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

DFM Company: Dance for Me

Sister Sledge’s classic disco track He’s the Greatest Dancer is playing. The Basement main space is packed – sold out for a lunchtime dance show from Iceland! Everyone is relaxed and chatty, including the two performers who are just hanging out in the performance space, casually greeting people as they come in. One is a slim, androgynous woman with dark hair, dressed in jeans and a red check shirt. The other is a big-framed middle-age man with a beer belly, wearing yellow trousers and a black T-shirt. The man is telling people that his daughter is coming along today, and that the seat in the front is reserved for her.

Here’s the show’s story, which we mostly glean from projected video clips: the man is Ármann Einarsson. He’s in his fifties, and lives in place called Akureyri in North Iceland. in 2013 he revealed to his daughter-in-law, choreographer Brogan Davison, that he has a dream – he wants to pursue his life-long desire to perform contemporary dance on stage, although he has never had any formal dance training. The show that they’ve developed together (and tour with Ármann’s son Petur as the technician, making it a truly family affair) asks the question: Is dance really for everybody?

Interesting question. Watching Ármann dance his choreographed contemporary dance routines, echoed by Brogan, you cannot but help admire his resolution and dedication. But context is everything: taken without the frame of the show, it would all be rather odd –but as it is, interspersed with constant reflection on the process, it becomes a fascinating investigation of the nature of dance, and the drive to dance. How was it that time? asks Brogan. I think it went great, says Ármann. Is that the best you’ve done it? she asks. Yes, I think so. And at another point he says: I’m in perfect shape – a lovely demolishing of the notion that you need to be a certain size or level of fitness to dance. He doesn’t want to be seen as a fat clown, he says.

It’s a piece with a familiar kind of format – two performers stepping in and out of the dance action, sometimes on-mic and sometimes not, talking directly to the audience – a knowing cross between dance and live art, postmodern to the nth degree in its constant reflection onstage of what is happening on the stage, and what has happened before. The inclusion of confessional video exploring Ármann’s motivation and the process of making the work is also a familiar contemporary dance/performance trope. Art will eat itself…

But it works because Ármann is such a genuinely endearing character. And (I say this as someone who has Icelandic friends and spent time in Iceland) he is so very very – Icelandic. It’s something about the way he tells his stories, which often have bizarre and puzzling punchlines. There’s a rambling story about berry barrels and fjords full of ice, a story about a butcher, a recounting of how when his dad was left to cook the dinner he went out to buy two hot dogs for himself and little Ármann, and a sharing of how special Coca Cola used to be in Iceland – something you only got twice a year if you were lucky, on your birthday and at Christmas, and that it came in tiny glass bottles. Oh and a pretty hair-raising tale of drunkeness, when he came home one night and almost accidentally pissed on his son’s computer instead of in the toilet, because he’d mistaken his son’s bedroom for the loo.

When it is Brogan’s turn to tell us her stories, we learn that she was born in England during the great hurricane of 1987, that she danced as a child, and that aged 10 she tried to give up ballet but no one would let her as she had talent, although later there were the usual queries about whether she had quite the right body required to dance. So here we have someone kind of destined to dance who tried to get out of it, as opposed to her father-in-law to be (she’s marrying Petur soon) who nobody ever thought to encourage, but who has held a long-term ambition to dance. An interesting juxtaposition.

The stories, live and on film, are interspersed with dance sequences – sometimes just one or other of them, sometimes both together. Ármann never looks truly comfortable, although he does say ‘when I want to feel good, I dance like this”. It’s a reminder that dance (unlike theatre) is all about the experience of the enactor, not of the witness.

There’s a very lovely moment, close to the end, when we see musician Ármann playing a mellow jazz tune on his clarinet. Suddenly he’s a different man – no longer the awkward person trying to get something right that is an effort, but the expert, the person in control, master of his instrument. It’s magical.

But there’s an interesting reflection to make here: Ármann’s music mastery has taken him only to a life as a high school music teacher. Now he’s a (non) dancer who dances, he dances all over the world. Brighton today, next stop Berlin – and maybe Brazil too.

I started a little sceptical – but Dance For Me won me over. A sweet and charming show that raises interesting questions about contemporary dance – and about following your heart’s desire.

The funding question: oops what a palaver

Social media is currently a-buzz with links to, and comments on, an article in the online edition of the Telegraph newspaper by Douglas McPherson entitled A critic’s plea: stop all arts funding now. The article’s standfirst is ‘In twenty years I can’t think of one publicly funded show that was any good – while every day commercial world creates amazing things without help’. I haven’t put the link here as you really don’t need it – grab a passing cab driver or pop down your local and you’ll hear the same cry: why do we need to fund artists from the public purse?

But before addressing that, a word of concern. We so easily fall into a clickbait trap with these sorts of articles. Like most free-to-view online publications, this newspaper relies on online advertising – and advertisers are wooed on the basis of the amount of traffic the site receives. Every time you click on or share the offending article you are boosting the newspaper’s coffers. Papers often run deliberately provocative articles like this to generate outrage (and thus endless commentary and shares on social media). It’s a kind of art-porn: you click, you read, the whole experience leaves you feeling sullied. Yes, I’m guilty. I clicked, I read, I got about a third of the way through, I hastily exited with a nasty taste in my mouth. What on earth was I thinking of? Resist, resist.

Rather bizarrely, the example given of a show that shouldn’t be funded with public money was the latest work by Australian circus company Circa, What Will Have Been, seen by McPherson (and me) at Norfolk & Norwich Festival this May. I loved it, he hated it. Fair enough, it’s only subjective opinion after all, and we are all entitled to express our opinions. They are Australian, so of course haven’t directly had any Arts Council or other British funding to make the show. But the company are indirectly funded here as it has a long and fruitful history of collaboration with Norfolk & Norwich, nurtured through former festival director Jonathan Holloway, current director William Galinsky, and producer Patrick Dickie (supported by others at Norfolk & Norwich Festival such as Matt Burman and Mikey Martins). All of these enterprising people have worked hard at creating a great circus-savvy audience in Norwich, who eagerly flock to shows by not only Circa, but other visiting luminaries such as Montreal’s Les Sept Doigts, and the terrific team who created Cantina (which transferred to Wonderground on the Southbank, as did Circa’s Beyond, after its premiere at Norwich Spiegeltent. Mc Pherson argues that Circa had full houses at £20 a head, so are commercially viable. The counter-argument is that Norwich, through its public money funding, has educated its audience and created that situation.

So why has he picked this particular example? Let’s stop here and reflect on who Douglas McPherson is, and what his motivation might be in picking on Circa (winners of a Total Theatre Award for Significant Contribution to Physical and Visual Performance – so firm favourites in this camp). Although this at first seems very odd, it doesn’t take much effort to unpick it. McPherson isn’t a Telegraph staff critic, he’s a freelancer who has written for many different publications. He has a strong interest in circus, and is author of a book called Circus Mania. Now, as former co-ordinator of the UK Circus Arts Forum (an organisation set up by Total Theatre in 2000, to support circus in all its manifestations) I know only too well of the horrendous and vicious in-fighting in the circus world, with many (although not all) people who work in or who support traditional circus harbouring an intense dislike of contemporary circus, particularly if it plays with form and crosses boundaries in the way that Circa’s work does so magnificently. I remember returning from the first-ever Circelation, a cross-artform professional development week for circus produced by the enterprising Chenine Bhathena, and getting an extremely angry phone call from Gerry Cottle, who berated me for supporting all this arty nonsense. McPherson is definitely in the camp that believes that circus is about glitz and glamour and tricks, not ‘arty nonsense’.

Arts funding quite obviously is instrumental in developing artforms and providing the fertile soil in which art in whatever form can grow and develop. Does that mean anyone and everyone who considers themselves to be an artist has a God-given right to public money? No, of course not. It is good and healthy to find ways to support yourself whilst establishing yourself as an artist. I’d argue that it is good to have ways to exist outside of total reliance on funding even when further down the line as an artist or theatre-maker. The company I co-direct, Ragroof Players, has a strand of work producing tea dances, parties and events that are self-sufficiently reliant on booking fees or box office income, and provide us with a much-need strand of income support.

But where we do get public funding, through ACE or Heritage Lottery, is in the creation of our street theatre and site-responsive or community-engaged shows – specific communities engaged with having included older people who love ballroom dancing (Shall We Dance?), boxers (Gloves On), teenagers (Youth Club) and migrants (our current project, Bridges).We create work that is free to audience – which seems to me should be a vital part of the arts funding sector. I feel passionately that art needs to be taken outdoors and into public spaces, not just sit in theatres and galleries – and if there is no box office, there is no income. The benefits are clear to see – a great example is the Stockton International Riverside Festival, set up by Frank Wilson in a downtrodden Northern town. Over many decades this has been the site for transformation each year when thousands of happy people hit the streets for four days of quality outdoor arts, featuring the likes of Wired Theatre and Periplum (and yes, Ragroof!). Of course, if you believe that there is no such thing as society, then the sight of a harmonious communal gathering of people from all strands of life having a collective joyful experience that enforces each person’s sense of a shared humanity might seem of little importance.

One of the other benefits of arts funding is that it nurtures work in its early stages that then goes on to be successful – and in some cases, that means the work can stand alone in the commercial world. Examples we could cite here include the National Theatre’s War Horse, which transferred to the West End and is still going strong. For a good reflection on treading the line between the funded and commercial worlds, see this excellent feature by Jo Crowley of 1927 on what her job as producer actually entails. There should be a culture of enterprise in the arts, where the relationship between different strands of income for an artist or company is up for consideration. In the coming years, we are all going to have to be looking to find means of support beyond arts funding, and to show the funders that we have other strands of income, That feels fine and good to me – I don’t want to exist exclusively on public money, and I’m willing to work hard on a portfolio of projects that receive funding from various sources, not just arts funding, combined with revenue from other sources. A word of caution here though about how we fund artists: there’s something of a trend for funding to come indirectly via venues or organisations, and although this works for some (Circa and Norwich seem to be a good example), for others it isn’t quite so cosy. Its the artists who know their own needs, and if experienced, can set their own budgets and production deadlines more easily if given free reign to do so, rather than be reliant on a collaboration with someone holding the purse-strings who doesn’t necessarily understand what’s needed and when.

This could go on for a lot longer, but I’ll finish here with a reminder to McPherson et al that when John Maynard Keynes set up the Arts Council, his aim was ‘to give courage, confidence and opportunity’ to artists and their audiences. That need is as strong now as it was then – and if a cash-strapped war-time Britain could find the funds for art then, it certainly can now. Winston Churchill may not have actually said ‘Then what are we fighting for?’ during a discussion on proposed wartime arts cuts – what he is documented as saying is this: ‘The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them. Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due’. And that’s from the mouth of a Tory…

Footnote:

Featured image is of Periplum’s 451, touring to outdoor arts festivals across the UK in 2015. Photo by Ray Gibson

Fugitive Theatre: Bolt

An empty stage, cool blue lighting. A metal-framed hospital bed, and to each side of the performance space thin muslin curtains – translucent veils that obscure rather than hide. On the back wall, a screen. Bolt opens with moving image. Our point of view is from the ground, and we are looking up into the face of a youngish man calling ‘Liv, Liv’ in an agitated voice. He’s twitchy, guilt-ridden: ‘Get, up Liv. I’m sorry… Come on, we were both going at it… Please, get up… Oh God there’s blood…’ . The lighting state changes, and a woman walks on. Grungy clothes, a scraggly plait, and a black eye. She speaks in the second person, calm but accusing: ‘You… You… You…’ She could hear him, she chose not to respond, she waited till he’d gone away to get help. ‘I’ll have to be gone when they get here’ he’d said.

The woman is Olivia Townsend (played by the show’s writer and director Siren Turner), hospital inmate. Perhaps she’s in a regular hospital, or perhaps she’s been sectioned – but no, it becomes evident that she’s in a rehab clinic, and is being dealt the cold turkey treatment. There’s a nurse, an older woman called Carol (played by Maresa Schick), who has hidden secrets that eventually impact on Liv’s story of her dysfunctional drug-driven relationship with boyfriend Jef (Alexander Ellis), and with her friend / housemate Lula (Sophia del Pizzo), a pale-skinned long-haired pre-Raphaelite beauty who we meet both on-screen and on-stage. Liv and Lula have a complicated relationship, like slightly incestuous sisters who love each other deeply – and who are obviously deeply wounded by each other’s behaviour.

The on-stage Lula lounging on the bed is, we gather, a figment of Liv’s imagination. Liv tells her (and us) that she is ‘held hostage by memories’. The intertwined realms of memory and imagination are represented by the on-screen characters of Lula and Jef (the renegade junkie boyfriend), and – less successfully – by their onstage appearances, as they pop in and out of the hospital room. Both Sophia del Pizzo and Alexander Ellis are strong actors to camera, but far less convincing on-stage. It is also, of course, harder to play a figment of someone’s imagination onstage. Having introduced the device of film as memory, it almost feels redundant to have Lula and Jef there in person too.

And it must be said that although Complicite, Punchdrunk and Sleepwalk Collective are all cited as influences on Fugitive Theatre’s work, what’s lacking in Bolt is the strength of movement-trained, stage-savvy performance that all of these companies specialise in. Yes, this is primarily a text-based work, but it would be great to see here a more European approach that recognises that a thorough training in physically-embodied theatre doesn’t exclude the voice – far from it, all the companies mentioned above are adept in delivering text without sacrificing physicality. There’s far too much fiddly gesturing and awkward blocking, rather than robust physical performance, in the live performance elements of Bolt. The actors often just don’t look relaxed and comfortable in the space.

What does work are scenes in which plot and character move forward onscreen whilst the onstage actors are held still in silent witness. There are also several scenes where onstage spoken text and onscreen text kind of echo or overlap each other in a way that is dramaturgically interesting. And I like the use of the ‘veils’ to each side of the stage, where characters lurk in a kind of here-but-not-here limbo, staring silently forward as action unfolds on stage or screen.

As her starting point in writing Bolt, Siren Turner used a Nan Goldin self-portrait showing a bruised face, which she kept as a reminder never to go back to the man who had hit her. That and the story of street photographer Dash Snow who lived fast and died young – age 27 of a drug overdose. Siren Turner’s Liv is a photographer, and photos (never seen by us) are used in the play as pivotal icons, unlockers of her memory, and crucial game-players in the plot. I wonder occasionally whether using the photos on-screen in tandem with the moving image might have been an interesting choice (although possibly one considered and rejected by the writer/director). But regardless, I like the dramatic device of the photos as catalyst to action in the play.

The script is somewhat over-written, with some plot twists and turns rather unbelievable, and there is sometimes an uncomfortable balance between naturalistic dialogue and poetic flights of fancy. For example, when Jef describes the moment of a hit in the vein, waxing lyrical on a ‘thousand tiny stars bursting’ it’s a nice bit of writing, but seems slightly odd and out of character coming from Jef. The onstage dialogue between Liv and Lula often feels stilted, and lacking any real dramatic spark – although as said, Lula/Sophia onscreen gives an excellent performance, a complex and muddled mix of innocence and experience; and Alexander/Jef onscreen combines attraction and repulsion most cleverly. The use of moving image as our lead character’s memory – with many filmed scenes repeating throughout the duration, each new viewing given a different context by the degree of new knowledge we’ve acquired – is a very nice device.

There is a bigger question about the doing-it-all-yourself syndrome. Of course it is possible to write, direct and play the starring role in a show. But sometimes handing your work over to a director, or stepping back from performing, or working with a dramaturg, can make for a stronger show.

These criticisms aside, there’s a lot to praise in Bolt – not least the adventurous interplay between screen and stage action. A company to watch – I’d be very interested to see if they continue their exploration of the stage/screen dynamic, and in what ways.

Sam Green: The Measure of All Things

Cinema: a shared banquet in a palace, or a snack consumed absent-mindedly on your iPhone? Sam Green is on a mission to find a new way for cinema to be presented, making it a live theatrical experience that, like any other form of theatre, is unique to this time and this shared space. What we are experiencing is not shown simultaneously in a number of venues; it’s only here and now.

So first, going back to the roots of cinema, there is live music – just as there was in the days of the silent silver screen. In this case, it’s a sextet called yMusic, a classical/jazz/pop crossover group whose members have previously worked with the likes of Antony and the Johnsons, Meredith Monk, and Sufjan Stevens.

Additionally, we have Oscar-nominated film-maker Sam Green (The Weather Underground, 2004) onstage, with a spoken word accompaniment to, and live commentary on, his film.

Finally, the film itself.

The Measure of All Things is an homage to the Guinness Book of Records, which Green says he was obsessed with as a young boy. It starts with the wow factor facts and figures, and the audience relaxes back into easy listening mode, chortling at the whacky ‘isn’t life strange?’ examples that follow on in quick succession. Here’s a woman with the longest nails in the world, great curly talons that turn back on themselves. The longest hair – a cascade that goes way beyond the person’s feet. The oldest person – a man in Japan aged 116, seen surrounded by adoring grandchildren. Most struck by lightning – seven times unlucky. The longest taxi ride – seven thousand miles. And on it goes. Tallest. Shortest. Oldest. Fattest twins on motorcycles. It’s starting to feel like a Forced Entertainment show – lists, lists, and more lists.

Just when we think this is it, the tone changes. Sam Green shrugs off the boyish enthusiasm of his younger self, and reflects on the Guinness Book of Records itself, which apparently started as a freebie offered by the beer-makers to its loyal customers, to help them win pub quizzes. An image of a stack of back copies is reflected on: records change all the time, so they’re as out-of-date as yesterday’s papers. By way of example, we see a picture of an entry about the world’s biggest computer. It fills a room and has 34MB of memory… the size of one MP3 on your tablet.

We delve deeper, and the commentary becomes more poetic and reflective. Sam Green draws an analogy to fairy tales: these stories are superficially simple and easy to understand, but there’s lots beneath the surface. By way of example, the human stories behind the stats are turned over. Roy Sullivan, the man who was hit by lightning seven times, wasn’t killed that way – he committed suicide. Which seems so sad, so unbearable after so many brushes with death. He described himself as ‘unlucky in love’, and died by self-inflicted gun wound. Then, there’s Randy Gardner who in 1964, as a high-school student age just 16, stayed awake for 11 days and nights – a record that still stands. He was featured on the American TV show To Tell the Truth (we get to see the footage) as a cheery and sanguine all-American teenager. This is paired with more recent footage of Randy, who has become rather more phlegmatic in middle age: ‘Life’s a journey with no destination’ he says ‘you’re born, you die – that’s it’.

It goes darker and more disturbing. A man is stuck in a lift for 41 hours. There is CCTV footage, and we see his ordeal in its time-lapsed totality. He was never the same again, we learn. Another man recites Pi to so many digits, over so many hours, that it is beyond comprehension that anyone could have learnt so much by rote. We come back to him a few times, then learn that he had made a mistake many hours ago, but they kept him going until that error was formerly declared.

Even the Guinness Book of Records itself has it’s dark days, as co-founder and right-wing supporter Ross McWhirter is murdered by the IRA (1975). The four gunmen received 47 life sentences, but were released under the Good Friday agreement, and one of them now likes to paint landscapes. As with so many of the juxtaposed stories, there is a whole theatre show in this little segment.

We are pulled out the darkness with a beautiful story. We meet the tallest man in the world. Except he isn’t anymore, he’s been usurped by a taller man. But just as he starts to feel unwanted and useless, his life takes an odd turn when he is invited to use one of his really long arms to fish a bit of plastic out of a dolphin’s guts. A woman sees this on TV, falls in love with him as he is ‘such a kind man’ and offers to marry him. They live happily ever after.

Odd-bod love stories feature frequently. Before the main feature, we are treated to an earlier short film by Sam Green, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, which reflects on the life of Rollen Stewart, who became famous during the 1970s for appearing at televised events wearing a rainbow-coloured wig, and carrying a ‘John 3:16’ sign. This starts as a whacky little biog pic, but soon turns into an uncanny reflection on co-incidence and crossed paths, as Rollen’s ex-wife Elsie turns out to have met the 9/11 bombers at a party. We see the party snaps – a group of smiley friends enjoying a nice evening together. And the moral of the tale? Even bombers like birthday cake. It’s a perfect Sam Green moment: whatever we think we know about people, it turns out there’s another side; and whatever stories we tell, there’s always a twist to the tale.

Laurie Anderson: All the Animals

What are the last things you see and say before you die and become dust? Do all oceans have walls? And why did the lark bury her father inside her own head?

All the Animals, a specially commissioned show for Brighton Festival, sees Laurie Anderson piecing together excerpts from earlier shows to make something that is more than the sum of its parts: a brand new work that presents a stunning cornucopia of stories and sounds; reworking mythical and fictional animal tales, and musing on our relationship with the natural world, but beyond that reflecting on the very nature of life itself. And death – death features heavily. Anderson’s bereavement (her husband Lou Reed died in 2013) is never specifically referenced, but it is there in the air, informing both her words and our receiving of them.

It’s a stripped-back Laurie Anderson show. The credits say it all: music, text and visual design Laurie Anderson; lighting design Brian Scott. That’s it – and it’s everything your heart could desire. As we enter the auditorium we see the vast stage lit by a projection of light on the whole-wall screen at the back of the stage. A beam of light is focused downwards on the lectern/music stand stage-left. There’s an armchair stage-right, and a row of small, twinkling lights marking the front edge of the stage.

The artist enters and immediately picks up her electric violin and launches into an intense opening number, fiery and passionate, layers of sound building through live multi-track sampling and modifying. At the end of the opening number, an electronic pulse remains as she then starts speaking – beautiful, poetic words that ricochet from her mother’s hallucinations pre-death (seeing animals on the ceiling) to Aristophanes’ The Birds, and the story of the lark who buries her father in her head – which is how memory came into the world.

Memory and imagination, archetype and myth: the stories tumble over each other. There are, roughly speaking, two performance modes. By the music stand, the delivery is poetic, lyrical and interweaved with music. The trademark vocoder-type voice distortion (which turns her voice into a deep masculine growl) is often employed – adding an extra surreal layer to the words. In one riff, she starts in with the fact that 99.9% of species that have ever lived are extinct, and takes this into an extensive list of what’s gone. Civets. Lizards. Sloths. Dinosaurs.

Sitting in the armchair, she’s in a more confessional storyteller mode – often telling stories about story-making. For example, we have a witty and entertaining spiel on the making of her opera, Moby-Dick. Anyone who knows and loves the book would, I am sure, have been as delighted as I was to hear her riff on Herman Melville’s imagined conversations with his editor – apparently Captain Ahab wasn’t in the first draft, and the book was even more ‘man goes fishing’ anoraky than it is in its final version. Talking of adaptations: there’s also a marvellous story of what Thomas Pynchon said when Laurie asked permission to turn Gravity’s Rainbow into a piece of music theatre. You can do it, he said, if you score it for solo banjo. ‘There are many ways to say no…’ she muses.

As she moves from one side of the stage to the other, sitting or standing, lighting states change. At one moment, she’s silhouetted against an Aurora Borealis pale green. At another, the stage is washed in deep violet light, with one deep magenta beam of light focused on her.

Back to the other side, and the violin sings out again. Next, a story of a prince’s funeral in Ubud. An enormous pyre is built, but then the body is dropped to the ground – apparently, the thud to the floor releases the soul, which flies away like a bird before the body is burnt. We move from birds to rabbits: a stuffed rabbit taken on a plane; and a Playboy bunny girl who berates Anderson and her demonstrating feminist friends with the suggestion that instead of objecting to women earning a good living, they turn their attention to the garment district where women work for 10 cents an hour.

And still the animals come: tigers, hamsters, horses, snakes, racoons, cows, donkeys. And dogs. Dogs are important to Laurie. When she speaks of her beloved Lulabelle she lights up with delight. Lulabelle sewn into her belly so she can birth her like a baby. Lulabelle poking her tongue up people’s noses. Lulabelle out for a walk, and seeing the vultures hovering above, realising that the danger can also come from above. The look on Lulabelle’s face, says Laurie, she saw again on people’s faces the day after 9/11. The awareness that we too can be prey – and that the hunters can come from the air.

It’s a sobering moment – but counter-balancing it is the story of Music for Dogs, which is just what it says on the can, a concert for dogs, held at Sydney Opera House. The piece was co-curated with Lou Reed. The couple’s shared love of dogs, and this marvellous shared project, conjures Lou’s ghost. It seems that a decision has been made not to bring a note of sentimentality into the show, and to leave certain things unsaid, so he’s not discussed. Cue a video of the dogs. It’s a poignant moment – although funny too. ‘Let’s hear the small dogs’ she says, yapping loudly. ‘And the middle-size dogs’ – woof woof. ‘And now the big dogs’ – a great big hefty, cathartic barking erupts.

Beautiful and barking mad – it’s a perfectly-formed, tender and heartwarming Laurie Anderson show, and receives a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation from this last-night Brighton Festival audience.