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

Ripstop Theatre: Luminous Tales

Mixing traditional tales from around the world (including the Native American story of the crow who stole the daylight) into a narrative about the necessary balance between day and night and the value of both, Ripstop Theatre’s beautifully titled Luminous Tales is billed as a ‘gentle journey through the darkness of night, over the light of the moon and back in time for bed’ that uses shadow play and storytelling.

Presented under the auspices of Escalator East to Edinburgh, usually a mark of quality, and the Norwich Puppet Theatre, no less, with company endorsements from renowned puppeteer Luis Z Boy, I had high hopes of seeing a children’s show of exceptional quality but sadly this wasn’t the case.

In the interests of fairness, I saw the first show of the Edinburgh run, and get-ins are notoriously fast and furious in the Fringe, which might explain the nervous performance and the clunky transitions – for although Zannie Fraser is an experienced puppeteer and performer, she struggled to cope with the enormous demands of managing the many and various props and effects in this one-woman show: screens of various sizes, projected paintings, OHP, shadow puppet hares, glove puppet dogs, hand-held shooting star torches, calico bags that were supposed to capture the blue night-sky (and instead, confusingly, captured the projection of the green trees), etcetera, etcetera.

But beyond this, I disliked her character’s cheery Jackanory/Playaway tone, in particular the cringe-worthy ‘No more night-time’ song and dance. Children’s theatre has moved on so much in recent years, and her tone struck me as dated and a little patronising. Surely part of the remit of children’s theatre is to give young people things they didn’t know they wanted, rather than play to cliché and the lowest common denominator? And I had no idea why this old lady character was dressed in a Mrs Mop housecoat and 1950s style scarf but with trainers. What was this supposed to signify?

Aside from any first-show nerves, the piece seemed, in essence, deeply flawed: the writing was dull as dishwater (prosaic where the publicity copy had been poetic); the dramaturgy all over the place, with the integration of the traditional tales into the narrative clumsy. There were some very odd choices about what to place in shadow and what not, and generally the shadow theatre and puppetry work were disappointing coming from a company with such a solid backing.

On the positive side, the painted and projected landscapes were lovely, I liked the soundscape (at least when it wasn’t competing with the spoken text, of which there was far too much delivered in a nervous frenzy, with not a pause for breath in the whole 45 minutes) and there were some nice visual images – including a rice-cake moon munched to bits, a rubber glove ‘flappy batty thing’, and some entertaining shadow-puppet boxing hares.

Perhaps it’ll settle in for its run, but regardless Luminous Tales sadly isn’t the future for children’s theatre.

www.ripstoptheatre.com

So You Want to be a Theatre Producer

by James Seabright

May 2010

£12.99

Yes! A good book on producing theatre, written by a successful theatre producer! So You Want To Be A Theatre Producer? describes itself as ‘a comprehensive guide to every aspect of producing a show, from raising the money to creating a hit’. And that is indeed what we get: valuable insights on everything from the creative issues of coming up with the ideas and casting a show, through to tackling touring costs, insurance, marketing, PR and so forth. The emphasis is more on the mainstream/potentially commercial sector rather than the experimental theatre/live art sector – but there is valuable information for anyone putting on a production of any scale in any setting. After all, ‘success’ takes many forms but surely, if we are putting work in front of an audience, we want to do this successfully? So here’s how… And one marvellous idea is the addition of companion website with downloadable contract templates, marketing packs and budget spreadsheets – all for free atwww.producerbook.co.uk

Feral flyers, displaced seas and singing lepers – a Brighton Festival and Fringe round-up

So, why are some things in the Festival and some in the Fringe? This was asked of me by an interested ‘non-artist’ friend visiting Brighton in the hectic month of May. Once, the answer would have been straightforward: the Brighton Festival is curated, and artists are invited to take part and paid a performance and/or commissioning fee, whilst the Fringe (like its big sister in Edinburgh) is a free-for-all. It’s uncurated, and anyone can take part – people wanting to show work in whatever medium find their own venues, and make what they can from negotiated fees or (more usually) door splits with those venues.

But things are less clear these days. For example, in 2012 one of the biggest successes of ‘the festival’ wasn’t an actual Festival event but a Fringe one – Dip Your Toe. And to further blur the boundaries, this was a curated, commissioning venture by a consortium of three organisations: the Brighton Fringe, the Nightingale Theatre, and the Marlborough Theatre – and it ended up as listed in both the Fringe and the Festival programmes, for various and sundry reasons. So, what was it? Six bespoke mock-Victorian bathing machines (large huts on wheels) were created and customised. In some cases, one artist or company received a commission to design and commandeer a ‘hut’ for their exclusive use. In this category came Karavan Ensemble’s A Small Museum of Displaced Sea, which operated as both installation and ensemble performance, inspired by local history and older people’s memories of Brighton; Seth Kriebel & Zoe Bouras’s Vivascope, a contemporary take on the camera obscura; and Grist to the Mill’s Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter, a peepshow soundscape-and-animation piece reported on in the last Total Theatre Magazine. There were also a number of shows that had temporary occupation of a bathing machine, these including Inconvenient Spoof’s The Terrible Shaman, a terrifyingly funny and irreverent look at anthropological adventuring, exotic religious practices, and the myth of the noble savage.

Dip Your Toe was created in tandem with Lone Twin’s The Boat Project, in celebration of the maiden voyage of said boat, which was created from donated wood – a kind of floating repository of memories. The (main Festival event) sail-by turned out to be a little bit of an anticlimax as the boat is not particularly large or spectacular. Seeing it moored at the nearby Brighton Marina was also disappointing – no signage, and no awareness of the project or interest from any of the local sailing community meant that it was nigh on impossible to locate, and when it was located, there was nothing to mark it out from its neighbouring vessels. It is hard to know if this is down to the company or to the Brighton Festival, but it did feel like something of a non-event. However, there seem to be a whole load of interesting events and initiatives circulating around the Boat Project – for example, I discovered some interesting sound-art works being broadcast on something called Boat Radio, hosted bywww.folkestonefringe.com Worth a listen!

But back to Brighton. Not content with organising the massive off-site project that was Dip Your Toe, the Nightingale also had a fully-fledged and properly curated indoor theatre programme on its home ground, a small but perfectly formed theatre space above the Grand Central pub next to Brighton Station. Treats here included a showing of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit – one of the big hits of the Edinburgh Fringe 2011. The USP for this show is that the author wants to be present but is absent (stuck in homeland Iran) and the one actor performing on his behalf has not seen the script before he/she takes to the stage and opens the envelope. I was lucky enough to get Sue MacLaine (of Still Life and Sid Lester fame) as the actor on the night I went. Hers was a tender and responsive performance that really highlighted the poignancy of the absence/presence pairing of author and actor – and funny to boot. I will remember her galloping ostrich until the day I die…

Another enjoyable evening at the Nightingale was a double-bill of two emerging but highly skilled and already firmly established companies, Touched Theatre and Moved to Stand. Touched Theatre’s Headcase employed the very talented Yael Karavan and Annie Brooks in the service of a story about a goldfish and a girl, exploring mental health issues in young people in a playful and effective way – a lovely fusion of puppetry, physical performance and film. Move to Stand’s Kin trod the delicate ground between new writing and physical theatre. I was reminded of Analogue Theatre in both the structure of the piece and the subject matter – Kin investigates language, communication, personal relationships, and the tug between competing desires. Ultimately, the piece is about sacrifice – the sacrifice of individual needs, and the sacrifice of one life in the creation of another. The performance skills of all four in the team (three actors and a musician) are unquestionably excellent, and the company are one to watch – but I personally struggled with some aspects of the story. (Hard to discuss without giving the game away – let me just say that I didn’t really suspend disbelief at the moment of tragic denouement!)

Elsewhere in the Nightingale programme were Brighton luminaries Tim Crouch, The Two Wrongies, Boogaloo Stu, and Circa69 (one of Simon Wilkinson’s vehicles, others including Junk TV and Il Pixel Rosso, his ongoing collaboration with Silvia Mercuriali of Rotozaza). A surprise hit for the Nightingale was another off-site show, the interactive audio piece If I Ruled the World by Nova Pitch, reviewed here by Miriam King.

Across the town from Nightingale, a couple of newer ventures were making their mark. TOM (The Old Market) has been around a while, but in recent times it has been rebranded and taken over by the Stomp boys (Yes/No People), and for 2012 had some real treats on offer, including an extended version of Blind Summit’s The Table (reviewed by Total Theatre online at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011, and again in print at the London International Mime Festival 2012). So yes – the Fringe attracts big stars too! Conversely, the Festival featured a number of not-too-well-known artists in its mix – perhaps there is an argument for supporting artists at all stages of their careers but I’d argue (as I have done in the past) that exposing an artist to the scrutiny that being programmed into a large-scale international festival brings is not necessarily for the best. But let’s move on…

And so then there were the pop-up Fringe venues – many and various, but including The Warren, a venture right in the heart of Brighton, programmed by the team that run Upstairs at Three & Ten, a successful year-round theatre-above-a-pub venue with an eclectic programming policy. The Warren had an exciting selection on offer in May, including the wonderful, wordlessTranslunar Paradise by Theatre Ad Infinitum (who will be taking their hit show back for a second year at Edinburgh in 2012).

Of course that’s the whole thing about Fringe festivals – a venue can be anything, anywhere. A church, say. A little off the beaten track came Feral Theatre’s production Triptych, set in what locally is called Small St Peter’s Church, on the edge of Preston Park. This still-working church – a beautiful Norman stone building which has survived fire and flood and all sorts throughout the years. I’ll admit to a little bit of trepidation when I read thatTriptych fused circus and storytelling, and had an ecological theme. It could have been a holier-than-thou disaster, but was nothing of the sort.

Emily Laurens, Rachel Porter, and Persephone Pearl are our three writer/storytellers. Each uses the specific personal skills she has at her service for both her own and her companions’ stories. Emily is first, with a heartbreaking story about the last of the Eskimo Curlews (an Artic bird whose numbers are in serious decline), playing on the differing languages of science, poetry, modern reportage and traditional storytelling in the telling of tales. Her story is illustrated with beautiful shadow puppetry by Rachel Porter.

Rachel’s own story introduces us to Papusza, a female Roma poet, and describes itself as ‘a poetic interpretation of fragments of her life’. We see Papusza tugged hither and thither, surrounded by torn pages, hearing voices, endlessly repeating phrases, as she struggles with accusations of madness and the disapprobation of society – ‘no one understands me, only the forest and the river’.

Storyteller three Persephone Pearl is an aerialist. She uses her silks to tell a tale of life in the trees – not the first time this has been done (see, for example, numerous works by Scarabeus) but she does it well – very well. The Twyford Down anti-motorway campaign of the 1990s brought the world images of protesters of all sorts – from weather-beaten crusties to hardcore hippies to veteran lefties to newly converted middle-class ecologists – banding together to stop the destruction of ancient forest to widen the M3. Persephone focuses on one character – an idealistic young woman, experiencing the politics of protest for the first time – and tells the story of her initiation into the protest. Silks are climbed and clung from, wound up to become tree-top sleeping ‘pods’ or used to ensnare our heroine. There are moments when the text delivery is a little shouty (how to play loud and outraged without the shoutiness, and whilst performing a delicate aerial manoeuvre, is a challenge, I am sure) and I would see spoken text delivery as a focus of future work for all the company. But this is all stuff that can, and will, improve with time. What is already in place is great, and their understanding of what makes good theatre is exemplary. Form and content marry well, and I particularly enjoy the way they pass the baton between them, moving the storytelling hand-to-hand from one to the other, drawing each other in and out of the action. I also love the merging and mixing of live and recorded song and sound, orchestrated by the fourth onstage performer, musician and multi-instrumentalist Tom Cook.

Meanwhile, back in the main Festival for something completely different: Spymonkey are to be found at the red-plush Theatre Royal with Oedipussy, an irreverent look at Greek drama’s most famous errant son – directed with aplomb by Kneehigh’s Emma Rice, who describes Spymonkey as ‘the greatest conceptual and physical comedians working in this country’ and ‘the true inheritors of vaudeville’. Well, can’t argue with that.

Spymonkey are indeed terrific. The clowning skills are superb – all four company members are wonderful, but I’m always drawn most strongly to Petra Massey, perhaps because female clowns of this calibre are so rare in the UK. The humour, as always, is deliciously tasteless. (Cue Aitor and the Leper Song: leprosy isn’t funny – oh yes it is!) Stephan Kreiss gets the starring role (yes! at last!), Toby Park gets to really enjoy making music onstage, and Lucy Bradridge’s costume design picks up on the Bond-and-Barbarella vibe beautifully – 60s sci-fi metal headdresses, sparkly silver suits, and ludicrous Cleopatra eyeliner. And, as with previous show Moby Dick, there is this odd and interesting realisation that these clown explorations of classic tales actually bring us closer to the real truth of the stories in question than many a serious interpretation. Is there a ‘but’? A completely honest response is that marvellous though it all is, this Spymonkey production didn’t, for me, quite match up to the extraordinary and wonderful success of Moby Dick, which was created in collaboration with ‘art of laughter’ genius Jos Houben (founder member of Complicite). For once, I found the postmodern cum Frankie Howard-ish stepping in and out of the action in Oedipussy just a trifle irritating, and the physical gags not quite as breathtakingly funny in this show as in the previous production. But nevertheless a good night out, filled with fun and frolics.

More main festival: War Sum Up, Hotel Pro Forma’s collaboration with the Latvian National Opera, uses Anime/Manga inspired animation in interaction with live performance in a way that can perhaps best be described as a work of moving sculpture. There are echoes for me of Heiner Goebbels’ work. The piece investigates the nature of war, and specifically the archetypal roles of Soldier, Warrior and Spy, who are all manipulated by the Gamemaster. Yes, it sounds (and indeed looks) like live video-gaming. The music is an extraordinary amalgam of opera, electronica, and what the company call ‘chamber pop’. I haven’t quite heard or seen anything like it before, and salute the artists for creating such a visually and aurally rich work, although I have to confess that not a lot remained with me afterward – it felt all very much like a vivid dream, intense at the time, but fading quickly. I was not surprised to learn that international collective Hotel Pro Forma is led by a visual artist.

I also got to see DV8’s renowned production Can We Talk About This?. I am possibly in a minority of one, but it didn’t move or inspire or excite me one little bit. It went to the head, not to the heart. Cleverly pieced together verbatim theatre mulched with some great choreography performed by exceptionally skilled dancers – and yes, Lloyd Newson is a brave man to tackle the tangle of issues around freedom of speech, multiculturalism, forced marriage, and Islamism in the West – but I felt preached to, and if ever there was a case of preaching to the converted, this was it!

The theatre programme of the Brighton Festival also included numerous shows already reviewed or appraised by Total Theatre, either on this website or in print in Total Theatre Magazine Volume 24 Issue 02. These include the festival’s flagship production The Rest is Silence, by dreamthinkspeak (the subject of The Works in the print magazine); a multimedia installation and theatre piece set in an old fruit market, Land’s End by Berlin; Motor Show, an outdoor work by David Rosenberg and Frauke Requardt, commissioned by Without Walls; and Bootwork’s boyish homage to the film Predator.

Somnambules & The 7 Deadly Sins

A game show that descends from a quest for the glittering prizes to an inhumane and degrading spectacle; some perverse partner dancing that ricochets from a twisted Tango to a slewed Swing; a surreal ballet with a mirror; a manic tug-of-war; a camp-fire tribal striptease; and a dreamy film landscape that suggests an Arcadia elsewhere…

Come on down, contestants, the price is right! Leave the material world behind and search for a universe in an atom; an eternity in the ticking of the Countdown clock…

Russian actor/dancer Tanya Khabarova (now resident in Italy), a founder member of the legendary Derevo, and long-term collaborator and former Derevo performer Yael Karavan (formerly of Israel, France, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Japan and now resident in the UK) have joined forces to create a new show together: ‘We feel the need to react to an unstable world and a life devoid of values where money and power have taken the place of conscience and sensitivity… a world in which the media and television have become our new gods.’

And so here it is. As we enter the performance space, we are sporting numbers stuck on our lapels. We sit to the sound of canned applause, and a game-show host’s cloying welcome booms over the PA. We wait to hear who will be chosen. I’m 723, and it’s not me. The lucky two are a young couple who take to the stage blinking uncomfortably into the spotlight. Of course, it is Tanya and Yael. Fix, fix! Yael plays a clownish version of a nervous young woman, the newly married girl-next-door. She fiddles with the lock of hair coming loose, and pulls her skirt down, showing her teeth in a trying-too-hard smile. The shaven-headed Tanya is completely believable as her ‘husband’, capturing the nervous machismo of the young male wanting to do his best. The slight twitch of the neck and shoulders, the brace of the legs, the glances at his woman, and the bravura face to the ‘camera’ – all note-perfect.

The game begins – a series of tasks and challenges released from a pile of numbered cardboard boxes; a kind of ‘seven deadly sins’ quest for further and deeper degradation that could also be seen as a descent through the circles of hell to the final abyss. ‘Lust’ brings a tortured tangle of limbs as bodies grapple to gain supremacy. ‘Greed’ sees a vaudevillian tussle over a wad of banknotes in a back pocket. ‘Vanity’ we presume is the aforementioned mirror-ballet, in which the ‘wife’s’ head becomes eerily replaced by the mirror held over it. There is an Adam-and-Eve reference in a gluttonous battle for an apple, and inevitably there is a gun. And, of course, once a gun enters a story…

The performance from both actors is beautiful, extraordinary – it’s a match made in heaven, and the unique physicality and ability of each, further enhanced by their shared history and jointly held ‘toolbox’ of physical theatre skills, makes for a mesmerising stage presence and onstage relationship. Each of the scenes, with its inherent tasks and battles, gives an opportunity for an intoxicating play between these two magnetic performers.

I’m a little less excited by the game-show frame for the piece. The game-show motif is a popular one right now: see, for example, the enormous success ofThe Hunger Games (a series of dystopian novels for teenagers, recently filmed); the Japanese story on a similar theme, Battle Royale; and Chuck Palahniuk’s new short story, Loser. Apart from the game-show-battle-to-the-death cultural phenomenon there is also, of course, a very obvious precedent for the daytime TV show send-up in Jerry Springer: The Opera. I cite these examples to say that although Somnambules is of course its own unique self, some careful thought could perhaps be given to how important the framing of the game-show is, and if it is considered key, then how this could be developed further in a new way. There is a danger in parodying cliché! In particular, a mock-interval ‘word from our advertisers’ feels a little tired, and the fact that although we get drawn into ever-more-surreal circles of imaginary worlds, I am slightly unsure if the game ever gets properly resolved. It is, no doubt, a deliberately ambivalent ending, but having been pulled into the action (albeit quite minimally) at the beginning, it seems odd to end without being pulled out again.

But it is early days yet for this show, as this was the premiere of the piece, and it will no doubt undergo many transformations over its next stage of development. The key thing though is the power of the performances, the strength of the onstage relationship, and the beauty of so many of the scenes – with work on the structure and framing, this’ll be a knock-out show. Game, set and match to play for!

www.yaelkaravan.com

Upswing: Red Shoes

Red shoes! High heels! As I write those words I know they will set your heart and mind racing with images and associations.

Shoes, in many and various fairytales, denote transformation, and often signify the awakening of female sexuality, the burden of full-blown sexuality descending on the growing female body, and the escape from the shackles of the father into the shackles of the lover. There’s Cinderella’s glass slipper, the twelve princesses with their gold dancing shoes, worn out nightly – and of course Hans Christian Andersen’s red shoes. They are all coming-of-age stories, and paint complex soul pictures – but in The Red Shoes, the dancing shoes, with their usual associations of sexuality and feminine freedom and rebellion, become a terrible and oppressive burden.

In their show Red Shoes, Upswing take associations and references from Andersen’s tale, but mix these with imagery from other archetypal stories – most notably Red Riding Hood, which in its archaic version pulls no punches about being a story about the loss of virginity.

The set is a square floorspace carpeted with Virginia Creeper leaves, deep autumnal reds. Eleven or twelve tall poles make a forest, with stretches of clingfilm wound between them. Enter two young women in dungarees, sporting ponytails and red hoodies.

So, the wordless story we get is of the lust for, and the act of striving to win, the red shoes, which are to be found blossoming like flowers atop two of the poles; the angsty, antsy dance that the shoes bestow on their bearer-wearers; the entanglement in the wild forest; and the escape from the burden of the shoes – although in this version, there is a kind of ambivalent one-shoe-on one-shoe-off resolution. The relationship between the two female characters is played out nicely throughout the piece, as they move from innocent sisterhood into sexual rivalry (via the shoes) and out into mature friendship.

The poles are used, of course, to represent forest trees, for climbing up and swinging from (just three or four are true circus-style Chinese Poles, the others being décor) and these two female performers are good strong climbers and swingers. I find myself noting that within circus-theatre practice (as opposed, say, to pole dancing!) pole work is more often than not associated with male acrobats rather than female aerialists, with a focus on a typically masculine upper-body strength, and it is interesting to observe how very differently the pole work here is to much that I’ve seen in other circus productions. There is (obviously, considering the nature of the tale) a lot of emphasis on held leg-lines and poised feet. The movement work – solo and doubles at various different points in the show – is fluid and graceful, and at times the poles seem to almost melt into silks.

The clingfilm earns its keep in an exciting corseting cum bondage scene of tangling and wrapping, as each of the young women, running through the ‘forest’ helter-skelter in her new red shoes, spins and turns the film around her body. The shoes themselves are truly lovely, and I see more than one little (and not-so-little) girl in the audience looking lustfully at the beribboned red footwear as it waves aloft at the end of a well-turned leg.

All-in-all a very nicely realised piece of new circus-theatre work. It’s a pretty simple narrative, prettily done. There is perhaps more that could be done with the Red Shoes / Red Riding Hood theme (see, for example, the various works by Kneehigh that use the same source material) and it might be good to see a little more of the dark side of these tales creep in – but what’s presented is all well and good. A word here also for the soundtrack, which creates just the right mix of whimsicality, fairytale wonder and slight eeriness.

Seeing the piece inside a shopping centre on a busy Saturday afternoon didn’t seem like the ideal setting – this is far from the company’s fault, but I found the way that that the carefully-designed set was squeezed into a space also occupied (on three levels, and thus right at the top of the poles’ height as well as at floor level) by multi-coloured balloons, shop fronts and plastic signage a little bit disconcerting. But such is the nature of street arts and performance in public spaces – whatever aesthetic chosen has to somehow accept that it will be placed next to all sorts of inappropriate other things. It’s just I suppose that outdoors at least the poles, nicely decorated with foliage and the ‘nests’ of shoes, would at least have stood out against the sky. However, given the weather in Winchester this Hat Fair weekend – and the fact that almost all of the planned outdoor shows got delayed, abridged or cancelled – we should be grateful that Upswing got programmed into a shopping centre!