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

Compagnie MPTA / Mathurin Bolze: Barons Perchés

An elaborate construction of scaffolding and timber, an open-fronted house, sits on a high stage in the centre of the performance space. Lights dim, other low-lights glow. The house seems to have a life of its own, flickering and humming. A man – dark tousled hair, black jacket, white shirt – comes in, makes himself at home. He turns off some lights, turns on others, shakes a cloth out of a ‘window’, turns on the radio. French voices burble, the sound quality of an old-school transistor radio, slightly incoherent yet filling the space. The man’s shoes clatter on the wooden floor as he walks the length of his house and back again. He sits slumped in a chair with his back to us in the dim light, silhouetted. This low-key scene setting the mood of the piece is long, but we stay engaged. We know something is about to happen. Tension builds.

The change comes as the man opens up a trapdoor and disappears below the floor, and at that exact moment his doppelgänger bursts from a door high up on the wooden wall stage-left, careering down and bouncing up again to disappear back through the door. So yes, the floor is a trampoline. Well, this is a Mathurin Bolze show, so it would be, wouldn’t it?

The man and his shadow (or is it the shadow and his man?) are then engaged in a game of hide-and-seek or call-and-response. There are many ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments. One appears, the other disappears – through the trapdoor, or through one of the many doors and windows built into the set. One stands by the back wall window, and we see his shadow outside. As Man One (or is it Man Two?) moves, and his shadow remains outside, we do a little double-take, our brains tricked even though we now know that there are two performers. Each in turn flies through the air, bouncing off the trampoline floor to take up a different vantage point on the set. As they move through the space, jackets go off and on seamlessly. We lose track of who is man and who is shadow.

The two men move into a different game. Now they are brothers, twins. They fall onto the trampoline in tandem, their moves synchronised perfectly. Now there’s another shift. One is shirtless, limp, lifelessly slumped, then cradled in the arms of the other, a Pieta moment. It turns nasty as the shadow is bundled away through the trapdoor. In one of the most beautiful images in the show, we see a figure trapped underneath the trampoline, struggling to escape – seen as a body shape pushing against the resistant fabric, then seen as a black shadow, legs flexed like a frog, as an intense light trained onto the trampoline transforms the image.

And so it plays out – the man and his shadow, the shadow and his man, sometimes rivals, sometimes brothers, but always two parts of one whole. Hans Christian Anderson’s eery story The Shadow – in which a man’s shadow replaces him in his life – seems to be an obvious point of reference, although not cited as such in the programme notes, which mention Dostoevsky’s The Double (which was published around the same time as Andersen’s tale – something obviously in the air in 1846) and Edgar Allan Poe. We are also told in those notes that Barons Perchés is a sequel to Mathurin Bolze’s seminal show Fenêtres, which was based on Italo Calvino’s novella The Baron in the Trees – a text which has inspired many circus-theatre creators over the years. Apparently, Bolze is now imagining his hero (a young nobleman who has decided to leave his family and live alone in the trees) split into a younger and older self. I didn’t see Fenêtres, but have to say that witnessing this sequel, I struggle with marrying up my knowledge of Calvino’s text with what I’m seeing onstage, although the doppelgänger, or shadow, or two-sided man motif is perfectly embodied. Let’s be clear – my quibble is not with the show itself, just with how it relates to the stated artistic inspiration. Best not to worry about such things, perhaps, and focus on what we see onstage!

And what we see is truly inspiring. The physical skill of both performers, Mathurin Bolze and Karim Messaoudi, is of the highest quality. Theirs is a delicious dance of bodies exploring every possibility of gravity, levity and resistance, using the trampoline, the set, and of course each other. In one minute they are hurtling on and off the trampoline at breathtaking speed, in another they are walking slowly along at ceiling height on top of the scaffolding, or poised in stillness like lizards on the open front wall, seen in silhouette.

The moodiness of the piece is broken up with the obligatory (in contemporary circus-theatre) loud and brightly-lit clowning moment – in this case, as the performers become a pair of rival birds, cockerels strutting and crowing. It feels a little like it is there to give the men a few minutes respite from the intense demands of trampolining rather than having any sound dramaturgical purpose, but we’ll allow them that!

The sceneography is beautiful – set design, lighting (which exploits the ‘shadow’ metaphor in every way it can) and the limited but effective use of video projection all working harmoniously to tell stories using pictures rather than words. And the sound design, by MPTA company member Jerome Fevre, is brilliant. How marvellous it is to see – and hear – a show in which sound, vision and physical action work so harmoniously together. The soundscape includes creaking cellos and melancholic piano lines mulched in with tweeting birds, chirping crickets, and the drone of the radio station. There is also live sound – a swanee whistle here, a dash of harmonica there – and the sound of the set itself features, as a clever mix of contact mics and one large ambient mic hanging from a light pendant pick up the bangs and thumps of bodies and objects hitting the trampoline or the scaffolding, turning the impact sounds into crashing cymbals or chiming bells. Throughout, the house feels to be as much of a character as the man and his shadow – but at this point in the show it really shouts its presence.

Barons Perchés is not a perfect show – there is the occasional slip in pace or tone, and I’m left with a few dramaturgical conundrums that bother me, such as: Why does the house appear to be moving through the landscape? Why are the men now wearing brightly coloured sports clothes? It is conceived, directed and performed by Bolze and could perhaps have benefitted from an outside director. Nevertheless, an excellent show. A marvellous merging of sound and vision, fantastic physical performance, and a thoughtful exploration of the ever-appealing doppelgänger theme.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Carnesky Productions: Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman

What’s the time, Mr Wolf? Oh – it’s that time. Time of the month. Lady time. Time for your little monthly visitor. Dr Carnesky eschews these euphemisms, preferring to explore the metaphor of the snake shedding its skin, to emerge renewed. The mythology of menstruation is her subject, and we are treated to a potted version of her PhD thesis, slide-show enhanced, which rattles us through musings on female icons Medusa, Hydra, and Kali, to confront the conundrum of the stainless Virgin Mary, taking us eventually to the notion of the crucified, bleeding Christ as a prime example of womb envy. Blood, death, resurrection. Move over, Jesus – it happens to us all the time. We learn along the way that make-up – rouge, red lipstick – can be traced back to the symbolic smearing of menstrual blood on the face, at which point Carnesky suddenly, as if by magic, has a bloodied face and hands. ‘Wearing make-up, we are all menstruants,’ she says.

And, bloody Nora – she’s not alone. Bleedin’ women, all over the shop. One (Fancy Chance) with a lipstick hidden in her fanny, conjured up to enact a ritualistic rouging of her body. One (MisSa Blue) a sword-swallower who injured herself a while back when performing whilst menstruating – the oesophagus swells in sympathy with the womb, it would seem. One (H Plewis) who performs a flowing dance with blobs of her own frozen menstrual jelly as a prop, reappearing later with the ultimate fertility symbol, her baby daughter Sula. One (Molly Beth Morossa) draws witchy circles of salt that she writhes within, whilst the screen behind her shows an image of a full moon. One (Rhyannon Styles) is seen on screen performing a rite of passage ritual on Southend beach, as her live self tells us that as a transwoman, she may not bleed monthly but she certainly experiences a cycle. One (Nao Nagai) who appears in a whole-body mask as a Yokai, a comedic phantom from Japanese folklore. Carnesky herself is seen on film bathing in blood as she tells us that she has experienced four miscarriages, and needed to find a way to work through the disappointment of the arrival of the blood that signified that the pregnancy was ending. Voila – the Menstruants! Or is it the Menstronauts? They seem to be both. Regardless, this group of women (which also includes Priya Mistry, who is not performing this evening) have met regularly at Dark Moon – the time of the birth of the new moon – over many moons to research the lore of menstruation, to enact ritual, and to create performance.

The resulting research is presented to us by Dr Carnesky, resplendent in a midnight blue gown with red-sequinned cape, who uses a form familiar from many of her previous shows, a performance-lecture that is both serious and tongue-in-cheek at one and the same time, interspersed with contemporary sideshow vignettes that both celebrate and subterfuge the popular theatre, circus and cabaret traditions of the show-woman making a spectacle of herself. ‘Do you believe in menstrual magic?’ she asks the audience. Yes, we shout – the loudest shout coming from a very young girl in the gallery.

The Doctor is on great form – her voice dips down into Thatcher-esque depths, then rises into girlish cheekiness. She moves from university lecturer mode to music hall entertainer with ease, addressing the audience directly: How many of us are on the rag tonight? Hands are raised. More than last night, Dr Carnesky observes with a twinkle in her eye – by the end of the run she predicts that the whole audience will be menstruating in synchronised harmony, and that includes the men.

Sometimes the performance mode moves into a poet’s declaiming rather than a professor’s explaining. The screen behind returns many times to the image of the moon, as we are reminded that observing its waxing and waning was the original means of calculating the passing of time.

The ‘lecture’, the live performance vignettes, and the still and moving images segue together seamlessly, for the most part – although some of the film work is not of the best quality. The music is a lovely mix, embracing fairground waltzes, sultry foxtrots, and Pierre Henry-sounding vintage electronica. All of the performance pieces are strong: I’m particularly blown away by Carnesky regular H Plewis – and let’s face it, you can’t beat a hair-hanging finale number (Veronica Thompson aka Fancy Chance on fine form).

It’s great to see this usually taboo subject bursting onstage in all its bloody glory, Dr Carnesky continuing in her ongoing quest to use sideshow, magic and popular entertainment forms to explore serious subjects. Here, not just menstruation and menstrual rights, but also female body shame, what it means to be ‘female’, issues around fertility, and the lost herstories of our matriarchal past. Yes, the revolution will be bloody – prepare to be cleansed and regenerated, shed your skin, and emerge born anew with the new moon.

Sleepwalk Collective: Domestica

A long table covered with a cloth. A banquet? Perhaps we are in Olympia and this is a feast for the gods. Or the goddesses. A candelabra. Perhaps we are in a castle. We could be in heaven, or perhaps purgatory. Hell, even – there’s a lot of smoke. We could be anywhere mythical. Anywhere that we’ve read about in stories.

There are three women. They could be Olympian goddesses, their gowns look – well, Greek. They have colourful bows on their backs, so perhaps they are princesses. Or are those wings? Angels. Fairies. They could even be witches. Or muses. They can, actually, be anything you want them to be. They have no demands to make. This, they say, is about ‘us versus you’. Their bodies, your gaze. Their words, your interpretation. They are going to waste as much of your time as they possibly can, without mercy. They will pose for you, they will form gracious tableaux, they will be the canvas onto which you project your hopes and dreams and fantasies. Look, the Birth of Venus. Joan of Arc. Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Snow White (Brothers Grimm or Disney, take your choice).

Or we can go further back. The Garden of Earthly Delights. Adam and Eve and that darned apple. Suggestions for a scenography scroll by, white on black, on the back wall of the stage. An altar. Red velvet curtains. A balcony. A statue. A forest at night. A bowl of fruit. A serpent.

On the (three) TV monitors – the modern muses – images flash by. Art. War. News. Culture. It’s all just pictures, pictures, pictures. A chorus line of horrors marches towards the void.

On stage, a woman lies on the ground completely still, and to her side a stuffed deer on a pedestal stares out glassy-eyed. ‘A dead person’ and ‘A live deer’ say the projected words. You can’t trust your eyes. You don’t know what to believe. You don’t know what to think, what to feel.

And the layers of sound build and grow and ebb and flow. Loops of symphonic music rising to an epic crescendo. Words mediated by microphones: litanies and lists, poetic declamations. Pieces of paper are peered over, pulled from one hand to another.

They wait, and wait, and live in hope. ’I’m waiting for a lover like a doggy waiting for its master’. They touch each other tenderly and offer a gentle sisterly kiss on a brow or a sweet smile. They are apart, and they are together. They lounge, they stand, they twirl on a motorised turntable. They occupy different levels – floor, table, floor. They are whatever you ask of them, but they wonder what went wrong along the way, through all those millennia of art and poetry and philosophy and storytelling. What do they get out of it? Where is our gingerbread house, they ask. Where is our Fairy Godmother? Where are our talking animals?

Domestica, by Anglo-Spanish company Sleepwalk Collective, has been a long time coming. It was started in 2012, premiered in its Spanish incarnation in 2014, and has taken another two years to rework into its English language version. Previous company work that I’ve seen has been performed solo by Iara Solano Arana. Here, she is joined onstage by Gloria March Chulvi and Malla Sofia Pessi, forming a holy trinity of performers who work beautifully together. Company co-founder Sammy Metcalfe is writer and composer, and the work has no named director, being collectively credited to Sleepwalk Collective.

It’s worth the wait. I’ve always loved their work: Iara Solano Arana’s extraordinary voice and stage presence; the carefully crafted words; the innovative play with moving image; the inventive scenography. But in Domestica, they have made a great big leap into new territory, in both form and content, and it has paid off. They’ve taken on the whole of ‘Western’ civilisation’s art, culture, and prevailing religions, and delivered it back to us as a distorted dream, drawing us into the collective unconscious of archetypes and mythologies, asking us to question the evidence of our own eyes and ears. It’s an exhilarating love-hate homage to high art. A bold and beautiful new theatre for a brave new world. Bravo, bravo!

Sleepwalk Collective: Domestica is at BAC 5–8 October then touring the UK autumn 2016.

For dates / further information see www.sleepwalkcollective.com

Photo (top) by Alessia Bombaci

Over the Hills and Far Away

Dorothy Max Prior samples some of the delights on offer at Inside Out Dorset, a ten-day festival of outdoor and site-responsive art and performance

Up the hill we climb, and climb, and climb. It’s almost, but not quite, the autumn equinox, the balance of light and dark; and it is almost but not quite dusk, the point where day meets night. We are near the village of Littlebredy, in Dorset, not so far from Dorchester. Hardy country – in both senses. Thomas Hardy country, and countryside that is robust and rugged. ‘It’s like a pilgrimage, isn’t it?’ says a man who is obviously an experienced hill walker, as he overtakes me. Walnut brown skin, dressed in shorts despite the chill of the evening, using a makeshift walking stick to propel him faster up the hill. I’m also overtaken by numerous small children, who run up the steep incline effortlessly as I huff and puff behind them, stopping often to look at the sun going down behind the trees, or to smile at the fish-on-sticks installation in a field to my right, or to note that the cars in the visitors’ car park far below are looking more and more like Matchbox toys with every passing minute.

And at last we’ve arrived, on a flat hilltop area with a panoramic view of the countryside. We’re here for Wayfaring, one of the key commissions for this year’s Inside Out, an installation and performance by artists Mandy Dike and Ben Rigby, collectively known as And Now:. Although the company was formed just three years ago, the pair have worked together for years, and both have formidable reputations, through their work as sculptors, makers and pyrotechnicians with legendary companies such as Welfare State International and The World Famous..

Night is falling fast. The hills all around us now have silver linings – yes, I do mean the hills, not the clouds. To our right, as we come over the summit of the hill we’ve climbed, we see a long avenue of hay bales, wrapped (as is the modern way) in black plastic – I think combine harvesters regurgitate them that way these days. I should have asked the farmer, Tom, who I met that evening. But as we stare down the ‘street’, wondering what might be at the other end, our attention is drawn to what’s behind us. A couple of figures are spinning fire poi in the distance, and a haze of smoke surrounds them. Out of the haze emerges a tall man – a shaman-guide, in a striped jacket and a kind of cowboy hat, bearing a stick decorated with bells that he beats into the ground. He starts to walk towards and then through the crowd, followed by a trio of musicians – a saxophone player, a tuba player, and a drummer/percussionist.

What ensues is a ritualistic journey in honour of the land. The rhythm of the earth, the passing of time, is beaten out by a chorus of around a dozen people striking stick upon stick, or stick upon bale. We move down the ‘street’, and when we get to the end and the bales fan out into two rows, we also fan out into two groups, and strip-the-willow down one row and back again. We see a man-made (or more like woman-made) copse of wooden trees and stakes and other sculptural forms, with fires burning around them. We see engorged hearts sacrificed to the land gods, and we hear a litany of thanks – to the cows, and the sheep, and the lions, and the wolves (so far, so good) and the frogs and the slugs and the wasps. The children in the crowd protest, but our shaman insists: they all have a place in this world, all creatures great and small. On cue, he and the musicians burst into a robust rendering of that well-known hymn – with the words altered to make it a secular song. We give praise to them all. And to the wheat and the corn and the oats and the barley and… Everything. Everything there is.

And Then: Wayfaring. Photo Elliott Franks

I remember years ago environmental art company Red Earth’s Caitlin Easterby telling me that almost everything we see as ‘natural’ in the countryside has been sculpted in some way by a human hand. I’m reminded of this here, as we overlook what seems to be untouched beauty – but there is evidence of a hill fort, there are barrows, paths, grass, trees. The land itself has ben sculpted over hundreds of thousands of years. Let’s get to the heart of the matter: our mark is clear; we leave traces.

We’ve danced around the bales, and sung the songs, and seen the sacrifice, and now the piece ends with the wooden sculpture-installation burning vigorously, and the expected whoosh of a fireworks finale. Although, for me, the fireworks are the least vital part of the evening, and I’m pleased that there is a coda: as the fireworks fizzle out, the ropes circling the installation are taken away, and we are allowed to come closer to the burning circle of wood. Now we stand quietly and peacefully, feeling the heat, watching the fire burn – as, no doubt, our ancestors did before us, perhaps on this very spot.

Bill Gee, producer and co-artistic director of Inside Out, puts an arm around my shoulders and we stare out together: ‘It’s what we do, isn’t it? Stand on top of hills at night, watching bonfires,’ he says. I’m not sure if the ‘we’ he means is the human race; or those of us who work in the outdoor arts sector – but it’s ‘yes’ to both of those in any case. As we make our way down the hill, stumbling a little in the dark, holding on to each other for support, it really does feel like we’ve been on a pilgrimage. A beautiful piece of work to mark the turning of the year.

Gobbledegook Theatre: Cloudscapes

It rains in the night. We’re woken in the morning to grey skies full of scurrying clouds, and the sound of Cooper the black labrador barking outside. We open the door of our ground-floor level BnB room to see not just Cooper but his friend Trotsky the pig keen to come in and say hello. Who could refuse a friendly pig on the doormat? I’m pleased I no longer eat pork – I wouldn’t be able to look Trotsky in the eye otherwise. So no bacon, but there are eggs for breakfast, fresh from the garden hens. They, Cooper and Trotsky all seem to co-exist quite happily. We don boots and coats, leave our digs and head off for Hengistbury Head, near Christchurch.

Hengistbury Headlines is our mission for the day – an art trail through a beautiful nature reserve on the Dorset coast that is home to over 500 plant species and 300 types of birds. As we reach the coast, the sun comes out – and stays out for the rest of the day. It is the autumn equinox, a beautiful end-of-summer day. We could have left the coats and boots behind.

Both plants and birds – and a lot more besides – feature in this marvellous cornucopia of installation and performance, much of it inspired by the site, some of it specific to this site, and all of it responding to the site in one way or another. There are eight works, and I manage to engage with most of them, although very minimally in some cases. But this is pretty good going, as some are a 40-minute walk out along the spike of the headland, and performance times overlap. I’m here on a Friday, a four-hour stint, and note that on Saturday and Sunday the event is open for six hours – which I think you’d need to see them all. All works are free to audience, although some are ticketed.

Amongst the ticketed shows is Gobbledegook Theatre’s Cloudscapes, written and performed by the company’s director Lorna Rees. This one is sited at the far end of the Head – through the woods then along the sandy beach. We arrive a little breathless, just after it starts, and are invited to each take command of one of the large, square cushions on the ground and to sit back and cloud-gaze (with sunglasses thoughtfully provided). Lorna, perched on top of an umpire’s chair above us, delivers a homily to cloud, sky and air – an eloquent train of thought with ideas that, just like the clouds themselves, form, hold steady for 10 minutes (the average life of a cloud), then disperse and reform. We learn about 18th century chemist Luke Howard, the father of meteorology, who is famed for his nomenclature of clouds, and whose work inspired Shelley’s poem The Cloud. We gaze upwards, as Lorna does at the punctuation points in her text, to a sky filled with clouds that seem to be static – but look away for a few minutes and look back, and they’ve changed shape completely. If I’d paid attention in my school geography lessons, I might be able to tell you which of Howard’s three main classification groups these big, cushiony clouds fall into – cumulus, stratus, or cirrus. We hear that René (‘I think therefore I am’) Descartes was an avid cloud-gazer, who moved from France to Holland because it had better clouds. There’s a story of a road trip with her dad that gives us some lovely anecdotes – of mushroom-cloud swimwear, and tourists told off for photographing clouds rather than rocks at the Grand Canyon. She sometimes seems to be pushing the subject matter a little bit further away from the core than it should be, yet she always reins it back in successfully, ‘self-ruining’ and rebuilding the narrative in cloud-like fashion. By inviting us to relax and listen, and to look up rather than along the horizontal plane that we mostly operate in, Lorna Rees has given us a marvellous gift. The stories she tells are beguiling and beautifully woven together, and the whole experience is delightful. Plus, there’s a kind of documentation booth (her ‘cloud box’ which is called Colin, after her grandfather) set in a horse box: the post-show icing on the cake – a repository of books, artworks, and photographs related to the project’s research and development. Lovely work!

The Miraculous Theatre Company: Romantic Botanic Photo Elliott Franks

‘To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.’ Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

Also ticketed and of fixed duration is Romantic Botanic, created by The Miraculous Theatre Company – Barnaby Gibbons, Paschale Straiton and Roger Hartley. It’s an eccentric promenade piece, and similar in this sense to the Red Herring show Funny Peculiar, an alternative tour of Brighton that Paschale Straiton made a year or two ago with Ivan Fabrega. Both shows take the form of a mis-guide to the territory, blending fact and fiction artfully. In Romantic Botanic, the subject matter is the flora and fauna of Hengistbury Head, and more specifically, the secret love life of plants. Barnaby Gibbons, in role as the tweedy countryside enthusiast Edward, is our chief guide, enthusiastically propelling us along paths and into leafy glades, stopping to invite us to admire the view or to sniff a flower here and there, or to tell us the story of Narcissus as we gaze into a pond. He’s aided and abetted by Paschale as the dotty lady scientist and devoted pagan tree-hugger Barbara, and BOSI’s Roger Hartley as the cheery Peter, a batty, blundering collector armed with AR-15 rifles, on the never-ending hunt for the (possibly mythical) Hengistbury Tuft. Barbara’s running gag about the mating of a silver birch and an oak (to create, yes, a birk) works very well, particularly as Paschale brings her character to life with her usual brilliant gusto and street-theatre sass; and the point in the piece where we come across Peter dozing by a tree that he then wires up so it can sing to us is brilliant. Some other moments and jokes drag a little, and the piece could have done with a bit of pruning, but for the most part, it’s a success. And there is a great ending, as a lily-padded pond proves to be harbouring an unexpected form of life…

Another promenade piece, although this time unaccompanied by anything other than an adventurer’s pack and a mobile phone, is Pebble Gorge’s You’re Getting Warmer – a digital treasure hunt for 7–11-year-olds and accompanying families. The children are cast as agents of change on an ecological mission to save the Marsh Warbler and stall the dreaded climate changers, the Three and a Half Degree Gang. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a 7-year-old with me, otherwise I may well have fared better. As it was, my usual curse on anything that involves auto-teatro navigation with electronic equipment kicked in – the phone froze on a cheery animation, and I had to abandon the chase. I am most definitely not the target audience for this one – but in the short amount of time I was in the game, it all seemed to be jolly good family fun, and educational to boot. I did, at least, get to find out where the Warbler lived…

There are two other performance pieces. Sweetshop Revolution’s Tree we get a sniff of – not the actual show, sadly, but we catch sight of a glorious feathered creature, a human bird who is apparently part of the team, and stop to pass the time of day with this magical being. Arbonauts (Helen Galiano and Dimitri Launder) offer The Soaring Sky, a coastal walk through a sung performance of birdsong, created by local singers who respond to the calls of migratory and endangered birds on the site. Which sounds gorgeous – but sadly it isn’t possible to get there. Kate Paxman’s Overture is a sound installation outside the former coastguard hut that sits at a high point on the Head overlooking the seas, which curve around three sides of the land. We find the hut, and walk all around the outside of it, enjoying the magnificent view, but struggle to locate the sound work. As there is such a beautiful natural soundscape here of crashing waves and calling birds, I do wonder if perhaps the artist has just ‘framed’ this spot, rather than adding to it.

Jony Easterby: Remnant Ecologies / Do Not Feed the Birds

Birds feature heavily in this programme. Jony Easterby (who I know mostly through his brilliant work with Powerplant, and also with his sister Caitlin’s company Red Earth, mentioned previously) has a number of installation works dotted around the Head. The works go under the collective name of Remnant Ecologies, all installation pieces running continuously, although one of the pieces, Do Not Feed the Birds, co-commissioned by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), seems to have a cycle of 25 minutes duration – a series of sound installations triggered by ‘algorithms, the wind and sun, and birds themselves’. What we actually see and hear is an assemblage of deconstructed birdboxes, from which emanate a beautiful, symphonic ‘composition’ of birdsong. I pass by numerous times in the afternoon to see and hear this beautiful piece of work, and note that adults, children and dogs all seem equally enchanted by what they are hearing. Elsewhere across the Head, Jony has triggered trees to sparkle with green lights and sing with sampled birdsong, and in a densely wooded area, installed an extraordinarily exotic medley of bird and animal noises. I think I hear monkeys but that might be my over-active imagination.

Also bird related is Ferdinando Bernstein Byrne’s Hides. Two very different hides are located on a cliff overlooking the beach. One is like an enormous nest; a great big donut of twigs and leaves, which the visitor can enter to sit awhile. Inside are an assortment of strategically placed objects that hold echoes of past days – the glory days, perhaps, of Victorian and Edwardian adventurers and explorers. A pair of binoculars in a leather case, a small birdcage, an oil-burning lantern, balls of twine, framed paintings of flying ducks… Even closer to the cliff edge is a square, whitewashed, open-sided hut, wallpapered with maps showing migratory routes not of birds but of human beings, with an accompanying low-volume soundtrack of recorded voices. Dotted below is a ‘path’ of fluorescent orange lifejackets, going from the edge of the sea all the way along the beach and up the cliff to this second ‘hide’. There seems to be a story here that contrasts those who choose to cast themselves away from home comforts in the quest for exploration and discovery, and those who have no choice but to be cast out from their homes, to seek refuge elsewhere. One seeks to hide amongst the birds to watch them, the other finds themselves following the paths of the migrating birds, travelling far across the sea. Hides is a thought-provoking piece of work that I wanted to really stay with and investigate more fully. But sadly the day is drawing to an end…

Had I not had to leave, there was also the option to take part in an RSPB Big Wild Sleepout at Hengistbury Head that night, to include campfire cooking, ‘nocturnal adventures’, and a memorable dawn experience as sounds of the harbour, sea and wind combine with the song of migrant birds. Plus, a special sunrise Fl-utter-ances walk with artist Jane Pitt.

Elsewhere in the 2016 Inside Out programme, Ray Lee’s monumental sound and light sculpture, Chorus, opened the season at Portland. The programme also included a number of circus performances, such as the darkly comic Le Cirque du Platzak which charmed audiences at Gillingham. A whole day at Poole on the closing Saturday, entitled Up in the Air, featured works that included Acrijou’s dance-acrobalance duet All At Sea, the Bullzini Family’s high-wire spectacle Equilibrius, and the crowd-pleasing drumming and pyrotechnics show Sparks! by World Beaters.

All in all, an impressive ten days’ worth of works that animated the towns and countryside of Dorset, showing the magnificent range of artistic expression that comes under the Outdoor Arts umbrella – from circus, to street theatre, to environmental art, to sound installation, to promenade performance, and beyond. And all of it free to audience, in keeping with the ethos of this sector of work.

I would have loved to have seen it all, but very happy with what I managed to get to. The two days I spent in Dorset with Inside Out gave me the opportunity to really engage with the (psycho, mytho) geography of the place through the artworks on offer; to walk in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy and meet and listen to ‘trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.’

Inside Out Dorset. Photo Elliott Franks

The quote in the last paragraph is from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Featured photo (top of page) is Ferdinando Bernstein Byrne: Hides, on site at Hegistbury Head. Photo by Elliott Franks http://elliottfranks.photoshelter.com/

Inside Out Dorset took place 14–25 September 2016, at various locations in Dorset. Co-artistic directors are Bill Gee and Kate Wood. www.insideoutdorset.co.uk

Inside Out is the flagship event of producers Activate Performing Arts: www.activateperformingarts.org.uk

Thank you to Martha Oakes PR for their help and support, and to Martha for company on the journey.

And Now: Wayfaring. Photo Elliott Franks

Compagnie du Hanneton: The Toad Knew

Acrobat, poet, clown, magician, musician, actor – the talents and skills of James Thierrée seem almost boundless. Inevitable, perhaps, coming as he does from such an impressive line of artists: great-grandfather Eugene O’Neill; another great-grandparent the Music Hall star Lily Harley; grandfather Charlie Chaplin; parents Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin, legendary circus artists. Theatre is in his blood; circus was his school. Now, his Compagnie du Hanneton are here at the Edinburgh International Festival with their sixth show.

So what’s it all about, then? Ha – we should know better than to ask such a question of Thierrée: ‘I do not make theatre to explain what shakes our inner workings, but rather to roam around,’ he says in the programme notes. ‘La grenouille avait raison. Pourquoi ? Je n’en sais rien.’ I know nothing. But why did the French frog become an English toad, that’s what I want to know. I probably never will. I will add it to the mysteries of the show.

This much I know. The red curtain is drawn back by a chanteuse (Mariama), and we see a breathtakingly beautiful magical chamber – shimmering fabrics in silver-grey, old gold, copper, teal. Perhaps it is an extraordinary creature’s den deep below the earth. Perhaps it is a scientist’s lair reimagined by HP Lovecraft. Perhaps it is a steampunk space-station. At ceiling height in this chamber is what the artist calls ‘un kaléidoscope caractériel’ which may or may not translate as an emotionally disturbed kaleidoscope. What I see is an oddly ominous collection of spherical objects on wires that seem to have a mind of their own – mini flying saucers that hover, group, and separate, glowing in different colours. The brain of the cell, perhaps? The chamber has a metallic spiral staircase, leading nowhere, that twists and turns around a kind of Chinese pole – thus providing a very lovely site for acrobatics, as well as making a suggestion of something otherworldly that is in between Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Murakami’s IQ84. The chamber also contains a water tank waiting for its Ophelia, and a magnificently ornate upright piano with the most decadently curvaceous legs you could imagine. Every so often there is an ominous electrical sizzle from the rear of the stage, lighting up human figures and turning them into shadow puppets. Is Dr Frankenstein in the house?

There are other inhabitants of this space. Human, possibly fairy, and animal. The two that we see most of, and are drawn to constantly, are a pair of fairytale siblings locked into an endless battle, existing in a space filled to the brim with love and rivalry. James Thierrée has met his match. Valerie Doucet is formidable. Formidable. (You need to imagine that said twice, once with an English accent, then again in French.) She ties herself into knots. She drapes herself round him, and around the piano, limbs akimbo, a spine like a rubber band. She spars and tumbles with him, her wild honey-brown hair trailing and flying. She flips and turns and falls and rises to fight again. She is the Goose Girl who gets stuck to anything or anyone she touches. These Arms of Mine… They are hilarious together, an extraordinary clown act. They are Beauty and – er, Beauty. Animus and Anima.

And Thierrée, of course, is always the clown – but this is the show in which he seems to have said to himself, well, I am of an age to really show that I am Chaplin’s grandson. So be it. It is whimsical, and lyrical. There is far less of the ensemble acrobatics and movement work from earlier shows, far more clever clowning and solo body-work or humorous duets. He takes no prisoners, pulls out all the stops. His body is fluid and mobile. He both celebrates and mocks himself and his heritage in a replaying of so many classic silent-movie clown routines. The priceless violin played beautifully, then thrown away in a crash of broken wood and strings. The handshake that becomes a wrestling match. The clattering silver dishes that fight back. The squaring up to the tall man, who might be the Guard (Yann Nedelec); or the short man, who seems to be the Servant (Samuel Duterte). Also in the mix is dancer/aerialist Thi Mai Nguyen, who is a kind of Deus Ex Machina, or magic helper – an ethereal Tinker Bell or Puck flitting through the space or around the staircase and aerial structures.

It’s not all away with the fairies: there is Mozart, there is Nina Simone. And there is a garish red plastic bucket floating in the water tank to bring us down to earth. There is also some absolutely gorgeous puppetry and object animation, including the culminating image of the show, created by the marvellous Victoria Chaplin (Thierrée’s mother) – where we at last meet the Lord – or perhaps Lady – of the Lair.

This is an almost word-free show. There are the song lyrics, and there is a kind of grommelage that occasionally uses a few recognisable words of French or English, but the words are part of the wash of sound – there for their semiotic value, not their semantic worth. This is visual theatre, in the words of Antonin Artaud, ‘furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams’. This is circus – a bold circus interested in pushing the ‘trick’ or the ‘act’ or the ‘numero’ to its furthest limits. This is an amalgam of those two forms that is of the highest order –Thierrée is at the height of his powers, and The Toad Knew is a pure and absolute joy.

A dream of a show. A dream you don’t want to wake from.