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

Over the Hills and Far Away

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

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

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

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

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

And Then: Wayfaring. Photo Elliott Franks

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

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

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

Gobbledegook Theatre: Cloudscapes

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

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

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

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

The Miraculous Theatre Company: Romantic Botanic Photo Elliott Franks

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

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

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

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

Jony Easterby: Remnant Ecologies / Do Not Feed the Birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Out Dorset. Photo Elliott Franks

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

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

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

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

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

And Now: Wayfaring. Photo Elliott Franks

Compagnie du Hanneton: The Toad Knew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Atelier Bildraum: Bildraum

In which an architect and a photographer compose an audovisual story live on stage. It’s all very simple – well, deceptively simple. It’s actually all very cleverly thought out and constructed.

At first, you notice – or at least, I noticed – two main focal points on the stage. Architectural models of buildings, one a modernist box, the other more of a ‘doll’s house’ house. There are two performers – or animators of the space is perhaps a better term. One, Steve Salember, fiddles with the models, adds and subtracts, rearranges. The other, Charlotte Bouckaert, places herself as the viewer, and, camera in hand, takes images which are then projected in enormous scale on the back wall. But she isn’t merely the viewer, the witness. She becomes the architect of the new onscreen space. The very act of taking the pictures of the space changes the space; changes our relationship to what we are seeing.

What are we seeing? We see what seems to be a deserted warehouse or aircraft hangar. We see a disrupted dinner party. So many of these images are about absence; the show becomes a photo album of absence. Where are all the people in these monochrome worlds?

The other crucial element is that of sound. This short work – just 35 minutes – relies on the soundscape (a mix of live and pre-recorded) to help create the dramaturgy of the piece. Example: we hear the sound of a ping-pong ball bouncing off of a table. Then lots of ping pong balls. The sound grows and resonates until it become a cacophony. On screen we see one ping pong ball bouncing. Then we see a roomful, appearing to cascade down onto a table. At the end of the show, when I look at the models on the way out, I see one ping-pong ball in a box, and I see that in the room with the tiny doll-size table a chairs, a cluster of tiny polystyrene beads portraying the table-tennis balls. ah yes, of course. There are also moments when Steve Salember goes and sits and plays guitar. A nice addition, although I’m not sure what it adds to the dramaturgy of the piece. Perhaps it is because it is another parallel way that he can craft the space; the aural landscape?

The stories are created by the performers in the space; and they are created by us, in our heads. We see what the architect has designed, and/or we see what the photographer is focusing on and is framing, and/or we see what we want to see. As the piece progresses, the focus shifts to other little models or boxes in the room, each lit in turn – five or 6 in total – and then on the floor itself. But the mediated image, the screen, is all dominant, it is hard to pull your eyes away from it – and I think that is the point.

I love the fact that we see the stories unfold in still images, rather than moving image. I love the quiet presence on the performer/animators, gentle giants in their domain, benign gods. I love the stories that unfold, and seem to ultimately take us away from a man-built world and into a more primal world of waves and duststorms and sticks drawing in the sand.

A quietly beautiful and meditative show, a world away from the razz-a-ma-tazz of much of the rest of the Fringe.

Bildraum won a Total Theatre Award 2016 in the Physical/Visual Performance category. It is presented at Summerhall as part of the Big in Belgium programme of work.

Briefs Factory: Hot Brown Honey

Make some noise, the hot brown honeys are here! Five feisty Australasian women of colour who are NOT going to be quiet, but instead are going to take some space for themselves; are going to show us who they are. We’re not witches, they say, but something wicked this way comes…

So stand up and, yeah, make some noise for: Ofa Fotu, Matehaere Hope ‘Hope One’ Haami, Juanita Duncan, Crystal Stacey, and your host/DJ Busty Beatz.

They do their stuff above, in front of, and around a hive – a great, flashing, brightly-lit honeycomb structure with luscious gold and brown cells. And what stuff do they do? Oh my! Busty Beatz is Queen Bee, running the show from on high. She raps, she proclaims, she says ‘fighting the power never tasted so sweet’, she warns ‘DON”T TOUCH MY HAIR’ – cue a sung celebration of the ‘afro’ with a rousing chorus that gets the whole of the audience on to their feet cheering and singing along. There’s soulful singing from Ofa Fotu and beatboxing from Hope One.

There’s a lot of dance – cabaret and burlesque routines that simultaneously exploit and undermine cultural stereotypes. For ‘a stereotype isn’t untrue, it’s just one part of the picture’ says Busty. A fabulous Polynesian / South Pacific parody. A coconuts and grass skirts dance. A wicked illusionist reverse striptease. A rocking romp in black-and-white maids’ outfits – hellzapopin’! And there are Busty’s great big boobies to suffocate you with, as she runs amok in the audience picking her victims with glee (two bald men – one bemused, one gagging for it – and one woman on the night I’m in).

There’s circus too: a pretty good hula hooping number, and Crystal Stacey does one of the best straps routines in this year’s Fringe – a harrowing visual portrayal of domestic abuse.

What it all proves, if you didn’t already know it, is that circus, cabaret and burlesque can be used to create subversive political performance.

The work sits within a framework of contemporary artists across the world who have eschewed the ‘regular’ theatre in favour of occupying other spaces, using popular forms to communicate a challenge to racism, sexism and colonialism. I would place in this frame the work of La Pocha Nostra / Guillermo Gomez Pena (Mexico/USA); Zecora Ura / Jade Persis Maravala (Brazil/UK); Jonathan Grieve and Nwando Ebizie aka Lady Vendredi(UK/Nigeria) amongst others. It’s a world-wide phenomenon, my friends. We’re all Singin and Swingin and Gettin Merry like Christmas…

It is, most definitely, not the time to sit down quietly in the corner and hope everything will improve. Now’s the moment to stand up and show your true colours, to Rock the Boat, Baby – and these five feisty women of colour from the Southern Hemisphere are here to help. All power to them!

A Honeydripper delight of a show, totally Fringe, and totally total theatre to boot! I’m still buzzing…

Hot Brown Honey won the Total Theatre Award 2016 for Innovation, Experimentation and Playing with Form.

Julia Croft: If there’s not dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming

A body, carrying weight. The weight of frocks and feathers and furbelows. Centuries of feminine adornment. Cue megaphone: This is Julia. This is her body. It’s a good body, a valuable body. A very rare diamond.

Onscreen, shots of a phone screen, texting/sexting. Or something. Close-up shots of her eye, her tongue, her foot, some other bits of flesh.

Cue: a play. Or maybe its a film script. There seem to be two characters in the scene, Rose (an artist’s muse) and Jack (an artist). Oh hang on, I’ve got it – Titanic! ‘I want you to draw me like one of your French girls… wearing this… wearing only this.’ Close-up on Rose’s face. Dissolve.

Cue song ‘Je ne veux pas travailler’. Cue pink satin kimono, cue green mini dress (plus champagne and willing audience member), cue 80s leggings and a slash of red lipstick that turns into clown make-up, cue the ubiquitous, the inevitable red dress, and a chalk body outline drawn on the floor. A tutu. Swan Lake. More films. More film scripts.

On screen, a recipe for a cocktail: The Leg Spreader. On stage, the noisiest hostess trolley in the world rattles through. There’s more. Twerking in a black catsuit. A sweet pink dress, and ‘I’m just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her…’ Oh shit, what’s that one? I know it, of course I do. Fail. I have to look it up afterwards. Notting Hill – of course.

I could go on, you get the gist. It’s a game. A spot-the-pop-culture-reference game. It’s a spectacle about the casting of the female body as spectacle in contemporary culture. It is the critique of the thing and the thing itself. It’s of course about the male gaze and the female response to the gaze and the objectifying and politicising of the female body and… and I haven’t even mentioned the pom-poms or the purple tights, or the pop music. Pretty Woman. Blue Velvet. And something modern, with very rude lyrics. I couldn’t possibly repeat them here.

And it is all Julia Croft! The creating, the performing. The performing! She has us in the palm of her hand for the hour. It’s like a marathon, a triathlon of costume changing and lip synching and exuberant dancing. Because, remember, If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m not Coming.

Postmodern performance art meets power pop politics – powerfully delivered. I loved it with a vengeance. I want to join her revolution.