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

Victoria Melody: Major Tom

In which Victoria Melody, a 35 year-old performance artist with a winning smile and an interest in anthropology, and her trusty dog Major Tom, a six year-old Basset hound with lovely long ears and an interest in Schmakos dog treats, pursue parallel paths of gruelling competition in their endeavours to become beauty queen / champion show dog, respectively.

And all in the name of art! What some might call intensive research for a theatre show, others might view as a life-as-art decision to really live it in order to know it, before you can even start to tell the story. And here onstage, telling that story in their very different ways, are Victoria Melody and Major Tom.

There’s a deceptively simple, beautifully designed set: dark stage, white dog cushion and bowl (stage left), white semi-opaque folding Chinese screen for the costume changes (stage right), and upstage a large screen, with underneath it a set of rather nice letter blocks spelling out Major Tom’s name in lights. Victoria mostly talks (well, you’d be surprised if I said the dog did) whilst Major mostly snoozes, and the anecdotes are supplemented by short bursts of video that take us, directly and without the need of any additional ironic framing, straight into the world of dog shows and beauty pageants – plus we get a number of quick-change costume catwalks (dress wear, swim wear, evening wear) and a little bit of pimping and preening of Major’s basset assets. The lighting design is elegantly crisp and simple, the sound and video perfectly supportive of the live performance. Everything that happens on stage is carefully choreographed, and executed with panache and precision – there is evidence of the influence of Victoria Melody’s mentor, Ursula Martinez, and that is only for the good.

Major Tom is the one wild card, free as he is to do as he will. He looks, says Victoria, like an old Tory, and that is exactly how it is – he dozes through the rhetoric like a House of Lords veteran, occasionally looking up and yawning or shaking those long ears, as if in agreement or approbation. Now and again there’s some noisy slurping from his water bowl, and the occasional stroll round the space. As Pina Bausch and Alain Patel have found, having a dog on stage adds a wonderful extra dimension to performance work – dogs are just so perfectly present.

Victoria Melody is an engaging performer, and her show is a clever weaving of the parallel stories of dog shows and beauty pageants. It all starts with Major Tom. We hear the history of his provenance and pedigree, and we learn that Victoria and her husband Mitch agreed that they’d first buy a plant, and if that lived buy a dog, and if that lived have a baby. Victoria (whose previous work includes an intensive and long-term engagement with Northern pigeon-fanciers) decides that an investigation of the world of dog shows will be her next artistic venture, so Major finds himself propelled into the limelight. Unfortunately, although he does well as an amateur, once he turns pro he keeps coming last, so needs a fair bit of training and grooming. Later his ‘mummy’ decides that it is only fair that she puts herself through a similar ordeal, and thus starts her journey on the beauty trail, with her eventually winning the title Mrs Brighton and being entered for the coveted crown of Mrs England (no, really!). Meanwhile, back in the dog world Major Tom’s success has risen to dizzy heights and he finds himself being entered for Crufts…

The story of how they both get sucked into the world of competition, and eventually ease out back into normal life, is a ‘gentle ride’ (as one fellow theatre-maker described it after the show), but the gentleness is deceptive. Had this been presented as a polemical rant against the Beauty Myth and the ways in which women’s bodies are judged, we’d have switched off in the first five minutes. Instead, Victoria Melody seduces us into her world with laughter. We guffaw at the absurdities, and we share her ambivalence towards it all, questioning the ethos whilst still loving it, as she does. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have lovely legs, shown off to their best advantage in a pair of five-inch-heeled sparkly silver shoes?

There are hard-hitting undercurrents – but they hit us through the holes forged with laughter. There are many cutting moments of awareness of the convoluted and simultaneous demands of so many different cultural attitudes to beauty – human and canine. We feel for Major when his ears and ribs and teeth and legs are commented upon. We are with Victoria as she battles with her weight, takes on a personal trainer, forces herself into skin-tight frocks, gets waxed and tanned, learns to walk in the highest of heels. I’m reminded of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and its discussion of women taking on ‘femininity’ as a drag queen does. Victoria’s stance is of someone taking on a feminine identity that is other than her own, although one she enjoys indulging in and playing with, almost treating herself as a real live Barbie Doll.

No doors are left unopened – there’s a fantastic moment when she recounts an incident in a changing-room, as she realises that all her beauty contestant companions are staring aghast at ‘her hairy bush’. At other moments, we hear of criticism of her thin, fine hair (she gets extensions) and her ‘upside-down’ mouth, which she is told will turn further downwards when she ages unless she gets plastic surgery now (she doesn’t do it, which causes the female members of the audience to roar in approval).

At the end of it all, the competitions won or lost, and the making of the theatre show underway, we learn that Victoria’s husband Mitch asks, ‘Can we go back to normal now?’

Major Tom, created and performed by Victoria Melody, commissioned and produced by Farnham Maltings, is a major achievement – bright and breezy sexual politics without the polemic, entertaining and thought provoking. It’s beautifully designed, carefully choreographed, and performed with panache. A grand success!

http://www.victoriamelody.co.uk/

Peter Reder: The Contents of a House

Pedigree and provenance, that’s what it’s all about. This ‘subversive promenade performance’ is one of the key commissions for this year’s Brighton Festival, and follows in the Festival’s tradition of commissioning high quality site-responsive work as a key part of its theatre programme.

It takes the form of a tour around Preston Manor, described quite accurately as ‘the epitome of Edwardian glamour’, set in its own luscious grounds on the outskirts of central Brighton. The provenance of the objects within – many of which, we learn, were not originally here at all, but were bussed in by Preston Manor’s enterprising first curator, a Mr Roberts, who saw the place as ‘his very own Wendy House’. The pedigree of the people who lived here – to wit, the formidable Lady Stanford, who could give Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell a run for her money by all accounts; her half-sisters, who were thrown out on their ear somewhere along the way; her as-good-as disinherited son; her beloved grandson who tragically died young; and her various husbands, who were obliged to take her surname. Not to mention the dogs…

The dogs play a crucial part in this story, serving to illustrate the importance of ‘pedigree’. The dog-owners of Brighton and their peculiarities get casually mentioned in Peter’s introductory talk, as we gather in the manor’s dining room. Later, the dogs that have occupied the house get solemnly name-checked, as we stand in the morning room (or is it, asks Peter, a mourning room?). He skilfully segues together a reflection on grandsons lost to mustard gas poisoning in the Great War with tributes to the occupants of Preston Manor’s famous pet cemetery. It’s interesting, says Peter, that we know the names of the dogs that lived here, but we don’t know the names of the servants. And it is noted that Jock and Queenie and the rest of Lady Stanford’s pedigree chums have the expected epitaphs – ‘faithful friend’ and ‘beloved pet’ bar one that reads ‘Here Lies Tatters, Not that it Matters’. And why doesn’t it matter? Because poor Tatters was a mongrel. Towards the end of the show we see film footage of a black dog frisking around the grounds, unencumbered – we presume the ghost of Tatters (ghosts being another thread through the show).

And as for provenance, there are a hundred and one fascinating tales about the things in the manor that are in and out of time and place. We see a library now stripped of books and turned into a dining room, and a maid’s bedroom with furniture that has been subsequently brought in: because, says Peter, when the house first opened to the public, who’d have been interested in seeing a maid’s room? This is one of many points on the tour where the upstairs-downstairs binary divide of Edwardian life is discussed, and Peter makes the interesting point that a girl in service was significantly less free than a girl working in a factory. She would have had almost no private life, may even have been stopped from marrying by her masters, hardly more than a slave.

And so where are the books? In the very public drawing room there’s a few novels that the Stanfords (or perhaps the curators that re-arranged their possessions) wanted their guests to see – including a very nasty 1930s book on eugenics that nowadays, if we were to own such a thing, we would almost certainly hide from view. Yet hidden away in the vaults, Peter came across a copy (in French!) of the Karma Sutra, which no one nowadays would be at all ashamed about owning. In another room, there’s a bookcase devoid of books but stuffed full of white porcelain – we surmise, says Peter, that Lady Stanford was not a big reader. The hideous Foo-dog statues lined up hardly strike us as desirable objects, but apparently they were (quite likely) looted from China, so their provenance no doubt added a frisson of desirability.

Running through The Contents of a House is a constant questioning of what is ‘real’ and what is not. There are numerous references throughout to ways in which reality and fantasy interweave: the house as a real home versus the house as a film set; the real snow in the grounds when Peter started his research in January and the fake snow that caused a mess when the house was hired by Noel Edmonds for a TV Christmas Special; the real life staff who work here and the Edwardian ghosts they may or may not have encountered; the traces on the wrangles and bell-pulls of the nameless cooks and butlers who really lived and worked here versus the fictional cooks and butlers – hammy actors who play out the imagined stories for the parties of school children who come along to dress in pinafores and caps and learn about Edwardian life. We are told again and again that things are not what they seem to be – everything on view has been tampered with or changed in one way or another, often many times over. And it’s not just inside the house that’s been tampered with, changed: the noise of the busy London Road traffic outside would once have been the flow of a small river, now forced underground.

There are stories and musings and things to look at and reflect upon, this augmented by a number of short video pieces interspersed throughout the tour – the best of which is a nicely edited montage of short interviews with Preston Manor employees about ghosts and ghostly encounters. And as in earlier works by Peter Reder that use a similar format (the performance lecture cum guided tour), the artist’s own autobiographical material is weaved into the work – the most poignant example being the placing of a photo of his deceased father on the four-poster in the main bedroom, prompting a monologue on the desire to die in one’s bed and the changed roles that beds play in our lives nowadays. How many of us, like Peter, grow up sleeping in the very bed we were born on? A section that tries to link the Stanford family’s relationship with the SW7 district in London to Peter’s own memories of South Kensington is less successful, feeling a little forced.

The Contents of a House was seen by Total Theatre on the press night, which (bizarrely for a whole-month run) was the very first show. Peter Reder is a seasoned performance artist, and for the most part relaxed and in control, but a little unsure of himself at times, as anyone would be on the first outing of a complex one-man promenade work. And it was a tough audience – a bunch of journalists with crossed arms and frowns and/or notebooks in hand, which hardly helps. There was one scene (the Karma Sutra one) in which a would-be humorous suggestion that the second husband of Lady Stanford was gay falls flat on its face. He also caused a little bit of consternation at one point by asking the audience not to walk around behind him whilst he was talking, whereas at the beginning of the show they had been encouraged by the person introducing the event to feel that they could look (if not touch) quite freely. So a little adjusting in audience management needed – which will surely come throughout the month.

First nerves and early teething troubles aside, an interesting piece, well researched and well delivered. Perhaps a little too bound to its tour guide format – Peter Reder could, potentially, subvert the set-up more forcefully – but a very full and rich experience.

www.peter-reder.co.uk

Do I please you, or do I please myself?

The title of this blog is a quote – or misquote, or paraphrase perhaps – from Liz Aggiss’s new work-in-progress The English Channel, an excerpt of which was presented 9 April at the Brighton Dome’s new venture The Works. (And where do I know that name from? Ah yes it was the title of a soon-to-be-revived series of features in Total Theatre. But we won’t complain, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.)

Anyway, back to Liz. There she is in all her glittery green glory, standing before us with hips a twitchin’ and a goblin grin on her face. ‘Do I please you, or do I please myself?’ she asks. It’s a statement that is at the core of an artistic investigation into the nature of performance, and of being a performer – and in particular of being a female performer age 60, who has long past the stage in her life or her career when she has to bother too much about what others think. And yet of course you never stop being bothered – never stop trying to please, never stop giving them what they want. That’s what performing is all about, isn’t it? That’s what being a woman is all about, isn’t it? ‘I’m a one-woman variety show’ says Liz as she takes her seat for the after-show discussion.

But the question raised in Liz’s piece – who this is actually for, the artist or the audience, who is pleasing whom? – is a pertinent one for the whole evening.

The latest new night of new work to hit Brighton, The Works is an open evening, advertised publicly, ticketed but free, in which works-in-progress are presented by three artists or companies at various stages of their career. But why? Who is it for? What are the expectations of both artist and audience?

I’ll admit straight away that I’ve developed a mistrust, steadily growing over the past decade or so, of Scratch nights and work-in-progress showings. There is an irony here, as without blowing my own horn too loudly, I did play a part in establishing this now-commonplace theatrical activity, so perhaps have only myself to blame. In the late 1990s, as director of an artists’ forum called Bodily Functions (yes I know – I didn’t choose the name), I set up something called Platform at the Komedia Theatre – a twice-yearly space for artists working in physical, visual and devised theatre / live art performance to present the beginnings of their ideas to a (hopefully) receptive audience. One of our production assistants was one Louise Blackwell, who then left Brighton to work at BAC in London, and subsequently coin the term Scratch nights, using a similar format to the Platform at the Komedia: a number of 10–15 minute acts; feedback forms to pass comment on work seen; and the chance to chat to the artists informally in the bar afterwards.

What we found with Platform was that even educated audiences often found it hard to really understand how to receive the work. ‘Most of the things I saw were not really developed’ said our then Arts Council officer in response (and ACE hadn’t even funded this particular part of our work, to add insult to injury). Er yes, it is unfinished work so it is not yet developed – that’s the point… But actually, is it fair to present snatches of unfinished work to an audience and expect them to understand? Can it do the artist more harm than good to present their yet-to-incubate musings in public? Maybe it’s a personal thing, but I know that when I’m developing work I often hold it close to my heart for a very long time, not even letting close family and friends in on it. Yet theatre is an artform in which the artist’s relationship to the audience is at the heart of the matter, so they have to be let in at some point. There are some venues / organisations who have worked hard to improve the scratch format: the Nightingale Theatre, for example, structures their evenings very well, with the post-show feedback set up as small roundtable discussion groups, audience members free to flow round to whichever artists’ tables they would like to join. I’m still wary of scratch evenings, but theirs is better than most.

The Works was work-in-progress excerpts rather than scratching new ideas, I suppose I should make that clear – and the three pieces shown were at very different stages of development. Liz Aggiss, I suspect, wouldn’t go anywhere near an audience until she’d put in a lot of legwork and was reasonably sure of where she was going and what she was attempting to achieve. Her excerpt from The English Channel was the very necessary stepping out from the solitary space of the rehearsal studio into the engagement with audience that is necessary for something to become a real piece of performance work. It was very new, very fresh, finding its way – but it was clear about what it was and where it was heading, and was thus immensely entertaining and thought-provoking.

So I’m fine with the idea of seeing work that is in progress, once progress has been made – I think there is a value in presenting early versions of newly created shows, and for artists to then rework them as a result of trying out before an audience, but that’s different to this bitty ‘a taste of this and a slice of that and tell us what you think’ approach. I’ll confess that I didn’t read the publicity properly and I thought I was just going along to see an early version of Liz’s show, so when I found out I was in for a two-hour marathon – three excerpts from three very different works, plus this rather formal discussion process after each one – I got a bit sulky!

Also to say that another gripe against the pot-pourri approach is that I feel unsure how to respond to something when I’m only privy to part of the picture. To just get 15 or 20 minutes of what will be a full-length show, then to be asked what we’ve seen and understood, is inevitably encouraging discussion along the lines of ‘I didn’t understand this’ or ‘’you need to make that clearer’. It’s like being in a writers’ workshop and reading out chapter four of your novel-in-progress and someone saying,‘Well, you’ll need to make that clearer, I didn’t understand what that character was doing’. Well of course you didn’t – I’ve just read you chapter four and you haven’t read chapters one, two or three, have you? How can you possibly understand?

But the aspect of the evening I had most problems with was the feedback format. The pieces were presented to a large audience in a formal theatre setting, with the feedback session after each one set up like a regular post-show discussion – i.e. with the artist or company and facilitator (director/dramaturg Lou Cope) sat on chairs facing the audience, who are then led into the discussion with pre-decided questions about the work, followed by some open/general discussion. To give Lou her due, she did start the evening by reminding the audience that this ‘wasn’t about them’ and that questions or comments made should be precise and to the point and relate directly to the work seen – but of course that didn’t happen. Instead we had the usual post-show horrors: the awkward silences as people try to think up answers to the questions thrown out to them; the gushers who can’t stop telling the artist how wonderful she is (and that’s helpful to the making of the new work? I don’t think so); the ‘maybe you could do it this way instead’ problem-solvers; and the ‘I haven’t really got an opinion about any of it but I feel the need to say something, and say it at length’ ramblers. Perhaps some people find this useful, but it just felt strained and uncomfortable to me. Both artists and audience were placed in the spotlight (literally and metaphorically) and when on the spot didn’t necessarily talk much sense. I tend to feel that just presenting the work to an audience is enough for the artist, who can then form their own opinion of what worked and what didn’t. Do it in front of people and you can feel when something sinks sadly into the ground or when something is a genius moment of inspiration – you don’t need a post-show discussion to tell you.

In many ways, this new venture feels like an audience development initiative disguised as something else. ‘Do give us your email addresses so we can tell you when these shows are on’ being an obvious give-away. As a friend of mine said, if that is what it is, let’s be upfront about it, rather than pretending it’s there to help the artist make the work. I dislike the pretence that it is useful to get the audience engaged with the dramaturgical process of making a show. In my humble opinion, that’s the artist’s job.

Diederik Peeters: Red Herring

The show starts – or does it? A figure with a sheet of white paper for a face appears from the very back of the deep performance space, walking slowly, an animated Magritte painting. He’s here to open the show; he would sing, but… But no, that was a red herring; in a flash the man re-emerges (minus the sheet of white paper) from a half-open doorway, a rapid lighting change transforming the space into a film noir set. Unmasked, pushing his lank hair behind his ears, Belgian artist/performer Diederik Peeters tells us in a slightly agitated, conspiratorial tone that this is the real start of the show. And so we begin, and begin, and begin. And so it goes.

The theatrical conceit is that everything is a red herring – there is no start, and no ending either, and what happens in between (the start and end of the show; the start and end of life) is a wild and random assortment of stimuli that juggle for our attention constantly. Where does life, never mind art, begin and end when so much that happens exists in parallel time; when time itself is at the mercy of memory and imagination and the games they play with our perception; when so much random stuff bombards our senses night and day? In the onstage world he creates so ingeniously life is a roomful of projectors running numerous films simultaneously. He sets up a game of rewinds and replays, of fanciful experiments and artful ‘mistakes’ – and of course the truth is that whilst playing with the notion of chaos theory, playing with the various realities and fictions of performance, film, radio, and indeed life itself, what we witness is something breathtakingly beautiful in its structure, and in the interplay of its aural, visual and physical elements.

Some moments are worthy of Buster Keaton: standing behind a dislodged door, just his hands showing (that image itself another gorgeous sculptural moment), he suddenly clambers up the door, which crashes over, bringing him almost crashing into the front row. At other points, he turns into an onstage Foley artist, creating a sound drama loaded with suspense – shoes crunch on gravel, the wind howls, a door creaks (doors feature a lot in this show). Later the drama is replayed in physical action, in tandem with the soundtrack that we’ve seen and heard being created. At other points he teasingly invites us to close our eyes: ‘DON’T think of the beach!’ he cries as we hear a soundtrack of crashing waves. Throughout the piece, things seen and heard are re-viewed/re-experienced with a twist. Constantly we ask ourselves: what did we see, what did we hear, what did we think, what really happened? What exactly is ‘reality’?

Diederik Peeters’ influences are worn on his sleeve: silent comedy, horror and suspense film, and the early 20th century art traditions of surrealism and absurdism. His years of experience both as a visual artist and as a performer with Jan Fabre and with Alan Platel have paved the way for the creation of solo work of the highest order. I say solo work, but there is a strong team behind the main player: the work of sound artist and technician Lieven Dousselaere is fantastic. Set design, lighting, dramaturgy – all contributes to one harmonious whole.

Red Herring is that wonderful and rare achievement: a show that is both pure entertainment and pure art, the two co-existing in a structured chaos controlled by a masterful performer. Proof (if any more were needed) that Belgium is currently a hotbed of top quality contemporary performance. A perfect choice to open The Basement’s spring season – a season that sees a number of excellent European shows brought to the UK over the coming weeks.

Ockham’s Razor: the map is not the territory

‘At the beginning we didn’t have a map, or even a destination’ say Ockham’s Razor in the programme notes for their latest full-length show Not Until We Are Lost, which opened the London International Mime Festival 2013 at the brand spanking new Platform Theatre in King’s Cross (a cavernous building that is home to the newly enlarged Central Saint Martins art school).

‘It’s terrifying to be lost; to not know whether to keep moving forward, or try and find your way back, or whether you should stop’, they say. Yet in the getting lost, straying from the usual path into new territories, we discover things we might never have otherwise discovered – new ideas, new experiences, new aspects of ourselves. In life, as in theatre-making, ’tis better to have run the risk and really lived, rather than to have just taken the path you know best which offers the least challenges and risks. It is for all these reasons and more that Ockham’s Razor cite the Thoreau quote ‘not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves’ as the inspiration for their new show.

The company – Alex Harvey, Tina Koch, and Charlotte Mooney – have, for quite a while, wanted to make a show ‘with the audience on stage alongside us’. In March 2012, before the process of making this new show got properly underway, I met the trio at artsdepot in North London, where they were working with Oily Cart on Something in the Air, a show for young people with severe physical and/or learning disabilities. In this tender and lovely show evoking the turn of the year and the flavour of the seasons, the children are placed in swinging cradles while the Ockhams aerialists unfurl from brightly-coloured silk ‘nests’ to swing gently around with the children, bounce balls and flutter leaves above, between or under them, and perform gentle trapeze or corde lisse routines so close that the children could almost reach out and touch them. Alex and Tina tell me that they loved working in this way for the Oily Cart collaboration, and the company were keen to explore the possibilities of a similar intimate relationship with the audience in their own new show. At that time, they had just started working with composer Graham Fitkin, and were excited by the idea of exploring the concept of a mobile choir interweaving with the audience (an idea also explored recently by H2Dance whose show Something to Say, also a promenade work featuring a mobile choir, played at Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe – there must be something in the air, so to speak). In the Ockhams case, the desire to work so closely (literally) with singers came out of their experience working as performers on Improbable’s version of the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha for the ENO. Alex says he ‘loved the power of being that close to the singers – the physical effect’. For the early dates of Not Until We Are Lost the company have worked with local choirs in regions they’ve toured the show to, but the LIMF run features a choir specially put together for the show.

A residency at the Generating Company’s space in France, then a block of time back at artsdepot (where they were circus artists-in-residence 2011-2012) culminated in the first showing of the work there in September 2012. Something in the Air is also supported by Dance City in Newcastle, and by the Lancaster collective Live at LICA, who specifically supported the development of Graham Fitkin’s specially composed score. Also name-checked for their support are Circomedia, the Bristol school for circus and physical theatre where the Ockham’s Razor trio trained and met. Circomedia co-founder Bim Mason is on board for the show, credited with ‘additional direction’, as is Matilda Leyser, the renowned aerialist who taught the company and whom Alex cites (with Bim) as one of his main influences.

Talking of influences and early training: it is interesting to note that the company members have backgrounds in visual art, scenography and literature that prefigure their circus training – so hardly surprising to note that their productions have an intelligent and multi-textured sensibility offering a view of ‘circus’ as a place for metaphysical reflection on the nature of human existence. The visual aesthetic is such that entering the space at The Platform there is the feel of having walked into an all-enveloping sculpture.

It’s always interesting to meet artists thick in the process of making work and hearing what the intentions might be – then to compare and contrast those impressions with what you witness when you finally see the show. I’m impressed by the great metal structures above my head, glinting in the ghostly, deep-sea green light – but my eyes are most strongly drawn to two ‘stations’ on either side of the room: one features an impressive pair of harps; the other a kind of see-through tower flanked by a Chinese pole. I recognise, if that’s the word for something you’ve pulled up from an image in your imagination, Alex’s description all those months ago of creating a ‘Perspex chimney’ with which to play with the notion of ‘rock climbing in reverse’. He said then that he wanted a scene in which all the performers get wedged into the ‘chimney’ together, and that he wanted the audience close up, peering in – and indeed, that’s what we get, although not till the end of the show. My favourite scene using this particular structure is a duet on, in and around the ‘chimney’, a play on quest and struggle and the offering of a helping hand to a fellow human being. And it’s very lovely that it’s a ‘she’ who offers the hand of support from above to the ‘he’ floundering below.

When I met with the company, they had commented on the fact that the equipment often leads the way in the devising process – and that this was particularly the case in the creation of short pieces Memento Mori (a haunting and tender trapeze double by Alex and Charlotte that made them Jeunes Talents Cirque laureates in 2004) and the gorgeously forlorn Arc (which premiered at the London International Mime Festival 2007), performed by the trio of Ockhams on a less conventional piece of circus equipment – a specially constructed tipping and rocking ‘raft’ made of metal bars. These two pieces, with a more lyrical third called Every Action…, formed a very successful triptych that subsequently toured extensively across the UK and really established Ockham’s Razor on the contemporary circus map. A first full-length show, The Mill, premiered at LIMF 2010.

In the case of Not Until We Are Lost, the equipment offering devising possibilities included not just that Perspex tower but also an enormous reworking of the metal rack cum raft idea used in Arc, here mutated into a great swinging thing that occupied the space in many different ways using various planes and levels. At first it makes a kind of triangular configuration with the floor, the five aerialists clambering up like monkeys, or human babies, only to slide down again, or dangle by the arms until ‘rescued’ by their mates. Again, I remember Alex’s voice all those months earlier talking about wanting to work with a kind of human snakes-and-ladders idea. One step forward, two steps back – two steps forward, one step back… the human condition in a nutshell.

At another point in the show, the frame becomes a great big playground swing, the five performers chasing it with childlike glee, playing the game of daring to jump, or chickening out at the last moment. When all five are sitting side by side, it has the feel of a Busby Berkeley moment of unified swinging. Then again, turned upright the frame provides the site and wherewithal for a whimsical threesome (two boys and a girl) to act out signs of flirtation and friendship, acceptance and rejection.

Despite the impressiveness of all the bits of kit, some of my favourite moments of the piece are the small ones: a solo performer way above our heads, up in the ceiling of the space, making her way quietly along the metal walkway usually only used by technicians and riggers; a choir member weaving through the crowd, walking past me, singing and smiling to herself; the harpist completely focused on the creation of the music, almost oblivious to the audience; a performer tearing paper into pieces that float to the ground like the paper leaves in Something in the Air. Time and again I find myself thinking that the development from that piece to Not Until We Are Lost is clearly on display: from working with children with severe disabilities, Ockham’s have developed a lyricism and tenderness in their performance that is very special. All the elements of the piece – the robust but understated physical performance, the angelic music, the magical lighting, not to mention the beautifully understated costumes in their soft and sensual palette of taupe and rust and rose-pink (designed by Bicat & Rigby, Tina Bicat being a long-standing collaborator of the company) – come together to create one very aesthetically pleasing whole.

If there are criticisms of the show, they are minor niggles. There’s a device for moving the audience around using a rope which people are encouraged to catch hold of that just doesn’t work well– at least not on the night I’m there. The fact that it is ‘explained’ at the start of the show by one of the company’s producers is something of an alarm bell – audiences shouldn’t need to be told in advance how they’ll get moved round a space. And the inclusion of a large number of woven bamboo portable stools for the audience to sit on means that there is an incredibly annoying squeak and creak going on throughout, marring the mood set up by the gentle singing and harp-playing, not to mention the trip hazard as we move around. Ditch the stools, folks!

For some people, the fact that the show is made up of a series of self-contained vignettes rather than having an obvious through-line is an issue – but not for me. The analogy with shows of this kind that works for me is that it can be viewed like a book of themed short stories or poems that develop and interweave ideas and images, rather than as a novel or traditional ‘play’ – and personally I can see nowt wrong with that. I’d say further that attempts to forge hour-long linear narratives that hammer home a plot often go awry in circus-theatre. Anyway, as Tina Koch puts it, ‘theatre is naturally inherent in circus’. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about the company’s work is the awareness of, and play upon, those moments of intrinsic theatricality – the arm reaching out to help, the girl passed from hand to hand, the momentum of that swing, the clutch for dear life on the bar… I’m also very fond of the way that the equipment is allowed to tell its own stories: in this case, that things aren’t necessarily what they seem, that nothing in life is as rigid as we think it is, and that a change in perspective can change everything we think we know.

With a decision (to-date, anyway) not to use text in their shows, Ockham’s Razor are working hard at proving that stories – meaningful human stories of loss and gain, joy and sadness, solitude and togetherness – can be told using physical, visual and musical forms. A great choice, therefore, for the opening of the latest London International Mime Festival.

Ockham’s Razor are produced by Turtle Key Arts, and are an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.

Not Until We Are Lost was seen by Dorothy Max Prior on 10 January, the opening night of the London International Mime Festival 2013, at The Platform Theatre, King’s Cross, London.

Ockham’s Razor tour Not Until We Are Lost across the UK from February to June 2013. For dates and full details see here