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

Compagnie Philippe Genty: Forget Me Not

Dead or alive? Alive alive-oh!

Compagnie Philippe Genty’s work has always had animation – the giving of life – at its heart. Not only in the sense that animation, in all its many and various theatrical meanings, is the form developed in the art, but also that the work has the investigation of animation, and a philosophical interest in the meaning of what it is to be, or to make something be, ‘alive’ on stage, as its on-going obsession. Never more so than in Forget Me Not (Ne M’Oublie Pas), which has toured the world to great critical and public acclaim since its creation in 1992.

Genty is oft described as a puppet-master or illusionist – he calls himself ‘a catcher of dreams’ and he is keen to point out that his intention is to present and explore inner landscapes, not to interpret dreams. The great dreamscape that is Forget Me Not begins with a lone figure on stage – a female monkey, dressed in purple silk, singing an aria. She seems to be a Prospero-like character, conjuring up all else that appears over the next couple of hours.

And what dreams these are! In one of visual theatre’s most iconic of scenes, an ensemble of a dozen bodies turns out to be half-human, half-mannequin. It doesn’t take too long before we work out that this is what we are seeing, but the moment of realisation is beautiful. From there on in, we are often caught out as the inanimate figure suddenly moves, or the ‘real’ person is flung in a heap on the floor. Genty’s work has been much admired and copied, and it features images that are now a mainstay of physical theatre: the flocking and de-flocking ensemble of bowler-hatted men and women dressed in long white gowns; the mannequin games, featuring humans playing the limp puppet and people dancing with inanimate others; the chairs that are stacked, thrown or used for children’s party games. These are now familiar tropes, but never done better than by Compagnie Philippe Genty.

The show is a wondrous montage of moving pictures, a scenography of the interplay between space, object, light and human body. Each new scene brings fresh visual delights, scale and form played with expertly: tiny shadow figures climb mountains in the distance, limp lengths of cloth leap and soar in the air, a pair of angel wings that almost span the wide stage rise into life. Every image of director Genty’s vision is embodied by the skilful choreography of his partner in life and work, Mary Underwood. It is good to see her take a bow at the end alongside the puppet-master extraordinaire, as although the company bears his name, its success is no doubt due to their longterm artistic partnership. Composer Rene Aubry and sound designer Antony Aubert also need a namecheck: the soundscape is a marvellous collage of composed and curated sound, ranging from opera to jazz via ambient and gentle electronics. In one scene, the sound of a bell tolling is so low as to be almost subliminal – a lovely touch.

In this multi-faceted visual and physical narrative, themes of evolution are touched upon. Where we are placed in our world, how we got here, and where we are going seem to be questions offered. I’m reminded of Darwin’s quote (echoed by William Blake) that ‘man may be an ape, but his brain is on the side of the angels’.

Monkeys trumping humans is a recurring motif: in one of the very few lines of text spoken, a girl murmurs: ‘The monkey ate my hand. The monkey ate my sorrows…’ Other mythologies are present: the primeval story of Adam and Eve and the never-ending battle of the sexes is played upon throughout, men (real life ones as well as mannequins) often appearing as helpless puppets, to be played with and tossed aside. In one scene, men appear as snowballs with heads, bouncing eagerly around the women.

The version of the show presented at London International Mime Festival 2014 is a reworking, created in collaboration with a team of young Norwegian dancers and clowns. The snowy landscapes of Norway, travelling on skis, and indeed snowballs (as above) all feature heavily. Many of these newly devised scenes in the show have a lightweight whimsical quality, which contrasts rather oddly with the darkly surreal humour of the original material. To be honest, it isn’t a winning combination for me – I end up wishing they’d just created a new show from scratch rather than reinterpret a classic – but this was Genty and Underwood’s decision, and they have been fully complicit in and at the heart of this recreation so we have to accept that this is their desire as artists.

We cannot turn the clocks back, and perhaps giving new life to old work is a noble artistic pursuit. It is impossible to see any show by Compagnie Philippe Genty and not come out staggered and delighted by the skill and beauty of the work. Such beautiful images so wonderfully realised. But for me this version of this show lacked a really sound dramaturgy – even dreamscapes need inner logic.

Jakop Ahlbom & Alamo Race Track: Lebensraum

Home sweet home! The stage is set as a studio apartment – or perhaps as an old-fashioned theatre set. A table and chairs, a wooden chest cum sofa, a pull-down bed, a bookcase, a toilet, two windows, a door. Two identically dressed men (black trousers and waistcoats, white shirts, white faces, slicked back black hair) pop out of the bed fully dressed, galvanised by the sound of an alarm clock, tripping and charging across the space. Breakfast time! A series of pulleys strung above and around the table provide the opportunity for plenty of clever play: passing the salt becomes a whole theatre of engineering (with a nod in the direction of Akhe company). The flock wallpaper bursts into life as a pair of guitarists ‘emerge’ from the wall space between the windows. They seem to act as echoes of our two heroes. (Or perhaps we should say ‘the voices of’’?) A mannequin’s leg is discovered in the wooden chest, a plan is hatched, the two inventors pop on their white lab coats – and not long afterwards the men (and their musical alter egos) are joined by a walking, talking, living doll, brought into being to serve their every (domestic) need.

What ensues is an odd and interesting mix of acrobatics, slapstick, farce, illusion, and live music – with the animated set acting as far more than a frame, often a central element of the action. The mock ‘real’ becomes super-surreal. What starts as a whacky gadget-loaded boys-own environment (Caractacas Potts meets Heath Robinson) becomes less and less of a real space and more and more of a fantasy construction, driven by dream logic. The bookcase turns into a fridge, which later spouts a great froth of foam. Pictures on the wall spin. Stepladders teeter. Walls and doors revolve. People dive through windows and disappear through other people’s laps. The bed becomes a wardrobe, the wardrobe a piano. Songs are sung from all sorts of odd places – the top of the wardrobe, the very edges of the room. And meanwhile the robot girl mops and mops and mops…

Lebensraum is inspired by, and loosely based on, Buster Keaton’s short film The Scarecrow. The show’s creator, Jakop Ahlbom, takes the film’s starting point – two men occupying a shared space full of gadgets and their rivalry over the search for a wife – and gives it an interesting modern twist in the interpretation of ‘wife’ as ‘domestic servant’. Of course, this being the twenty-first century, the robot girl rebels (or perhaps it’s just her wiring going AWOL), the men get more than they bargained for and inevitably get their come-uppance. Chaos descends, with that wonderful bad-dream feeling that if only we could wake up, it’d all be alright. But it’s not all over yet – within the dreamworld is another one, a land of Arcadian pleasures. The victor’s spoils – or an afterlife for the defeated? There is an odd sub-text in the piece of the Nazi concept of ‘lebensraum’ – beyond the literal meaning ‘living space’, a conquering of other (inferior) people’s space in the pursuit of the Aryan dream. I have no idea if this is intentional – but it is interesting that a Swedish/Dutch company have chosen this German word with loaded associations as the title of their show.

Lebensraum is a fascinating piece of work. In contrast to most shows that use live music, there’s a very brave decision taken to place the musicians (members of Indie band Alamo Race Track) completely within the fantasy world created, totally upfront and demanding as much attention from the spectator as any other element of the show. This isn’t unique (think, for example, of the work of Heiner Goebbels, or of Clod Ensemble) but it is rare, as in theatre, music is usually used at the service of the performance rather than as an equal partner. Although it is a completely different beast, there are echoes of Shockheaded Peter in the use of a band (Tiger Lillies in that case) as the vocal storytellers through song. In Lebensraum, this sometimes works and sometimes it doesn’t. I love the image of the two guitarists standing stock still on either side of the stage, or singing from the top of the wardrobe. At some other points, the fact that they are not actors on stage with very competent physical theatre performers feels a little uncomfortable. Occasionally, the music and stage action seem at odds, competing for our attention.

The three physical performers are all extraordinary in their acrobatic skills – with a special mention to robot-girl Silke Hundertmark, resplendent in a lace dress and yellow leggings, who does everything the boys do and then some. There have been many a time that we’ve seen dolls cleverly depicted on stage, but my goodness this woman is extraordinary, maintaining the made-of-wood illusion for more than an hour whilst tumbling and turning every which way: over bodies, tables, chairs; in and out of windows, walls and doors.

Lebensraum is a not-quite-perfect show, as somehow the whole feels a little less than the sum of its extraordinary parts – but it’s a very good show with some groundbreaking elements.

Compagnie Non Nova: Vortex

‘Beneath how many layers do we hide our true selves?’ asks Phia Ménard of Company Non Nova. The question posed is explored not through words but through physical action, in one of the most intense, focused, and visceral solo performances you are likely to witness at this year’s London International Mime Festival (or indeed anywhere else).

Created and performed by Ménard, with dramaturgy by Jean-Luc Beaujault, Vortex is the dark companion piece to Compagnie Non Nova’s Total Theatre Award-winning L’Apres-midi d’un Foehn, which wowed Edinburgh Fringe audiences in August 2013. Together, these works are called The Wind Plays, although L’Apres Midi will be known forever more as ‘the plastic bag show’ as it was fondly dubbed in Edinburgh. Both shows feature the same staging: audience seated almost in the round, a dark-floored circular performance space ringed by a hefty number of heavy-duty industrial fans. In fact, both shows have a similar start: a lone performer slowly and meticulously creating a puppet character from a small pink plastic bag and a roll of Sellotape, the little person (and its companions, which are tucked away in the performer’s jacket pockets) animated in a delightful dance by the currents from the fans.

In Vortex, this start has a more ominous feel as the puppet-master is an enormous stuffed figure with every inch of flesh masked by bulky clothes, dark glasses, white gloves – Michelin Man meets Invisible Man. From there on in, the works diverge drastically. L’Apres Midi keeps the nature of animation – life, breath, movement – as its subject matter, with two possible outcomes for the little plastic bag people, depending on which version of the show you see. Vortex takes us on an ever deeper and more disturbing investigation of personal identity and the winds of change that toss us hither and thither through the world. If L’Apres Midi moves from gentle breeze to storm, Vortex takes us far further, into a world of tornados, mistrals, hurricanes and gyres – the human figure in the midst of all this wild, wild wind caught up in a tempestuous succession of metamorphoses.

Phia Ménard enacts a shamanic journey, peeling off onion layer after layer of costume/identity in the search for what is ‘real’. The metaphors jostle for attention in our mind’s eye: here, we see a snake shedding its skin, there a chrysalis with the butterfly within pushing to get out. There are very many breathtaking moments of transformation. A black plastic skin shed from one incarnation of the body on stage is animated by the wind from the fans, to rise as the now shiny white plastic body’s dark shadow. The human figure and its black bin-bag doppelgänger are pitted against each other in a terrible battle, an exploration of the archetypal terror of the evil twin that is reminiscent of the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. At another point, yards and yards of plastic entrails are pulled from the ever-thinning body, to be caught up by the wind into a torque of whirling and writhing high above. Later, a pregnant figure gives birth to the clearest and purest of cellophanes, animated not only by the wind, but by the intense red light beaming down from above, the transparent material shimmering with the blood-red intensity of a thousand rubies.

The piece is complete in itself, needing no further word of explanation to be a beautiful and wondrous exploration of the search for identity and the nature of change and renewal. Knowing a little about the personal history of its creator adds an additional layer of interest and understanding: Phia Ménard was formerly Philippe Ménard a transgender artist and juggler whose previous work has similarly investigated his/her life, personal identity, and the experience of living in transition – caught between states of being.

Compagnie Non Nova offers us a fantastic example of the marrying of scenography and physical performance in both works shown at LIMF 2014 – the space and everything in it manipulated skilfully by light, sound, movement and object animation. Having now seen both shows, I see L’Apres Midi and Vortex as twin works offering a different perspective on the nature of life and death, the animate and the inanimate. By repeating the beginning of L’Apres Midi in Vortex, that connection is firmly made, although this repetition is perhaps unnecessary – if you’ve seen both pieces, you make the connection anyway, and for audience members who haven’t, the beginning of Vortex is perhaps a little puzzling.

That small criticism aside, this is a tremendous piece of work – a visual theatre bursting at the seams with images that delight and haunt in equal measure. Vortex gives no answers, just more questions – the questions that we grapple with (physically, mentally, spiritually) from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Who are we? Why are we here? Where does the internal ‘me’ end and the outside world begin and end? How much power does the individual have to change, and how much is determined by external forces? A whirlwind of ideas, a wonderful show. Tout bouge, tout bouge…

Tomorrow Never Dies

Dorothy Max Prior reflects on the recent works of Forced Entertainment

The Basement arts centre in Brighton on a school night. A young and eager audience, and a stage set simply – just a square of wooden decking and a festoon of lights. Enter two performers, one male and one female, playing themselves (or versions of).

‘In the future…’ says one, and the game begins. A game in which all sorts of possible futures – utopian, dystopian, chilling, amusing, depressing, or just plain daft – are mooted. All of our sci-fi dreams, fantasies and fears are voiced, confronted, laid bare.

In the future, all the world’s problems will be solved. In the future, there will be no men, or women, just rocks. In the future, everyone will live underground. Or under glass domes. Or in space. In the future children will run the world. Or robots. Or cannibals. In the future the world will be one big idyllic garden filled with tame animals controlled by computers. Or a constant war zone. Or peopled by clones. In the future, perhaps everyone will disappear, until there are just two people left, standing together, side by side, one man and one woman. Adam and Eve will inherit the earth, and perhaps start the whole darn thing off all over again…

It’s a beautiful thing, this hour of riffing and reflecting. It has a gorgeous rhythm and pace. The pure power of words; a hundred and one ideas portrayed with poetic precision.

Ah yes, words. They’ve always been important to Forced Entertainment. Words and a lot more besides. All of their work, of whatever scale, has elements in common: ‘Lists and games. Gibberish and silence. Dressing up and stripping down. Confession and lies. Jokes and death.’ Their body of work, although constantly returning to familiar themes and tropes, embraces very many ways, and can be loosely divided into two camps: the great big brash ensemble pieces; and the quieter, more reflective duets. The two most recent works by the company, The Coming Storm (2012) and Tomorrow’s Parties (2013), neatly illustrate the case.

The Coming Storm falls into the big and bold ensemble work category. The key question being investigated in this piece is: What is it that makes a good story? Narratives are set up one after the other by the cast of six, and then disrupted or appropriated by the others. The spoken texts – half-told stories, lists, musings – are only part of the narrative. As is often the case with Forced Entertainment’s ensemble shows, objects tell their own stories: wigs, chairs, sheets, party dresses, a big bunch of twigs, and a rattling old piano tugged hither and thither all play their part in this one. It is said that there are only seven stories in the whole world, and if that’s true, they are all told here – chopped into pieces and thrown into one big stew. Familiar Forced Entertainment tropes emerge: the play between life and death, humour and horror, truth and fiction. It’s a good show, but for me not a great show. Beccy Smith captured the problem in her review of the show on this website: ‘So it’s clever, provocative, sure. Peppered too with easy comedy and pleasant to spend time inside. But it feels straightforward to identify what they are doing, what hypothesis they are testing. I feel I have encountered this question before in their work (most clearly in 2004’s Bloody Mess) and so the experience of the show for me was not so much of treading new ground but rather of revisiting a familiar intellectual landscape, one littered with powerful memories of past incursions to which this exploration couldn’t live up.’

Had Forced Entertainment reached a point where they had said everything they had to say, and were doomed (with supreme irony) just to repeat themselves? It was thus with some trepidation that I went along to see Tomorrow’s Parties. I wasn’t disappointed – finding the show to be one of their best, using familiar devices in a deceptively simple structure, but worked into a beautifully crafted piece of theatre.

Although from the outside it seems that Forced Entertainment have decided to alternate the creation of larger-scale and smaller-scale works, that is not necessarily what’s happening. Spectacular (2008), for example, was originally intended to be a larger ensemble work, but ended up as a piece for two actors ‘by accident’ (as Tim Etchells put it in a 2009 interview with Total Theatre). The company rarely start with a script (Exquisite Pain based on a script by Sophie Calle, was an exception), instead most often starting with improvisations ‘inside a framework of rules’, later annotating and transcribing from rehearsal videos, refining, reworking, and finally scripting. So yes – this is tightly scripted work. Improvisation plays its part in the development, but once developed – that’s it. I find it odd when people in post-show discussions ask if the Forced Entertainment actors were improvising. Far from it, the work is immaculately crafted, finely honed – and as anyone who has seen any of their shows more than once would testify, varies no more or no less from night to night than any other piece of scripted and rehearsed theatre. It was an honour and a revelation for me to see Bloody Mess (which many consider to be their greatest show) three times. Yes, there was a slightly different energy to each show – that’s the point of live theatre – but essentially, what happened on stage was the same each time, even though it seemed at points to be the most chaotic mess imaginably (hence the show’s title). As Tim Etchells put it: ‘Where you see a kind of chaos, or an apparent randomness, in these shows, then it is usually well rehearsed, highly structured.’

2014 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the company. The Forced Entertainment Theatre Co-operative (as it was originally named) was born in 1984 in Sheffield – where the company is still based. This was a conscious choice – to be away from London, in the North where the resistance to Thatcherism was stronger and where there were large warehouse spaces available for low rents. The same six people have stayed in the company for three decades – five actors (Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Richard Lowdon, who is also the company’s resident designer) and director Tim Etchells. In the past thirty years, their work has embraced theatre, durational performance, installation, video and digital media. From the whirling frenzy of costume changing that is 12am: Awake and Looking Down to the pared-back precision of Speak Bitterness (the ultimate ‘personal confession’ show); from the durational quest that is Quizoola to the deconstructed variety show of First Night; the everything including the kitchen sink constructed chaos of The World in Pictures to the seemingly simple storytelling of The Travels.

In the past decade or so, the company’s work has mostly been produced with European partners, be they venue or festival. Tomorrow’s Parties is a co-production supported by a whole raft of arts organisations – from Bergen, Hamburg, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich and (yes) Sheffield. They are also ‘regularly funded’ by Arts Council England.

In recent years, artistic director Tim Etchells has created his own body of solo work, and other members of the ensemble have pursued work with other companies or collaborators. To anyone who views Forced Entertainment as being all about Tim Etchells, I’d counter that companies do not stay together for thirty years if there is no sense of ownership. Forced Entertainment is a collective of six artists, and all six voices are crucial to the work. Despite the possibilities that technologies afford for collaboration by remote – Internet, Skype etc – which Tim Etchells has exploited to the full (for example, in his collaborative ‘auto-teatro’ work with Rotozaza’s Ant Hampton), Forced Entertainment operate, for the most part, in the good old-fashioned devised theatre way. As Etchells put it: ‘ …[through] months together in a shared space. A space where you can work for long hours and share the air – see where the group is, where it’s headed, see what the interests are.’

Forced Entertainment, thirty years from their inception, are now firmly established as part of the British and European theatre establishment. There seemed to be a time when they shied away from ‘theatre’, fitting more comfortably in the ‘live art’ bracket – but the world has moved on, and definitions of theatre have broadened beyond the previous restricted views, with devised work an established part of today’s theatre landscape.

What will the future bring? Maybe everything promised in Tomorrow’s Parties, and more! The company are currently launching their latest work – the biggest ensemble piece yet: The Last Adventures is a collaboration with Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui and claims to be ‘a performance spectacle on an epic scale”. Working with the largest cast the company have used in some time, The Last Adventures ‘has the visual extravagance of a living art installation or a large scale choreography, while its live soundtrack mixes electronics and live instrumentation to create an intoxicating audio experience.’ As the premier was in Gladbeck (Germany), Total Theatre has yet to see it – but no doubt it will be arriving in the UK very soon!

In the meantime, the company are inviting anyone who wants to join the game to tell them about their experience of Forced Entertainment. Texts can be personal, academic, tightly focussed or free-associating. There’s only one rule: each must be exactly 365 words long. At the end of the year they will select 30 texts for a limited edition book – one word for each day of the company’s existence. The word is out…

Footnotes:

Tomorrow’s Parties was seen by Dorothy Max Prior at The Basement, Brighton, 7 November 2013.

The world premiere of The Last Adventures was at Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck, Ruhrtriennale 2012 – 2014 International Festival of the Arts, 5 – 8 September 2013. It featured 17 performers and live music from Tarek Atoui.

For more information on the company and all the shows referenced, see www.forcedentertainment.com

Forced Entertainment 30^th Birthday 365-word posts can be submitted by writing to: 365@forcedentertainment.com or post online, using Twitter hashtag #FE365.

Quotes from Tim Etchells taken from interviews with Dorothy Max Prior and Alexander Roberts for Total Theatre Magazine, published in print editions Vol 20.04 and Vol 22.03. These and other back copies of the print magazine are available to purchase from University of Winchester. Email Christian Francis on info@totaltheatre.org.uk

Enfila’t: Folds

The stage is a playground of visual delights. A backdrop of ruched and rumpled cardboard, a folding screen daubed with Picasso-blue squiggles and splurges, a giant metal cylinder that’s an odd cross between a German Wheel and a double-edged tightwire, and a kind of suspended roundabout that doesn’t look like it could hold the four acrobat-musicians and assorted instruments perched on its circular wooden base – yet does.

And what happens upon it is truly enchanting. A length of Sellotape becomes a twanged bass string, accompanied by a percussive scissor snip, and a paper-and-comb kazoo. Cardboard boxes grow legs, become home to a somersaulting Jack-in-the-Box, or turn into an Aunt Sally fairground stall (cue a delightful interactive game as scrunched-up balls of brown paper sail back and forth between auditorium and stage). A keyboard appears in the backdrop, played by disembodied hands. A banjo player walks a tightwire without missing a note. An accordionist weaves through folds of cardboard that mirror his instrument’s expansion and contraction.

Folds is a balancing act – physical performance with musicianship, the manipulation of fragile materials like paper and paint against the solidity of metal and wood. ‘Modern life thrives on organisation and precision, but in its folds and creases it still surprises’ it says in the programme notes – and our four entertainers use the hour or so that they have with us to charm and surprise with an exploration of materiality that challenges the delineation of circus skills, live music and object manipulation. Although the pre-show publicity places the emphasis on the play within the paper world, the performers’ interactions with the more solid objects – musical instruments, circus apparatus – are just as vital to the content of the piece.

Catalan based Enfila’t, like La Fura del Baus and Els Comediants before them, create a visual theatre rich in skill and playfulness. It is no surprise to learn that the piece was co-created by scenographer Xavier Ella – ‘design’ is not a tack-on element in this show, it is at the heart of the matter. The four performers have amassed a multitude of skills between them: Manolo Alcantara (the company’s creative director) is a renowned contemporary circus and street arts maker and a gifted performer; Xabi Elicagaray is not only a multi-instrumentalist and circus performer but also runs a second illustrator and designer. The hi-energy bundle that is Karl Stets (on loan from Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkor) and Argentinean Claudio Dirigo (aka Claudio Inferno), a beautifully bendy and fluid acrobat, make up the fab foursome. All have a lovely complicity with their fellow performers and with the audience.

It really is a magical show – hard to fault. There are deeper and more thought-provoking circus shows out there, but you’d be hard pushed to find anything as lyrical and endearing, and as visually and musically enchanting, as Folds. The perfect family show for all seasons.