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

Fly Me To The Moon: Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014

Norwich ahoy! Tagged as ‘one of the UK’s big four’ festivals, Norfolk & Norwich (NNF) is also one the country’s oldest, if not the oldest, arts festival – it can trace its roots back to 1772, don’t you know! This year’s programme at NNF is a little depleted, compared to some recent years, it must be said – but nevertheless offered an interesting and engaging mix of local, national and international work.

The big international theatre draw of the 2014 programme was Dmitry Krymov’s Opus 7, also presented in three other UK venues/festivals (and reviewed by Total Theatre at the Brighton Festival). Obviously, it makes sense that work of this scale from countries far afield (Russia, in this case) travels to a number of venues. But it would have been nice to see some N&N ‘exclusives’ on the international theatre front, as has been the case in previous years. National touring talent on show included David Leddy’s Long Live the Little Knife, previously seen by Total Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe 2013 and Brighton Festival 2014. The programme also included the world premiere of Pioneer by Curious Directive, a Norwich-based company with a national profile. But that was it for theatre – there seemed to be an emphasis on music in this year’s festival. A mere three theatre shows programmed seems rather slight, unless we count the street arts programme and the late-night [Live] Art Club – more on both of those later.

Local but on a grand scale was the site-responsive Souvenir by The House Project, a music piece which sounded delightful, featuring a quartet of composers (including Orlando Gough, who is well-versed in quirky crossover music/contemporary performance /audience interaction projects), the Bold as Brass ensemble, a choir, and numerous singers and performers animating hidden corners of Holkham Hall and its grounds. Word is out that this one-night-only extravaganza (and NNF exclusive) was an immense success.

The other big NNF exclusive that I did manage to see was the UK debut of S, the new show by Australian circus superstars Circa. Norfolk & Norwich Festival have a great reputation for promoting and celebrating the best in international circus – last year they presented the only UK appearance of the latest show by Montreal’s 7 Doigts de la Main with Séquence 8, and not one but two shows by Circa, the Spiegeltent special Beyond, and the captivating and beautiful How Like An Angel, seen in the equally captivating and beautiful Norwich Cathedral – this a site-responsive classical music/circus collaboration which was the brainchild of former N&N director Jonathan Holloway. S is a very different kettle of fish to either of the aforementioned Circa shows – although with some inevitable overlap in the ‘tricks’ and motifs used. Yes, there were clear glass bowls of water involved! (For those readers not familiar with Circa’s work, they have developed a trademark object manipulation scene using clear glass bowls of water balanced on various body parts that seems to find its way into every show in some permutation. But that’s OK with me – visual artists repeat motifs from exhibition to exhibition, so I think it is fine if performing artists do too.)

What makes S different to anything else I’ve seen by Circa is the tenderness. The first 45 minutes of the show involves no circus equipment, and is a beautifully soft, sinuous, seductive, sensuous (you get the idea) meditation on the individual / group relationship and on the nature of ‘support’, which sits (stands, climbs, falls) very comfortably between dance and circus. In what can perhaps be described as a marriage made in heaven of acrobalance and classic contact improvisation or ‘release’ techniques, bodies move and sway in standing groups; are swung and caught with breathtaking ease; climb into three-man (or woman) towers, then topple; test the ability to ‘take weight’ to its limits – a woman in a full backbend ‘crab’ position bases a man standing on her stomach. Sometimes things are gentle and flowing; sometimes there’s a more staccato or chaotic energy. The soundtrack is sublime: mixing works by Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen and the Kronos Quartet with live amplified breath, silence (yes!), and the sounds of ringing phones or chiming bells. I think I heard a didgeridoo as well at one point. After 45 minutes, it’s a rather different show as the equipment comes into play: hoop, often just one, used with wonderful precision; a very able straps act with a lovely upward climb; silks – a tempestuous routine set on three pairs of black hanging cloths, the black-on-black aesthetic throwing the hanging bodies into the light; and the aforementioned glass bowls. Costumes are deceptively simple: leotards, leggings, body-suits, fitted trousers, of different designs but all in the same soft body-hugging black material. Lighting states remind me of previous Circa show Wunderkammer: a dark stage with atmospheric spots focused on the lone body or group, or dramatically lit by back-wall Perspex blocks of colour (electric blue, red, green), or highlighted by rows of duel-coloured overhead LEDS – violet and orange, say – clear-cut, geometric, stylishly in service to the performance. Although the visual aesthetic of the piece recalls Wunderkammer (which wowed crowds and won awards at Edinburgh Fringe 2013), this is a very different show. Gone is the cynical ‘circus soft porn’ sexiness, and in its place a beautiful reflection on, and demonstration of, the human state – sometimes alone, sometimes together, always in relation to ‘the other’. The sinuous S is a far finer show than the crash-bang-wallop audience-pleaser that is Wunderkammer, in this reviewer’s opinion, and its UK debut deservedly garners a standing ovation from the circus-savvy Norwich Theatre Royal audience.

Elsewhere, a new initiative for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2014 was the late-night [Live] Art Club, presented by Norwich Arts Centre in collaboration with East by South East – a showcase led by the Basement, Brighton. So even when I escape Brighton for a weekend, Brighton finds a way to follow me…

The Norwich Arts Centre is a delightful venue, set in an old church on the edge of the city centre. Artists presented over the festival include Total Theatre favourites Rachel Mars, Chris Dobrowolski, 30 Bird, Ross Sutherland, Kindle Theatre, and Sylvia Rimat (with a linked appearance in a pop-up café somewhere in Norwich by Hunt & Darton). A magnificent line-up! On the evening I was there, I had the pleasure of seeing Stacy Makishi, performing her new solo show The Falsettos. Sitting somewhere between stand-up and performance art, this is an entertaining and engaging show born of autobiographical material – American born in Hawaii, menopausal, re-evaluating her relationship with her ageing mother – which is weaved expertly into musings on murder real and fictional: a family killing in Hawaii; the artist’s obsession with Tony Soprano. At one point, she voices the taboo thought that killing off her elderly mother might be kinder than letter her slip into further dementia and decay. Then, there’s the dazzling joy of hearing Barbra Streisand sing ‘On a Clear Day’. Life goes on! Stacy is a very amenable performer – she starts off in an armchair onstage, greeting the audience as they come in, and moves with ease from gentle banter into a more poetic and abstracted use of text and physical action, interweaved by snatches of film clips, news bulletins, and excerpts from TV drama The Sopranos. It’s just not been the same since the ducks left… The subject matter of the show is ageing, decay and death – actual death and the death of fertility that comes with menopause. This could be depressing but it’s not: ultimately, this is a life-affirming show – life has its challenges, we all die, but for now, here we all are, sharing something together: ‘hope comes in many forms’.

A word here also for the artists (whose names I missed) who post-Makishi were animating the corridors and bar of this lovely building with gentle interventions that included rolling on bubblewrap, and tying objects to balloons – I had to hurry away so didn’t have time to engage with what they were doing with full attention, but I enjoyed what I saw and appreciated the whole-building-animation that seemed to be the order of the day at Norwich Arts Centre – a venue I intend to return to another time.

Finally, no mention of Norfolk & Norwich Festival would be complete without a reference to Chapelfield Gardens, host to the Adnams Spiegeltent and The Garden Party. The Spiegeltent programme for 2014 was, as always, an eclectic mix of ‘tent’ favourites: vintage dancing delights with Ragroof Tea Dances (declaration of vested interest: these are my reason for being here in beautiful Norwich), buffoonery from Red Bastard, a greatest-hits show for Bourgeois and Maurice’s 7^th Birthday Party, spoof Kunst Rock from Die Roten Punkte, and sultry torch singing from the fabulous Camille O’Sullivan, who I think of as the ultimate and archetypal Spiegeltent performer. On the night I’m there (post- tea dance), it’s the turn of Orkestra del Sol, presenting their fabulous mix of Ska, Balkan and Klezmer merriment – how lovely to be invited to dance a polka on a Sunday night!

Out in the garden, which was luckily graced with a weekend of early summer sunshine, Wet Picnic presented their latest street theatre show The Lift, which looked to have a similar aesthetic and tone to their highly successful first show The Dinner Table. I missed the show, being in tea dance mode at the very time Wet Picnic took to the gardens, but I heard the company rehearsing backstage saw the marvellously designed lift go trotting by like a kind of Art Deco sedan chair on its way to its spot! I like the concept – the audience experiencing fragments of life through encounters in the lift – but can’t comment on how successful it was. One of the problems with performing in street festivals is that you think you are going to catch lots of work by other people, but are inevitably performing yourself, or doing a get-in or get-out, at the very time the thing you really want to see is on…

Ramshakilicious’ Grime I did see as it was on in the evening. It is an update of the Punch and Judy story (with a touch of Sweeney Todd), an ‘ordinary everyday tale of a dysfunctional family’ set in a dodgy burger bar. It’s a step up in scale for the company, whose previous work I’ve enjoyed greatly. Grime features a fabulous set: a kind of open-fronted steampunk doll’s house, with higgledy-piggledy rooms, wobbly walkways, and shaky staircases built above and to the side of the chrome-fronted burger bar. The show goes up as the sun goes down, and the house is lit up with fairy lights, like some sort of terrible take on the witch’s cottage in the woods in Hansel and Gretel. Live music and clowning combine to tell the terrible tale of ‘meat, meat, meat’ – a tale which on the opening night of the show was a little too long and drawn out: an hour and 20 minutes is 30 minutes longer than any street show needs to be, and although some of the over-length was due to technical problems, it also needs a great deal of dramaturgical chopping to really cut the mustard. Always a dilemma – street theatre has to be rehearsed in public, and shows tend to come into their own in their second year. In their previous work, Ramshakilicious have had a lovely direct engagement with their audience – in Grime they feel distant and cut-off from their audience for most of the show, so apart from problems with the length and structure of the piece, work needs to be done on how to translate their skills into larger-scale work. They are working under the direction of veteran street theatre performer Flick Ferdinando, so I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.

The Astronaut’s Caravan, on the other hand, is a small but perfectly formed piece (created by the resourceful fairground engineer Tim Hunkin and legendary sculptor/automata maker Andy Plant) that falls into the kind of alternative sideshow/booth territory occupied so well by companies like Whalley Range All Stars. A caravan is suspended on an axis, spinning round 360º like an odd-bod fairground ride – which is almost what it is. Audience groups of around seven or eight people enter the caravan, and are seated in a row on a bench with a roller-coaster style safety bar in front of them. The caravan is kitted out in vintage 70s style – duck-egg blue cupboards, Formica, orange plastic cups, gingham curtains. Our friendly astronaut-pilot – who has the air of a Norfolk Broads boatman – gives the all-clear to his companion outside, through a mouthpiece that looks like a sink plunger connected to a hosepipe. Then off we sail to see the Milky Way – or at least, to see the tree-tops of Chapelfield Gardens. Around and round we spin, giddy as goats. Or do we? It’s the old ‘is our train moving or is the one on the adjacent platform moving?’ conundrum – very clever, a perfect piece of fun for all ages that for me was the highlight of The Garden Party 2014. Well, that and our Dirty Dancing themed tea dance anyway!

Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014 ran 9–25 May.

Dorothy Max Prior attended the festival 17–18 May 2014.

Mirror, Mirror on the World: A Bouffon Seduction in Catalonia

It is Maundy Thursday, the eve of the holiest day of the year in the Christian calendar (Good Friday). Here in the ancient Roman town of Vic in Catalonia, a procession is taking place. Processions of penitents are the norm across Spain in Holy Week. Wearing face-concealing black or purple pointy hats, dressed as centurions, bearing crosses or flaming torches, waving flags, carrying massive floats adorned with statues of the Madonna, flowers, and candles, they parade through the streets for hours with a steady step-brush of their sandaled feet.

But this procession is a little different. From across the massive sand-strewn expanse of the square comes a dragoon of bouffons, bearing a great blank flag. One of them does indeed have a black pointy hat, but he also has bare legs, big boots and a number of dismembered cuddly toys poking out from under his fur coat. Another has a lizard’s tail and a jester’s hat. There’s egg-box armour, demented beehive hairdos, furry boots, big bottoms, swollen breasts, puffed-out chests. Step-brush, step-brush, step-brush. What do they want with the people of Vic? They are here to make a proclamation! It starts as a re-iteration of key articles from the Declaration of Human Rights in a medley of languages, the buffoons enacting scenes of mock torture much enjoyed by the younger members of the audience. La vida! La libertad! La seguretat! Ha ha ha! It ends with the Oda a la Merda (Ode to Shit) – a satirical Catalan poem on the human condition: ‘Salut, oh merda! Materia que agermana les persones malaltes o be sanes, el ric i el pobre, el savi i l’ignorant.’ (All hail the shit! The stuff that unites the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant.’) Shit the great equalizer: even the queen needs to take a shit – and here she comes, resplendent in pink chiffon, armed with her trusty toilet roll. The proclamation over, the buffoons roll up their flag and head off to who-knows-where…

But where did they come from? Bouffons, I have learnt, are born fully-formed. They appear from cracks in the ground, from the backs of broken TV monitors, from the debris of a tsunami or a nuclear disaster. They are not human – in fact, they don’t actually exist at all, they are a product of the audience’s subconscious. The bouffon has no opinions – he or she just knows. The bouffon holds a mirror up to the audience, reflecting their deepest darkest fears. Indeed, the bouffon holds a mirror up to the whole world. This, she says, is what you look like. Aren’t you funny! A bouffon works in the comic register, but is not a clown. We laugh at – or with – the clown’s human folly. The bouffon laughs at us.

The word ‘bouffon’ has come to us as a theatrical term through the work of Jacques Lecoq. The derivation of the word (and indeed of the English word buffoon) is a Latin verb: buffare, to puff, to fill the cheeks with air. Giovanni Fusetti, in an essay called The Ecstasy of Mocking elucidates on the nature of the bouffon: ‘A bouffon exists to mock, to represent elements of his or her society in an amplified, distorted, exaggerated way, therefore provoking laughter or outrage. Their purpose is to have fun mocking humans and therefore they use everything they find.’ However, it is important to note that the bouffon’s satire ‘never touches individual or private themes’. Politics, power, money, finances, morality, war, the army, science, education – these are all fair game. So it is the institutions and cultural mores of humanity that are the targets of the scorn rather than individuals.

The bouffon might exist in his or her own universe, holding our world in the palm of their hand, but behind every bouffon is an actor, and ‘the actor is always in charge’ as Marian Masoliver and Maria Codinachs say repeatedly throughout the week-long Bouffon Workshop which they are co-teaching at The Actors Space (just 20 minutes drive away from Vic, up into the Catalonian hills) in the week before Easter. This becomes almost a mantra throughout the duration of the workshop. For just five days – days which each feel like a lifetime, such a rich amount of experiences are contained in each – this group of fourteen actors have been learning the true meaning of that mantra for the art of the bouffon: how to take on the mantel of the bouffon, to don a whole-body-mask that allows you to say and do the things that your bouffon would say or do, then once the work is done, to lay that mask aside and become yourself again. Sometimes the subjects we are dealing with are difficult – violence, abuse, suicide, torture – but we are reminded again and again that this is theatre, this is play, this is not the present-moment reality for us. We can and must learn to put some space between ourselves and our material, however harrowing that material might be. This is an important concept, reiterated many times over by the team of Lecoq-inspired teachers at The Actors Space. Speaking to Maria and Marian over a lunch break, both teachers relay the belief that ‘the actor needs to be comfortable’ by which they mean comfortable physically and mentally. There needs to be space and distance, Marian says, to ‘play’ the character, not be the character. To play the suffering, not be the suffering. It needs to be a pleasure. But also a pleasure for the audience, Maria says, ‘not a masturbation’ with the actor too focused on his or her own pleasure to worry about anyone else! Indeed, the real ‘actors’ space’, says Marian, is inside the audience’s mind and heart.

The Actors Space is run by Marian Masoliver and Simon Edwards. Both are graduates of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, but have many other strings to their respective bows – Marian as a performer with legendary Catalan company La Fura del Baus and with Kneehigh; Simon as a renowned teacher and director, travelling the world to work as a coach for comic actors working on stage or screen, directing, or delivering lectures. The Actors Space has, over the years, become a renowned international centre of theatre and film, providing high quality training for actors, directors, writers, teachers and students of dramatic art. It is housed in a beautiful old farmhouse nestling in the gorgeous Catalan hills, yet only an hour or so from Barcelona. Most of the courses at The Actors Space are taught by Marian and Simon – occasionally (as in this case) inviting in a guest teacher. Maria Codinachs is a friend and colleague from the Lecoq days and beyond. Since graduating from Ecole Jacques Lecoq in 1988, she has performed and taught throughout Europe (with an increasing emphasis on the teaching, which she feels is her calling in life, dedicating herself to ‘opening the creativity of others.’) She now mostly works in her native Catalonia, teaching a range of physical theatre skills – including neutral mask, Commedia, and bouffon – mostly at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. ‘This is my holiday’ she says with a twinkle about teaching in Easter Week at The Actors Space!

From the very first session of the very first day, it is clear that both Maria and Marian are skilled teachers with a wealth of wonderful material to share. Each day is split into four sessions, three taught and one the ‘auto-cours’ in which work is prepared in small groups to show to the others on the following day. Some of the work is general Lecoq-inspired exercises – pushing and pulling the space with body parts, evoking the journey of the child, bringing the essence of an object (a corkscrew, say) into the physical body – and some are more specific to the study of bouffon. Cruelty for example – in day one it is straight in at the deep end with an exercise in lopping off heads and legs of imaginary enemies. Students are also, right from the first day, given tasks to work on in small groups, for presentation the next day. I’m here not just as a rapporteur but as a participant, and in my first ‘auto-cours’ I am paired with two others to create a science-gone-wrong scene about a botched experiment in robotics. We are urged in these first forays into devising bouffon to allow the politics of the playground into the game.

By day two, we’ve moved into visualising and making our bouffon characters – drawing our bouffon, adding key words to other people’s drawings, bringing the drawing and the words into physical action, and finally making our first tentative attempts to create our bouffon character using foam to exaggerate body parts, and finding costume items that we can adapt. For our second auto-cours, we are placed in a different ‘family group’ and sent out to create a short site-responsive piece based on fairy tales, set in the beautiful grounds of the house. We have by now amassed a long list of concepts and ideas that we are working with. ‘Cruelty’ has been joined by: rhythm, the energy of the chorus, stylised movement, impulse, working in gangs. Later in the week we embrace ‘power’ and ‘seduction’.

As the week progresses, we spend a fair amount of each day in our ever-evolving bouffon costumes. As we learn more about our bouffon, things are added or subtracted or modified. My one starts as a kind of twisted version of a floozy clown character I’ve developed in other times and places, but she soon shifts to something rather different; a kind of monsterish over-sexualised child-star. In my notebook, I’ve written of her birth: ‘…a Venus born not from the waves but from the back of airwaves, a creature that crawls out of a cracked TV screen. A cross between Miley Cyrus and Shirley Temple…’

Maria and Marian take turns leading sessions, but sometimes teach side-by-side, working with a complicity which they both call ‘rare and special’. We work on choral sound-making, ensemble physical actions, and eventually with given texts. Nothing is sacred: Nelson Mandela’s speeches, Harold Pinter’s address to the Nobel committee, the Declaration of Human Rights. All are plundered, mocked, deconstructed.

We are once again split into new ‘family groups’, and on day four present pieces based on a mix of the Declaration of Human Rights, a set of Nursery Rhymes, and the Catalan Oda a la Merda. These groups and their chosen texts get taken forward into the final day’s work. Following numerous reworkings and some much-appreciated direction from Maria and Marian, the day ends with the early evening presentations in the town square of Vic…

Having spent a week living and working so intensely with a group of fellow performers, it is naturally hard to say goodbye. Easing the pain a little is the knowledge that the Actors Space prides itself on being a holding space for the many members of the international theatre, film and performance community who have passed through its doors – there’s a ‘members’ section of their website for the posting of bibliographies and further notes, and the teachers are always willing to answer burning questions that come up after the workshop has finished. Maria and Marian’s Bouffon Workshop Easter 2014 was, surprisingly, the first-ever bouffon workshop at the Actors Space – but all agreed that it was a great success, so it will hopefully be repeated. In the meantime, there is their usual strong summer programme of clown, acting for stage or screen, and directing workshops on offer (see below).

A final note, as we leave the beautiful hills of Catalonia: Marian and Maria both strongly endorse Lecoq’s view that his teachings are not a ‘method’. ‘Keep the research going’ they say, ‘make it your own’. As I move off from this idyllic retreat back into my regular world, I feel that all that I’ve learnt is travelling with me – and that my bouffon is in there somewhere, waiting to burst out whenever she might be needed…

The Actors Space Bouffon Workshop took place 12–18 April 2014, led by Maria Codinachs and Marian Masoliver.

Summer School Workshops 2014 at The Actors Space:

The Creative Actor: 16–28 July 2014

Screen Acting: 3–11 August 2014

The Art of Comedy: 17–29 August 2014

Directing Performance: 6–12 August 2014

Free accommodation for students and people on a low income.

For more information please contact: info@actors-space.org

Maria Codinachs teaches at Institut del Teatre in Barcelona: www.institutdelteatre.cat

Photos by Pep Aligué

Circus Feria Musica: Sinué

Green, ochre and violet washes of light and blurry images of leaves and branches projected onto the back wall. Shadows of crouched figures poised high and low in a metal ‘tree’. A forest of ropes slung every which way across each other, with one straight-standing pole at the back. A hurdy-gurdy man with an arsenal of musical trinkets downstage right, and upstage centre a man with a big gong…

Sinué starts with echoes of Scarabeus’ Arboreal – a circus piece inspired by the Calvino story A Baron in the Trees, about a boy who refuses to come down, living in the tree-tops as a life-long protest (a popular story for circus artists, also featured in Iron Oxide’s Snails and Ketchup). Programme notes tell me that in the case of Sinué, by Belgian company Circus Feria Musica, the starting point is not Calvino but a children’s author called Anne Ducamp and her story Petit Jules, which the company describe as ‘grounded in the tension between the powerful desire to make progress – to grow up – and the fear that holds this back.’ A kind of riposte to Peter Pan, perhaps? Feel the fear and do it anyway!

Jules is represented onstage by five acrobats (four male, one female) – this dramaturgical decision gleaned from the programme notes rather than being transparent onstage: I had no idea this was what I was watching. That aside, the five Jules made a pretty good job of representing the grow up/grow down dichotomy of childhood. The ‘innocence’ of early childhood is represented by much joyful swinging through bars, climbing and sliding up and down the pole, and leaping from rope to rope with the agility and skill you’d expect from a top-notch international circus company. Particularly attention-grabbing is the female performer Natalia Fandino, known to UK audiences for her beautiful aerial work in NoFit State Circus’ award-winning Tabu. Here, she climbs and tumbles and swings along merrily with the boys, then in a scene that I take to represent adolescent excitement and insecurity, the onset of ‘experience’, she balances on and around a chair suspended from the tree cum tower structure, murmuring in Spanish. The only phrase I manage to catch properly (we assume that the words are there mostly for their sonic feel rather than semantic value) loosely translates as ‘this will be the last time…’ The ropes unravel, there’s some rather nice corde lisse work from another performer who has taken the spotlight in the story of the growing child, and eventually our five representations of Jules are all earth-bound. A lone figure contorts and curves his body along the ground; a chorus of bodies join him. With the knowledge that we are watching five representations of one person, the baton passed from performer to performer, it is clearer (with hindsight) to see and appreciate the power of the hero/chorus work of the piece.

The childhood pastoral idyll in the trees having ended, the onstage action becomes darker, louder and more frenetic. The percussionist moves into overdrive; the projected images become faster moving, less organic – lines, masts, elongated triangles – with an electric edge to the sound and the physical action. There’s some high-velocity juggling – very skilled and enjoyable to watch, but it is always hard to find ways for juggling to fit a narrative, even a very loose one as here: it is what it is. A corkscrew appears – there’s no other way to describe it or explain what it might represent – it’s a great big screw-end-of-a-corkscrew to be rolled and climbed in and around. It adds little to the piece other than novelty value.

More successful is a scene with an extremely bendy plank crossing over the metal tree-tower, a man poised perilously on the end in an eternal caught-before-jumping moment. Ah, life on the edge! Ultimately, the tree-tower is set free from its vertical position and turned into a kind of swinging boat/cradle/raft – lots of wild rocking and dropping and rescuing images that do aptly conjure up thoughts of the precarious balance between moving forward and holding back.

The skilled team of five international circus performers and two musicians end to rapturous applause from an enthusiastic Brighton Festival audience. Sinué is a big production, in many senses of that word, and in a lot of ways they’ve pulled it off. The central idea of an exploration of resistance to and embracing of the leaving behind of childhood is a lovely theme for a circus piece, offering multiple opportunities for the play between ground and air – Mauro Paccagnella’s choreography is energetic and engaging, with many welcome touches of whimsical humour. And it is always a pleasure to have live music with circus, especially if this involves a hurdy-gurdy-playing multi-instrumentalist.

There is always a dilemma reviewing a circus show with a narrative that doesn’t quite come off. Although the core notion of childhood development and embracing the adventures that life offered is there to see, finer details of the dramaturgical intention fall short, and it is hard to see what the company are actually trying to say about it all without resorting to the programme for elucidation (not that a discussion of the‘ sinuosities’ of vegetation helped). Also confusing is the programme claim that there are five representations of Jules (this from notes written by the company), whereas other sources talk of the four Jules. Does this then cast the female performer as the traditional female ‘other’? An unresolved mystery.

I left feeling happy to have been well entertained by a company of excellent circus performers in an interesting visual and aural environment – although not really challenged or shaken in any way theatrically. Perhaps that’s good enough!

Casus: Jerk

Crash! A body lands from a height – it’s a wake-up start to the show. The body belongs to a young woman who seems a little bit dazed but OK, shakes her head a few times, tumbles with ease across the small stage. Then – jerk! Some kind of synaptic snap occurs, and she’s thrown into confusion. Where is she? She remembers crossing the road, her mobile vibrating, it’s her brother and she doesn’t want to talk to him, she finds it hard to talk to him, she’s bought some socks for her dad because all the ones he has have holes in them, people say he drinks too much, she can see this guy Gill who she likes. Her first thought is: someone has screwed up; her second thought is, oh it’s me that’s screwed up; her third thought is, I don’t want Gill to see this…

Jerk, presented by Australian circus company Casus, is a solo show performed by the extraordinary, awe-inspiring, ridiculously talented Emma Serjeant and expertly directed by British physical theatre luminary John Britton. Although in its early days as a show, it is already an outstanding piece of circus-theatre.

Creating good circus-theatre is an enormous challenge. How to weave narrative and circus skills together in a believable way? In particular, how to integrate circus equipment into that narrative? Jerk is a text-book example of how to get it right.

First, keep the narrative simple, poetic, a snapshot of one moment in time that explodes outwards into a world of possibilities – a short story rather than a novel. The story is not obscure – it becomes obvious pretty early on that our heroine has been the victim of a road accident – but where is she now? In recovery? In a coma? Facing the moment of death? It’s unclear – by which I mean unclear in a good way: there’s room here for the audience to be part of the creative process, to work at interpreting the story.

Rule two: use the intrinsic qualities of the circus equipment to aid the telling of the story. Aerial equipment offers the play on fear of falling and crashing, so fall and crash; hand-balancing equipment is wobbly, so wobble and twitch; tiny hoops can contain and trap the body, so are an excellent metaphor for a body trapped in a nightmare physical experience.

Next, find ways to use skills that you have in an innovative way at the service of the story. Emma Serjeant’s huge arsenal of circus skills includes a command of the speciality nail-up-the-nose trick – here re-invented with other objects in a flashback party scene of drug-taking and puking that simultaneously evokes a suggestion of hospital breathing tubes and feeders forced into a struggling body. Clever, so clever!

Last but not least, remember that the audience is part of the theatrical equation. Emma, in character as Grace – the smart and pretty girl who is a successful photographer and whose idea of rebellion is leaving the dishes overnight – draws us into her story through direct address from the stage, and later leaving the stage to take Polaroid photos that capture the moment, reinforcing the core ‘snapshot moment in time’ motif running through the show.

Text is used beautifully, sparingly in the show – a mix of recorded and live spoken word. A concealed radio mic picks up words, breath, the sound of contact with equipment, this all weaving in and around an evocative soundtrack that is always in service to the physical action. Lighting design uses straightforward archetypal colour-association to add to the storytelling (and there really is nothing wrong with being obvious in these matters) – blue is cold confusion, red is a dreamworld of past memories.

It is really hard to fault this show – it feels raw and fresh, and its brand-newness is visible, but that is fine by me. It will no doubt grow and change through performance, but I hope it doesn’t change too much. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It runs for just under an hour and every moment feels vital, alive. As the show ends, I walk out into the Spiegelgarden, feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights, dazzled by this extraordinary experience.

Casus’s previous show Knee Deep was shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and currently (May 2014) is also presented at the Spiegeltent as part of the Brighton Fringe. Jerk is a radical departure for the company, a brave experiment that has paid off, and proof that circus and theatre can, in the right hands, combine to become a powerful force.

Ultima Vez: Talk to the Demon

Demon, daemon, fiend. Christianity traditionally places the demon, a spiritual entity that can be conjured or controlled, in binary opposition to the good and the godly. Many ancient mythologies see gods and demons as one and the same. In Bali, a black-and-white chequered flag is at every household or temple door, reminding the guest that good and evil co-exist and need to be balanced. According to Wim Vandekeybus, a demon could manifest as a wizard, a healer, nothingness, the Id, a clown. In Talk to the Demon, he and his company Ultima Vez investigate the relationship between the human and the demon that constantly walks with or within him or her. This is played out onstage, controversially, by two small children, one representing ‘innocence’ and one ‘experience’, forming the two halves of one character –a kind of budding everyman/everywoman whose thoughts, desires, dreams and fears are enacted onstage. Mostly, the younger boy-child orchestrates the game-playing, and the girl-child witnesses, comments and occasionally joins in. Trick or treat?

At times, it’s like a staging of Lord of the Flies, the adults playing children who are fighting to the death over a piece of chocolate or a tangerine. These sections are Bouffon-like in their use of the classic outsider-insider ensemble games most often associated with Jacques Lecoq. People are bullied, hung by their heels, locked in boxes. A mocking list, announced with childlike-glee, details things we could conjure up for ourselves – ‘a big ball to live on… a place you can send your children to so you can get rid of them all day… a bomb that could obliterate a whole city!’ The ‘innocent’ small child orders all the grown-ups to become cows (echoes of the ancient association of oxen with daemons in many religions and mythologies), then they are mocked for being cows: ‘Look at yourselves – you are dead. No thoughts, no insults, no music’. This last a refrain that is repeated often throughout the show. The child later demands that they all hang themselves – which they do.

In this onstage dreamworld, death is omnipresent, but the dead don’t lie down. A bullied man seemingly beaten to death dances up, grinning – victim becomes bully becomes victim becomes bully in a terrible, eternal game of soldiers. At some points, it is like a particularly grotesque computer game being played live. ‘Am I going to die?’ asks the child, and the adults bluster distressed answers: ‘We are all going to die!’ ‘When are you going to die?’ comes the retort. There’s some sort of resolution when the (older) child decides that when she dies she wants to come back as a clown. So of course she does.

The question of child abuse looms large – Wim Vandekeybus shies away from depicting sexual abuse, but the physical and emotional abuse of children is hinted at constantly and occasionally played out graphically (albeit with the darkest of humour). I’m on the edge of discomfort and protectiveness in some scenes – and I suspect that it is this aspect of the show that prompts the many audience walk-outs witnessed on its opening night at the Brighton Festival. I’m reminded of the furore around Romeo Castellucci’s Purgatorio when this was presented in the UK – although I feel Vandekeybus succeeds where Castellucci failed in exploring abuse in a palatable way onstage. Just about.

Vandekeybus defends adamantly his choice of using child actors, and it can be argued that the onstage horrors are very obviously game-playing, and that the content of his violent theatrical fairytale is no worse than many stories by the Brothers Grimm that we regularly tell to very young children. The witches, hairy beasts, and torturers of our classic fairy tales are seen by many modern interpreters as the manifestations of aspects of the self. Theatrical devices traditionally used to depict horror or to make it clear that this is ‘not real’– such as slapstick, shadow work, stylised movement theatre, and carnivalesque grotesquery – are employed in great measure in Talk to the Demon.

Sound plays a crucial role in this production, but there is no composed soundtrack – a radical departure for a renowned choreographer who made his name over the past quarter of a century with his integration of contemporary music and experimental dance. There is, though, a great soundscape, created live by contact mics on equipment such as a metal ‘wall’, creating a harrowing booms as stones are thrown at it; or by the live playing and mixing by the small child of a number of mic’d-up percussion instruments and objects such a tinkling music-box, which are set on a console stage-left.

There is also a great deal of spoken text, much of which is used in the subversive way that companies such as Station House Opera and Forced Entertainment use words, meanings twisted, played with or re-evaluated. (Indeed, Forced Entertainment actor Jerry Killick is to be found here in the cast of Talk to the Demon, which features an interesting mix of actors and dancers.) There are orders and provocative questions (‘Do you love me?’), parodies of parent-child or teacher-child dialogues, lists, taunts, monologue (including a very long rumination on the nature of war by ‘an old general’), and direct address to the audience – which often ‘fails’ in the environment of the Dome, as it has a large stage looking out into a large auditorium – with spotlights shining into the performers’ eyes, they doubtless could hardly see the audience. Perhaps the questions were rhetorical, and no answer expected?

There is dance – visceral, engaging, featuring bodies of many shapes and sizes – but it is just one of many elements in this production, and often feels secondary to the rest of the physical, visual and aural action. Ultima Vez might be a dance company, but Vandekeybus, who has previously branched out into film directing, is bored with being typecast as the granddaddy of postmodern ‘Eurocrash’ dance and has thus decided to make a theatre piece. As Vandekeybus is choreographer, director and scenographer of the piece, which was co-devised with the company, the guiding eye of a dramaturg might have been helpful. The piece is too long, and has a number of odd dips and rises in pace and structure.

‘We force you to make choices; but in fact you quickly come to feel that you are being influenced on all sides and that a simple choice doesn’t exist’ says Vandekeybus in an interview with Charlotte de Somviele reprinted in the programme for the show. In the reviewing of Talk to the Demon, I have tried not to be influenced on all sides by the audience walk-outs and the scathing comments about the production on social media – to try to stay true to what I really think and feel. I realise that I have no idea what I ‘think’, but that I know that I feel energised, stimulated, disturbed, irritated, and entertained by Talk to the Demon, and that’s a pretty good result from a night at the theatre. Vandekeybus has been lauded and vilified in equal measure over the past 25 years – and no doubt will continue to shake things up for as long as he continues to make work, in whatever medium he chooses to make it.