with our ageing bodies. The guest performers are three older people (me plus two) who have spent a life onstage, known collectively as ‘the Roses’, and three younger people who aspire to a life onstage, called ‘the Daisies’. Gob Squad are also people who have decided to spend their professional lives being looked at onstage – currently mid-career and mid-life, average age 48.

Of the Gob Squad team here in Brighton, Simon Will and Berit Stumpf (and Bastian, who is off-stage this time round, acting as outside eye – there is no director) performed the show when it premiered in Berlin, but not Johanna Freiburg, who I’m mostly teamed with in this version of the show. We’re learning together, she says. In one scene, we three Roses are each behind a mirror, responding wordlessly to questions from Johanna such as ‘show me the face of someone who knows they are beautiful’ and ‘show me where the shame is’. The questions vary each time we run the scene – to keep us on our toes; to discourage us from learning a fixed choreography – but the final one is always the same: ‘show me the smile you had as a child,’ which segues into the cue for the next scene, ‘Max, do you still have that same smile?’. As Johanna and I face each other through the mirror, hugging it as one might hug a tree, I am pulled across the stage in a weird kind of waltz, each revolve of the mirror accompanied by a question inviting me to reveal personal details about identity, performance and the journey through life. Being born female in the 1950s, a tomboy childhood, finding my inner femme, working as a cabaret dancer, playing drums in the punk and post-punk years, mothering three boys… the conversation isn’t scripted, and the scene changes playfully each time we do it. Regardless of what decade we are in, it ends when one of the Daisies runs on with a shout of ‘Look At Me!’ countered with a Rose’s response of ‘Do You Know Who I Am?’

Two days on, we are running the show for the first time on the stage. It’s the dress rehearsal, and just hours before the premiere. I get through the run without tripping over any of the plinths, falling off a trolley, missing my light, forgetting the song, or being run over by a waltzing mirror. Hurrah! Because the Roses and the Daisies have been rehearsing scenes in separate rooms, I’m seeing some parts of the show for the first time in this dress run.

Gob Squad: Creation. UK premiere at ACCA, Brighton Festival 2018

Wow, it all works! The mix of a fiercely choreographed movement of people and objects around the stage combined with the relative spontaneity of guest performers’ verbal and physical responses to instructions or questions is a good balance of fixed order and improvisation. The power and humour of the Gob Squad performers’ conversational exchanges and monologues is a revelation – we’d seen so little of this in rehearsal, partly because they’d held back, to keep the show as fresh as possible, and partly because the rehearsal period for the guest performers was so short that the focus was on our scenes and cues.

So now, a couple of hours later, we are back in our starting positions, Daisies and Roses sitting out of sight in the wings on a row of chairs stage-right. Johanna is at the back of the stage creating a flower arrangement. Ah no, sorry – it’s not mere flower arrangement, it’s Ikebana, a Japanese artform in which nature and humanity are brought together, the Ikebana Master creating displays that emphasise shape, line, and form. We hear the chatter of the audience, which gradually subsides as Simon, practicing his life-drawing skills, riffs with Johanna on the power of triangles in general, and the relationship between (A) artist, (B) object and (C) viewer in particular. Johanna is ruthlessly trimming all the leaves from a stalk, saying that she is helping the flower to be seen, improving on nature, because ‘being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.’ Oh yes, says Simon, five minutes in and we get our first Oscar Wilde quote! ‘I think this really needs a frame’ says Biarit, holding a gaudy gilt frame in front of Johanna’s flower arrangement, the image now projected onto a giant screen behind them – a frame within a frame. ‘This is all very well, but I feel I need to work with a different sort of material, something more like this…’ says Biarit. And she walks over to where we are sitting, takes my hand, and we’re off, into the limelight, seeking the gaze.

A wish come true

A fantasy revealed

By mirrors of the mind

Reflecting pictures of the soul…

Gob Squad: Creation. UK premiere at ACCA, Brighton Festival 2018

‘Experience is simply the name men give to their mistakes…’

Zoe Czavda Redo writes:

There’s a palpable frisson at ACCA tonight. I daresay all the theatre-makers in town are here, the older ones with spare cash in hand for the post-show debrief in the bar, the young ones making notes for their college papers. Gob Squad, the performance collective who (someone is whispering, someone else is writing) formed as university pals in Nottingham in the 90s and have been based in Germany since, come to the UK every so often as a refreshing easterly wind, ambassadors of a Berlin ‘air’ long after it was sold in bottles but before the birth of maybe a third of the audience. Their use of – ‘irreverent!’ ‘contemporary!’– conventions (such as live camera feeds, unusual locations, and the mixing of professional and non-professional performers) is 25 years on, and now absorbed into the canon; the company trades freshness for mastery, and their latest show is – in part quite literally – a reflection on this. A controlled, sprawling, moving, and beautiful piece using mirrors, frames, plinths, humans older and younger, and flowers wilting live under a heat-lamp, brings Gob Squad’s own midlife crisis, the inter-generational encounter it provokes, and all the ensuing questions of freshness, liveness, ageing and self-regard to the stage.

Creation (Pictures for Dorian) uses The Portrait of Dorian Gray less as a template, more as a palate; it’s more remix than reprise. In Wilde’s novel, famously, Dorian sells his soul to live a devil-may-care life while a magical portrait confined to the attic ages in his stead. Gob Squad plays with the Victorian vocabulary of flowers – star of the still-life – and portraiture, a means of preservation and archiving, in tension with artistic expression. As an accumulationist piss-take on the artistic process, as well as a poignant meditation on mortality, this piece feels messier and grander when it’s happening than its constituent elements would suggest.

It starts with an almost-bare stage, a single performer bantering with the audience, and adds elements gradually, starting with flower arrangement and extending the principles of Ikebana to the ‘locally sourced material’: three performers in their 20s and three in their 60s, at first compliant models to be directed and manipulated into works of art using frames and plinths, and the roving camera. The local material is not ‘raw’, exactly; all are professional performers (emerging or veteran) and used to being onstage and being looked at, a suspicion confirmed as they go past being arranged by the ‘artists’, and begin to offer narratives and perspectives, hopes and reminiscences of their own: a young girl reclaims her narrative on Instagram; the athletic Adonis creates movement sequences Biarit struggles to follow; an aged ex-dancer performs a version of the choreography that represents the pinnacle of his life onstage. Conversation seems unscripted, movement highly orchestrated. Performers, frames, mirrors, plinths, cameras – all seem to be gliding around the stage to rephrase themselves. Costumes are traded and exchanged, from Grecian sheet-robes to fantasy-futurist metallic getup; bodies create and invert relationships amongst each other by moving in and out of frame, behind and in front of mirrors.

Gob Squad’s pacing and deadpan humour work well in the weave of this live video; the stage itself is a mixture of behind the scenes and outside-the-frame, a shifting series of small scenes-as-bouquets, continually melting towards, or rearranging, into something else. As expanded ikebana, it’s all happening before us, all under the light, and yet in the spaces where we aren’t looking, a sort of transformative magic seems to have taken place. We leave the auditorium softened and devastated. No one goes to the bar right away.

Gob Squad: Creation. A London Rose and a London Daisy prepare

‘Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.’

Ciaran Hammond writes:

Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room: Sharon Smith stands at the back of the stage. She’s pruning a selection of flowers and arranging them on a table. ‘Ikebana’ she tells us. Co-performer Sean Patten draws a crude caricature of an audience member. Sharon tells Sean and the audience that Ikebana is a meditative practice that requires the person to appreciate each flower for what it is, and to avoid comparison and establishing any sort of hierarchy between the flowers. It is about the composition as a whole. These ideas, and others, surrounding Ikebana open up a conversation for exploring identity.

In exasperation with the flowers, the third Gob Squad performer, Bastian Trost, brings on six guest performers claiming he needs ‘A different sort of material to work with’, directing and positioning them on stage among potted plants, giant empty photo frames, mirrors and a camera – the live footage of which is projected onto the back wall of the stage. Three of the guest performers are in their late teens or early twenties, and the other three are in their late sixties and seventies. In the middle, we have Gob Squad. In the same manner that Sharon places trimmed twigs next to one another, the exposed and vulnerable guest performers are lined up, moved around and framed as art objects. Wearing skin-tight, pale body suits and hair nets, they are stripped down to their most basic and least defined; trimmed of unnecessary foliage. After bringing their guests back to a tabula rasa, Gob Squad use themselves and the guest performers to ‘find art’ by delving into what makes each performer who they are.

The piece explores both the core Gob Squad performers’ and the guest performers’ lives and personal traits through its autobiographical angle and distinctive non-actorly performance style. For a young man studying acting at Lancaster Uni, this is his first time on a stage in London. For a seasoned drag performer… well, he’s lost count. The guest performers are given brief introductions and are provided with tasks to complete throughout the performance, such as walking towards the camera ‘with the spirit of nature’ and being asked questions like ‘do you want to die on stage?’ and ‘what were the 70s like?’ The tasks and questions are designed to bring out a specific aspect of each performer, and are tailored to each performer with a level of specificity that significantly changes the piece depending on who the performers are. The performance’s structure and core ideas remain the same but its content changes drastically in each new incarnation. What holds the piece together, and keeps its identity intact throughout its different iterations, is the company’s core practice, as well as the ideas it explores: Gob Squad at this point in their careers have become well cemented in the postmodern performance landscape, often incorporating multimedia technology and a non-performative style into their shows. Their creative process is solid, and is framed within Creation as a living, breathing thing that is explored within the piece, in some ways as equally as the guest performers are explored.

The ideas that Creation explores have depth, are well developed and are open for interpretation within the performance, but due to the piece’s reshaping between iterations it is suspected that the process of essentially making a different – but quasi-identical – performance for each location has inhibited the performance’s development in more physical and technical areas. The performance feels unintentionally slow with the crescendos in energy, although well placed, feeling as though they are being walked through, lacking in an organic quality. This strips some parts of the performance of its sense of autobiographical truth and its non-performative nature. At times when the rehearsed parts of Creation stick out for what they are, the question of whether they’re rehearsed or improvised no longer exists for the audience and the performance loses a sense of mystery. This loss, at times, hinders the audience’s engagement with the performance and makes certain aspects of the piece feel disingenuous. When we can see the confessions of a performer as rehearsed, what they’re saying becomes merely another part of the performance, rather than a part of them and their identity.

The ambiguity and openness within the way Creation presents and theatricalises its performers makes them more alive on stage; what gives them strength as individuals, in the audience’s eyes, isn’t a rigid and easily attainable categorisation of their personalities, making them easier to comprehend. Instead, Creation shows constantly changing individuals, who with each movement on stage, become infinitely more complex, and is a soft reminder of perhaps how is best to observe our guest performers, and others, on and off stage.

Gob Squad: Creation, London premiere at LIFT

‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’

Dorothy Max Prior writes:

I’m here to see how the show looks from the outside – but of course it is not the show I was in. Another time, another place, another show – performed by nine different people. For not only do the local guest performers change with each location, the core Gob Squad team changes too. Bastian, outside eye in Brighton, has taken Biarit’s role for the London LIFT shows. Sean Patten has replaced Simon Will as principal narrator and muser on conceptual conundrums. Sharon Smith has replaced Johanna Freiburg as Ikebana arranger and I’ll Be Your Mirror reflector on the naked female form onstage (although apparently it is Sarah Thom in this role in some of the London shows).

The form and structure is essentially the same – the order of the scenes, the mechanics of moving people and objects around, the live-feed video, the clever way of signifying a scene has ended once the artwork being created live has been named (the name, often an Oscar Wilde quote, scrolling up over the image on the enormous back-wall screen), and the central notion of having nine performers who represent a life on stage, past present and future. But the content feels radically different.

Of course, it goes without saying that I will feel forever wedded to the version of the show I took part in, and can never offer an objective view of Creation, but I will try my darnedest to bear witness in a fair and honest way to what is being offered here on the stage at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room.

A stage, I will say first of all, that seems a little small for all the things that are happening on it, particularly when all nine performers are onstage together, moving in and out of various groupings. I’m thinking particularly of a scene later in the piece in which all perform an ensemble score of repeated gestures, presented forward-looking to the audience ( if ‘yes’) and backward-looking to the mirrors (if ‘no’). From the third row, many of the performers feel a little too close to us for this epic, panoramic picture to really work. Was it thus in Brighton? I was on the other side of the footlights then, so can’t say – but I know that the Attenborough Centre has a particularly wide and deep stage, so perhaps not…

On the other hand, some of the more intimate scenes are truly breathtaking. Particularly, a three-way conversation between Bastian, a Daisy (‘Can I call you my past?’) and a Rose (‘Can I call you my future?). The combination of performers, and the particular content of this version of this scene is a beautiful thing. All three identify as gay, and a genuine echo-chamber is set up in which we clearly see, in an eternally reflecting triptych, the past, present and future of queer politics and performance, with Bloolips co-founder Stuart Feather’s revelations of the pioneering days of drag performance bringing a hushed awe to the auditorium.

It is also interesting to see how the different Gob Squad performers bring a completely different energy to the show. The strongest contrast is between Johanna Freiburg (Brighton) and Sharon Smith (London). For example, in the scene in which the nine performers stand in a straight line at the front of the stage, facing out, the audience invited to feast their eyes on this collection of humans who live to be looked at. As performers and audience silently mirror each other’s gazes, a woman performer removes her clothes as she returns the audience’s gaze. When that woman is Johanna, her cool, calm pose and unflinching gaze undoes the spectator, and there is a stunned silence finally broken by laughter when Johanna says, ‘They are all looking at me, you can go now.’ When it’s Sharon, there is a cheery throw-away attitude that makes for a more obviously humorous, less unnerving moment. The waltzing mirror scene also has a very different energy in this version: where Johanna and I stood nose-to-nose on either side of the mirror, arms outstretched in an embrace of mirror and each other, engaged in an intense, one-on-one conversation delivered with little regard to the audience, Sharon and guest performer Claudia Bolton (a former member of legendary 1970s women’s theatre group Beryl and the Perils) take the mirror in a one-hand grasp on either side, questions and answers swinging out to the audience with many a nod and humorous aside. Often, in this version of the show, there are winks to the audience and a feeling of knowingness that was pushed far less in the Brighton incarnation. I am sure that every incarnation of the show acquires its own special feel and form – it’s a piece that you could see again and again.

There are moments when some of the guest performers seem to have their responses over-prepared. This may be the inevitable result of this being day four of their run – familiarity has set in, and there might well be less spontaneity than on day one. Perhaps we similarly settled in too much as our Brighton run progressed – and I now completely understand why Johanna said to me, in response to a worried question about a cue, ‘I may well change what I ask you every night.’ I’m reminded of the old performance adage ‘no acting required’.

What I really get on the outside of this extraordinary piece of work is the sheer beauty of the show. Such utterly gorgeous stage pictures drawn and erased! From the auditorium rather than the wings, I can far better see the cleverness of the interplay of live and mediated image. And I adore witnessing the obvious rapport and complicity between the God Squad core team. I enjoy the way that every element of the show – costume, set, lighting, sound, performance – works harmoniously together, creating (yes!) an Ikebana arrangement in which balance and harmony is all.

Mostly, I appreciate being asked to think about what I am seeing. Where is the balance between objective and subjective viewpoint? Who am I watching most and why? Why am I drawn to one image and away from another? Who determines what is ‘good’ art, or even what is ‘art’.

Reflecting on both experiences, inside and outside of Creation, I ask myself: why do any of us crave the eye of the beholder? Is the present moment always our greatest moment? Am I happier to be (A) artist or (C) witness? I certainly enjoyed being (B) art object, relieved of the obligation to think too hard, try too hard, or take too much responsibility for the success of the show.

I’m in my mid-sixties now. It is probably true to say that there is more behind me than in front, onstage and offstage. How did I survive? Have I any regrets? I’m certainly closer to my death than to my birth. What will remain of me after I die? Does it matter? What will people do with all my belongings when I’m gone? And what about that painting in the attic – will they chuck it out with the rest of the clutter?

Though dreams may fade

The images remain

They find a secret place

To hide the terror and the pain

of Dorian

The Sins of Dorian…

Gob Squad: Creation (Pictures for Dorian)

All images courtesy of Gob Squad.

Quotes by Oscar Wilde. Song lyrics by Dalbello.

Gob Squad: Creation (Pictures for Dorian):

Concept and direction: Gob Squad (Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will)

Guest performers (Brighton): CHUB RUB, Holly Nomafu, Sam Longville, Dorothy Max Prior, Kate Dyson, Nicholas Minns

Guest performers (London): Claudia Bolton, Christina Brown, Lieve Carchon, Stuart Feather, Mike Narouei, Amelie Roch

The UK premiere of Creation (Pictures for Dorian) was presented at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts (ACCA) 23–27 May 2018 as part of the Brighton Festival. It was seen by Zoe Czavda Redo on 24 May 2018.

The London premiere was presented at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room 4–7 June 2018 as part of LIFT. It was seen by Dorothy Max Prior and Ciaran Hammond on 7 June 2018.

David Shrigley: Life Model II / Problem in Brighton

She’s nine-foot tall, with Barbie-doll legs, a severe bob and big, big eyes that sometimes blink with a satisfying mechanical clunk. Her ‘skin’ is alabaster white and shiny, and there is only a hint of a pubis. Hairless, of course. She stands in the middle of Fabrica gallery (a deconsecrated Regency church in central Brighton). Easels and paper are set up around the space – we are invited into this ‘life drawing’ class to draw not from life but from a caricature of life.

Which is a very interesting idea – the brainchild of artist David Shrigley, who is guest director of Brighton Festival 2018. What is especially interesting, looking at the images on the wall of drawings done by previous gallery-goers, is that it is not necessarily obvious that the model for these images is a giant doll. Some representations are indeed doll-like – but that could also happen were the model to have been a live woman. Some are a Cubist echo of Picasso’s deconstructions of the female form. Some have softened and humanised the plastic model, making the final image look more ‘real’ and womanly. Some have gone the other way, turning her into a Marvel or Manga comic heroine. Some have taken the opportunity to make a humorous or political statement (almost Shrigley style, we could say). There is one drawing that places a knife in the left hand behind the model’s back, one that covers her in tattoos, and more than one that gives her underarm or pubic hair.

The act of drawing brings up so many different things. I’m always happy to draw – cartoonish doodler is my default mode when armed with a pencil. Some people find the act distressing – ‘I can’t draw!’ is a common cry – so they won’t be drawn in, preferring to just enjoy looking at other people’s drawings. Some people grit their teeth and do it anyway, relieved that they’ve overcome their feelings of failure. Some are ardent amateur artists delighted to be offered the opportunity to draw in public, in some cases bringing their own art materials, and settle in for the long haul.

What happens to all these drawings? They are packed up and sent on to the next gallery, an invigilator tells me. Having work on the walls from day one encourages otherwise reluctant participants to give it a go. Not that reticence was much of an issue in Brighton, she adds wryly.

Life Model II is a delightfully interactive and engaging artwork that provokes all sorts of thoughts about the nature of reality and representation. In making their representation of the model, spectators become artists, and enter into a creative response to the artist’s provocation, offering interpretations, criticisms or questions in their drawn replies.

Other Shrigley works in the festival include Problem in Brighton, commissioned by the festival, and written by Shrigley in collaboration with musician/composer Lee Baker. It is described as an ‘alt-rock/pop pantomime’, which is stretching definitions a bit. It’s a comedy music gig by a put-together band which includes Baker himself, actor/musicians Pauline Knowles and Gavin Mitchell (who have previously worked with David Shrigley), and physical theatre supremo Stephan Kreiss from Spymonkey.

Stars of the show are the gorgeous custom-made wonky guitars, commissioned by Shrigley – they were drawn in his style, a hotch-potch of erratic shapes with just one string instead of the usual tally of six, and a luthier, Tom Harrup, made them following the designs as closely as he could. The result is a wonderfully eccentric line-up of bespoke instruments cum artworks.

The show starts promisingly with the seven band-members standing in a line playing the guitars, which is a strong visual image and sonically interesting. Then, one leaves to play drums, and we are into a sub-Jean Genie rock and roll riff. And so it goes. Another band member puts down his guitar to play keyboards, and the whole thing has descended into a pretty regular rock gig, featuring songs with comic lyrics illustrated with a minimal amount of physical action and visual images. ‘Bring ear plugs’ the publicity says, but that’s hardly necessary, it’s pretty tame stuff – after that interesting first musical moment, most of what follows is a rehashing of rock, pop and punk cliches. Maybe that’s the point, but it feels like a lost opportunity to do something more interesting musically.

I’m not a great fan of comedy bands, so probably not the ideal audience member for this show, but there are a few memorable moments. A fast and furious song that reminds me of punk surrealists Wire consists of the band all shouting ‘Michael Gove’ non-stop, then upping the ante to shout ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg’ even louder and faster. It’s ludicrous, and genuinely funny. There is a also a good visual to go with it – images of Gove and Rees-Mogg projected on the backwall screen. Which makes a change from just looking at the word ‘Problem’ illuminated in different lighting colours. Stephan Kreiss really comes into his own on Mother, You Can’t Be in the Band which relates (in his endearing Austrian accent) the angst-ridden and desperate tale of his mother’s bid to be the drummer in the band. By contrast, Pauline Knowles gives us numerous gently funny poetic texts that have a hint of Ivor Cutler’s ditties (or perhaps that association is just because it’s whimsical spoken word in a Scottish accent?). Humour is a very personal thing, and although I like much of Shrigley’s work, this show just doesn’t ring my bell. But the main problem with Problem is that the music is just so mainstream and unchallenging. I’m sorry David, when it comes to artists forming rock bands, Martin Creed does it better.

But the guitars are wonderful – there is that.

Life Model II is at Fabrica, Brighton 14 April to 28 May 2018.

Problem in Brighton is at The Old Market, Hove, 10–12 May 2018.

David Shrigley is guest director of Brighton Festival 2018, which runs 5–27 May. For details of all shows and events, see www.brightonfestival.org

Making Space, Leave No Trace

Mandy Dike and Ben Rigby, who work together under the name And Now: are interviewed by Dorothy Max Prior about their latest outdoor arts collaboration, Wayfaring

Here today, gone tomorrow. Everything in this world – its people and animals, its landscape, even the rocks themselves, are impermanent things. Sometimes the changes are slow, taking millennia, and sometimes things move quickly. But everything, everywhere is moving and changing, all the time…

This notion of transience is the key theme of a new work by artists Mandy Dike and Ben Rigby which premieres at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May. Wayfaring is an outdoor event combining installation with live performance and music – but it will be a very different sort of experience to the usual outdoor arts show. You will find no large PA system booming out electronic music, no massive great firework finale, no big theatrical sets that have to be brought on-site in large trucks. Instead, there will be structures made from the wood and other materials that are available on site, the artist and performers working with, not against, the environment; and a use of elements such as fire effects and acoustic music to create gentle animations of the space rather than overwhelming the natural environment. In Wayfaring, the audience plays an active part in the show – walking, looking, listening, singing, and moving in gentle choreographies from one part of the site to another, as a part of a group that takes on some of a sense of a pilgrimage, a truly shared space.

Mandy and Ben have been partners in work and life for 21 years, first meeting and working together on a large-scale outdoor arts show set on a boat by Manchester-based Walk the Plank, a company Mandy worked with for many years. She also worked with the legendary Welfare State International, creating spectacles with a political slant, then went on to co-found The World Famous, which made its reputation with large-scale shows using sculptural structures and pyrotechnics, such as the acclaimed Full Circle, which toured to major festivals across the UK and mainland Europe. The company no longer exists, but many of the people who worked for The World Famous have continued to contribute to the outdoor arts scene, for example by working collaboration with companies such as Periplum, creators of The Bell and 451.

And Now: photo Sian Williams

Ben frequently worked with Mandy on The World Famous shows. They are both visual artists and visionaries, and both have a strong belief in creating work that is accessible to as many people as possible – a view that comes directly from Mandy’s training in Art in Social Contexts at Dartington College, and Ben’s background in social sciences, anthropology and politics. In their work, they don’t aim to bombard people with socio-political messages; they don’t make shows ‘about’ environmentalism – instead, they want the way they work to be intrinsically sound and good politically and environmentally. When they work in an outdoor site, they work with the landscape and with the people, animals and plants within that environment; and when they leave a site, they aim to leave as little trace as possible. ‘We live it rather than preach it’ says Mandy.

They are both thinkers, but they are also both hand-on doers and makers. Whilst Mandy often leads on the visual design of the work, Ben has a pragmatic approach, sorting out the whys and wherefores. So the literal and metaphorical nuts and bolts of the structures and sculptures are created as a joint effort. Ben says that he is ‘happier not to be seen’, content to be in the background wielding a screwdriver or sorting out the rigging. But throughout the whole process, both feel that it is crucial to keep challenging themselves. ‘What is the nature of this?’ is a question they ask themselves constantly, and, ‘What is sacred and what is alien? What do we mean by “natural”?’ A tree that is protected in one area of the country is considered a weed in another. A landscape that we consider to be completely natural turns out to be carefully sculpted. We want to preserve ‘the past’ – but which past? The Romantic English landscape, the neolithic landscape?

In many ways, it feels as if the world has caught up a bit with Ben and Mandy: we are now in an era in which projects that bring together art, science and environmentalism are seen as something desirable: ‘I don’t think there are boundaries between art and science,’ says Mandy, ‘it is just a spectrum’ adding that the company aim to ‘make space for people’s imagination’. Their work is thought-provoking, ecological, spiritual even – but humour, and a love of popular artforms, is never far away. Expect a robust sing-a-long somewhere along the way!

And Now: Wayfaring. Photo Tony Gill

A work-in-progress version of Wayfaring was created for Dorset’s Inside Out festival in 2016, and the company have subsequently entered a further long period of research and development. The new phase of the project is inspired by the present landscapes and ancient routes of the Icknield Way, a pre-Roman pathway running from north Norfolk to the Dorset coast. In 2018, Wayfaring will be presented at three different Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty on the 400-mile route. The Icknield Way is an ancient ‘super highway’ along a chalk path, and the particular qualities of chalk will be a key area of artistic investigation: made up as it is of the skeletal remains of tiny creatures that lived long ago, chalk is the perfect example of the transient nature of all life that is at the heart of the artistic quest of this piece. Animal, vegetable, mineral – all is interweaved.

The project will manifest in unique ways in each of the different sites, but the connecting threads will be the nature of time and journeying, resonances, and the notion of boundaries and liminal spaces – ridges, tide lines, and the space between day and night that we get at dusk. Mandy and Ben are very fond of the expression ‘the gloaming’ to describe this moment, and all the shows will take the audience across this line from light into darkness. ‘Just how often to people these days get to just be outdoors at night?’ they ask. What will actually happen is yet to be discovered, but both artists are keen to say that Wayfaring will be ‘us reacting to these particular landscapes’ and that bringing people together for this fleeting, transitory experience is an ‘opportunity for something special to happen that will only be for those people at that time. Stepping out into the unknown…It’s a leap of faith. Take a risk!’ They also want to stress that the work is for everyone. You can appreciate it at many different levels. ‘If you just fancy a walk, and to see a bit of night-time fire, that is fine.’

The first stop on this artistic journey will be in May, on the beach at Wells-next-the-Sea, as part of Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2018. The site was chosen purposefully as it is on the chalk ridge, but away from the woods, because at this time of year, the height of the nesting season, ‘there would be baby birds everywhere’, which the artists wouldn’t want to disturb. And it is not only the birds who have to be considered – backstage production and site management of a project such as this is immense. ’We had to get permission from the Queen!’ they say as the beach tide margin at Wells crosses crown estate. Ben and Mandy spent a week in residence on the site last May, and grew to love the space, with its strong tidal surges that create big changes on a daily basis, its sand dunes, and its odd ‘islands’ which allegedly have built up around abandoned vehicles.

And Now: are a company who believe in slow art, resisting the tendency to arrive on site for a one-hour show then disappear again to get to the next stop on the tour. They prefer the model they have created of a week-long process open to an audience’s involvement, so that they are ‘insinuating’ themselves into a landscape, slowly and gently. On the days in question, 21 to 26 May, the artists will arrive on Monday morning and begin to create the central installation, using local and found materials and objects including chalk, flint, reeds and perhaps even whelk pots. The local community, and people in Norfolk for the international festival, will be invited to come along and witness the progress over the next few days, and they will be gently guided into adding to or interacting with the structures. On Friday and Saturday evening, the installations will become animated by live performance, music and fire effects. This will be created by a dedicated team of regular And Now: collaborators, bolstered by a number of community performers. On Sunday, it will become uninhabited, broken down into its elements and carried away. The makers will sail away – perhaps literally.

Last word to Mandy: ’Everything is in flux, and we are just an element of that. We –the humans in all this – are not all that important!’

Featured image (top) and image above of Wayfaring, Norfolk & Norwich Festival.: Imagery by And Now: Photo by Nick Read.

For more about And Now: see the artists’ website: www.andnow.co.uk

Wayfaring is the culmination of a three-year artistic and heritage collaboration between producers Activate, artists And Now: and the National Association for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is an outdoor art event inspired by the ancient 400-mile Icknield Way.

The world premiere of Wayfaring is co-produced by Norfolk & Norwich Festival. www.nnfestival.org.uk

Wayfaring will take place at:

Norfolk & Norwich Festival: Wells-next-the-Sea, NR23 1DR

And Now: will be working on the beach during daylight hours to set up the installation from Monday 21 – Friday 25 May 2018. Live performance event Friday 25 & Saturday 26 May 8pm – 10pm.

Wayfaring will also take place at two other sites on the Iknield Way:

Basildon Park, Lower Basildon, Reading, 18 to 21 July 2018. See https://cornexchangenew.com/event/wayfaring-1

Dorchester, Inside Out Dorset, 17 to 22 September 2018. See www.insideoutdorset.co.uk/

NoFit State Circus: Lexicon

Lexicon takes place in NoFit State’s familiar silver and purple spaceship tent, but unlike previous shows staged in this space, such as Tabu and Bianco, it is not a promenade piece – we are seated in the round (a full 360 degrees round). There isn’t a sawdust ring, but the centre circle is sawdust coloured. You can almost smell the elephants…

Pioneers of the UK’s contemporary circus scene, NoFit State have decided, after 30 years, that it is time to go back to their roots. Or rather, to circus’s roots. Back to its childhood, you could say. So in Lexicon we have a tented circus show that references and plays with the tropes of traditional circus, whilst retaining its contemporary knowing edge. But no, there aren’t any real elephants, only metaphorical ones, to quote NoFit State’s co-founder and artistic director Tom Rack.

The structure of Lexicon is that of a traditional circus show – the aerial and other equipment-intensive acts balanced with a number of floor-based turns: juggling, fire, unicycle or merry clowning acrobats chattering in a mix of European languages, or a no-language grommelage, in homage to the great Auguste clowns such as Charlie Cairoli or Coco the Clown. It is particularly lovely to see a comic three-man Cyr Wheel turn, and Luke Hallgarten’s pants-on-fire juggling act is a winner. A traditional circus skill we don’t see that often in contemporary circus is foot juggling – Rosa-Maria Autio manages to honour the tradition whilst giving it a modern feel, in her lithe limb-stretching duet with an armchair and a number of circular cloth ‘discs’.

But being NoFit State, there are also unexpected moments of great skill and beauty of a different sort – a lone performer in a party dress and platinum wig sitting in the circus ring playing harmonium; a hand-balancing act from Mathieu Hedan that becomes a shadow theatre piece when set inside an enormous black-gauze tube and lit by hand-held lights; a Chinese Pole routine from Luca Morrocchi on a piece of equipment that extends the pole upwards into a spinning metal ‘cage’, the lighting cast downwards through the structure making a kaleidoscope of spinning wheels on the ground.

Ah yes, wheels! Bicycles play an important part in the show. There is a marvellous collection of trick cycles or oddly shaped vehicles that appear a number of times in the ring, circling merrily around. A Penny Farthing, a double-decked scooter that forces its rider into the splits, and a daft floor-hugging go-kart. King of the cycles is Sam Goodburn. He gives us the trad whip-yer-trousers-off unicycle act, but later in the show updates with a clever twist as he gets dressed into evening wear whilst cycling, transforming from schoolboy geek into prom queen’s dream date.

The bicycles are part of the schooldays trope that runs throughout – with echoes of everything in the sepia-tinted coming-of-age cannon from Le Grand Meaulnes to Laurie Lee. This works well much of the time, but as is oft the way with these large-scale NoFit State Circus shows written and directed by Firenza Guidi, a narrative suggestion or theme set up at the beginning of the show – in this case, adolescent innocence and longing, played out over a spectacular set of moving school desks – ebbs and flows throughout the piece, sometimes to the fore and sometimes forgotten about. It can be hard to mould all the acts that you need to fit in with a given theme!

Talking of acts: we haven’t yet mentioned the aerialists and wire-walkers. Fabian Galouÿe performs an elegant straps act, Rosa-Marie Schmid gives a great show of feminine strength on double rope, and Vilhelmiina Sinervo is both clever and a comic delight on the slack wire. But the star act is undoubtably Lyndall Merry on swinging trapeze – he’s a performer I’ve long admired, and is supremely elegant as well as highly skilled. He’s also the rigging designer – which in a show as complex as this one, is quite a job in itself.

All of this physical skill and wonder is accompanied by the marvellous live music of composer David Murray and the team of musicians, most of whom get drawn into the physical action at one point or another. And when they do, it is the movement direction of Joe Wild that steers the action into a series of lovely and lively tableaux. I say ‘accompanied’ but often it is more than that – a truly interactive and responsive play between music and physical action, for example when a performer is perched half-way up a scaffolding tower strumming a guitar, or a solo mouth organ tune accompanies a Chinese Pole act. Murray and his musicians plunder the world to give us jungle drums for a whip-cracking act with human tigers and lions; a mournful, heartbreaking lament that has echoes of Georgian or Bulgarian polyphonic song; and a number of gorgeous soulful numbers with echoes of American jazz classics.

At two and a half hours, inclusive of the 20-minute interval, the show feels a little too long. I find myself thinking (somewhere around the two hour mark) that an outside dramaturg is needed to come in and get tough with the director/company. There are some odd dips – for example, after Lyndall Merry’s spectacular swing over the audience’s heads, which feels like it should be the last, or at least the penultimate, act. There is sometimes unnecessary repetition, or a good scene morphs into something less interesting – for example, in the aforementioned big black gauze tube handbalancing scene, in which the beautiful shadow images give way to a mediocre projection onto the gauze that my companion described quite aptly as looking like a 1980s screensaver graphic. And there is at least one major scene that really doesn’t fit – a very pretty but superfluous aerial hanger act with crinolines and parasols which although a visual delight feels like it has crept in from another show. There is so much spectacular circus work and wonderful comic moments in Lexicon – there is just a little too much of everything, and a bit of trimming and honing is needed. It is a new show, and I am sure it will, in time, transmute from the good show it already is into the excellent show it is destined to be. But hats off to NoFit State for getting this far – it is a mighty achievement, and certainly not as easy as A-B-C. A show full of delights that both honours and gently usurps circus tradition.