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

Nick Steur: A Piece of 2

A handsome, rugged-looking young man, with a cowboy-country tan and tousled hair, his black T-shirt streaked with rust, lifts a glass water bottle to his lips and drinks slowly and purposefully. It’s a wonderfully theatrical moment. The theatre continues. He stands, poised, and looks over at the big rock almost-perched on an even bigger (human-sized) rock, held in place by a harness and iron chains, the whole thing hanging from a square-based pyramid (a pentahedron, even), the rusty metal of the structure the reason for the orange-brown streaks on his clothes. He and this large sculptural construct are circled by people, some sitting on a quartet of equally large rocks that mark the outer edges of the metal floor; some standing, and some lying on the beach half-watching whilst doing other things. There is, for example, a trio of teenage girls making their own small sculpture, pebbles and shells arranged into circles on the beach. I’m trying to avoid making a judgement on gender-specific activity, but the sight of these pretty young things in their white crop-tops and shampoo-scented long hair making delicate patterns with their sea-shore treasure up against this young man with his big rocks and his clanking metal chains and poles invites such thoughts…

The sculpture cum work-space is sited beautifully on Brighton beach between the sci-fi silver mast of the much-derided new tourist attraction, the i360, and the decaying hulk of the West Pier, the remains of which sit stranded off-shore – two visual icons that could be seen as representing the past and the future of Brighton. The remnants of what were the supports of the shore-side end of of the pier now stand alone and useless on the beach – great columns of rusted metal that complement and create a dialogue with the metal of the sculpture. The large grey pebbles of the beach are small echoes of the great big grey boulders of this work, which is called A Piece of Two.

The young man – Dutch rock-balancer and sculptor Nick Steur – ponders, counts on his fingers, seems to be making calculations, then moves back to his construction. Another 15 minutes go by – I’ve been here in the blazing sunshine for an hour and a half, and time seems to be moving slowly – and the giant rocks have now been manipulated to a point where Nick considers that they are balanced. There are murmurings in the crowd. ‘I’ve been here three hours, I could watch him all day!’ says the women sitting next to me on the rock, and a man behind us calls over to his partner, saying ‘Come back, he’s done it!’ The three girls look up from their own art-making – it’s hard to tell if this is approvingly but I suspect they are playing at cool – and a family of four arrive all in a rush and ask what’s going on. An usher tries to explain and they shrug, take a quick selfie, and walk off… Ah, the joys of outdoor arts!

Then begins the painstaking process of removing the harness and chains that were holding the top rock in place before the point of balance was reached. Much nail-biting (for me) moments of hooking and twisting and pulling and clunking later, the rocks are standing alone in the centre of the pyramid, and there is a round of applause from the audience. Nick holds up his hand (another perfect theatrical moment) and says: ‘I’m not finished yet. I’m never finished…’ As I move away, he is starting to rearrange or perhaps dismantle the metalwork structure. Apparently, the process is continuous. Everyday he spends six hours (give or take a few tea breaks) here, and as soon as one balance is created, it is time to move off into the next challenge, using the same or other rocks, with just a few archaic pulleys, chains, metal poles, and bolts as tools.

I was pleased to see a conclusion of sorts, a point of balance reached, but do take on board that, like Sisyphus, Nick Steur’s task of manipulating his boulders is endless… Art. Life. Sculpture. Theatre. Big rocks or little rocks, Nick Steur is your man. Entrancing stuff.

IOU: Rear View

When you book a train seat, do you like to face forwards or backwards? I always opt for backwards. Forwards and you are hurtling into the future, trees and cars and people a blur as you pass them by. Backwards and the past recedes from you, stretching out into eternity. You have time to take it all in; to contemplate your relationship to the world around you.

Rear View builds on that idea. Literally – they’ve built a special open-air bus in which all the seats face backwards, this marvellous beast created by veteran street theatre company IOU’s director David Wheeler, in collaboration with maker extraordinaire Andy Plant. The show’s audience are taken on a journey through the streets of Blackpool or Halifax or Norwich or, in this case, Brighton accompanied – not quite led, not quite followed – by a young woman, who we take to be the ghost/alter ego/younger self (pick your metaphor) of an older woman looking back on her life.

There is spoken text – beautiful and evocative poetic text, written and performed by one of two young women artists. On my trip, it was Brighton born and bred performance poet/playwright Cecilia Knapp, who alternates shows with Jemima Foxtrot. The text is conveyed to us through state-of-the-art headphones and (we presume) a bluetooth connection. Then, there is the sheer pleasure of travelling through a city on an open air bus, facing backwards, feeling the breeze on your skin, smelling the ozone of the sea. And there is the marvellous framing of the landscape that occurs with each scheduled stop – and indeed at any moment on the journey. Everyone and everything becomes part of the artwork. A dissolute looking man stands at the gate of Sussex Gardens (where Lewis Carroll’s Alice first encountered the White Rabbit), looking pensively at his watch. Are we late? An elderly couple make their way painfully slowly along the promenade as the sun dips down over the sea: they are not arm-in-arm, they are struggling along independently, each intent on their own journey. A young couple are standing on a street corner, talking intensely, close to arguing. A mother pushes a pram with one hand, trying to text with the other. Meanwhile, our narrator – dressed in a very costume-y asymmetrical white dress, marking her out from the landscape as someone or something not quite here, not quite ‘everyday’ or of the present moment – stands leaning against the promenade rail looking out to sea, telling stories of the man in the bar who always asks her to lend him her ears for the afternoon; or peers into a Kemptown cafe window, remembering the woman who smelt of bleach, peppermint and liquorice Rizlas; or glances up at the bird perched on top of the gasworks tower in the industrial estate, whilst she tells us how and why she got her bird tattoo.

Framing is everything, which is why the show starts not on the bus, but in a makeshift art studio. We are invited into a life-drawing class and briefly instructed in the art of looking, sizing up, framing the figure (Cecilia in her white dress) – really seeing what is in front of us. This device, together with the choice to have the two performers alternating shows, is a handy way of making it possible for the company to run a number of shows in a day without too long a changeover time… I mention these practical dramaturgical decisions as a way of noting that IOU are one of the UK’s most experienced outdoor arts / site-responsive theatre companies, and these matters of structure and timing are something they have a lot of experience managing.

Talking of responding to site, we have an interesting situation here. The texts – each performer has written her own version – are a response to a brief to develop short poetic texts voiced as a fictional older woman looking back on her life, to be presented in a number of suggested generic sites, e.g. (and I am guessing here, I don’t know the brief): in an art studio, outside a cafe, in a run-down urban setting, in a place of natural beauty, near a postbox. The text thus interacts with the site it is placed in, staying the same in form but changing in resonance from location to location as the show tours. So there is a universality to the story (exploring as it does such everywoman experiences as self-image, being the subject of the gaze, the tide of memories as we age, losing people along the road of life through bereavement or other circumstances) and a specificity evoked by the text placed in that particular setting, with the audience’s relationship to the place another factor. Like many people on that bus, I have my own memories of and relationship with Brighton Marina, Kemptown’s vintage shops and cafes, and the seafront – and my own memories and imaginative wanderings worked in tandem with the text I was hearing and the sights I was seeing. Rear View is therefore a show that evokes and invites a complex relationship with site.

It is not a perfect piece of work (that would be asking a lot), but it is a very good one. My reservations include finding the music backing track (an ambient wallpaper-ish mix of piano and synth) a little disappointing – I get that the aim was unobtrusive ambient, but I find this sort of easy-listening synth-driven composition a little irritating, and found myself asking: where is Clive Bell when you need him most. But in the interests of fairness, no one else I have spoken to had this response; most barely noticed the music, feeling it blended in with everything else in a satisfactory way. There is also something about the way Cecilia was sometimes ahead of us unseen and sometimes behind us and visible that jarred slightly. I was particularly bothered by a scene where she got into a car that followed us. It took us away from the illusion that she was a ghostly figure who was haunting the spots that we arrived in, being there in place as we turned a corner, so that we encountered her in each new setting as a sculptural figure in the landscape.

But these are small details, and not enough to distract from my enjoyment of the piece. The bigger picture is that Rear View is a cleverly constructed piece that delivers a feast for the eyes and the ears, and a clever reflection on the constant play between perception, memory and imagination that informs all our journeying through life. It invites us to see familiar landscapes with new eyes, to reinvent the streets and sites we think we know. A major achievement for IOU, and a highlight of the outdoor arts programme for Brighton Festival 2018.

Total Theatre Archive: HLF Grant Success!

Total Theatre Magazine’s Archive Project Heritage Lottery Fund grant success: the full 25 years of Total Theatre Magazine in print to be preserved, digitised, and made available for free online

Total Theatre Magazine is delighted to announce that we have been awarded a substantial grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund through their Our Heritage funding programme which will be used to create a valuable new online resource.

Every single print issue of the magazine – which was published for 25 years between 1988 to 2012 – will be digitised and made available online on a brand new website.

For over 30 years, Total Theatre Magazine (now online) has been at the forefront of the advocacy, celebration and documentation of contemporary theatre and performance – including the support of forms such as circus, street theatre, site-responsive performance, puppetry, and visual theatre, which have often been ignored, or not treated with the seriousness they merit, by other publications. The print magazine encompassed 100 issues over 25 years. Thanks to National Lottery players, this archive will be preserved for everyone to engage with, all content provided free to view. The new Total Theatre Archive website is to be launched early in 2019.

Editor Dorothy Max Prior and Web Editor John Ellingsworth will be working with members of the magazine’s editorial team and volunteers to scan, upload and tag content, creating a fully searchable website that will be a valuable resource for scholars, journalists, artists, students, and anybody interested in Britain’s alternative theatre and performance history. Once the website is built, Total Theatre Magazine will be working with writers, editors, and leading arts professionals to create new content that will reflect upon and interact with the archive; and collaborating with our partners to create a programme of activities and learning opportunities using the new archive.

Total Theatre Magazine has also received financial support from a number of leading institutions and organisations, including Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, Royal Conservatoire Scotland, and The Attenborough Centre of Creative Arts at University of Sussex.

The theatre and arts industry of Britain (and across the world) has been galvanised into expressing support for the digitising of the Total Theatre Magazine archive: artists, directors, producers, festival directors, critics, and professors and lecturers from leading drama schools across the country have all endorsed the need for Total Theatre Magazine to be digitised and made accessible.

Lyn Gardner (lead theatre critic, The Guardian / contributing editor The Stage) says:

‘Total Theatre Magazine has been a pioneer in terms of documenting theatre which has often been neglected by mainstream criticism. It has been a significant player in changing the culture of British theatre.’

Editor Dorothy Max Prior, who has worked for Total Theatre Magazine for more than two decades, says:

‘I’m grateful to Heritage Lottery Fund and our supporters for this opportunity, and delighted to be starting work on the Total Theatre Archive. I’m particularly excited at the prospect of re-engaging with all the wonderful material that we’ve published over the years, and finding interesting new ways to interact with the archive content.’

Editor’s Notes:

About Total Theatre Magazine:

Total Theatre Magazine is unique as an artist-led practice-based publication and resource that celebrates, supports and documents innovative work by artists and companies creating ‘total theatre’ – a term we resist defining too tightly, but which includes: physical, visual and ensemble devised theatre; dance-theatre; mime and clown; contemporary circus; cabaret and new variety; puppetry and animation; street arts, outdoor performance, and site-specific theatre; live art performance and hybrid arts. www.totaltheatre.org.uk

Total Theatre Magazine is currently in a process of redevelopment which will result in an exciting new phase of life, building on our strong heritage and finding new ways to critique, document and support contemporary physical and visual theatre and performance.

Total Theatre Magazine is now, since 2017, managed and published by Aurelius Productions CIC. The core editorial team (Dorothy Max Prior, John Ellingsworth, Beccy Smith and Thomas Wilson) is working to progress plans for the next phase of Total Theatre Magazine.

About Total Theatre Network:

Total Theatre Magazine operates in collaboration with, but financially independent of, the Total Theatre Awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which are produced by the organisation Total Theatre Network. See www.totaltheatrenetwork.org

About the Heritage Lottery Fund:

Thanks to National Lottery players, Heritage Lottery Fund invest money to help people across the UK explore, enjoy and protect the heritage they care about – from the archaeology under our feet to the historic parks and buildings we love; from precious memories and collections to rare wildlife. See www.hlf.org.uk

Download the PDF of the news release here:

Total Theatre Magazine News Release HLF grant success March 2018

Attention! Colonel Quince is in the house

Dorothy Max Prior profiles actor-creator Andres Aguirre, whose one-man show Lorcuedus is a physical theatre tour-de-force

Ra-ta-tat tat. Ra ta tat. Poom. Poom. Poom-poom. A wild-eyed figure is regaling us from a balcony, his arms gesticulating, onomatopoeic outbursts fired from his mouth with automatic-rifle power and precision. After a few minutes we start to hear the sounds form into recognisable words: Trump Trump Trump TRUMP, Putin Putin Putin PUTIN. It’s a perfect play on the nonsense of political and military rhetoric.

Colonel Quince is the creation of Andres Aguirre, a Mexican physical theatre actor who for a number of years has been based in Italy. The Colonel wears the uniform of an indeterminate country: braided khaki, with leather jackboots, and a cap. He sports fifteen (quince) medals: he is the medals – Colonel Quince. He marches, he goose-steps, he ducks and dives, and he returns regularly to his balcony to berate the crowd. Are we with him? Of course we are. Do we love him? Of course we do.

Lorcuedus, Aguirre’s breathtakingly brilliant one-man show, takes us on a theatrical roller-coaster ride, exploring the archetypal figure of The Colonel. He is everyone you might imagine him to be, or none of them: it depends on your viewpoint. In his extremely long and thorough creation process, Andres Aguirre has researched the obvious European candidates – Hitler, Mussolini – but has also taken a good look at Russia and the Americas, from Chile’s Pinochet in recent history, back further in time to the dictators of his own country – the Caudillos or self-appointed political-military leaders emerging in Mexico in the 19th century, in the years after Spanish rule.

The show, Aguirre’s first full-length solo, and the Colonel character it revolves around, have been a long time in the making…

Andres Aguirre grew up in Guadalajara where, as a hyperactive child who could be a bit of a problem in school, he was sensibly guided towards physical activities such as martial arts, boxing, dance and gymnastics. And as if that was not enough, he also competed in swimming and cycling! Watching him onstage, the legacy of this impossibly physical regime is in evidence – the man has seemingly endless strength and energy. He was, for many years, one of the core team members of circus-theatre troupe Les Cabaret Capricho, encouraged by company co-founder Cesar Omar Barrios to learn circus skills and create a ‘numero’. Acrobatics, hand-to-hand and slackwire were all part of his repertoire. He trained mostly through short-form workshops and YouTube clips – with one unproductive term at Guadalajara University studying dance – but got to a point where he felt that he needed to engage in intensive, full-time physical performance training. ‘I started to ask myself why something sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t, and the voice in my head said: it’s because you haven’t studied…’ Time for a change! On the advice of clown Anna Cetti, he took himself off to Italy, where he felt the quality of training would be higher than in Mexico, and presented himself to master teacher Philip Radice at the Atelier Teatro Fisico in Turin – offering to teach yoga in exchange for a place at his school. This was in 2010. Four years of serious training later, he started work on the Colonel character. He had previously met, and spent a lot of time as a companion, with the grandmother of a friend. He heard first-hand stories about the Second World War, which led him to further study of both European and Latin American histories, and to explore the way war was represented in literature and the arts. Writers he cites as influences include Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano (author of Las venas abiertas de América Latina / Open Veins of Latin America); and Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, author of Last Days of Mankind, which he loves for its absurd humour. An exploration of the relationship between visual arts and war/fascism led him to Picasso’s Guernica on one hand, and the Futurist Manifestos on the other. He also immersed himself in films, factual or fiction, about World War Two.

Meanwhile, Andres worked in the rehearsal room on transforming ideas and images into physical motifs. Military walks, for example: 300 observed and copied got reduced down to seven that eventually made it into the show! Photographs of soldiers with amputated limbs inspired a darkly funny and grotesque scene of ever-diminishing body parts. He put together the Colonel’s uniform, and working with the possibilities of that costume inspired the body language of the character. In 2014, he showed some early work in progress scenes at Philip Radice’s Atelier, then continued with the the slow but steady work of creating a full-length show.

And what a show! Every scene has been worked on with military precision until it is ship-shape and ready for action. The extensive physical training – from childhood dance and gymnastics to circus and then theatre – shows in every move. Of course, it is upfront in the Colonel’s eccentric dances, and his military take on the Ministry of Silly Walks, or in that extraordinary ‘walking wounded’ scene, or an equally fantastic ‘ostrich with its head in the sand’ scene that is all chest and sex and puffed-up stupidity; but it is there too in every single small action or point of stillness: here is a performer who knows how to be onstage.

Throughout the creation process, Andres has worked without a director, filming himself and studying the results carefully to see what needs to be improved. ‘You have to sift and sift to find gold,’ he says – taking the analogy further by saying that the process is like alchemy: a constant reducing down to the essence. Aware that he needed an audience response, he tried scenes in a cabaret setting, or in public spaces. In the middle of the process, he realised that he was interested not just in war but in peace – in what dictatorships and oppressive regimes do to the soul of a people. And not only dictatorships, but life in supposedly ‘free’ countries: personal histories of race, economics and politics entered the picture. John Berger’s A Seventh Man, a book exploring migrant labour in words and images, influenced the work, as did a growing awareness of the plight of toxic masculinity – not just the worst-case scenarios of machismo in the Mexican and world psyche, but what he describes as the ‘tiny moments of machismo in the joking and teasing of everyday life’, and the use of language like ‘man up’. Now approaching 30, he started to re-evaluate his younger self and look to where he might make positive changes in his attitudes towards gender – and all this too entered the work. The show is a satirical reflection on war and politics, but more, it asks: where are we placed in all this? How easily are we swayed? How readily do we follow orders? Do we turn a blind eye to oppression if it suits us? As for the Colonel, the epitome of toxic masculinity: every day he’s at war with himself; every day he invents a new battle, and makes enemies of those around him. It’s no way to live. The notion of the destructive internal dictator – what Andres calls ‘the dictator of the self’ – started to inform the process.

Eventually, of course, you have to stop the researching and experimenting, accept that the process could be limitless but must be limited, and get the work out there. Then comes the Kool Aid Acid Test: the audience. Always a vital part of the equation, but in Lorcuedus the fourth wall is frequently broken through, and the Colonel’s engagement with his public – his pueblo – is vital to the success of the piece. When seen at the Ficho Festival in Aguirre’s hometown of Guadalajara, he does not fail the test. The audience are with Colonel Quince for the journey: from the first, surreal image – the Colonel upside-down, head literally in the sand, as if rocketed into the space – through to the numerous gobbledegook calls-to-arms from his balcony; the contorted dances and mimes; and eventually to the extraordinary last scenes where he orchestrates us flinging our shoes on to a stage filled with earth, a humorous moment that suddenly changes tone when we view the bombsite that we’ve created…

There are some people who may well have created three or four or more pieces of theatre in the same timespan – five years – that Andres Aguirre has taken to make Lorcuedus, but the ‘slow art’ approach has really paid off here. Physical theatre of the highest order. Congratulations, Colonel Quince – the first battle is won.

Lorcuedus was presented at the Alianza Francesca theatre in Guadalajara, as part of Ficho Festival, on 19 November 2017.

Dorothy Max Prior spoke to Andres Aguirre at Caligari Cafe, during the Ficho Festival 2017. www.fichofest.com

For more on Atelier Teatro Fisico di Philip Radice see http://www.teatrofisico.com/

Nigel Barrett & Louise Mari with Abigail Conway: Party Skills for the End of the World

Skills. It’s all about skills. Party skills. Survival skills. Party Skills for the End of the World:

How to mix a martini – shaken not stirred, naturally. How to play a record – yes, there are people in this world old enough to drink alcohol who do not know how a turntable works. How to make a balloon animal. How to make a light bulb. How to tie a knot. How to pick a lock. How to use a knife – it needs to be sharp, and best to go for arterial points on the body that are low in fat, like behind the knees. How to turn your trousers into a float that can save you from drowning – come on, you did this at school, surely? Or scouts. Lifesaving badge. How to signal to a landing aircraft – you never know when that might come in handy. How to walk in high heels – heel, then toe, not toe first. How to dance. How to dance like all those people we see on YouTube, in all those clips we cheerily share on Facebook, to brighten up our workdays.

Party Skills for the End of the World takes us on an exhilarating journey: lambasting us with survival information (surviving life, surviving war and terror, surviving parties); embroiling us in party games (musical chairs, hurrah!); and showing us that there is nothing to fear except fear itself. Yes, bad things happen. It’s how we respond to them that matters. Do we grow ever more timid, terrified to walk the streets, or to talk to strangers? Or do we feel the fear and do it anyway? Yes, let’s dance, we have nothing to lose. We are all going to die, one way or another.

We are all going to die. Nigel Barrett – tall, broad, dressed in dusty jeans and a white T shirt stretched across his belly, a commanding presence yet vulnerable, his body still, his head face-on – stands on stage and says these words, looking out at a sea of young faces looking up at him. Are we afraid? Are we afraid of dying too quickly, without saying goodbye? Are we afraid of dying too slowly, in pain? We are all going to die. This bald statement – the only thing that we all know for sure – comes a good way into the show. We’ve supped cocktails, we’ve donned paper party hats, we’ve heard about the 32 things you need to teach your children, we’ve learnt that buttercups are poisonous, and that we should avoid furry caterpillars. We’ve seen two teams of people dressed in a hotch-potch of charity shop clothes dance a lackadaisical Macarena. We’ve peeled oranges and sewn their skin back together: ‘This is how to sew skin together. Imagine it is your neighbour, or your mother’. We’ve seen the space transform from a catwalk for survivors in evermore bedraggled and surreal garments to an arena rock gig, as two kit drummers (from the magnificent experimental music group AKDK) battle it out.

Ah yes, an arena, where there is live music, and young people enjoying a night out…

Party Skills for the End of the World is created, written and directed by Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari of the Shunt collective, and produced and co-commissioned by Manchester International Festival and Shoreditch Town Hall. It was originally made as a celebration of the people of Manchester. The artists worked in the city for months ahead of the Manchester International Festival 2017 premiere, engaging scores of people in the local community, creating and joining in with ‘skills’ workshops, and starting the process of occupying a large and complex site. On 22 May 2017, in the middle of the devising process, a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb was detonated as people were leaving Manchester Arena following a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande. Twenty-three people were killed, many of them young people, and over 500 were injured. In a country used to regular terror attacks, this one was particularly harrowing and terrible because so many of the victims were children and young adults on a night out. Now they’re coming for our children? The worst nightmare of all. This event didn’t alter the content of Party Skills: it placed the content within a particularly poignant context. Here were Nigel and Louise, working with dozens of young community performers and students from Manchester, when suddenly the very essence of the show they were all working on – how we brave the onslaught of fears the modern world throws at us – seemed suddenly to be about the current moment.

Now the show is being remounted at Shoreditch Town Hall, where a small R&D showing took place a few years ago. They have made the show in collaboration with visual artist/designer Abigail Conway. For this leg of the journey, Nigel and Louise are continuing to work with the core Manchester team, with additional participants and backstage helpers drawn from drama colleges such as the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (where Shunt formed almost 20 years ago).

When I see Party Skills on the opening night of its London run, I go in unaware of how and when it was made, which is good as its powerful message of the power of life over death (until we die, anyway!) and facing up to fear comes through loud and clear as something with universal meaning. The Manchester arena bombing, the war in Syria, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1970s IRA campaign of terror on the British mainland, the rise (then fall then rise again) in knife crime, the rise in gun crime, the Blitz, the refugee crisis after the Second World War, the current refugee crisis, school shootings in the USA – depending on your age, and where you live, any one of these could have sparked the same anguished soul-searching about fear, survival, and the need to party on, regardless.

It asks us – sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly – what we feel about fear and survival. How much time and energy do we give to our nightmares? One by one, people emerge from the audience to take the performance space, stating their name, age, address, where their parents are from. They offer us helpful or humorous or disconcerting or downright ludicrous information and advice. You suspect that every single thing we hear is true, and features in some government pamphlet or other, somewhere in the world. We are bombarded with this stuff throughout our lives, and we have to judge, on a daily basis, how to respond. Perhaps we might be better off worrying less about our news-media-induced nightmares and fears, and more about the things we can change. We can choose to be kind, to help other people. We can choose how much to consume, and what resources to use. We can choose to party, rather than cower in the bunker. Yeah, let’s dance. Let’s dance like there’s no tomorrow.

There’s a robust mix of professional and community performers in the show – a marvellous mish-mash of humanity of different ages, genders, cultures, and yes – skills. I especially like the way the young people taking part are honoured and profiled. In one scene, the performers and participants walk on a diagonal across the room, making numerous transits, the lighting creating a corridor to walk along until they reach the silver slash of the exit curtain. We watch this seemingly endless river of humanity flow past, and marvel at just how beautiful and strong and watchable all human beings are.

Party Skills, perhaps because of the scale, feels more like a Shunt show than some of the previous work Nigel & Louise have made together. When we end in the Shoreditch Town Hall basement, invited to drink and play in a number of delightful cellar rooms, each hosted by a performer, it feels almost as if we are back at a Lounge night in the Shunt Vaults underneath London Bridge station. But this is no bad thing. Shunt have been the leaders and innovators in the field of immersive, site responsive theatre over the past two decades, and there is no reason at all why the company members should not continue to use the tropes and devices of their past successes. But it is also very much a Nigel and Louise show, and like previous work is tightly written and artfully directed, the dramaturgical purpose of every word, action, sound and image carefully thought through.

It’s a clever and thought-provoking show, and it’s a very loveable show. I love the site and set-up. And who doesn’t love a show with free cocktails at the start? I love the performers, and I love the audience. It’s a show in which the two can’t be separated. None of us are passive in this experience. We move around, we play games, we learn skills, we dance. Some of the actors/participants are ‘in performance mode’ from the off; others emerge throughout the evening – and in some cases we are never totally sure who is and who isn’t, as there are ‘returners’ to the show who know the score and join in with authority.

But despite – no, because of – the fun elements it is also a show unafraid to broach the most serious questions we face. Questions that human beings have been facing forever: look around you, look at the people in the room with you. We are all afraid. We all want to be loved. We are all going to die. We are all here to dance. Dance, dance, dance – for the world might end tomorrow.

Photos by James Berry.

Party Skills for the End of the World is produced and co-commissioned by Manchester International Festival and Shoreditch Town Hall

Book here.