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

Rosana Cade: Walking:Holding

Rosana is wearing a magenta-coloured coat, which matches my magenta-coloured skirt and tights. We laugh about this as we walk along hand-in-hand through the streets of Brighton. She asks me what I think people might suppose our relationship to be. I suggest that because we are wearing the same colour, they might think we’re members of some strange new cult. Or that we’re performance artists. Or that we’re lovers who like to dress in matching clothes. We cross into Kemptown – gay capital of England, so unlikely two women holding hands is going to cause much of a stir there. She takes me into a sex-shop for gay men, and Rosana remarks on this being on a high street, open access to all. I remark that it’s all pretty normal here. We’re standing in front of a shop window looking at our reflections, chatting away nineteen to the dozen, when someone else joins us – and with something of a shock, I’m whisked away by a young man called Felix. I can hardly talk to him at first, I want my new best friend Rosana back, but after a few moments I’ve readjusted. And so it goes.

An hour later, I’m on the beach. I’ve been around gardens, through shopping arcades, and down the pier. I’ve held hands with very many people: men and women of different ethnicities, ages and sexual identities (some of which are stated upfront, some not referred to, or subtly suggested). It’s a bit like speed-dating. I’m asked the same questions many times over, and sometimes I tire of telling my own stories: Yes, I’m from Brighton, although from London originally. Yes, I like it here. No, I don’t find it odd to be holding hands with another woman/a younger man/anybody actually in public. Yes, I often hold hands with people.

Art mirrors life: In Walking:Holding we are constantly thrown back, Groundhog Day-like, to the first ten minutes of a new relationship. With some people, conversation’s a little strained, there’s not a lot of instant chemistry, although everyone is lovely, and I’m more than happy to hold everyone’s hand. With other people, it’s straight in, and you find yourself talking non-stop about all sorts of things – you realise it is working best when you are finding out as much about them as they are about you, or when you are walking along without talking because you don’t actually need to say anything in that moment.

It is an intimate experience – the walking hand-in-hand and the talking. It is hard to be engaged in a one-on-one theatrical encounter of this sort without thinking about dearly departed Adrian Howells, one of the pioneers of this form of performative encounter (and like Rosana Cade, he lived and worked in Glasgow – if I had had more time with her I would have asked if she knew him). His name is in my heart and on my lips throughout this experience. Reaching back in time, I can feel his hand in mine. I feel the print of many other hands on my hands over the years – friends, lovers, children, parents, dance partners, art partners.

There are reminders of artistic precedents, of work by other artists that offers an intimate encounter through performative walks: Zecora Ura’s Drift and BR_116 projects; Wrights & Sites, Katie Etheridge and Gustavo Ciriaco; Cambar Coletivo’s Urban Labyrinth. It’s a growing area of work. What all these artists have in common is an interest in walking without the theatrical artifice of fictional characters or scenarios – an encounter with the real world in tandem with one or more real people. Rosana Cade’s Walking:Holding holds its own in this venerable list. When I walk with her, the echo of these other footfalls is with me. There are also resonances, in the decision to frame the holding of hands as a potentially subversive act, to the work of choreographers Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane, who held up the simple image of two men (both gay, one white and one black) holding hands as the ultimate political statement. I muse with one new friend on how the same simple, human act – holding hands – can be perceived so differently in different cultures. Holding hands with the ‘wrong’ person could get you shot, stoned, raped, ridiculed, imprisoned.

Before I start out on my walk, I have a conversation with someone about technology-driven art pieces, voicing my frustration at being left to my own devices with an MP3 or GPS navigation system. As I walk, I think: how much nicer it is to have someone to hold hands with as you navigate the urban landscape. And to be passed from hand to hand, like a lovingly held child owned by the whole world. What a pleasure, what a privilege.

Amy and Rosana Cade: Sister

In the words of Irving Berlin: ‘Sisters, sisters – there were never such devoted sisters’. Amy and Rosana Cade are sisters, born exactly 22 months apart in the mid 1980s. One (Amy) is tagged – or perhaps I should say self-identifies – as a sex-industry worker, the other (Rosana) as ‘a lesbian with a shaved head and hairy arm-pits.’ They are both feminists. I am not sure why one woman defines herself by her job, and the other by her sexuality – but that is what we are given as our starting point.

But which is which? We first meet them in their underwear, identical sets of sexy black bits of string just about covering their modesty. They have identical make-up, identical high-heels, and identical silky long-haired auburn wigs. One is onstage pole-dancing; the other is weaving provocatively through an audience sat in a red-light cabaret set-up, finding volunteers (of either/any sex) who’d like a lap dance. Two chairs are placed onstage, two volunteers brought up, and the instruction is given in chorus: hands here, no touching, just leave the stage when the music finishes. Cue bump and grind – a full striptease and then some. They start out identikit, but as the ‘dance’ progresses it’s pretty easy to tell who is who. Amy the seasoned pro has all the right moves; younger sister Rosana is slightly less at ease in her act, but has a mesmerising performance presence. Finally, the wigs and shoes come off, and both stand side-by-side, fully naked and proud of it. It’s a terrific opening.

What follows is an intriguing and well-realised autobiographical exploration of personal and sexual identity. A full arsenal of contemporary performance tactics is used: confessional monologue about choosing to become an escort, or discovering that you don’t really like sex with men; lists (of boyfriends and girlfriends slept with, of blow jobs given, of what can and can’t be chosen in life); physical performance action (simple, strong images of the two women standing, walking, lying naked); letter-readings of defences of lifestyle to a worried mother.

The central pole is used well throughout: both circle it slowly to the strains of that famous Irving Berlin song; at another point Rosana crawls in a circle around it with high-heeled shoes on both feet and her hands as Amy pole-dances in that oddly prim mock-balletic way so beloved of strippers. Projected on the rear wall of the stage are home video clips of the two as toddlers, cute as can be, hugging each other, blowing bubbles, dancing naked to camera without a care in the world – not much has changed there, then!

On the surface, they do indeed reveal everything ‘in an attempt to understand their own and each other’s sexual identities’ – although it is only during the ‘question time’ slot built into the show, which invites audience questions for just the length of one music track, that we get a hint of anything that probes a little deeper than the bare facts about sexual practices and preferences. The show claims to investigate how the ‘world they grew up in together has shaped them into who they are today’ but that seems to be the very thing missing from the piece. What we get are beautiful portraits (in many senses of that word) of Amy and Rosana Cade, but we learn little of what makes them tick on a deeper level, and little of what surrounds them in the wider world outside of their interweaved relationship, other than the most basic facts (there is a mother, there is a younger brother). Maybe it was the simple, stress-free and idyllic childhood gleaned from the video clips – but it feels as if the confessions we are party to are risqué in a kind of ‘naughty’ way, not really risky.

As for the ‘feminism’ claim: I’m very happy to hear young women using the ‘f’ word with pride, but it would have been great to have a little more evaluation of what that might mean for someone selling sex as a lifestyle choice. There is no dialogue, for example, with the notion that it is dead easy to get your kit off when you are a lithe twenty-something woman (much is made of Rosana’s shaved head and a little bit of blonde fluff under the arms, but Amy and Rosana are both very pretty young women by anyone’s definitions), and that this choice is tolerated by our ‘liberal’ culture. It would have been good to have had some acknowledgment that there is more to feminist discourse around the display of the female body (as pole-dancer; as performance artist – and ultimately, are these actually very different?) than whether you shave your legs or not.

What I do like, though, are the scenes of casual nudity – for example, when the two women, naked and under bright stage lights, take apart the pole with allen keys and pack it away whilst chatting about how it detaches and how it fits in the box. I’m reminded of The Two Wrongies and their usurping of the female body on display mode with their naked backstage banter. I enjoy the use of objects and clothing in the piece, the constant on-off play with the wigs and stockings and silk robes (reveal and conceal: now you see me, now you don’t), and the symbolism of the shoes, used in so many different ways. Although on that note, one audience member asks why we see Rosana in heels, but we don’t ever see Amy in Doc Martens…

Reflecting on that last point, I realise that Rosana’s stomp around the pole in DMs has quite a startling effect, not only because it is a strong and forceful visual and aural image, but also because it is just about the only moment that is about Rosana standing up and standing out as herself, not Rosana in response to big sister Amy and her world. I note that the show is called Sister, not Sisters. Although both are on display, and the show is credited to both women, this is ultimately Rosana the lesbian performance artist’s tribute to, and attempt to understand, Amy the pansexual stripper and sex-industry worker.

Feral Theatre: The Invisible Giant

On a darkened stage, we see heaps of discarded junk – black plastic bags stuffed with goodness-knows-what, cracked white plastic chairs, a Brighton & Hove Council recycling box. A constant, amplified drip-drip-drip sounds. We hear muffled sounds of scraping and digging, and four boiler-suited figures enter, wearing miner’s headlamps. They speak in a kind of Riddley Walker-esque new-world old-world English, and as they pick through the rubbish, stories unfold. These four are future archaeologists known as SCUZ (Synthetics Collectors in Underground Zones), working through the pile of plastic bags, unearthing treasures used by humans in some long-lost era – things made of plastic, which the show implies, is no longer in use in this future, possibly post-apocalyptic age – and is therefore an interesting treasure.

Using some text, but mostly through physical movement, visual imagery, soundscape, and puppetry, a story unfolds – two of the four look on as the other two tell the tale of how humans used to live, in their odd world of Polly Pockets, plastic hair grips, and flip-flops (which are actually made of a natural material, rubber – but never mind). Things which are All Cast Away (cue song). It is a little unclear why two of the SCUZ members are seen acting out the tales and two are observing – and often hard to pinpoint where we are supposed to be. Are these two witnesses seeing back into the past? Are they imagining what the uses for these things might have been? (If, so it is hard to understand how they could guess so accurately.) ‘If plastic could talk, what story would it tell?’ is the byline for the show, and perhaps we are witnessing the plastic telling its own tale – but that doesn’t quite make sense of what we are seeing either. It’s a dramaturgical conundrum! This section of the show is overly long and suffering from numerous odd narrative choices. I struggle to work out what a TV-watching scene means, other than a vague ‘everything about our contemporary world and how we are raising our children is wrong’ kind of commentary.

However, there is some lovely performance work in this section, with acrobalance moves merging effortlessly into physical acting, and some great ‘poor theatre’ uses of random objects to tell stories, such as a bridal veil made from bubblewrap, and swing-bin lids as helmets on a bike ride. The use of children’s toys in the show – a xylophone, a little dog on wheels – is a nice touch, a gentle commentary on the Toys R Us throwaway culture handed on to our kids from age 0+. We see a rubbish cart arrive to cart the junk away, and again there’s a nice bit of classic physical theatre here – a chair, a bin lid and four black plastic sacks telling the story perfectly. The next section of the show tells us what happens at the landfill tip over the years, with the emergence of an odd little junk-baby as the new focus of the action…

If this all sounds familiar, yes – it is a very similar premise to Rubbish by lauded puppet-theatre company Theatre-Rites (reviewed for Total Theatre by Darren East). In Rubbish four steampunk-styled ‘excavators’ explore a mountain of black bin bags, from which puppets emerge and objects are animated. It is terrible timing for Feral, at the start of their life with this show, as Theatre-rites years of experience using puppetry to tell a similar story makes for a difficult comparison…

But all is not lost! The second half of Invisible Giant feels far stronger, more original, and more in keeping with Feral’s own style, established in their previous award-winning Brighton Fringe production Triptych. We move away from the cheery children’s entertainment mode of the first half into something far more dreamy and poetic. A great blanket of plastic bags unfolds across the stage, weaving and fluttering and transforming from wave to cloak to dress. A clear sheet of polythene creates sea ripples. A seagull soars and dives. Eventually – and we’ve waited a while but it’s worth it – the Invisible Giant appears, a glorious construction of clattering junk. A sad and sorry Frankenstein’s Monster which the human race has created collectively from our rubbish piles: and like Mary Shelley’s creation, this Monster murders without meaning to, and thus the poor seagull dies. An all-enveloping surf of white plastic rears up; a ‘skyline’ oasis of plastic bottles surrounded by fairy lights emerges. The only thing marring this lovely section of storytelling was the inadequate lighting – the key figure of the story, the Invisible Giant, emerging without any focused light. But this may well be down to the technical restrictions of working with the quick get-ins of a fringe production.

For me, the second half of the show is the show – the first-half potted history of the human race and its follies felt a little too polemical– the image of the sad plastic Giant and the doomed seagull tell their (literally) entangled story very well without any moral to the tale, and without the pre-amble. It was the sea of plastic in the sea, and the relationship between plastic (personified as the Giant) and nature (represented by the seagull) that was the essence of the tale. I also liked the fact that the plastic in the show was attractive, aesthetically pleasing – it was alluring, seductive, a dangerous drug.

There’s a lot of potential here, but the show needs a structural overhaul of the narrative, the voice, and the tone. And a good lighting design! The strong cross-over with Theatre-rites’ Rubbish does need to be addressed: there’s certainly room for more than one show for family audiences about our throw-away culture, but perhaps not for two puppet-theatre shows featuring a team of four excavators foraging through rubbish bags. Ditch the archaeologists! I sympathise with the frustration of finding that someone has come up with the same idea, but Rubbish is in its second touring year.

Invisible Giant is not there yet but it has a solid future, I am sure. Already present in these early days for the show (seen by Total Theatre on only its second public performance) are some lovely ideas, beautiful designs, haunting images, an interesting soundscape, and robust physical performances. The best is yet to come…

Moscow Theatre School of Dramatic Art / Dmitry Krymov Laboratory: Opus No. 7

Visual theatre, you say? Here it is in shed-loads: the awesome Opus 7 – created by Russian designer-director Dmitry Krymov and a team of performer-devisers and co-designers – is truly epic, and takes up every inch of the Brighton Corn Exchange with cardboard, paint, a football game, a giant puppet (she’d be ceiling height in most venues, but has a bit of clearance, just about, here), besuited men hanging from chandeliers, waltzing cut-outs, and a herd of beaten metal pianos racing through the space to the sound of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony.

Two days on and the images are racing through my mind like greyhounds on speed – I shut my eyes and there are those pianos playing bumper cars, there are the beguiling eyelash-fluttering eyes of that enormous Mother Russia tucking a small figure under her skirt, there are the row of clerics and madonnas throwing tubs of black paint in unison, there is the woman’s leg splintering the plywood door, there is the on-screen image of a Stalinist (or is it Nazi?) guard looking with evil intent into a pram, a real 3D pram hurtling into the space a split-second afterwards.

And sounds, sounds are important too. There are Russian words, and there are surtitles, which I ignore mostly – I catch references to Abraham and Isaac; to a destroyed school; to lost children; to religious and political oligarchies; to award ceremonies; to wars. The sound of the words is what I like – poetic texts, incantations, liturgies. And there is song: church madrigals and bracing folk songs from the ensemble, tiny little voices singing hymns, deep bass drones, or a solo contralto voice rising out from a surprisingly slight young woman. There is the ringing of tiny bells, and there is the boom and crash of Shostakovich’s bombastic orchestrations.

In essence, Opus 7 is not one show, it is two hour-long pieces linked thematically – with a half-hour interval in between, which gives the company time to transform the space completely. Part one is called Genealogy. The whole length of the space is used (although there are some problems with sightlines, I feel, sitting at one end of a very long row of chairs). The tubs of black paint thrown early on at the white wall create dripping silhouettes representing fearful and scurrying residents of a Jewish ghetto. Photographic images of real ghetto Jews are projected into the gaps, and a row of black suits hang in other gaps. There is a further layering as performers interact with the 2D images, often creating hybrid 2D/3D pictures. Images of burning fires, heaps of children’s shoes, shredded paper, and that ominous guard rolling the pram. We don’t need words to tell this story – it is sadly the story of the Jewish diaspora throughout Europe in the 20^th century. ‘Shot by both sides’ we could say, musing on Russia’s treatment of its Jewish population (Hebrew banned, schools closed, books burnt, and then worse under Stalin). And then, the enemy without as well as within, as the Nazi regime attacks Russia.

After the interval, Shostakovich takes a different tack, focusing specifically on that composer’s troubled relationship with his motherland. He’s played by a petite young woman, and later by a small puppet engulfed by the enormous bosoms and skirts of the Mother figure – a towering puppet that has the magical ability to shift from grandmotherly piano teacher to terrifying commandant in just the blink of an eye. Part one of Opus No. 7 is disturbing and exhilarating in equal measure, but part two ups the ante considerably – perhaps because the story is so clearly told in sound and vision. At the start, a group of workmen drill and hammer a rickety oversized piano set in the centre of the space. Beneath it are the torn and stained ‘white walls’ from part one. The piano is mounted by a small figure in round glasses, overseen by the enormous Mother – all smiles and nods at this point, but a menacing presence none the less – and Shostakovich is there with us, starting on a career which is always overshadowed by his troubled relationship with Mother Russia.

You don’t have to know that the composer was at various times in his life feted by the Russian state and given prestigious awards, then at other times ostracised and vilified – it’s all here in the image of the enormous badge pinned on that pierces right through his slight body. The infamous debut of the Leningrad symphony, written about a city that Shostakovich apparently claimed ‘Stalin destroyed and Hitler merely finished off’ comes to life here in that extraordinary bumper-car piano sequence, the enormous metal wrecks wheeled at full speed through the length of the space. It is easy to imagine Nazi bombs falling on Russia’s cities, and the desperate and depleted musicians from the orchestra dropping dead from exhaustion and hunger.

Opus No. 7 could be held up as a shining example of how stories can be told in sound, physical action, and visual image. The work of Kantor comes to mind as a comparison – a true marriage of visual and performing arts. This is a monumental piece of theatre – what a joy to see such marvellously visual, physical, visceral storytelling taking centrestage at the opening of the Brighton Festival (and also being presented at other UK festivals throughout the spring and early summer months).

Eric Kaiel: Murikamification

‘No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.’

Three young people negotiate the urban environment. A man in a red hoodie rolls across the ground (‘Like the rolling saint of India!’ says my companion). A woman with strawberry-blonde plaits scales the wall of a building, creating a window-frame with her arms. A different man in a roll-neck, quiet and lithe as a cat, walks across a narrow ledge from one building to the next. Brickwork, guttering, grafitti – all is highlighted, framed, as the three move around, by, through, the spaces in-between. The dancers bodies meet the concrete harshness of pavements, walls, alleyways, and staircases with an astonishing softness and suppleness, alternating between melting into the urban landscape and standing out against it. Often they move calmly, quietly. Sometimes they break into a run.

‘Chance encounters are what keep us going.’

Occasionally they encounter other humans – a man sitting on a bench eating a take-out salad; another just sitting and watching. These people are sat next to, leant upon, danced around.

‘What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.’

Always we feel that our three protagonists are existing in an alternate reality – they connect, but they are on another plane. They have slipped through the cracks into a world where (perhaps) the streets rearrange themselves, cats can talk, and love affairs can be kindled with ghosts.

‘Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.’

Murikamification by Dutch choreographer Eric Kaiel (who makes a Hitchcock-style appearance in his own work as a map-reading tourist) is a promenade piece using dance and parkour that takes us on a journey through the backstreets of the North Laine area of Brighton. It’s a piece that’s been shown in cities across the world, and is justifiably well received wherever it goes. There’s no denying its beauty, its accomplished choreography, and its wonderful interaction with the environment. As for the title and theme: I spent the first part of the show seeking out the Murakami references – I’m a keen fan of the Japanese author. They are not overt, unless I missed something. But I ended up feeling that the spirit of Murakami’s books has been served well. Triangular relationships, brief encounters between strangers filled with poignancy, cities that shape-shift. The magic realism of everyday life, there and visible if we just re-focus our eyes. The feeling that there is something strange just around the corner. The discovery that familiar urban landmarks take on a different light if viewed from another angle. The notion that the streets we walk every day might suddenly twist into new shapes. Was that gap in the wall always there? What’s under that manhole cover? And where does that metal staircase lead to?

‘If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.’

There’s nothing more wondrous than looking at something we think we know well through re-tuned eyes and re-programmed brains. No need to understand. Just be.