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

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.

Mayhem

The Bangkok Ladyboys have taken up residence on Grand Parade, the Famous Spiegel Garden is sparkling away on the Old Steine, there’s a crashed planeapparently made out of withies and tissue paper sticking out of the ground next to St Peter’s church, a shipping container or two on the seafront, Brighton’s taxi drivers getting into gear for their annual collective denial of the very existence of The Basement arts centre (Where love? Never ’eard of it’), not to mention the ‘shared space’ of New Road awash with afternoon drinkers trying hard to avoid the onslaught of kamikaze truck driving and persistent flyering…

It is very evidently May, and as I’m sure you know – even if you live far, far away – Brighton in May means festival month. That’s ‘festival’ as in theBrighton Festival, a curated festival of international work from many disciplines; the Brighton Fringe, an uncurated hotch-potch of stuff, many of it in pop-up venues, so rather like a mini-Edinburgh Fringe); The Open House festival of art in people’s front rooms, and the edgier and newer Open House offspring HOUSE; the Charleston Festival, in Virginia Woolf’s old gaffe; the Tate on Tour’s Artist Rooms (featuring naughty-but-nice Jeff Koons); and the Great Escape music festival. Plus, the things that people just do in May, because it’s festival month…

Yes, I know how you feel: exhausted just reading all this. We are four days in, and already I’m ready to put my feet up with a nice cup of tea for the rest of the month. But no, on we go.

‘What do you recommend?’ asked a friend on Facebook a few minutes ago. Oh Lord, I don’t know. I recommend hiding under a duvet for a month with a torch and a good book? No, no – I don’t mean it, I love it all, really I do…

Anyway, here goes with a quick whip-through. A highly subjective and idiosyncratic round-up. OK, disclaimer over – here goes.

First to say that elsewhere on this site we’ve got an extensive news/preview item on the main Brighton Festival programme. I’d just add that reviews are going up as and when, so do check – for example, see my review of the big site responsive commission for 2013, Peter Reder’s The Contents of a House. The only other thing I will say here is that the Brighton Festival programme (as in selection of works) is a good and interesting mix, but the Brighton Festival programme (as in the paper thing with information in it) is a dog’s dinner – terribly confusing, horrid layout, awkward daily diary – and the worst sin of all, the listings under artforms at the front and the page numbers don’t match up in many cases, so it’s almost impossible to find what you are looking for. I have actually thrown it across the room in disgust a number of times in the past few weeks… There, I feel better now.

The Fringe frightens me. It’s not as bad as Edinburgh, but that great mass of stuff out there all fighting for our attention… Aaaaaggghhhhh! One way through it is to go to venues you trust – oases of curation within the great open desert of good, bad, and sometimes downright ugly performance work out there. The Nightingale is as good a place as any to start. Winners of Star of the Fringe and Most Groundbreaking Act awards for their off-site extravaganza Dip Your Toes in 2012, the venue are this year keeping things indoors, with a programme that cuts across divides of new writing and physical/visual performance. Although there is one off-site piece, Red Herring’s Speakers’ Corner: A Platform For You, which is very much what it says on the can. (25 May, on New Road as part of Fringe City.) To reserve your slot, email Red Herring.

Two Nightingale shows that cross the new writing/physical theatre divide are Caroline Horton’s Mess, a big hit at the Edinburgh Fringe 2012, which kicked off the Nightingale’s May programme; and Tunnel, written by Mags Chalcraft and directed by Tanushka Marah of Company:Collisions which runs till 12 May, promising ‘poetry and physicality’ to tell its story of a Gaza Strip smuggler stuck in a tunnel with a surfboarder and a goat… other highlights include Boogaloo Stu’s Pop Magic (featuring the Two Wrongies), David Sheppeard’s Holocene (about volcanoes: quote Sheppeard: ‘I love volcanoes’), and Lecoq trained Clout Theatre’s How a Man Crumbled (another Ed Fringe 2012 hit, shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award). There are two very different puppetry companies featured: Annie Brooks’ Colossal Crumbs with Fish Pie, and Touched Theatre with Blue. I’ve seen excerpts from both of these shows at The Nightingale’s year-round new puppetry night, Punched, and on the basis of what was seen there, would urge you to get your tickets now!

Talking of Punched: this ‘puppetry night for grown-ups’ moves (just for May) to a new venue, The Old Market (TOM). A large stage and a big auditorium with lots of room for audience members might be a bit of a risk for producers Touched Theatre, but Punched have been selling out three-night runs at The Nightingale this year, so it should pay off. The Best of Punched night (26 May) will feature some of the juiciest bits from the last year – including work by Matt Rudkin of Inconvenient Spoof fame, Annie Brooks from Colossal Crumbs, and Isobel Smith of Grist to the Mill – not to mention Philip Suggs and his Toy Theatre, Foz Foster and his animated musical instruments, and of course Touched Theatre themselves (a company led by Darren East and Total Theatre’s very own Beccy Smith). We are also promised a few brand-new titbits thrown in for good measure.

TOM is still finding its feet as a venue, and in May is splitting itself between Brighton Festival and Fringe presentations. Included in its frankly worryingly varied May programme is Les Enfants Terribles with The Trench, and an off-site guide-tour type show by TrailBlaze called Someone Else’s Shoes that sounds interesting but could be wonderful or awful, who knows? And it’s also host to numerous music-theatre and cabaret events, so worth checking them out. Ditto The Warren, which last year had a very strong and interesting programme, including the marvellous Translunar Paradise by Theatre Ad Infinitum, for which it won a Best Venue of the Fringe award – not that I got to anything at The Warren in 2012, but never mind – perhaps this year! Warren highlights for May 2013 include My Robot Heart by Molly Naylor, Theatre Temoin’s The Fantasist, Sparkle and Dark’s The Girl with No Heart, Smoking Apples’ The Wordcatcher, and The Girl with Iron Claws by The Wrong Crowd. Nice to see so many puppetry/visual theatre shows programmed, Warren!

Other venues worth checking out include The Marlborough, which punches bigger than its weight with appearances by Bette Bourne and Neil Bartlett amongst other treats, amongst which are a staging of The Secret Garden that looks interesting, and the acclaimed Young Vic production Bitch Boxer.

If circus is your bent, then you are probably best off looking at the main festival programme – except that NoFitState’s Bianco_Turning Savage is part of the Fringe – they are in residence in their own silver spaceship tent on Hove Lawns from 14 May to 2 June. What’s so great about NoFitState (previous winners of a Total Theatre Award for physical/visual performance) is the opportunity to get really close-up to the 20 or so circus performers plus live band who will no doubt be swinging and honking and twirling all around us as we promenade throughout. Also on the Fringe circus front is a beautiful show I saw last year by Feral Theatre called Triptych, featuring three interwoven tales from an aerialist, a shadow puppeteer, and a spoken-word storyteller, staged most lovingly in the Preston Manor old church (right next door to Peter Reder’s (Contents of a) House. Read about Triptych in last year’s Brighton Fringe round-up here.

There’s also circus within a cabaret context at many venues, not least the The Spiegel Garden (run by The Famous Spiegeltent, but for Spiegel anoraks, this is their second tent on-site, the Moulin Rouge big sister is back home in Australia). La Clique returns (although many of its original famed stars have set up their own thing, La Soiree, elsewhere – it remains to be seen what the new lot are like!), and Spiegel favourites like Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen and The Ragroof Players (vested interest, yes yes – I know!) who are there on Sundays throughout May with their famous glamorous Tea Dances. The Spiegeltent are one of many venues who are hosting both Brighton Festival and Fringe shows – which is slightly confusing, I find, but maybe that’s just me.

Talking of programmes that sit between fences, the HOUSE programme 2013 – which started as a kind of alternative programming of domestic spaces for more cutting edge work within the Open House programme – is this year staying both out of houses (except the Regency Town House, which doesn’t count as it isn’t a real lived in domestic space) firmly in the contemporary visual arts camp. Some things (like those shipping containers, featuring an audio-visual piece called Aria by Emma Critchley) look interesting but sadly, no wonderful cross-artform performative thingies like the Hangover Square installation or Sue McLaine’s Still Life, which were two highlights of last year’s programme. And the Regency Town House show by Mariele Neudecker is listed as a Brighton Festival and HOUSE co-commission. Does this matter? I somehow feel a bit cheated – all these different festivals and organisations are getting funding to put on work, so personally I’d rather they did that, not kind of shared it… I’d like to really feel the taste and touch of each individual festival curator.

Is that enough? What else can I mention? Hang on, I’ll just have a glance at my Facebook ‘events’. Oh dear – so, so many. Here’s a selection: Horlicks and Armageddon, featuring ‘electronic music, automata and archives’ from Sarah Angliss of Spacedog fame (at the Old Police Cell Museum); 50 Shades of Suit, being fifty Situationist performances by the legendary Dave Suit (Caxton Arms); a Double-Header of solo performances by Adriano Fettuccini and the Karavan Ensemble’s Marion Deprez at the Lord Nelson; an interactive game by Root Experience, with very little information about what or when but maybe the answer is here; and all sorts of fantastic goings-on at Jane Bom Bane’s café, including an interactive tribute to the crossword puzzle (which has its centenary in 2013), called 20 Across 5 Down.

Right, that is surely enough – perhaps too much – information? Can I go back to bed now please? See you in June!

Compagnia Dello Scompiglio: Trilogia dell’Assenza / Trilogy of Absence

Time – a long time, a short time, recent times, past times. Time – a moment that never passes. The past no longer exists, the future has never existed. There is only the present moment. The present is always – this. Yet still the hands of the clock turn, still the minutes tick by, still we wait for lift-off. Time waits for no man, and certainly for no woman either, so here we all are, and there they all are, caught in this moment forever: two retired ice-skaters making a desperate bid to relive past achievements; a soiled white bride who wants the dreams and desires of the future to satisfy the present, sailing from a great height down into a lake; an ashen black widow who wishes she could wipe out all that is lost, kneading the earth as if it were dough; a team of suited men who read and rant and roll through the hills; an astronaut whose bike was his first spaceship, commencing countdown to the tune of Thus Spoke Zarathustra whilst arranging absent friends into a dream dinner-party.

Cecilia Bertoni’s Trilogia dell’Assenza (Trilogy of Absence), set indoors in the arts centre (first and third shows) and outdoors in the luscious landscapes of the Tenuta dello Scompiglio in Tuscany (second show), is an epic production that takes its audience on a journey – both literally and metaphorically – to explore themes of winning and losing; of childhood shame and adult mortification; of innocence and experience, of presence and absence. And memory – ever-present memory that exists to taunt us, to pull us out of the present moment into a land of hopes and regrets. If only, if only… if only we could be like the Scompiglio dogs Didi and Gogo, always present in the moment. Ah, memory – the joy and curse of being human.

Part one is entitled Tesorino, perche hai perso? (Sweetheart, why did you lose?). We start indoors, in the theatre space, with the ice-skaters who’ve lost everything and want to get it back. It’s as if they are forever destined to overcome past humiliations and failures. They could be Adam and Eve trying to find their way back to a lost paradise. (In the second part of the trilogy a text from Nietzsche reaffirms this suggestion: ‘Smooth ice / Is paradise / For those who dance with expertise.’) Two recorded texts set the scene: a story of a ten-year-old boy’s shame and horror at being home-filmed in his underpants by his crowing father, following an unfortunate incident with a cowpat; and a ten-year-old girl’s humiliation at her Catholic Confirmation ceremony, wearing her emancipated mother’s choice of a cream dress and ‘Florentine’ straw hat, when every other little girl in the church is in virginal white dress and veil. Words, images and associations from these texts resonant throughout this first piece, and in the subsequent two other works in the trilogy. Our two skaters are pulled between gravity and levity: dangling from harnesses, clambering over a multi-tiered moveable scaffold, falling with full force to the ground. The ice is long gone, and with one skate off and one skate on, they hobble and posture and pose, preening themselves and each other. They are past their prime, but there is the hope of one last victory – even if it is just a victory over the other one. The onstage relationship between the two performers (creator of the trilogy Cecilia Bertoni, and French actor/co-creator of part one, Serge Cartellier) bears the mark of longtime collaboration and complicity. They are at ease in their roles and with the interactions of their two characters, creating a playful dynamic that balances the humour and pathos of their situation. The soundscape, by Carl G Beukman, expertly weaves spoken texts, crackling radio recordings and mindless muzaks together into a rich, multi-layered aural tapestry. Grainy videos (by Claire Guerrier) projected onto a rear screen and two small metal cases at the front of the performance space add a layer of visual imagery as hazy as half-remembered dreams. We believe unreservedly in the limbo world our two protagonists occupy, and in the situation that (inevitably) cannot be resolved.

Next we are escorted by a suited man wielding a megaphone into the great outdoors for part two, Riflessi in bianco e nero (Reflections in white and black). We journey through the woods and terraces of Scompiglio, cleverly guided by our man with the megaphone – it is great to witness the always challenging problem of how to lead and steward an audience being dealt with in a creatively interesting way. There are four stops along the way. At the highest point, we sip berry juice and gaze narcissistically into a mirror set into the ground, a pair of white ice skates hanging above, to one side an open dictionary marked at the definition of ‘memory’. Further down the terraces we meet the black widow (Marialucia Carones) and white bride (Serena Gatti), voicing laments and lullabies with their bodies, as harsh cracks and explosions sound across the hills, a posse of men posed on chairs above them. Our two ice-skaters appear as silent witnesses to the action. As we move on to Il Cemetero del Tempo (The Graveyard of Memory), a distorted recording exhorts us to ‘never look back’; the cemetery of decomposing metal beds and rusted gates becomes the site for a symphony of distressed dances and obsessive-compulsive actions. At the final stop, the lakeside Funerale del Tempo (Funeral of Time), we witness a wondrously beautiful scene: the widow close to the lake’s surface; the bride suspended on a harness terrifyingly high from one of the top branches of an extremely tall and magnificent old tree; the posse of men now dressed in vermillion red lounging on the banks, looking as if they are made from the same red brick of the house behind them. From clay we are made, to clay we return: dust to dust, ashes to ashes…

The third part of the trilogy, Kind of Blue (titled in English) returns us indoors, this time not to the black-box theatre but to a smaller white-cube gallery space in which we are seated on scaffolding, overlooking the only performer (our astronaut, Mauro Carulli), who in turn is placed inside a metal tower with a playground slide attached, and a bicycle leaning against it. The room becomes the site for a three-sided projection, on two walls and a floor, creating an unsettling and vertiginous perspective. There are echoes from the earlier two sections of the trilogy, but the connecting threads to this third piece feel slighter than the links between one and two – perhaps because we are meeting new characters (live and on film), and those we have already met have faded out of the action for the most part, their headless bodies passing by on the conveyer belt of film to each side of us, their heads arriving, like John the Baptist’s, as offerings on plates at the dream dinner party. Thematically, the main text used – from Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, reflecting on summit and abyss not as diametrically opposed concepts but as one and the same thing – ties us in very neatly to part one. The return to childish pleasures on the slide and the bicycle harp back to a section in Riflessi in bianco e nero in which we hear the gentle sounds of music boxes and ball games whilst gazing upon the antics of the occupants in the distressed playground of the Cemetery of Memories.

Each of these three parts of the Trilogia dell’Assenza is a self-contained and autonomous show. Kind of Blue is the newest of the three, and comes accompanied by a small exhibition/installation of photographs and other research materials. During the three-week run at Tenuta dello Scompiglio, the shows have sometimes been presented as separate works, and sometimes as a three-part experience over an afternoon and evening. The first and third part, sited as they are in theatre/gallery space, could be happily toured or presented in other theatres or arts centres. And even though the second show of the trilogy is site-specific to the spaces of Scompiglio, it could potentially be reworked for other spaces. Each of the three feel complete, but there is a special resonance in seeing all three together, noting the echoes and references and developments of the themes throughout.

Taken as a whole: this feels like a truly contemporary theatre – one that is indeed a crossroad of the arts (to steal a line from Jean-Louis Barrault). Original texts and found texts (from Nietzsche, Murakami, Pinter et al); autobiographical confession mixed with poetic reflection and semiotic wordplay; movement theatre and performance actions; montaged soundscapes; video projected in many different settings; short film; sets and structures that invite physical action; aerial performance; inventive lighting; installation in the landscape… the list of ways and means seems pretty endless. But the senses are not overloaded: there is time to savour each new development; there is space to really see and hear and feel what is being presented. The deep themes addressed – loss, failure, memory, regret, the passing of time – could, in other hands, lead to a heavy and wearying audience experience, but the balance is kept between light and dark. Absurd humour often cuts in to relieve the work of any overly oppressive elements, whilst also allowing us to feel the pain and angst of the individual and universal experiences of shame, bereavement and regret that permeate the work. Partaking of all three shows together in one sitting, it feels as if we have been fed a very generous and nutritious theatrical feast.

www.delloscompiglio.org

Blast Theory: Fixing Point

‘Have you used a GPS system before?’ asks the steward, handing me a smartphone and a pair of headphones. Alarm bells ring: I never have much luck with Google Maps. ‘Me’ is me, she explains, and there’s a white dotted line to follow. When circles show up on the screen, I’m to move towards them to locate the sound recordings.

And thus I find myself in a field full of bemused cows, which I need to cross to reach the small copse in which the recordings are located. Being nervous of cows, I develop a strange looped cow-avoidance walking pattern, which throws the GPS into overdrive as it tries to realign me with the dotted line. It’s not a good start, and it’s downhill from there on in.

On my headphones is a pretty average electronic soundscape (by Chris Clark of Warped Records – I’m a great fan of Warped, but what I’m hearing isn’t particularly inspiring), interspersed with verbatim soundbites about a ‘disappeared’ person that pop into your headphones when you and the GPS system coincide at a given spot. The absent character at the heart of the piece is a real person: Newry man Seamus Ruddy, who went missing in a wood in France almost thirty years ago – killed (it is claimed) by the Irish National Liberation Army, a breakaway group from the Provisional IRA. The words are those of Seamus’ sister Anne Morgan, although spoken by an actor (Amanda Jones). I manage to locate two recordings out of a possible six or so, and also get to hear an introductory text that pops up as I cross the field. I understand that I am supposed to receive this as a fragmented narrative, but the combination of the minimalism of the texts, the imbalance of sound levels of texts and soundscape, and the fact that I only locate some of the spots, means that I come away feeling I’ve learnt very little about this man, and the devastating effect of his disappearance. It is immensely frustrating. There was more to learn about Seamus from the A4 sheet of photocopied paper we are given afterwards than is manifest in the show itself.

We are, I suppose, placed in a wood in a field because Seamus disappeared in a wood (in France, 28 years ago) but, for goodness sake, writing and theatre exist to evoke a sense of place – we don’t have to be physically placed in a woodland to understand Seamus’s plight, and that of the family who have never found his remains. The source material (email correspondence transposed into spoken word) might have made a good sound piece in someone else’s hands, and had that been the case it would have made more sense to me as an experimental radio play, broadcast on Radio 3.

I suppose you could argue that being alone in the woods, frustratedly searching for something you can’t locate, is a metaphor for the plight of the lost man’s family, but I wasn’t even alone – the small copse was occupied by three other people whilst I was there, and at least two of them were having as many problems as me with locating the sound recordings. I spent a lot of time standing still, waiting for the system to catch up, and often it froze completely for many minutes. After 30 minutes it cuts out, sending a ‘your time is up’ message.

So the fundamental problems with the piece could be summed up as: technology that isn’t yet up to the job; a nebulous connection between site chosen and the core content of the piece (the story of Seamus Ruddy); a less than inspiring soundscape by the collaborating musician; a desire to tell an important story that gets strangled by the chosen means of communicating that story.

The worthiness of the cause – promoting the plight of the ‘disappeared’ – should mean that the art that attempts to address it really is worthy of that cause, and this sadly isn’t. Seamus deserves better.

www.blasttheory.co.uk

Clod Ensemble: Zero

‘You are nothing but a big zero,’ says the Fool to Lear. I paraphrase, apologies Mr Shakespeare. But this is not, you understand, a version of King Lear, although that was the starting point – a period of research supported by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which Clod Ensemble discovered that what they didn’t want to do was make a version of the play.

What they’ve done instead is take the play’s five-act structure, some of its themes (jealousy, desire, father/daughter dynamics, sibling rivalry, the absent mother), and some of its motifs and metaphors (weather, nature, storms) to create Zero, which has been commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and Brighton Festival, in collaboration with South East Dance. I see it on its second ever performance, and it does feel very new and, to be honest, not quite cooked yet. Actually, even more crucially, there are some fundamental flaws in the piece…

It’s an end-on piece presented in a large space (as in large stage and large auditorium). The large performance space is familiar territory for Clod, but many of their works (An Anatomie in Four Quarters, Red Ladies, Under Glass) are presented in spaces that are shared with small audience groups, or, in the case of shows in which the audience is in a more traditional seated auditorium, that have an intense and intimate feel (for example, in two of their collaborations with Split Britches – Must, and It’s a Small House and We Lived in it Always). Zero tackles the big stage / big auditorium dynamic by going for a full-on visual and aural assault with things happening all over the place, and hardly a chance for the audience to draw breath or take in what they are experiencing. Certainly, when it comes to the physical action anyway, as soon as something interesting starts, it stops, or is interrupted.

As always with Clod, this show is a collaboration between the company’s two co-directors, composer Paul Clark and movement theatre director Suzy Wilson – and as always the two artforms are both of equal importance. It is – despite the fact that it is supported by Sadler’s Wells and South East Dance – not a contemporary dance piece; it is a total theatre piece, in which the aural, visual and physical elements interweave harmonically.

At least, that’s what it should be. At the moment, the movement work feels much too far into the contemporary dance camp for comfort, and to a contemporary dance that feels pretty dated: there are rather too many references to Pina Bausch’s gestural dance; too many sections of choreography that doggedly tag and illustrate the blues-inspired score; too many references to popular dance (Charleston, for example) that get repeated too many times; too many clichés of contemporary dance and theatre (such as the stopping-another-dancer-in-her-tracks intervention so beloved of Wendy Houston/Forced Entertainment). I often find myself thinking that I’ve seen so much of this choreography so many times before. It is almost as if Suzy Wilson hasn’t quite allowed herself to do what she does best – make visual/physical theatre that uses dance as one of its elements, rather than dance per se.

And yet despite the criticisms I enjoyed a lot about Zero. I loved the robust and earthy music, played by a group of seven musicians that includes legendary harmonica player Johnny Mars and trombonist Annie Whitehead; I loved the energy of the performers, and mix of bodies of different ages and sizes and experiences onstage (the ensemble including Clod favourites like Zoe Bywater and new company members such as Antonia Grove); I enjoyed the soundtrack of found or recorded texts from many different sources (including clips of siblings Jackie and Joan Collins, and the Kray brothers) that were cleverly edited and placed in counterpoint to the live music. There are some lovely hero/chorus ensemble sequences, some good same-sex duets exploring power struggles within relationships, and some great solo vignettes – I particularly enjoyed the Hebrew rant by charismatic Israeli actor/dancer Uri Roodner.

So there is a lot to like in Zero, yet still it feels lacking. Previous Clod Ensemble shows bear the mark of a highly talented director of physical theatre, a marvellous manipulator of bodies and spaces; Zero suffers a little from Suzy Wilson being cast (or casting herself) as a contemporary dance choreographer, and falling a little short. More visual theatre, less contemporary dance please, Clod!