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

Blast Theory & Hydrocracker: Operation Black Antler

How far would you go to protect yourself, your family, your country? Does the end justify the means? If you are acting under orders, for the greater good, does that absolve you of any harm done to individuals along the way? Is it OK to be a whistleblower? Is it OK to spy on your friends and colleagues? Where, and to whom, do your loyalties lie?

I remember the childhood playground conundrum: if you had a loaded gun, your friends asked, and you were in a room with Hitler in 1939, would you pull the trigger. I always said ‘no’. I understood the logic of ‘yes’ but I believed that you must follow your own moral code regardless – and if you believe it is wrong to kill, it is always wrong to kill. Later, in adulthood, I’ve revisited that question many times. I think my answer would still be ‘no’. But I’m not so sure. Would you pull the trigger to save your children’s lives, say? Yes. Any mother would say yes. There are few moral absolutes.

The means-to-an-end question is at the heart of many works of literature and art. That exact scenario – shooting Hitler, changing history – is explored in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. The De Toro film Pan’s Labyrinth brought us the moral dilemma of people fighting fascism who find themselves behaving with the same cruelty. John le Carre wrote eloquently about the life of a spy, and the daily moral dilemmas of living a double life. The petty betrayals in his stories are always the most harrowing.

So, even if you wouldn’t kill, would you lie? How do you fancy yourself as an undercover agent? What, for example, if you were given the opportunity to undermine the activities of the far right? How far would you go? Can you make the grade?

Operation Black Antler is a – well, I was going to say site-responsive, but I think situation-responsive might be more accurate – show that explores the world of the undercover agent infiltrating a new right-wing organisation. It is participatory theatre to the max – and as such, is something of a Marmite show. You either throw yourself into the scenarios offered and enjoy it, or you sit on the sidelines feeling uncomfortable.

‘You’re very good at this,’ says the man I’m working with in my ‘unit’ of three. He’s our communications officer (or ‘on coms’ as our police handler Gemma would have it). Gemma’s a tough cookie, totally believable – I feel pretty nervous when she tests me on my cover story and breathe out when I pass the test. I’ve taken her advice: it’s easier to lie if you just distort the truth rather than invent something totally new. So I’m an English teacher who went to Teacher Training College in South London. Because 40 years ago, that was true, so it is easy to play the lie. I’m enjoying myself in my new identity. I’ve located the person I’m supposed to befriend, and it’s all going to plan. But the two people who make up the unit with me aren’t having fun. They don’t like role play. They want out. Perhaps, I think, this is a show that only appeals to actors. Professional liars. But no, in the debrief session at the end I meet fellow performers who felt slightly uncomfortable in their roles, and people who had never done a day’s acting in their life completely happy to throw themselves in head-first with great gusto.

Operation Black Antler aims to get its audience talking about the issues raised by such cases as Edward Snowden, the Wikileaks affair, and the recent terrible revelations that certain UK undercover policemen were ‘deep swimming’ so far in that they formed relationships with women they were spying on, even having babies with them to maintain their cover. In this aim it most certainly succeeds, judging by the animated conversations in the debrief session that ends the show.

It is a show that is hard to assess critically as each experience is an individual one, and so much depends on the audience member’s willingness (or otherwise) to engage with it all. I enjoyed the game, and got a lot out of the experience.

If I have a criticism, it is that the show is actually a little too safe, (for me personally, anyway). There was a moment when I found myself being recruited as a right-winger, and I feel I could have been grilled far more rigorously about my beliefs by the man I had been taken to. I believed in him as a character – he pitched it very nicely, reminding me of people I met when I was really and truly ‘infiltrating’ right-wing pubs in Thanet, as part of my research for a show about migration, during Farage’s election bid last year – an interesting coincidence. But I didn’t believe that he would accept my story and take me on board in his organisation so quickly. Not that I want to advocate that actors make audience members feel truly uncomfortable. But that edge could have been approached and played with, as it has been in previous Hydrocracker productions. I would also have liked more double-bluff along the way. Sometimes things felt a little too obvious and straightforward. Once I’d identified my target, she was exactly as the briefing had suggested, there were no hidden surprises in her story. I also felt I was ‘pulled out’ of the operation just as it was getting interesting.

Of course, I say all of this knowing how hard it is to get the balance right, especially in the opening weekend of a show with this many built-in complexities.

Operation Black Antler is an exciting and challenging new collaboration by two well-established Brighton companies with reputations for creating challenging off-site work. It draws on both their strengths – Blast Theory’s interest in work driven by an interaction with new technologies, placing the audience member at the heart of the action; Hydrocracker’s mission to create intensely political work in unusual spaces, using actors who interact with audience members. Deep swimming indeed… Dive in and you won’t be disappointed. Cower on the shore and you’ll never know the pleasures of swimming against the current.

Marc Rees: Digging for Shakespeare

Here’s flowers for you; hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram…

Digging for Shakespeare takes its audience on a journey that starts on a bus, proceeds through a park, wanders through a woodland, diverts into an industrial storage unit, and dallies amongst the dales of Hollingdean, which are populated with a fine array of allotments, many sporting a quaint wee shed flying an orange flag to signify that they are part of the game. Allusions to, quotes from, and ruminations upon Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and in particular his citing of flowers and herbs, crop up everywhere.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream features, of course: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows…’ is inscribed on a mirror placed inside a glasshouse, with a rather rude looking Puck – or perhaps it is another fairy – in the form of a knitted doll dangles above. These mirrors and knitted dolls (Welsh artist Annie Hardy is the doll knitter) are the uniting visual motifs of the concluding allotment section of the show – which is the section the audience have most obviously come for. People in sturdy walking shoes enjoy testing their own knowledge of herbs and/or of Shakespeare. Here’s one for starters: chamomile. Yes? No? It’s King Henry the Fourth, Part One (Act 2, Scene 4): ‘For though the chamomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’ People nod sagely.

It all concludes with a cuppa and a tea cake as audience members swap packets of seeds – artist Marc Rees is sowing a special memorial garden for the project: there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

This is all truly delightful – it’s what comes before that it less satisfactory. Because it takes a good 90 minutes to get to the allotments. Twenty minutes of this is bus journey – and yes, this is a good decision, as it gathers everyone together in one starting place, and establishes the herd mentality needed to get an audience through a lengthy outdoor promenade show. Welsh artist Marc Rees (who has a strong track-record in site-responsive performance) uses the time to tell us about himself – as we whizz past the University of Brighton, we learn that he is a graduate of the legendary Visual and Performing Arts course. He then switches mode, into character as a kind of tweed-wearing gentleman gardener, and hands out accolades for biggest marrow or sweetest smelling rose (ah, wherefore art thou Romeo…?)

When we disembark, we are taken to Hollingbury Copse, site of the now-demolished home of Shakespearean scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips. Who, I’m afraid, fails to really grab my interest, despite the fact that he is a genuine English eccentric. And off we trot, to the woods, via a row of splendid flint-stone cottages. Marc Rees, in tour guide mode, delivers mini lectures and homilies throughout the journey, cribbing from notes on postcards, which bothers me. Why didn’t he learn the lines? Is he playing a postmodern game? Any decent tour guide wouldn’t use notes that he squints at constantly; and delivery of Shakespeare’s lines, and his reflections on them, is often nervous and a little faltering. Perhaps – if it is not a deliberate ploy – this will change as the show settles in.

Costumed characters pop up along the way, including regular appearances by Haliwell-Phillips (danced very prettily by Guillermo Weickert Molina). The walk through the woods is enlivened by a lovely team of young people dressed in Green Man mode (the Theatre Workshop Youth Cast), who scamper and chant and call to each other with shrill sounds that echo the loud and insistent birdcall all around us. I’m very fond of this boisterous ensemble of living plants.

Then, a lengthy ‘lecture’ section inside a storage unit which fails to engage me at all. I learn lots of facts about James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, who obsessively catalogued all Shakespeare’s work, Charles Nicholl’s tweedy lecture embellished with OHP photos projected onto a screen. But do I care? Not a lot. Perhaps I would in other circumstances.

It feels as if there are two shows here, battling with each other: the story of the Elizabethan garden and Shakespeare’s references to herbs and plants in his plays; and the story of the eccentric scholar, Halliwell-Phillips and his obsession with cataloguing Shakespeare’s work. Yes, it’s all about Shakespeare, perhaps that’s connection enough, and yes there are attempts at merging these two main threads, but they don’t really marry well. An awkward hybrid.

At last we are let out of that darned shed and set loose to roam amongst the Roedale allotments. With heigh! the doxy over the dale… We gather gardening tips on postcards, sniff the herbs, and read the accompanying quotes. It feels like the time spent in the allotments should be the heart of the work, and thus allocated more attention and resources. Lovely though the dolls are, a bit of live performance wouldn’t go amiss here.

But it is a beautiful sunny afternoon, and everyone is so totally happy to be out and about amongst the flowers and herbs viewing the allotments, that all gripes and grudges are quickly forgotten.

Digging for Shakespeare is a dramaturgical dog’s dinner – but one full of tasty titbits.

The Art of Comedy

Dorothy Max Prior on the wonderful training for actors and clowns to be found at The Actors Space near Barcelona

Are you ready? Are the other players ready? Is the audience ready? It is day one of The Art of Comedy, a week-long residential course at the beautiful venue in the Catalan countryside that is The Actors Space, and already we are getting to the crux of the matter.

We have done our warm-up, and we are on exercise one – and facilitator Simon Edwards is on our case from the start. All that is required is for us to enter the space in normal everyday mode, one at a time, to acknowledge the audience in whatever way we like, and to exit. ‘Give it space!’ says Simon, and ‘Just be with whatever you’re feeling; whatever is going on’. Next, a group exercise. There’s a classic comedy prop – a bench, and four players. Entrances, one at a time. Acknowledge the audience; acknowledging the new arrival. Negotiate the space between you. Next, Pass the Smile, sitting four in a row: ’Remember to receive before you give to the next person’. Build the smile into laughter, into hysteria, into tears, and diminish. Simon is both strict and encouraging at the same time. He is neither too touchy-feely nor too admonishing. He has something positive to say about everyone, but he makes it clear where there’s room for improvement. And there’s a lot of room for improvement, for all of us – hardcore pros with 30 years’ experience and young students alike.

Marian Masoliver, teacher and co-director of the Actors Space

The second session of the day – and days here are full-on, with four working sessions between 9am and 7pm, although paced well with breaks – is with Marian Masoliver. Simon and Marian are co-directors of The Actors Space, and they run most of the courses there together – although there a few guest teachers, such as Maria Codinachi, who co-runs the Bouffon course with Marian, and yours truly, running Eccentric Dance for Actors and Clowns in June. They are both alumni of the Lecoq school in Paris, and have that training as their shared territory, but they have developed the work both together and separately, bringing other experiences into play. Simon worked for many years with the UK’s Kneehigh Theatre, and Marian is a former performer with legendary Catalan company La Fura del Baus.

Marian’s session starts with some work on our own natural stance, then some classic Lecoq ‘body parts’ exercises, progressing into an exploration of Comédie Humaine, using Commedia-style half-masks . We work on getting to know the mask by ‘puppeteering’ it around the space, then on how best to don the mask: ‘Make sure your eyes can see and your mouth can speak.’ And then Marian asks us to ask ourselves: Who is the mask? We are encouraged to make our mask characters the same sex and nationality as ourselves, but they can be any age, and can be radically different to ourselves in other ways. Some of us have done a fair amount of mask work before, and some are new to it, but for all of us it great to be led through the essential ‘rules’ so thoroughly and efficiently. Keep your head up and towards the audience; don’t touch the mask with your hands; don’t get too close to the audience or it kills the magic of the mask; keep your distance from the other masks, at least a metre.

Simon joins Marian to watch the scenes we’ve devised. His notes are many and various: The masks play out to the audience, alongside rather than to the other masks. The audience are in the world, but not brought into the action. Say yes not no to the propositions brought to you by the other masks. Build the conflict. He also has some questions for us: What is the game? Who is the mask? What does the mask want?

I’ve worked on a scene with an American woman called Jade and a very young German man called Aurelius. Our sketch is set in a convent, featuring two lascivious old nuns and the new priest, who soon realises that he is one in a long line of Fathers who have come to a sticky end in the covent. Simon and Marian like the basic idea, and like most of what we’ve devised, except the ‘zombie’ ending, in which the young priest rises from the dead on Easter Sunday. Once you step out of the territory of the purely human experience, you’re on dodgy territory with the Comédie Humaine, we are told. Stay clear of supernatural beings, fantasy creatures, or even animals. These masks occupy the human world. They are at their best when they are exploring the base desires: food, sex, power, money.

Mask work at the Actors Space

I ask Simon and Marian about their chosen methodology, which starts with mask and moves to red nose – which Jacques Lecoq called ‘the smallest mask in the world’ – and then to absurd costume, circus and theatre clown, to the comic presence of the actor, and finally to playing comedy to-camera. Marian explains their approach:

‘In one week we follow an evolution of comic acting that covers more than 500 years: from the birth of Commedia Dell’Arte (half mask theatre) in the 16th century to the discovery of one’s own personal clown with the help of the red nose; and to then go beyond pre-determined styles to the necessary freedom for today’s comic creators.’

This approach has grown out of Marian and Simon’s own practice, and the experience they had when participating in Lecoq’s research.

In contrast to the mask work, when choosing a costume for ourselves, we are encouraged to choose things that don’t hide our face. There’s a wardrobe of things to play with, or we can use things that we’ve brought along ourselves. Now, we are working with an exposed face, and a very mobile head. We walk, looking up to the sky, down to the earth, out to the horizon. We meet and greet other characters. We create 10-minute showbiz numbers or ‘clown numeros’. We are working in ‘the world of the demonstrative’.

‘One realm of relationship is the demonstrative, as in a circus or cabaret,’ says Simon. ‘The clowns come in to perform their act for the audience, or this is what it seems; in fact the clown plays with the audience. The clown is transparent – as they try to survive the world and themselves, their inner feelings, thoughts and reactions spill out, for the pleasure of all.’ The comic actor needs to be aware of this dynamic relationship and thus subverts the perceptions and expectations of the audience.

Simon Edwards, teacher and co-director of the Actors Space

So, a clown numero: I work with a Spanish woman called Isobel, and we create our own red-nose soft-shoe-shuffle version of There’s No Business Like Show Business. Simon dons a hat and announces that he is Kevin the producer, auditioning people for his new show – this allowing him to take on the persona of grumpy critic tearing the performance to bits. When he has the hat on, he is nasty Kevin; when it is off, he is friendly Simon. ‘What on earth was that? What do you think you are doing?’ Kevin says to me and Isobel. ‘She’s not my usual partner,’ my character finds herself saying, snootily. ‘I just started working with her today. The other one I had was much better’. Isobel’s character stares at the floor morosely and makes small whimpering noises.

We keep to these costumes for the next few days. In the choosing of the costume, and the continuing work with the same costume, I’m reminded of the Bouffon workshop that I’d also attended at The Actors Space. Although both, obviously, operating within the comic register, clown and bouffon are very different:

‘The clown is profoundly human and we identify and laugh at the fragility and weakness that we all share,’ says Marian. ‘The bouffon is not human; it is from another dimension. This non-human being laughs at and mocks humanity, and at our common vulnerabilities.’

A clown can be dark; or can shine a light on life’s dark spots. But the clown is always human – one of us, even if a nasty one.

The Art of Comedy workshop August 2015

Sometimes we work with the red nose, and sometimes without. Now that we are often without mask or nose, we are often reminded that the mask is still there. Simon explains this thus: ‘When we say “remember to keep the mask” we are reminding the student to maintain their comic presence, and to keep the level of projection that the mask teaches, and which performing comedy requires.’ And further, on maintaining our comic presence, we are told to remember that once we up the ante, we have to maintain that level. ‘You can’t return to your entrance mode,’ Simon warns.

Always, throughout the week, we return to the performer’s relationship with the audience. ‘Have the problem, experience it, share it with the audience’. No need to overplay: just share the state with the audience.

So does the clown really suffer? No. Stay in clown. Stay with the audience. Aesthetic emotion is the goal, not real pain. ‘Everything is amplified in comedy,’ says Simon. ‘We laugh because we identify. If a clown really suffers it is not comic anymore, it becomes tragic. This can be valid for a moment but it cannot endure in the comic register (it was a trick, or he was kidding), or there must be another step of pain and suffering which takes us beyond the tragic to a heightened state and situation of ridiculousness.’

We also talk about – and work out in devising – such tricky questions as how to play with boredom and repetition. It’s a delicate line. Boredom can be an interesting game, and repetition can be a great technique. But don’t really bore the audience… We talk about ‘ruptures’: the process of setting up a situation, then breaking it. Or at least, breaking expectations, or introducing a spanner into the works, or creating conflict, or doing something that is unexpected – there are many different sorts of ruptures. We watch each other’s scenes and note what is working. Often things are strongest when the set-up is totally clear. A dinner party, a first date, an audition. Whatever it is, we need to believe in it, believe in the truth of the situation, so that ‘there is something to rupture’. Taking this idea further, we are given a classic Lecoq exercise: the clowns ‘do’ Shakespeare. It can’t be disruption and subversion from the start. We have to understand what play it is. We have to see the clowns trying their best. We then really appreciate it when things take an unexpected turn, whatever that might be.

We are cautioned to beware of velocity; to really work on the rhythm and the pace of the piece. To finely tune our instrument – the body. Make us laugh – but be honest. ‘Keep it real’ is our mantra for the week.

The final day is mostly spent working on the comic presence on film. As someone who has spent a lot of time as a street arts and cabaret performer, this proves to be challenging. How to maintain comic presence without overblown parody? ‘The camera is a microscope,’ says Simon ‘We must not theatrically project as the performance is already being captured. When we put our shared humanity under this microscope we must keep things subtle and avoid exaggeration. The more we trust and keep it simple, the more the audience can enjoy the result.’

I’ve noticed that often during the week, Simon and Marian often use the word ‘clown’ as a verb rather than a noun. To clown. I ask them why, and Marian says: ‘People try to create ‘a clown’ but you can’t because when you are in a situation – with all your human wishes and desires – where you try and achieve something, and then suffer the consequences of your actions, you already are one!’

And so here we are – clowns one and all.

All images courtesy of the Actors Space

The Actors Space is a renowned international centre of theatre and film, located in a place of outstanding natural beauty, only one hour from Barcelona. They provide high quality training for actors, directors, writers, teachers and students of dramatic art. www.actors-space.org

Courses taught by Simon Edwards and Marian Masoliver:

The Creative Actor (residential)

16–24 July 2016 (inclusive)

The Art of Comedy (residential)

29 July – 6 August 2016 (inclusive)

Screen Acting (residential)

20–28 August 2016 (inclusive)

Directing Performance (residential)

1–9 September 2016 (inclusive)

Book all of the above courses via the Actors Space website

Dorothy Max Prior will be teaching Eccentric, Comic and Popular Dance for Actors & Clowns (Residential) at The Actors Space 6–12 June 2016 (inclusive). See http://actors-space.org/courses-workshops/other-courses-and-activities/

Please note that this course needs to be booked with Aurelius Productions, not via the Actors Space. Please email aureliusproductions@gmail.com or for full information, and to pay via Paypal, see dorothysshoes1.blogspot.co.uk

Eccentric Dance workshop 2015

Circus and the Search for Home

Across the Barbican’s vast stage – right across, east to west – is a wall. It could be anywhere: Berlin pre-1989; the West Bank, anytime over the past 30 years. It could be now: Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary; the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Calais. It’s perhaps 3 or 4 metres high, a mottled rusty-grey metal. Six figures, dressed in muted blues and greys, are dotted around the space in front of the wall, lit by a tunnel of light that casts them as puppets on a marionette stage. Or rabbits caught in the headlights. Or, indeed, fleeing people illuminated by searchlights. Over the next hour, the six acrobats – three men and three women – act out a painstaking choreography. They are caught in the wind, or perhaps the waves, tumbling and rolling across the stage in pairs, hanging on to each other in desperation. They are grouped backs-against-the-wall, staring out at us pleadingly. They form towers, or create tortuous hand-to-hand balancing poses as they scramble up and over each other, but without any of the usual ‘aids’ into those difficult positions: often, there is no prep, no jumps or braces, they just have to – get there, somehow. Even more unnerving, they often don’t make eye contact with each other, giving a terrifyingly tentative look to many of the moves.

It’s a very clever game to play: these are some of the top circus performers in the world, and often their director (Circa founder Yaron Lifschitz) has created scenes in which their safety nets are taken away. There are wobbles, and shakes, and trembles – but these aren’t faked, they come from the arduous situations that have been set up. This is circus, not theatre: everything you see is real.

Circa’s The Return is not exactly a ‘version of’ but a kind of poetic re-interpretation of Monteverdi’s opera Il Ritorno de L’Ulysses de Patria, bringing together the Circa acrobats and an ensemble of five musicians and singers. Monteverdi’s opera, and Circa’s show, are inspired by one of the oldest poems in Western literature – Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus (or Ulysses as the Romans renamed him) finds himself far from home, and cast adrift on a flimsy raft, tossed on rough seas, and washed ashore on a small Greek island. Yes, it is a story that has great contemporary relevance.

Circa: The Return

In the post-show discussion at the Barbican, where the show had its UK premiere as part of the London International Mime Festival, Yaron states with complete honesty that the current refugee crisis wasn’t the starting point for the show. It is, he says, a reflection on the core themes of the Odyssey – desire and absence – exploring the story of the 10-year separation of Odysseus from his wife Penelope, the tests that were placed on both of them, the desperate desire for re-unification, and (in Odysseus’ case) the longing to return home. Yet as the piece was being made, the constant, depressing news of Europe’s refugee crisis intruded upon the work. Yaron talks of the day that he, like so many of us, was stopped in his tracks by the image of a small Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a Greek beach. As the creation process continued, the terrible photographic images (and the images conjured by the galling words of the news reports) that we have all been inundated with over the past year or two informed the development of the piece, which Yaron says has changed considerably since its first outing in their hometown of Brisbane, Australia.

For example, almost all the usual circus props have been discarded along the way – there is only one section with equipment, a scene in which the three women are each, independently, in their own space, working – one with straps, one hand-balancing, and one in a kind of cage-like metal cube serving as a type of static trapeze. Mostly, the cast are just there onstage together, telling stories through their bodies, without the equipment. But it is always circus that is the form doing the telling: ’I have only two rules. No acting. and no dancing,’ says Yaron.

So the six acrobats are not actors playing characters – there is no one Odysseus or one Penelope on stage, everyone is contributing to an abstracted reflection, a poetic expression in movement, of those key themes of desire and absence. And they are not trying to act out the feelings of being off-kilter, displaced, dispossessed – they are demonstrating that through the physical actions they have been directed to take. What we witness is a poignant portrayal of what it feels like to have everything cut from underneath you; to be cast adrift; to be displaced. Unlike Homer’s poem, there is no happy ending; no reuniting – we are left with an image that suggests that the uprooting, the moving on, the being pushed forward, is continuing, over and over and over again…

T1J: Les Inouis

Belgian-based Theatre d’un Jour’s Les Inouis (seen in the UK as a work-in-progress at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, and probably returning in 2016) also reflects on the struggles of displaced people, but has a rather different starting point. Creator/director Patrick Masset was originally intending to make a biographical piece about his Belgian father, who had migrated to Canada many years earlier, having lived and worked in what was then the Belgian Congo in Africa. He had been intermittently filming his father talking about his life for about four years, and at one point his father started complaining about the ‘crazy migrants’ Canada was taking in. No amount of arguing on Patrick’s part could make his father see that he was a migrant who was now showing the same prejudice to new migrants that was perhaps shown to him when he arrived in Canada with no family and no friends. ‘It’s not the same’ his father argued stubbornly.

This set him thinking – and the nature of the piece changed, to become focused on the plight of refugees and migrants, past and present. ‘It is not the artist’s role to provide answers, but to ask questions’ says Patrick, when I speak to him towards the end of the Edinburgh run. At this point, the show had had a brief development time, pre-Edinburgh, working for a month with Belgian migrants on their stories. Patrick was now working on a plan to take a new, smaller version to small villages, performing in a truck, and engaging people in the question of how to view the migrant ‘problem’. This show is now touring, and is called Les Inouis 2, and it aims to show how the reality of the emigrants of yesterday echoes the prejudice experienced by the migrants of today. The word ‘inoui’, incidently, has no exact translation to English – the nearest is probably ‘the unheard’ or ‘the voiceless’.

Patrick believes passionately that circus – like physical theatre, puppetry, film, and music which are all also elements of his work – can be used as a tool to explore difficult questions. There are many ways to tell stories, so ‘why not speak with circus?’.

When I see the show, it is still very fresh and new, but brimming with startling images. It weaves the story of a nameless man washed up on a shore, imagined by the girl who finds his dying body, with a bigger story of migration and environmentalism. The famous bicycles of the Calais Jungle, a makeshift migrant city, are suggested by a unicyclist moving around the space at the start of the piece, as three washed-up bodies lie on the ‘beach’ next to two carved wooden dolphin.

The central puppet is a human-size figure that alternates cleverly with a real human playing the migrant on the shore. The simple but effective animation, with human interaction from behind the translucent material that forms the screen, is used to tell the story – from both a human and an animal perspective – of a journey across the ocean. The movement work is sound, with some strong acrobalance sections. There is a beautiful slack wire act on which a woman gives birth to a puppet baby – it fits very well into the piece, suggesting the shaky vulnerability of women migrants giving birth whilst in transit.

The piece also tells a story of a border crossing with a wagon filled with caged birds. The birds can’t cross, because they don’t have the right documents. Their carer opens the cages and they fly across the border – a beautiful and pertinent image of a world without borders.

Palestinian Circus Company: B-orders

Also presented at Edinburgh Fringe 2015 was Palestinian Circus Company’s B-Orders, which won a Total Theatre / Jacksons Lane Award for Circus. ‘Imagine a world without borders and a life without prejudice’ is its tagline. It is created and performed by Ashtar Muallem and Fadi Zmorrod, both totally engaging onstage.

The pair use dance, acrobatics, Chinese Pole and silks in the telling of their story of the desire to break free of the boundaries of nationality, gender, religion. Also object animation and manipulation: each has a pile of bricks that are used to build walls, and houses, and human figures; to throw and kick; and to use as stepping stones to walk over to each other. Their onstage relationship is beautiful, poignant. They are all things to each other: sibling, friend, alter-ego, lover.

Afterwards, I speak to Fadi Zmorrod about the making of the show. He and Ashtar (Ash) have known and worked with each other since they were 15, and part of a growing youth circus scene in their hometown of Birzeit, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Training is not easy in Palestine, and he has luckily been able to exit the country to attend short courses in Belgian, French or Italian circus schools. There is also YouTube, and Fadi says that to a great extent he and Ash are ‘self-taught’. Things are often hard, but ‘we have a sense of humour,’ he says. B-orders was made in a five-month spell in 2015, with spells of work of two to three weeks, devising different sections and working with different circus trainers. Part of their process involved interviewing people, old and young, to ask about what bothered or restricted them; their experiences of provocation on the streets; and the things that block people’s freedom. The piece is political, but it isn’t agit-prop. There is no single message, and many of the issues of ‘freedom’ explored relate as much to gender within Palestinian/Arab culture as to the specificities of the West Bank. ’Palestine is a masculinist society’ says Fadi. ‘In the villages, a young woman will have to take orders from her little brother.’

What he wants do in the work is to ‘hold up a mirror so people can see themselves’. His is a long-term displaced nation with no signs of any resolution to the dilemma of being, essentially, a refugee in your own country.

What he hopes for – for himself, for his circus company and school, and for his country – is ‘Belonging. Togetherness. Having a space.’

Ultimately, all three circus shows reflected on here are about that: belonging, togetherness, having a space to call your own. In other words, coming home.

Circa’s The Return was presented at the Barbican Theatre as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016. The post-show discussion was chaired by Dorothy Max Prior on behalf of LIMF on 28 January 2016.

See Total Theatre’s review by Thomas Wilson, here. For more on Circa, and full details on The Return and all the other shows currently in repertoire, see http://circa.org.au/

T1J’s Les Inouis and the Palestine Circus Company’s B-orders were seen at Circus Hub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015. Some of the material in this feature was taken from a previously published post on work seen at the Circus Hub, August 2015, for the Total Theatre Awards.

Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) is a cross-discipline company that makes works in many genres, under the artistic direction of Patrick Masset. In 2015, the company celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Currently touring shows include L’Enfant Qui, and Les Inouis 2. For more on Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) see: http://www.t1j.be/

The Palestinian Circus School / Palestinian Circus Company is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, established in 2006 and registered with the Palestinian Authority since February 2007. It teaches circus in Birzeit and in other cities like Jenin, Hebron, Ramallah and Al Fara refugee camp. http://www.palcircus.ps/

Urgent call: 23-year-old Mohammad Faisal Abu Sakha, who works with the Palestinian Circus School, was detained by the Israeli military, without charge or explanation, on 14 December 2015, as he was on his way from his parents’ home, in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, to work at the Palestinian Circus School in Birzeit, near Ramallah. See Amnesty International’s campaign here: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-palestinian-circus-performer-held-israel

This feature is published as part of an ongoing collaboration between Total Theatre Magazine and The Ragroof Players related to the company’s research process for their site-responsive and community-specific show Bridges y Puentes. See http://www.ragroofplayers.co.uk/bridges-y-puentes.html Research material related to the project will be gathered on www.bridgesypuentes.com

Small World

Dorothy Max Prior has the pleasure of two intimate performance pieces presented at London International Mime Festival 2016

Two shows for small audience groups, set around tabletops, in rooms squirrelled away in the basements of arts centres. But oh such different shows!

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra

David Espinosa’s Mi Gran Obra works on creating distance; playing with scale. Although we are tightly grouped around the table – tall people on high stools at the back, shorter people on low stools upfront –we view the scenes enacted with tiny models on the tabletop through opera glasses. When Espinosa’s hands come into view, we jump back at the sight of the hands of a giant. Or of a malicious god toying with his creations – this is, after all, a show exploring the theme of megalomania.

The piece works as an evolving series of tableau in miniature. Tucked beneath the operator’s table (Espinosa does everything in this show – object manipulation, lights, sound) are trays of tiny model railway people, plastic animals, and toy helicopters. Also to-hand are a reading lamp, a couple of red bike lights, a pot plant, and a tambourine. On the table, a pair of mini speakers each sport a band of musicians perched aloft: a rock group and a military brass band.

The first tableau gives us a procession from cradle to grave, a diagonal line across the table. Later, we see a fabulous wedding photo group that features a Mexican Mariachi band; a beach scene sporting posing athletes and a posse of toy bulls, with a car crash to the side; an even more surreal scene featuring elephants, monkeys and Santas; and a magnificent miniature sex scene, in which the earth moves… and moves. The pot plant serves as a graveyard; the bike lights turn the tabletop into a disco, replete with pole dancer; the tambourine becomes the podium for a kind of open-topped doll’s house, where the beds get put to good use, until the savage god hammers nails into the tambourine, sending everything flying. The soundtrack gives us an eclectic mix, from Mexican marches to Latino covers of hits like Hotel California.

If there is a reservation, it is in the use of a tablet screen, integrated into the action on two or three occasions. It is hard to see the screen if you are sitting to the side of the table, and in any case it feels an irrelevant addition.

That aside, Mi Gran Obra (subtitled ‘an ambitious project’) is a fabulously clever adult take on the childish pleasures of play – anyone who has ever enjoyed Playmobile, Lego, or Sylvanian families, or perhaps liked those bargain packs of plastic model soldiers, will appreciate the appeal. In David Espinosa’s hands, his little model people (bought from Hornby Trains and numerous other companies across Europe) become the actors in a grandiose theatre with a cast of hundreds. Life, death and everything in between is played out before our eyes, with humour and pathos. When the tiny people are squashed by giant hands, or bulldozed into a pile, there is an audible intake of breath in the room. Luckily, the piece ends with an image of hope – a great relief. A postmodern puppetry for the modern world.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten

Xavier Bobes’ Things Easily Forgotten is a very different beast; a show that from the outset celebrates intimacy. Espinosa delivers a mini-lecture at the start of his show, explaining his motivations and outlining the provenance of the show, giving us the intellectual task of imagining that what we are about to see would exist at 37 times the scale, if the little people where life-size. Bobes, on the other hand, keeps things close to his heart. As we enter the ante-room, he is firmly in performance mode: not quite ‘in character’, but certainly ‘in persona’, dressed in a neat brown suit and tie, and sporting an elegant wristwatch. Our vintage tickets are clipped with a hole-puncher, and we enter a dark room.

As the audience of five sit down, placing our hands on the table as a candle is lit, it feels for all the world as if a seance is about to begin. And indeed this is not so far from the truth – what we get for the next thrilling 75 minutes is a cross between a seance, a family gathering, and a magic show, as the dead of Spain’s twentieth century are conjured up for us through an extraordinary array of printed ephemera, everyday objects, and crackly sounds that come from a vinyl record player. Our host holds the space beautifully – sometimes silently, sometimes drawing us in with text. At the end, we are asked not to reveal too much about the show, so I will honour that request and refrain from saying what he does and how he does it, and focus instead on how it makes me feel.

It leaves me with the sort of bittersweet melancholy you feel when you find a cache of old photographs in your grandmother’s wardrobe; or you find an old newspaper in a junk shop that is from the year of your birth. It appeals to the part of me that is fascinated by portraits of people I don’t know; whose lives are frozen in a moment in time – forever young, or forever ‘just married’, or forever walking down that seaside promenade. If you are a hoarder, who keeps old matchbooks, redundant banknotes, and souvenir keyrings in dusty corners of your loft, then this is the show for you. There is an added poignancy for anyone with an interest in the painful history of Spain over the past 100 years, particularly the Franco years.

It is a theatre that finds a novel way to create a linear narrative – a timeline that tells the history of a people through the things they leave behind; creating a shared space of evocative sounds and images that I leave feeling touched and nurtured.

I applaud the brave and good decision by the London International Mime Festival to programme these intimate works for such small audience numbers. Small in scale, big in ambition: Mi Gran Obra and Things Easily Forgotten are both beautifully crafted visual theatre works that added something special to the festival – grand works that won’t easily be forgotten.

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra was seen at Tate Modern, 13 January 2016.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten was seen at Southbank Centre, 20 January 2016.

Presented as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016.