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

Chris Goode: Monkey Bars

In which Chris Goode comes of age, taking words out of the mouth of babes and onto the stage of the Trav…

Monkey Bars is a piece of verbatim theatre, with texts taken from interviews with children between the ages of six and eleven (conducted by Goode’s collaborator Karl James – mediator, facilitator, and director, known for his work with Tim Crouch) placed into the mouths of adult actors – actors who play adults, not adults playing children. Still with me? Good. Goode. Those who have followed his work will know that Chris Goode likes words, and likes using words spoken or written by others to craft extraordinary and eloquent theatre pieces – see, for example, Hippo World Guest Book, which used texts from a website for hippo enthusiasts. Yep, hippos. ‘Never work with children or animals,’ said WC Fields. Well, we can ignore him and live dangerously…

So, we have wine-supping ladies talking about the joys of Haribo fried egg sweets; and grown men in ties grumbling that all the girls want to do is play, ‘Girls catching boys. It’s wrong.’

There are cakes and superheroes and bubblegum and broken arms. There’s a boy who sings to his jelly, and a girl who likes to play rugby. We have reflections on fame (‘You have to put on your make-up just to go down the corner shop, which I think is quite sad really’), on the oppression of the media (‘They’re telling you the crime rate has gone up… we don’t need to know that cos now we are going to be even more scared’), and on the monarchy (‘Our money’s going to them, like buying their jewels.’) There are eloquent accounts of frightening experiences: ‘A man he got hit by a car… and it looked like a ragdoll, and it was just lying on the floor. And I got so freaked out, I was so scared.’ There are hilarious exchanges on money and wealth: ‘Fake money – they can print it off the internet!’ There are worrying exposes of domestic violence and family discord: ‘When my dad was beating up my mum, I gave my mum the umbrella…’

It’s crafted beautifully, the whole thing choreographed with tender loving care. The scenography is simple but effective: a set of ten white glowing cubes are moved around the space by the actors, sat on, stacked, turned into sofas and desks and chairs as needed. A red light upstage references the recording ‘on’ of the interviews. The actors group and regroup in the space, the scenes played out as monologues, dialogues, group discussions. These adults behaving as adults but talking like children reveal, through the children’s words, that we are all – of whatever age or social class – essentially the same, concerned about the same things. We want to be loved. We want to be happy. We want to be approved of. We want to be successful; on whatever terms we define success. We dream of falling. We are frightened of being mugged. We don’t know quite how to handle the opposite sex. We are distrustful of authority. We sometimes feel ashamed or overwhelmed. We worry about change – be it a new job or moving on to Secondary School (and although the age range of children interviewed was six to eleven, I think I detect more voices from the older end of this age span.)

If there’s a criticism, it is less of the work – which is a very complete and inspiring piece of theatre – than of some of the hyperbole around it. Monkey Bars works as a piece of theatre because transposing words said by one person to a different person, one who we wouldn’t expect to be saying those words, often opens our ears to really hear what is being said. As, for example, in Forced Entertainment’s ground-breaking show Speak Bitterness in which women’s stories of abuse are spoken by male actors. So this is in fact a tried and tested theatrical device. And although appreciative of the way in whichMonkey Bars reappraises children’s words, I’d dispute the claim that we don’t listen to our children. In my experience, parents (myself included) are often full of awe and wonder at how intelligent and insightful our children are, but aware that people who are child-free are often suspicious of and impatient around children. That Chris Goode is a man who, despite not being a parent, is someone who really wants to listen to children and honour and respect their words, is to be commended.

Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne: XXXO

Two girls with laptops at a table, upstage. The content of each screen is projected side-by-side behind them onto the rear wall. The images we see are of two tear-stained faces – a whole slideshow of them. It goes from photos to real-time videoing, and we see the tears really falling. This moves into footage of famous tear-jerking film moments, from Bambi to Titanic – some amusing, some disturbing. Every genre of film and TV is touched on, from horror to thriller to soppy romance to soap opera. The girls are now on the floor downstage, playing out the scenes – death-bed scenes and murder scenes and child-hugging scenes – to and with each other, synching their live words to the relayed screen images, and joining in the crying and howling and comforting. There are bad wigs and a few props, and it is all both ludicrous and strangely touching: I’m reminded of Forced Entertainment’s And on the Thousandth Night in this ironic telling of so many stories upon stories upon stories.

It strikes me that it’s the girl equivalent of playing Pokemon or superheroes or Power Rangers. I’m reminded of my own sons’ acting-out games when younger, and of a marvellous moment in Martin Amis’ novel The Informationwhen he perfectly captures boys role-playing: ‘I want to be the blue Power Ranger!’ ‘No. I’m the blue Power Ranger!’

I’m also remembering being 16 and practising frowning and crying to the mirror: How will I look when the newspapers photograph me if I suddenly find out that both my parents were killed in a plane crash? I’d forgotten that till now… So this is the 21st Century version of the faces-in-the-mirror alone-in-your-bedroom game. It’s a girl thing, a modern girl thing.

In their programme notes, the show’s creator-performers Nathalie Marie Verbeke and Charlotte De Bruyne – who came to fame as teenagers starring in Ontroerend Goed’s Once And For All We Are Going To Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen – explain that the starting point for XXXO came from discovering that they had both filmed themselves crying, and that many of their friends had confessed to doing the same. It kick-started an artistic investigation of what makes us cry, and of how this generation of young people are responding to the constant bombardment day and night with images of grief – real and fictional – in media of all sorts. How to know when grief is real? How to feel real grief? When are crocodile tears as therapeutic as real tears, and are there different sorts of tears anyway? My train of thought moves into: Why did I cry when Lady Di died and stay stony-faced at my own mother’s funeral? As Camus pointed out, we are willing to persecute someone who does not cry when they are ‘supposed to’ – crying is expected. Use onions if necessary to bring on the tears (and they do).

The screens switch to projected play texts, and we see our heroines acting out Medea’s despair and rage at the point when she decides to kill her children to exact revenge on her erring husband: ‘Let no man say of Medea that she is mild as milk.’ We move into a montage of clips from YouTube: everything from Nessun Dorma to lost penguins in the wild to newborn babies first cries, via car crashes, bomb blasts and desperate last phone calls from the struck towers of the World Trade Centre. Oh, life! Oh, death! Remember, these young women would have been nine or ten years old when 9/11 happened, would have seen it all played out on TV. They will have seen the Gulf War footage and torture and slaughter from all across the world played out on their computer screens night and day. They would have had access to all sorts of horror, real and imagined, throughout all their growing years. They will have surreptitiously watched all sorts of things on YouTube that their parents wouldn’t have wanted them to see. How does that affect you? How do you deal with all this pain, all these tears?

Children have always coped with distress and terror and grief by acting out what they’ve witnessed in their play. Adults do the same, but they call it making plays rather than play. As young theatre-makers only recently arrived at adulthood, these two have created an exciting and imaginative piece of work that sits between ‘play’ and ‘a play’. It’s courageous and disturbing and funny and curious, all at once.

There are dissenters. A friend (who disliked the show) described it as ‘a Marmite show’ – love it or hate it – and I am sure that there are many people who, like him, wonder who the audience is for this sort of work. It is not an obvious crowd-pleaser, and I feel that placing it in the home-of-the-jolly-romp Pleasance Courtyard is really not the right decision for the company. The gloomy cavernous space feels completely wrong for the show, and the black curtain backdrop means that the projections are murky and hard to make out at times. I do feel British audiences are open to this sort of experimental theatre-making – but how, when and where such work is presented is a key issue.

Regardless of these production issues, and the problem of targeting the right audience, a great debut from two young women who have grown up with Ontroerend Goed and have now set off on their own path as theatre-makers. I eagerly await whatever they decide to do next, together or alone.

Teatr Biuro Podróży: Planet Lem

Welcome to the future! This is the future as it used to be – spaceships, robots, and hovercraft-like vehicles. Planet Lem’s vision is of a world in which experiments in Artificial Intelligence have led to robots taking over all the important work of the world. Humans, relieved of all major responsibilities, with no productive work to do, have become idle and useless.

In their latest piece of spectacular outdoor theatre, Teatr Biuro Podróży present ‘a story never written’ – a kind of loving homage to the ideas of Polish writer and philosopher Stanislaw Lem. Lem is probably best known as the author ofSolaris, a metaphysical sci-fi novel which ponders on the nature of reality and has been filmed three times to date, although it would seem that this show is more interested in referencing the more humorous and satirical Cyberiadstories. It all works on many levels – there’s enough ‘Lem’ details to amuse the fans, but the story is an archetypal one that questions what it means to be human, and it is presented as a jolly good bit of outdoor entertainment, so knowledge of the novels is certainly not a prerequisite to enjoying the show.

Teatr Biuro Podróży have a deservedly high reputation for their inventive use of stilts in outdoor performance. Shows such as the legendary Carmen Funebre(which played for just one night here at the Quad as a fundraiser for Amnesty in the week of the Pussy Riot trial verdict) and the more recent Macbeth: Who Is That Bloodied Man? (which had a good run for the first half of the Fringe at the same venue) prove that stilt-work can be more than cheery walkabout festival fodder – it can be used to dark and dangerous effect in stories that tackle such subjects as the Bosnian conflict, as is the case in Carmen, or rework and cast a new light on the terrible tragedy of the Scottish Play. Their influence has been seen far and wide – with UK street theatre artists such as Periplum acknowledging their debt to the company.

There is a certain aesthetic that we associate with Podróży – black-cloaked creatures towering above us, flame-bearers racing through the space, rusting metal structures, fires in braziers – all pretty Gothic. In Planet Lem, director Pawel Szkotak goes for something completely different – everything is white and bright, and there’s a kind of retro sci-fi look to it all, a techno soundtrack adding to the back-to-the-future feel.

The robots are suitably big and shiny-silver, and there’s a great ‘spaceship’ frame-construction which is like a giant trampoline on its side that rises up to great effect, the human figure inside it spread-eagled, Catherine-wheel style. There’s plenty of kit involved in this production – including video screens, TV monitors (which, if I’m not mistaken, play some vintage footage of Lem himself speaking), and a whole formation of high tech shopping trolleys that act as sleeping/eating stations for the humanoids, who are kept docile by being fed hallucinatory drugs (a nod here to the placating Soma in Brave New World, then – although perhaps Lem had the idea independently as he and Huxley are often working on similar territory). These poor hapless humans are played by actors in squidgy pink whole-body-mask suits (‘like Teletubbies with tits’ as a colleague remarked gleefully).

It’s all a jolly good sci-fi romp for much of the time, with lots of crowd-pleasing lift-offs and robot-battles and whatever, but the sections that I enjoy most are the ones that are the least spectacular, such as the scenes in which a roller-blading man-in-black and a ‘noble savage’ space explorer forge a relationship. I’m assuming these are representing robotic engineers Trurl and Klapaucius from the Cyberiad novels, ‘constructors’ who, god-like, roam the universe fixing problems on distant planets, alternating between rivalry and friendship. The way the performance space is used in these scenes – both figures on the same level – no stilts – but moving with different patterns at very different speeds – is an interesting contrast to the robot/humanoid encounters that use the more familiar play-with-scale Podróży-style groundlings versus stilt-walking monsters dynamic.

The show is in its first year, and it hasn’t yet bedded in, but it is good to see Podrozy playing with a very different aesthetic, and introducing humour in a more upfront way. I’m also amused by the use of cigarette smoking as a motif of individualism and redemption! An interesting show rather than a great show, but it is early days yet for Planet Lem.

There’s a message here in this depiction of Lem’s vision – which shares with other ‘philosophical’ sci-fi writers of the 20th century (Aldous Huxley, Philip K Dick, JG Ballard) an interest in exploring what it actually means to be human in a world of ever-increasing new technologies. In our contemporary striving for everything to be clean-cut, smooth, easy, and trouble-free, we are in danger of losing our core humanity. No pain, no gain.

Sleepwalk Collective: Amusements

A lecture theatre painted womb-red. Headphones and an instruction sheet – we’re going on a journey, welcome onboard. An empty stage, populated by a pair of lady’s shoes and a pair of rather brief briefs. The lights are dim, there’s a hum in the air. We await instructions.

Headphones on, and we are taken on an aural rollercoaster ride that pitches the thrills of the fairground against the rush of sexual excitement, the crash of the waves into our bodies as we enter the sea, and the adrenalin surge of the moment before crashing in a car or a plane. The words are poetic, rhythmical, resonant. The voice is sensuous, soporific almost, with a purr that would do Eartha Kitt proud. We are lulled, we are seduced. There are moments of total blackout that allow us to momentarily drift into other worlds. ‘This is not real,’ she says, ‘but your body doesn’t know that.’ The electrical charges are the same, the hormones pumped are the same. It’s a provocation that intrigues us: from a cognitive psychology perspective, how do we know when we are experiencing ‘reality’? We’ve seen The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we’ve played video games, we know about Artificial Intelligence. Now we are sitting here, ruminating on the fact that storytelling has always, from the dawn of time, been about transporting us to other times and places whilst we sit in the dark listening; and that theatre has always been about suspending disbelief. We are here and now, but we are also there and then.

As we come out of one such blackout, we see the shoes on the stage space have been occupied. A lone female performer, a woman in a red dress (Sleepwalk Collective’s Iara Solano Arana) is standing stock-still, speaking into a mic and smiling at us. We see her mouthing the words, and we hear the words in our ears. She toys with us, sending sound from the left to the right earphone. She dares us to look at her, really look at her. She paints us, sitting there with our headphone wires linking us together, as a multi-headed beast, there to devour her. She offers herself to our gaze, plays with the sexuality of the situation, then makes us uncomfortable with suggestions of a story of sexual abuse.

Amusements combines powerful performance, poetic writing, and daring scenographic choices to great results. It’s only the second show by this enterprising new company (and a word here to the offstage half of the equation, Sammy Metcalfe, co-creator of the company’s work) and it confirms that they are rising stars in the ‘total theatre’ firmament. A beautiful show.

www.sleepwalkcollective.com

Penny Arcade: Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

‘There are lesbians in this room; there are gay men in this room; there are heterosexuals in this room; there are bisexual people in this room, are there not? There are transsexual people, asexual people… There are at least five kinds of gay men in this room and they don’t agree with each other about anything! There are people in this room who don’t identify with any particular group in this room. We need a new language to communicate our truth to each other – a language that doesn’t come from academia or politics, because a political language is a language of debate, and in a language debate someone wins and someone loses…’

This call comes towards the end of Penny Arcade’s seminal show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!. Written and performed by Ms Arcade, created in collaboration with dramaturg/designer Steve Zehentner, and first performed in 1990, it’s a play that takes no prisoners – but in the best Stonewall / GLF tradition, the polemics and the partying go (sequin-gloved) hand-in-hand. The 2012 version, presented in London at the Arcola Tent for a month-long sell-out run in July, with a triumphant move for August/September to the Old Vic Tunnels, contains some additions and amendments to its core text, but remains in essence faithful to its original message – proving that although much has changed in queer art, theatre and politics over the past two decades, much else is ‘business as usual’.

The night starts, as perhaps all good nights out should, with a bevy of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed go-go dancers (male and female) performing both in the auditorium and on the stage. Then, our hostess arrives with a ‘Hey! My name is Susana Ventura but since I was 15 and raised by gay men, I’ve been called Penny Arcade.’ Intros over, we get a number of skits and sketches in which Penny plays a succession of female characters eking out a living in the sex trade – the phone girl at a massage parlour with a rapier tongue (‘What’s the difference between the half-hour and the hour? Thirty minutes, John.’); a conservative prostitute called Charlene who claims it’s all a question of economics, not sex (‘Honey, the sexual revolution did not do one thing for women in this world, except drive down the price of sex’) – before we move into a series of scenes in a more confessional-autobiographical mode that mix personal anecdote with radical perceptions.

Penny explains that being ‘raised by gay men’ doesn’t mean outings to the opera with her out father and his lover – ‘that’s a purely post-70s phenomenon’ – but rather that she was ‘taken in by a tawdry band of drag queens and their minions’. To Penny, she is what she is because of them, and ‘queer’ will always be something other than merely ‘gay’. She shares with Germaine Greer, David Hoyle and other pioneers of radical personal politics a belief that the goal is not acceptance into the establishment, but a constant querying of the sexual, social, political status quo. Like Jean Genet, she knows that the fear of the gay man is most often a fear of the feminine, and in particular the frivolous feminine.

She rails against what she calls ‘white-collar feminists’ who disapprove of striptease, burlesque and drag. There is a brilliant scene in the show in which a naked Penny (a voluptuous and beautiful 50-something) delivers a rant against a media that allows children to watch horrific scenes of war or torture on film or TV whilst censoring images of sex or nudity. What are we scared of, she asks. We’ve seen it all before, ‘there are no new holes’! The long speech ends with her saying: ‘Well, I guess by now you’ve probably forgotten I have my clothes off.’

Childhood confessions of illicit sexual behaviour with other children; reflections on the joys of being a bisexual faghag (a noble occupation); coming to terms with a relationship with a domineering mother; stepping away from an abusive working-class family suspicious of anything it deemed different or ‘other’; the horrors of the AIDS-ridden 80s; why so many lesbians prefer talking politics to having sex… the subjects come thick and fast, presented with an almost-Brechtian approach of seducing us into a exposé of a serious subject through song-and-dance and a vaudevillian staging.

There are, of course, costume and wig changes galore. There are the aforementioned go-go dancers, flashing lights, glitterballs, a specialist pole-dance interval scene and the feel-good disco music – Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, almost inevitably, is in the mix, as is Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing. There is a scene on secrets set in the dark, and a cameo appearance on film by the legendary Warhol superstar pseudo-priest Taylor Mead. There are the occasional topical additions – a reference to the ‘cyanide in the Olympic Torch’ urban myth, for example, and some surreal suggestions that eels from the Thames could be fried with rosemary and Marmite. There’s overall a kind of feisty optimism for the world, and in particular a cheer for multicultural London in which people ‘eat each other’s food and hear each other’s language’. Penny’s philosophy is ultimately one of the power of the bright lights, big city mentality to combat old-world peasant intolerances. There is also a touch of Julia from Orwell’s 1984 in her claim that the establishment ‘doesn’t want people to fuck, because people who fuck – think!’.

Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is a celebration of femininity, of eroticism, of polymorphous perversity, of the power of personal politics. Its message, twenty years on, rings out loud and clear: we will survive, we won’t sit down, we won’t shut up, we won’t go away – we’re here to party for a world that believes ‘there is just one unity’. And yes, while we are all very different from each other, we are still, ultimately, overwhelmingly similar.