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

The Games People Play

An interview with David Espinosa, creator and performer of Mi Gran Obra

Imagine for a moment that you have an unlimited budget and bounteous resources. The largest theatre in the world. A cast of hundreds. Marching bands. Animals. Helicopters. You could make the biggest, the best show ever seen!

Spanish artist and theatre-maker David Espinosa has, since his arrival on the Barcelona scene in 2001, eschewed spectacle and the grandiose, focusing instead on work that plays with the boundary where new dance, physical theatre and conceptual art intercept. Somewhere along the way he became interested in exploring how the animated object might represent and replace the performing body – a puppetry of sorts. And this has led him to the idea that he could perhaps create the greatest show on earth – on a tabletop with figurines and toy animals. Thus, in 2012, was born Mi Gran Obra (My Great Work), which comes to the London International Mime Festival 2016, presented in collaboration with Tate Modern.

It is one of a series of works that David Espinosa has made which explore the notion of megalomania. When he first created the show, he worked with a sound and lighting operator. Now he does everything: towers over the tiny people and animals, pulling them hither and thither; zooms in with the toy helicopters; turns the lights on and off. He is the god of this miniature world, a Zeus lording it over his plastic Olympus. This is the grandiose theatre he never wanted to be part of, ironically embraced with gusto.

Although Mi Gran Obra seems a long way from his starting point as a dance and physical theatre performer, Espinosa insists that it is on a clear continuum. ‘I think choreographically,’ he says, ‘my work is about the relationship between space and time. And sound…’ In word-free work, he says, ‘music is half the performance’ – the sound becomes crucial to the dramaturgy of the piece, giving it ‘its timing, its meaning’. He works with composer and sound artist Santos Martinez, a renowned film score composer and winner of the coveted Gaudi prize, who has no interest in the film industry, preferring the place where performance and experimental music collide. The two artists devise together – music making and physical action intrinsically linked. Deconstructing and reconstructing ‘the masterpieces of music’ was a key element of Mi Gran Obra: ‘Beethoven, Deep Purple, Tibetan monks… we make Beethoven’s Fifth better than Beethoven!’ Espinosa also regularly collaborates with a number of architects. At the beginning of the process of of making Mi Gran Obra, he had an intention of making an elaborate model theatre, but the architects talked themselves out of the work, insisting that it would all work so much better with an empty space. Also key to the process is company manager cum creative producer Marta Oliveira, whose mantra is ‘Don’t forget the audience!”

David Espinosa comes from a regular working-class Spanish family who have no connections to the art world. This, he feels, is important as it has given him a freedom to move in whatever direction he wishes, free from an overbearing middle-class view of what art or culture might be. ‘For most of my family, the first time they went to the theatre was to see me!’ he says. He was an only child, used to playing on his own, creating imaginary worlds – something he still does. Game-playing is core to his artistic practice. A key area of investigation of all the work he has made over the last decade or so is: how can I continue, as an adult, to play with the full immersion and passion of a child. Did he have toy soldiers or other tiny plastic models as a child? No, he says, he was never allowed them for some reason, no matter how often he asked – which is perhaps why he is now getting so much pleasure from playing with them in Mi Gran Obra: ‘Now I choose what I can spend my money on so I can buy as many as I want!’

On leaving school, he went (aged 18) to study theatre in Valencia – a pretty traditional text-based course. ‘Lope de Vega…’ he says, with a small sigh. He wasn’t sure at the time why he choose this path – he just wanted ‘to do something different’ – but with hindsight, he feels it stemmed from ‘a desire to carry on playing’. Contemporary dance and physical theatre classes and courses brought him closer to something he wanted to do: to use his body to create art and tell stories. Like everyone else working in physical performance in the 1990s, he admired Pina Bausch greatly. After a three-month spell in Brussels, he found himself in Barcelona as a dancer – and it is here that he has laid down his hat and made a home, with partner in life and art, Afrika Navarro (also a professional dancer, turned eagle-eyed outside eye on the work) and their children. ‘We have very different ideas, ‘ he says of Afrika. ‘She likes things to be beautiful, I like things trashy.’ So it is not so much that they are co-creating work: he makes the work, and she takes the role of dramaturg – observing, questioning, challenging. ‘We have a good connection because we fight,’ he says with complete honesty. Somehow between them they ‘arrive in a balanced place’.

The children have had a direct influence on his work too: watching them play has inspired him, but more than that he has appropriated their toys into his work – not only in Mi Gran Obra but also in the subsequent piece Much Ado About Nothing (2014), in which all of the works of Shakespeare are performed in one mad burst using toys, puppets, models, ornaments. ‘Everything I could find in the house…’ This progresses a way of working that has been a recurring aspect of his practice: to take whatever he finds in his immediate environment and incorporate that into his work. An earlier solo piece saw him involving his computer in the studio play, turning himself into the living avatar of a football manager video game: ‘a chance to make real all my fantasies!’ he says. This was before he decided to replace the living body with object substitutes – or, as in the case of another work, La Triste Figura (which premiered autumn 2015), replacing the performer with the audience member who has to discover the work through a journey armed with torch and opera glasses.

The past fifteen years of Espinosa’s work has a seen a steady progression away from contemporary dance into work that is informed by fine arts practice – especially sculpture. It is no coincidence that Mi Gran Obra is being presented at Tate Modern alongside the big Alexander Calder retrospective currently showing. Joseph Seelig, co-director of the London International Mime Festival, and Marko Daniel of Tate Modern saw Mi Gran Obra at Birmingham’s BE Festival 2014, and hatched a plan to present the work in tandem with the Calder exhibition. Espinosa, like Calder before him, describes his work as ‘performing sculpture’. He continues on that trajectory with the new work that he is currently planning, which will be threefold – an opera, a dance performance, and a 3D film – using big toys and other large-scale models. This will evolve over the coming two years.

The work in development will be the third stage of the investigation into megalomania, alongside Mi Gran Obra and the Quixote-inspired La Triste Figura, and will progress the key principles and obsessions that drive the artist. Adult toys. The power of play. A love of the homemade and the handmade.

In the wake of the financial crisis that has decimated Spain in recent years, David Espinosa considers his choice of a small-scale and lo-tech ethos to be a political one. He also finds it impossible to separate the issues of scale and the dramaturgy of a piece of theatre. ‘How much money has been spent, how much support – these things inform the work.’ Whilst viewing these big overblown productions, he has found himself asking ‘what would I do if I had these conditions?’ And so, the creation of Mi Gran Obra, to use ‘ the little scale to do a big performance.’

The ultimate irony of Mi Gran Obra is that, tiny though it is, performed on a small table to audiences of 20 or so people at a time, it has been an enormous success and has toured the world, and has thus been seen by thousands and thousands of people. Which would delight any megalomaniac, really!

David Espinosa’s Mi Gran Obra will be performed at Tate Modern 14–17 January 2016 as part of the London International Mime Festival. Limited audience capacity. Bookings: www.mimelondon.com

For more on David Espinosa’s work see www.davidespinosa.org

Dorothy Max Prior is editor of Total Theatre Magazine, online at www.totaltheatre.org.uk, and a judge of the Total Theatre Awards, held annually at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Dickie Beau: LOST in TRANS

We meet, and the angels sing…

LOST in TRANS gives us a plethora of interlocking love stories. Recordings. Traces. Echoes. Our host for the evening is Tiresias, the blind sage who lived part of his life as a man and part as a woman. This was back in the day – you know, Olympus and all that. Who feels the most desire, Zeus’s wife Hera asked. Who experiences the most pleasure in sex, man or woman? And here, the answer is laid bare.

Richard Boyce plays Dickie Beau who plays Tiresias as a hermaphrodite playing all other characters in the many stories we hear tonight. Well, almost all. There is also Eleanor Fogg playing johnsmith playing a pantomime horse playing Pegasus.

The key story around which all else turns is the myth, from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, of the nymph Echo who loved and pursued the beautiful youth Narcissus. But he was in love with his own reflection, and eventually died of unrequited love, wasting away until nothing was left of him but a little yellow flower – a narcissus. Echo too wasted away until nothing was left but her voice, doomed forever to repeat the last words of everything she hears.

One of the many marvellous things about this beautiful new show from Dickie Beau is its challenging portrayal of female sexuality, and investigation of what it means to be a woman. Echo is a gentle nymph, but she’s no retiring flower. She is upfront about her desire for Narcissus and pursues him with determination, throwing herself upon him in a rejected embrace.

Spring flowers feature in another extraordinary love story, captured on a 3-inch reel-to-reel tape found on a commuter train in the mid 1960s, and posted (under the name Nubbin) on a site that shares found audio material. An unnamed Canadian woman has recorded a love letter. The full 15 minutes is incorporated into the show. It starts with mundane commentary on the worsening weather in whatever city her lover lives in; on a friend or relative’s medical problems; and on the level of work she’s dealing with. Inundated, she says. She’d rather be at home, she says, snuggled in bed… the recording then moves into a highly charged declaration of sexual desire that is stunning in its honesty and detail. The recording steers back into the everyday, with a reflection that the crocuses and daffodils are coming out…

Another found recording also features a love letter, this time from a man to a woman – a married man, a clandestine relationship, so the man spins discs while he is making the recording so his wife doesn’t hear him. Dance band classics serenade us: And the Angels Sing. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. His love is an obsessive, devouring love. But it is love, not sex, he insists.

And then there’s the drag queens, and the trans women, who add their voices. One voice talks about taking hormones, but holding back from going under the knife – you can always change your mind that way: be both sexes, like Tiresius, and move from one to the other and back again. One has made the transition, and is happy to be all woman. Another voice is clear that s/he might dress as a woman but is not a ‘real’ woman: ‘I’ve never had that service once a month.’

So those are the words – but there are pictures too! Oh such wonderful images that burst out of the darkness, morph into something else, dissolve. Toynbee Studio theatre’s traditional proscenium arch stage is perfect for the cinematic scenography of the piece. A thin black gauze veils the front of the stage. To the rear, stage left, a circular white screen – a moon, a mirror, a glowing sphere, sometimes projected on, sometimes shining white and empty – with a microphone on a stand placed in a spotlight in front of it; a podium stage-right which is the site for many of the live body’s moments of transformation.

Throughout most of the show, the dominant aesthetic is white and black, a play on the binary divide. The black-clad Tiresias, with a womanly bosom and a manly groin, has his/her trunk superimposed by a sexless white babygro suit that becomes a puppet-esque animated figure; and Narcissus appears as an enormous upside-down head in the ‘mirror’ that is the projected image on the gauze. A siren with floor-length hair sits and muses; a giant headless be-suited Perseus dangles a beheaded Medusa by her hair. Who’d be a hero? Joseph Campbell’s words resonate.

Dashes of colour: the subtle brown-and maroon shades of the centre of a spinning vinyl record projected on the thin black gauze as we hear our obsessive male adulterer say again and again ‘ I love you. I suppose you’re going to get tired of my saying it.’ The moon-like sphere a deep purple. Later, an intense reddish pink immerses the wildly wigged one-eyed Dickie who takes to the mic for a plaintive song: ‘ Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings and fly away…’

The last time I saw Richard – Dickie – was in Blackouts at Sacred just a few weeks ago. LOST in TRANS uses many familiar motifs and tropes – the things that have become the tricks of his trade. The transformations. The play on gender. The investigation of identity. The interest in the play between artifice and reality. The lip-synching to recorded voice. The obsession with ‘found’ audio material: radio, reel-to-reel tape and vinyl. The use of the gauze screen and projections. The wigs. The multiplicity of overlapping voices. The slow, careful, movement work – living sculpture.

But LOST in TRANS feels light years ahead – a great leap into new territory in its complexity and richness of imagery and ideas. Richard’s got his gorgeous wings – and he’s flying high.

Featured imaage: Dickie Beau: LOST in TRANS at Toynbee Studios: Photo James Allan.

The Tiger Lillies: Lulu – A Murder Ballad

Good Lord, she gets around, this Lulu. Spreads herself about a bit. A couple of plays by Frank Wedekind (Earth Spirit, 1895, and Pandora’s Box, 1904). An opera by Alban Berg. At least four films, including the GW Pabst classic reworking of Pandora’s Box, featuring the legendary Louise Brooks sporting that haircut. A character in the Final Fantasy series of video games. The inspiration for the last-ever album by Lou Reed. And now, the subject of a contemporary opera by The Tiger Lillies.

But who is the elusive Lulu? What is she? Are we any the wiser? Do we get any insight into her thoughts and dreams and desires? No, of course not. Lulu eludes us, as she has always done. A girl who goes by many names: not only Lulu, but also Mignon, Eve, Nellie. She is a blank canvas, a fabrication, a doll. A depository of men’s dark dreams and dirty desires.

The Tiger Lillies’ Martyn Jacques takes Frank Wedekind’s verses as the starting point for his lyrics: She was born in the big city / In the middle of a slum / A chap called Shig pass for her Papa / And a harlot was her mum. In the programme notes, Jacques says ‘it was hard writing the songs for Lulu. You’re drawn into a very dark place’. And if you have any previous experience of the Tiger Lillies’ work, you’ll know that if Jacques finds the subject matter dark, then ye gods it must be the darkest of the dark.

The resulting production pulls no punches. We encounter the whole terrible tale – child abuse, rape, prostitution, exploitation, murder – through Martyn Jacques’ sung lyrics, and his spoken words delivered in character as her amoral father, Shig. We are never placed inside her experience – everything is seen from the outside. But the trajectory is clear enough: behind the Femme Fatale who lures men to their destruction is the abused child, sold into prostitution at a terrifyingly young age by her father. Passed from man to man, until she is old enough to take it upon herself to conspire with her father ‘to see what could be had’. But she’s never herself: ‘For each man she’s a mirror’. Again and again Jacques’ lyrics describe her as a doll – a doll to be dressed and played with, a puppet to be manipulated. She drifts silently through every scene: Jacques as Shig chucks her chin as he leers at her; or she stands on the piano and stares down at him. When we hear of her being painted, then bedded, by the artist Schwarz she moves ghost-like through a series of empty frames projected onto the screen.

Our Lulu here is played by Laura Caldow, a Merce Cunningham trained dance-theatre artist who has worked with Deborah Warner and Maresa Von Stockert, and is a frequent collaborator with Will Tuckett. Apart from the three Tiger Lillies, she is the only performer. The portrayal of Lulu as fantasy character, as avatar, as the projection of others’ fantasies, is bolstered by the constant changes of costume, and the use of a screen veiling the rear of the stage, which she is often to be found behind. But whether she is behind that thin veil – which creates a filmic mise-en-scene – or right there with the musicians, she is always ethereal, other. Caldow’s delicate and effective self-choreographed movement work embraces ballet, contemporary, expressive dance, mime, and a kind of sculptural posing, so that she appears to be placed in the scene as a kind of living statue.

Lulu – A Murder Ballad is directed and designed by Mark Holthusen, whose previous work encompasses photography, album artwork, music videos, and stage design for numerous bands. He previously collaborated with the Tiger Lillies on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. His chief scenographic tool is projection. This works best when the images are of a Gothic landscape (tall wonky houses, lit windows, street lamps) or ornate interiors. It is less successful when performer-video interaction is attempted – with the exception of a simple and beautiful image of Lulu holding an umbrella as filmed rain bears down on her. The culminating murder scene uses a beautiful design idea of lighting the proscenium arch with an intense red-and-black projection, although this is marred slightly by an odd cartoonish burst of on-screen blood.

The songs are mostly written in the third person, about Lulu and her abusers/lovers, although some are addressed to her. The imagery is nasty. One abuser of the young Lulu is described as ‘salivating on her dress’ (accompanied by nasty slurping noises by Jacques). And as for Lulu: ‘Does she want it? She doesn’t know anything else.’ he spits. Lulu is, variously, ‘A bird on a wire’ or ‘Just a marionette of a pervert’s desires’ or ‘An animal in a cage.’ There is, amongst the original compositions, a very lovely cover of Cole Porter’s Love For Sale, Jacques’ robust delivery forcing the song away from breezy romanticism into a harsh laying-out of Porter’s disturbing lyrics in all their bare distress: Love for sale / Appetising young love for sale / Love that’s fresh and still unspoiled / Love that’s only slightly soiled / Love for sale.

The most harrowing of the songs – the culmination of the story, the horrific ending of Lulu’s life at the hands of Jack the Ripper– is written in the second person, addressed to her killer. Jacques sits at the piano, and rasps the words out: Do you pray, Jack? Got a crucifix on your wall? Do you think God will be grateful you’ve rid the world of vermin? Do you masturbate over her dead body, Jack, her uterus torn out…? It is truly, terribly, magnificently horrible.

Musically, it’s mostly the usual Tiger Lillies mix. Waltzes fast and slow. A fair few ‘oom pah, oom pah’ jolly bounce-along tunes. A rumba or two. Martyn Jacques moves from standing with uke or accordion (and occasional swanee whistle) to sitting behind his piano. Adrian Stout is solid as a rock on contra bass, and adds interesting layers of sound with musical saw and Theremin. New boy Jonas Golland does a fine job on drums / percussion. There are some interesting and complex sections of music that take it all into a more jazzy and experimental direction. But it is Jacques’s voice that mostly draws our attention – his extraordinary falsetto singing voice, and his horribly gruff spoken voice (as Shig), a mesmerising mix.

Lest we leave the theatre totally destroyed, there is a very lovely comic coda to the story – the murdered Lulu re-appearing pretty as a picture to be serenaded by Jacques with the second cover version of the night. It’s another Cole Porter classic – and it is, of course, My Heart Belongs to Daddy. Sick!

Watch the Birdie: Sylvia Rimat and PanicLab at Sacred

Time is waiting in the wings. Again. Deja Vu. Chelsea Theatre, Sacred Season 2015. A show about the nature, and perception, of time. Last week, Project O’s Voodoo; this week, the new show by Sylvia Rimat, This Moment Now.

We start with a riff on time, a beating of time. Sylvia is noticeably absent. We have instead a jazz-rock drummer, and someone who describes himself as the ‘stage manager’, although perhaps ‘performative technician’ might be closer. A number of metronomes are placed downstage, set off at different times, and the drummer (Chris Langton) launches into a flurry of paradiddles. The stage manager (Alasdair Jones) then twiddles with his laptop and brings up a live-feed image of Sylvia on the large screen upstage. She is outside, braving the wind and rain on the edge of the World’s End to tell us that time is different from where she is – nearer the ground, thus moving slower because of gravity. No, I don’t understand either. I gave up physics when I was 14. And I’ve no regrets: I’ve given up trying to understand everything. At age 60, I’ve realised that I just won’t, and that’s that – life’s too short.

And the brief burst of time that is our short lives is the heart of the matter: this is very much a show about ageing as time ticks by, measuring out our lives. When she finally makes a live appearance onstage, Sylvia describes herself as ‘neither young nor old’, placing herself (sometimes literally) between screen images of 93-year-old Eileen and 9-year-old Rose. Of course, to the old dears in the audience – like me and my companion – Sylvia is a spring chicken. But I suppose that is the point. It’s all relative, as Einstein might have said. Musing on both the aforementioned Einstein (much in the news at the moment due to it being the 100th anniversary of the publishing – or exposing or revealing or whatever you do with theories – of the general theory of relativity) and on quantum mechanics (which I’m told is different to quantum physics, but – well, if you know the difference, you’re a better woman than I), the artist reflects on how time is perceived by different people, and especially by people at different stages of their life. For little Rose, a minute passes very slowly. For elderly Eileen, the years fly by. Well, no surprises there. But what, Sylvia says, really matters is the here and now: ‘ I am here. I am here with you now. I am here with you now and believe that it matters.’

Sylvia Rimat is as gorgeous and endearing a stage presence as ever, but This Moment Now doesn’t have quite the appeal for me of last year’s Sacred offering, the inspirational If You Decide to Stay. Perhaps because it is new, and needs bedding in? But the material just doesn’t seem to be as compelling: what is really being said here that is beyond what we all know only too well about time? But is this my age speaking? Perhaps it is all a revelation to younger people. And the performance mode is less relaxed, with rather too many contemporary live art / new dance cliches for my taste (the gestural choreography, the shaking and twitching, the running back and forth to the mic). I also find the audience involvement in this show less engaging: the synchronising of timepieces feels token and meaningless (there is no real synchronised time, it is all a man-made nonsense); the pause for a tea break I suppose a nice little reference both to J Alfred Prufrock’s measuring out of life with coffee spoons, and to the endless waiting for the tea trolley in hospitals and nursing homes – but watching people queue for their tea is tedious. How to denote boredom without being boring, always a theatrical dilemma.

What I very much do like, though, is the filmed interviews with Eileen and Rosa, and later with two even younger females, Lola and Marlina, and the way they are used in the piece – really lovely work. This could perhaps be further extended to include women of all ages. And I appreciate the nod to If You Decide to Stay, in which Sylvia mused on whether she should bring a live cockerel on stage. She decided against it then, opting instead for donning a furry white rabbit suit. This year, we get the bird. An actual live cockerel who stands alone on stage and stares at us, then pecks at the grain scattered on the floor. The legacy of Pina Bausch lives on…

After a short break, we’re back in the theatre for more bird action, in PanicLab’s Swan Lake II: Dark Waters. The performance space is set with a large, deep circle of feathers, and a naked figure is lying curled up on the downy island. Above, a swan hangs. A discarded costume. A puppet. A slaughtered bird in a butcher’s shop. What evolves over the next hour is a really beautiful reflection on the tug between savagery and civilisation, as the themes and motifs of Swan Lake are deconstructed and played out in this clever ‘ode’ to Tchaikovsky’s iconic ballet.

Lone performer Jordan Lennie is Prince Siegfried, waking up alone in the lake, we presume having survived the double-suicide at the end of ballet. There are, in any case, numerous alternative endings to Swan Lake that have been danced over the years – why not have one more? He has apparently morphed into a swan – or at least, into a kind of half-man half-swan hybrid. Like a naif encountering the world with fresh, innocent and confused eyes, he explores the possibilities and limitations of his own beautiful body, stretching and preening, and then moves on to investigate the world he’s locked into on his island. Feathers are ruffled, and within them he finds eggs, devoured raw – but as his human half gains precedence, the eggs get fried and served on a plate, and his naked lower half is covered with semi-opaque dancer’s tights. Memory returns, and shocked and stunned he stands and screams: ‘ODETTE, ODETTE, ODETTE…’

At one moment, as our prince rises sur pointe to dance a pastiche of moves from the ballet, I recall having seen a cabaret version of this piece in Duckie’s Border Force. Which raises (as with Dickie Beau’s Blackouts) the interesting question about the role of cabaret in contemporary Live Art, and the use of the same material in different contexts.

Swan Lake II: Dark Waters is choreographed by Lennie and PanicLab co-founder (with producer Clara Giraud) Joseph Mercier, who directs the piece. It is a visually stunning work, merging a celebration of hedonistic pleasure with an exploration of what it means to be human (with all the pain that this brings). There are also many moments of humour played out alongside the beauty and the bathos. A very beautiful piece of work overflowing with powerful and haunting images.

O Supergirls: Project O X 2

Dorothy Max Prior sees Project O twice in two weeks: their first work, O, was presented at the Marlborough Brighton, whilst latest work Voodoo premiered at Chelsea Theatre as part of the Sacred season

Zebra Katz’ Ima Read blares out, and two figures on all fours – androgynous, anonymous, head-to-toe in black – work their rear ends back and forth. Ima read that bitch. Beneath them is a pink fake-fur rug. Yoga for the modern girl. The rug is pulled out to reveal a ‘mat’ of books. Proof-read that bitch. Simone de Beauvoir. Germaine Greer. The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage. The books are kicked across the floor towards us. Gonna take that bitch to college.

PROJECT O, O. Photo Paul Blakemore

The black garments are removed, the bodies revealed. Female bodies. A dark brown-black body. A lighter brown mixed-race body. I mention this because they do – Project O I mean, in their publicity material for the show: O is a dance duet about ‘being female, black, and mixed’.

Over 50 exhilarating minutes they explore, celebrate and subvert every cliche imaginable of the black/mixed female body. Luxuriant vanilla-dressed tresses. Afro curls. Shaved heads. Covered heads. Veiled faces with smouldering harem eyes. Strong and sporty in black lycra vest and shorts as Grace Jones’ Walking in the Rain plays out. Go-go dancing wildly in pink and red nylon wigs. Twerking against the back wall, topless in lurex hot pants. Lap dancing amongst the audience. Or lap sitting, anyway. Various people are silently pulled in to the stage action. They sit and watch, they help to ‘black up’ the dancers’ bodies, they get invited into the dance… The performance space is filled with boogie-on-down-ing bodies.

Project O: Voodoo

Two weeks later I’m at Chelsea Theatre for the Sacred season – the premiere of a new show by Project O, Voodoo. Which also invites its audience into the dance, but is a slower, cooler affair. Voodoo explores time, which is waiting in the wings. It speaks of many things. ‘If all time is eternally present,’ said TS Eliot, ‘all time is unredeemable.’ There is no point in speculating on what could have been, because it couldn’t. Have been, I mean. I paraphrase. Eliot said it more eloquently… The Four Quartets is quoted by Project O in their programme notes; Eliot’s reflection on the nature of time – his last major published work before his death, and the catalyst to winning the Nobel Prize, informing the content of the show (we presume).

As we enter the theatre space and take our seats, we are watched by two tall still figures dressed in long white gowns, standing quietly before an opaque screen made of thin black material. A relentless roll of facts and dates scrolls down the screen. Malcolm X murdered. The Millennium Bug. Jamila’s mum caught in the Brixton Riots. The words are faint, greenish white traces, a little difficult to read.

The ghosts of past persecutions, present realities, and future possibilities are embodied in these two figures who are both themselves and all of us, simultaneously. They move slowly towards the people in the auditorium, gently touching, burying heads in shoulders. They retreat behind the screen, which continues in its relentless scroll of facts and figures, and emerge carrying great bunches of black balloons, held aloft. Happy birthday. Happy deathday. In memory of.

One figure takes to the decks, DJs, the other dances. We’re invited into the dance, verbally, through the mic, over the PA. But they are in the performance space and we are sitting in theatre seats, so the take-up is a little slow at first. Just one man joins them and dances. We watch. They stay cool, calm and collected. The invitation is repeated, and there is a sudden movement of bodies as many of us leave our seats to ‘lay down our defences and dance’.

Eventually, the door opens. We are invited to leave, and new people arrive. This is a four-hour long piece, but we don’t get to see how the next three hours play out – although perhaps if we really wanted to, we could?

It is interesting to reflect on the difference between these two works, seen within a fortnight of each other. O is an established piece – the first ‘conversation’ made by Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small. And although there is a serious intention – to highlight the assumptions made about the gendered body, the body of colour – it is nevertheless a feel-good piece, full of joy and humour, and bursting with fabulous and fun dance routines. There’s no getting away from it – it’s a romp.

Voodoo is brand new, and presents itself cautiously. It’s subtler, more nuanced. The dialogue between the two women is harder to break in on, the intention harder to unravel. Why have they chosen these particular historical happenings, these points in time, to highlight on screen? What is this slow and measured physical contact with some audience members about? Why are we being asked to dance with them at the end of the hour? Joining up the dots feels more difficult here – although I am happy to just allow it all to seep into me, without feeling that I completely understand. ‘Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.’

Project O describe Voodoo as a work of science fiction. And as we know, SF is always about our present realities, it just purports to be about the future. Or an imagined past. Or a parallel universe present time. A time that cannot exist, or cannot have existed. There is only now: ’Here, now, always’. Thanks TS. Amen.

Project O: O was seen at the Marlborough Theatre Brighton on 4 November 2015.

Voodoo was seen at Chelsea Theatre Sacred season on 17 November 2015.

See www.acontemporarystruggle.com