‘My mother always told me you can cure almost anything with a hot bath.’

Two women in identikit white body suits sit in a white bath tub. Except it’s not two women, it’s one woman. A woman and her subconscious self. A woman and her inner child. A woman and her mother’s voice, which follows her around constantly, not just heard but also felt.

This woman is a modern woman of the world. She’s different to her mother.To the mother who has just died, and for whom a eulogy must be written. A eulogy written, a casket chosen, flowers ordered, a dress bought. And nylons too, perhaps. Our two-in-one woman rants against these tasks imposed upon her by her mother’s bereavement, and she rants against her mother – still the little girl who is trying to cut the apron strings. She is not like her mother. Not at all. Her mother was always neatly coiffed, immaculately dressed, beautifully made up. She has never, never ever, seen her mother eat French fries. Never, not once. She struggles to understand who her mother actually was. What did she do? What did she love?

Running through the show are continuous references to the white wedding that her mother never got to host. Maybe she’ll wear white to her mother’s funeral rather than black? Her mother was desperate to see her in a white dress in a church. Even as she plans the flowers for the funeral, bride’s bouquets seem not too far from her mind. Lilly of the valley. Baby’s breath.

The grief-stricken and angry and sulky and often hilariously funny rants and raves explode outwards, morphing into sobs and songs and screams. The two voices speak or sing as one voice, or in cannon, or in call and response. They mirror each other precisely, or overlap, or run just slightly out of synch, or in counterpoint. There is harmony, and there is dissonance. Much of the piece is a cappella, but there are interludes of recorded music with a rock or jazz or gospel vibe sung over or against.

The relentless outer-inner dialogue about the funeral arrangements is complemented by a number of set-pieces of feminist critique, for example, a great monologue on women’s voices and how high and low pitches are perceived and interpreted.

Mouthpiece is written and performed by Amy Nostbakken (who many UK audience members will know as the musical director of Theatre Ad Infinitum) and Norah Sadava, who are based in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. The women complement each other perfectly. Different heights and colourings, different talking and singing voices, very different performance qualities. It’s a physically robust show – exhausting just to watch these two excellent performers whose vocal gymnastics are matched by a gruelling choreography of physical actions in and around the bath tub – movement director/dramaturg Orian Michaeli, working with director Amy Nostbakken (who also composed the music), has done an excellent job in physicalising the voicework. The two women mirror, shadow, and see-saw; pushing, pulling, gyrating, supporting.

It’s not an easy ride, for performers or for audience: Mouthpiece is cathartic, disturbing, unnerving – but there are many moments of humour to counterbalance the intensity. It tackles a number of difficult subjects head-on: bereavement, especially when there are conflicted feelings about the dead person; the nature of the continuing insidious oppression of women in a hundred different small ways day in and day out; and the way that women collude in that oppression. Most of all, it tackles the one subject that many modern women find so immensely difficult to deal with: how do we make peace with our mothers, whether they are alive or dead?

Mouthpiece is presented at Edinburgh Fringe 2017 under the auspices of the Canada Hub programme at King’s Hall, in association with Summerhall and Aurora Nova.

Bella with White Collar, I and the Village, The Fiddler, The Praying Jew, The Birthday… We know and love these Chagall paintings – they feed our souls and invade our dreams – and here they are recreated live on stage in Kneehigh’s The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, which charts the great love story of Marc and Bella Chagall in glorious pictures, words and sounds.

The painting are presented to us not as facsimiles in paint on canvas – nothing so crude and obvious – but as human bodies singing, dancing, making music, making love. Inevitably, in a show about a great visual artist staged by a great visual theatre maker, the scenography and dramaturgy are completely and harmoniously intertwined. The raked stage is patterned with painted swirls and dribbles; the screen to the rear serves as a canvas for a constantly evolving painting in light; and the four performers – two musicians, Ian Ross and James Gow; and  a pair of perfectly paired actor-singers, Marc Antolin as Marc Chagall and Audrey Brisson as Bella  – create a succession of tableaux vivant and moving pictures that constantly delight. The only time that director Emma Rice and designer Sophie Clist choose to have an actual Chagall reproduction on stage it is when we encounter the Praying  Jew (the Rabbi of Vitebsk) – but this is very much tongue-in-cheek as the Rabbi’s portrait is ‘puppeteered’ with human arms sticking out to the side – one of many lovely comic moments in the show.

The action takes place on a stage within the stage, the audience on three sides – this stage supplemented with a musician’s station, which is centred around a piano bearing an old-fashioned lamp; and a comfy armchair placed downstage, which is often Bella’s place of refuge. The back screen also serves as a shadow theatre screen, and the space around the sides of the stage is also a performance space – used most effectively, for example, when Bella in wedding dress steps down to address us as her wedding guests: ‘People offer doubts as gifts,’ she says, referring to her family’s reservations about her marrying a poor painter. A Jewish painter who wants to waste the rest of his life with her!

As is always the case with Kneehigh, music plays an important part in setting the scene, conveying the mood, and driving forward the narrative.  The two musicians play piano, cello, accordion, fiddle, trumpet – sometimes from their off-stage station, and sometimes taking centrestage – perhaps donning papier-mache headresses. (The cockerels, cows, candles and clocks of Chagall’s paintings find their way into the stage pictures in many and various ways!)  Audrey Brisson sings like an angel in Yiddish and French.The choreography embraces bright and breezy Jewish Russian wedding dances and delicate moments of love and romance – the lovers fly from the ground not on harnesses or pulleys, but using the simple effect of a well-held acrobalance pose on a chair, or dangling gently from a short rope hanging from a wooden beam. Less is more, and it works beautifully.  Emma Rice does stage sex very well: as we saw in Tristan and Yseult, and other earlier Kneehigh productions, she has an excellent knack of creating breathtakingly tender and erotic duets between her main characters.  Here, when Bella softly rolls over the length of Marc’s body, or straddles him on a chair, or literally leaps into his arms from across the stage.

The lovers’ story takes them (and us) on a breathtaking journey through twentieth-century history. The pogroms, the Russian Revolution, the renewed animosity towards Jews, the rise of Nazism, life in exile in Paris or Berlin or New York… At times, we are subjected to slightly too much information, and scriptwriter Daniel Jamieson puts rather too many words in Marc’s mouth: a heavy burden is placed on the character of Chagall to constantly carry that story, and perhaps there could have been a little more transposing of narrative into physical or visual narrative.

Jamieson and Rice do not shy away from presenting the occasional difficulties in Marc and Bella’s marriage and the conflicts between them, nor the flaws in Marc’s character – some of which we could see as of-its-time masculine attitudes to the woman’s role in a marriage, and some of which as the acting out of the eternal (and ongoing) Romantic view of the life of an artist as something separate from and above the domestic. Bella’s hurt when Marc doesn’t come to visit his newborn daughter because his painting had taken an inspirational turn is raw and harrowing – she tries to tell him how painful the birth was, and he replies: ‘Do you thing what I do happens painlessly?’ Yet if those were the days that produced paintings we see as masterpieces, was that justified? There are no answers. It is a dilemma we still tussle over in the 21st century.

We do, though, see Marc change and grow. Throughout their marriage, he mocks and dismisses her interest in theatre, and her desire to write and to act. ‘I wish actors would just stop moving around so we could get to see the scenery better’ he says dismissively. (This of course raises a big laugh in the auditorium.) After Bella’s premature death – he lives on for many decades after her – he finds her notebooks, filled with her memoirs in Yiddish of her  and their life in Vitebsk, and says wonderingly: ‘We saw the same things, but with different eyes’ – finally acknowledging that rather than being an appendage to his creativity, she was a creative person in her own right.

The Flying Lovers of Vitebesk, which premiered in Bristol in 2016, is Emma Rice’s final production as artistic director of Kneehigh, and a fitting and fulfilling end to that particular chapter of her life. Having played at Shakespeare’s Globe (where Rice is currently artistic director, a role she will rescind in 2018) it is presented at the Traverse as part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2017.

Circus Hub: two shows, one from Australia’s Circa, possibly the world’s number one circus company, who bring Humans to this year’s Fringe; and the other is just the second show from UK based Barely Methodical Troupe, whose sparkling first show Bromance won a Total Theatre Award. Their new show is called Kin.  Let’s start with Kin…

‘Here we are again gentlemen’ says the young woman in a trenchcoat and shades, dinging her bell. Round one. Show us what you’ve got. The five men vie and jockey for the woman’s attention. “great things come in small packages’ says BMT co-founder Beren d’Amico, flipping and twirling across the floor, ending in a boylesque moment with pants pulled down. We are treated to a brief history of the diabolo (a Chinese bird-catcher, apparently), and a tune on the accordion from Frenchman Jean-Daniel Broussee who later finds himself ‘interviewed’ by the woman (Nikki Rummer). ‘Take a seat’ she says. There is no chair. In a lovely little clown moment, he perches awkwardly on her table before sliding down to kneel on the ground, attentive as a small dog. You and me baby – here, have a banana…

Barely Methodical Troupe: Kin

JD is the chosen one, but it doesn’t last long. Who should I choose? Why? The men are lined up on plinths, laurel wreaths on their heads. Every one a winner. Every one a loser. The ante is upped; the real skills come out to play. Charlie Wheeler’s cyr wheel routine, performed to David Bowie’s Five Years, is a real treat. He is so soft, so flowing, the clever moves made to look easy peasy – and always in harmony with and response to the music. Yep, worth a banana. (The cyr returns later fin the show or a thrilling double-act – a rare treat.) Next question. What are you afraid of? Blood, death, pigeons. Marks so far? A teeter-board comes out.  A breathtaking routine to Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien. The audience applaud wildly, but our woman isn’t happy. Again! she cries. And again. And again.

Kin is a very wise and witty exploration of the state of young manhood, and an interesting reflection on the nature of circus itself. The need to please ‘the other’, be it the elusive ‘woman’ or the anonymous ‘audience’. The constant competing for attention – to be the best, to be the chosen one, to break records, to break hearts. The format works because having been set up, it is pushed to the limits with confidence. There is a well-balanced mix of solo turns (from all the men, and from Nikki, a gymnast turned circus performer who’s a dab hand at  flips and walk-overs), duets of all sorts, boy-girl and boy-boy, and gorgeous hand-to-hand ensemble sections playing with the woman as ‘other’, as she clambers and climbs, is carried and thrown. Towards the end comes a shift, and our lone woman becomes integrated into the group, and a spellbinding six-person acro routine presents them on equal territory, a group of six bodies of different shapes and sizes in the space, gender irrelevant.

Circa: Humans

Circa’s Humans is as carefully crafted and highly skilled as you’d expect from this seminal circus company. What does it mean to be human, is the key question that started the process. How much weight can a body carry; how far can a body stretch? Although, it must be said, that these ten ultra-fit acrobats only represent one aspect of humanity – the top end of physical fitness. That said, here is a lovely exploration of the human at play in the world.

It is interesting to think about the notion of ‘human-ness’ in relation to other occupants of this world: ‘I Wish I Was a Lizard’ sings out from the soundtrack as a female contortionist moves in an eerily non-human way across the floor, stopping to tangle herself up in a way that makes her pigtail look like her tail. This is an ensemble work, and all ten performers are brilliant and work in harmony with each other, taking the lead, then falling back into chorus – but our pigtailed girl is the one I’m drawn to most.

There are three other women in the show, and six men. Most of the action is floor-based acrobatics, tumbling or hand-to-hand – gorgeous three-high towers and huddles of all sorts. A marvellous line of people moving in various ways from the back to the front of the line – walking on shoulders, swinging around or through bodies, body surfing, walking on heads. There are some set-pieces: a good-enough trapeze act, a really lovely hand-balancing act on tiny floor-level red bricks, and a three-person straps/strops tag-team (on separate rigging I hasten to add). There is also a very well executed contemporary take on the old vaudeville favourite, the Rag Doll routine, as a woman is puppeteered around the stage by her male partner.

The transitions from one to another are beautifully managed, as is Circa’s way, with our attention being moved tenderly from one solo or duet to another via the intervention of other performers to ‘close’ one act and ‘open’ the next. Music, as ever, is an eclectic mix, from Joanna Newsom to Caetano Veloso. Veloso’s Triste Bahia is used for a long and beautifully executed acrobatics sequence that loosely references capoeira, ending in a frantic shake that conjures up the trance like states entered into when the spirits are summoned in Candomble.

If there’s a criticism it’s that the dramaturgical premise is a little loose and drifted away from now and again. It feels like some of the acts in the show are just that – acts slotted in as crowd-pleasers. And pleased the crowd obviously is – so that’s fine.

Fauna

From Circus Hub to the Assembly, which also has some great circus shows this Fringe. I’m yet to catch Gandini Juggling’s Sigma at Assembly Hall, but managed to see two pieces at the Assembly Roxy – both nominated for a Total Theatre Award – Fauna and All Genius, All Idiot.

Fauna, sharing some territory with Circa’s Humans, takes as its starting point the notion of exploring primal behaviour in humans, comparing and contrasting human behaviour with that of other animals. The company is an international one with performers drawn from other well-known circus troupes, including NoFit State (Wales), Les Sept Doigts (Quebec), and Gravity & Other Myths (Australia).

We start with darkness and the sound of bird songs and calls, and as the lights come up a group of five creatures flock and strut to the sound of a classical Spanish guitar, giving the movement something of a flamenco feel. (Guitarist and percussionist/ live soundscape creator Geordie Little is a real asset to the show.) Battle lines are drawn up: we see courtship rituals, competitions for supremacy, and cunning attempts to outwit other members of the pack. This plays out in some very lovely duets as the three women and two men pair up and regroup in a constantly evolving quest for the survival of the fittest (or sometimes the funniest). A feather is stolen cheekily from a head; two men lock in what feels like mortal combat; a woman and a man wrestle and roll frantically. From the skills tally perspective, there is some excellent floor tumbling, hand-to-hand and acrobalance; some nifty handbalancing on canes; and a great comic trapeze turn. This bunch do upside down brilliantly. There are extensively held handstands, hand balances on canes and floor and other humans, headstands, and heel hangs from the trapeze. Sometimes they are upside down for so long it starts to feel that this is their natural state. The duels get dirty sometimes: there is hair pulling and body trampling, and (giving Circa a run for their money) a good ragdoll duet. There is plenty of action, thrills and spills, but there is also great pace and rhythm, and a lovely use of silence and humour.

Svalbard: All Genius All Idiot

Also at Assembly Roxy, London International Mime Festival hit All Genius All Idiot is yet another show exploring what it is to be human – in this case, revelling in the most animalistic aspects of human behaviour. Drunkeness, debauchery, hedonism, gender bending, and wild and dirty disco dancing all have a part to play. The four-man team engage in what Tom Wilson in his Total Theatre review called ‘a hedonistic celebration of the Bacchanalian spirit’, which sounds pretty spot-on to me. The show takes the form of an anarchic gig set in a post-apocalyptic pagan hinterland and witnessing it is like taking part in some kind of extreme cathartic ritual. It’s not for the feint hearted, but brave hearts will be rewarded with a transcending experience.

And also stepping out of the traditional restraints of circus comes Ellie Dubois’ No Show (Summerhall), featuring a five-strong team of women who start the show with a girly chorus line to the tune of Pistol Packin’ Mamma, then go on to mock and challenge our expectations of women in circus – and indeed of circus itself. The ‘look pretty and smile, smile, smile’ syndrome is satirised in a running joke with hand-balancer Alice Gilmartin gagged, pushed onto her canes with any number of hups, and then talked through her act by her companions. ‘Can you do something different, Alice. That’s too much like the last thing you did’  and ‘turn to look at the audience, Alice – and bat those eyelashes, it’ll divert the audience’s attention from those big arms of yours!’ Lisa Chudalla takes to the cyr wheel – a piece of apparatus more usually associated with male artists – and as she demonstrates the basics of the form – basketballs and leg crosses and coins – we are told how heavy and dangerous it is. If it lands on her foot, her toes will be crushed; if it hits her head, then possibly concussion will result. We hear cartwheeling Kate’s story of wanting to do the power tumbling but being expected to do walkovers and high kicks, or  ‘feminine’ aerial numbers on silks rather than her preferred Chinese pole.

And so it goes. It works well. There’s a good balance of the presentation of real circus skills, and the parody or mockery of the mores of circus (traditional or contemporary) and how it likes to present its women performers – Lisa gets to do a full-on cyr wheel act, Kate gets to tumble powerfully, not just cartwheel endlessly, and Alice finally gets to go up on the canes without any ‘help’ to see her act through. There’s also a great hair-hanging act, and some nifty accordion playing from Francesca Hyde; and as a grand almost-finale, a flying trapeze number minus the trapeze from Michelle Ross. Five strong women doing what they do best – that’ll do nicely.

Featured image (top) Ellie Dubois: No Show. Photo Chris Hoyle.

 For details of all shows and to book, see www.edfringe.com 

For the Total Theatre Awards shortlist see www.totaltheatrenetwork.org