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 Passion

Body, blood, soul and divinity: Dorothy Max Prior takes part in a week-long exploration of secular ecstatic art, led by Nwando Ebizie and Jonathan Grieve of MAS Productions

Ancient gods have multiple purposes – they are complex, often contradictory, beings. Take, for example, Artemis. Goddess of hunting, but protector of wild animals. A virgin goddess who is nevertheless the patron of midwives and childbirth. So to create modern deities, let us look to the possibilities of creating flawed, ironic, contradictory creatures, at odds with the idealised monotheist God of the Christian religion.

It’s day two of our week together, and today we are creating contemporary gods and goddesses, using each other as modelling clay. Just as the Golem becomes a reflection of the needs, desires and anxieties of the person conjuring it from clay, and a portrait painted by an artist is always in some ways a self-portrait, so the deities we create become as much about us as about the person we are using as our model, even though this raw material, this person in front of us, comes complete with his or her gender, ethnicity, age, body shape, markings, piercings, hairdressings, and whatever else. We note the similarities and the differences between them and us. We are the same, yet we are different. We delight in the similarities and in the differences.

When we finish our modelling work, we look around at what’s in the room. Some images are clearly defined and labelled: for example, the Goddess of Contemporary Childhood is a girl in a short skirt, dishevelled hair, and messed-up make-up passed out on the ground, clutching a bottle – a good, straightforward commentary on modern life. Others are more complex, harder to pin down. The ethnicity of the model is often exploited, played with: a dark-skinned woman, cloaked and crowned, cuddles a black baby doll in one hand and a gun in the other whilst holding a scroll bearing a proclamation – a complex Mama Africa figure offering simultaneously the options of liberation through the power of the word, through nurturing of the young, and through violent political action.

MAS Secular Ecstatic Art. Photo Dorothy Max Prior

We’ve arrived at these living statues through a process that has started with the Pocha Nostra exercise of ‘reverse anthropology’, developed by the legendary explorer of ritual, and exploiter of cliches of ethnicity and gender, Guillermo Gomez Pena. In this exercise, which can be challenging the first time you do it, one person is ‘scientist’ and one ‘specimen’. A process of exploration of the subject’s body leads to the ‘scientist’ carefully and respectfully looking, listening to, smelling, and touching the ‘specimen’. Over the week, we return many times to this exercise in different partnerships, each time building on it, so that the first stage of observation leads to manipulation, modelling, and re-styling the body in hand.

It is one of a number of Pocha Nostra techniques used throughout the week. Jonathan Grieve (co-facilitator of the week, with Nwando Ebizie) first encountered Guillermo Gomez-Pena at a lecture and performance at The Tate in 2003, later attending a workshop and performance with him at the Centre for Performance Research that summer. ‘His work was following similar lines to those we were pursuing in Para Active [the company he co-directed with Persis Jade Maravala] regarding social and cultural representation,’ he says. ‘Guillermo’s irreverent attitude brought out the anarchic side of my personality, which up to that point had been obscured by the over-seriousness of our approach.’

The seriousness he refers to perhaps stemmed from what he describes as a ‘teenage obsession’ with the work of Jerzy Grotowski, and the intensive training and practice he subsequently followed, through encounters with Zygmunt Molik and Jolanta Cynkutis in the early 1990s, and then later with Workcentre in Pontedera (Italy) and in Serbia. ‘But it was always as much about his thinking as the training,’ he says. ‘What has remained are the exercises plastiques and the emphasis on embodied impulses that manifest as physical action. However, I have abandoned any attempt to use the formal or stylistic elements that are associated with Grotowski.’

Our week of working together always includes at least two hours of full-on physical training in the mornings, stemming from the Grotowski plastiques and the principles of MCT – mutuality, contact, trust – but no doubt moulded into his own way of working by Jonathan. Both he and Nwando set high standards, but with a respectful approach. We are discouraged from zoning out, giving up, or stopping to take slugs of water constantly, instead encouraged to discipline ourselves to stay present and engaged with the physical action, although adapting moves if need be to suit our own personal abilities (much appreciated by this older performer, for one!).

I have only a very superficial experience of Grotowski’s training methods, but I’ve done a fair amount of Lecoq / Decroux based corporeal mime, and see analogies in the work. And indeed, crossovers with other training methods I’ve experienced: with Indonesian performer Parmin Ras, in Butoh practice, and in work with 5 Rhythms creator Gabrielle Roth. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that so many practices worldwide focus on the exploration of ways that different body parts can lead movement, and the power of metaphor and visual imagery in the process of movement practice – but I’m always delighted to encounter correspondences between forms across the globe and across artform practice. One memorable image that Jon uses is that of a stag caught in a bush, encouraging us to move our heads to free our antlers. In another moment, we explore the movement of the hands, and the encountering of different weights and resistances. We move giant ice blocks across the space, but then put our hands out to experience the sensation of expecting to find a wall behind a curtain only to encounter none there.

MAS Secular Ecstatic Art: Nwando Ebizi. Photo Rafaela Rocha

MAS Secular Ecstatic Art: Nwando Ebizie. Photo Rafaela Rocha

Often in the morning training there is a kind of gentle pass-the-baton between Jon and Nwando. They do this with the ease of a longterm working relationship – having both met in the Para Active days, just before Jonathan left the company, they re-met and resumed their work together in 2012, after a gap of six years. Having reconnected, they formed MAS, with the aim to create work from a wide range of influences, co-creating, with Jon as director and Nwando as performer in her alter-ego, Lady Vendredi. ’The moniker “secular ecstatic art” sums up the approach,’ says Jon, ‘we are creating an emotionally and politically charged vernacular theatre with a fluid relationship between artforms, combining the immediacy of music and the conceptualism of Live Art with theatre and ritual.’

When it’s Nwando turn to lead in the morning training, she often takes the movement work seamlessly from the Grotowski-inspired practices into her own extraordinary and exciting explorations of elements of Vodou (aka Voodoo, although the former is the preferred spelling) dance and ritual, learnt from here own teacher and mentor Zsuzsa Parrag.

We thus find ourselves gently undulating in movements inspired by the Yanvalou dance. In no way an attempt to imitate a trance-like experience, we are nevertheless striving to find a kind of opening of the heart – a release and connection that forges us into droplets of one ocean. And indeed, much of the imagery we are offered by Nwando is watery: feeling ourselves to be part of the rolling of the waves, a universal wave in fact, or placing ourselves under a waterfall and feeling the water wash over us. Again, I find myself reminded of corporeal mime (be the thing, don’t imitate the thing) and of Butoh (work from the inside out).

In other Vodou-inspired sessions, we explore movement and gesture inspired by the honouring of the Lwa (spirits) – and the Banda dance that evokes the disruptive spirits of the dead known as Ghede. These Ghede are mischievous creatures who embody and exploit all the known vices – and probably a few we haven’t yet discovered. When they arrive in the room they are loud, rude, rampantly sexual, and a great deal of fun, encouraging those in the land of the living to throw aside their inhibitions and let loose on the dancefloor. When using this material, Nwando is clear about her intention: ‘Most of the work we do with Vodou is purely training,’ she says, ‘we don’t seek to replicate Vodou rituals. We’re not creating folk art or purporting to present anything authentic.’ That said, there are some present in the group who feel a slight unease about tampering with the spirit world!

The Haitian Creole word Vodou comes from Vodun, a word meaning something like ‘mysterious invisible powers that intervene in human affairs’; or as more simply put in the Fon language, ‘spirit’. Haitian Vodou keeps alive the theology and spiritual practices of West African cultures, and Vodouists believe in a distant and unknowable supreme creator, Bondye (derived from the French term Bon Dieu, meaning Good God). As this supreme being does not intercede in human affairs, Vodouists instead communicate with (and sometimes worship) the spirits who are subservient to Bondye, the Lwa.

Although few people in the UK have had direct experience of working with Vodou, many have encountered the archetypes secondhand, through Carnival, or even through Mondo film and B-movies (which were Jon’s way in!). The one that everyone has heard of is Baron Samedi, often depicted as a grinning skull in a top hat, sporting a fat cigar and a glass of Bourbon. The Baron’s wife is Maman Brigitte, who drinks rum infused with hot peppers, and is symbolised by a black rooster.

Baron Samedi

Amongst the more esoteric higher spirits are archetypal figures whose attributes resonate throughout many cultures. Ezili is the spirit of love, beauty, jewellery and dancing who has a direct correspondence with the Afro-Brazilian Candomble spirit Oxum. One of her husbands is Ogou, known as Ogun, in Afro-Brazilian Candomble. He’s a warrior spirit, often syncretised with the Christian Saint George.

Of course there is a discussion far outside the reaches of this article about the extent to which such archetypal spirits, saints or deities are universal to all human cultures, and to what extent they originate in one part of the world then get transported – through trade and cultural exchange, or through slavery and missionary conquest. What we can reflect on here is how Nwando, who is herself of Nigerian heritage (West Africa is usually cited as the source of Voudou, exported to Haiti through the slave trade), has encountered Vodou and developed it in her own performance practice:

‘For me it is a precious gift that my teacher Zsuzsa Parrag was gifted by her teacher, who told her to teach it in Europe. It is a way to get in touch with the inner self, the space around one, the partners in the space (audience/performers). It takes you to your centre and outside of yourself. It connects with fundamental, truthful gesture, action and movement. It is evocative.’

MAS Battle Cry: Lady Vendredi. Photo Rafaela Rocha

Nwando says that Vodou came into her life almost by accident: ‘At least, I didn’t realise I was searching for it. As is the cliche for children of a diaspora, I was trying to connect to my roots in the ways I understand – through dance, through music, through social ritual. This took various forms – from making a dance-off music video with my family (the video Beat Freak which featured around 40 people, from 2 year olds to 80 year olds) to talking to relatives about social rituals and customs. Maybe I didn’t search hard enough, but I felt disheartened with what I found. Relatives feared the word “ritual” because of connotations with witch doctors and pre-colonial religion. I found it difficult in London to find much beyond a generic African Dance or Afro Fusion, which although brilliant fun, I found dissatisfying for the research that I’m interested in. Imagine if somebody went to Tokyo and taught “European” dance – where on earth would you start? How insulted would you be as a Spanish person to see somebody teaching Morris dancing as a representative of them as a “European”?’

In summer 2013, keen to seek out something more specific to their needs, Nwando and Jonathan made contact with Haitian Voudou practitioner/teacher Zsuzsa Parrag, arranged to meet her, and inspired by that meeting, invited her to work with them.

‘What I found when I started working with her makes me feel quite emotional – I couldn’t imagine my life without it now,’ Nwando says, ‘It’s strange to be taught a dance which immediately brings to my mind family members and the way they move. There is an emotional connection, a feeling of coming home, whilst at the same time it is very difficult to connect to, because there are movements that you just don’t do in other dance forms or in everyday life.’

Her love of Vodou, and desire to find a way to incorporate it into her work, is very much at the heart of the creation and development of her performance persona, Lady Vendredi:

‘Lady Vendredi is a continuing collaborative creation between myself and Jonathan Grieve. She comes through various dreams and ideas I’ve had since I was a child, conversations Jonathan and I had when we first started working together in 2012 – and he was interested in Blaxploitation films and New Orleans Voodoo/Hoodoo.’

The Vendredi character has evolved through three years of training, research and development. She is performance art persona in a theatrical world. Her various origins and influences forge her into some sort of comic book super hero with connections to Nwando’s mythologised ancestral past. Through each project she adds extra layers, gaining both gender-bending and ethno-bending dimensions. For example:

‘During our training leading to a performance at Latitude Festival in 2013, she (Vendredi) added the delivery of a preacher crossed with memories of my grandma at 3am prayers. She is my alter-ego and she is a place to put the ideas I reject from the current playing of Nwando (a priestess of a religion! A believer in the spirit world!) and the discoveries we make about the world around us (from experiences in a theatre-cult to current discourses on race, cultural appropriation, white supremacy). I’ve been told I look different when I perform her…’

Nwando Ebizie aka Lady Vendredi. Photo Rafaela Rocha

This notion of creating a performance persona that is some sort of freak-show cum super-hero version of the self becomes a central focus of the second half of the laboratory week. Nwando shares some of the mapping that were part of her process with Jonathan in creating Lady Vendredi – a large sheet of wallpaper on the floor is covered in words and phrases linked with connecting lines. We are then encouraged to think about how we might map our own persona. We are asked to list everything that we like about ourselves and to think about ‘self-ploitation’. Never mind what we are in our deepest, most private selves – what have we got that is valued in the wider world, and thus ‘sellable’? Physical attributes, talents, abilities, party tricks, beliefs. We are looking for the exaggerated self; the objectified self. We are also asked to think about the personal traits that we (or other people) dislike in us; to consider the unacceptable versions of our self.

And so to work. My raw material is a very white body, Celtic white (of Anglo-Irish stock), so white it’s almost blue, with eyelashes so pale you can’t see them without mascara. Long strawberry blonde hair, thick as old rope. A mature female form, matronly even. I like to be seen and heard, always put my hand up first in class. I talk a lot. I get cross easily and I’m argumentative, but I’m also a great defender of people and ideas. I use words as weapons. I am generous with food and money. I know a lot of about popular dance, and know lots of party dances, such as the Charleston Stroll and the line-dance from Saturday Night Fever. I’m vain, and a bit of a show-off. I’m short-sighted (due to a visual disability, not correctable by glasses) and clumsy. I hate people asking me why I don’t wear glasses. I’m a dilettante, a Jill-of-all-trades. I have a confused sexual history.

Left to work on all this alone, with the help of a mountain of props and costumes, I feel some analogy to the process of creating a clown or Bouffon character, and find myself (almost inevitably) drifting towards familiar territory, creating a kind of kooky tart-with-a-heart party girl who is not dissimilar to performance personae I’ve created in other situations. Which is interestingly very different to the rather earth-mothery/golden empress personae that others had modelled me into.

MAS Secular Ecstatic Art. Photo Rafaela Rocha

In other corners of the rehearsal room, all sorts of interesting beings are taking shape, evolving from this diverse group of artists of varying ages, genders, and ethnicities. A male opera singer/physical theatre performer with an interest in exploring transgender possibilities is working on creating an Ave Maria-singing cloistered and veiled being whose pent-up hysteria would give Ken Russell’s nuns in The Devils a run for their money. A young Flamenco dancer is exploiting her persona as the ‘pretty ballerina’, swathed in white net and lace with a red rose between her death, and blood between her legs. Elsewhere, I spy an ultra-hairy Valkyrie, the performer sporting an extraordinary and wonderfully lunatic number of wigs and hairpieces, not all of them on her head; a White Supremacist swigging from a bottle and tormenting a tiny doll; a trench-coated photographer snapping wildly, desperate to join the performance action; and a kohl-eyed Arabic beauty with undulating hips who is strapping a gun to her body. Meanwhile, Nwando is honing a kind of reverse-Voudou/inverted Minstrel act, in which a joyfully dancing Lady Vendredi emerges from the mock-Minstrel blacked-up/whited-up drag.

Mas Secular Ecstatic Art: Photo Rafaela Rocha

On the final couple of days, these personae are refined further, and placed in juxtaposition with each other, creating interesting inter-relationships (the aria-singing madonna/whore/nun persona and the spoiled ballerina work beautifully together, for example – especially when then partnered with a cello-playing hippy traveller). Finally, a performance script is created for the Saturday evening, which will include live music performed by Lady Vendredi and her band, ecstatic dance, solo and ensemble performance, and plenty of audience interaction. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there for the final showing, due to other commitments – but plenty of others were there, including Thom Andrewes, associate director of ERRATICA. He had this to say about what he witnessed:

‘My immediate impression was that the show was about ritual and the creation of ritualistic spaces, in which ecstatic transformations of the body become possible. I think this was very clearly, strikingly and effectively achieved on various levels, while being simultaneously problematised/critiqued, which was ideal… The ritual actions at the opening of the show—dancing, sharing food and drink – established the rough realness of the performance, i.e., if this is a ritual, we are (to some degree) involved, and it is actually happening here/now, rather than the representation of a ritual performance that was/is happening elsewhere, for an imaginary audience for whom we are standing in. This was pretty integral to what I felt throughout as the possibility of participation, as was the number of plants/performers who seemed to blend in with the audience. It was never clear to me, even at the end, exactly who was in on the performance and how much they had been expecting. I haven’t been to many events/performances of this style/approach, but I’ve been to some, and this is perhaps the first time when it’s really worked for me. I suppose it had the real feeling of a “happening”, and it was all down to the possibilities of the “ritual” form as a general frame – which is highly theatrical, governed by arbitrary yet absolutely necessary rules/laws, and also present, real and co-existing with the audience—and to the commitment of the performers to everything.’

Battle Cry at Apiary Studios. Photo Rafaela Rocha

Thom also raises a question that is always central to our work throughout the week: ‘The question of cultural appropriation, or the fact that it might seem somehow inappropriate to recreate elements of African ritual practice with white performers for a predominantly white audience in Hackney (i.e., completely separated from its cultural context) is one that remains, but I also think it is a far more complex/interesting question than most people assume…’

It’s something that has been explored in various ways throughout the week, and its something that comes up for me again and again in work and life. Some of the questions I’m interested in include: is there anything that belongs exclusively to one nation or culture? Argentina for example, claims tango as its own – but so does Uruguay. And tango itself is a hybrid form, bringing together rhythms, dances and musical instrumentation from Spain, Italy, Morocco, and numerous other places. Similarly, Flamenco might be thought to ‘belong to’ Spain but evolved from the coming together of influences from Kathak dance from India (brought to Europe by travelling Roma people), Arabic music, Jewish song, Andalucian folk dance and any number of other influences that converged in Southern Spain a few centuries ago.

Is there, in any case, actually any differences between ‘races’ and ‘cultures’ or is there only one race, the human race,with ‘culture’ a constantly evolving mix of influences and ideas, ever-shifting in time and space? For example, we talk of England as a Christian country, and our head of state is also head of the Anglican church, yet this religion so intrinsically tied to ‘British values’ was imported from the Middle East.

Can we ringfence religion, music, dance, language, ethics, and say ‘this is a value/idea/practice that belongs to this culture, but cannot be used by this one’, or do we all own everything? Who decides? If I want to ‘find my roots’ how far back is it reasonable to go? I’m white, Anglo-Irish – but with Jewish ancestors in there too. And that’s just what I know about. Who knows what else is in the mix. We all evolved from the same place, so I’m ultimately a daughter of Eve – and at some point, way back in time, my great, great grandmother (to the power of whatever number it might be) was a dark-skinned, black-haired African Savannah dweller. Did she once dance to the rhythms that informed the development of the Yanvalou dance that is core to Voudou practice? Or does this practice now ‘belong to’ Haiti, not to the Igbo of West Africa?

Jon acknowledges that these are thorny issues – and reflecting after the event, Nwando has these thoughts to share:

‘I think it’s really important, as an artist, that I have the freedom to self define – to not limit myself to people’s ideas of what I should be presenting, hiding or showing. Through the work we do I hold up the various contradictory aspects of my being (real, imagined, projected onto me by society, authentic, fake) and explore them.’

Jon adds: ‘My own approach is fairly simple and is summed up by this quotation from the psychologist Clare W Graves: “Damn it all, a person has a right to be who he is.” When that is tested against the complications of various power structures and dogmas, we get a range of diverse results.’

Thinking back over the week, so much has stayed with me. One of the most intense and fruitful sessions saw the creation of a whole-room shrine, in which each of us entered the space one by one, chose an object and placed it in the designated area, building and building until we’d created a wonderful, composite artwork that incorporated furniture, fabrics, props and objects of all sorts, including many that we’d brought ourselves to make use of. There, dangling from a shelf is one of my blue satin Latin tango shoes. On the other side, a handful of shells (the casings of long-dead sea creatures) collected from Brighton beach when my children were still small enough to go to the beach with me. Next to them, a lurid pink feather fan that I bought in Rio during Carnival (although like most Carnival products in Brazil, it was made in China). The stories these objects of mine represent are multiple and complex, and they are just a tiny fraction of the heap of objects arrayed here.

After we’ve finished our making – and with no signal or voiced decision to do so – we all find ourselves dressing in anything that we can find that we take a shine to (Jon is wearing a giant whoppee cushion costume, but that’s the least of it), and dancing exuberantly in a circle of call-and-response sounds and actions. It feels good and right – reverent and irreverent at one and the same time, an invented ritual that has arisen from the energy of the moment – but aren’t all rituals just that?

I will leave the last word with Nwando: ‘As I understand it, Vodou is an incredibly dense, non-dogmatic, ancestral, joyful practice of which most people outside of Haiti are wholly ignorant and many people (particularly black people) are afraid. As an atheist I have no fears of any religion but I do have a profound respect for ritual practices connected to mythology and am particularly interested in ones that contain ecstatic dance. And Vodou mythology is up there with the best myths you care to name!’

MAS Secular Ecstatic Art. Photo Rafaela Rocha

Footnotes:

Featured photo (Top) by Rafaela Rocha. Other images throughout as credited.

MAS: Secular Ecstatic Art – a week-long laboratory and performance took place at Apiary Studios, Hackney Road, London, 15–20 June 2015. It was facilitated by Nwando Ebzie and Jonathan Grieve of MAS Productions.

Battle Cry, a public performance by Lady Vendredi and participants in the week’s work, co-produced by MAS and NitroBEAT, took place at Apiary on the evening of Saturday 20 June 2015.

MAS Productions have announced that the ongoing Lady Vendredi project has received Arts Council England funding, and a new stage of research and development will culminate in a public performance at the Roundhouse, London, on 22 October 2015.

For more see http://www.nwandoebizie.com/ and http://www.jonathangrieve.com/

Duckie: Border Force

Bring down the borders! Bring them down! Prime Minister of the Whole World (Amy Lame, our DJ for the evening) has given the word, so down they will come. But for now, it’s time to dance: a great big melting pot of human beings, all nationalities and ethnicities, all genders, and all sexual orientations merging, one big writhing mass of humanity. There are people in bikinis and people ‘performing their ethnicity’ in national costume of various sorts, although often with a twist. There are people in the world tourist uniform of Hawaiian shirts and shorts, and people in security guard uniform – which adds an amusing layer of confusion, as even without the punters dressed as security in the mix, there are already two types of guards on duty: Duckie performers in blue shirts and black ties, and all sorts of thing on their bottom halves; and actual Brighton Dome security guards in their trad black polyester guard drag. It’s Brighton, it’s Gay Pride, and it feels like a fitting end to a day that’s seen the biggest gay pride celebration ever in our fair city.

It’s a great party night, a fabulous end-Pride-with-a-bang clubbing experience – but Duckie are hoping that Border Force is something more. ‘If you have a UK passport, you can be considered lucky.’ it says on an information sheet I grab on the way out in the wee small hours. ‘ UK nationals have freedom of movement to 174 countries and territories – that’s 89% of the countries of the world’ Compare this, say to an Afghanistan passport, which gives you free access to just 28. What Duckie are hoping for is that people have a good fun night out; but they also want to raise awareness of the limitations many people from non-UK countries experience – especially LGBTQI people – and to pose the question: is there a different possibility to the nation state? They freely admit they don’t have the answers…

So, how this all plays out: we arrive, we get searched and frisked, we are given our passport (which takes the form of a photo ID card on a lanyard). We join a queue (of course), and we are allocated a country. There are four countries – Duckie have gone for the BRIC group – Brazil, Russia, India, China. Why the BRICs? So we can imagine a world in which the G7 are no longer world rulers, and our UK passports aren’t quite the gold ticket they once were. The grand, high-ceilinged space that is the Dome Corn Exchange is divided up into four fenced-in arenas (quarters of a pie, if you like), with a central podium used for the cabaret acts that ensue later in the evening. You can go into your own ‘country’ at any time, but if you want to enter another, you have to get a visa.

Here’s how you get a visa: you go to that country’s embassy (four designated areas outside of the country boundaries), you take a numbered ticket and queue (of course), and when it’s your turn you have to fulfil the assigned task. I’m allocated Brazil, so luckily I don’t have to have a Brazilian wax. My companion is India, so to come visit me in Brazil he does. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be your bikini line that you offer up… In other parts of the world, there’s a ping pong challenge, a spelling bee presided over by a cricket umpire perched on high, and gymnastic horse vaulting with a young Putin look-a-like.

My favourite ‘embassy’ is the Russian one. It’s partly the luck of positioning – there’s a lot of space in front of the small stage bearing the gymnasium horse, so onlookers can hang around to watch and cheer the action, and it’s right next to the main bar, to boot. Also, the performers manning this station are totally engaged and involved with their audience, immediate and wider. It’s a stroke of genius to have Richard DeDomenici as the photographer/cheerleader, with images then appearing onscreen, so we can see the current visa applicants in compromising poses with ‘Putin’, whilst enjoying watching past moments of glory with eager applicants giving their all for the Russian motherland. I also like the Indian cricket umpire who is merciless in her spelling challenges and takes obvious pleasure in her ‘visa not granted’ pronouncements. The ping pong game is fun, but a one-trick pony, and the Brazilian waxing a bit tame – I didn’t hear anyone squealing anytime I went by. Also, these last two are stuck in a tight space near a wall, so it is hard to loiter as a spectator, you are essentially in the queue or you’re not.

So that’s the embassies – what about the countries? Unfortunately, I realise at around 10pm (one whole hour after doors have opened), that I’m hours early for the party. Each country has just a handful of people hanging about drinking nervously – there’s nothing else to do. There is some entertainment, in the form of a dancer/performer in a corner. Duckie say they wanted to ‘give the space of the countries in Border Force over to artists who are trying to make sense of their own identities’, but this is with very varied results, and drastically varying levels of quality. My country, Brazil, has a great border guard – a big, jolly Brasileiro who greets me with an ‘Ola! Tudo bem?’ every time I come by. The dark-side Carmen Miranda ‘barmaid’ looks great but doesn’t really engage in much audience interaction, although compared to the performer in the corner dressed in Brazil football kit who is nervously kicking foam balls around, her performance skills are consummate. Still, there are gratis pao de quejo to eat, and rather watery caipirinhas to purchase. China I like, because the border guards are suitably tough about letting us ‘non Chinese’ in, even with our correct visas in place, and whoever it is under that panda suit is someone who understands how to engage with an audience, and s/h/ze dances, poses and performs with a wonderful energy. Russia and India suffer from the same problem as Brazil: no-one really holding the space or interacting in any meaningful way – the performers are dressed nicely but are not doing very much to keep our attention for more than a couple of minutes. The smoked salmon in Russia is nice, though.

The problem really is that I’d arrived on time – as you would, on a press ticket – but that there just wasn’t enough going on for the first two and a half hours. I suppose I should have been thinking nightclub not theatre – but I was expecting something along the lines of a Shunt’s Dance Bear Dance (which had a similar starting point), or Ursula Martinez and Chris Green’s Office Party (which similarly mixed cabaret acts into a themed evening in which the audience were divided into groups), or indeed something like earlier Duckie shows such as the multi-award winning C’est Vauxhall – rather than a clubbing experience with some add-on performance elements, which is what this was. I suppose I was also seduced by the fact that Joshua Sofaer was on board as writer/director – I wasn’t convinced that his vision was being fully realised. It’s a great concept, with some absolutely lovely ideas, and some fantastic performers (although there were also some people who could hardly manage to stay in character for even the first hour) but it needs more content, and more rigour. I’ve no objection to the ‘Sunday newspaper photo-spread’ shallowness of the national identities – and totally buy into the ‘tourist snapshot’ portrayals. But having got my visas, I wanted something more than a nicely decorated drinking den to go to. And I would have like to have gleaned more of the important information given in the accompanying info sheet from the show itself.

It depends, I suppose, what you view this as. If it hadn’t been for that information sheet picked up on exit, I probably wouldn’t even be worrying about it. But, having read about the intentions of the piece, I feel that there are opportunities missed in Border Force – the sparse first two to three hours of the night would have been the time to fill the space with something a little more thought-provoking.

But maybe that’s not the point. By 11.30pm, the space has filled, everyone is drinking, everyone is happy. The four ‘culturally appropriate’ cabaret acts go down well – especially the naked young man performing his version of Swan Lake (Russia). There’s also a Classical Indian dancer, a snazzy Brazilian partner-dance act who mix different forms of samba with a bit of jazz, and a scarf-waving Chinese dancer who turns all raunchy and burlesque half way in. (There was no programme crediting performers, hence my vagueness.) Following the cabaret, the Queen of Everywhere – the ever-entertaining Dickie Beau – takes to the stage to entertain her subjects, then it’s time to dance all the way to a borderless world.

It’s past my bedtime and I slip away, crunching my way through the litter-strewn streets of Brighton lit by a full moon, passing gaggles of drunk people in pink feather boas hanging outside the bars of the North Laine, even drunker people picnicking on weed and Haribos on the grass outside St Peter’s Church, and extremely drunk people lying in the gutter on London Road (although no doubt looking at the stars). A couple of police people on horseback canter by, and a helicopter whirs overhead as sirens screech from every direction. It’s the nearest England gets to Brazilian Carnival, and actually – I feel at home.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui: M¡longa

A beautiful start – reminiscent of Pina Bausch. Or perhaps even a Gotan Project gig. A screen fills the stage, and on it we see a milonga in progress, the camera wandering over the images of the couples dancing beautifully with each other, oblivious of the camera. Regular people, on a night out in Buenos Aires. And this intimacy and oblivion is the point. Tango is about the relationship between the dancers, not the response of the onlooker, and as such is not a performance form, it is a social dance form.

A dilemma that Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui acknowledges in his programme notes to M¡longa. How do you make a performance piece out of a dance form that isn’t, in its essence, intended for the stage? He is not alone in this problem. Many have gone before him, and he stands on their shoulders. Indeed, many of the tango performers in this show, and his chief tango consultant/rehearsal director Nelida Rodriguez, have been there with this dilemma for decades. She is a veteran of Tango Argentino, the 1980s show that brought Argentine tango to the world. (I saw this show in New York in 1981/2, and it opened my eyes to the wonders of the form, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.) In this, and many subsequent shows that sprung from it, such as the Tango Por Dos repertoire (also seen at Sadler’s Wells in recent years), the answer to the dilemma has often been to present an onstage history of the dance as it progresses through the 20th century, from its roots in La Boca (the old port area of Buenos Aires) to the salons of the city. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui eschews this idea, and offers instead an odd patchwork of scenes that purport to show a meeting of contemporary dance and tango in its reflection on what happens during a milonga (confusingly perhaps for tango outsiders, the word ‘milonga’ means both a social dance occasion, it’s most usual meaning, but also refers to a faster and perkier dance form that is part of the tango family).

The only problem is that although he perhaps thinks this is something new, Tango Nuevo has been the toast of BA (and elsewhere) for many decades now; and many tango dancers (including some of the Argentinians he here employs) are also trained in contemporary dance, and have been exploring the onstage dynamic between the two forms for years. Go to any tango show in Buenos Aires – be it at a commercial club or at an arts venue or festival – and you will see scenes almost identical to those presented here on the Sadler’s Wells stage. Indeed, presented by the same dancers! I know that is irrelevant for those seeing the show (the vast majority, I suppose) who are not serious tango aficionados, but for those of us who are, the response is ultimately that this is a very pleasant evening, with high production values, and wonderful dancing (by some of Argentina’s finest), but there is nothing innovative about it.

Believe me, this is not the first tango show to feature a row of chairs (eyes across the dancefloor), a wallflower abandoned by her man, a three-way all-male dance, or a nod towards the traditional Apache dance-fight. And on that latter scene: in the interest of feminist consciousness, you really cannot and should not, in the 21st century, have a scene in a contemporary dance piece in which a woman is grabbed by the back of the head, presented without humour or irony. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui says that he isn’t afraid of the cliches – I’d say be afraid, be very afraid, unless you have the means to interrogate those cliches. There is also the nagging spectre of cultural appropriation…

Having been reminded of Pina Bausch in the opening scene, I can’t help, throughout this show, think what she would have made of the material. Indeed, what she did make of investigations of social dance, both European and South American, in many of her shows, including Kontakthof, Waltzer, Masurca Fogo, et al. I long for the sort of loving deconstruction that is the hallmark of her work.

There are some scenes that spark my interest, showing an intent to take things beyond the regular tango show format. I love the use of film, especially the way live performers interact with the moving images – gorgeous city landscapes of Buenos Aires, or multiple images of the dancing bodies. Some of the use of film windows and cut-up boxes reminds me of Carlos Saura’s films. There is a good use too of cut-out 2-D figures and shadows to create a lovely sense of the faceless ‘others’ in a milonga that surround a dancing couple who only have eyes for each other. Set and video design is by Eugenio Szwarcer, who has done a sterling job.

And it has to be said again, the tango dancers are wonderful – with a special accolade to legendary traditional dancer Esther Garabali (who was featured in Carlos Saura’s Tango), and to Vivana D’Attoma and her longterm partner Gabriel Bordon, who have gravitas, versatility, and a brilliant and theatrical sense of humour, particularly in the milonga scene (second sense of this word employed here). The musicians too, under the leadership of composer/musical director Fernando Marzan – a full tango orchestra of piano, bandoneon, violin, guitar, and bass – who deliver all the classics, from Gallo Ciego to Libertango and beyond, with dash and panache .

M¡longa was created in 2012, and has toured the world with enormous success since its premiere in 2013. This is the last night of the current run, and naturally there is a standing ovation for the team of twelve dancers and five musicians. It is a palpable hit for Sadler’s Wells. a solid piece of entertainment, and if I were someone who’d bought a ticket looking for a good night out that was easy on the eye and brain, I wouldn’t be disappointed. But I’m here on a press ticket, with an expectation (created by the publicity for the show) that Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a renowned contemporary choreographer, would be creating an unexpected and interesting response to the time he has spent in Buenos Aires. Something that genuinely pushed back the boundaries. That I didn’t see.

Richard DeDomenici: The Redux Project

In 2013, live art performer and professional trickster Richard DeDomenici launched The Redux Project, which he describes as ’my attempt to disrupt the cinema industry by making counterfeit sections of popular films.’

And so here he is at Norwich Arts Centre, presenting a show about the project for this enterprising venue’s [Live] Art Club, as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. Like much of his performance work, it’s quite hard to pin down. As is his wont, it’s a kind of performance lecture illustrated with video clips, and peppered with a fair amount of witty commentary.

We are first given a run-down of The Redux Project. For the past couple of years, Richard has been making no-budget appropriations of Hollywood (and other) blockbusters. He re-creates a scene from a well-known film, shot by shot, using mates and volunteers and ‘resting’ actors. And – here’s the killer – he uses the original locations. So despite the toy cars that replace the real cars in the chase, or the slightly dodgy costumes sourced from the local fancy dress shop, we are immediately transported into the world of the film. It’s all about location, location, location.

My memory is pricked: I remember a community engagement project that Richard did in Croydon many years ago, in which he recreated Godzilla in the foyer of the Croydon Clocktower and Library. Making his own version of famous films has been brewing for quite a while, it would seem…

The Redux Project has taken him all over the world – The Bourne Ultimatum: Redux (Berlin), Terminator: Redux (Los Angeles), Fallen Angels: Redux (Hong Kong), Royal Tennenbaums: Redux (Harlem, NYC), Priscilla Queen Of The Desert: Redux (Sydney), Entrapment: Redux (Kuala Lumpur), and Bangkok Traffic Love Story: Redux (yes – Bangkok). Plus Cloud Atlas, Matrix, Superman IV and a whole lot more I’ve never heard of. On Richard’s website there’s a handy map with pins in, so you can look up all the project locations. His only worry is that he’s done so many now that he is actually getting quite good at film-making. Some of his redux versions are getting better reviews, and more stars, than the original films.

The Norwich show circles around a local project: Avengers Age of Ultron: Redux – reconstructing a scene which, like the original, was shot at the University of East Anglia’s futuristic Sainsbury Centre. Not only that, but one of the extras in the original is a star of the redux – and here he is in the audience! Richard invites him and a number of other people who performed in the redux up on stage with him to talk about their experiences. We also learn that Allo Allo and Dad’s Army were filmed in Norfolk, so they are on the cards for future consideration. Everything is fair game here.

But this isn’t a straightforward lecture on the Redux film project. Redux reflections and clips are intercut with flashbacks to previous DeDomeneci work (he likes to keep everything connected) – so we have some musing on the theme of imitation in his work, and specifically the fake versus the real in his Olympic torch project, in which he ran with an Olympic torch of his own ahead of he ‘real’ torch bearer, causing consternation on the streets of London or wherever. He’s thinking of repeating the torch project for the Rio Olympics but is a little wary of the armed Brazilian police force.

We also have another odd and delightful thread in the show, sparked by a story about the theme from Star Trek – originally scored under the title Where No Man Has Gone Before – which was written by Alexander Courage. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry apparently wrote a set of lyrics to the tune (never recorded) just so he could claim 50% of the royalties. Inspired by this, Richard has decided that he could make some dosh from writing (uninvited) lyrics to instrumental theme tunes and registering them with the PRS. He treats us to his version of the Cagney and Lacey and Casualty theme tunes, singing live. His lyrics rival Roddenberry’s in their mediocrity. It’s typical DeDomenici lunacy – and it’s brilliant.

I often find myself getting lost in DeDomenici shows as the popular culture references pile in one on top of the other in a relentless barrage of wit and repartee – but I never mind, as I find his performance presence so refreshing and delightful. I could listen to him for hours, even if I don’t know what he’s talking about half the time. I end up feeling a bit like a granny propelled across a busy road I didn’t intend to cross by a very lovely young boy scout – but I’m grateful nevertheless. God bless you Mr DeDomenici –may you continue to redux, re-evaluate and review the world for a very long time to come. I’ll happily come back for more – anywhere, anytime.

What Will Have Been (and beyond)

A reflection on What Will Have Been, the latest work by Circa to be developed in collaboration with Norfolk & Norwich Festival, and a meeting with the company’s director Yaron Lifschitz

The Adnams Spiegeltent, in the last week of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival: word is out, and the tent is full. Circa are perennial favourites here at Norwich, returning to the festival that has done the most over the years to promote and nurture the company’s work in the UK, building a savvy and appreciative audience for contemporary circus along the way. I’m up close to the podium that thrusts out into the space, surrounded by audience on three sides. Soulful music is playing. The stark stage is lit by a flood of blue light, and devoid of any props, staging or circus equipment other than a single, heavy rope hanging in the space. There’s a hum of expectation in the air.

Enter a female performer, dressed simply in black shorts and top, and up the rope she shins for a robust and pretty damn good corde lisse opening routine that leaves us (and the lighting rig) shaking nervously. Lauren Hurley is a relative newcomer to the company – having previously trained at the National Circus School of Montreal and performed with both Les Sept Doigts de la Main and Cirque Eloise – but could be described as a typical ‘Circa girl’ in her strength and agility – and later on, she shows off her ability to be the base, as is the wont of these wonderful Circa women. She’s joined by two male performers (Lewis West and Daniel O’Brien, both regular Circa ensemble members) who are dressed in martial-arts style wide black trousers and white shirts.

There are words from the Bhagavad Gita, and the four-armed Vishnu is summonsed onstage in a fluid sequence that blends acrobatics, dance and martial arts moves. The fourth person, who steps forward into the limelight and retreats throughout the piece, is a bare-footed violinist in a blue dress (perhaps she’s Vishnu?), whose mellow Bach fugues weave around the physical action – and indeed the acrobats at times weave around her, cat-like.

At other times, there’s recorded sound – a dash of Nyman-style piano or Glass-like electronics here, a raunchy guitar riff there, a flicker of a fading waltz in the distance. The finely-tuned relationship between music and physical performance is always at the heart of Circa’s work, and this show is no exception. There are some utterly stunning sequences, including a duet by Lewis West and Lauren Hurley on hand-balancing canes, done to the Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes, which totally subverts the way this equipment is usually used, the couple creating a series of soft and beautiful hand-to-hand and acrobalance moves that would be extraordinary enough if they were done on the ground, never mind perched on top of these sticks.

In this and other choreographic sequences, iconic images of transcendental ecstasy (religious or otherwise) are conjured. I’m not too surprised to read in Lauren Hurley’s biography that she enjoys ‘the beauty of pain’. Later, the chiaroscuro lighting of a doubles trapeze piece by the two men – now bare-chested – casts them as figures in a Caravaggio painting. As they twist and tug at each other, we seem to be watching a passionate play-off between two mythological gods. Love is in the air, but so is death – the eternal battle between Eros and Thanatos. Another lovely sequence, playfully exploring control, submission and vulnerability, sees the trinity of acrobats fainting, falling and recovering, conjuring up images of the cycle of birth, death and resurrection. Everything is performed terrifyingly close to its audience – so close that the thuds of the bodies on the ground cause our own to shake.

As with much of Circa’s work, the response is less ‘what was this about?’ than ‘how does this make me feel?’. In a meet-the-artists session in the Spiegeltent the previous day, company director Yaron Lifschitz had talked of aiming to ‘give expression to an emotion that you do not know’. My take is that What Will Have Been evokes what the Brazilians call ‘saudade’ – a kind of untranslatable word that might best be described as a bittersweet nostalgia. Even that choice of future subjunctive in the show’s title adds to the just-out-of-reach-but-still-there feel that pervades the piece. À la recherche du temps perdu… In the same session, Yaron also talks about the quintessential liveness of circus: as Warhol said of sex and parties, ‘you have to be there’, Yaron adding circus as a third example of something that you can’t experience by proxy, or via documentation. Circus is not acting, it’s really happening: ‘you pay us to do dumb and dangerous things’ he says.

Circa: S

Yaron Lifschitz set up Circa, and is the company’s artistic director and CEO, but interestingly he does not have a background in circus performance – he is a theatre director who graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) where he was the youngest director ever accepted into its prestigious graduate director’s course. He has subsequently directed over 60 productions including large-scale events, opera, theatre, physical theatre and circus. His passion is for ‘creating works of philosophical and poetic depth from the traditional languages of circus’.

When I meet Yaron the morning after seeing the show, he tells me that he feels that what is often missing in contemporary circus-theatre is the eye of an experienced theatre director. We talk a little about the creation process – he is not too keen on the word ‘devising’, and I get the impression that this is because it implies an approach other than the auteur-director led process that is at the heart of Circa’s work. Not that there isn’t workshopping and exploration in the rehearsal room – there is, but it isn’t devising in an empty space: whichever ensemble members are working on the new show bring their particular strengths and talents into the room; Yaron brings his starting-points – the beginnings of a vision of what could be this time round – and stuff happens. He is keen to point out that although the shows are often very different in style, he doesn’t start each new one with a conscious intention of making something different to the last, it is just that this is often what happens. And there really is a diversity of work in their repertoire. In the last two years, I’ve seen seen the cheeky cabinet of curiosities that is Wunderkammer (presented at Edinburgh Fringe 2013, where the company won a a Total Theatre Award for Significant Contribution to Physical and Visual Theatre), and the sinuous and seductive S (Norwich Theatre Royal, 2014); the site-responsive How Like an Angel, seen in Norwich Cathedral in 2013; this year’s new show What Will Have Been, which with its intimacy and its minimalist beauty is perfectly placed in a Spiegeltent; and three different incarnations of Beyond, the Spiegeltent version of the show (which had its first outing at Norfolk & Norwich Festival in 2013) and the end-on theatre / large stage version presented at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, and Brighton Festival 2015. At Brighton, the show is played to a full house in the Dome Concert Hall, the largest performance space in the city. Brighton Festival have, like Norwich, been instrumental in upping the ante for contemporary circus by presenting some of the world’s best (including Circa).

Circa: Beyond

I ask Yaron about Circa’s relationship with Norfolk & Norwich Festival – obviously a strong and ongoing one, as so much of the company’s work has been created or developed at Norwich. He tells me that the collaboration was born when he met former Norfolk & Norwich director Jonathan Holloway at a festival in the Netherlands. The two men hit it off, and the idea of Circa coming to Norwich was mooted. The company had previously performed in the UK, but Yaron had felt that the regular regional touring model didn’t really suit them, whilst a residency at the Spiegeltent in Norwich had great appeal, providing an opportunity for both company and festival to develop the circus audience in the city. The show that came first was The Space Between. This led to the commissioning of How Like an Angel – a site-responsive work with music composed by Robert Hollingworth, which was performed at the magnificently ornate Norwich Cathedral by an ensemble of Circa acrobats and a live choir, the Renaissance Music vocal group I Fagiolini, and subsequently toured to churches and cathedrals around the world. By then, Jonathan Holloway had moved on from Norwich to become director of the Perth Festival, but incoming festival director William Galinsky picked up and continued the collaboration, bringing Circa back to create Beyond in the Spiegeltent, along with a return showing for How Like an Angel.

Other than the successful ongoing relationship with Norwich, Circa are now an established feature of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and even though What Will Have Been has only just been developed, Yaron has already started in on a new show, Close Up, which will be presented by Underbelly at Ed Fringe 2015 throughout August. All he’ll say (perhaps, at this stage, all he knows!) is that it will feature a team of four acrobats from the Circa ensemble, and that he’ll be collaborating with a film-maker on the inclusion of moving image in the piece.

Circa: Wunderkammer

As if that’s not enough, he’s also reworking Wunderkammer; making Il Ritorno, based on the opera same name by Monteverdi, which will feature four singers, two musicians, and six acrobats and creating a French Baroque circus programme for the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. Musing on this, Yaron says that although he loves working with composers, there is the problem of not being able to swap in songs if he feels that something else would be better, as he often does with the shows that use recorded music! The company have another work in repertoire called Carnival of the Animals, inspired by the Saint-Saëns’ work for young concert-goers, which is a collaboration with composer Quincy Grant.

All of these shows are in development or on the road between now and September 2015. It’s an extraordinary workload, and I wonder how much delegation there is. Not a lot, I suspect. He says that he has a strong team which includes a Head of Circus, responsible for the ongoing training and professional development of the acrobats – but as far as I can tell, there are no choreographers, co-directors, dramaturgs, or other creative collaborators. This – all of it – is his baby.

I suspect he holds it all close to his chest because he feels so passionately about the vision he has for circus-theatre, and how to move that vision on. We talk a little about the Australian circus work that preceded Circa, and agree that great though companies like Circus Oz were and are, they are in essence a modernising and reworking of a traditional circus model.

This leads me to ask Yoran about his thoughts on UK circus. Where does he feel we are at? He namechecks and praises both Barely Methodical’s Bromance, and the Gandini Juggling Project. But generally he feels that British circus could really do with a generation of inspirational directors and creators, to move the artform on in the way that (say) contemporary dance moved on a few decades back. Circus is at least 10 years behind dance, he thinks. He also suggests that he is open to offers, and wouldn’t mind a little sojourn in the UK, directing circus. I’ve no idea where on earth he’d find a gap in his schedule to do this, but perhaps there’s some sort of workshop in Brisbane creating 3-D print-out Yarons to race around the world doing all this work. It’s pretty hard to imagine how else he’s managing to be so many places all at once.

Before I leave him to catch my train out of Norwich, I ask for his email – which he writes neatly in fountain pen in my notebook. He is keen to say that he doesn’t use a fountain pen as some sort of poseurs thing – he genuinely loves the real difference it makes writing with real ink. Exactly what you’d expect of someone who cares passionately about attention to detail. It is this care for detail that manifests so brilliantly in the Circa works whizzing around the world – all so different, with contrasting aesthetics, but all meticulously crafted, and visually stunning.

I take my leave knowing that by the next time I see Circa, in Edinburgh in little more than two months time, he’ll have sent What Will Have Been off to Mexico, created Close Up, reworked Wunderkammer, sorted out Il Ritorno, made the French Baroque programme, and overseen the touring of other shows in the repertoire. I’ve always considered myself to be a super-busy multi-tasker, but this is something else altogether. For me, there’s a long train journey back to Brighton, and the chance to rest a little, and read a novel, after a busy weekend in Norwich. I suspect Yaron was back at work in the Spiegeltent even before I’d got to the station…

Circa: Opus

For more on Circa see www.circa.org.au

Circa’s Close Up will be presented at Underbelly George Square throughout August 2015.

See http://www.underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/whats-on/close-up

Or book at www.edfringe.com

Dorothy Max Prior saw Circa’s What Will Have Been at the Adnams Spiegeltent, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, 17 May 2015.

Beyond was seen at Brighton Festival, 2 May 2015.

Other shows seen as cited, at Edinburgh Fringe, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, and Brighton Festival.