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

Shame, Shame, Shame

What do you know about sex? How do you know it? Dorothy Max Prior sees two shows at Sick! festival that are presented as part of the Wellcome Collection Sexology Season – and joins in the ensuing post-show discussions

So You Can Feel: the opening show in Sick! Festival 2015. The house lights are still up. Pieter Ampe walks out onto a bare stage. He’s dressed in regular-guy jeans and a T-shirt, and he has a hipster beard and longish hair pulled back from his face. He stands. He eyes people up. He goes very close to a woman in the front row. He intercepts a latecomer and puts his arm around her, gently. She laughs and we laugh with her, with him. His gestures and actions are all pretty ‘normal’ – by which I mean he doesn’t do anything that you would consider out of the range of regular-guy behaviour – although of course he is onstage, so everything is framed, everything feels important, relevant. He exits, almost, and re-enters the space in a different mode. Now there’s music, and a bar stool. He gets up even closer to the woman in the front row. He takes off his T-shirt and flexes his muscles. He changes costume, many times. He clambers over us. He goes from regular-guy to wacky way-out guy in a wild Afro wig bouncing around with a beach ball, to parody gay-club cruiser bumping and grinding in a shiny black nylon mankini, to see-through fishnet-clad go-go dancer, rotating his hips provocatively and shouldering a leg with an ease that would challenge any good Can Can dancer. Ultimately he’s naked – yet still ’dressed’, in body paint that seems to transform the human flesh into a statue, an object d’art to be gazed at and admired. At what point, if any, his presence seems to be asking, are we looking at adornment and gestures and body movements that are beyond the norm for a male body? Is a hair scrunchie OK? A wig? A catsuit? Can a man circle his hips without being considered ‘womanly’? What in any case do we mean by ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’?

Although this is not a dance piece, Pieter Ampe’s beautifully structured and delivered performance is that of a dancer and choreographer – he has the ease and control of his body that comes from years of physical training. There is also a lovely relationship with music in the piece, which seems to tell a parallel coming-of-age story – from the exuberant boyishness of Whole Lotta Shakin’ through the emotive and embracing Frankie Goes to Hollywood classic The Power of Love to the edgy, ‘been there done that’ tone of Nina Simone’s live Stars/Feelings medley

Pieter Ampe: So You Can Feel

In his play with receiving the gaze and framing himself as a moving sculpture, and in his use of props and costume, he reminds me a lot of legendary female performance artist La Ribot. In the post-show discussion, there is debate about humour – specifically, whether a woman performing the same gestures and movements would raise a laugh (as Ampe did) with a similar bump-and-grind and leg-splaying – and whether we are laughing to cover up discomfort. This last point is put to us by guest speaker Eric Anderson (Professor of Sport, Masculinities and Sexualities at the University of Winchester). This suggestion is refuted strongly by many members of the audience – there are few if any here who would feel discomfort at the sight of a man in a wig and a fishnet catsuit, even one gyrating his hips provocatively. And many of us also feel that many women working within New Dance and Performance Art have successful reclaimed the gestures and actions familiar from the products of the sex industry, and made them their own: from Annie Sprinkle and Coum Transmissions through to The Two Wrongies, Rosana Cade, and GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN. It looks as if an interesting discussion might be brewing on what we call ‘feminine’ dress and why physical actions are viewed as feminine or masculine. There’s a brief discussion of changing mores in Western society (18th century men in powdered wigs and heels are cited, as is the long-haired liberation of men in the 1960s and 70s that preceded the neo-reactionism of the 1980s onwards). I’m all poised to put forward the suggestion that some movements (particularly circular hip- or pelvic-based ones) are deemed ‘feminine’ because of their longterm association with biologically female experiences of fertility and childbirth – so called ‘belly dancing’, forerunner of the stripper’s womanly gyrations, having developed (many sources claim) in the all-female harems, as a means of easing the pains of menstruation and labour. But sadly, the discussion veers away from this interesting subject and into a defence of Professor Anderson’s key beliefs about contemporary male image and behaviour.

Although suggesting earlier that we might feel discomfort with images of the male body that challenge the norm for men, Anderson argues that things are very different nowadays for young heterosexual men – claiming that his extensive research shows that ’straight’ 17-year-olds are happy (for example) to wear pink and to share a bed with a male friend who isn’t a sexual partner. Although no-one is disputing his findings, within the demographic he has chosen to work, this American sociologist’s rather romantic view of British youth is challenged by numerous audience members. Some of us raise the question of rising trends for teenagers within the Islamic community to adopt conservative views about sexuality – with young women veiling themselves in growing numbers, and both sexes citing religious texts that supposedly support the subordination of women and the extermination of gay men. Anderson’s reply to this is astonishing: he says that it is of no interest because Britain is ’93% white’ and that he is not willing to go into Muslim communities, because as a gay man he would be unsafe. When BBC journalist Melita Dennett challenges Anderson’s hunky-dory view of teenage tolerance, citing the use of the word ‘gay’ as an insult, even in the liberal oasis that is Brighton in 2015, she is told that she has ‘an attitude’.

Luckily the chair, performance artist Boogalu Stu (dressed very fetchingly in a peach feather onesie with matching nylon quiff), manages to get the focus back on Pieter Ampe and his work. Much of the purpose of this, his first solo work, was to playfully explore his own liberation (as a self-defined heterosexual man) from restrictions of how the 21st century male body could look and move. Ampe talks of a desire to expose and move away from shame. To shame ‘shame’, you could say. He suggests that of all the things that a human being could be ashamed of, it’s a shame that physicality and sexuality are such a source of shame.

Christopher Green: Prurience

Shame – and the shaming of shame – is also right at the heart of Christopher Green’s latest work, Prurience, which is presented at Sick! as a work-in-progress (although this isn’t made clear in the publicity, it is flagged up in the discussion after the show).

The theatrical conceit is that artist and audience are members of a self-help group for self-confessed porn addicts. The Brighton showing is in Fabrica, an art gallery set in a deconsecrated church, which feels appropriate. As we come in, we are asked to make ourselves a name-tag, and to write down our expectations, hopes or fears for tonight on a slip of paper placed in a bowl. There’s a circle of chairs, and a trestle table at the rear of the space with tea and coffee. Christopher Green introduces himself as ‘Jack’, and gets the ball rolling by inviting members of the group to take and read out some of the Expectations papers. ‘I’ve kicked the coke and the cake – now it’s just the cock’ is one. ‘Great expectations!’ is another. Others are a little more prosaic: ‘I’m keeping an open mind’ or ‘No expectations.’ As the evening progresses, we are drawn into confessional mode by our uber-Californian self-help guru Jack, who insists on tolerance and respect for others with that kind of tense and slightly edgy tone so familiar from counselling and support groups. No-one is forced to participate – it’s fine to just observe and listen. The stories that emerge are harrowing, funny, believable, incredible. A woman who likes watching extreme gay male porn. A 20-year-old man who has seen so much that he now suffers from erectile dysfunction. A middle-aged male therapist who is sick of seeing his pleasure described as a problem. The beauty of the structure of the piece is that, as with porn itself, it is really hard to tell the difference between reality and fabrication. Which stories belong to the teller, and which don’t? Which of us (if any) are plants? Who’s acting and who’s ‘acting as if’. In both porn and self-help groups, role play is important. Some words seem to come from the heart, spontaneously, and some are pre-prepared statements or commitments, read out at Jack’s request. ‘No more wanking in the office disabled toilet trying not to get spunk on my iPhone’ is one. Everything is OK, except when it’s not OK – we’re here to bear witness, not to judge or intervene, and Jack helps us to understand and obey the ground-rules. Thankfully, no one mentions 50 Shades of Grey. There’s poetry, and a group song, and a break for more tea and coffee. And after the break, a build into ever-more intense interaction, with lots of huffing and puffing, until a climax is reached…

Christopher Green: Prurience

When the show ends, the bar opens – and filmmaker Toby Amies chairs a fertile and invigorating discussion. The sexology expert on-hand tonight is Clarissa Smith (Professor of Sexual Cultures, University of Sunderland) – who is thankfully far less volatile than Eric Anderson, calmly presenting a good case for tolerance and acceptance, pouring cold water on the fever about the dangers of pornography. She cautions against the medicalisation of porn consumption – as an example, she seriously doubts the evidence on porn addiction resulting in erectile dysfunction in young males. Christopher Green talks about his desire to create a show that expresses as many different viewpoints as possible, rather than a polemic piece that takes sides. He talks with great concern about the commodification of both porn and the ‘cure’ for porn addiction: we are in a society that sells us the notion of addiction (porn, drugs, fags, food), tells us we have a problem, and sells us the solution. Therapy itself has become codified; has lost its sense of play – hence Green’s creation of prurience.org (with its charismatic founder, DVDs, and branded T-shirts), and the unsettling Jack character, a perfect parody of the sort of groups and group leaders that invade every aspect of our ever-more addicted lives. A few questions Christopher Green thinks we should all ask ourselves: Who are we giving the power to? Where are we getting our facts? Who is driving the moral panic?

Porn, says Professor Clarissa Smith, is neither good nor bad. It just is. Perhaps it goes without saying – but I still feel it needs to said – that there are limits to libertarianism. When talking about porn, we need to be clear that we are indeed discussing pornography – adult erotica, made by and for consenting adults – not images of child abuse. There is a growing awareness of the need to describe these images as what they are, rather than using the term ‘child porn’. Professor Smith is quick to clarify that what we are discussing excludes the viewing of images of child abuse, which is rightly illegal.

Both of these shows are presented at Sick! with the support of The Wellcome Collection, as part of its Sexology Season. Other shows and events in the festival similarly supported include What Tammy Needs To Know About Getting Old And Having Sex, in which Tammy WhyNot (the girl who put the ‘cunt’ into ‘country’) – aka performance artist Lois Weaver of Split Britches – collaborates with older people in Brighton, drawing on their personal stories of over-age sex; Brian Lobel’s Sex, Cancer & Cocktails, an ‘in-home conversation about doing it during treatment’; and Sexual Violence: Male Problem/Male Solution? a debate that asks how masculine identity in the 21st century can continue to allow the horrific level of abuse still perpetrated against women and girls. The opening event of the Brighton leg of the Sick! festival (which also runs in Manchester) was not a show but a debate, called Sexual Transactions, and the programme also includes a film called The Unspeakable Crime: Rape, and a showing of the internationally acclaimed verbatim theatre show about the horrific Delhi bus rape and murder of the girl they called Nirbhaya. It is evident from the high profile within the programme, and sheer amount of events on the subject, that issues around sexuality – male sexuality, in particular, are high on the agenda.

This is an interesting move for Sick! which is now in its third year, and establishing itself as a major fixture on the UK festival calendar. In the first two years, the programme was focused on exploring attitudes towards health, illness, and disability – and in particular, providing a platform for disabled artists making work about their bodies and their selves. In 2015, the interest is broader, becoming a festival ‘that confronts the challenges of life and death’ – challenges that ‘are sometimes rooted in bodies and minds that fail us, sometimes in the complexities of living in an imperfect society… bearing witness to the realities of our lives and shining a light on urgent issues that remain taboo or misunderstood’. A pretty broad sweep – which along the way takes in the brilliant Chop Theatre production How to Disappear Completely, in which lighting designer and filmmaker Itai Erdal delivers a reflection on his mother’s life refracted through the lens of hours of footage he has taken of her (reviewed at the Edinburgh Fringe 2014, where it was shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award); and Sue Mac Laine’s new show Can I Start Again Please? in which her two lives, as theatre-maker and BSL interpreter for other people’s theatre, become one in a piece described as a ‘duet and duel’ in which two performers (the writer herself and Nadia Nadarajah) used signed and spoken language in a ‘linguistic challenge to represent traumatic experience, in particular that of childhood sexual violence’.

In the festival programme notes on Can I Start Again? it is described as a piece that is ‘both personal and political’. There has been much recent debate in the wider world about the need for politics to move away from the personal and back into collective organisation and action – to be less about ‘me’ and more about ‘us’. Yet whilst we still have a world in which a man can be thrown from a tower for no other reason than he is known to be homosexual; or a woman can have acid thrown in her face for having ‘dishnoured’ her family by making her own choice of husband; or a child can be groomed by a gang of men, who are not prosecuted for years because she is deemed at age 13 to be a ‘slut’ and not worth the police or council’s consideration – then the personal and political cannot be separated. Yes, we must act collectively –voting, campaigning, standing up the rights of others, demanding an end to the structures of power (political, financial, religious) that are used as tools of oppression. But the telling of personal stories, and the bearing witness to those stories, is a crucial part of the process of liberation and progression.

Dorothy Max Prior saw the UK premiere of Pieter Ampe/Campo’s So You Can Feel at The Old Market, Hove on 5 March 2015, and Christopher Green’s Prurience at Fabrica, Brighton on 6 March 2015. Both were presented at Sick! Festival with the support of The Wellcome Collection as part of the Sexology Season.

www.sickfestival.com

www.wellcomecollection.org/sexologyseason

Osborne & What: Birdy

Birdy takes no prisoners, right from the opening shots. A low-lit stage. A drone. The sounds of war. Specifically, the sounds of 20^th century-style war – buzzing plane engines, Hurricanes and Spitfires, lobbed grenades – mixing with the universal and eternal sounds of war: the shouts and cries of confused voices, the groans and gasps of wounded bodies. One of these bodies is lowered from on high, a prone, planked figure in camouflage uniform. Uncoupled, he slumps to the ground. But once he flew, and he dreams of flying again, and perhaps one day he will fly once again…

This is how we first meet Birdy. War-wounded, traumatised, he is transferred to a military psychiatric unit, where we see him squatting on his haunches, hands behind him with elbows sticking out to the side, head jutting forward – a bird caught in the headlights, frozen with fear (all power to performer Joe Garcia, who spends a lot of his time onstage in this awkward position – although he does also get to swing out on the bungee, and to climb and coil around ropes).

His childhood friend Al – not even his mother calls him Alfonso, although Dr Weiss, the military doctor, does – is drafted in to help. Wounded himself, we see him mostly with his head and face bandaged, turning him into a slightly spooky masked character. ‘Come on Birdy, cut it out!’ he urges ‘I know you’re not a bird… Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. The war’s over.’

In the effort to bring Birdy back to reality – whatever that might be – Al takes him (and us) on a journey exploring their shared adolescence in Atlantic City, where it is ‘easy to steal a bike’, and where there are trees to climb and tree-houses to build: Al a typical all-American boy, into biking and ball-sports, a hit with the girls; Birdy, by contrast, is an odd-bod loner into swimming (which he calls flying) and birds – the feathered variety. ‘Blue bars, red checks, white kings – no fancy birds, none of that crap’ says Al (Chris Towner-Jones), as he carries a half-dozen or so pretty white birdcages on to the stage, placing them next to the also-white metal hospital cot. (He knows about birds for sure, but for Al, the pigeon lofts and tree houses are childish games, long left behind.) Meanwhile, Birdy is dreaming of an elusive, beautiful canary. Although, ostensibly, the question we are being asked to consider is ‘What can make Birdy better?’ there is, running underneath, a metaphysical investigation into how each human being experiences reality in a different way; how ‘normality’ in a mad world could be a disadvantage rather than an advantage; and how escapism is as sane a choice as any in a world that attempts to suppress the human spirit. From a difficult childhood and adolescence, through to his traumatising war experiences, Birdy has found a way to deal with the madness around him: find comfort in non-human creatures, pursue your dreams, and fly above the madness like a bird.

The dramaturgical structure of the piece is thus set up: we alternate between scenes in the hospital and scenes from the boys’ past – with the added twist of a dreamscape vaudevillian cabaret in which dancing bears juggle what we are told are balls of shit, an androgynous creature twirls on a trapeze, and a beautiful canary-girl twists and tumbles on vibrant yellow silks. In its mix of theatre and vaudevillian forms in the telling of the traumas of war, there are echoes of both Brecht and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop.

The easy directorial decision would have been to keep the circus tricks and turns within the dreamscape scenes – but writers/directors Catrin Osborne and Mitch Mitchelson aim higher, creating an integrated and challenging piece of circus-theatre. The circus is fully worked into the piece, making for a truly total theatre in which spoken text (live and voice-over), physicality, visual imagery, lighting, and original composed music/soundscape are all summoned at the service of the story.

As is the norm in the post-Complicite physical and devised theatre world, all scene changing is done by the performers, in full view of the audience. The hospital bed is trundled on and off by Al and the doctors. The trapezes, silks and corde lisse ropes (which all have a logical place in the piece, being sometimes material representation of the childhood games, at other times belonging to the dream-logic of Birdy’s inner life) are unfurled by performer-rigger Claire Crook, who takes on a host of characters, from Birdy’s grumpy Mrs Mop mother (stealer of the neighbourhood kids’ baseballs), to hospital orderly, to gawky teenage girl. It’s a tough call, integrating rigging into a show with theatrical logic, and some of these characters and transition moments work better than others. The Mrs Mop character is a rather too stereotyped and clownish housewife for my taste – she looks like a young woman impersonating an older woman, and it doesn’t sit easily on her. On the other hand, she’s a brilliant teenage girl, hooping in a day-dreamy deadpan mode to the side of the stage, ignoring the boys on bikes and bungees.

In fact, all of the cast (other than our main two characters, Birdy and Al) multi-task, taking on a number of characters and providing a chorus of soldiers or doctors. Sarah Bebe Holmes is superb – she’s a strong and elegant aerialist and physical actor, moving as easily from silks to Chinese Pole as she moves from being the elusive and beautiful Canary Girl of Birdy’s dreams to the bird-loving Mrs Prevost (his childhood neighbour and ally) chasing the cats away from her precious birdcages – the performer breaking the fourth wall to cast us all as cats that she shoos and scolds. There are other moments when the wall tumbles: Matt Devereaux does a good job doubling as both Dr Weiss and as a circus ringmaster and musician, tootling a swing-dance tune on a clarinet or inviting us into the action. But although this role is set up early in the piece, and returned to later, it would have been good to have it used more often throughout to invite us in – there are long swathes when as audience we move into a more traditional behind-the-wall relationship with the stage action.

An important element of the work is the excellent soundscape – a mix of recordings of original compositions by Pete Helmer and Tina Grace (she of the gorgeous, breathy voice featured on many of Nitin Sawney’s recordings); dashes of live song and music from the cast; and a cleverly montaged mix of spoken word texts, sampled sounds (chirping birds, droning planes, beeping submarines), Eno-esque electronics, screeching strings, and mellow guitars and saxes. Really, a very beautiful piece of audio work. I’m not totally convinced that the musician-technician needs to be placed where he is onstage – I understand the directors’ desire to have nothing hidden, but perhaps the laptop-bound musician could have been placed to the side rather than upstage, where his desk dominates the audience’s eye without really adding anything to the sceneography of the piece.

There are strong performances from all the cast, who rise to the many and various artistic and logistic challenges of so complex a show with great aplomb, ably holding the balance between physical action, music and spoken word. My only gripe is the adopted American accents. Everyone’s take on this is slightly different, and the result is a kind of transatlantic mulch that doesn’t convince, and which seems sometimes to restrain the actors. I haven’t read William Wharton’s Birdy novel, nor seen the acclaimed film adaptation by Alan Parker, but as this isn’t a naturalistic retelling, accents don’t seem strictly necessarily. It seems to be a pretty universal tale that doesn’t need to be sited quite so specifically, but if the creative team do want to retain the references to the original setting, I’m sure we could believe that we are in Atlantic City in Birdy in much the same way that we believe we are in Ancient Rome in Julius Caesar, or Andalusia in Blood Wedding, without the need of accents. Also to note here that despite the complexity of the story, not being familiar with the original text didn’t feel a disadvantage – which is the sign of a good adaptation. It has inspired me to read Wharton’s novel, which was helpfully on sale in the theatre foyer: it was rather touching to see the company selling novels after the show, rather than souvenir T-shirts…

Birds are often employed as subject or theme in circus-theatre for pretty obvious reasons – bird stories being something of a gift to aerialists. This particular little Birdy sets an example of how circus can be employed within theatre as something more than a tired metaphor. The show here at Connaught Theatre in Worthing is the last date in the current tour, but hopefully there is more to come: this is an ambitious piece that deserves to be supported in further development, and to be more widely seen; proof (to those who don’t already know it) that circus can be harnessed to theatre in the telling of complex and disturbing stories.

Photo: Hannah Edy

DV8 Physical Theatre: John

Meet John. John, we learn, had the sort of childhood that shakes your belief in the inherent goodness of human beings, and challenges the myth of the ‘caring society’ in this rich and supposedly civilised country of ours. John’s early life is one of immense poverty, marred by physical, emotional and sexual abuse. A life of slammed doors, dark corners, filthy mattresses, life-choking illnesses, abused women, raped babysitters, battered babies, whipped children. A life blighted by drink and drugs and petty crime. Shoplifting is the least of it, and ‘dysfunctional’ hardly begins to do it justice. At age 10, John is taken into care – he’s quite pleased, really. Adolescence sees John fulfilling his destiny, living in an ever-changing environment in which everything stays the same: another scuzzy hostel, another girlfriend whose problems are as bad or worse than his, another arrest, another hit of heroin or coke or whatever, upper or downer. Life goes on, somehow. Other than for those in John’s life who die and lie undiscovered for weeks, or who drain away slowly with dirty-needles-induced AIDS. And through it all, the inherent dignity and intelligence of our hero somehow shines through: at first, in little glimmers of humour in the midst of the mayhem; later, in the dawning of self-awareness that leads to re-evaluation and redemption.

How do we learn all of this? Through a fantastic combination of fluid physical expression and spoken word, performers twitching and toppling and turning on a revolving stage (designed by Anna Fleischle) sparsely furnished with a bed, a few chairs; the constantly shifting floor, the doors opening and just as quickly shutting, a beautiful metaphor for a life in which nothing is stable, the rug pulled out from under the feet again and again. The team of seven men and two women performers take on a whole host of characters in John’s life, the whole enacted with a relentless pace as we ricochet from home-as-prison to prison-as-home. The choreography is exquisite: this is Lloyd Newson’s DV8 we are talking about – you really wouldn’t expect anything less than an expressive and perfectly executed combination of meticulous gesture, loose-limbed Limon-esque release, and intense but sensitive contact dance: solos, duets, trios. Bodies lean and crumble. Legs buckle. Words are spoken in a ‘non actorly’ stream, often voiced in a strong accent, sometimes mumbled or slurred – at times you have to prick up your ears to hear what’s being said, but I like the way this keeps you on the edge of your seat. The soundscape is mostly made up of actors voicing verbatim texts derived from interviewing John and other men, and also includes (louder) voiceover-ed questions, and snatches of pop tracks from John’s youth: Mama Told Me Not to Come, Whole Lot of Love…

So, where were we? John as a young adult, living out the distresses of his upbringing. It gets worse. John has a kid he never sees, and ends up sleeping rough for five years, and is eventually jailed. He pulls himself together enough to trace the boy, now grown. His son agrees to meet him, but then changes his mind after Googling his dad and deciding he doesn’t like what he’s found. At this point, the show does an odd tilt, tipping us (without any proper explanation) into the world of gay saunas. The focus shifts from John onto myriad tales (from sauna owners and users) that present, in a calm and non-judgemental way, the reasons why gay men use saunas, and reflect on the issues that many gay men consider core to their lives and sexual choices: HIV status, the lure of condom-free sex, the risk of STDs, promiscuity versus monogamy. It is this section that has won DV8’s John its reputation as a ‘sleazy and immoral’ piece of work (at least, that’s how Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail saw it). A ludicrous assertion – these are stories that should be told, and are told with honesty and humour. My gripe is that here is not the place – the sauna section is a whole other potential new DV8 show, and takes us unnecessarily away from the core story of John’s life. Towards the end of the show, we learn that John has, in later years identified as gay, and is finding a new sense of self-worth in his new identity. But unlike the rest of John’s life, this information is told to us, not shown. It comes out of the blue – and we really miss knowing what exactly John’s process of self-discovery and coming out involved. The presented fact – that John is one of the users of the sauna – is not enough to justify the focus on the sauna and its clients in the show. I know I’m not alone in feeling a little bored in the sauna section, just dying to get back to John. When we do return to his story, there is a gorgeous coup-de-theatre when we suddenly, loud and clear, hear a voice-over of what we presume is John himself, stating his resolve to turn around his life: it’s a heartbreaking and life-affirming moment.

In the process of devising the show, writer/director Lloyd Newson interviewed 50 men about the subject of love and sex. John’s story emerged as the one that caught Newson’s attention, and he decided to make this story the focus of the show. But it almost feels as if he then chickened out, feeling that he had to somehow represent something of the lives and stories of the other 49 interviewees – hence the sauna section and the chorus of voices that this embraces. If ever a dramaturg were needed, here is a prime example. Someone really should have said ‘No Lloyd, stick to your guns, stick to John’. It is (I know) difficult when working with true-life stories: you feel that you need to honour your interviewees’ contributions. And perhaps in a community theatre project this is paramount, but in professional theatre, dramaturgical needs override all other considerations. This is John’s story and that should have remained the focus.

That said, this is such a strong piece of theatre, such an amazing core story, that ultimately all is forgiven. It may have its faults, but John’s extraordinary story is told so beautifully and lovingly by DV8 that this trumps all other considerations.

Basil Twist: Dogugaeshi

On the Barbican Pit stage, a screen, and within it another screen, and within it another, and another, and another… and so (almost) to infinity. We start with what appears to be an animated film – flickering images of tiny travelling people crossing a mountain, a boat tossing on the sea. These animations are actually created live, silhouette cut-outs moved manually; unseen operators flickering lights to give the impression of film. Then, a kind of toy theatre (minus the human figures) takes over, screens sliding in and out and flipping up and over as a palace of gold is constructed then destroyed, little gold columns becoming characters as they scuttle around pursued by a white fox who pops up and down cheekily like a Pokemon. It is interesting that almost no human figures feature in the show, yet it feels full of characters. But this is not surprising coming from Basil Twist, whose definition of puppetry goes far beyond the creation or animation of figurines (he has received an odd recent recognition in the UK as the designer of the dancing silks and other puppet-esque effects for Kate Bush).

Dogugaeshi is the name of the show, but also of the tradition it honours and explores. Its history is intrinsically linked to that of Japanese puppetry; the word ‘dogugaeshi’ literally means ‘set change’, and that is the essence of the form – a series of beautifully painted screens sliding open to reveal image after image in rapid succession. It is a practice that has fallen out of favour in recent years, and the story of the form itself informs the content of Basil Twist’s homage. The screens we see here (modelled on original Japanese screens the artist unearthed on a research trip) combine with reminders of the heritage, for example in a section showing film footage of elderly Japanese villagers recounting their memories of seeing Dogugaeshi performed in their childhood.

The piece has a gentle narrative, being a reflection on the passing of time itself – everything dissolves eventually, and there is nothing left but a white light at the end of a tunnel. The piece could best be described as poetic and theme-driven rather than dramatic in the usual sense; yet it is filled with stories, a whole host of small dramas. A sensory delight of moving pictures unfolds as images bow in and bow out – now you see me, now you don’t. Sometimes in 2D, colours and patterns – luscious orchids and frangipani, long-tailed curling dragons, art-deco-ish abstracts, monochrome high-heeled boots – emerging like living wallpaper, or like a big colourful flickerbook; at other times playing with 3D, real and imagined, perspective shifting with the eye, taking in the opening-up depths (some real, some an illusion created by the paintings on the screens, or by the video projection used with them). As the screens slide out and in and up and down (with an earthy, satisfying clunkiness), a landscape builds, dissolves, rebuilds; a place where traditional Japanese woodcuts and drawings, contemporary Manga and Anime, impressions of modern day Japan, and icons of twentieth-century design all contribute. The climax of the show gives us a sequence of no less than 88 painted screens as the destroyed palace re-instates itself, triumphant. A metaphor, yes…

The visual spectacle is augmented by the beautiful live Gidayu music of Yumiko Tanaka, Twist’s collaborator in this project. Together (and in collaboration with a second sound designer, Greg Duffin) they explore the tug between the old and the new. Tanaka straddles the world between traditional form and experimental music practice, her live Shamisen playing and singing blending effortlessly with the recorded soundtrack that uses electronics, sampled sound (snatches of old dance tunes rise and fall), and recordings of treated voice and acoustic instrument. At times it is hard to tell what is being created live and what isn’t – always a good sign. She is seated to the side of the screens and is sometimes visible and sometimes not. Although she often circles off on her revolving turntable when not playing, sometimes she sits quietly with her back to us looking at the screens – a wonderfully rapt and attentive witness to the action.

Also part of the action is a large puppet representation of a beautiful nine-tailed fox (a traditional Japanese puppet character) who is introduced occasionally as another witness to the dogugaeshi world explored. In one lovely moment, our fox friend dances across the front of the stage, and rests his/her head lovingly at Yumiko’s feet, honouring her contribution.

Behind the scenes, a team of three other puppeteers/operators – Kate Brehm, David Ojala, and Jessica Scott – join Basil Twist in what is no doubt a physically and mentally exhausting choreography of sliding and pulling and crouching and stretching, often in silent co-ordination with the person at the other end of the screen. Not to mention lighting and moving the real-live candles used in the show which somehow got pushed through UK theatre health-and-safety rules and regs!

Such a treat to see this show finally make it to the UK as part of London International Mime Festival 2015. A beautiful work, full of rich images and dreamy sounds that resound long after the very last veil is pulled across the dogugaeshi screen.

Knights of the Invisible: Black Regent

Iona Kewney is awesome – there’s no denying it. Her physical, visceral, shamanic performance is an extraordinary blend of contemporary circus and radical dance – it is no surprise to learn that she trained at the legendary School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, before moving on to Cirkuspiloterna in Sweden. She is a contortionist, and then some – her ludicrously supple and bendy body twisting into unbelievable shapes. In one early section of the show, she remains on her hands for so long – her gangly legs waving in the air and weaving around her torso into ever more convoluted shapes – that we start to believe that the human body is supposed to be this way up. At other points in the show she seems to become a bouncing frog, or a foal finding its feet, or a caterpillar morphing into a cocoon; and then again, she’s human – a human in a state of trance, or perhaps in the throes of a fit: shaking, twitching, her breath coming hard and fast, her head tossed from side-to-side, her face obscured by her hair. Not since I first saw Marcella Soltan of Russia’s BlackSkyWhite have I felt so impressed by the twisted shapes a human body can make. And she has muscles in places I didn’t even know you could have muscles…

This talented performer also has a background in visual art (a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone art school in her native Scotland, and a veteran of the National Review of Live Art), which shows in the scenography of the piece, and the animation of the physical environment through both light and physical action. Objects take on totemic, fetishist values – a stack of cardboard boxes dived through, worn, kicked over. Dangling lace curtains that become a kind of bridal veil cum burqa, both concealing and revealing. A hanging rope is toyed with as much as it is used in any sort of regular circus manner: an ominous suggestion of execution or suicide.

In Black Regent, Kewney is partnered with musician Joseph Quimby (an ongoing artistic relationship established in 2010). Their physical differences are played upon throughout the piece, which starts magnificently with the big, burly, bare-chested Quimby bursting through a door at the back of the stage carrying the limp, lanky Kewney in his arms, echoes of King Kong and every other Beauty and the Beast story you’ve ever heard or seen. Later, he rocks her tenderly on a kind of hammock-swing placed below his music station, and in one rare moment of role-reversal, she tows him across the stage on a little wheeled trolley – his big form resplendent in a kitsch pink cloak (eat your heart out, Rick Wakeman). I would have welcomed a bit more subversion of the big-guy tiny-girl dynamic – she’s twitching at his feet or leaning on his chest too many times for my liking.

As for the music: mostly it is a little too Midi-synth-dominated for me – I was somehow expecting something rather more radical than the laptop-musician symphonic compositions that abound – but this a personal taste thing: he is no doubt a talented composer, and there are some sections that I love, usually the parts where synth melody is less important and a low drone dominates, or a stomach-churning drum and bass beat pulses. What I especially like is Quimby’s voice – a high, tender, almost falsetto voice that is a surprise coming from such a big man. A voice that, heavy on the echo and reverb, reminds me strongly of Icelandic group Sigur Ros.

So much to admire; so many amazing images; such a relentless physical performance that leaves you shell-shocked. Yet there are reservations. It’s an interesting combination of artists, and there is complicity and exchange onstage, but I don’t feel that this is an absolutely symbiotic musician-and-dancer relationship of the strength, say, of Spitfire Company’s One Step Before the Fall, seen at London International Mime Festival 2014. Despite the ongoing collaboration of the two performers, Black Regent feels somehow unfinished, unresolved, a work-in-progress. But maybe that’s what it is – an ongoing collaboration, an ongoing process. And perhaps that is more than enough. They are certainly a compelling couple, and this a show filled with images that will resonate for a long time to come.