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

Circus – a Tale of Two Cities

This May saw two major UK festivals – Brighton Festival and the Norfolk & Norwich Festival (NNF) – presenting a hefty amount of circus work from across the world. Unsurprisingly, Quebec and Australia were heavily represented…

The Quebec crew first: it’s hard for outsiders (and even insiders) to understand how a circus company could come all the way from Montreal to perform in England in May and not be booked by both Brighton and NNF – but what do I know? I realise that festival directors and their producers have all sorts of complex factors informing their decision-making. Be that as it may, Brighton opted for presenting Cirque Éloize’s Cirkopolis, whilst NNF went for the new Les 7 Doigts de la Main show, Séquence 8.

Cirque Éloize have always been one of my favourite circus companies, and Cirkopolis is a dazzling delight, although there are criticisms to be made. Inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, it takes ideas and themes from these two films – mechanisation, consumerism, state control versus individual freedom, the rebel outsider, the role of fantasy in an over-ordered world – to create a series of thematically linked vignettes. A gorgeous design (by Robert Massicotte, who like many Éloize associates has previously worked for Cirque du Soleil) uses projection as a scenic backdrop: a wonderful Modernist cityscape cum factory is created, cleverly stealing visual motifs from both films – perhaps a little more weighted towards Metropolis’ towering skyscrapers, art-deco angles, Escher-like staircases, turning cogs, and giant ticking clocks.

There’s much to admire. One of the highlights of the show is a cyr wheel act by Angelica Bongiovanni who spins around the stage inside her wheel (a kind of overgrown hoop) with dizzying precision. She’s a vision of other-world loveliness, the machine-cog projections behind her shifting to a fantasy circus-sideshow painted-with-light backdrop of red and gilt drapes as she takes to the wheel. Another favourite scene is a witty and whimsical dance of unrequited love played out with a suit of clothes on a coat rail – gorgeous manipulation that takes us to a space between circus and object animation.

A criticism of Cirkopolis for some people is the rigid adherence to traditional male and female roles (this was a bit of a talking point in the bar after the show, the large number of UK circus performers and producers there forming an instant, informal post-show discussion group). This isn’t a big issue for me – most of the time, anyway. Although you could argue that it is a stereotypical image of woman as ‘other’, the gazed-upon object of desire, I find the scene in which a lone bare-footed woman deftly crosses a sea of male hands held high in the air breathtakingly beautiful and poignant (and the soft and sensuous acrobatic and contortionist skills of the female performer, Myriam Deraiche, are extraordinary). But oddly it is in the very scenes where usual gender roles are seemingly challenged that some unnecessary gender stereotyping crops up: for example, a two-person (one male, one female) upbeat Chinese Pole scene with a feisty unisex feel is suddenly cheapened by boy-meets-girl steal-a-kiss-and-get-your-face-slapped silliness.

There was a distinct lack of UK circus companies presented at these international festivals, for whatever reasons, but I was delighted to see that Cirkopolis’ international cast features two graduates of English circus schools, juggler-clown Ashley Carr (Circus Space) and Samuel Charlton (Circomedia), who gets in all over the place with hand-to-hand acro, banquine balancing, German wheel, Chinese Pole and (along with all the boys) teeterboard. This grand finale teeterboard act is impressive, but again there is a bit of a question about the traditional gender divide – beefy boys bouncing off the boards whilst these fabulously talented circus girls kind of decorate the scene, posing in retro swimwear. It’s lovely, but…

You’ve probably gathered that acrobatics, and equipment such as the various wheels, boards and balancing/juggling kit, are the mainstay of this particular Éloize show – there is little aerial work. This, though, seems to fit thematically with the wheels-of-industry man-machine theme very nicely. The show is presented for two evenings and a matinee at Brighton’s largest venue, the Dome, and on its last night receives a standing ovation from what looks to be a full house. There is most definitely a big audience for circus at the moment!

Meanwhile, over in Norwich, NNF have plumped for Les 7 Doigts de la Main’s Séquence 8, also from Montreal, also a UK premiere. Sometimes the hardest shows to write about are the ones you love best. With this one I just want to say ‘go and see it before you die’ and leave it that – but I realise that won’t do. Les 7 Doigts (the 7 fingers) are, as the name implies, a seven-strong company of circus artists trained to the highest level. Some of their shows feature members of that core company onstage (or dangling above it); sometimes they stay on the other side of the footlights. The latter is the case with Séquence 8, which sees two of the ‘7’, Shana Carroll and Sébastien Soldevila, sharing a director credit, and a fresh batch of precociously talented young performers set loose onstage, with the show devised around that particular team’s skills and strengths. And my goodness they are an energetic bunch: the cast of eight bounce off, around and through each other with astonishing skill, verve, humour and daredevil bravado. Sitting close to the front, I had my heart in my mouth many times over, marvelling at the sheer audacity of the sky-high lifts, death drops, and ridiculously fast throws and catches that come in relentless waves.

Well, almost relentless – the action is interspersed with an entertaining on-mic running commentary (by clown-narrator, acrobat, musician and all-round multi-tasker Colin Davis) that highlights and gently mocks the world of performance. Yes, it’s been done before – the mix of high-level skill and postmodern interrogation reminds me a little of the late great Nigel Charnock –but it’s done well, and is a clever way to build in breaks in the high-octane action. For example, around halfway through there’s a ‘non interval’, in which our narrator tells us that we can go for a pee or to buy a drink if we like, but in the meantime he’ll be hosting a quiz for those that stay, and ‘the winner gets to take home a performer of their choice’. ‘Question: is Max on the trapeze a) angry, b) hungry, c) not hungry, d) purple?’

They are such a wonderful team and they have so much made this show their own that it is hard to single out individual acts – it’s all brilliant. But moments still with me are Eric Bates’ beat-boxing and blocks-juggling (to Tuung’s Bullets – some great soundtrack choices in this show); Ugo Dario’s gorgeously fluid dance to Julie London’s Cry Me a River, in which he weaves himself seductively through a maze of black sticky tape; a Russian barre act by the sinuous and cat-like Alexandra Royer; a teeterboard act that turns around a comic reflection on philosophical and artistic differences, set to the ghostly sounds of a ship creaking and lurching through the high seas; and the fabulous Chinese Pole work of Devin Henderson – not to mention the moment when he leaps offstage and snogs a man in the audience!

What’s it all about, then? Relationships, oppositions, contradictions, separation and togetherness – life, really. It’s about – everything! In many ways, it’s a show about circus itself – the highs and the lows, the breath and the blows – and thus of enormous appeal to anyone in the biz. But the riotous applause at the end of the show from this Norwich Theatre Royal festival audience proves that Séquence 8 isn’t just for the cognoscenti; it has massive popular appeal. I’d happily see it again and again: a glorious hybrid of astonishing circus, dance and physical theatre, all glued together with a healthy dose of knowing humour.

Over to the Aussies now: back in Brighton, also at a Theatre Royal (the lovely red plush Brighton Theatre Royal) comes Casus with Knee Deep. I’d previously seen this show when it made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe 2012, presented at a Spiegeltent, and I wondered how it would work in an end-on regular theatre. The answer is very well – even better than at the Spiegeltent in fact, the proscenium arch setting and use of back projections framing the performers nicely. And the show has (inevitably I suppose) really benefited from its year of honing and touring since that auspicious Edinburgh debut last year (which got it shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award). It’s sleek and ultra-stylish, yet still really human, really present. The staging is simple: the minimal projections are actually live-feed video giving us close-ups of, for example, a row of eggs about to be walked upon. Most of the time though it’s down to the simple, elegant scenography of a classy lighting design (lots of subdued golds and browns and blues) to illustrate the bodies moving in space.

This is a young company, but made up of seasoned performers – three men and one woman. That woman is Emma Serjeant, and she is phenomenal. A NICA graduate and former full-time member of Australia’s leading contemporary circus company, Circa, she has it all – grace, strength, power, and delicacy; moving with ease from base to flyer. Not that the three boys lag behind in skill or stage presence – Jesse Scott, Lachlan McAulay and Natano Fa’anana are all a delight to watch, with Natano adding an extra layer of humour to the show with his knowing play on male eroticism (he’s also a member of the all-male circus-cabaret company Briefs). The show has no overarching narrative, but explores notions of strength and fragility, exposure and vulnerability (those eggs feature heavily, bottles and nails also making an appearance!). The core skills are acrobatics and balancing, with some aerial (rope, silks, straps) that is mostly classic moves performed absolutely beautifully, often with a challenge to gender expectations. The acrobalance, though, is astonishing. Sound and image work in wonderful harmony. The recorded soundtrack features found tracks, rather than commissioned compositions, but it’s a track listing showing excellent taste and an ear for the unusual: the quirky crackles of Múm vying with the whimsical strings and breathy vocals of Patty Plinko and Her Boy; the earthy and edgy growl of late-era Gil Scott-Heron contrasting with the gorgeous melancholy piano of Max Richter. It’s a show that has few aspirations towards circus-theatre but instead gets to the heart of circus: skill and beauty combined artfully to fantastic effect.

Meanwhile, in another part of Brighton (well, Hove actually – All Saints Church to be precise), Casus’ fellow Australian company Circa are presenting How Like an Angel. I don’t manage to see it here, but it turns out it is also at Norwich – and luckily I do get to see it there. Which feels perfectly right, as it was commissioned by NNF’s former director Jonathan Holloway – a truly creative producer who had the idea of placing Circa with Renaissance choral music company I Fagiolini, the only brief being that the repertoire be sacred music, and the performance respond to the sites it is presented in (cathedrals, large churches or other places of worship). This show in Norwich Cathedral feels something of a glorious homecoming. How Like an Angel explores the mythologies surrounding those heavenly creatures common to the three great monotheistic faiths of the world (Judaism, Islam and Christianity), messengers of God and guardians of the celestial spheres. It plays (physically and thematically) with the great magnetic pull between heaven and earth, the air and the ground: Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, Icarus’ doomed flight to heaven. Bodies drop from terrifying heights; voices soar into the highest reaches of the cathedral roof. The audience are free to move around the space, although it is not exactly a promenade piece – once we are in the main space most people stay put in their spot, turning heads from side to side or gazing up into the roof. The interaction between singers and circus performers is handled deftly by Circa’s director, Yaron Lischitz. The singers never look awkward or uncomfortable with their physical tasks – walking slowly through the crowd from different starting points, or (more ambitiously) being borne aloft by the circus performers.

But Angel isn’t Circa’s only show in this year’s Norfolk and Norwich Festival. I return the following week to see the same cast debuting Beyond, a brand new show made for Spiegeltents. Because of the vagaries of the M25 and A11, I arrive in Norwich halfway through the show, so cannot pass a full and fair judgement, but saw enough to perk my interest – and to see that there is an interesting dilemma here…

The setting and staging for Beyond is about as far from How Like an Angel as you could imagine. From the hushed cloisters of an echoing grey-stoned cathedral to a rammed red-plush-boothed Spiegeltent in full cabaret mode: no respectful silence here. From Tallis and St Hildegard to Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra in one quick move; simple and tasteful costumes in plain white silk and black cotton replaced by big white fake-fur bunny heads and Yogi bear suits. It’s a totally different aesthetic, but the shows seem like two sides of the same coin: if Angel is about the thin veil between human and angel realms, Beyond is about the fine line between human and animal – and the aspiration to escape the ground and rise above the bestial; to dream the Impossible Dream (‘to try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable start… this is my quest.’).

What’s odd though – in the section of the show that I saw anyway – is how much of the content from How Like an Angel is repeated in Beyond. Is it because this is inevitable with the same team performing two shows almost concurrently? After all, circus acts with this skill level take years to perfect. Are Circa banking on the fact that they won’t be getting the same audience for both shows, or that people won’t notice because the costumes and staging are so different? Or is it a deliberate artistic choice – to re-run ideas in a totally different setting to play on that contrast? Who knows! Despite the repetition of the core elements of some of the acts, I very much enjoy the Chinese Pole ascent in a furry bear suit, and the fantastic reversal of male-female base-flyer roles in the acrobalance (at one point, in both Angel and Beyond, one of the women bears three people simultaneously aloft on her head and shoulders). I’m less interested in the clear-glass bowls of water balanced on the bodies and carried around the space – it was an OK image in Angel (resonance of baptism, holy purification, etcetera) but really has no reason I can see to be in Beyond. But it is a new show, and I only caught the second half… I’ll live in hope of seeing it again somewhere soon. (It’s currently, June 2013, playing Wonderground on London’s South Bank.)

Also at the Adnams Spiegeltent in Norwich was the debut of a new cabaret show, Les Enfants Perdus, sadly unseen by Total Theatre as it clashed with Les 7 Doigts, but by all accounts an exciting new addition to the adult-only circus-cabaret circuit. We can also mention in passing that NNF very ambitiously programmed not only the circus shows reflected on here but also extended their reach to the Hippodrome in Great Yarmouth for Compagnie Galapiat’s Risque ZérO. It was a risk to programme so much circus, but a risk that seemed to pay off, going on the sold-out shows I saw in Norwich.

Back in Brighton, a different and very well established circus-cabaret evening runs the length of the Fringe festival at The Famous Spiegeltent’s little sister, Moulin Rouge – yes, it’s the return of the legendary La Clique. Well, I say ‘return’ but there has been much water under the bridge since La Clique first wowed Brighton and Edinburgh (and indeed the world) a decade ago. After many successful years, most of the mainstays of that show, including MC Brett Haylock, hostess with the mostest Miss Behave, the always impressive Ursula Martinez, Franco-Irish chanteuse Camille O’Sullivan, and the various bendy boys and boys in bath tubs that shared the bill with them, left to form rival Spiegeltent cabaret show La Soiree, or to pursue other projects. A crude analysis of the situation from an outsider’s perspective is that Brett Haylock kept the stars and Spiegelmaestro David Bates kept the name, relaunching the brand with new artists.

So – how is the new La Clique? Not bad is the short answer – not as strong as those early legendary line-ups, but a pretty good evening’s entertainment, with quality circus acts still integral to the show. La Clique always had a raunchy vibe – more circus sideshow than regular variety show – but the new version has tipped over into hardcore burlesque, with verbal sexual innuendo and visual double-entendre ever-present. Take, for example, Scotty the Blue Bunny, whose act is very much what it says on the can: a big man dressed in a skin-tight blue lycra bunny suit, ears and all, who camps about and cracks jokes and does silly things with balloons. There’s an MC who does that excruciating rubber-band wrapping thing on his face, and a striptease act with a surprise ending from someone who would probably like to be the new Ursula Martinez but falls a bit short, although s/he has a demented energy that I enjoy. Magician-comedian Paul Zenon is entertaining, despite doing the same tricks and jokes as seen at La Clique in 2005; and Movin’ Melvin is his usual cheery and lovely self, tapping his way through Ray Charles classics. There’s a good hula hoop act from someone who is not Marawa the Amazing – perhaps she was having a night off – but a good substitution, a feisty girl with great stage presence, and, as her additional tea-cup and spoon act showed, something of the Miss Behave about her.

Sadly the magnificent Mikelangelo was also off duty that night (although I did luckily catch him and his Black Sea Gentlemen in their own shimmering music-cabaret show earlier that week), so that particular evening felt the lack of a quality crooner. The scene-stealer of this line-up was male aerialist Stephen Williams, who opened with a piano-top whiskey-soaked dance, returning later for an aerial straps act in the role of a car mechanic (tyres providing a useful double purpose of set and safety device). There is, inevitably, a trouser-removing moment. Away with you bath tub boys – it’s all about axle grease these days. A nod also to the very talented Wau Wau sisters, a burlesque-circus duet who combine doubles trapeze with audience participation acro in Dolly Parton drag.

From Spiegeltent to circus tent: the darlings of UK circus NoFit State were back in Brighton for the festival month, although this year not programmed into the main festival, as they have been previously, but instead part of the Fringe. It is odd that a show like Bianco by a world-class company like NoFit State was not presented in the main programme, but I am sure there are reasons.

Bianco (subtitled Turning Savage) is, on paper, ‘the story of a great journey inside and outside ourselves… a battle between beauty and brutality’. What we get are all the things we love about NoFit State: a big bouncy cast of acrobats tumbling all over the place; the thrill of being herded round the tent as aerialists swing and swoop above; a rip-roaring and raunchy live band; and the smell of popcorn always nearby. This may be contemporary circus, but it’s also good old-fashioned circus through and through. The company could be the inspiration for the phrase ‘motley crew’: tattooed riggers, gold-toothed ushers, tousle-haired trapezists, bristle-chinned fire-eaters. The downside is the set – a number of no-doubt expensive but cumbersome white scaffolding structures that get hauled around the space, making audience movement less fluid than is usual in NoFit State shows (the performer-stewards often having to explain very precisely where we need to stand to avoid being crushed, rather than the usual organic process of gentle herding we get in other shows). The structures look impressive and are swung and bounced from merrily, but these ensemble routines, although good, aren’t spectacular enough to justify all the trouble moving these things around. That aside, there are (as always) many top quality acts to marvel at: I love Anne-Fay Johnston’s giggly mock-wobbly handstands, and Elena Burani’s elegant rope work. The company’s current roster includes a number of top-notch British aerialists, including Circus Space trained August Dakteris with a big and beefy straps routine, doubles trapeze (well, it was actually an odd kind of moving frame rather than a trapeze, reminiscent of something Ockham’s Razor might use) from Lyndall Merry and Freya Watson, both Circomedia grads. There’s also an ensemble of less experienced aerialists that provide a chorus-line of rope, in line with NoFit State’s policy of integrating performers at different levels of experience into their shows. The design is lovely, with many beautiful images still glowing in my mind long after the lights go down. Lots of white (of course), including a spectacular ceiling-to-floor wedding dress shedding red rose petals, and a chorus of silver-and-white twirling canopied swings descending to the ground.

NoFit State’s writer/director Firenza Guidi seems to have accepted with this production that it is hard to push through a strong linear narrative in a circus performance, which by its very nature is episodic, and has instead gone for thematic links over ‘story’: Bianco feels less of an attempt at a circus-theatre amalgam than either Immortal or Tabu. Which is not a criticism – ultimately, it’s raunchy and robust circus full of thrills and spills, and that’s good enough for me.

NoFit State’s Bianco troupe is a truly international ensemble, featuring artists from Wales, England, Ireland, America, Quebec, Italy, and Portugal. That’s the nature of circus – it embraces the world. It was fantastic to see so many world-class circus shows putting the spring into May’s step in Norwich and Brighton – and great to see so many UK circus artists making their mark on the world stage (or tent).

Dorothy Max Prior saw Cirque Éloize, Cirkopolis at the Dome Brighton, 7 May 2013; Casus Knee Deep at Theatre Royal Brighton 14 May 2013; Les 7 Doigts de la Main, Séquence 8 at Theatre Royal Norwich 17 May 2013; Circa, How Like an Angel at Norwich Cathedral 17 May 2013; No Fit State Circus, Bianco at No Fit State’s spaceship tent, Hove Lawns 27 May 2013; La Clique at The Famous Spiegelgarden, Brighton 29 May 2013.

Without Walls: Brighton Festival Goes Outdoors

Brighton Festival has a long-standing commitment to what was once called ‘street theatre’ or ‘street arts’ but which now tends to be called ‘outdoor arts’. Which is – or at least in Total Theatre’s opinion should be – work that is presented in public spaces, free to audiences and ideally unticketed, so that the passer-by drawn into the action is as key a part of the audience body as the arts-savvy person who has booked a ticket in advance. I may be an old-fashioned girl, but both as an artist working in this field and as a critic and commentator, I stick firmly to the above definitions as vital to the essence of street or outdoor or whatever-we-call-it work. Of course streets arts, like any artform or mode of practice, moves and changes and embraces new ways of working – but to me it feels important to hang on to what makes the essence of the form…

So, bearing this in mind, ticketed shows such as Blast Theory’s Fixing Point, and the interesting looking (but sadly unsampled) Burn the Curtain show The Adventures of Don Quixote by Bicycle, don’t count for the purposes of this article, which is focusing on outdoor arts / street theatre work that upholds the ethos of free-to-audience presentation in a public space.

Above shows aside, what we have left on the Brighton Festival Outdoor programme that fits the bill is a very mixed bag of work: the Same Sky Children’s Parade opened the Festival as is the tradition; two visual arts pieces set in public space were on show throughout the duration, The Blue Route by Kaarina Kaikkonen, which saw the Brighton Clocktower adorned in clothing (a twin to the Finnish artist’s beautifully blue indoor installation at Fabrica), and what we could call an intervention in public space called Under the Shadow of the Drone by James Bridle, a line drawing of the shadow of a drone plane painted on the street (presented as part of HOUSE festival); there was one big international street arts booking, KompleXKaphaurnüM’s Figures Libres; and every weekend at least one work on show from the Without Walls programme – a presentation of new outdoor arts work by UK artists.

And so to Without Walls, ‘a consortium of festivals dedicated to commissioning, presenting and supporting new outdoor work’. This consortium includes Brighton Festival and Norfolk and Norwich Festival (who kick off the outdoor season in May), Greenwich & Docklands, Stockton International Riverside Festival, and Mintfest – amongst others across the land. The programme is managed by Xtrax, an organisation that has been at the forefront of street arts in the UK for many decades, and each year a number of new outdoor works are commissioned and produced at the participating festivals throughout the year (and hopefully beyond). Not all the festivals programme all of the work – this year’s Brighton Festival saw five of the ten commissions presented.

First seen, in the opening week of the festival, was Mercurial Wrestler’s Magna Mysteria. Or at least, I did my best to see it! It’s a kind of magical mystery tour, in which you sign up at a beautifully crafted fairground sideshow fortune-telling booth, receive a sort-of tarot card (mine was The Sisters – there’s also a Policeman, a Siren, and a Magician), and then await instructions, which arrive some time later by text. You are referred to a website that gives some background information on the characters, and you are then – over a number of days – sent on a quest to find these characters and to glean, through this fragmented narrative, the fate of the missing sister. Indeed, more than ‘glean’ – you become a participant in the creation of the story (which is a kind of post Angela Carter / Erin Morgenstern tale of shady alternative reality happenings in Victorian music halls). I very much enjoy my second-day encounter with the Policeman (in a back alley, inevitably), which I find more inspiring than the first brief encounter with the forlorn remaining sisters, and I am sad not to meet the other characters and see the piece through to its conclusion – but putting aside three or four days in a row to participate in a few 30 minute bursts of performance just wasn’t feasible for me in this busy May festival month. It’s a lovely idea, but very much work-in-progress. Though it was fatally flawed as presented, I was engaged and interested, and would like to see Magna Mysteria reworked and developed into something that manages to balance the need for audience commitment with the demands of daily life.

Second up, a few days later (that is, on the festival’s second weekend), was Rag & Bone’s Bone Yard Tales, a cautionary tale of existential angst and dawning environmental awareness, set in a no-man’s-land junkyard in which ‘beauty is in the eye of the magpie’ – Steampunk meets Steptoe and Son, perhaps? Directed by Periplum’s Damian Wright, there are definite shades of that company’s earlier outdoor work here, perhaps in the way in which the rhythmical text delivery – a would-be epic poem about finding and killing your inner demons – is balanced with the live music and physical action, which takes place mostly atop and below a trio of moveable three-wheeled towers. The characters (‘Rag’ and ‘Bone’ and their entourage) are performed with gusto – I particularly like Periplum stalwart Ben Phillips as Bone and the onstage saxophonist (who I believe may well be the company’s resident composer, Tim Hill). In a story focusing on two characters in limbo, forever locked in the pursuit of absurd tasks in a strange other-world, there’s an inevitable Beckett-esque feel to it all, which personally I think could be built upon a lot more – it is all rather too lightweight at the moment. I like the household object graveyard look of it all, and I enjoy the animation of the giant dragon-like creature that emerges from the rubbish, but the final demon-slaying (or not?) scene is a bit of an anti-climax. The moments of audience interaction also fall a little flat: people wearing red, say, or who are tall or small, are hauled into the performance space for no discernible good reason. It’s all enjoyable enough for the most part, but again this show feels most definitely ‘in progress’.

Which brings up an interesting point about street arts. Work can of course be scripted and rehearsed, objects can be built and manipulated, physical action devised and developed indoors – but inevitably there comes a point when it all has to be placed together outdoors, and placed in interaction with an audience. So in many ways there is no way to rehearse a street show other than by just getting out there and doing it. This has always been known and accepted as inevitable – a show in its first year is trying out, and in its second outdoor season it hopefully starts to settle into what it will be. In the context of dedicated street theatre /outdoor arts festivals, this all works fine as there is an audience expectation of seeing work at various stages of development in one setting, and developing shows have the buffering of stronger and better shows around them. The problem with the Without Walls programme seen in Brighton is that these undeveloped shows are being presented as finished works within the context of a major international arts festival. Each was showcased at separate runs throughout the month, and each was often the main or only outdoor arts event on that day, thus attracting audiences with high expectations.

The piece that suffered most from this dynamic was Bad Taste’s Faust. Presented on a Saturday and Sunday evening at central Brighton sites, the show attracted big crowds – most of whom couldn’t see what was happening in the performance space for a lot of the time. This was partly because one of the key elements of the show, breakdancing, happens at floor level and just isn’t visible from the back of a large crowd, but also because for some reason the whole show was played to stage-left, so that all the hundreds of people sitting or standing on the other side of the square (including me) spent most of the time looking at someone’s back. This odd staging seemed to be because of the lighting choices – an enormous floorlamp highlighting this small off-centre dance area – which meant that quite apart from having a back view, everyone stage-right had the light beaming directly into our eyes for the duration. The show itself is a very simplified and abstracted dance version of the Faust story, set in a Roaring 20s prohibition era speakeasy. It features an all-male cast who Charleston and Lindy Hop with great gusto, alongside the aforementioned breakdancing (which is, you know, good – but nothing we can’t see every weekend on the seafront at Brighton), and some nifty physical action with fire – blazing cocktails, and a dance-fight tag match in a burning boxing ring, for example. The show’s currently around 25 minutes long, and after a rather abrupt ending, the cast return for an encore that is move-for-move a full repeat of the ‘Sing Sing Sing’ multi-dance-rhythm routine that is the highlight of the show, bumping the running time up to a little over 30 minutes. It feels slight, for sure.

Much more successful, for this reviewer anyway, was A High Street Odyssey, a new outdoor piece by Inspector Sands (a usually-indoors company, previous winners of a Total Theatre Award for Hysteria at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and subsequently presented at the London International Mime Festival). Without Walls have been positively encouraging companies who don’t usually work outdoors to apply for commissions, and although there are different views on this – many established street arts companies feeling that commissioning money could go to people choosing to work in this sector, who know what they are doing – in this case, I think it has been a good commissioning choice. Not that it’s perfect – like all the other Without Walls shows reflected on above, there is a way to go. But in this case, less of a way – there’s already a lot in place that is very good.

As the show name implies, A High Street Odyssey seeks out the epic in the everyday. ‘What histories, what mysteries, lie behind our pedestrianised shopping centres?’ ask Inspector Sands. ‘Who were Mr Boot and Mr Smith?’ Who indeed… The show is cleverly structured – each new town setting means new research about the neighbourhood, and new material to be weaved into the performance text, but the ubiquitous nature of the high street environment being commented upon means that there is material that can be transposed from site to site. There is also plenty of general reflection on human evolution (‘we’ve risen out of the sea and walked on the moon…’) and the paths that have been trodden many times before by man and beast (‘Once there were trees here – is that a wild boar under that garden bench outside Robert Dyers?’) that would be re-usable in any setting. As for the site-specific touches – yes, some nice little references to bar staff who are students of philosophy, and the provenance of the name ‘Hove’, but it feels as if a trick has been missed in the research as there are very many wondrous things about Hove that don’t get referenced – I can’t remember if famous resident Laurence Olivier (who allegedly coined the phrase ‘Hove, actually’ when asked where he lived in Brighton) gets a mention, but I don’t think he did. A scene in which passers-by are commented on feels a little too safe and nervous of offence – and I should also say that I was waiting to learn why Claire was so into accessories, but I never did get to find out. That aside, I very much enjoyed the clever use of headphones, with a soundtrack that we suddenly realise with a jolt has a live element; the low-key performances and interventions – the rubbish picker that we suddenly realise is in on the game, the man loitering with a pram who turns out to be the sound engineer, the lady who steals people’s croissants in a coffee shop and later is seen dancing wildly in a shop window, the busker whose rendition of Wonderwall gets hijacked by that batty lady to become a full-on poetic rant on consumerism: ‘I want a Blackberry, and a well-fitting bra, and a car… and three kids, or maybe two will do…’ This finale is the one point in the piece where passers-by get properly drawn into the action – and if I have one major criticism it would be that it would be good if Inspector Sands could think through how people who haven’t booked in to this free but ticketed event (and therefore don’t have a pair of headphones) could perhaps be brought into the action in some kind of secondary manner along the way, rather than be excluded. After all, a pack of people walking down a street together wearing headphones is going to attract attention! A High Street Odyssey is created by a very capable theatre company, and although they have a fair amount to learn about working outdoors, and how to create truly site-responsive work, they are highly talented writers and performers and I can imagine that this is a piece that will grow and grow with each performance.

The one Without Walls commission (or co-commission, at least) presented at Brighton Festival that I haven’t commented on here is OCM’s Audible Forces, an Aeolian (that is, wind-powered) sound piece curated/created by Max Eastley, and featuring sound-making structures built with and by seasoned outdoor sound art creators such as Jony Easterby, Kathy Hinde and Dan Fox. This piece, being an ambient installation work, and being by artists highly experienced in making outdoor work, seems to stand apart from the other shows discussed above. That and the fact that I haven’t a great deal to report on as, due to inclement weather, I got blown back from the seafront when I made an attempt to go and see/hear the piece on the opening weekend of Brighton Festival. Sadly, it was only in place for that one weekend, so I didn’t get a second chance – but it was somehow enough to just appreciate it from afar and know it was there, whistling and sighing, oblivious to whether it had human attention or not… I’ll make another attempt at the Greenwich & Docklands Festival in June!

Audible Forces aside, these Without Walls shows were presented at key city centre sites over successive weekends: Magna Mysteria had a Sunday finale in the first weekend of May (although unadvertised as you had to have followed the trail), Bone Yard Tales was presented in the daytime and on both evenings of the second weekend, A High Street Odyssey filled the daytime slot andFaust both evenings of the third weekend. On the final weekend of the festival (Friday 24 and Saturday 25 May) the evening slot was occupied by the French company KompleXKarphanaüM, with the UK premiere of their large-scale promenade work Figures Libres. This I sadly didn’t get to see as I was at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival for that weekend, but by all accounts it was an example of the sort of big, bold and inspiring street arts presentation that Brighton Festival is known for. Seasoned street theatre producer Karen Poley described it as ‘Epic and transformative. They did an amazing job of spreading out projections along the entire length of the route so everyone felt at the heart of the performance… amazing strength in combining intimacy and scale.’ Other knowledgeable street arts folks mentioned the extensive and efficient use of video and sound technologies, and the well-handled interactive elements, including the use of text messaging. Veteran street arts photographer Ray Gibson described it as one of the best street shows he’d ever seen, adding ‘The whole event transformed a part of the city barely visited by most Brightonians into a visual delight.’

I’m glad that there was one work of this quality programmed into the festival, but a number of questions arise for me. First, that it seems unbalanced to place new undeveloped work like Bone Yard Tales and Bad Taste’s Faust in a similar high-profile standalone weekend evening slot as a company with the experience and clout of KompleXKarphanaüM. I’d prefer to see the Without Walls commissions presented across one weekend, and flagged up far more strongly in the programme as newly commissioned work. I’d also, of course, like to see more top quality street arts work presented in Brighton Festival. It shouldn’t come down to just one properly developed work of scale by an experienced company carrying the torch for outdoor arts in what is, after all, England’s largest arts festival. There is always the familiar question of where the UK work of scale and quality is. The answer to this is complex. Large-scale and spectacular work by the likes of Periplum and Wired Aerial Theatre has been presented by Brighton Festival in past years, and perhaps the argument is that there just isn’t anything currently available of a similar scale and ambition that hasn’t already been programmed, although there is also the possibility that the opportunity to fund or commission new large-scale work from established UK street artists is being overlooked. We can note here that two South East based established street theatre companies, World Famous and Ragroof Theatre, went out of business in the past year, due to a lack of the kind of long-term company development funding support (as opposed to project-based support) that they would need to continue. Periplum have also not been in a position to create the kind of large-scale work like The Bell(previously seen at Brighton Festival) that made their name, and have, of late, focused on smaller scale and more intimate work. And perhaps there is currently a trend, in this country anyway, away from spectacle and towards work that engages audiences in a different way – although KompleXKarphanaüM (whose previous work PlayRec I saw at a previous Brighton Festival) are an example of a company who manage to combine spectacle and intimacy very cleverly, and integrate current trends for promenade, site-responsive and immersive theatre into their work very successfully.

In conclusion: great to see the variety of new work presented under the Without Walls banner, but the context in which it was presented at Brighton Festival raises questions. It would be great to see a range of work of different scales by experienced street theatre/outdoor art makers, from the UK or from elsewhere, presented in tandem with this fledging work.

The Without Walls shows seen at Brighton Festival now go on to tour to other festivals throughout the UK. They are joined by five other new outdoor works on the programme, from Les Enfants Terribles, Pif Paf, Motionhouse Dance, Tilted Productions, and Candoco.

For more about Without Walls, and the touring dates of all the works commissioned for 2013 see their website.

Brighton Festival ran 4 – 26 May 2013.

Right Here, Right Now: Site Responsive Theatre

As I write (April 2013), the new dreamthinkspeak show In the Beginning was the End has just finished a run at Somerset House; Look Left Look Right (who won a Total Theatre Award for their show You Once Said Yes, set on the streets and public spaces of Edinburgh) open their latest one-on-one show Above and Beyond, commissioned for the Corinthia Hotel; and booking is opening for the new Punchdrunk show, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, which is based on Büchner’s Woyzeck.

Site-responsive theatre is everywhere these days – in some ways one of the newer strands of contemporary theatre, in other ways one of the oldest forms, perhaps as old as theatre itself.

In recent decades, the form has moved from being mostly associated with Artaudian theatre-of-the-senses – highly physical, visual and visceral fantasias set in warehouses or abandoned industrial sites, as practised in their very different ways by Catalan trailblazers La Fura dels Baus and the legendary Dutch company Dogtroep – to embrace all manner of theatrical forms, from the Mis-Guides and mythogeographic drifts of Wrights & Sites through to the issue-based drama of acclaimed Scottish production Roadkill (which took its audience on a journey in the company of a trafficked girl held captive in a flat on a Glasgow housing estate), via the many and various off-stage theatrical experiments of the Shunt collective.

Having recently led a five-day course at LUME Teatro (Brazil) called Bem Aqui, Bem Agora – Right Here, Right Now / Site-Responsive Theatre and Performance (27 February to 3 March 2013), I felt that right here and now would be a good opportunity to reprise my long-standing relationship to this area of work; to muse on some of the common terminology used; and to reflect on the way that the course gave me (as well as the students, hopefully) good insights into the real joys and challenges of this area of performance practice.

You’ll note that I say ‘site-responsive’, which has been the preferred term in recent years, rather than ‘site-specific’. There is a lot more to be said about that, but not quite yet! First to say is that site-responsive theatre and outdoor performance are dear to my heart, both as an artist/teacher and as a commentator on other’s work.

Ragroof Theatre’s Bridges. Photo by Rosie Powell

As an artist, working with Ragroof Theatre, Grist to the Mill, Dorothy’s Shoes, and other companies I more often than not create work that is sited outside regular theatre buildings. Some of it could be called ‘site-responsive theatre’ and some could be called ‘street theatre’ and some could be called ‘performance in public spaces’. Some is harder to categorise… It’s hard to say precisely when and how my decision to work outside of regular theatre spaces got made, it just seemed to happen – but reflecting back on how things evolved, it is surely a lot to do with a desire to make work for people who don’t often go to the theatre; to really enjoy the kind of audience relationships that occur in public spaces; and to create truly 3D theatre and performance work that isn’t just a framed image viewed from the fixed point of a theatre seat.

This work is extremely varied, although what it always has at its heart is an interest in exploring the relationship with audience and site. With Ragroof Theatre, I have, over the past decade, helped to create large-scale projects set in car parks and dilapidated buildings (what we could see as the now-traditional arena for ‘site-responsive’ work). One of these was Bridges, a piece about migration and transience and a search for home; another was a ‘site-generic’ (more on terminology later – yes it’s coming soon!) show made for dancehalls and bandstands; and yet another was a show about boxing (set in boxing clubs, but also performed with its own touring boxing ring). Most recently, our Youth Club was set in a working building – a three-storied youth centre with a massive skateboard park on the top floor, a dance studio, a gymnasium, and various other arts and sports rooms. We found that trying to work in an occupied building is very different to working in an empty warehouse or car park – both have their challenges and rewards but I’d say that the problems of clearing rubble and rotting rubbish from an abandoned warehouse are nothing compared to trying to plot routes and devise scenes round a busy youth centre you have very limited access to at only some times of the day or night!

With Grist to the Mill, I recently (2012) co-created a show commissioned by Dip Your Toe for Brighton Fringe called Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter set inside a facsimile Victorian ‘bathing machine’ – a kind of beach hut on wheels. Using a soundscape of spoken word and composed music, and a visual landscape of puppetry, animation, and installation, we created an installation/performance peepshow using nautical folk tales and fairytales as our starting point. So, a work about the sea set in hut on a beach, with the sounds of both live and pre-recorded seagulls and waves and boats causing a very lovely aural confusion!

Dorothy’s Shoes is the vehicle for my own personal performance/art projects with invited collaborators, which includes work indoors and out. Behind the Moon, Beyond the Rain was a commission for Anglo-Brazilian festival BR-116 in collaboration with LIFT, made for the buses, trains and public spaces of East London; and Flying Down to Rio was an interactive performance and installation work set in a dancehall, co-commissioned by Sacred Festival at Chelsea Theatre, London, and Entre_Lugares at Sergio Porto in Rio. The former operated in public space, mostly on public transport, so an enormous number of variables were had a bearing on the performance. Who, for example, could have predicted the moment in which a fairytale princess on rollerblades got chased along the glass bridge of West Ham tube station by a bunch of coppers? The latter was a far more controlled and staged event, in which the two commissioning theatres had the nooks and crannies of their space transformed into shrines and film booths, or became the site for a carnival in a cupboard… Yet although an indoor site is far more ‘controllable’, the enormous variable in a show in which the audience can roam free under the twinkling fairy lights (rather than be strapped into seats in the darkness) is the audience – and careful thought has to go into the management of that audience in the space.

So, that’s a few examples from my own experience of how site can become a major character in the show. Now, onto that niggling matter of definitions within the umbrella term ‘site-responsive’, with a few examples from recent work seen…

Let me start by letting loose a bee from my bonnet: the term ‘site-specific’ is used more and more often these days, yet very little of what is presented is truly site-specific. The clue is in the name: a site-specific work is specific to that site and no other. It cannot tour, it was created right here, and it belongs right here and now. No other time or place is possible.

A good example was seen in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I spent a few days in January before moving onto LUME’s headquarters in Campinas. Teatro de Vertigem’s Bom Retiro 958 Metros is a truly site-specific theatre show. It is a response to a kilometre-long stretch in Sao Paulo, an area called Bom Retiro, which has traditionally been the core of the dressmaking and tailoring industries. Teatro de Vertigem followed an extensive process of interviewing residents, street-dwellers and immigrants to the area (and like many inner city areas worldwide, this area has seen waves of immigrants over the years – traditionally a Jewish area, the main ‘newly immigrant’ group here now are the Koreans). The reminiscence work has gone hand-in-hand with a process of historical research, and a (psycho) geographic and choreographic investigation of the chosen site (which includes narrow streets, a shopping mall, a busy crossroads, and an abandoned clothing warehouse), and these sites, together with the specific stories of inhabitants past and present (of seamstresses and consumers; street-dwellers and landlords; warehouse skivvies and fashion mannequins) are what makes the piece what it is.

Teatro de Vertigem’s Bom Retiro, Sao Paulo, Brazil

So, there is some work that is truly ‘specific’ to its site, but a great deal of performance work presented as ‘site-specific’ is in fact ‘site-generic’ (a term coined by UK company Wrights & Sites, who create work of very many different sorts, usually outdoors, often site-specific). By ‘site-generic’ we mean that the work is made for a particular genre or type of site, but it doesn’t necessarily have to live in that site – it could tour to another similar site. Examples of sites used by artists are many and various, but include: shops, hotels, bars, ballrooms, parks, churches, graveyards, bus stations, trains, kitchens, bathrooms, playgrounds, supermarkets… Of course some work in these sorts of sites is ‘specific’ to that site. Or perhaps the core of the show is ‘generic’ but some changes are made each time it is presented in a new site to make it ‘specific’ to that site. Examples of artists who work in this way includeGrid Iron, who have made shows in department stores, airports, bars, children’s playgrounds and museums amongst other sites. Stalwarts of the Edinburgh Fringe, their new show, Leaving Planet Earth, will instead be part of Edinburgh International Festival 2013.

Then there’s a whole body of work we could label ‘community responsive’ – site-sensitive work that is as interested in the people that use a particular site as it is in the site itself: the place, its use, and the people who use it are all interlinked, and it is this that is of interest to the theatre-maker/artist. It may (as in the case of Bom Retiro, cited above), be a fully site-specific work about one particular community in one geographic location, and thus non-tourable – or it could be an ongoing project recreated in numerous different communities with shared factors or interests. Often in community responsive / site-sensitive work, the line between ‘professional’ and ‘community’ art is deliberately blurred: the work is led by professional artists, but the engagement of the community that is being worked with is crucial, and their active involvement key to the success of the project. An artist who immediately springs to mind to cite here is Keith Khan, an example of someone who, both with Moti Roti and as a solo artist, has taken the notion of art within a community to its highest levels.

Linked to the above, historical and research-based work extends the interest from the current users of the site to its historic users. A very common example of this strand of work will be focused on a well-known historic event, series of events, or crime that took place in a certain site. Often the historical/research approach will combine with an interplay with other, imaginative elements in the creation of performance or installation – see, for example, Peter Reder’s work, including his latest piece The Contents of a House, presented atBrighton Festival 2013. (Brighton Festival have shown a longstanding commitment to supporting and commissioning site-responsive work, with past successes including pieces by Dreamthinkspeak, Frantic Assembly, and Fevered Sleep.)

Moving into more nebulous areas of performance/art: the ‘psychogeography’ movement, which has close ideological links to the French Situationist movement, sets out to reclaim the streets with artistic intention, using ‘drifting’ (walking with an open heart and mind), and conscious walking / meditative walks – mentally remapping and redesigning the environment. In the UK artists such as writer Iain Sinclair, photographer Mark Powers, artist Janet Cardiff, and theatre-makers Wrights & Sites (who describe themselves as ‘a group of artist-researchers with a special relationship to site, city/landscape and walking’), have been at the heart of this movement.

Mythogeography, a term coined by Phil Smith of Wrights & Sites, takes the psychogeographic approach deeper, proposing a multi-layered investigation of the streets, shopping malls, rivers and fields around us, taking in archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, sociology, and of course mythology. Many of the exercises I used in the Bem Aqui, Bem Agora workshop – themed daily walks focusing on, say, touch or smell, or what’s above in the skies, or what’s below at street level; creating portraits of a street; using maps to inspire memories of places never visited – were inspired by or adapted from the works of Phil Smith and Wrights & Sites, and in particular by their marvellous Mis-Guides (to Exeter and Everywhere).

Abre Alas outdoor performance by LUME Teatro, February 2013

Another area of work that I’ve become increasingly interested in over the years is the creation of ritual performance and Rites of Passage ceremonies. Welfare State International were for many decades pioneers of site-responsive performance. Over the years, the company moved from creating large-scale outdoor works to focusing on smaller-scale work, and developing models for alternative Rites of Passage to mark key moments in life such as marriage or the birth of a child. Such work blurs the boundaries between ‘real life’ and ‘art’. Welfare State co-founders John Fox and Sue Gill have since formed Dead Good Guides, ‘an artist-led company, seeking a role for art that weaves it more fully into the fabric of our lives’. Dead Good Guides focuses on rites of passage enactment and training, and on environmental art (by which I mean art that not only has the natural environment and the human relation to it as its subject, but which also places that art within the environment). One of the key elements of the Dead Good Guides rites of passage work is the creation of a new ‘sacred art’ that exists outside of conventional religious practice.

Within the Right Here, Right Now workshop, I included exercises on shrine-building and the creation of mini ‘instant ceremonies’ for a new (non) religion that were inspired by work that I had done in the past with Sue Gill, John Fox and Gilly Adams of Dead Good Guides. It was a delight to meet the various gods and goddesses of the night garden that my dear students unearthed in their work… During our afternoon sessions we had outings to the lovely Praca de Coco, whose trees and plants and pathways presented all sorts of opportunities to explore the possibilities of installation and durational performance work. A nod here in the direction of environmental art companyRed Earth, whose work sits between visual arts/sculpture, durational installation and performance.

From the rural to the urban: it would be a mistake to forget that the city is an environment too. I’ll just mention in passing the possibilities of parkour, street dance and circus/aerial dance – all of which interact with the urban environment – and contain myself to reflecting on how street theatre and site-responsive theatre are placed in relation to each other. Street theatre – unless it is just a regular play set outdoors on a static stage, which is not true street theatre, just theatre placed outdoors – is inevitably site-sensitive, as it is not possible to perform in a public space without being responsive in some way to the environment in which the performer is working. But street theatre is usually less concerned with site per se as it is with audience, and that relationship to audience is the key defining characteristic of ‘street theatre’ – it takes place in a public space (street, beach, bar, hospital, shopping mall), it is unticketed and at no cost to the audience, and the audience is free to walk away if they wish.

Abre Alas rehearsal, LUME Teatro February 2013

The performer/audience relationship is of course always crucial in theatre, but in street theatre the artist has no stage to define their performance area, no pre-existing division between performance space and audience space, and no ‘fourth wall’ to hide behind. The crossover between site-responsive theatre and street theatre occurs when the performance takes place in public spaces. Some forms of street theatre / performance are of course more fully site-responsive than others, and some street theatre work is site-specific – but this isn’t a defining characteristic. In our workshop, we crossed over into more familiar street theatre territory when we developed a city maps exercise into an ensemble piece set in a petrol station and neighbouring streets.

This last example was one of many versions of ‘transposition’ that we used on the course. By which I mean the process of taking material inspired by a response to one site and siting it elsewhere. Of course, in the making of theatre, we do this all the time – take pre-existing texts or memories or imaginative ideas and transpose them to the theatre or rehearsal room. But the key difference here is the choice to transpose these elements into a new ‘non-theatre’ site in order to enjoy the ambivalence of the two placed together. Another example from the Bem Aqui, Bem Agora workshop: we can take memories of our home, images of our home, songs from our homeland and we can create a new ‘home’ elsewhere (in this case, in the LUME house or garden) and explore how these two ‘homes’ fit together.

One last nod in the direction of Wrights & Sites and an idea mooted in the Mis-Guides: ‘imaginary site’ work is the natural extension of the notion of transposition. In this case, we are allowing our imaginations to run wild in our response to a site: perhaps we see angels in the sky, or spirits in the trees. Or perhaps we imagine ourselves to be a stray dog seeking out the best porch to shelter under – as we did in one of the most moving exercises on the workshop, which we dubbed ‘Simi’s Dog’ in honour of the dog who took up residence outside LUME actor Carlos Simioni’s house. Framed within a silent city walk after dark, the street in which LUME are based was brought to life by a series of beautifully performed miniature performance pieces in which drunks, strays, cats, birds, wandering spirits and homeless waifs emerged from the shadows to tell their stories in words, pictures, and physical actions. Each person used the site they had chosen artfully. Pavement stones and steps, doorways and gates, parked cars and moving people, trees and bushes, stacks of wood – each was integrated beautifully with the chosen performance mode. One of the highlights of a very fruitful week of explorations of ways we can respond to a given site.

Bem Aqui, Bem Agora photos from showings of installation work in progress in the Praca de Coco, Barao Geraldo, March 2013.

Bem Aqui, Bem Agora – Right Here, Right Now – Site-Responsive Theatre and Performance, led by Dorothy Max Prior, took place 27 February to 3 March 2013 as part of LUME Teatro’s February workshop season and Terra LUME programme, at the company’s base in Barao Geraldo, Campinas SP, Brazil.

LUME Teatro are supported by and affiliated with UNICAMP (University of Campinas).

Do I Look Like a Peggy?

‘Could this piece be performed by anyone else?’ asks someone at the post-show discussion that follows the presentation of Ruff, the latest solo performance by the legendary Peggy Shaw, co-written and directed by her Split Britches partner, Lois Weaver, and seen at Chelsea Theatre as part of their ongoing Sacred season.

Peggy and Lois like the question and muse on it awhile. ‘That might be interesting,’ they say, and no conclusions are drawn. But it is obvious from the audience’s response that the majority view is no, no one else would do – this is Peggy’s story, and her presence in the telling of it is crucial.

Ruff is the latest in a series of works – earlier Peggy Shaw shows presented in the UK include You’re Just Like My Father, Engendered Species, Menopausal Gentleman, and MUST (a collaboration with Clod Ensemble) – that blend autobiography with observation and reflection on the wider world, starting with the self and spiralling out to encompass all of us in the room, and everything beyond. Ruff is in many ways a continuation of recent work. It takes off from where Menopausal Gentleman left off in its insightful and playful exploration of popular culture icons and tropes that define the gender-play of ‘becoming a man’. With a sideways step, it also follows on neatly fromMUST in its intense investigation of the workings of the body, and the relationship between inside and outside, personal and universal, art and science. Both previous shows also, like Ruff, pivot around an ironically humorous acknowledgement of the ageing process and the awareness of mortality.

The twist in the tale is that Peggy Shaw had a stroke in January 2011. The stroke was in her PONS, which rhymes with the Fonz, as she points out in the show – the Fonz, along with Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra, being one of her many male role models as she grew from girl-in-a-green-dress to iconic butch woman performer with three legendary companies (Hot Peaches, Spiderwoman Theatre, and Split Britches) and concurrently as a solo performer / collaborator with many other theatre-makers in the USA, the UK and beyond. We learn that since having the stroke she’s realised that she has never really performed solo. She has always had a host of lounge singers, movie stars, rock and roll bands, and eccentric family members living inside her. Ruff is thus ‘a tribute to those who have kept her company these 68 years, a lament for the absence of those who disappeared into the dark holes left behind by the stroke and a celebration that her brain is able to fill the blank green screens with new insights’.

I’ll admit to some moments of trepidation before the show. She’s one of my favourite performers, someone whose work I’ve loved since first meeting her when the Hot Peaches troupe brought their wild multi-gendered post-Stonewall extravaganzas to the ICA theatre in London in the mid-1970s – and like an anxious relative coming into the hospital after hearing the bad news, I walked into the theatre wondering what I might find of ‘my’ Peggy, fearing she’d be a shadow of her former self. And if she were, that would be OK, I tell myself…

But she’s not. She’s no shadow, she’s fully there, present. She’s alive, she’s alive – do not doubt that she’s alive. She’s as strong and as powerful and as entertaining as ever, a stage presence to be reckoned with. She’s different, yes, to her old self (or selves – one of themes of the show is that we are always many people wrapped up in one body) but the differences are placed upfront, are handed up to us to view and reflect upon.

Screens play a big part in the show. The use of a number of monitors turned now towards her, now towards us, are both a practical device to prompt her memory (should that prompt be needed), and a way of exploring memory, repetition, mediating and ‘monitoring’. Sometimes they run the text of the show and sometimes they run footage of brightly coloured fish swimming round and round (fish whose memories are so short that they don’t feel trapped in a tank?). A large rear-stage screen portrays that internal rock and roll band, externalised larger than life: pounding drums, screeching guitars – and accordions. At another point, the screen gives us a shaky and blurred image of a young woman in a green dress walking towards the film camera – a woman that Peggy knows is ‘her’, yet is clearly someone else from a far-off time and place. Again and again in the show we come back to the same question, reflected in many different ways and finally stated directly: ‘Am I the one you know?’

It’s interesting (as my companion points out) that it’s the words that need the prompts – the physical action on the stage, the scenographic relationship of body to space, needs no prompting other than one brief moment when Lois calls a direction from the back of the auditorium. Again, there is no subterfuge, or trickery, or embarrassment – the possibility that this might happen is built into the show. These safety nets are there, upfront and clearly present, for us to see and accept, but in fact they are not too often needed. A few links and transitions need some double-checks, but each monologue or song sees her getting into her stride and enchanting the audience in the way that has always been her special gift.

She has this odd and wonderful kind of rapping/lip-synching to popular tunes thing she does in her shows – here taken into very odd and interesting territory. There is, for example, a very funny take on Shirley Ellis’ 1964 pop hit The Name Game (I’m old enough to have sung it in the playground: ‘Shirley, Shirley bo birley, banana-fanna fo-firley, fee fie mo mirley – Shirley!’) which comically explores the post-stroke problem with remembering names, using audience members’ names for the game. Later, we get a satirical take on the Hokey Cokey (‘put your left arm in, take your whole face out…’); a clever identity-switching rework of Jacques Brel’s paean to bohemian male bravado, Jacky’s Song; and an oddball appropriation of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man, with Peggy’s voice layered over footage of Cohen in concert: ‘If you want a boxer I will step into the ring for you. And if you want a doctor, I’ll examine every inch of you.’

Aha, so here we are – back to the doctors, and back to the stroke. The show is called Ruff – a piece of costume, something that externally marks the internal meeting of neck and head – and Peggy tells us that she is dizzy from ‘the same neck holding the same head holding the same brain’ for all these 68 years, the old brain and the young brain ‘thrashing it out’. She says she sees lights, and we see lights twinkling in her hands. She coughs and needs water, and retrieves the bottle she asked someone to hold at the beginning of the show. Constantly the audience are drawn into the show with small moments of direct contact. She tells us that she has drunk too much coffee in her life. Maybe that’s why she had a stroke. She hears clocks ticking all the time; the clocks are everywhere, she can’t escape them. She can’t sleep for worrying about remembering to get up to make a ham sandwich for her small grandson’s lunchbox.

None of this is acting. This is for real (although ‘real’ does not mean there is no need for performance – playing yourself is probably the hardest job of all). Which brings us back to our opening question: could anyone else take Peggy’s place on stage?

If they did, it would be something other than this show, something very different. I was interested to note that the Time Out listing placed the show under Cabaret rather Theatre. Hardly your usual Cabaret material – but on reflection, there’s a kind of logic. In Cabaret – as in Clown – there is a parallel to Performance in that it is an extension or version of the self that is being portrayed. You could argue that an actor has nothing to mould his character from other than his or her self, but there is something intrinsically different about an actor playing a character (real or fictional), created through a process of observation and mimesis, and an artist who performs the self – or some aspect of the self. It’s perhaps about transparency, about there being no attempt to submerge the self in something ‘other’. In acting, the self and other merge to become one; in performing, the skills of the actor are used without the taking on of an ‘other’.

Whether we give the word ‘actor’ to the creator of this process, or whether we instead use the preferred (in Live Art circles, anyway) word ‘performer’, we’ll here acknowledge the great body of solo work in which the self performing is indivisible from the self who created the content of the work. The best examples of this autobiography – this writing of the self – are, like Peggy’s work, not autobiographical in a self-indulgent navel-gazing way, they instead use the self as the springboard to explore the world of which they are part, finding the personal in the universal and the universal in the personal. Peggy shares this heritage with a host of esteemed performers of her generation who use (or ‘used’ in the case of those who have left this world) the self as their raw material: a list that includes Holly Hughes, Penny Arcade, Carolee Schneemann, Laurie Anderson, Karen Finlay, and Spalding Gray – amongst others.

And sometimes, a personal story just has to be told by that person. The body, mind, soul and sacred essence combined to make up that person is the only possible storyteller – and Ruff is a case in hand. At one point in the show, our storyteller asks, ‘Do I look like a Peggy?’ To which the reply might be: you don’t look like a Peggy but you certainly look like the Peggy – the one and only, the truly remarkable performer that is Peggy Shaw.

Ruff was seen by Dorothy Max Prior at Chelsea Theatre, London, on 5 April 2013. It was presented as part of the ongoing Sacred Season of Contemporary Performance. For more information on this year-round season, and for the coming shows, see the Chelsea Theatre website.

For more information on Peggy Shaw’s solo performances, and her work with Split Britches and other companies, see her website.

Ding Ding – Half Time at Brighton Festival

So here we are, half way through May, and therefore half way through theBrighton Festival, which runs 4 – 26 May (although the Fringe is cheekily marching on till 2 June this year).

So far, I’ve stayed focused on the main festival. In the past 10 days, I’ve schmoozed in the glorious Regency Town House venue with HOUSE festival, at the private view of Mariele Neudecker’s Heterotopias and other Domestic Landscapes; joined Peter Reder at Preston Manor for the site-specific (yes, really and truly site-specific!) The Contents of a House, reviewed here; been to the circus (Circus Eloize’s Cirkopolis at the Dome); visited The Old Market for Tam Teatromusica’s Picablo, an homage to Picasso; gone back to the Dome for the diametrically opposed in all ways Bigmouth and Flathampton; frequented various street corners and alleyways in pursuit of a lost music-hall performer for Magna Mysteria; seen and heard Felix’s Machines flash and tinkle at the University of Brighton gallery; vaguely noted the distressed clothes dressing the Clocktower (one part of Kaarina Kaikkonen’s The Blue Route); shivered in the cold whilst watching outdoor extravaganza The Bone Yard; and laughed my socks off with Victoria Melody’s Major Tom at The Basement.

And although I haven’t, whilst wearing my Total Theatre hat, as yet engaged much with the Fringe, I have done so (switching hats / changing shoes) as my alter-ego Dorothy’s Shoes, hosting two Ragroof Tea Dances at the Famous Spiegel Garden, and leading some instant dance classes in Swing, Charleston and Paso Doble on the streets of Brighton for Fringe City.

So it’s been a busy ten days, and it’s interesting to reflect on what works and what doesn’t work so well in this major festival context. I realise I’m in a privileged position as the recipient of press tickets – I quite like seeing things I don’t like or think haven’t worked, because the experience is such interesting food for thought, but I might perhaps feel differently if I had forked out an arm and a leg for tickets. Although sometimes I think that when people have paid a lot for tickets, perhaps treating a friend or partner to a night out, they are really keen to enjoy the experience, regardless of what is presented, and are sometimes a little over-generous. Audiences are generally very kind, I find!

So first some thoughts on festivals and where the audiences come in. Brighton is the biggest arts festival in England, second only to Edinburgh when it comes to UK fests, but Brighton is a very different beast to Edinburgh. There’s a lot of shows and events all over the place, true, but they are for the most part on at normal show times – evenings and weekends. There isn’t an army of eager theatre-goers who move into Brighton for the month, as they do with Edinburgh in August, tearing round the city day and night in search of the next show. Most tickets are sold to locals, and most people are getting on with their lives in between seeing the shows.

This may be why Mercurial Wrestler’s Magna Mysteria didn’t work quite as well as it could have, although it is very well-intentioned and a lovely idea. It’s a kind of magical mystery tour, in which you sign up at a beautifully crafted fairground sideshow fortune-telling booth, receive a sort-of tarot card (mine was The Sisters – there’s also a Policeman, a Siren, and a Magician), and then await instructions. Now, like other people I know, I’d assumed this meant you’d get the instructions there and then, and you’d then spend an hour or two following a trail. I’d put aside a whole afternoon to do this very thing. But no – you get a text that asks you to visit a website, and you then (over the next few days) get instructions to meet characters at various times and places and thus piece together the unfolding story. Now, I have a pretty flexible life as a freelance artist and writer, but I only managed to make two of the appointments, and I also missed the final denouement. God knows what people who have proper jobs, or who have care of small children or elderly relatives, would do. I completely understand why the company want to create something that unfolds over a number of days, and to keep the instructions and assignments secret till the last minute, but I just can’t see who could manage to complete all the tasks and still live their lives.

I had an interesting chat about it to seasoned street theatre / site-responsive performance director Damian Wright (of Periplum). He has enormous sympathy for the company as he has created similar work in the past, and has learnt along the way about the hazards of such projects. How to balance the mystery with the necessity for people to be able to plan in their engagement with an artistic project? How to find a way to weave in and out of regular life? ‘There must be a way!’ he cries, and together we decide that ideally Magna Mysteria needs to take place on an isolated island with a tiny population so that there is no escape and everyone can be engaged – somewhere like Summerisle in the Wicker Man film, perhaps.

I was with Damian having just seen another of the Without Walls commissions at the Brighton Fest, a show that he’d had a hand in (well, more than a hand – he was the hired-in director of the show). Rag & Bone’s Bone Yard Tales is a kind of environmentally conscious Steampunk romp, featuring some rather nice animated objects tearing around on three-wheeled trolleys. I enjoyed it, but with some reservations – like Magna Mysteria, it felt a little bit work-in-progress so I’m hoping to catch it again at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival on 18 May before saying too much more. I will muse on and report back soon… Keep a look out for the street theatre/outdoor performance round-up.

Another family-friendly show with a strong visual aesthetic is Tam Teatromusica’s Picablo, an almost word-free homage to Picasso. It’s a pleasant enough hour watching the unfolding and morphing 2D and 3D images, as paintings and drawings we are all familiar with (images of harlequins, ballerinas, blue-faced beauties, doves, bulls et al) construct and deconstruct themselves through digital projection that, with the help of two whimsical live characters, interplays with a set of screens, canvases and cubes – the whole thing moving from animation to shadow play to multi-layered moving picture. It’s all very easy on the eyes, and there is a wit and playfulness to the show that reflects Picasso’s own approach to life, but it goes nowhere really as a piece of theatre. Reading the programme notes, I learn that the company’s main interests are in fusing film, music, video and painting. As might therefore be expected, the live performers are the weakest link in this mix – I can only imagine how much better a show this would be with a couple of really top-notch physical performers on stage… too much skipping and posing and not enough dynamic physical action from these two.

So moving on from the so-so to the wow factor shows: my highlights of the first week were Cirque Eloise’s Cirkopolis, a feisty piece that takes its inspiration from Lang’s Metropolis and Gilliam’s Brazil, which I’ll be writing about in a festival circus round-up; the highly entertaining and thought-provoking Major Tom by Victoria Melody, review to come; and the much hyped Bigmouth by Belgian company SKaGeN – a one-man homage to the art of oration that lived up to the hype. See Matt Rudkin’s review of it at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2012.

In the Bigmouth post-show discussion (very ably led by Brighton Festival theatre programmer Orla Flanagan – so ably that she restored my faith in the value of post-show talks. Keep the audience out of it for as long as possible, that’s the secret, folks!) solo performer Valentijn Dhaenens spoke of the pleasures and pains of being part of SKaGeN – a four-person actor-led company with no director, with all the negotiations that entails (hence the need to make a one-man show where he could do what he wanted, without compromise) and of the journey from first idea to project fruition in the creation of Bigmouth. For many years, he accumulated speeches from 2.500 years of human history – Socrates to Osama Bin Laden via Martin Luther King – and had many false starts with the show whilst trying to find the key to the piece. He was, he said, ‘waiting for the speeches to talk to each other’. The breakthrough came with the recasting of the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels’ call to the women of 1930s Germany as a gentle, seductive wooing, which he juxtaposed with the verging-on-the-insane rantings of General George Patton, who demands that cowards be killed before they breed so that America can become the land of the brave. He also has some interesting comments to make on the use of song in the show, which he sees as crucial pauses or moments for reflection in between the torrents of words. The live mixing of sound is a key element of the piece, with echo, reverb, looping, and layering adding to the key dramaturgical notion of the show, which is that words work on us on many different levels, semantic and semiotic. I had trouble reading the surtitles, so just sat back and listened to the sounds – and oh what lovely sounds he made! He has a lovely singing voice, as well as a lovely speaking voice, an easy familiarity with many European languages, and amazing talents as an actor, switching between four different languages and many different accents and timbres. I love his rendering of La la la la la A-mer-ica and how it segues to and from Sinatra’s swinging Fly Me to the Moon and Marilyn Monroe’s breathy Happy Birthday Mr President…

After such a mind-altering and seductive experience, I really ought to have gone home to bed to let it all digest but no, I went from the sublime to the ridiculous, in the form of Flathamptom.

Now, this is a show aimed at primary school children: ‘Ninety joyously playful minutes’ in which ‘children and their families meet the residents of Britain’s flattest town and help them turn Flathampton into a fully three-dimensional world’. For one night only, a special late-night version of the show was turned over to adult festival-goers. We were gathered up by a ‘bus driver’ and toot-tooted from the Dome bar into the Corn Exchange and round a giant playmat, then co-erced into building Ikea-flat-pack play-houses and furniture, then let loose with our toy money to spend and play at the village shops. Unfortunately I just wasn’t in the mood and found it excruciatingly horrid – like being thrown sober into a late-night Glastonbury Festival ‘immersive’ field or a tacky themed club night.

I think I would much rather have experienced the show with its intended audience, primary school children, rather than with a bunch of late-night revellers lapping up the irony. Piña Colada instead of lemonade didn’t do it for me, I’m afraid – although I did enjoy the sherbet dib-dab and the opportunity to guess the number of sweets in the jar. The performers (the cast including many physical and devised theatre stalwarts like Becky Kitter and Frank Wurzinger) did a sterling job in engaging their adult audience in the playtime activities (making cakes, raiding the dressing-up box, playing doctors and nurses, running toy post offices etc), but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I did stay for the allotted 90 minutes, but unfortunately the show was running over time, so I left to catch my last bus home without seeing how the mayhem and merriment got brought to a conclusion. Time for bed, said Zebedee – and off I went, feeling rather old and tired.

Only another ten days to go. Or three weeks if we count to the end of the Fringe…. I need a little kip before the next round, which kicks off for me at the Theatre Royal with Cassus’ Knee Deep, another classy circus show – wake me up before you go-go.