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

A Day in the Life of the Edinburgh Fringe

Give Me Your Love. Give Me Your Love. GIVE ME YOUR LOVE.

Yes, yes, yes – Ridiculusmus slay me with a beautifully written, gorgeously designed and staged, magnificently performed show that leaves me weeping.

There’s an elephant in the room here. Except it’s not an elephant, it’s a brown cardboard box stabbed with ragged holes. Skate around it, skirt around it, but there it is. There’s someone inside. Get out of the box, shouts a disembodied voice. You get out of whatever you’re in, comes the retort. Through the holes we see feet in scuzzy trainers. An eye staring warily at us. A male crotch in grubby cut-down shorts. A finger wriggling out, telling the story of a decapitation which may or may not be the root of the box-dweller’s trauma. A Beckettian mouth, agape, distraught. There are objects in the space. A roll of parcel tape. A piece of piping that falls to the ground when the door is rattled. Ah yes – the door. Locked, with a chain on. The disembodied voice is trying to get in, and when that fails, get something in – a tortuous process involving string, pulleys, and discarded junk mail envelopes. Like previous Ridiculusmus work, this is a piece in which words are important, but the words are embodied in extraordinary physical, visual, visceral performances. Totally total.

Give Me Your Love is the second in a trilogy the company (David Woods and Jon Haynes who write, devise, direct, perform) are making about innovative approaches to mental health. Here, the investigation is into the use of MDMA with sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (the box dweller is a former soldier). The show, seen on this occasion at Summerhall, has been previously reviewed by Total Theatre Magazine at the Sick! festival in Brighton.

So that was a good start to my Ed Fringe 2017. On next to Pleasance Courtyard for two shows by ensemble physical theatre companies – old hands Gecko and relative newcomers Theatre Re.

Gecko: The Dreamer

Theatre Re’s offering, The Nature of Forgetting, gives us four performers who take the tag ‘physical theatre’ seriously. They run on the spot, they throw chairs between them, they cycle on bicycles fixed to the floor, they dance on tables. Is there a mime or physical theatre more that they have forgotten? I don’t think so. Photo freeze-frame moments, tick. Watching an imaginary film, tick. Rails of clothes whizzed on and off stage, tick. Funnily enough my favourite moments are the quietest ones, in which the lead character, a man called Tom with early onset dementia, sits in a chair on his 55th birthday, agonised by his lack of understanding as he tries to recall his daughter’s words about which jacket to wear: ‘Dad. Mike’s coming with Grandma. The blue jacket on the end of the rail. The red tie is in the pocket.’ As he tries and fails numerous times to locate the right jacket, or find the tie, or work out which arm goes into which sleeve, we watch in agony, silently willing him to succeed. These moments are proof that the best ‘physical theatre’ is actually about the calm control of the body rather than frenetic running about. The ensemble are also not helped by the two live musicians (drum kit and synthy keyboards) whose bombastic accompaniment often ruins tender moments. The show is very well received – full house, standing ovation – and I’m pleased to see this sort of classic Lecoq work appreciated at the Fringe. But to be honest, if you want to see a lyrical and whimsical show about memory and loss, I’d suggest booking yourself in to Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Translunar Paradise, which does the same thing a lot better.

Much of Theatre Re’s repertoire of physical moves brings early Gecko to mind – so it was interesting to move immediately on from The Nature of Forgetting to The Dreamer, Gecko’s collaboration with Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre. The ante is upped. As we enter the space, we are confronted with an enormous set on two levels. Performers are running in and out of the auditorium, wearing flowing overcoats and with miner’s headtorches, chattering to each other or taking selfies on their phones. The following hour is a delightful deconstruction / reconstruction of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with disappointed lover Helena cast as the central character, the object of her desire (Lysander) betrothed to her best friend Hermia. The show also references a Chines play I am not familiar with, The Peony Pavilion (by Tang Xianzu) about a woman who falls in love with her dreams. The ensemble work is excellent – precise, and to the point. Yes, it is all very typical of Gecko – the flocking and unflocking, the juxtaposed duets on different levels, the clever use of chairs and ladders, the disorienting tipping-up of pieces of staging and objects – but the Chinese performers give the vocabulary a new zest. The massive set – including a giant bed that whizzes on and screens used effectively for sections of shadow theatre – is used well, with interaction between human body and object always precisely executed, creating a a piece that is a great flow of beautiful visual images. My only reservation is the representation of Fairy Queen Titania’s foolish love Bottom – having set up a world in which the lovers (Helena et al, who play out their play centre-stage) are in modern-day Shanghai, and the fairies (on the top level or in the little stations below) are in other-worldly floaty costumes, Bottom arriving in traditional donkey-eared garb seems somehow odd. And is he even necessary dramaturgically in a version of the story that focuses on and recasts Helena as the lead? That aside – a good show, which manages to highlight contemporary issues for young Chinese women within a frame of reference accessible to audiences worldwide.

And now for something completely different, at the Assembly Roxy: Trygve versus a Baby, in which a world-famous mime artist (Trygve Wakenshaw) shares the spotlight with a baby. But not just any old baby: this is his 13-month-old son Phineas. As the audience arrives both are dressed in white romper suits – well, Trygve’s is actually a white shirt and ludicrously tight white spandex leggings but you get the idea – and both are rolling and romping on the stage. Although Phineas sometimes takes off in a run from one side of the stage to the other, which Trygve comments on, pointing out that the show is very different to how it was when they started two weeks ago – Phineas couldn’t run then. I suppose I’m expecting an hour of father-and-son improvisation, but no – this is a properly written and rehearsed sketch show, with walk-on (crawl-on, run-on) parts for Finius who arrives from the wings as the sun, as a matador, and as a boxer amongst other roles. When he comes in as a lion, with a little tail pinned to his bottom, Trygve holds at bay with a chair. It is all very cleverly orchestrated, with the tight structure allowing for the joys of in-the-moment improvisation, in the best clown and physical comedy tradition. It is extremely funny and heartwarming, but also an interesting reflection on how eager human beings are to perform. Perhaps there are off days, but on today’s showing Finius and Trygve both very clearly bask in the sunshine of attention and applause.

Spitfire: The Narrator

My final show of the day is at Zoo Southside – Spitfire’s The Narrator, a new show programmed alongside their award-winning One Step Before the Fall. Like its sister show, The Narrator features an intense physically challenging performance by one woman (Cecile de Costa) on stage and an offstage musician on numerous instruments, including drumkit. The relationship between them is excellent: a flamenco-style tattoo of the feet is picked up by the snare drum, and the mic’d up floor of the rather stunning set – a square stage surrounded by tanks of water, sand and gravel – picks up the sounds of her feet, feeding these sounds into the soundscape. The relationship between sound and physical action is as vital here as it is in One Step Before the Fall. There are many beautiful moments: feet scuffling on gravel, the whole body immersed under water, a dowsing in sand to become a woman of clay. And there is voice: beautiful song that sounds like a Gregorian chant; an intense poetic rant that brings Patti Smith to mind. There is also spoken text which is less successful. It may be a case of lost in translation, but the words are puzzling, making little sense (in the wrong sort of way). If I heard correctly, ’God is not the name of my three unborn children’ is a line repeated in many different parts of the show. The show purports to be about ‘secrets, about the unspeakable truth, about being a woman’ and although I love a fragmented narrative as much as the next person, and don’t need everything spelled out for me in a show, I nevertheless felt that I wanted just a little more inclusion into this story of – what? Miscarriage, perhaps? Despite that reservation, it is a powerful show delivered by two excellent performers, Spitfire proving again their prowess in the creation of intense, physically embodied performance work that goes straight to the guts.

Featured image (top of page):: Ridiculusmus: Give Me Your Love.

Full details of all shows, times and tickets prices/booking options at www.edfringe.com

Slap and Tickle – Cheese and Pickle

Dorothy Max Prior encounters the force that is Liz Aggiss, whose show Slap and Tickle comes to the Edinburgh Fringe 2017 as part of the British Council Showcase.

‘I stage a revolt against the mundane and banal through the re-appropriation of glamour and beauty. I am a one-woman operation; performing, directing myself, writing texts, sorting visuality, constructing choreographic mash-ups, producing, administrating, and generally puzzling how to communicate complex ideas in a clear visual performance form.’

Liz Aggiss is 64 years old and describes herself as ‘the enfant terrible of the bus pass generation’. Four years ago, after 40 years spent straddling the worlds of dance, film and academia, she decided to make a new solo show, The English Channel, to mark her arrival at pensionable age. How to explore the ramifications of turning 60? ‘Do I please you, or do I please myself?’ she asked, dressed in a perky green sequinned mini-dress.

Liz Aggiss is The English Channel

Having made that show, there was, she discovered, residue: ‘Leakage – there is often leakage!’ In other words, there was a lot of material generated that didn’t quite fit the form. ‘I put it to one side… I didn’t know if there would be another show. I thought, at 60, that perhaps I only had one piece left in me – but after two years of doing The English Channel I felt compelled to make this next work.’

And lo and behold, the emergence of Slap and Tickle. ‘It was inspired by the question: Are there any women in the house? A question which set me going… ‘

‘Are there any women in the house? Any foxy ladies? Any yummy mummies? Any pishy old Susans with trouble downstairs?’

Slap and Tickle asks a lot of questions about language, about women, about the ways that language can be used to oppress women.

‘This was the meat and bones of the piece – it started with that. I made this ‘women in the house’ section – now the middle part of the show – first, not sure whether I was going to make a full-length piece. I tested that material at Live Art Development Agency and at Queen Mary’s – and it just felt like it might have the possibility of opening up…’

And open up it did. Soon enough, there was another show on the road. But if any of the above reflection on gender politics and language and what-not give the impression that this is a po-faced piece of polemic – far from it. It is a fun-filled feminist frolic, rife with double-entendres, dirty jokes, and deliciously saucy dances.

Slap and Tickle is structured with three acts or distinct sections punctuated by party games (pass the parcel, and a manic balloon twisting interlude) that give Ms Aggiss time to change from one extraordinary costume to another. In Act One, her Cinderella phase, she is in silver slippers and a gorgeous old-gold party dress, with a vest and breeches underneath that would do Buttons proud. In Act Two she is stark and monochrome in a dramatic version of the figure-hugging ‘little black dress’ that every grown woman ought to have in her wardrobe. By Act Three, she’s in a red dress and no knickers, sporting a magnificent horse’s tail (platinum blonde to match her hair) that dances enticingly from her bare bottom as she struts and prances around the stage. It’s a fabulous moment of emancipation and celebration of the older female body.

‘Humour and irony are the best means to engage an audience with the serious propositions of the work. They provide a space and a frame to invite the audience to be nudged into the challenges of the content. Laughter is also a pleasurable response to elicit from an audience. Would I pay to be miserable and confused? Not knowingly!’

Survival Tactics, a performance-lecture by Liz Aggiss

Liz has had an eclectic career in contemporary dance (and other animals). She started off in the 1970s with a Teacher Training course in Keele, then various jobs teaching PE teachers how to teach dance. Following a piecemeal self-organised training programme through workshops in London at the Laban Centre or Pineapple Studios – very much what you did in those days – Liz took herself off to New York for two years (1980-1982). Here she found, through the listings in Dance magazine, that the range in training and professional development in experimental, contemporary dance were far wider and grander than in the UK. She spent a summer ‘studio hopping’ from Graham to Cunningham to whatever else she fancied, before eventually alighting upon Alwin Nikolais and the Dance Theatre Laboratory New York. ‘You know when you find the thing that’s right for you?’ she says, singing the praises of Nikolais and lead teacher Hanya Holm, ‘Allowing you to play with form. Boundaried improvisations. Very specific…’ This notion of finding freedom in discipline comes up a lot in Liz’s explanation of what makes her work what it is.

Back in London, she trained with the legendary German Expressionist Hilde Holge, and, now based in Brighton and running the dance strand of the Visual and Performing Arts BA (a course that produced many fine artists, including Robert Pacitti and Marisa Carnesky) formed Divas with composer Billy Cowie, an anarchic dance theatre company that defied the expectations of the day with extraordinary ensemble pieces for bodies of all sorts, in works such as Falling Apart at the Seams. In tandem with this live stage work came a longterm preoccupation with and exploration of ‘dance to camera’, creating international award-winning short film and video installation work that used choreography in innovative ways, including the larger-than-life Men in the Wall.

Whether live or on film, creating moving pictures is at the heart of the work. Big, bold pictures. ’I don’t have an ounce of lyricism in me’ she says, explaining why she turned to kohl-eyed, grotesquely-costumed Expressionism at a time (the 1980s) when most other contemporary dancers were dressed in grey sweatpants and exploring Somatic Practice or Contact Improvisation. ‘I’ve always hated jumping and rolling on the floor’ she says ‘I like the jarring, the angular, the distorted.. I like to make a stop-frame animation live performance…’

Liz Aggiss: Grotesque Dancer

A major development in her work came with the creation (in 1986) of a solo piece Grotesque Dancer, her homage to the Expressionists who inspired her: the people she describes as her silent mentors and invisible chums, sitting on her shoulder and guiding her. People like Valeska Gert, Mary Wigman, Bronislava Nijinska, and of course Hilde Holger…

Her father came to see it and was so shocked, he called out from the back of the auditorium: ‘Good God, Elizabeth, what the hell do you think you are doing?’ He wasn’t the only dissenter. Although the piece, and others by Liz Aggiss’s company Divas, garnered a plethora of good reviews, this was counterbalanced by damning critiques from the likes of John Prentice of The Times who wrote, as Liz puts it, ‘three columns of pure anger’. What was he so upset about? Women dancers not looking like they should look, or moving the way he thought they should, apparently.

‘I deliberately make a spectacle of myself, de-familiarising the codings of femininity. I violate boundaries between being subject and object. I am the author, so it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. Come on everybody lets have a party!’

As she has aged, Liz Aggiss has become more, not less, provocative and more determined than ever to expose the ludicrousness of the oppression of women through disapproval. Specifically, disapproval of bodies on stage that do not conform to expectations of what the female dancing body should look like or act like. She also challenges our expectations of what ‘dance’ is and can be, making work that crosses boundaries of form.

‘I have an odd, eclectic, non-specific background in being classifiably unclassifiable, an un-disciplined inter-disciplinary artist. Through chance, opportunity, research and belligerence I found a performing art in the expressive gesture and grotesque performance form that suit my body and me.’

Expressionism is one major strand of influence on her work; another is the tradition of Music Hall and Variety. Liz’s grandmother was her portal into this world. This East End gran curled ostrich feathers for a living, and adored Marie Lloyd. ‘She used to sing those songs to me. Kick her legs up and dance round the bed.’

The old Variety stars have always held sway in Liz’s world: Max Wall, Wilson Keppel and Betty, Jack Stanford… . It is, says Liz, musing on the fact that so little of popular theatre is archived or preserved, ’a real creative force that has got lost’. Often, the traditions and skills of Variety and Eccentric Dance are passed on person-to-person rather than in formal dance or theatre training – Liz has, for example, worked with legendary Variety performers Joan and Barry Grantham, who are possibly the last remaining living link with the early twentieth century UK Music Hall and Variety world.

She playfully extracts from and reworks ideas from Vaudeville and Variety, whilst making the work her own: ‘What I do is reconstruct – extemporise into contemporary culture.’ She loves the way Vaudeville stars had an act that they toured and toured for years. ‘When people went to see Wilson Keppel and Betty they wanted to see their Egyptian Sand Dance, not a new act,’ she says, going on to reflect that fans of her first performance company, the Wild Wigglers, also wanted to see the old favourites. Their greatest hit was Hop on Pops, which involved the three Wigglers (Liz Aggiss, Neil Butler, and the dearly departed showman extraordinaire Ian Smith) bouncing up and down to an electro-pop soundtrack, wearing stripey body suits and pointy hats. Pure genius.

Similarly, people often come back to see Slap and Tickle more than once… ‘They wonder, did she really say that? It’s a dense, multi-layered piece of work; you maybe didn’t catch all the innuendos, all the filth…’

Another aspect of the work – of all Liz’s work – is relationship to audience. In good old-fashioned Music Hall tradition, the fourth wall is regularly kicked down.

‘How to invite the audience into the space? How to make an audience active not passive, to cross the fourth wall? To engage full-frontally with the audience. How to be a solo artist in a space that engages with more than one person. How to be a role model – if I am – I suppose I am. There aren’t that many 60-plus women who even want to be getting up on stage; who feel compelled to say something about being a mature women in a predominantly Peter Pan world.’

Her process, when making her own work and when choreographing others, is rigorous. She says that people are often surprised when she goes in to the rehearsal room on day one with a script: ‘Oh, you mean we are not going to improvise?’ they say.

‘I don’t go into the studio until I really know why I’m there, rather than entering the studio with some vague idea… I’m just much more interested in refining, through research, why I’m present in the room as a body and how that body might be used. What are you doing and why are you doing it? This is important.’

Timing is everything. Timing and precision. Along with all the best artists working in dance, theatre, clown, and stand-up comedy, Liz Aggiss has the ability to deliver a charged moment on stage that appears to be improvised but is in fact tightly written and painstakingly rehearsed. Choreography: writing with the body…

‘The body needs to be able to repeat – every gesture, shift, nuance – the same touch of the foot in the same way at the same place every time. I don’t improvise at all! When people come back they are surprised to see the same things happen at the same time in the show…’

What then can the audience coming along to see Slap and Tickle expect?

‘Expect to see a mature solo woman engaged in a feminist soup of collage and cut-ups, whilst lurching seamlessly between dance, text and song. Expect to revise your attitudes on mature female visibility. Expect a mirror to be held up to the invidious nonsense, name-calling and restrictions perpetrated to limit female expectations and aspirations. Expect a visual treat with a dizzying array of props and costumes, an aural soundtrack down memory lane and juxtaposition between vaudeville and high art, live art and physical theatre. Dark, funny, raucous, sophisticated, and potent – it will make you simultaneously cackle and cringe.’

Liz Aggiss’s Slap and Tickle will be presented 21–26 August 2017 at Zoo, Edinburgh Fringe as part of the British Council Showcase.

Slap and Tickle photos by Joe Murray.

Her next commission will be for Mischief la Bas’ new project Nursey Crymes. She will be making a film inspired by the legendary eccentric dancer Jack Stanford (aka Mr Rubber Legs) which will be shown in The Panopticon Glasgow as part of the promenade installation-performance on 24th & 25th November 2017.

For more on her work see www.lizaggiss.com

Edinburgh Fringe 2017 Pick n Mix

You shall go to the ball, Cinders!

Yes, I’m off to the Edinburgh Fringe: a little late to the party, the first time in years that I haven’t been there for the opening week, but it’s all fine as there’s more than two weeks to go, and the last week includes the British Council Showcase, which offers some of the best of UK work to an international gathering of producers and promoters.

So, what am I going to see? How to choose. Play it safe or wander off on wild adventures?

Circa: Humans at Underbelly Circus Hub

The Dance, Physical Theatre and Circus section is always my first port of call. There are plenty of circus delights at the Circus Hub, Underbelly’s two-tent venue on the Meadows. These include Acelere by Circolombia. I’ve not seen this show, but I know the company and have high hopes. Other familiar circus companies at the Hub include Australia’s finest, Circa, here with Humans; and the Total Theatre / Jacksons Lane Circus Award winning Barely Methodical, creators of Bromance, who are back in the Burgh with new show Kin.

I’m sad to note that Cirk La Putyka’s Batacchio (Zoo Southside) finishes on 12 August, so I’ve missed that one. Never mind! Other Czech goodies at Zoo include the return of Spitfire with two shows: first there’s TT Award winning One Step Before the Fall, in which two women – one performer/dancer with fabulous presence and boundless energy, and one musician/singer with stunning sound-bending skills – enter a boxing ring to deconstruct and replay a few minutes of Muhammed Ali’s boxing career; and not only that gem but also The Narrator, a one-woman ‘story about secrets’ that I’m very much looking forward to experiencing.

Spitfire at Zoo Venues

Back to the circus: more goodies can be found at Assembly Roxy, who have the London International Mime Festival hit All Genius All Idiot (Svalbard Company with Aurora Nova), and another Aurora Nova supported show called Fauna which I know nothing about other than the brochure blurb, which promises ‘a captivating exploration of primal behaviour’ – but I’ve heard good reports, so will be booking myself in. Other Assembly Festival circus treats include Casus who since their Fringe success with Driftwood last year have whizzed around the world and wowed audiences here there and everywhere, and now bringing the show back to the Burgh; the return of the magnificent Gandinis, who this year manifest as a three-woman exploration of the juggling and dance dynamic with a piece called Sigma; and Quebec circus stars Flip Fabrique with new show Transit, following on from last year’s success with Attrape-Moi! (Catch Me!). More from Montreal at Pleasance ECC who are hosting Cirkopolis by the fantastic Cirque Eloize – a Fritz Lang-inspired show I saw a couple years back at Brighton Festival and enjoyed greatly / reviewed favourably. Check the reviews section of this site to read all about it.

The more usual Pleasance Venues (Dome and Courtyard) have a number of great physical theatre shows, including not one but two by Theatre Ad Infinitum, the one-man tour de force The Odyssey, and the word-free and stunningly beautiful mask-theatre piece about bereavement, Translunar Paradise. Two other great ensemble British companies with an Internationalist approach at Pleasance: Gecko team up with Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre for The Dreamer, and Mime Festival supported Theatre Re present The Nature of Forgetting. And also at Pleasance, one I won’t be missing is the irrepressible Anton Adasinsky of Derevo with his solo show Last Clown on Earth.

Listed under dance is a little gem at Greyfriars, a Rosemary Lee video installation called Liquid Gold Is the Air, which has a soundtrack by Graeme Miller. It is a 15-minute loop repeated throughout the day – so could be a lovely pause in a busy day of shows. This is presented in collaboration with The Place. If you want actual, physical dancers rather than dance-to-camera, then head down to Dance Base, who have (as always) an eclectic and interesting programme. I’m hoping to get there for Argentinian two-man dance / physical comedy show Un Poyo Rojo. A flag-up also for Finnish physical theatre company Kallo Collective, who last year collaborated with Thomas Monkton on Only Bones, and this year present Helga – Life of Diva Extraordinaire at Summerhall.

Sh!t Theatre: DollyWould

Ah yes, Summerhall… Richard Demarco’s year-round Edinburgh venue with a strong penchant for European visual theatre and experimental performance. Far too many interesting looking shows to namecheck them all, but some I have my eye on include Mouthpiece (featuring the fantastic Amy Nostbakken, music-making star of Theatre Ad Infinitum shows The Big Smoke and Bucket List) which is part of the CanadaHub programme at Summerhall. I’ve also got a yen to see Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story by Zb Theatre Company, also part of the CanadaHub programme, also looking to be an interesting take on the music-theatre crossover possibilities, and featuring Klezmer folk sensation Ben Caplan. The curated programme within the prgramme thing has really taken hold in Edinburgh. In a Fringe of many many thousands of shows it is inevitable that people will be relieved to find something familiar to latch on to, The Big in Belgium programme, also at Summerhall, is a guaranteed-to-please theatre brand for those of us who love European experimentation in general and the Flemish front guard in particular, and the 2017 line-up includes old favourites Ontroerend Goed with Lies alongside a number of interesting shows by Edinburgh newbies (new to me anyway) such as On Ice (yes, it is on ice) and Arm – Mireille & Mathieu, an absurdist object theatre piece that seems right up my street.

Arm – Mireille and Mathieu. A Big n Belgium show at Summerhall

Arm – Mireille and Mathieu. Big in Belgium at Summerhall

I’ll also be going along to Summerhall to see perennial TT favourites Ridiculusmus (Give Me Your Love), the circus-shape-shifting Ellie Dubois (No Show), and the always-funny and thought-provoking Rachel Mars (Our Carnal Hearts). Shunt’s David Rosenberg is also there with Seance, another collaboration with soundscape artist Glen Neath (working together under the name Darkfield) an ‘intense sonic performance in a shipping container. Fun, fun, fun! Talking of which – Sh!t Theatre are back! This time it’s not politics or unemployment or the housing crisis, it’s Dolly Parton. The show’s called DollyWould. Of course it is. Another clever-funny artist is Jamie Wood, creator of Edinburgh Fringe hit O No! (a quirky homage to Yoko Ono) whose new show I Am a Tree is at Assembly George Square.

Over at the Traverse, Kneehigh give us The Flying Loves of Vitebsk, written by Daniel Jamieson, directed by Emma Rice, and inspired by the life and work of Marc and Bella Chagall (opening 15 August); Zoe Coombs-Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott prove they too are not afraid to talk out of their arses in Wild Bore; and the fabulous poet and storyteller Inua Ellams is at the Trav in the final week for A Evening with an Immigrant.

It’s worth noting that many good shows are late openers, often only on for a few dates during the British Council Showcase (which takes place during the final week of the Fringe). These short-runs include Paper Cinema, who are presenting their instant live animation take on Macbeth at Pleasance Dome from 21st August; RashDash, who bring back the exhilarating Northern Stage hit Two Man Show (in which two women play two women playing two men) to Summerhall for a few days that week; and the magnificent diva of experimental expressionist dance, Liz Aggiss, whose saucy feminist frolic Slap & Tickle comes to Zoo from the 21st (seen and reviewed most favourably in the Brighton Festival).

Hot Brown Honey: Total Theatre Award winners 2016

A couple of other shows previously seen and highly recommended are Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman (Pleasance Courtyard), which grabs menstruation by the pussy and waves a red rag at detractors; and one of last year’s Total Theatre Award winners, Hot Brown Honey, which is another ensemble of feisty female performers taking taboos about race and gender by the short and curlies and giving us a new song to sing. Let’s here it for singing – singing is so much what we need. Another returning winner is FK Alexander. I’ve seen / experienced / taken part in (I Could Go on Singing) Somewhere Over the Rainbow twice already – and may well go back for a third time. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be sung to by a brilliant performance artist channelling the spirit of Judy Garland whilst accompanied by one of Britain’s best noise bands, Okishima Island Tourist. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

No, of course we’re not. We’re in Edinburgh, remember. The Fringe. Ah yes…

That lot, I can see, will be far two much for one person to see in two weeks – but I am going to give it my best shot. I will report back. Watch this space.

Wild Bore at the Traverse

Enter the Dragons – and Divas, and Dancing Girls

If I see another article or blog about the dearth of women theatre writers and directors, I warn you I will scream. Scream and shout in a hissy fit, and stamp my feet. Why? Because people are looking at things the wrong way up. They’re looking but not seeing. Whilst wringing their hands about it all, they’re missing all the marvellous woman-work right in front of their noses.

The thing is, it is often stuff that many people – even people who should know better, and even though physical and devised and total theatre is supposedly pretty normal these days – don’t quite clock as theatre. Perhaps it is billed as ‘performance’ or ‘live art’. Perhaps it’s ‘physical comedy’ or ‘clown’ or ‘cabaret’. Whatever it calls itself, it is often work made by women artists, and it is often the best stage work that you will find out there.

Over the merry month of May I saw a whole raft of magnificent stuff on the stages of Brighton – and it is only now that I think about it, almost all of my favourite things in the Brighton Festival and Fringe were made by women.

And when women make theatre and performance work, we see women of all sorts placed up for our gaze our gaze – maidens, sex goddesses, crones and a whole lot more. We get myths and legends, feats of endurance, love stories with a twist, tussles between sex and death, camp political satire, the Hero’s Journey. The big stuff. Not a kitchen sink in sight.

Let’s start with the uncomfortable and thrilling combo of sex, death and religion. Triple Threat (Marlborough Theatre, Brighton Fringe). Enter stage left Lucy McCormick, dancing her silver sparkly sandals off, dressed as Mary Magdalene, or Mother Mary, or Jesus Christ himself, in a wicked exploration of the New Testament told through the eyes of its female characters. The props are the thing: Poundworld meets kindergarten toy box: wigs and wings and beards; boxers’ dressing gowns, baby dolls with really weird pink plastic shoes welded on, and tacky gold crowns. Ah yes, the three kings: Nescafe Gold Blend, frankfurters, and mer-engues… and oh what fun Lucy and her brace of boy helpers have, Singing and Swinging and Getting Merry like Christmas. Costumes fly on and off as they all multi-task magnificently as angels, devils, apostles, disciples, God the Father, Jesus, Mary this that or the other. They bump, they grind, they smooch, they make out in the aisles. There’s an infamous scene in which Doubting Thomas is brought to faith by inserting his finger into every orifice Lucy can offer up. ‘You’re gonna take it in the eye now…’ Adam Ant sang, many decades ago, when he was a decadent counter-culture hero. And that’s just the start of it.

When Triple Threat played at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016 reviewer Matt Trueman said ‘Don’t bring your mother’. I’d be more inclined to say, ’Don’t bring your children.’ We, the crones and grannies of today, were the pioneers of this sort of thing, I’ll have you know. We have stories to tell. You can just imagine a nursing home in the not-too-distant future, with me and Cosey Fanni Tutti and Annie Sprinkle sitting there in the lounge, talking about our orifice-penetrating performances and piercings and punk-rocking and what-not. Oh, those were the days!

I have, by the way, just read Cosey’s autobiography, Art Sex Music – so a little aside to note that here we have a woman, core member of Hull-based Coum Transmissions, co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, whose pioneering work and importance in the UK experimental performance scene has often been sidelined in favour of her male collaborators. Just saying. Women do stuff; people often chose to ignore it, sideline it, or play down the contributions.

Which brings us to Emma Rice. Female auteur/director. Leading light of Kneehigh Theatre. Current director of Shakespeare’s Globe – but she is to be ousted early from that role, because she dares to mess around with Shakespeare’s heritage. I mean – did anyone who employed her actually go to see anything she’d made before signing her up for the job? What were they expecting? Anyway – there’s plenty been said about this out there on the old interweb, so let’s leave it at that.

Instead, let’s look at the work. Specifically, Tristan and Yseult, a highlight of the Brighton Festival 2017. Oh what a joy this piece is. Almost 15 years old now, and still fresh as a daisy. Apparently Kneehigh’s dearly departed designer Bill Mitchell suggested the old Cornish myth to Emma, and she resisted strongly at first, claiming no interest in stories of kings and knights. But luckily for us, she eventually gave in – and created an awesome and beautiful piece of theatre that is a multi-faceted exploration of love, taking in the voyage from maidenhood to wife and lover, and the reclaiming of feminine power by a woman used as a prize bartered between men, and adding in some musings on the age-old duel between innocence and experience. There’s a live band (led by Stu Barker), fabulous physical comedy from a terrific ensemble of actor-dancers, and stunning performances from the three leads: company artistic director Mike Shepherd as Cornish King Mark; Kneehigh regular Dominic Marsh as his long-lost French son Tristan; and Kneehigh newbie/Matthew Bourne regular Hannah Vassello as Irish firebrand Yseult. Our heroine’s journey – augmented by sub-plot stories of two other women, her maid and her Unloved namesake, making it a love pentangle rather than a love triangle – shows us that you can steal a woman but you can’t own her; you can marry a man but you can’t make him love you; that love can come in many forms, often bending us in directions we weren’t anticipating; and that – yes – you can love two people at the same time. That the old maid, Brangian, is played by a man is a lovely Kneehigh touch. The show is currently playing at Shakespeare’s Globe in Emma Rice’s last summer season there (she has also programmed a winter selection at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, then that will be that – a vibrant female theatrical talent lost to this venue).

More myths, and another journey, this time not by a heroine, we are told, but by a female protagonist (comes with less baggage). Enter the Dragons – in which Abigail Dooley and Emma Edwards (aided and abetted by directors Will Kerley and Toby Park and designer Lucy Bradridge) bring us ‘an unruly combination of joy and dissent for anyone who is considering growing old’ (presented, on different dates, in both the Festival and the Fringe).

Both performers play The Protagonist, a woman of a certain age fearlessly weaving her way through the world of dawning cronedom with the aid of three gifts bestowed on her by her fairy godmothers, Iris Apfel, Dolly Parton and Germaine Greer – who manifest to our Protagonist as a three-headed puppet. These priceless magic gifts are the Spectacles of Insight, a tongue sharpener, and what you might take to be an old beige cardigan from M&S but is really a Cloak of Invisibility. Heading off on her journey by Uneasy Jet, The Protagonist is almost tripped up by a last-minute call from a teenage son needing something-or-other right now, but she ploughs on, through the Sea of Apology, and beyond the Forest of Forgetfulness (wondering why she went in there in the first place). Satirical sketches roll by one after the other relentlessly – no stone is unturned, no subject taboo: plastic surgery, the anti-ageing cosmetics industry, ‘finding yourself’ holidays, and the menopause all come under the scrutiny of A&E’s fine-tuned physical comedy. The fourth wall takes a battering as our brave duo constantly step in and out of the action, explaining their decisions to the audience or subverting each other’s performance with cheeky asides, in true cheeky chap-ess music hall style. Underneath it all, there’s a serious message. Be yourself. Your 8-year-old self and your 80-year-old self are always walking alongside you: love them both; let them guide you. Abigail Dooley and Emma Edwards are a brilliant comedy coupling: the writing is sharp as a witch’s nose, the performance as sparkly as Cinderella’s silver slippers. A fabulously entertaining evening.

Talk of sparkly slippers brings us to FK Alexander, who has once again donned hers and taken up residence in The Spire (Brighton Festival) for a soul-enriching durational performance called (I Could Go On Singing) Somewhere Over the Rainbow. This enchanting piece of performance art won a Total Theatre Award for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016. There’s always a worry, revisiting TT Award-wining shows outside of the Edinburgh bubble, that they might not shine as brightly on a second visit, but no fears here.

Accompanied by Glasgow noise band Okishima Island Tourist Association, FK’s ritual re-enactment of Judy Garland’s last live performance of Somewhere Over the Rainbow presents a portrait of female strength and vulnerability. The costume, make-up and sparkly shoes are diva-ish, transforming her into a stage goddess; the way she holds each participating audience member’s hand, and gazes into their eyes, and sings for them, and smiles for them alone, is a manifestation of the tender mother, making the song a beautiful lullaby.

We need more rainbows, and sparkly slippers, and goddesses, and crones, and witches, and lovers, and lullaby-singing mothers. More female fairy tales. More feisty heroines. Bring on the dancing girls, and the singing divas, and the women clowns. Let’s sing and dance and laugh our way out of austerity and greed. Let’s put on our silver shoes and wave our panties in the air at the politicians and terrorists who’d like to stop us in our tracks. Girls just want to have fun, and sisters are doing it for themselves. There’s lots of fantastic woman-led performance work out there. Go see, go hear.

Cock and Bull and Drool and Drivel

2017: Security. Stability. Opportunity. Stability. Stable stability. Strong and stable. Strong. Stable.

2015: Opportunity. Opportunity. A land of opportunity. Hard working people. Hard, hard, hard. Families. People working for their families. Working hard.

1992: This government. This government. This government keeps its promises. Not always standing there as moaning minnies. Now stop it!

Nic Green’s Cock and Bull was made in 2014, in response to David Cameron’s election campaign. Three women (Nic Green, Rosana Cade, and Laura Bradshaw), dressed in man suits, with Goldfinger gold hands and mouths, stand in the performance space, which is set up in traverse. Whatever way they face, someone is looking right at them. They rant, they rave. They spit and drawl and drool, repeating the words of Cameron and co ad nauseum. It becomes a Concrete poem. Merz. Hard hard hard. People, people, people. The words start to disintegrate. The suits start to disintegrate, jackets and trousers falling by the wayside, baggy boxers and breasts covered with an x of black gaffer tape revealed. The gold paint starts to disintegrate, gilt to grime. They sweat, they shout, they bump, they grind. It’s an exorcism, a shamanistic ritual. Calm down, dear.

Just three years since this show surfaced and ye gods – things have moved on swiftly since then. David Cameron out, Teresa May in. A foolhardy referendum on EU membership, and a Brexit result. Another general election. And today’s the day. Off we go to the polls again – third time in two years! By the time you read this, it may well be all over.

It feels as if a lifetime of politics has passed by since Cock and Bull was made. The show made an attempt to update itself with an inclusion of the ‘grab her by the pussy’ moment from the 45th president of the USA, but this feels slightly token and out of place, particularly as there is no reference to Teresa May. Given that events have already overtaken it, it might have been better to keep Cock and Bull of its time – a response to Cameron, Osbourne et al without any attempt to update. Because this it does very well indeed, and the points made about privilege and deception and sloganeering are (sadly) flagging up behaviours that show no signs of going away. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if no time at all has passed and we are back in the heyday of Thatcherism. Significantly, I saw Cock and Bull (at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts) six weeks ago, on 19 April 2017 – the day that parliament voted to back Teresa May’s call for a general election…

It’s interesting to be witnessing this extraordinary piece of physical, visceral and political theatre at ACCA, on a stage that has seen so much come and go. ACCA (part of University of Sussex) was formerly known as the Gardner Arts Centre, for years a bastion of fabulous artistic activity in the South East, with a programme which included work from afar (Peter Brook, Wim Vandekybus, Ryoji Ikeda), much admired UK companies such as Forced Entertainment and Jasmin Vardimon, and always a healthy amount of quality work from locally based artists with a national and international profile, including Dreamthinkspeak, Vincent Dance Theatre and Liz Aggiss.

It’s Liz I’m thinking of right now. Her company Divas were regular fixtures at the Gardner, and the ghost of one show in particular seems to have left its trace in this space. Drool and Drivel! They Care! was the Divas response to Margaret Thatcher’s use of the English language as scatter-gun political tool. Conservative party slogans and catch phrases uttered by Mrs T are repeated, regurgitated, deconstructed, and reduced to absurdity. They are reassembled into ditties danced to with vaudevillian panache, whilst the performers mouth the words. Moaning Minnies is a personal fave – a choreography of sur pointe ballet moves danced in houndtooth suits, handbags to the fore. Now stop it. Now stop it. Now stop it. This Government (a riff on the ‘This government keeps its promises’ Thatcher soundbite) is a moment of genius – the sketch reworked to give us a line of five Maggies morphing into Majors.

Drool and Drivel! They Care! and Cock and Bull were made more than three decades apart – both created/choreographed by gifted women artists who understand that the personal and the political can never be separated. It is sad, on the one hand, that Liz Aggiss’s work seems so relevant today, with Maggie-wannabe May taking us once again to the polls accompanied by an absurd chorus of near-meaningless slogans; but reasuring, on the other hand, that artists such as Nic Green have stepped up to continue the good work of debunking political clap-trap and reducing this cock and bull to what it is – drool and drivel .

Nic Green: Cock and Bull won a Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016. It was seen at the Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts on 19 April 2017. www.attenboroughcentre.com

For more on Liz Aggiss/Divas’ Drool and Drivel! They Care! see the artists’s archive.

Total Theatre Magazine is embarking on a quest to fund the creation of an interactive archive of material, with the aim of placing all 100 print versions of the magazine from 1989 to 2012 online. Partners in this project include Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. See www.totaltheatre.org.uk for further news updates.