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

Bootworks Theatre: Predator

So, you know the 80s action movie Predator? The one with Arnie in, about an alien stalker who picks off a load of butch blokes one by one when they stray off the beaten path into the deepest depths of the South American jungle? You don’t? Neither did I, which some might consider a disadvantage for an audience member attending maverick theatre company Bootworks’ latest wheeze, an interactive performance by Andy Roberts in which his childhood dream of finally getting to the end of a blow-by-blow re-enactment of Predatoris finally realised. Luckily, it is all a jolly good and entertaining romp, regardless of whether you get the film refs or not. I’m just glad I wasn’t called upon to be one of the three audience members to take starring, multi-character roles in the action, as I don’t think I would have done Dutch and Billy and Poncho justice – although I think I made a pretty good brief appearance as a restless jaguar stalking the jungle, even if I do say so myself.

So, let’s rewind a bit. Andy is doing this because when he was a little boy, he and his big brother used to sneak downstairs after bedtime and watchPredator, then act it out obsessively the next day – gun battles, grenade attacks, ferocious tearing apart of victims limb-by-limb, the lot. But they never got to the end, to the bit (‘spoiler alert’) where the cyborg predator gets beaten; there was always school or homework or tea getting in the way. And one day, his brother went to big school, and got more interested in ‘Liverpool FC and boobies’ than in playing war games, so that was that.

The film is acted out with great vim and vigour and enough amusing asides to entertain those of us who have little idea of what the hell is going down. As the mother of three sons (the eldest not that much younger than Andy), the role of the show’s absent character, the boys’ mother, struck a chord: ‘Christmas morning and we wanted guns, guns, guns. And what did we get? Rubik cubes!’ Ah yes, I remember clearly the gun ban, enforced by all well-meaning feminist mothers in the 80s – thwarted in my household by a seven-year-old who spent his very first pocket money in the Poundshop buying a cop gun, badge and handcuffs set. Boys will be boys will be boys will be boys, it was always thus so and will probably ever be, regardless of what the mums might wish for – and the Bootworks boys are playing with this platitude to great comic effect.

The visual aesthetic for the show is (not surprisingly) super-low-tech: a blow-up palm tree and a paddling pool filled with bouncy balls, a batch of cardboard signs, an economy bag of plastic soldiers, and a joke shop Predator costume – with a few Anglepoise lamps and a clickety-click slideshow of family snapshots illuminating the action. Special mention also to the remote-control toy ’copter that plays a crucial role in the proceedings.

It is all strung together very nicely, Andy handles his helpers with due care and attention, and keeps it all moving at a cracking pace, the only drop being a ‘snack break’ section that falls a little flat, despite the cheese strings and Mother’s Pride sarnies.

Audience was key in this show – well, it is in any show but you know what I mean. As well as our three supporting ‘actors’, who fill in for Andy’s absent brother (too tied up with Dad duties to come out and play, although Andy did try to get him in, calling him on a Fisher-Price toy telephone – a nice touch), the rest of us get to be swaying palm trees, or parrots, or – did I mention what a good jaguar I made?

The Basement’s intimate space, The Pit, was the perfect setting for this show – packed in to capacity and up close, there was no choice but to be involved. It was great also to go to a ‘main programme’ Brighton Festival show that had a high proportion of young adult males in the audience – a demographic more likely to be found in the comedy clubs than theatre and performance art venues. Brownie points for Bootworks and The Basement for bringing in new audiences to contemporary theatre!

www.bootworkstheatre.co.uk

Made in China: We Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?)

Presented under the auspices of ‘east. by. south. east’, a collaboration between key venues in those two regions, Made in China’s We Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?) is a strange beast, in the best sort of way – an interesting mix of new writing and physically embodied, really there, live art performance. It took me a while to be won over, but won over I was by the time we got to the end.

But wait, let’s start at the very beginning…

As we enter the space, we see a young female performer standing on a table, bare-legged and dressed only in a black nylon underslip. Gestures of self-consciousness, if not actual awkwardness – pouts, nervous smiles, tugs on the underslip, etcetera. Once we are seated, a young male performer enters, looking straight out of the 80s – all Bowie-inspired trews and braces, black shirt and tousled hair. Our two performers use their real names (Jes and Chris) onstage – and who is to say what this means in this play between truth and fiction? A stylised dialogue starts up, a kind of litany listing truths, half-truths and lies – and who is to know which is which? Trivialities and things of monumental importance sit side-by-side – stolen ice-creams, hangovers, London tube bombings, thwarted picnic plans, a plane crashing into a city skyscraper… it’s all as important or as unimportant as you want to see it. Weaned on Forced Entertainment’s Speak Bitterness, I find myself thinking.

But as the piece progresses, the two performers settle into their onstage relationship – a kind of pseudo-sibling rivalry in storytelling, playing with the nuances of their real and imaginary relationship (in one moment they are claiming they were inseparable as children, and lived next door to each other, and the next minute we learn that she is American, but he is Canadian) – and really make the material their own as they spin a web of words around us. The words weave bigger and better webs – the real-life lies and made-up truths, false memories and true imaginations all mulching together beautifully.

The call and response listings of things seen, felt, laid claim to and lied about are punctuated by physical actions: an intermittent robotic dance sequence to ‘Rebel Rebel’, that returns and returns again at an ever-increasing pace; a drunken sway to ‘If I Had a Hammer’; a ritualistic dousing with flour, ketchup and water; and an endless number of ice lollies sucked, and beer cans opened, drunk from, and chucked aside. Ultimately, it’s a coming-of-age tale: if you had to define ‘adolescence’ it is surely the brief time in your life when ice cream and beer assume equal importance?

By the time we’ve reached the end, I feel that I’ve witnessed a very carefully written and effectively realised piece of theatre, words, physical actions and visual images all balanced beautifully – and in both performers (although perhaps particularly in Chris Bailey, who I was drawn to constantly in this production) seen evidence of a really special performance talent.

A mention also to off-stage company member Tim Cowbury, who is one of a growing number of young playwrights crossing the worn-thin dividing line between ‘new writing’ and ‘performance’ and who, with Jessica Latowicki, is the co-founder of Made in China.

www.madeinchinatheatre.com

Berlin Theatre Group: Land’s End

The Old Municipal Market is known locally as the former fruit and veg market. It’s a fine old space that’s seen better times: a great big, cold, dark and dripping hulk that has been the venue for many so-called ‘site-specific’ performances over the years, by both professional artists and ‘VPA’ (visual and performing arts) students from what the old-guard call the art school – otherwise known as the University of Brighton, which is right next door to the market.

What the Berlin Theatre Group – who are in fact from Belgium, not Berlin – are doing here with Land’s End is difficult to fathom. It is hard to think of an example of a potentially good show more inappropriately sited.

It is, in essence, a two-part piece. In part one, the audience are let loose in the warehouse and wander freely around, viewing a number of installations which reference a murder most foul. Some are obvious references: a section of a car with feet sticking out of the boot circles on a creaking turntable; a split-screen video depicts a man crashing down a staircase; a cranky conveyor belt sends a cup of coffee on an eternal circling journey, the coffee augmented by a sickly green powder. Other exhibits are more puzzling: a trough of goldfish with plugged-in hairdryers hanging over them, menacingly; a listening-post set around an onion-chopping contraption, that on the night I attend is one of a number of the mechanical structures that isn’t working properly. Coming close to the listening post, we hear a series of unanswered questions, related to the topics of personal relationship, anger management, and witnessing: How is your memory? Do you remember what you see or what you hear? How do you manage guilt manifested by others? Are marriages made in heaven? On the floor next to the onion-station is a sign that says ‘I never cry in public’. In one part of the market is a bank of seats and some free-standing film screens: ‘This section isn’t open,’ says an usher. ‘It is something secret.’

A not very well-kept secret as the impatient audience, bored with the installations and chattering loudly, have by now mostly gathered at this part of the market, waiting for the next thing to happen. A looped electronic soundtrack kicks in, and everyone crowds in to sit in the regular tiered theatre seating arrangement. Except that this is a freezing cold warehouse, not a theatre, so the next hour is marred by cold and discomfort, making it hard to appreciate what is presented.

And what is presented is good: a clever and interesting mix of live and filmed action, blurring distinctions between fiction and reality as the words of ‘real life’ on-screen interviewees, and live and screened actors, mix stories both banal and harrowing – all centred around reflections on the fate of a farmstead that sits on the border between France and Belgium. There is, for example, a bizarre story of how hard it is to get the roof fixed when half of it is in one country and half in another – one legislation granting permits immediately, the other taking six months; one allowing Velux windows, another forbidding them. Weaved into all these amusing odd-bod tales of life lived in two countries is the key story of a murder that took place in the border country, provoking all sorts of complicated legislative proceedings which are played out in the dining room of the borderline farmstead, requisitioned for the purpose – a line literally drawn down the middle of a table separating the two suspects, the victim’s wife (Belgian) and the alleged assassin she has hired (French), who are seated at each end, in separate countries as neither extradition for him nor border-crossing for her are possible. Less a recreation of a true-life event, although indeed based on a true story, the show is a clever deconstruction of the issues raised by the case, and the absurdities of the legal proceedings (the Belgian woman has to enter the house through a window as the door is in France; the French man has a portaloo so he doesn’t have to enter Belgium to use the toilet). References to Kafka are many and various in the company’s programme notes!

It’s a great story, the twists and turns of ‘what really happened’ worked through cleverly in tandem with the townsfolk’s reflections on living simultaneously in two countries, the issues of nuances of language, cultural differences, and miscommunication being key to the main story – this played out very nicely in all the intermingled texts in two languages, French and Flemish (with English surtitles adding another layer of meaning). Ultimately, it is less about the murder than about the relationship between the wife and the hired man – an exploration of communication and miscommunication, similarity and difference, saying and meaning.

Had I been seated in a warm and comfortable theatre – where this piece would most appropriately have been sited – I would have felt that I’d had a good theatrical experience. As it was, it was hard to separate my response to the work from my physical discomfort – the choice to put its audience into seating banks in a freezing cold warehouse seemed more bizarre than the stories that unfolded! And the linked installations, although amusing, ultimately added little to the main piece – turning out to be a kind of expose of the ‘thirteen ways to kill your lover’ scenario espoused in part two.

It seemed that the company and/or the Brighton Festival (who co-commissioned the piece) were seduced into the idea of creating a piece of work outside of a theatre space, without really thinking through what the relevance of the site was to the proposed piece, and how well the piece fitted this particular site. A common mistake made by many of those VPA students over the years – although one would hope that seasoned professionals would know better. Take the piece out of this site and it would be improved 100%.

www.berlinberlin.be

Carnival!

Ola do Brasil!

If you were wondering why your editor had gone a bit quiet these past few weeks, it is because she’s been in Brazil on an extended research trip. Is still there, in fact, spending quality time with LUME Teatro and other Brazilian companies!

So being in Brazil in February/March means being in Brazil for carnival (you know, Mardi Gras/Shrove Tuesday the big blow-out before Lent). This was my second year in a row in Brazil at carnival time, so thought a few words on the subject wouldn’t go amiss!

First to say that when I was in Rio for Carnaval 2011, I didn’t see any of the carnival displays that are beamed to TV sets across the world. That carnival is hidden away in the Sambodromo, a massive stadium where tickets costing a fortune are sold months in advance to visiting tourists, or ringfenced for corporate hospitality. There is a sense of cynicism amongst Cariocas I know about the invisibility of this famous display, the majority of the people of the city excluded from its most famous cultural activity…

Where they and other Brazilians throughout the country have their carnival experience is in the street ‘blocos’ which you can imagine as a kind of cross between Glastonbury and Gay Pride: fancy dress of every conceivable type on display – sequinned hot-pants, Harem pants, blue nylon wigs, angel wings, devil horns, halos, funky shades, Hawaiian leis.

But the essential element of the experience is the music and the dance. And true to the origins of carnival, the street bloco is a collective experience in which there are no onlookers, all are participants to a greater or lesser extent, and in which the roles of ‘performers’ and ‘non performers’ merge and cross.

So let me give you some idea of how these work in somewhere like Barão Geraldo (a smallish town on the edge of Campinas, Sao Paulo district). A carnival bloco is scheduled to start at, say, 6pm. Should you turn up at the designated starting point at 6pm, what you will find is a truck with a sound system playing some recorded music, and a bunch of musicians ambling about, chatting to colleagues, drinking beer, trying on band t-shirts, changing strings on their cavaquinhos or guitars, tightening up the skins of their snares – or whatever. There will be some small children in fairy wings or Superman outfits running round and through their legs, and a spattering of other people lounging around smoking and drinking. A police car will be blocking the road to traffic, and a few policemen will be leaning against it, arms folded, bored expressions on their faces.

At some point a while later – maybe an hour, maybe more – the band will have taken up their cortege formation – cowbells and tamba and bass drums and snares, with the stringed instruments to the rear, a snake-nest tangle of leads trailing from the PA truck and plugged in to the pick-ups on the instruments. There will be a few low-key guitar-and-voice based songs (mostly as a sort of rehearse-in-public soundcheck, I suspect), but then we see the band leader go round and shake everyone’s hand or hug them intensely, so we know something is about to shift.

And suddenly there is a great surge of energy, as following the whistle blow and fingers-in-the-air countdown from the bandleader, the batteria thunders into action, and the ever-growing crowd starts dancing. But we are still, as yet, in our starting spot, no forward movement. Usually there are a fair few tunes played at the starting site, and these attract more and more people in – the first things played are often popular songs that everyone knows the words to, or perhaps songs newly-written for this year, with helpers passing round sheets of paper with the words on.

Once the band are fully in their stride and the unifying first few songs have been sung, the whole cortege starts to move forward along its designated route. Which may well be a mere mile or so, but it’ll take us five or six or more hours to do that route, in a kind of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ pattern of progressing and stopping.

Along with musicians and accompanying crowd – some dancing wildly, some kind of edging along in what we might call the ‘carnival two-step shuffle’ – will be a whole army of drinks sellers, their beers and water and energy drinks (and in some cases, spirits and cocktails too!) housed in a variety of ways, from the simple polystyrene ice-box carried on the shoulder, to the shopping trolley filled with cans, to the rather more sophisticated fridge trolley and umbrella contraptions. Sometimes these get caught in a kind of bottle-neck, and have to edge their way to the side of the crowd.

There’s all sorts of unwritten rules about the blocos. If you are right in front of the band, then it is customary to dance backwards, so you are kind of paving the way for them rather than holding them up, as you might do if you had your back to them. This way, the band (and any ‘official’ dancers or flag bearers the band carries with them) can set the pace of the forward movement rather than the crowd setting it – although it is always a give-and-take situation. This front row of backward-facing dancers often hold hands and get into little patterns of forward and back runs or grapevine-like side steps weaving from left to right, as well as the legendary faster-than-the speed-of-light on the spot footwork the street samba dancer is renowned for!

If you stay right in the thick of things you really need to keep dancing and go with the flow – although I did, at one bloco, see a very tall man with a child on his shoulders stand resolutely still right next to the band, people weaving around and past him as if he were some sort of civic statue or sculpture to be negotiated.

If you feel that your energy is flagging, then you can ease your way out to the edges and take a break, walking slowly alongside for a while, or even just watching the parade go by, then working your way back upfront, should you so wish, once your energy returns. These slower and calmer edges are where much of the meeting and greeting goes on. In a place the size of Barão Geraldo, everyone at any event will know a great deal of other people there. What I found most amusing and lovely was the excitement with which people greeted others whom they had seen a mere 24 hours earlier – hugging and kissing each other as if they were long-lost brothers returned from a great sea journey lasting many years…

In Rio, I experienced blocos day and night – a complete carnival immersion, with little chance of escape. Barão Geraldo is a lot different, with one main bloco each carnival day, which lasts a good long spell of up to eight hours, and a number of smaller events. I went to two of the big blocos. Saturday evening’s event was led by the extraordinary and redoubtable Altaneira, who played for an astonishing and truly marvellous eight hours without a break, cleverly shifting rhythms and speeds to accommodate traditional carnival samba song, hardcore percussion-led battatuque, axe style music from Bahia, sinuous African rhythms – and a whole host of other things I couldn’t name but loved.

Monday evening saw the turn of Cupinzeiro, who had a slightly more laid-back and melodic style, and who paced their bloca in a different way. Rather than the relentless build of Saturday’s event, in which Altaneira never stopped playing, but found ways within their eight-hour set to give some musicians a short break, for example by having a number of vocal-and guitar based tunes as an interlude for the percussionists – Cupinzeiro’s event scheduled stops along the way, where the whole band came to rest for a while, and everyone had the opportunity to sample the delights of the downtown ‘portaloos’.

Both these two blocos start early evening, and there is a family-friendly feel for the first few hours, the children weaving in and out of the crowd of dancers or excitedly poking at the sculptural decorations that were wheeled along the streets at the head of the cortege (the Alterneira event on Saturday had some sort of evolutionary theme, and featured models of space rockets, dinosaurs and a rather fetching monkey writing the works of Shakespeare on a word-processor!). But as the night progresses, it gets a little more adult and earthy, as more and more people join the throng, and more and more drink is drunk. Yet despite the high volume of alcohol being consumed, I didn’t see one moment of bad humour from anyone.

I should also mention here that apart from the street events there are also special carnival bills at the live music venues, for those who prefer a more sedate carnival experience. For some people it is enough to party in their gardens with friends. Carnival is different things for different people.

But whatever choice the Brasilieros make at carnival time, one thing is for sure: it beats pancake races in the cold!

[This blog is an edited version of a post that first appeared on www.terralume2012.blogspot.com]http://www.terralume2012.blogspot.com

LUME Teatro: Cravo, Lirio e Rosa

Blackout, and we hear the William Tell overture. A grand entrance is anticipated; the same kind of anticipation I built when I was purchasing the Play Goes Wrong show tickets. Lights on – and, and… And here is Teotonio, who is delighted to be on stage. So delighted. It shows in every muscle of his body, which is as tightly primed as an overwound clockwork toy. He veers from nervous grinning at the audience to a worried exploration of the extremely large and forbidding empty space that is the SESC theatre stage. Nothing! Is he, Teotonio, supposed to do something? He doesn’t seem to know. Now what? There’s no hiding place, although he makes a feeble attempt to erase himself by retreating upstage, spread-eagling himself up against the blacks, his arms outstretched, his back to the audience. But there is no peace to be had, as he (and we) suddenly notice a tiny white spot on the black curtain, which has to be removed and disposed of – easier said than done.

The William Tell overture – encore. And this time we really do have a grand entrance, the arrival of the high-and-mighty Carolino, who takes immediate control of the situation with nose-in-air disdain and a regal wave of the hand, suitcases large and small organised into their X-marks-the-spot stage positions (Teotonio doing the actual donkey work, of course). All is prepared, on with the show!

What follows is a delicious clown parody of the instant-show-in-a-suitcase tradition. First up in the tricks and turns department is a demonstration of the marvellous skills of a tiny wooden trapeze artist (one of those simple mechanical children’s toys), pulled from a suitcase with great aplomb. In one of the many gorgeously realised moments in the show, the toy breaks, mini trapezist hurtling through the air to land in a broken heap, then anxiously given emergency resuscitation treatment by Teotonio, who weeps desperately – until he sees Carolino playing with a new toy, a push-along cycling puppet on a stick. The tiny trapezist is thrown to the dogs, and the new toy takes the spotlight…

More foolishness unfolds with the toys and the suitcases, and then there’s a shift in dynamic as Carolino disappears and his female alter-ego Gilda arrives onstage – a vision of blonde curls, dressed in a delightful blue-and-yellow polyester dress. She gyrates to the sound of the Gypsy Kings, lips slightly parted, hips circling, feet (clad in rather fetching blue towelling mules) swivelling on the spot. Teotonio is mesmerised. His attempts at courtship fail (Gilda is as high-and-mighty as Carolino, in her own inimitable way), but pride comes before a fall, and it’s not long before Gilda gets her comeuppance, which ends in her crashing arse-over-elbow to the floor, legs akimbo, with yellow lacy knickers revealing a rather unladylike bulge. Not to be outdone in the drag department, Teotonio dons a tutu and punk-pink hair ribbons – and ultimately the two ‘ladies’ together discover an Arcadian paradise in a suitcase full of flowers.

Cravo, Lirio e Rosa, created and performed by Carlos Simioni (Carolino) and Ricardo Puccetti (Teotonio) of LUME Teatro, first saw the light of day in 1996. It has subsequently become a mainstay of the company’s repertoire, appearing in festivals across Brazil – a continent-sized country – and throughout the world. It is classic theatre clown with a contemporary bite, playing with the traditional clown hierarchies of status with more than a touch of irony. We can see evidence of Ricardo Puccetti’s training with Philippe Gaulier; and evidence in both performers of the intense personal physical training, inspired by the legacy of Etienne Decroux disciple Luis Otávio Burnier, that is at the heart of LUME’s work.

So tradition is there in the foundations, but the show is very much its own unique self, built around the relationship of the two clown characters – and of course the relationship between the two actors, who have honed these wonderful clown characters in partnership over many years. The experience shows in the tremendous ease and control with which the game is played out: the timing is immaculate, and it is commendable that the two performers have allowed themselves the liberty of a slow and carefully orchestrated build. I particularly like the fact that music is used sparingly but effectively.

As with any good show, it’s the details that make the difference: that small white dot on the black curtains obsessively picked at, Gilda’s blue slippers shuffling rhythmically, the ludicrously manic way in which the push-along puppet is steered around the space, the arch of Carolino’s eyebrows and arrogant angle of his red nose, the jittery shake of Teotonio’s hands and his colt-like charges around the stage, the touching tenderness with which they finally make their peace…

Cravo Lirio e Rosa unsurprisingly garners a standing ovation on this, its opening night of a three-night run at the SESC Santana theatre. A lyrical piece of theatre, a great demonstration of clowning skills, and a lovely vehicle for the tremendous talents of LUME’s two longest-standing members. Bravo!