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

Take your Time

How do we look at video installation work? How should we look at it? Specifically, how much time do we give it? Are audience members expected to watch all the material presented, from beginning to end, or to just dip in and out? And in looped screenings, where the heck is the beginning and the end anyway? How do we take our time and use our time as spectators?

A couple of very different installation works seen at Brighton Festival 2017 provoked these questions.

Ipek Duben: They/Onlar

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once, said Albert Einstein – but there again, he hasn’t been to Fabrica gallery recently…

They/Onlar is a multi-screen video installation by Turkish artist Ipek Duben, sited in Fabrica, a beautiful, 19th century deconsecrated chapel in Brighton’s historic Lanes, throughout the Brighton Festival month of May. As we walk blinking off the street and into the dark interior of the church, we hear voices, a constant burble. It sounds as if the space might be very busy with chattering people – which it is, but the chattering is coming not from visitors but from the speakers hanging over the full-length (talking bodies rather than just talking heads) screen images of a number of individuals who, in modern day Turkey, are more often than not displaced as ‘other’. The people we are here to meet virtually include Kurds, Armenians, Jews, LGBT people, and a female victim of domestic violence who is now shunned by her neighbours because she left her husband. There are six screens, each one devoted exclusively to one person’s story, together with a triptych of screens that show us edited excerpts from interviews, these juxtaposed to give opposing or endorsing views of, for example, homosexuality, or a woman’s place in society. We note that in some cases, people discriminated against for one reason express bigotry against another group for a different reason. Thus is life.

One thing puzzles me, which is the inclusion in the triptych of people whose story we have not met on one of the screens. It turns out that the original work, when staged in Istanbul, had a far larger number of screens (around 19 I believe), but here we get just six people profiled. Thus, we are given edited snippets from interviews we haven’t seen in full. It makes for a slightly odd and unbalanced representation, but is nevertheless a striking and unsettling work. The low lighting, babel of voices, and larger-than-life screen figures all vying for our attention create a perfect metaphor for the bustling world of human stories, all crying out to be heard. Being here surrounded by so many stories calling for our attention is quite disarming and unsettling. Quite likely this response is anticipated by the artist, who could (we assume) have chosen to place headphones in front of each screen so listening was a quiet and private affair, but eschewed this choice in favour of the competing chorus of narratives.

Even with just six screen subjects, plus the triptych, to view, rather than the original 19-screen+ installation, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to sit and listen to the full cycle of stories. I’m not sure how long each monologue is, but in two one-hour-plus visits to the gallery, I experience three interviews in full, a substantial amount of the triptych edited moments, and snippets of others. Perhaps that is what is intended – that we dip in and out, feeling a little bit pressurised and guilty that we are picking one person over another. I also spend some time, on the first visit, reading and looking at the documentation presented about the making of the piece and the artists’s vision. I notice, in both my visits, that a lot of people wander in, glance around, look and listen briefly to a few of the screen monologues, and wander out again, with an ‘oh yeah, I get it’ nod to the usher. Which is fine, I suppose – it’s a free exhibition both in the sense that there is no entrance charge and that the doors at the end of the gallery are open so spectators can come and go at will. But these stories of discrimination and survival and finding your way in a world that doesn’t necessarily allow you to be who you are feel so vital that I worry, perhaps overly, about the fact that I just can’t manage to give everyone here equal attention. But hey – that’s life, and probably very much the point of the piece.

Vincent Dance Theatre: Virgin Territory. Photo Hugo Glendinning

Vincent Dance Theatre’s Virgin Territory (placed in ONCA gallery, a relatively small exhibition space) is also, predominantly, a multi-screen video installation, although it does have other elements. At least, this incarnation of the project is an installation work – it has also been presented as a live dance-theatre work. In this case, interviews with pre-teens are used as the starting point to create a series of juxtaposed performance-to-camera vignettes and mini-choreographies which explore the impact of digital culture on girls and young women, in particular the invasion of personal space and the hyper-sexualisation of young females. The series of short films – highly stylised representations of, for example, a drunken woman’s stagger through a car park on high heels, or a pseudo-rape scene on a street, or schoolgirls fighting off male aggressors like super-heroes – deliberately harrowing and unnerving material – play on a loop, and are shown on screens which are mirrored on the reverse, so if we move around we can catch voyeuristic glimpses of ourselves watching the screens, and watching other audience members watching the screens. The video work is augmented by the presence of physical objects, placed in racks under the screens as if in a school cloakroom, with smaller spaces downstairs containing other physical objects and another screened film. There is also an online element to the work, with audience invited to engage in digital tasks on social media using the hashtags #VTerritory and #VDTEverydayAction. Apparently there are plans for a related piece, called Shut Down, exploring the digital/online experiences of boys and young men.

The decision to place a large number of chairs in the space, all facing forwards, is quite odd – the space is cluttered, and it feels a little awkward to stand up and move around, especially as any movement seems to provoke an usher coming over to explain what is happening. There is a cycle of around 50 minutes, I am told. You’re around halfway through, and it continues downstairs… I am not quite sure what I should do, and feel a little over-ushered. Watch until it starts to repeat, or stand up and walk about (difficult in so small a space), or investigate the second part downstairs? I decide to move downstairs and to come back on another (quieter?) day to watch the whole cycle of moving image work upstairs. Unfortunately, that day doesn’t come as I misread the closing date, so when I return in the last week of the Festival, it has all gone away. I will, I promise myself, at least pick up the online thread at www.virginterritory.org – but haven’t done so yet.

Downstairs, there is soil and leaves and labels and an invitation to contribute to a tree of positive images of role models for young people. I’m not sure why, but I resist joining in. I’m not convinced that the downstairs part contributes anything significant to the work, but that might be because I felt the lack of space all the time I was in the gallery. It was a busy Saturday mid-Festival, so perhaps that crush was inevitable.

I end up feeling that the staging of the piece (If we can use this theatrical term in this context) was compromised by trying to satisfy two different needs. If it was deemed necessary for the audience to sit through a cycle of almost an hour of looped footage, then we needed to be properly seated in a comfortable setting. If we were supposed to move around, as I am sure we were, we needed the space to do this freely. Lovely though ONCA gallery is – a place where I’ve experienced many beautifully sited exhibitions/events – in this case, it felt like the wrong space for the work presented.

Although I was personally more interested in and drawn to the material presented in Virgin Territory than in They/Onlar, the latter won out in presentation – how it was staged. You made a choice about which screen to sit and watch/listen to, and sat on the little bench in front of it, moving freely around the room without any direction or fuss when you felt the need to. On reflection, this is no doubt why they only six large screens (plus the triptych) were installed, to give the piece some breathing space.

So what we come back to (thank you Albert) is that it is impossible to discuss time without discussing its relationship to space. We can’t take our time if we don’t have the space to do so. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said: space is the breath of art.

Vincent Dance Theatre: Virgin Territory was presented at ONCA Gallery 10–21 May 2017. Ipek Duben: They/Onlar was shown at Fabrica 8 April–29 May 2017. Both installation works were part of Brighton Festival 2017.

www.brightonfestival.org

Street, Park, Wood, Water – Sites and Sights

‘So what’s the difference between site-specific and site-responsive?’ asks a colleague, as we wait on the platform of the eastbound Jubilee Line at London Bridge station. Deep breath. I say straight away that I try not to be too pedantic. I know that most people just say ‘site specific’ for all work outside of theatre spaces, and I go along with it a lot of the time, not wanting to be a definitions anorak, but if left to my own devices to choose the terminology, I tend to use ‘site responsive’. For me, it works as a broader term, to denote work that could respond to site in any one of numerous different ways – and so much work that is labelled ‘site specific’ isn’t necessarily completely specific to that site.

As an example, I say, looking around, if I were to make a piece of work that was site-specific to London Bridge station then perhaps it would take in the history, geography, psychogeography even, of that site. It’d be about London Bridge station – the place, and perhaps also the people that use it – and set in London Bridge station. That would be one type of response to the site, a response specific to that place. I could, on the other hand, make a piece sited in the station that was about travel and transience, and/or a choreographic piece using the escalators and stairs and lobbies, and that would be a response to that site, but could be moved on fairly easily to other stations. And of course example A could and probably would incorporate elements of example B, because why wouldn’t you use everything/ do everything the site offered?

That was quite enough for a brief chat while waiting for a Tube train. Saying more would move into trainspotter territory, but it set me musing. I started thinking about the time – what, almost 20 years ago? – when I had asked the same question of artist/writer/dramaturg, and now legendary mythogeographer, Phil Smith. When I started editing Total Theatre, he kindly wrote a rather splendid article about his company, Wrights and Sites, and their Mis-Guides to Exeter – then a programme of live performative walks, now a series of books encouraging us all to drift and derive daringly around our hometowns, and anywhere else we find ourselves. Phil also, around that time, put me in touch with his Wrights and Sites colleague Simon Persighetti, who had made a rather nifty chart explaining site-specific and other forms of site responses, including (now we really are getting anorak-y) ‘site generic’ work, which is a way of describing example B above – work that is suitable for a genre of sites: railway stations, for example, or children’s playgrounds, or hospitals. Or in the case of my company, The Ragroof Players, ballrooms, bandstands, or boxing clubs.

Circa: Depart. Photo by Tristram Kenton

Thinking of the work I’d seen in this year’s Brighton Festival and Fringe, there’s much to reflect on about site and siting. There’s the work that aims to be site-specific, and the work that is sited outdoors but not specifically to any one site, and the wandering walking work, and more…

So, all aboard – let’s go for the obvious as a first stop. Five Short Blasts: Shoreham (by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey) was made in collaboration with Shoreham’s water communities – those who live by the sea or on the banks of the River Adur. It was first made in the port of Melbourne (Australia) and remade in Shoreham (West Sussex). So it’s a site-generic show if we want to use that tag – a piece set on a boat that can move from place to place – but then becomes specific to each new place (just to ruffle up our definitions). Things then went off into another direction when, for various technically watery reasons, the whole thing got moved to Brighton Marina. Interesting! It worked, though – once I’d decided that I’d view it as a map of Shoreham misguiding us across the waters. If you’d like to know more, read here.

For the Birds was a Brighton Festival exclusive, set in the woods of Hollingbury – a night-time walk experiencing the delights of sound and light installation works by Mark Anderson, Jony Easterby, Kathy Hinde, Ulf Pederson, and Pippa Taylor. I had, in fact, seen some of the Jony Easterby contributions as part of Inside Out in Dorset last year, but that was not only another time and place, but also a daytime event – so it’s a very different experience here. Where better to site installations about birds than amongst the trees in a wood, you might think – although that wasn’t everyone’s opinion. There were grumbles about the fact that May is nesting season and this installation would thus disturb the birds. Countering that, other people argued that city birds manage, with traffic noise and street lights and all sorts. Human beings constantly impose themselves on the landscape with our homes and vehicles and farms and artworks and what-nots, and anyway art is always Against Nature (to steal a line from Huysmans). Discuss. I missed the press night and took myself along as a regular punter on a particularly rainy and muddy night, slipping and sliding all over the place – but glad I went. No really, I am. It was pretty, witty and wise. I loved the robot birds whizzing along, the man who could talk to the birds, the musical birdboxes whistling merrily, and the deconstructed piano triggered by light sensors.

Also a night-time adventure: Circa’s Depart is set in a graveyard – in this case, Woodvale Cemetery. I was luckier with the weather this time round (in fact everyone was – the rain held off until the last audience member on the last performance date left the site, then the heavens opened making the get-out for the crew a bit of a nightmare – yes, I have insider knowledge here). I reviewed the piece when it debuted at LIFT last year, and was keen to see how it worked in a different site. The answer is, beautifully. The show has mulched in, with some of the unnecessary trimmings ditched (including video projections on graves that detracted from rather than adding to the beauty of the London site). The large cemetery, set on a steep hill and filled with extraordinary monumental tombs, grassy banks, crunchy paths, and gnarled trees, is a gift of a site – and Circa take this gift and make the most of it. The audience are very minimally guided around by dark-clothed ‘undertakers’ with lanterns who double up as seductive choral singers. Often they stand holding lights aloft as paths fork, and we just choose which path to take – the obvious, brightly lit one that brings us close to the young women dancing on graves with wild abandon, or the darker, spookier one that moves us away from the aerialist hanging upside down from a branch, a living embodiment of the tarot Hanged Man icon, who we witness from afar. It is a great relief not to be over-ushered around the site. Often we are called from one place to another by sound or light – which is how it should be. A work that I enjoyed, with reservations, on first viewing became, when transposed to this site, a work that I loved.

Wild N Beets: Bingo Lingo

Other outdoor work in the Brighton Festival included the Without Walls days in Portslade and East Brighton, which were free to audience. Whilst admiring Brighton Festival’s endeavours to bring performance work to communities who might not otherwise experience anything in the Festival, I am getting slightly tired of outdoor arts always, in recent years, being billed as ‘a family fun day out’ with minimal space in the brochure – no information on which shows appeared on which day, no photos, and in the case of Wild N Beets’ Bingo Lingo no company name given – and no proper programme of when things are on available either beforehand or on the day. It’s as if it is all just interchangeable ‘fun’ so of no importance what we see and when. I feel that outdoor arts deserves better.

So due to the lack of timetable information, I missed Wired Aerial Theatre’s new show To Me, To You, as both showings were programmed close together, early in the day (on the Saturday in Portslade). Hope to catch this one somewhere else this summer! I was on-site for almost four hours and found the afternoon’s programme a little thin, to be honest. Much of the work was not street theatre or outdoor arts, but dance pieces placed on a big black- cloth-covered stage, and a very intact fourth wall. It was also pretty unacceptable to have almost non-existent toilet and catering facilities at such a busy event. These things matter!

Of the work that deserved to be billed outdoors: Cocoloco’s Willy and Wally saw a pair of performers with heads poking out of giant ‘dresses’ made of trash, whizzing around on motorised wheels, declaiming poems and bon mots about pollution. It seemed to be very loosely based on Beckett’s Happy Days, the two characters referencing Willie and (more crucially) Winnie, who starts the play buried to her waist and ends it buried up to her neck, whilst still talking her head off. It is gently educational and mildly amusing, but it isn’t saying anything we don’t know about plastic bags and garbage mountains, although at least it is saying it in a witty and visually interesting way. It is an OK piece of walkabout (whizabout?), but it feels like a minor rather than major piece of street theatre work, and with so little else on offer it was pushed into a prominence it didn’t merit.

Wild N Beets’ Bingo Lingo is better – harnessing the joy and the kitsch of end-of-the-pier bingo and marrying it to disability politics, in a bid to make bingo a Paralympic sport. Artificial Legs Eleven, anyone? Comperes Beryl and Cyril have the audience eating out of their hands in the bid for prizes galore…

And of course I am biased, but I have to say that the Ragroof Players really took Easthill Park by storm closing the Saturday programme with Happy Feet – an interactive dance spectacular that whizzes the audience through a 100 years of dance crazes in a 100 minutes (vested interest declaration, I am a co- director of the Players, although Happy Feet is not my baby).

Kriya Arts: Hip Trip of Brighton

Over in the Fringe, I had the great pleasure of accompanying Jolie Booth (who makes work under the name Kriya Arts) on Hip Trip of Brighton, which bills itself as ‘a psychedelic wander’. This alternative walking tour of the city’s North Laine area, presented in association with Marlborough Theatre, is a parallel piece to the indoor show Hip, which investigates the life of one Anne Clark, a Brighton resident who had her finger in many pies (or perhaps that should be dope-cakes) of Brighton in the days when it was a seedy seaside town with a strong beatnik, hippy and punk community getting by alongside the dodgy bric-a-brac shops and even more dodgy boozers. In the show, reviewed for TT by Lisa Wolfe, Anne’s colourful life is brought to the audience through an exploration of the contents found in her flat after she died – books, diaries and letters forming a kind of time-capsule archive of the counter-culture scene of the city in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

The performative walk that we enjoyed is a work intertextual with the indoor show – both take the format of ‘ultra real’ theatre (there is no fourth wall, and performer Jolie is in a conversational, direct-address mode), and both investigate Anne’s life – the Hip Trip through the experience of visiting the pubs Anne frequented, or gazing at the places that were once key sites in her life but have now shut down or become something other. The piece is at its best when it hovers around the places that were most specific to Anne’s life: the house she grew up in, the newly restored (by Kriya Arts, from her ACE funding!) Unicorn Bookshop mural; the site of the former occult shop Avalon, where Anne worked; the Heart and Hands pub, her favourite boozer; Infinity Foods, old and new sites, where she worked as part of the original co- operative.

The bookshop stories and associated performative actions, in particular, are fantastic. As we stand gazing at the restored Unicorn mural (the original wall painting was by John Upton, possibly the first ever UK street artist), we hear the tale of owner Bill Butler’s prosecution (in 1968) for publishing J G Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. A personal highlight of my trip was getting to be John Upton, which involved wearing a polar bear costume…

Coming full circle to that opening question, Hip Trip of Brighton is a good example of a truly site-specific piece of work. Whereas the show Hip can travel (and indeed has, to the Edinburgh Fringe and beyond), the walk can only exist here in the North Laine Brighton. Its subject and its setting are completely enmeshed.

Glad we’ve got that one settled, then…

Full information on all Brighton Festival 2017 shows at www.brightonfestival.org

For the Marlborough Theatre’s Fringe and ongoing programme, see www.marlboroughtheatre.org.uk

Details on the Without Walls programme at: www.withoutwalls.uk.com

Phil Smith’s books on walking, site and a whole lot more are published on: www.triarchypress.net/

The Sea, The Sea

The sky is low and grey and the rain is lashing down as we take our seats in the open boat – only the helmsman is allowed into the small cabin. Wooden benches, soggy blankets, yellow ponchos, leaky boots, sodden gloves and a ridiculous attempt to keep an umbrella up in the whipping wind as we leave Brighton Marina.

POSH I’m not: It’s starboard out, port home for me.

Our vessel is called the Brighton Diver. We trundle past other boats – I note a Lady of the Lake and a Grey Viking. As the motor kicks in with more force and we pass the jetty and head out to sea, the ambient soundscape becomes more dynamic, and we hear the voice of a young boy – a cabin boy? – calling Man Overboard. Heave ho; maintain eye contact. An older woman asks, Is there a cabin? Well, sadly – no. We sit and shiver and blink the rain from our eyes. Are we in safe hands? Hope so. Such a city girl – I don’t own any proper clothing for this sort of thing. I start to wonder if it is complete madness to be on a boat in this weather.

But there is something very site-appropriate, so to speak, to be sitting here in the driving rain, bounced about on the waves, hearing stories of people whose life and livelihood depends on their respect and tolerance for the this great big heaving swell of water – the sea, the sea… A sunny day would make it more of a pleasure trip; a more usual and humdrum experience. This places us in empathy with the characters whose stories we hear. How hard it is to stay out all night in a storm (yep – 45 minutes in wind force 4, which is nothing, feels hard enough). The search for relatives and companions lost at sea. The rigours of fishing.

Words come and go, often repeating in a slightly different arrangement. Behind the words are sounds – church bells calling out to sea, bursts of looped guitar, echoes of piano phrases.

‘He put his fingers in the mackerel’s mouth and pulled back its head. Snap! It’s better that way…’ says the older woman’s voice. Down to earth blasts of verbatim text mix with poetic reflection. The fish on the floor of the boat are an ‘iridescent mess’. We hear of the ‘frantic slapping’ and the ‘pink foam’ that follows the boats. A fisherman is described as having ‘fish-gut fingers’.

I find the motion of the boat tossing on the waves soothing. A fairground ride. I find myself thinking of my last boat trip, a year ago – a motor boat trip to Bonete, a remote fishing community in Brazil. As words gathered in Sussex wash over me and I daydream about Brazil, I am not surprised to discover the universality of histories and mythologies in these tales of the sea, here and there. In Bonete, the fishermen say, ‘Eu, pescador… meu pai, pescador… e o pai de meu pai, pescador!’ They are all the son of the son of a fisherman. Here too – a community that has shrunk, but is still holding on, skills passed down from one generation to the next.

Fishermen everywhere have a story of a relative lost at sea, and how that story plays out. It’s the same everywhere. Fishing boats capsized or filling with water, or men overboard. The search in dark water. The protocol of cries and actions. The abandoned search at night resumed in daylight. Coming to terms with mourning someone when there is no body found. I think about tattoos – a tradition of sailors, creating a unique ‘brand’ for themselves so that wherever a body might wash up, and however bloated by the sea it might be, there is a chance of identification.

I look back at white cliffs. Beachy Head, suicide capital of the UK, is just out of sight to the east. I think of those who’ve taken their own lives, and those whose lives have been taken. In the past year or two, there have been numerous ‘incidents’ in these parts that have resulted in the death of adolescent or young adult men. Boys falling off cliffs. Boys jumping off piers. Boys standing too close to treacherous waves, washed out to sea. Boys who can’t swim on an outing from London, caught unawares. I’m the mother of three boys, now grown. We live by the sea, we hear these stories. There but for the grace of God I think, every time I hear of another watery death of a young man.

My wandering mind is pulled back by a story on the soundscape of scuba diving marvels and discoveries. Apparently, there are very many seahorses under Brighton Pier. Who knew?

Tea time! A very welcome hot cuppa and an oaty biscuit. We’re invited to chat, but mostly we concentrate on shielding our mugs and biscuits from the rain.

Five short blasts is for danger but luckily, not tonight. We get three short blasts: the engine is in reverse. We’re turning around. ‘Who will steer us safely to shore?’ asks the woman whose recorded voice we’ve heard throughout. ‘Is there a cabin?’

As we approach the shore, we hear a reflection on sanctuary. Will we welcome the desperate souls who attempt to reach our shores, crossing perilous stretches of water in insubstantial wooden boats? The boats, say a voice, know they were once trees. We are all interconnected, is the suggestion: land and sea; continent and island; family member and foreigner. One world.

I start to feel pretty pathetic for finding a trip of less than an hour, in a safe and sound open boat, challenging. There are around a dozen of us. Well-fed, warmly dressed people. Imagine scores of people, exhausted after long journeys. Pregnant women, babies, sick and elderly people. Imagine much harsher weather. The dark. High waves. Imagine a boat filling with water, possessions thrown overboard.

Why would we refuse refuge? Why would we say no? Why would we close our doors? These questions are just hinted at here, but they’ve kickstarted the thoughts.

More thoughts swim around. I think for a while about ‘site’ and ‘response’. This piece is called Five Short Blasts: Shoreham. It’s not sited in Shoreham, we set out and return to Brighton Marina. Does it matter? Yes and no. The sea stories told and evoked are mostly universal, archetypal. It could be anywhere there’s a sea, and people who earn a living from its waters – Brighton or Bonete or anywhere in between. Some of the verbatim sections are specific to Shoreham and that feels a little odd. We hear, for example, of swells and tides on the River Adur and stories of the houseboat dwellers. I don’t know if the sounds on the soundscape are field recordings from Shoreham. We generously accept what we are fed without questioning – a church bell sounding across the water is a pretty universal sound, I suppose – but the dislocation from one site to another feels a little – untrue. I’d like to know more about the making of the piece, and information is scant…

Then, a more generous thought takes over: it’s a bit like Wrights and Sites’ ploy of taking one map and transposing it to a different site, I think. Take a map of Prague and use it in Exeter! Go for a walk, and see what happens. Take a set of recordings from Shoreham and play them in East Brighton! Go on a boat ride and see what happens. The cracks and slippage and edges of overlay are interesting. Some things from the overlaid aural map of Shoreham waters fit, some don’t. It’s an interesting jumbling up of sites and maps and territories. This sea is all sea, and this sea is not that sea, and this sea is like that sea, and this sea is not.

I find myself thinking that a site, in any case, is not a fixed thing. It has its ‘objective’ existence (I use the word cautiously). Longitude and latitude. Wind force. Knots. Distance from shore. Number of blasts from the boat. It is also experienced through the interplay of our memory and imagination. This is my sea, and that is your sea. My boat journey is not your boat journey. The map is not the territory.

Back on dry land. Well, wet land actually. Slippery wooden boardwalks. Squelching boats. Useless sodden hat and gloves. I feel like I’ve been on a bit of an adventure. But now I’m safely in harbour, and I am going home to get warm and dry. I am one of the lucky ones.

Five Short Blasts: Shoreham was experienced on 18 May 2017 at Brighton Marina. The piece was created by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey. This version of the piece is created with text by Tony Birch, Tim Crouch, and Julia Crouch; and made in collaboration with Bindi Green, Joseph O’Farrell, Bec Reid and Valerie Furnham. Presented by Brighton Festival www.brightonfestival.org

Hair Today – musings on Cut Festival: The Art of Barbering

I am known for my long flowing locks – it’s part of who I am. But it wasn’t always that way. When I was a little girl, I didn’t want to be a little girl. I wanted to be a little boy. And my parents humoured me – which is interesting, because this was the late 1950s and gender divisions between boys and girls – marked by clothes, hair cuts, and toys – even more defined and restricted than they are today. It was unheard of for a little girl to wear trousers and have a short haircut – but whenever I could, I wore trousers (my red and black tartan trews were my favourite) and my hair was short.

Not just short, but short back and sides. My dad took me to his barbers – Arthurs of Gipsy Hill. I remember it all very well. The name Arthurs written in gilt on deep brown wood. The red-and-white pole outside. The glossy black-and-white photos stuck to the glass of smiling, confident men with brilliantined black hair and fierce side partings, perhaps a token American GI style crop thrown in for good measure. The black leather chairs with a wooden board placed across the chair for small boys (me!) to sit on. The big mirrors, trimmed with manly silver chrome.The Murray Mints on a tray. The thick badger-hair brushes with no handles (only women’s hairbrushes have handles). The steel combs, as dangerous a street weapon as a knife. The whirr of the razor. The smell of Brylcreem and sandalwood pomade. The bottles of Old Spice aftershave. The ‘Something for the weekend, sir?’ cabinet. Yes, English barbers in the late 1950s/early 1960s really did say that. I remember asking my dad what these little packets of three contained, but I can’t remember if he answered. A few years later, I found some Durex in my dad’s bedside locker alongside other masculine secret treasures: the black-suit bow-tie worn for works-do dinner and dances, his big square white cotton hankies with an F for Frank embroidered on (men had bigger hankies than women), and the revolver he’d never given back when he left the RAF. I was horrified. Horrified by the condoms, not the gun. Later, in the 1970s at the height of the Troubles, I remember some Sinn Fein person saying he’d be more ashamed to be caught smuggling Durex across the Irish border than guns…

The more I think about it now, the odder it all seems, this taking a small girl to the barber shop in 1959 or 1960, whenever it was (it went on for a couple of years, a fortnightly ritual). A masculine enclave forbidden to women. There were no signs up saying No Women or Girls – they weren’t needed. A woman or girl wouldn’t dream of going into a barbers then. I was there because I was with my dad, and Arthur was my dad’s friend. My parents were pretty conventional South Londoners. He was a cockney lad who worked as a car mechanic; she was an Irish immigrant who’d been a waitress in a number of London hotels, before meeting my dad out dancing at the Streatham Locarno, and becoming a ‘housewife’ – as you did. But they went along with all this. Or maybe it was just my dad who was humouring me – I was always a daddy’s girl. My mother, I think, felt a bit awkward about it. Makes it easier to comb, she told her friends as justification. Her hair is so thick, it always tangles up when it’s longer.

In those days, it was normal for very young children to be sent off to the corner shop alone. So age 6 or 7, I’d head off to buy a loaf of bread, or a packet of Players No 6 for my mum. Here you are, sonny, they’d say, and I’d grin. My granny wasn’t too keen on this looking-like-a-boy thing. She’d take me up to the tin hut stall near the station that sold hot pies and sausage rolls, and we’d sit on stools outside eating our steak-and-kidney pies wrapped in thick white paper. Is she a boy or a girl, my gran’s mates asked. She’s a girl, my gran said. She’ll grow out of it. And I’d scowl.

But actually, I did grow out of it. Secondary school age: now I wanted to be a girl. I watched Hollywood movies. I wanted Hollywood hair. Mostly, I wanted to be Veronica Lake. Age 11 or 12 I have a weird hair-do – still short at the back but a bit fluffy at the front. Kind of a 1960s precedent of the 1980s poodle look. Age 14 I grew my hair long, and parted it on the side. It was thick and blonde and a bit wavy. Like Veronica Lake. I’ve kept it long ever since. Sometimes very long. At one point it almost came down to the back of my knees. Nowadays, people see me as the epitome of the femme cis woman. Long hair, skirts, pretty shoes, lipstick. They’d probably be very surprised to hear the story of my barber shop days…

Cut Festival: Hick Duarte

I found myself musing on all this when I went along to the press launch of Cut Festival. Cut Festival, subtitled The Art of Barbering, runs from 24 February to 5 March 2017 at Toynbee Studios (Aldgate) and various sites across the East End. It is a multi-disciplinary arts festival bringing together international artists, barbers and activists who will creatively and critically explore the history and role of the barber in communities in London and across the world. Its curator/director Jamie Lewis Hadley, and creative producer Xavier de Sousa, are interested in ways in which the history, politics and craft of barbering can be a catalyst for artistic reflection on gender, race, ritual, community and healing.

Artists and artworks flagged up that caught my fancy included Hick Duarte’s Chavosos photographs that highlight the importance of the haircut for the visual culture of baile funk (Brazil); a gif-based project by Brandon Tauszik, Tapered Throne, creating portraits of Oakland’s black barbers (USA); and playwright/performer Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles, which is coming to the National Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse soon. Inua read from his play at the launch, and his memories of trips to the barber shop struck a chord. His research has taken him from London to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos, and Accra.

The artists/projects mentioned above are all, in their very different ways, reflecting on the traditional male world of barbering. Others often a different take on the question of hair. Open Barbers and Amy Pennington will be celebrating diversity by offering haircuts ‘free of gendered language’. Which will hopefully have more attractive results than the gender-neutral haircuts I inflicted on my three sons. (Until they eventually rebelled – two out of the three did, anyway – and insisted on going to the barber’s. But that’s a whole other story.)

Katy Baird will ‘invite beauty industry professionals to conduct a public transformation of her body in an exploration of identity construction and consumption’. Which sounds awesome but terrifying! Cary Kwork’s Plummage is ‘a series of intricate exquisite drawings exploring different black hairstyles of recent decades’. The one we saw at the launch was a beautiful ballpoint drawing. And Emma Frankland will ‘create an immersive barbering experience reflecting on the queer history of East London’ which sounds marvellous.

Out on the streets, Joshua Coombes will be offering cuts to the homeless communities of London; and New York based barber Mark Bustos, founder of Haircuts for the Homeless, will also be out and about in the East End –#Be AwesomeToSomebody

Jamie Lewis Hadley’s Blood on the Streets is a performance and exhibition exploring the history of bloodletting and barber-surgeons.

There’s more too – full details on the website. It all kicks off with Cut to the Chase on Saturday 25 February – a day of talks, discussions and performances at Toynbee Studios Theatre (from 2pm). There is also a free exhibition, The Art of Barbering, running throughout the festival at Archive Gallery, Haggerston (12–6pm).

Something for everyone, then – not just for the ‘sirs’ and not just for the weekend.

Cut Festival: The Art of Barbering, 24 February to 5 March 2017. Mostly at Toynbee Studios, London E1 6AB, and Archive Gallery, London N1 5SQ. Also offsite at various times/places, see website for details. Some events supported by Next in Line, see website for details. www.cutfestival.com

Featured image (top of page): Inua Ellams: Barber Shop Chronicles (National Theatre / Fuel)

Cut Festival promo film by Rosie Powell.

Dorothy Max Prior being coiffed by hairdresser Kris Gallagher

Mime and So Much More: LIMF’s 40th Anniversary Edition

A magical merging of choreography and film-making, puppetry of every persuasion, Beckettian clowns, the body as manipulated object, and circus shows that deconstruct and re-asssemble the traditional skills into new forms: this and more was seen at the London International Mime Festival by Total Theatre’s team of writers. Dorothy Max Prior reports on shows seen and post-show talks facilitated…

The 40th anniversary edition of the London International Mime Festival saw a whole raft of world and UK premieres, but also a number of returning shows. There was a special edition of Gandini Juggling’s worldwide hit Smashed; Familie Floz with what is perhaps their best show (although all are great), Teatro Delusio; and Charleroi Danses from Belgium with Kiss & Tell (read Donald Hutera’s interview here).

Kiss & Tell was (unusually) first presented out-of-season by LIMF, who brought it over to the Barbican in June 2014 (reflected on by Beccy Smith, in the feature I Am a Camera). This collaboration between renowned filmmaker Jaco Van Dormael and choreographer Michele Ann de May is an extraordinary piece of work, blending object animation, live action and film – the onstage cast and crew creating a film live onstage,the audience seeing both the creation of the scene and the film simultaneously. Scenes are enacted using ‘puppeteered’ hands, tiny model figures, dolls houses, tanks of water, clouds of coloured smoke – and an entrancing miniature train that whizzes round and round throughout the show. Performers, cameramen, lighting technicians and object manipulators scurry around in the semi-darkness, between half-a-dozen or so on-stage sets, the filmed action appearing on an enormous screen on the back wall. It is a technically stunning show – but it is far more than a show of techniques, as the story is a tender and moving one about memory and what one values most in life, focusing on a woman nearing the end of her life who remembers her five truest loves – she can count them on the fingers of one hand – starting with the boy whose hand she touched on a train when she was just 12 years old. It is exactly the sort of show that has made the reputation of LIMF: a merge of awe-inspiring form and soul-nurturing content to create a magnificent example of visual theatre.

Festival firm favourites who were back in 2017 also included the terrifically talented Moussoux Bonte with Whispers, reviewed by Thomas Wilson; perennial favourite Mathurin Bolze/ Compagnie MPTA with Barons Perches (which I’ve reviewed, on its opening night at LIMF 2017) and marionettist Stephen Mottram with a double bill, The Parachute / Watch the Ball (reviewed by Darren East). I say marionettist, but there was hardly a string in sight…

Stephen Mottram: Watch the Ball. Photo David Fisher

Stephen Mottram’s was one of five LIMF 2017 shows that I attended as facilitator of the post-show discussion. In this case, almost all the sold-out audience at Jacksons Lane stayed on for the talk – and (in puppetry terms) it was a pretty heavyweight audience, with such luminaries as Lyndie and Sarah Wright of Little Angel Theatre, Ronnie LeDrew (manipulator of Muffin the Mule, Sooty and Sweep, Zippy and so much more), and Indonesian Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry expert Matthew Cohen of Royal Holloway – all facing front expectantly. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t disappointed! Stephen talked eloquently about the interchange between science and art in general (I once took part in one of his workshops and learnt a lot about physics from his explorations of pendulum swings!), and the work of Swedish Psychologist Gunnar Johansson in particular. Johansson’s research was the catalyst for the creation of The Parachute, as well as leading the film industry to the techniques of motion capture. Stephen explained how, in the 1970s, Johansson had attached white markers to a few key points on a black-costumed actor’s body and then filmed the actor walking against a black background. When the film was played back, he was surprised to find that the white spots seen moving relative to each other on the screen contained so much information that not only could the viewer immediately identify a human walking, but also the gender, age and mood of the person. In The Parachute, Stephen Mottram uses the idea in reverse. The white tips of his multiple magic wands (ten at a time, imagine!) reveal ephemeral characters – characters that within a minute of the piece starting we completely believe in. The second of the two pieces, Watch the Ball, cleverly plays with the nature of puppetry. A puppet assembles itself from a piece of cloth and a pair of human hands, chooses itself a head, and then the puppet goes on to make itself another puppet. Meanwhile, the puppet master, wearing dark glasses, looking away, appears to have nothing at all to do with all this. Discussing it afterwards, Stephen talked of the puppeteer’s task being to manipulate the audience rather than the objects – it’s all an illusion, that’s the magic of puppetry.

Les Antliaclastes: Here Lies Shakespeare

Also a puppeteer (although of a very different ilk); also at Jacksons Lane: Patrick Sims, formerly creative director of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, who in recent years has been working under the name Les Antliaclastes. He was last seen at LIMF in 2011 with Hilum, a micro comic-tragedy, based on the cycles of a washing machine and set in the basement of a rundown museum of natural history. Previous shows for Buckinger’s (Vestibular Folds, and Armature of the Absolute) have been a similarly mind-blowing blend of surreal dreamscapes – with influences ranging far and wide, but usually with some traceable lineage to Alfred Jarry. His new show is called Here Lies Shakespeare, and it lives up to expectations – a cornucopia of extraordinary ideas and images enacted by grotesquely masked humans and taxidermied puppets. Some of the images are still haunting me weeks later, not least the terrifying larger-than-life Potato Man with the swivelling eye who leaps out of nowhere to appear just inches from me. Perhaps I won’t sit in the front row next time… The show is loosely based on Mark Twain’s provocative text Is Shakespeare Dead? which heralded the still-ongoing heated discussion about the existence of Shakespeare, the authorship of the plays, and the Stratford-upon-Avon tourist industry. Sims is something of a Renaissance man – he writes, directs and performs in his shows, and all the puppets and masks are designed and made by Sims and his wife, Josephine Biereye. He talks intensely about the creation of the show, saying that he has no fixed opinion on whether Shakespeare did or didn’t exist, but is fascinated by the controversy and the notion of a whole culture based on what is possibly a fraud. He seems at his happiest not when he is talking about his doctorate on Jarry’s work, or his take on the authorship question, but when he is sharing the discovery that the Shakespearean tourist industry at Stratford was kickstarted by no less auspicious a name as circus proprietor PJ Barnum; or when answering questions about the functionality of the eye mechanism in Potato Man. Detail is everything in Patrick Sims’ world.

Plexus Polaire: Ashes

Whilst we are talking puppets, a shout out to Nordic Puppet Ambassadors from Finland, whose Only One Suitcase Allowed is a small-scale (miniature, even) one-one-one tackling an enormous subject – the Holocaust. (This was presented in the basement of the Southbank Centre’s Festival Hall.) It was beautifully done – one of my favourite shows in this year’s programme. Another firm favourite was Plexus Polaire’s Ashes, the brainchild of the eloquent writer, director and puppet-maker Ingvyld Aspeli – also Scandinavian, but in this case from Norway. The post-show for this one saw the whole international company on stage – three puppeteer-performers, a video maker, a lighting technician, and Ingvyld herself. It turned out to be a good call – we had a very sparky exchange on all aspects of the work, discussing the original inspiration, a Norwegian novel about arson; the writing and devising process when creating a visual theatre work about the process of writing (there’s a challenge!); the challenges of human v puppet wrestling matches; how to light puppetry of different scale effectively; integrating video, object and live action; and the argument for making one’s puppets as beautifully crafted and honed as possible. Yes, Ingvyld is also obsessed with detail. It is a puppetry thing, no doubt.

Thomas Monkton/Kallo Collective: Only Bones

Another post-show to lead – this time at Soho Theatre, for Thomas Monckton/ Kallo Collective’s Only Bones. In contrast to previous show The Pianist, which featured a grand piano, a chandelier, and numerous other props that fought back at every opportunity, Only Bones sees this very able physical performer strip things back to just the human body (albeit an extraordinary one, his), a hanging light, and a couple of small props – including a bottle of red nail polish used to extraordinary effect. I saw (and reviewed) this one at the Edinburgh Fringe 2016, and it was a delight to see it again – just as proficient but if anything funnier, as the relationship with the audience had really grown and developed. The show was created in collaboration with Gemma Tweedie, whose onstage presence (both in the show and the post-show discussion) is as an interesting almost-still and almost-silent foil to Thomas’s exuberant presence. They make a great double act!

Silver Lining: Throwback

Vibrant UK-based circus talent continues to be supported at LIMF, with the 2017 programme including the charming, feel-good circus show Silver Lining: Throwback, which had Circus Hub audiences eating out of their hands at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016 (where it was reviewed). The LIMF 2017 version, presented at Silver Lining’s home, Jacksons Lane, saw regular company performer/co-creator Niamh O’Reilly off duty and hand-balancer extraordinaire Alice Gilmartin filling Niamh’s shoes – and balancing canes – with aplomb. Joining a pre-existing ensemble at short notice is never easy, and the show, as seen on the first night of the run, was not quite as slick as it had been in Edinburgh – but it was just as bright and breezy and the (mostly young) audience loved it. The post-show talk was equally lively, with the cast of six (including company founder Tom Ball) joined onstage by Tom’s brother Simon Pollard (one of two co-directors of the show, the other being Paulette Randall). What a lovely bunch of people they are! We chewed over issues around safety – both in the sense of physical safety, putting your life in someone’s hands once you start training with them; and emotional safety, with reference to the inclusion of the piece of so much sensitive autobiographical material. We talked about the UK circus family; the training offered at the National Centre for Circus Arts (aka Circus Space); the relationship to audience in a show with no fourth wall, in which performers often step down into the auditorium; the involvement of a non-circus-trained director (Simon’s background is musical theatre); and the process of co-creation of circus work that has an over-arching theme rather than the usual linear narrative of theatre. This led to a very interesting discussion about the difference between the circus performer and the actor – everything we do and say is real, we are not actors, say Silver Lining – although they agree that they are employing the techniques of theatre in the construction of the work….

Leandre: Nothing to Say

As always with the Mime Festival, there are shows that you’d love to see but just can’t fit in. My one that got away this year was Spanish/Catalan clown Leandre, who presented the UK premiere of Nothing to Say. Next time, hopefully. I would also have liked to have gone to the Clowns and Power Symposium, hosted by Bim Mason. Or indeed, the legendary Angela de Castro’s workshop How to be a Stupid. I did, though, get to see French clowns Sacekripa, whose Maree Basse (Barbican Pit) explored downtime and the ‘odd couple’ dynamics of male relationship with an intriguing mix of apple paring, wine drinking and knife-throwing.

I also missed Theatre Re’s Kantor-inspired ensemble work The Nature of Forgetting, but hopefully this world premiere show (presented at Shoreditch Town Hall) by a young UK-based company that LIMF have nurtured and supported for the past few years will make a return visit, or will tour.

The Festival also included Jolie Vann’s Imbalance, which Adrian Berry saw at Ed Fringe 2016; Dewey Dell’s Manga inspired Marzo, reviewed by Rebecca Nice; and Euripedes Laskardis’s intriguing-looking Relic (previewed by Donald Hutera).

So that’s it for this year – another London International Mime Festival done and dusted… and 40 years of magnificent Mime Festivals marked.

Congratulations to LIMF’s co-directors, Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan, for another great edition, and to everyone who works for this extraordinary organisation. For one month of the year, you make London buzz and hum. You make us think, you make us feel, you make us laugh, you make us cry.

Long may LIMF continue to enchant and entertain us!

Featured image (top); Charleroi Danses: Kiss & Cry. Photo by Marteen Vanden Abeele.

Dorothy Max Prior is writing /co-editing a celebration of 40 years of the London International Mime Festival, which will be available later in 2017. Further details soon on www.mimelondon.com