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

MAS Productions: Lady Vendredi – Battle Cry

Voodoo, debauched dancing, white-and-black minstrels, abused crucifixes, popcorn, twerking (culturally appropriated and otherwise), wigs, stilettos (knives and shoes), tits, bums, and a superb jazz drummer. Not your average night at the theatre.

What exactly is it? Is it a gig? Is it performance art? Is it immersive theatre? Yes to all of the above. Merging a launch for a new single by Lady Vendredi and her band The Vendettas (What Time Is It? – available on iTunes now!) with performance work exploring the possibilities of self-exploitation, Battle Cry comes charging into the Roundhouse, guns ablazing, taking no prisoners.

Weaving through and around all this is an exploration of dance and ritual from the Vodou (aka Vodon aka Voodoo) tradition. Glueing it together is the exhilarating free-jazz funky music of three live musicians (playing drums, saxophones/other brass and percussion) and a laptop.

Audience members are free to wander, yet gently manipulated by the performers – encouraged with ease into a circle to witness the mesmeric undulations of the Yanvalou dance that bless the space at the beginning of the evening, or attracted by sound or light over to Pocha Nostra-style ‘stations’ in the corners, on which personal explorations of race, gender, and cultural identity – extreme versions of the self – are enacted.

See here, for example: Mexican performer Ignacio Jarquin, who has transformed himself into a licentious priest or nun, a grotesque transgendered figure in a cassock, lying on his/her back, bare legs akimbo as s/he tries to force her feet into ridiculously high heeled shoes. And there: a devil-girl anointing herself with lipstick, pushing what looks like a Guy Fawkes mannequin around in a trolley; a creature bedecked with a swathe of West African cloth, wearing a Lucha Libre mask; and now Lady Vendredi herself (Nwando Ebizie), pushing the blaxploitation card to the max, shaking her booty in her sequinned bikini, donning her minstrel costume and tap shoes, and inviting audience members to help her white up.

Working well with all the supporting company of three musicians and five performers, with particularly electrically charged duets with Daniel Cunningham – her perfect foil in Eminem-esque backward baseball cap, shades, and white-boy rapper attitude – Lady V brings things to a head with an ecstatic Banda dance, which in the Vodou tradition evokes the disruptive spirits of the dead known as Ghede. The way this manifests is as a wild party dance in which invisible drugs are snorted, smoked and drunk; hilariously over-the-top orgies mimed; and great imaginary feasts gorged upon.

Battle Cry is one stop on a long journey: this particular leg started as a nine-day Secular Ecstatic Art performance laboratory, reported on by Total Theatre here. It is part of an evolving two-year process that will culminate in a show called The Passion of Lady Vendredi at Soho Theatre in spring 2016 (co-produced by MAS Productions and nitroBEAT).

So this is, I suppose we could say, a work-in-progress. There’s a lot of fabulous material on show here – the singing, the music, the vodou dance, many of the performance vignettes – but some things that are puzzling. An over-arching theme of an imaginary neo-feminist cult called M.A.M.A (Mothers Against Male Aggression) goes over my head: that what I’m witnessing tonight is purporting to be set within this cult is something I glean from the programme notes, not the performance itself, although knowing it makes sense in hindsight of some sections of the evening I’m not particularly drawn to, including a rather cringy moment in which men and women who’ve come to the show together are invited to pair up to enact confessions of male abuse. Although there is some take-up, many don’t want to – and same-sex couples and friends, and people who’ve come on their own, stand back bemused.

There are also transitions between musical numbers and performances in which the energy drops – often the times when Nwando takes to the mic to do typical between-song gig chat, which doesn’t work well in this context. It’s one of the few moments where the tug between gig and performance piece produces an uneasy compromise.

But it is early days, with many months to go before the full-length show comes to fruition – and the company and director Jonathan Grieve (formerly of Para Active, this current project in many ways the natural successor to that company’s extraordinary interactive show Zoo-Oids) are to be lauded for their refusal to play safe, constantly trying new material, and growing up in public rather than hiding away in the rehearsal room. This is the sort of work that needs an audience right there, live in the room, to see if things are working.

What I’m sure they’ll take away from this exhilarating and highly succesful showing at the Roundhouse is the knowledge that they have all the core elements in place: a fantastic persona in Lady Vendredi (performed with phenomenal verve and energy by Nwando Ebizie); great music, a truly innovative fusion; a fabulous team of supporting performers and musicians; a way of using the vodou material that works outside of its religious/ritual origins; and the praiseworthy intention of finding interesting, humorous and courageous ways to explore questions of race, gender and cultural identity. Most of all, what’s here is the passion. Everything’s ripe for the taking – go get, Lady Vendredi!

Stacy Makishi: Vesper Time

Stacy is greeting us as we come into the Marlborough Theatre’s cosy, pink, womb-like theatre space. She’s wearing a radio mic, but there’s also (80s pop) music playing, so her words are only just audible, which is rather nice – a kind of murmuring undercurrent. Everyone gets a hug or a smile or a wave or a few words. She’s like an excited puppy greeting her family’s homecoming.

So now we’re all seated and she prevaricates before getting up onto the stage, musing on the separation of performer and audience intrinsic to theatre and performance – no matter how interactive or intimate a piece is, she (the performer) is in one role and we (the audience) is in a different role. This is something important to acknowledge, and I like her for it. It’s hard to get up there, to cross the divide.

Cut! The music stops and she introduces herself and the theme for the night. She’s here because she wants us all – together – to learn that we don’t need to play it small. We can be bigger, better, louder, prouder. She tells us that her estranged father mistakenly called her ‘Tracy’ – and then gets us singing along to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. I’m possibly the only person in the audience who doesn’t know the words, but as we get to sing it five or six times throughout the evening, and as she has a karaoke version on video for us, I get to learn it. We do all learn, together, not to play it small, to give it all you’ve got – and by the time we’re on our last take, the audience is standing and leaping and singing at the top of their voices.

Vesper Time is an odd and interesting mix. Her ‘evening prayer’ is a reflection on ageing, and specifically on doing it and saying it before it’s too late; on male role models and the need for father figures (real or imaginary – gods, heroes, or mere mortals); and on the perils of obsessing on revenge and regret.

She manages, skilfully, with a firm grasp on the dramaturgy, to weave together reflections on Moby Dick, the ultimate exploration of masculinity, peppered with homoerotic desire; stories from her own childhood, marked by the departure of her father and the arrival of her ‘uncle’ Leo; and some deliciously blasphemous fantasies about God the Father. Holding it all together are the constantly recurring threads of the Tracy Chapman sing-a-long, and a stated desire to change her little red slippers into a pair of multi-coloured glittery platforms under her chair. Again and again she tries and stops herself, defeated…

We don’t just get to sing – we also get to greet the person next to us (like you do in church these days) with a great big ‘Aloha – Ai Yai’, and to write down the thing we really need to say to someone before it’s too late – a declaration of love, an apology – these all fed into an American-style mailbox on the side of the stage (Stacy was born in Hawaii but lived her early adulthood in mainland America). Inevitably, we learn of instances in Stacy’s life when she’s left it too late – sometimes just by a whisker, learning of a death just days before of the person she needs to tell ‘ I love you, you were there for me’.

Vesper Time, like previous work by Stacy Makishi, weaves together engaging and warm verbal storytelling informed by her experience in stand-up comedy (with a bit of street preacher thrown in); video clips from TV and movies (Demi Moore! Moby Dick!); and a simple but effective scenography, the white dress complemented by white sheets hung from hooks that reference the sails of a ship. These ‘sails’ are the screen for her film clips. There are choreographic sections that give us sculptural images of birth and death, the hanging cloths becoming a bundled baby, then a shroud, then – as she dons her black-framed glasses over the shroud – an evocation of The Invisible Man (to my eyes anyway – aware that this is a reference that might mean very little to anyone under 40).

She ends – of course! – by donning the platform shoes and revelling in her decision not to play it small – to go for big, tall, brave, wild. The packed house includes a lot of teenage and young adult students, who are all on their feet cheering and whooping. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve seen – ever’ I hear as they exit, smiling and excited.

Vesper Time describes itself as a ‘secular prayer’ and it does feel like a quasi-religious communion has taken place. You leave feeling that you’ve been nurtured and nourished – that you haven’t just witnessed someone else’s story of the fight for liberation and self-expression, but have been made complicit in the united desire for a better world in which we can all grow to our full potential – no rivalry, no competition, just everyone doing their best and being their best version of themselves. Wow! What more is there?

Fierce 2015: What Will Be, Will Be

It’s a Wednesday night in central Birmingham, and we’re heading to BOM (Birmingham Open Media), a venue and artists’ studio close to New Street station which is the designated hub for Fierce Festival 2015, a five-day bonanza of live art, experimental theatre, installations, screenings and parties. We pass old-school Chinese restaurants with red dragon signage; a gaggle of girls with bare legs and massively high heels who are cheerily falling out of a taxi; a pub with peeling purple paint offering a special Monday night beer and curry deal (on a Wednesday?) And here we are. A blue neon pin-up girl announces Adultworld, the ‘gentlemen’s club’ opposite, illuminating the small group of smokers in animated conversation standing outside BOM. I’m reminded of an action Katie Etheridge did at the National Review of Live Art many years ago, in which she issued non-smokers with fake fags so they wouldn’t miss out on all the best conversations.

For Fierce, like the dearly departed NRLA, is more than a festival. Or perhaps it is a festival in the original sense of the word. A gathering of a community to share a space and celebrate. In this case, a community of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers from Birmingham and beyond – Fierce is both determinedly hyperlocal and ambitiously international (and all things in between). Of course there is a wider audience – particularly as much of the work at Fierce over the years has been presented in public spaces; and collaborations with partners such as Warwick Arts Centre, macBirmingham, and DanceXchange lock into their audience bases – but there is a core group of attendees who are fellow artists, creators, and cultural commentators of all sorts.

So this evening is the official launch of Fierce 2015 – although things actually kicked off the night before at Warwick Arts Centre with the opening of the new Chris Goode show Weaklings, which is a corker of a show inspired by the blog of cult writer and artist Dennis Cooper (reviewed here).

At BOM there are all the usual things you’d expect at a festival launch – glasses of fizz, thank-you speeches, hardcore networking – there’s more to it than that, as many of the installation works presented at this year’s Fierce are sited here – so people like me who hate networking and always spend time at launches talking to people they already know can actually see the work being talked about.

One Five West :Code and Carpentry. Photo by Meg Lavender

The basement space has been taken over by Birmingham-based One Five West, whose Code and Carpentry is a ‘series of interactive objects’ encouraging ‘tactile creativity and play in a digital age’. The space has the feel of a fairground sideshow or an old-fashioned games arcade, repossessed and radically altered. Low tech is the name of the game – reclaimed and customised furniture meets schoolboy (or in this case, girl) electronics kit. There are glass-topped boxes on legs (think pinball table) that change colour when you approach them, hall-of-mirrors screens with in-built theremins, and love-seats lit with miniature LED lights that are touch sensitive. When I first enter I’m alone, and enjoy the awareness that I am shaping what I’m seeing and hearing. As the space fills up, there’s a different enjoyment, feeling part of a big moving mechanism of people and machines; everywhere a mash-up of sounds, lights, and shadows with it hard to tell who is instigating what.

Meanwhile upstairs, there’s a screening of Orange Bikini, a film by Emily Mulenga, who uses video and digital art ‘to explore ideas around the (female, Black) body in the Internet age’ . Like One Five West, Emily Mulenga was a Fierce FWD 14 artist – Fierce FWD being a scheme that supports emerging artists from or based in the West Midlands (in Emily’s case, Burton-on-Trent).

In Orange Bikini, Emily’s avatar is seen moving through a series of brightly coloured and fast moving landscapes. It’s somewhere between a girly Disney movie, a Japanese anime, and a quest-based video game – a kaleidoscope of fast-moving mutating landscapes in which our heroine poses, twerks, pole-dances, drives and swims. Here she is shaking her butt in skimpy white shorts and afro hair, a Blaxploitation movie star with a tiny waist and big curves. Now she’s whizzing along a multi-coloured cityscape in her Cobra sports car, long sleek hair streaming in the wind. Then she’s sitting on a tropical beach at sunset, the screen a rainbow of hot orange tones, which shape-shifts into a field of daisies, our heroine sporting My Little Pony pink hair. Next she’s swimming with dolphins, her floating turquoise hair longer than her body. This is a world of unfettered freedom and happiness, in which the self can be anything the artist wants it to be – a body moulded by the mind to absorb, reflect and contradict the oppression of cultural expectations heaped upon young women of colour. Orange Bikini is very lovely piece of work, stating its case for self-determination with humour and joy.

Emily Mulenga: Orange Bikini

Emily’s work can also be seen in the magazine Contemporary Other, which is launched at the Fierce opening. The editor is Demi Nandhra, who is another of the Fierce FWD 14 artists. Contemporary Other is an actual print magazine – hurrah! – 36 A4 pages of quality heavyweight paper with perfect binding. Before I get to any reflection on content, can I say how much this pleases me. What we find inside is creative and critical writing, hand-drawn illustrations and digital artworks. The theme of this launch issue is ‘feminisms’, and the edition includes poetry, poetic prose, manifestos, presentations, essays, and statements – I am Not a Feminist by Zoe Samudzi, and An Open Letter to a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, to pick two examples, are provocative and polemical, addressing current issues in contemporary feminism of white supremacy and the acceptance (or otherwise) of transwomen within feminist communities. I’m personally more drawn to the visual arts work, which manages to be strongly political without the polemic. Joiri Minaya’s DWGS postcard series gives us a beautiful collection of portraits that reclaims and updates the sort of imagery used by painters of the ‘exotic’ female form, such as Gauguin. Kamal Badhey’s I Must Remind Myself is a series of photos in which faces or objects are overlaid with texts: a chest-of-drawers with clothes tumbling out bears the words ‘imprints of cruel memories’. Emily Mulenga’s contribution is a photoshopped and digitally enhanced self-portrait – skin made paler, hair changed from black to blonde, waist impossibly slim, breasts ridiculously large, pubic hair airbrushed out. Written on the image are the words ‘the tan lines will fade but the memories will last forever.’

Selina Thompson: Race Cards. Photo Meg Lavender

Key to Emily Mulenga’s work is the notion of a safe space – an idea with a great deal of currency in the debate on ‘contemporary otherness’. It is therefore unsurprising, when entering the room for Selina Thompson’s Race Card installation, to see the phrase ‘safe space’ cropping up numerous times on the 1000 questions she has written and posted all around the walls. Here’s the idea: you enter the room, alone. You read the cards in numerical order, and you stop when you reach one you want to answer. You’re advised to try to pick one that isn’t too easy for you. You write a response and pin it on the wall, so others who enter the room can see your answer. You then pick another question that you can’t answer, and copy that one out on a new card which you take home with you to reflect on.

Here are some of the questions, all of which relate to enquiries around race and cultural identity:

How do you go about exposing white supremacy in liberal arts spaces?

Do you feel comfortable using terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ to describe race?

What does it mean to be black?

What does it mean to be white?

Whatever happened to multiculturalism?

How can I be more like Grace Jones?

Who is Live Aid for?

What will freedom look like?

When I enter the room, there’s an immediate practical problem in that the early-number questions are up high, written in small and difficult to read script, white on black, set in a dim space – there’s no way I can read them. So I immediately disobey the rules and start reading things in a random order. Inevitably, I spot things that push buttons for me: ‘Who is more problematic, famous racist Nigel Farage, or the liberal journalist politely asking questions?’ promotes a bout of inner rage as I rail against the idea that we can’t ask questions of, or listen to responses from, people we don’t agree with. I decide not to answer that one. I also note ‘Why do we have borders?’, ‘Is immigration traumatic?’ and ‘What will it take to stop Katie Hopkins?’ as they relate so strongly to current work I’m doing with people who have migrated to the UK. Aware that although I’ve been told to take as long as I like, there’s a queue outside, I stop dithering and pick ‘What labels does your body wear?’

Race Cards is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece of work, but there are flaws in the execution: those up-high cards you can’t read; the fact that you are told to write your reply in red ink, but there is only a black biro available which is confusing; the ‘take as much time as you like’ directive which just makes you feel stressed when there are a load of people waiting outside – I’d prefer a fixed time limit. But these are things that can be easily readjusted. The main thing is the core intention and content of the piece, which is sound and good.

Ria Jade Hartley: Spit Kit. Photo Meg Lavender

The labels my body wears – and whether I accept or reject them – ends up tying in neatly with my experience the next day (also at BOM) of Spit Kit by Bristol-based artist Ria Jade Hartley. In this, you are led into a room upstairs that has been converted into an art-sci laboratory. Vials containing tiny samples of saliva are lined up on shelves, a glass-fronted cabinet contains a selection of scientific and medical instruments, and a number of lines are pegged with photos of human faces and bodies adorned in exotic decorations (white clay, feathers, painted lips…). There is also a wall of pictures of the artist enacting earlier works from the Genetic Body series, of which Spit Kit is the latest strand.

I’m greeted by Ria, invited to sit down, and then presented with the sort of official document we are all familiar with, in which questions of nationality, cultural identity, and race are ascertained. I go for my usual replies: Anglo-Irish. Mixed other. Prefer not to say. We talk about these answers. A sample of saliva is taken, prompting a discussion on DNA testing and ancestry. I’m told my saliva won’t be tested, just added to the museum of samples. I’m asked if I can go back six generations. I can only manage three – parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. This already takes us back to the mid 19th century. Irish. English. Eastern European Jewish. The conversation takes us to a discussion of intermingling cockney London communities, Portuguese sailors arriving in the Irish port of Cork, and the Norman invasion of Hastings. The final stage of the piece leads to me embracing the term I’m happiest with to describe my race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage. I decide on ‘human’ – which is, as well, the only label I was 100% happy for my body to wear in Race Cards. Ria Jade Hartley’s Spit Kit is a great experience – a well-structured, warmly embracing, and thought-provoking work.

Neil Callaghan & Simone Kenyon: Permutations in the City

Meanwhile, on the streets of Birmingham, Permutations in the City continues its investigation of movement in public spaces, partly choreographed and partly improvised around a structure, and inspired by Stefan Jovanovic’s provocation: How can bodies be used to alter the social scripts inherent in public space? Friday is day two for choreographers Neil Callaghan and Simone Kenyon and their team of guest dancers. On Thursday, I watched two of them work their way around the grimy urban environment of a motorway underpass. Although the movement work was fine – simple, slow encounters between two bodies negotiating their way along the inside edge of the boundary wall – I felt a little bored. Partly, I think, because I have seen so many choreographic works in cities that seemed to have an identical intention. (Although I realise that I am very old, and have seen a lot, and that young artists need to feel that they can discover things for themselves.)

I have quite a different reaction on Friday, when I see another pair of dancers in the busy Victoria Square in the city centre. Here, the piece is less about a response to urban architecture, and more about the social space. In the underpass, the dancers negotiating the concrete walls and floor were watched by a few Fierce aficionados, with an occasional passer-by scurrying past uninterested. It seemed a pretty insular affair focused on the bodies’ relationship to the physical environment. In the square, there are people who are here to enjoy the autumn sunshine, to take a cigarette break, leaving their offices for a take-away coffee, or sitting on a bench with a lover. People who become slowly or suddenly aware of the two figures standing still and leaning against each other. There is a strength in the fact that the dancer’s bodies are locked in to each other, with movements mostly a slow and cautious embrace and unwinding. A pair of builders walk by looking a little bemused, glancing back over their shoulders; a group of charity workers stop their drill when they realise they have competition; a man asleep on a bench with a copy of the Sun over his face sits up to ask me if I know ‘what that’s all about’. As is oft the way with work in public spaces, I enjoy watching the incidental audience as much as I enjoy watching the performers. ‘But what’s the point?’ says the Sun reader. Just being there, doing it, is the point, I feel.

The performers unlock their hold and walk off, moving off to their next site. Sadly, my time is up and I have to go too, to head for the train station. I leave Birmingham regretfully, knowing that I will be missing a fabulous weekend of work that will include terrific new shows by Ursula Martinez, Fernando Belfiore, and Kate MacIntosh. I’ll miss the Saturday night Club Fierce featuring not only Gazelle Twin but also Miguel Gutierrez. I won’t get to bring my own record to Montreal company PME–ART’s Bring Your Own Record Listening Party. I won’t get to Sleep with a Curator. I’ve missed my chance to see Tim Etchell’s neon Will Be – in which the words The Future Will Be Confusing will shine out from the historic frontage of the Moseley Road Baths, a foreshadowing of which was seen at Chris Goode’s Weaklings, which ends on those very same words. A zeitgeist thing, or are they in collusion?

This is the last year that Fierce will be curated and directed by Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison. The call is out for a new artistic director – and we can only hope that whoever takes up the post brings as much verve, energy, and ambition to the job as these two, who now move off into their own futures, confusing or otherwise. What will be for Fierce Festival in the future we shall have to wait and see.

Tim Etchells: Will Be

Featured photo (top of page): Emily Mulenga Orange Bikini. Photo courtesy of artist.

Fierce is an international festival of cross artform performance centred in Birmingham. The festival embraces theatre, dance, music, installations, activism, digital practices and parties. Fierce fills the city with performances in theatres, galleries and other out-of-the-ordinary spaces. Fierce 2015 took place 7–11 October. www.wearefierce.com

Dorothy Max Prior attended Fierce for Total Theatre 7–8 October 2015.

Chris Goode and Co: Weaklings

The future will be confusing. This is how it ends – there are no answers, no conflict resolution. In this, it could perhaps be argued that Chris Goode’s latest work, Weaklings, is less a piece of theatre than a multi-artform installation of texts, sounds and images, inhabited by four performers who activate the space. But that wouldn’t be telling the whole truth, because Weaklings is brilliant, beautiful, and dramaturgically sound, theatre. A play, you could say, that playfully deconstructs the world of an interactive online space – writer Dennis Cooper’s Weaklings blog, a magnet for every outsider in the blogosphere – and somehow, marvellously, miraculously, reconstructs it on stage.

He takes everything we know about online space – the overload of information vying for our attention; the multitude of voices all speaking at once; the constant flow of images coming at us; the weird juxtaposition of cheery cartoon characters, pop videos, and porn all one click away from each other, whizzing past in fast succession; the mix of static and moving images; the interplay between text read and text heard; the anonymity and the exposure; the freedom to be whoever you want; the need to to be heard; the sharing and the shaming – and feeds it to us in a dazzling display of cut-ups and montages, all informed by a desire to move queer culture into revolutionary new territories. If William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were doing their thing now, this might be what they’d do.

The stage is set with an extended cage-like wire structure taking up a lot of the floor space, the site for the projection of texts, still images, and video. Three male performers move in, through, around, and in front of, this structure, sometimes alone, sometimes in relationship with each other. Their bodies (clothed or otherwise at varying points in the piece) become another site for the projections. There’s the intense intellectual one, played by Christopher Brett Bailey, who reads fast and furious tracts from his laptop. Nick Finnegan is blond and boyish, a picture of innocence, ripe for the taking. Craig Hamilton is a Joe Dellasandro for the modern age, flexing muscle, running, posing with hair falling into his face, a sullen come-on look in his eyes. Fantasies of bondage and rape, confessions of murder, harrowing tales of tormented childhoods, and heartbreaking pleas for love and understanding are played out by these three, augmented by onscreen contributions from actors and from real-life (whatever that might be) users of the Weaklings site (who contribute to the discussion forums using pseudonyms such as Tender Prey, Lost Child, and Atheist). My favourite is a very affable man called Thomas Moore, who I see as a portal or guide into the blog for uninitiated people like me.

Above all this, at a work station positioned on a kind of mezzanine level above the cage, is the actor playing Dennis Cooper himself. The instigator, the puppet master, the Deus ex Machina, the controller, the mediator. A reluctant god, we learn early on in the piece: he starts the blog at the request of his website visitors, having asked them what would most improve the site. A message board would be better, he grumbles, before devoting himself selflessly to the task of replying to every single comment with a religious devotion that takes up an enormous chunk of his life. As Dennis speaks, a large image of ‘his’ face is projected onto the front of the cage, so we see, simultaneously, the live and mediated image of the writer at work.

And here is the stroke of genius. Chris Goode has cast Karen Christopher (the enigmatic ex Goat Island performer) in the role. Having a woman – particularly such a talented and charismatic one – playing Dennis Cooper is perfect. In a show that is about mediation, about roleplay, about questioning what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fantasy’, this is just what is needed. Every time Karen speaks Dennis’ words, we are reminded that everything we see and hear – here on this stage, there on the internet, and elsewhere in the wider world – is only one version of reality. All life is a game, don’t take things at face value.

It is also great to have a strong female presence onstage throughout the piece – the easier decision would have been to have all-male casting, but that would make it something else, something less compelling. Inevitably, most of the site users are male – although we meet a couple of women onscreen. We also meet Dennis Cooper’s associate director Jennifer Tang, who confesses with complete honesty that as a ‘straight woman’ (her definition of herself), the site is not talking to her.

There are times when this reviewer also feels that she is meeting a world that is not hers. As I often have throughout my life, I find myself wondering why men get so hung up and obsessed by sex, which is (after all) only sex. And it is hard not to be disturbed by some of the extreme Slave and Master confessions regardless of whether they are pure fantasy or actually enacted in some way. In the post-show discussion, Chris Goode talks of Dennis Cooper as a ‘profoundly moral’ person, who again and again ‘stays with’ people in a vulnerable place, acting as a non-judgemental witness. This, I feel, is what Chris Goode has brought to the stage. He asks us to be non-judgemental witnesses, to be there for these often difficult and disturbing ideas and images.

Although occasionally alienated or disturbed (and that’s OK – these things are disturbing) I find myself drawn into a fantastical world of extraordinary and exciting words and images that jostle for my attention in the best possible way. Often, there is a beautiful contrast of speed and stillness between the projected texts and images, and the pictures created by the human bodies that stand frozen in the light, or move slowly and rhythmically in the space like living sculptures.

A word of praise here for designer Naomi Dawson, who has worked with Chris Goode to create a powerful scenography for the piece; and also for lighting designer Katharine Williams – the strong reds and blues, placed to the side and giving a suggestion of light from stained glass windows, and the sea of tiny red lights placed around the stage by Craig, suggest a sacred space. Original sound is by Scanner – although that is mashed in with clips, samples and soundbites galore.

This is the first outing for Weaklings, presented at Warwick Arts Centre (who co-commissioned it) as part of the Fierce Festival 2015. It is a technically complex work, and the performers all did a sterling job, working with the technology to create a cohesive whole. It could, perhaps, be slightly shorter, and there are a few odd lulls, and towards the end moments where it feels as if we are coming to an ending, then don’t. But this is all to be expected so early in the life of a show, particularly one as complex as this. Hippo World this ain’t…

Shared Space and Light: Talking Posts

The Old Market sits in a moody cul-de-sac in old Brunswick, which bridges the gap between Brighton and Hove – a splendid building illuminated by its own wall-mounted lamps, and additionally by two large lamp-posts standing proudly on the paved area in front of the building. Are they always there? They look as though they could be. They are set off-centre rather than on either side of the main door, which gives an edge of unreality, and an interesting asymmetrical air to the architecture. One of the posts has a bicycle tied to it – these are proper, solid lamp-posts which when struck produce a satisfying metal ring. But they are no ordinary posts, they are the means of transmission of a number of ghost stories, presented by an evolving series of disembodied heads seemingly trapped inside the lamp-head. As each story is told, it is augmented by sounds from the other post: booming thunder, crashing waves, howling wind, squeaking doors…

Talking Posts has been created by Brighton based multi-media / cross-artform company Shared Space and Light, who have brought to fruition a number of renowned design, film, and video-mapping projects over recent years. The design and visual arts elements of the piece are beautiful – the lamp-posts themselves, and the integration of the moving image and sound into the posts. It is a plus of the piece that the technology is harnessed in the service of the art, which is how ithings should be.

The stories are local, telling tales of all sorts of supernatural happenings, from the horribly harrowing to the mildly amusing. The Old Market itself is the subject of one them – an odd little story of horses neighing and whinnying in the basement (the building used to be a riding school, apparently). Some are from recent times, such as a story of a kindly ghost who hangs around the Sussex County Hospital at visiting times – the other-worldly visitor (seen as a sort of guardian angel loitering by the beds) sadly lost along with the old wards when the hospital is re-developed. Many conjure up a long-lost Brighton from many centuries ago, a rough and ready town populated by sailors and smugglers and serving wenches – although we recognise the names of roads in what is now called The Lanes (the original city centre). One of my favourite stories is set around the town’s parish church, St Nicolas’, and features a truly spooky and unnerving tale of a sailor lost in a fire at sea, his demise (and that of the whole ship) witnessed by his beloved, who has climbed to the top of the spire, and who then falls with shock – or perhaps jumps to her death. Every May, as the anniversary recurs, her screams of terror can apparently be heard, and if you’re very lucky, the burning ship itself can be sighted off-shore. Move on a few centuries, and we hear the story of a seafront tea-room in which the waitresses serving the scones and jam repeatedly trip over some unseen obstacle in the room. Haunted homes and hotel rooms naturally crop up a few times – a story of a typewriter that clatters along all by itself is very lovely; and the tale of a child who feels the hands of death around his throat is truly frightening.

These classic tales have been reworked into first-person narratives by playwright Sara Clifford, who has done an excellent job, giving enough shared style to offer cohesion to the whole piece, whilst yet allowing for individual narrative voices to shine through. The actors include Brighton luminaries Ivan Fabrega, Merry Colchester, and Darren East (who tells the tale of the tripping waitresses with a cheeky ladies-man raise of the eyebrows), through to veteran TV actress Shirley Jaffe (who brings her wealth of experience to the job). Some of the team of thirteen (of course!) storytellers in this hour-long cycle of tales have evidently more experience than others in delivery to-camera. Some seem to be natural storytellers, whilst others are a little too actorly. In some stories, cuts (where we presume the text hadn’t been delivered in one take) are a slightly awkward distraction. It is unclear if a director has been employed – some of the actors look as if they could have done with a little more time and direction – and if there is an opportunity for more artistic development on the piece, it would be great to have time allocated for further rehearsals and re-recordings.

Talking Posts, though, is a success – a very lovely concept, well realised. A shivery, shadowy experience perfect for melancholic autumn evenings.

Talking Posts was commissioned by The Old Market as part of their Industrious Creatives programme (funded by ACE) and presented as part of Brighton Digital Festival. Photo by Scott Ramsey.