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

Heads Will Roll

So, another London International Mime Festival done and dusted! 2013 saw the usual eclectic mix of work, crossing a whole plethora of artforms that snuggle under the ‘physical and visual performance’ umbrella, including contemporary circus, puppetry and animatronics, theatre clown and mime, live art, and some things that are hard to categorise, other than under the ‘interesting theatrical experiments’ header (cue The Cardinals by Stan’s Café).

I saw five shows – not bad going, you say, until you realise there were fifteen programmed. But still – the editor can’t snap them all up, can she? Those fifteen productions hailed from Australia, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia and Switzerland as well, of course, as the UK. There was also a hefty helping of top-notch workshops, including an intensive day with acclaimed movement director Toby Sedgwick, a week on Making Theatre Without Words with Total Theatre favourites Theatre Ad Infinitum, and a wonderful two weeks learning How To Be A Stupid with clown extraordinaire Angela de Castro.

Some of the treats I didn’t see included new work by Les Ballets C de la B artists Romeu Runa and Miguel Moreira, Switzerland’s circus-theatre stars Zimmermann & de Perrot, the London premiere of Derevo’s Harlekin, and the tenth anniversary revival of Compagnie 111, /Aurélien Bory’s Plan B. There was also a second year’s Mime Fest outing for Gandini Juggling’s Smashed. But come to think of it, I’d seen Harlekin previously at the Edinburgh Fringe, and Plan B I saw first time round. So maybe I can claim I’ve seen seven LIMF 2013 shows? Almost half the programme! There, I feel better now… You can get the low-down on shows seen by TT – which is, we are pleased to say, most of the festival – in our reviews section.

So what I did see was the opening show for the 2013 fest from the darlings of British contemporary circus, Ockham’s Razor. Not Until We Are Lost, presented at a new venue for London, the Platform Theatre at Central Saint Martins art school in King’s Cross, is a gentle and playful piece which brings the audience right into the heart of the action. I’ve weaved my response to the show into a feature-review that gives a little more context and background than a regular review, circling round a meeting I had with the company when they were in the early stages of creating the work. You can read it here.

I saw (and reviewed) another contemporary circus piece, also by an international company of young circus artists, this time based in France. My!Laika’s Popcorn Machine was everything (and more) I was hoping from a publicity blurb boasting influences that included Jacky Chan, The Ramones, and Kurt Schwitters.

The other shows I saw – The Cardinals by Stan’s Café, Les Hommes Vides by Invisible Thread, and The Heads by Blind Summit – I didn’t personally review (others have) because I was there wearing a different hat, as facilitator of the after-show Meet the Artists sessions.

Oh yes, the post-show discussion… I’ll confess here that I often don’t enjoy these, especially if we hear little from the artists about the making of the work and a lot from audience members keen to use the opportunity for a ‘question from the floor’ to ruminate in a long-winded and unfocused way on their own experiences making a similar piece of work (is that too cruel? It has certainly been my experience over the years as an audience member). So, call me a control freak, but when I’m leading post-show discussions I like to keep the focus on the artists’ experiences of making and delivering the work, and keep a firm hand on the whip when it comes to the audience participation. The post-show session for The Cardinals was a little subdued (no whip-cracking needed there, then) and the one after Invisible Thread’s Les Hommes Vides was as entertaining, whimsical and thought provoking as the show itself. I almost came a cropper, though, at the discussion after The Heads (Soho Theatre 21 January). Here’s how it went…

So, despite some worries about too long a gap between show and post-show (due to changing rooms to the cabaret space and a late running show by comedian Alexi Sayle), a healthy number of people stayed on, and we had a great start, with Blind Summit’s co-directors Mark Down and Nick Barnes and the rest of team as eloquent as ever, giving intelligent and thoughtful answers to my questions about the relationship between last year’s hit show The Table and The Heads (which grew out of a six-minute section of The Table), the devising process, use of text versus purely visual work, their collaboration on this show with artist/director Andrew Dawson, and more. Then we opened it up to the audience, and the first question wasn’t a question, it was a rather indignant statement from someone who said that she came because she liked last year’s show, but this one had no story. Which Mark answered very graciously with a reflection on the issues of linear narrative in visual theatre. Despite my efforts to move into other areas of discussion, this is the one that everyone seemed to want to talk about, and we ended up going well beyond the allocated time slot with a feisty debate that took in many and various issues around storytelling with and without words: the choices between through-lines and linked themes; ‘plot’ versus ‘story’; the ‘novel’ versus the ‘book of poems’ approach to making a cohesive theatre piece; the framing – literal and metaphorical – of ideas through images, the role of words in a wordless show (The Heads features many images of reading and writing: books, newspapers, manuscripts, written texts, letters released from their bound slavery to fall to the floor like fluttering leaves). It certainly felt like a real debate was had, even if at moments early in the discussion there seemed to be a worrying amount of criticism of the company – but the balance was restored as this was countered strongly by those, like Mischa Twitchin from Shunt, who preferred The Heads to The Table for its purely visual storytelling, and Mime festival co-director Helen Lannaghan who commended the company for their bravery in making something very different to the 2012 show, rather than just churning out The Table Part Two.

What emerged, expressed very well by Blind Summit’s co-founder/director Mark Down, was that LIMF is a festival prepared to hand over power to the artists it trusts. Both The Heads and Invisible Thread’s Les Hommes Vides are experimental puppetry shows in which the artists concerned decided to be brave and make something in a different way to their previous known and loved works – quite a risk to take when premiering that new work at such a high-profile international festival. LIMF, although also committed to finding exciting theatre works old and new from far afield, has a brilliant track record of ongoing support for UK based artists key to the British visual/physical theatre scene. Thus, many on this year’s roster are companies who we’ve seen in previous years – from circus stars Ockham’s Razor and Gandini Juggling to puppeteers Blind Summit and Invisible Thread (the latter emerging from the ashes of Faulty Optic, another well-loved LIMF company).

It is also interesting to see the boundaries of the festival’s remit stretched with the inclusion of works by companies such as Les Ballets C de la B (who would most usually appear under a ‘dance’ banner, but have made a very different show this time round, by all accounts) and Stan’s Café, who perhaps epitomise the concept of ‘total theatre’ with their extraordinary canon of work that crosses boundaries of form.

We don’t know yet what LIMF 2014 will bring to us – but since 1977 we’ve been getting an ever-more eclectic mix of shows and artists, so there is bound to be new work that surprises from familiar faces, artists never previously seen in London, and… Well, your guess is as good as mine!

My!Laika: Popcorn Machine

A popcorn machine, indeed – the popped corn littering the stage, the smell of burnt oil and singed corn filling the room. Not only, but also: a wonky honky-tonk piano, whirring fan wobbling atop, dry ice puffing out from below; a trunk-load of dismembered mannequins, hands and feet and heads juggled and rolled; a dislocated chandelier trailing fairy lights and ringing with birdsong; a rail of clothing probably salvaged from an am dram group’s cupboard; a trapeze hanging ominously empty centre-stage; various chairs and cellos and amps and guitars; and four louche young people eyeing up the audience insolently, here downstage at the lip of their space chewing non-existent gum, there dragging each other across the space by the hair or ears, and now playing 60s psychedelic garage band guitar solos in party-shop shades.

Although My!Laika look and sound like they could be the bastard child of Forced Entertainment and Os Mutantes, they are in fact the latest hot young circus company from France to be picked up by the London International Mime Festival – laureates of the prestigious Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe (2010). I say ‘from France’, but individually they hail from far and wide: the sole male performer, Salvatore Frasca, is from Italy, and the three women come from Argentina (Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto), Germany (Philine Dahlmann), and Holland (Elske van Gelder).

And oh what a combo, a match made in hell! And how cleverly they weave their wonderfully warped circus acts into this distressed domestic-apocalyptic environment! Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto has the air of a blood-drained victim of Count Dracula. White-robed, red lipped, vacant-eyed she alternates her time onstage between slumping dazed in a chair upstage, muttering voiceless words with an unblinking stare, and performing the most excruciatingly slow and tortured solo trapeze act you could possibly imagine, often with very minimal use of her hands. I’ve seen and marvelled at the dreaded ‘neck hang’ before now; I’ve never seen it done by someone who looks like they’ve actually been hanged.

The other two women have what could loosely be described as an acrobalance partnership, which manifests as a kind of punk Mexican wrestling bout. The tall-and-lanky Dahlmann catches the short-and-muscley van Gelder by her long bleached-blonde hair. Aha, I think, the punchline is going to be that it’s a wig and it comes off, but no – she’s whirled around her partner’s body, and then across the stage, by her hair, which if not her own must be stuck on with superglue, and landing with an enormous thump. As she stares out at us, her head twisted under her partner’s arm, she looks just like the dismembered mannequin head placed on the piano. The pony-tailed and mascara’d one then races full-tilt at her goggle-eyed adversary, more or less running up her body in a wild flying kick. At one point Frasca tries to intervene but he’s caught by his ears and seen off easily.

He’s a great clown – tall and gangly, spouting cod philosophy, leering and posing, juggling dismembered limbs, riding a trick cycle through the debris in his ludicrously tight nylon underpants, or acting out his rock-star guitarist dreams lying prone on the stage floor. The foursome pass the baton of stage spotlight to each other with ease – all disguised as a fearsome battle for attention with ever-more outrageous actions.

Frank Zappa, Jackie Chan, Kurt Schwitters, and The Ramones are all cited influences – the hook that caught my interest. Who wouldn’t want to see a show with that publicity blurb? What was gratifying was that it was all here, and more, in this marvellous Merz / punk / pop art / circus mash-up.

What a find! I feel like I’ve fallen in love (with someone I shouldn’t have fallen in love with), to quote The Buzzcocks, whose sounds see us out of the auditorium, exhausted but exhilarated.

www.mylaika.com

From art-circus to psychedelic puppetry – go Mime London!

It’s January – so that means it’s Mime time! The 37th London International Mime Festival runs 10 – 27 January 2013, and promises ‘art-circus, aerial acrobatics, illusion and psychedelic puppetry’.

For full listings go to: www.mimelondon.com

Meanwhile, here’s a summary to tempt you…

LIMF 2013 opens 10 January at the beautiful new Platform Theatre in King’s Cross with the latest show from Britain’s most innovative aerial theatre group, Ockham’s Razor. Not Until We Are Lost is an immersive promenade performance which brings the audience right into the heart of the action.

Soho Theatre sees a puppetry double: Blind Summit’s new show The Heads (World Premiere) runs 17 to 26 Jan 7.30pm, with an after-show discussion led by Total Theatre’s editor Dorothy Max Prior on 21 January. The Heads promises ‘a cascade of imagery inspired by Cubism, McCarthyism and Catholicism, with guest appearances by a puppet Madonna, a cardboard J. Edgar Hoover, some giant hands and much more.’ See you there! Running in tandem with Blind Summit are Invisible Thread (led by Liz Walker, one half of the legendary Faulty Optic) with Les Hommes Vides, a twenty-minute, low-tech, charming, eerie and comic performance of slapstick and surreal table-top puppetry and object theatre. It contains scenes of plank action, eyeless shopping, bouncing puppets, poetry and prizes.

Jacksons Lane will be hosting Simone Riccio (Italy) with Nothing Moves If I Don’t Push It, Friday 18 – Sunday 20 January.
London-based Italian circus-theatre artist Riccio (seen recently as part of the Albany’s mini circus fest) promises an enticing mix of high octane acrobatics, using German wheel and Chinese pole amongst other circus skills. The show was developed in collaboration with Spymonkey’s Aitor Basauri

The Southbank Centre has been a longstanding partner of LIMF, and this year they will be presenting My!Laika (France) with Popcorn Machine (12 – 15 January). We are promised an apocalyptic, electric landscape where a surprising present coexists with an unknown past; and where humour, bold acrobatics, a well-played Chopin waltz and a popcorn volcano are all elements in the eclectic mix. German company Circle of Eleven’s Leo was a great hit at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011 and 2012, and now (16 – 22 January) makes its London premiere at the Southbank. Leo combines world-class acrobatics, visual artistry and clever film manipulation in a journey of joyful discovery and invention. Also at Southbank (18 – 20) are LIMF favourites Compagnie 111 (France), back with one of their best-loved shows, Plan B – a thrilling mix of circus, dance, video, ‘sonic’ object manipulation and optical illusion, performed on a cunning, tilting set that plays with gravity and perspective. And then (24 – 27) there’s the return of another LIMF favourite, the gentle and whimsical clown Wolfe Bowart (Australia), creator of the lovely solo show LaLaLuna, now presenting Letter’s End (UK Premiere) in which mops sneeze, storks swoop in bearing gifts, trees grow out of shoes and long-lost letters tell their stories.

The Barbican Silk Street is where you’ll find Yeung Fai (China) with Hand Stories (15 – 19 January) which, it is claimed, brilliantly interweaves modern multimedia effects with traditional Chinese puppetry; and Israeli company Amit Drori who present Savanna: A possible landscape (22 – 26 January). Savanna is a journey through a fantastical landscape, an African garden of Eden inhabited by beautiful, automated animals: elephants, snakes, giant tortoises, birds, snails, moths and caterpillars. Then comes Zimmermann & de Perrot (Switzerland) with Hans Was Heiri (23 – 26). Following their success with Öper Öpis in 2010, Swiss choreographer Martin Zimmermann and composer Dimitri de Perrot return to the Barbican with a company of outstanding physical performers, and their latest production fusing circus, theatre, music and visual arts.

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House will be hosting the legendary Derevo (Russia) with Harlekin (16 – 19 January). A kind of dark take on the commedia dell’arte story of Harlequin and Columbine, Harlekin is a show that many see as a very special and personal piece by Derevo founder-director Anton Adassinsky. Les ballets C de la B are not regularly seen at LIMF, but are here at the Linbury with The Old King (21 – 23 January). Produced under the guidance of C de la B founder and artistic director, Alain Plâtel, this epic new movement-theatre work was a hit at the 2012 Festival d’Avignon. Also at the Linbury, the welcome return of 2012 LIMF hit Smashed by Gandini Juggling, a sensational mix of j skill and theatricality inspired by the work of seminal German dance-theatre maker, Pina Bausch. Catch em if you can! (24 – 26 January)

Over at the Roundhouse, Birmingham’s own Stan’s Cafe introduce us to The Cardinals, an evangelical puppet show in which the puppets have gone missing… The Cardinals ask us to show faith, whilst theatre traditionally asks us to suspend our disbelief; a fascinating premise for a thought-provoking, witty and hugely entertaining show. Once again, there is a post-show discussion facilitated by TT’s Dorothy Max Prior (on Tuesday 15 January).

Happy New Mime Fest! Full programme and booking details online at www.mimelondon.com

The legendary performance artist Penny Arcade, in her own words

I am a performance and theatre artist, a poet and writer and an entertainer. Sometimes when I am working at my highest ability I am all those things at once…

I was an imaginative child. My very first obsessions were based on fairytales, and I lived in the metaphysical realm, with imaginary friends that were either fairies or angels. This also included intimate relationships with inanimate objects like rock formations, fields, swamps and groves of trees, based on fairytales and magical stories from my pagan southern Italian culture. Later, I was obsessed with Hollywood and fashion. I compulsively read movie magazines and hairstyle magazines and tabloids which I discovered when I was allowed to go to church on my own, using the 25 cents my mother gave me to put in the collection box to purchase the tabloids.

I dreamt that I had been discovered as a child movie star (like my mother’s favourite actress Shirley Temple) and that I was going to bring my family out of poverty by being a movie star. The crisis each night was that I believed I had to also write the movie, which kept me in a perpetual state of anxiety because I believed that this was how I’d save my mother, a single-parent sweatshop seamstress with four children.

By the age of 9 I was completely submerged in a fantasy world – I was actually convinced that I was in the television series Bonanza and Zorro, and that roles had been written especially for me on those shows. I was brought screeching into the real world when another 9-year-old girl told me she no longer wanted to be friends with me. I looked at her and said ‘That’s ok but you can’t be on Bonanza anymore! She looked at me with the strangest expression and said ‘Bonanza is not real!’ and I burst into tears and shouted ‘Bonanza IS REAL! It is REAL!’

By the time I was 11, the entire town was wrongly convinced that I was having sex with everyone. It was a very painful time in my life as I had no one to appeal to, no one to take my side or protect me, least of all my own family. I was an outsider among outsiders, which moved me increasingly further and further away and out of any society. I was a loner compelled to follow my destiny.

I was told I was bad by nature, that I had ‘bad blood’. But I don’t think of myself as a bad girl or as a rebellious person. I think of myself as a good person in a bad society. Am I still a ‘bad girl’? Do I still get cut out and left out of parts of society that are based on maintaining the status quo, based on fitting in at all costs to personal truth? As a woman in our culture that hates women – that especially hates smart and strong women – and as someone who could not hide my difference, my queerness, I was belligerent when faced with the petty lies and hypocrisy of the bourgeois world.

I became an artist because I was compelled to express myself. This was my earliest sense of myself, my desire to create my own reality and to escape oppressive emotional circumstances which I had no control over, and couldn’t deal with in a conscious way. Creating theatre deals with these subconscious feelings in a conscious way, making use of them in a transformative way.

Being an artist was not a career choice in any sense: even when I was a Warhol superstar at 19 and was told I had a career, it made little impact on me. It was much, much deeper than that, and it has only gotten deeper as I have grown older. I now, many years later, see it as my role in life. Everything in my life was and is funnelled through my imagination and creativity. It is the only way I have ever known how to make sense of life.

I met Andy Warhol through ‘Superstar’ Jackie Curtis. Andy was a friend of John Vaccaro’s and a fan of his theatre, The Playhouse of The Ridiculous, where I was performing. Andy came to see all our shows. Andy asked Jackie to bring me to the Factory because he had seen me on stage and was looking for new ‘stars’. I was the ‘It’ Girl of the downtown art scene in 1969 because of my performance style and my youth and my ability to communicate verbally with anyone. By 1969 Edie Sedgwick was quite diminished by drugs and mental illness. Viva had moved on to other things. They were all a lot older than me. I was precocious. I had met Taylor Mead on my own, on the streets of the East Village, which is the way one met most people in those days. I wanted to be like Taylor. He was a comedic genius.

I don’t think that most people fully understand that as a child of the depression, Andy Warhol fully believed that he was going to become rich by making movies. Of all the Pop painters, Andy’s work was worth the least. His paintings were never sold at the prices other Pop painters like Oldenburg got. Andy made most of his money through commissions from society people and this too was looked down on. Andy was pretty much a joke in the art world until after his death.

Andy Warhol didn’t pursue content. It was we who brought content to him, and that was why he needed us. None of us were interested in ‘real life’, but Andy was the least interested. Andy was like a metal detector. He detected ideas. He didn’t actually work from his own ideas. He found ideas in other people. That was the genius of his mind. His ability to find, follow and act on other peoples ideas. It is this quality of his mind that makes me say that Andy convinced the art world he was an artist when he actually was an art director. You see his influence and a great deal of his legacy in advertising, because there is so much art in advertising today, and so little art in art.

Glitter, that is what is left from those days. And the magic that resides in some people’s spirits that nothing – no hardship, no criticism – can remove, then or now. A twenty-something drag performer was at my house the other night changing for a performance in a nearby club. She said, ‘I have to warn you, I leave glitter everywhere.’ I replied, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can take you to East Village apartments where people are still annoyed by the glitter I left between their floorboards in 1968.’

When I started out making my own work I created characters from real people I knew, so in that sense I did drag of them. Male and female and actually drag of drag queens like Margot Howard Howard, the famous NY drag queen. She was a working class intellectual of German-Irish extraction who convinced NY Society that ‘she’ was the granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk! That was my work in the 1980s.

I will say that very little has actually changed in ‘sexual politics’ over the years. It has just shifted, and in some ways the situation is worse because the issues have been deflected. Transgendered people are still on the lowest rung of both the gay world and the straight world. Bisexuals are still considered aberrant and lesbians are still invisible and do not have the cache that gay men have long enjoyed.

My sex and censorship show Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! still has a massive impact today, even though it was written 20 years ago. People routinely come up to me after the show and say ‘No one is saying what you say in this show! It is so contemporary. I can’t believe you didn’t write it this year.’ The show started as a solo fellowship audit for the National Endowment for The Arts in 1990 at the height of the Censorship Crisis, what is now called The Culture War – a war that incidentally has never ended in the USA. It was meant to run for four performances. It sold out immediately and continued to run for two months. It began as an improvised show, like all my work, with just the ideas that I take on stage with me and two women strippers, Arlana Blue and Diana Moonmade – both staunch freedom-of-speech advocates and feminists. In 1990, in NY’s downtown art scene which was highly politically correct, strippers were simply unacceptable. You could play a stripper in a play but you couldn’t actually be one without being seen as pandering to the patriarchy. In 1992, Mark Russell, of Performance Space 122, which had lost its funding (like every other theatre that presented queer work during that period) and was looking at having to close the venue, unable to pay salaries, asked me to bring B!D!F!W! for the summer. It ran and ran…

A week after we closed at Performance Space 122 we opened at the legendary Village Gate (which had launched Lenny Bruce) and played there for one year. I had the very great freedom to continue to improvise: after every show my collaborator Steve Zehentner would bring up questions that were sometimes very difficult for me but forced me to dig deeper into what I was trying to say. One of the best lines in B!D!F!W! came from Steve pushing me about what it meant to me to be a faghag! Finally I just burst out in anger and shouted, ‘Faghags are like certain Christians who hid Jews in their attics.’

I decided that I needed to include men in the show if I was serious about my feminism, because feminism that doesn’t include men and strippers is not a feminism I can be part of.

It was a queer show, based on a political humanism that said: We are all equal. We are free, and so don’t use your gay liberation to oppress my gay liberation or my inclusion in the human race. The show represented ideas and values that did not have a voice in the theatre or anywhere else. The queer politics that I espoused in the show were in complete contradiction to the ‘gay’ world that either sought to distance itself from anything that seemed unseemly, or had completely capitulated to a very narrow ghetto marketing mentality – to the point where it was creating the same institutions of distrust, hatred and oppression towards heterosexuals, bi and transgendered people that decades of gay people had suffered from.

Of course Quentin Crisp was a big advocate of the show because he had been the victim of so much oppression by the ‘politically correct’ gay world. It was, and remains, a very important show about personal freedom and individuality. Many, many people saw that show at least three times and as many as 25 times bringing everyone who mattered to them. They brought their parents, co-workers and neighbours to the show and even came out to them during the show. It is a show as much about the audience as it is about me, my ideas, and the dancers.

The question the show has always asked is: How do we live now? How do we really live? How do we find the freedom to inherit our natural legacy of joy and fulfilment? How to love ourselves and stop feeling oppressed and tortured by other people? How do we stop hurting others, stop limiting others because we ourselves feel hurt and limited?

The truth is that someone will always be ‘queer’ because humans are pack animals, herd animals, and humans want other humans to fit in with the crowd. Humans don’t like outsiders, but then conversely humans admire outsiders when they are at a great distance, not in their midst – and they especially admire outsiders once they are dead. Look at what dying did for Jesus Christ, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo!

The kind of censorship that two decades ago was rampant in America, and is still rampant today, has infected the whole world. B!D!F!W! is grounded in separation of church and state. When I performed in Britain 20 years ago, the British press was shocked by how narrow-minded America was. The were stunned by the fact that no American newspaper, or radio or television show, dared use the title, except for the Village Voice. From The Times to the Guardian to local British newspapers, the title twenty years ago was not an issue in the UK. This year I was a guest on the Joanne Good show on BBC1 and before I went on the air the producer took me aside and said, ‘I am afraid we can’t say the title of your show on the air. BBC rules.’ Jo Goodman and I spent the rest of the show speaking about the censorship that has crept into Britain. Twenty years ago there was no Born Again Christian movement in Britain. Now it is everywhere.

The personal politics which were so radical and put the artists who expressed and worked with issues of race, gender, sexuality and personal identity at real risk in the 80s and 90s have become a branding idea. A provocative gesture is simply not enough. An artist has to dig much deeper to talk about these issues at the depth they need to be spoken about. The accepted societal mood and pose today is sardonic, sarcastic, cynical and eschews anything that smacks of real feeling or real emotion, and that’s led to emptiness in the theatre. I see so many young artists who have had no real life experience trying to communicate using nudity, bodily fluids, sexual action on stage to get attention – and of course they get it, but within ten minutes it is clear that they have no ideas, no emotions, no experience to communicate to the public.

I see very little real politics in performance art today. Politics meaning what we do to one another in the world, culture meaning how we talk about what we do to one another in the world. Most of the work I see among young people is about personality – their own. The values of any given era are reflected in the work of that era. There is a big focus on becoming famous, and successful. The work is very career driven, which limits how political people can be or want to be. The artists I know who are political are marginalised. It seems there is a haze of political meaning to work, like a veil cast over the concept of it but most of it is about the artists themselves. Not all of it, but a great deal of it. This is natural I suppose when people come directly out of school into ‘Performance’: there is very little life experience to draw from, so much pressure to be successful and to have a career, with art being taught as a profession – when art is in fact a lifelong vocation.

For a political response to the world as it is today, I look to Judith Malina of The Living Theatre, who at 85 is still making political theatre and working as she always has for the beautiful, pacifist, non-violent anarchist revolution with her mainly very young company.

There is nothing in the world that compares to seeing the work of artists who have consistently made work for over 25 years. Art is one of the things that one gets better at doing. I have long loved the work of Richard Foreman, The Wooster Group, Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines, William Forsythe, Meredith Monk, John Jesurun, performance poet John Giorno, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver… Amongst younger artists, I admire David Hoyle, Robert Pacitti, Taylor Mac, Meow Meow, and I am often as influenced by painters, photographers and musicians (from Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith and beyond) as I am by theatre-makers – perhaps because I am fundamentally a conceptualist.

I do not think and then speak. I think as I speak, I find out what I am talking about as I speak. Every good line, every powerful line in my writing, was born by my speaking it to someone in real life, long before it was spoken on stage. Or it was born on stage while I was supposed to be saying something else. To improvise is to be a medium, to be an antenna. It is a somewhat frightening thing to do because you have to relinquish control on certain levels.

I am very happy. I grew up to be the kind of person I wanted to be. I am very proud of my work… Everything is next!

Penny Arcade is a writer, poet and theatre-maker/performance artist. Always a keen documenter and observer of people, she wrote her first play when she was 14 years old in reform school (Borstal).

She started performing professionally aged 18, creating improvised theatre with The Playhouse of The Ridiculous, and then joined Warhol’s Factory aged 19. She continued to work with various different experimental theatre groups (as a performer, poet and singer) until she was 34 years old, when she launched her own work as a performance artist Although she moved on to create scripted work, she has always maintained a high percentage of improvisation in her live shows.

Penny Arcade’s seminal work Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! premiered in 1992, and ran to great acclaim at PS122 and the Village Gate in New York City, then subsequently toured to 20 cities around the world from 1993 to 1995, including two tours of Australia, and a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe. She retired the show in 1995 and created four other full-length shows. The show was revived in 2006 and has enjoyed great success since. It is playing at The Albany, London 15-23 December 2012; see here.

Penny Arcade also creates ‘ hosting monologues’ for Pussy Faggot, a performance art party she has hosted over the past three years for Earl Dax.

Apart from her performance appearances, theatre-making, acting and touring, Penny Arcade currently also writes poetry, essays, and magazine articles. Her long- running video documentary series – The Lower East Side Biography Project, Stemming The Tide Of Cultural Amnesia – was created with longtime collaborator Steve Zehentner (Steve is also dramaturg on Bitch!Dyke!Faghag!Whore! and designer of Penny Arcade’s work). It broadcasts weekly on cable television on Wednesdays at 11pm NY time, and also streams online at the same time.

Julien Cottereau: Imagine Toi

An empty stage, curtained back wall, red lights. Enter dishevelled young man in too-short trousers and a floppy felt hat, wielding an invisible broom. Cue classic clown/mime sequence, in which a series of imaginary objects and actions are animated by live sound – the performer’s own squeaks, whistles and body-percussion. Ideas and images start simply and build beautifully. Example: there’s a piece of chewing gum on the floor, it sticks to his shoe; he pulls it off and pops it in his mouth, he chews and chews then pulls out a great long length, which becomes a skipping rope, which becomes a lasso to catch a buzzing fly. Later, there’s a rubber ball that morphs into a beach ball bounced back and forth with the audience, which becomes a football passed to a young boy, who is invited onstage for a game of footy-keepy-uppy, which the boy wins – so the ball gets passed out again to the audience, which then gets lost under the seats.

At which point there is a glorious moment of impromptu audience interaction. A little girl, no more than three years old, scampers down the aisle to help find the ball, hopping happily from one foot to the other. At which point our entertainer stops in his tracks and stands watching her – not for seconds, but for minutes. She hums to herself, oblivious, and carries on peering under seats or picking dust off the floor. It’s a moment worthy of Philippe Gaulier, the on-stage pause in action pushed and pushed, a collective holding of breath giving way to riotous laughter.

And Julien Cottereau is indeed Gaulier trained, his stint with the master-clown coming after his graduation from France’s renowned ENSATT theatre school, and before his long-standing employment with Cirque du Soleil, most famously as the solo mime Eddy in their best show, Saltimbanco. His skills as a clown and mime are superb, and this first section of the show is a perfectly realised showcase of these skills. Here, as elsewhere in the show, these physical skills, together with that clever live sound accompaniment and well-chosen bursts of recorded music (cheery synth bleeps from the Popcorn instrumental Euro-pop hit; moody twangs of Ry Cooder guitar), combine with a simple but strong scenography of light which uses colour washes and spots and strobes to animate the empty stage for each carefully crafted vignette.

The second block of scenes takes us into slightly more grown-up territory, with a dating scenario acted out with a young woman chosen from the audience – the predictable nervous-clown-seeking-a-kiss spoof following on from a slightly suspect model-girl photo-shoot sequence. We then have an interesting section playing out a moral dilemma, in which a wounded dog needs to be put out of its misery, an audience member chosen to fulfil this gruesome task. It’s wonderful how much empathy an audience can be made to feel for an invisible dog! The final big audience participation number brings the ‘girlfriend’ back onstage as a silent-movie melodrama heroine, tied up in sacrifice to an invisible growling beast which has been making an intermittent appearance, through sound and pulsing red light, throughout the show. A large-bodied man picked from the audience is schooled by Cottereau to stomp and growl and slash, but he seems unsure of whether he is supposed to be the beast or the hero, and we are thus also unsure. In all three of these scenarios using adult audience participants, I have the slightly uncomfortable feeling that Cottereau has picked the wrong person to play with.

That could be just bad luck, but I have seen this show before (at the Edinburgh Fringe 2010), and had the same concern about the ‘beast’ section, which similarly fell a little flat. I can’t help thinking that whilst the interactions with children are pure brilliance, and the general whole-audience exchanges are beautifully managed, the grown-ups brought into the action aren’t really dealt with as well as they could be. And at 90 minutes, it all seems to drop a little in energy towards the end. It feels like an hour-long show drawn out beyond its own comfort-zone.

It is hard not to draw comparison to that other famous Gaulier trained solo clown-mime, the Total Theatre Award winner Dr Brown, who seems always to pick the right people – people who morph from audience participants to full-on collaborators in seconds. It also has to be said that in the 21st century, Cottereau’s traditional typecasting of male and female characters seems a little old-hat.

Imagine Toi has been touring since 2006, winning awards and charming audiences across the world. It is a show for everyone, but it is not a children’s show – the marketing of it to ‘age 4 and over’ implies that the key target audience is young families, which is a shame. Ninety minutes is a long time for small children to hold both attention and bladders, and a number of very young audience members are carried howling from the auditorium.

It is a delightful show in so many ways – but in the three plus years since I last saw the production, it seems to have shrunk rather than grown, and is perhaps now ‘done and dusted’. I’d love to see what else Julien Cottereau might use his extraordinary talents to make and do – he is, regardless of anything else, a breathtakingly beautiful performer!

http://juliencottereau.canalblog.com