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

Aurélia Thierrée, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin: Murmurs

Ah, the walls, the walls – our lives are bound by them! Literal walls, metaphorical walls… But what if life is but a dream? Or what if we acknowledge (in the words of Jacques Lecoq, with a nod towards the Buddha) that ‘tout bouge’ – everything moves, nothing is solid? Where does that leave these repressive boundaries? Gone in a puff of smoke, that’s where.

In Murmurs, we are presented with a world made not of bricks and mortar but of cardboard packing boxes and crumpled curtain fabric. There is much play on absence and presence; on dressing and undressing; on covering and revealing; on solidity and mutation. Here today and gone tomorrow is the message; magic is the medium.

The opening scene places Aurélia as an ethereal creature surrounded by a set of boxes, a pair of removal men attempting a house clearance aided and abetted by our heroine, who we might take to be an awkward lodger or a ghost who won’t move on. The scenes that follow manage to be both fast-moving and other-worldly, perhaps mimicking the way dreams play out. Nothing is quite seen through – as soon as it arrives, it departs.

Illusion is the name of the game: lightweight buildings swoosh across the stage, then roll up into nothing; a pair of red shoes magically reappears onto a pair of pretty feet again and again, despite the fact that we clearly see them packed away; and a shapely leg crossing a threshold remains in place as its owner materialises elsewhere. Aurélia’s elusiveness is key to the piece. Popping up out of boxes, through windows, or from behind screens – never where you expect her to be, always one step ahead of the game – she is the desirable ‘other’ that is chased, flirted with, and occasionally captured momentarily by her two male foils (played by Jaime Martinez and Magnus Jacobsson) and by the various puppet-creatures, formed from everyday objects such as bubblewrap or bellows, that arrive in this other-world. It’s all breathlessly beautiful, and constantly unnerving.

Murmurs is the second show by Aurélia Thierrée to be created with / directed and designed by her mother Victoria Thierrée Chaplin, and comes with a lot to live up to. The first show by this team, Aurelia’s Oratorio, took the world by storm eight years ago and is seen as one of the defining moments in contemporary visual theatre. Then, there’s Victoria Thierrée’s thirty-year body of work with her husband Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, on Le Cirque Imaginaire andLe Cirque Invisible, which is often credited as giving birth to New Circus, looming over. (Aurélia made her stage debut with her parents, performing as a suitcase with legs – the image of legs appearing out of or behind objects is a continuing motif in her work!) Victoria has also collaborated with Aurélia’s brother James Thierrée on his renowned Junebug Symphony and La Veillée des Abysses. How could Murmurs possibly live up to the expectations seeded by this track record?

It doesn’t is the short answer – but that has to be qualified by saying that even a ‘less interesting’ piece by the Thierrée-Chaplins is worth seeing. Whilst watching the piece, I found myself frustrated by the constant fluctuations and wanted more things to be ‘seen through’. On reflection, after the show, I realise that this fluctuation is dramaturgically key to the notion of dissolving walls at the heart of the piece. I also, at the time, found the lighting to be rather odd – lots of steely-blues and straw-white washes rather than strongly focused spots, so the eye often had to make its own decision where to look. But perhaps the right effect for a dream world?

There’s an interesting moment at the curtain call: as Aurélia skips across the stage and takes the hands of Jakobsson and Martinez, there’s a kind of complicity and joyousness danced out that I suddenly realised was sorely missing from the show itself. Perhaps a little less ‘magic’ and a little more magic is needed.

It should, though, be acknowledged that both Aurélia’s Oratorio and Le Cirque Invisible were years in the making and have been constantly honed whilst touring. Murmurs is a recently-devised work, and was seen on the opening night of its London run. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops over time.

White Night Beach Party Animals

So, that was autumn then. Halloween, Bonfire Night and – if you live in Brighton – White Night, in which the city’s venues, clubs, art galleries, and museums open their doors all night to mark the end of British Summer Time and the turning of the year. The event is produced by Donna Close, who cut her teeth on the Streets of Brighton festival, so she knows a thing or two about programming outdoor performance and work for public spaces.

This year’s treats included environmental artists Red Earth on the beach; Rachel Henson’s Flickers, in which participants navigate an area using flicker-books of photos of the area they are asked to journey through – reviewed by Total Theatre Magazine at Stanmer Park during Brighton Festival 2010 and relocated/reworked for the seafront for White Night; and Periplum’s Navigator, which also (unsurprisingly) is a navigation piece for one audience member at a time – in this case using a pre-made film played on an iPod, which the audience member uses to work round the small streets and alleys of Brighton’s ancient old town, The Lanes – a journey that is spookily un-nerving due to the disorientation and discombobulation that occurs as you try to marry the real-life 3D environment and the portrayal of that same environment on film, the minor differences in the two representations playing strange tricks on your mind.

I had the privilege of being a guinea pig for Navigator on the night before White Night, and am proud to say that despite being a ‘luddite peasant’ I didn’t get lost, or break the iPod, and I even managed to turn down the right street occasionally, or look up at a window at the right time. It was quite odd to be followed along the route by six members of the company all anxiously looking after me like you’d carefully watch out for a tiny toddler taking their first solo journey along a street, ready to rush in and rescue them from trouble. Once I’d stopped panicking and relaxed into it, I find myself experiencing a delightful reflection on the passing of time, the nature of memory, and our perception of ‘reality’ – all framed within a gentle and wryly amusing take on lost childhoods that featured boys and bears of various sizes and age…

It was reported back to me that one of the most delightful moments that occurred on the actual run for Navigator was when one audience member – dressed as an angel, halo and all, and perhaps a little the worse for drink – turned out to be the most focused and attentive audience member of the evening, so completely enraptured and bent on his task, and moving so slowly and carefully and elegantly through the streets that he attracted an admiring crowd of observers following him in his quest.

If there’s a criticism of the show, it’s that the novelty of the form seems more important than the content at the moment – I’d like more characters, more street encounters, more integration and interaction with my environment, In saying this, I’m aware that these things take time and money, and that these are early days for this new work. And even at this delicate early stage of its evolution, Navigator is a witty, poignant and surprisingly moving piece of work, navigating (sorry!) street-arts supremos Periplum into fresh theatrical waters.

Usually on White Night I manage to weave my way across the city, taking in as much of the action as possible, but this year I was on performance duty with Ragroof Theatre, hosting an evening of dance, music and cabaret at Home Live Art’s Alternative Village Fete – a riotous evening that also included work by live artists cum cabaret and walkabout stars Brian Lobel (in 6-inch heels), Jenny Éclair (in 20 bras), Chris Cresswell (with sick superstar Baby Warhol), and the carnivalesque Day-of-the-Dead-ers Copperdollar – all set in a Big Top on the Old Steine, close to the pier.

Our White Night commitment didn’t end until 1.00am, by which time many of the more interesting artworks and performances elsewhere had been and gone, and the town had descended into a litter-strewn outdoor Halloween party. I realise, on reflection, that the first two years of Brighton’s White Night didn’t, for reasons of how the night falls in the annual calendar, coincide with Halloween (which always ends up as an enormous big trashy street party in Brighton these days), and that it is thus better when it doesn’t clash. If the organisers are determined to stick to the clock-changing weekend, next year will also clash with Halloween. But there’s talk of the clocks not going back (Boo! I like GMT!) and if that is the case then White Night could be held on any old autumn weekend I suppose!

Anyway, back to this year’s: the seafront remained a place of respite from the town centre madness (at least, it was fine if you ignored the mooning boys and staggeringly high-heeled girls tripping over on the pebbles), and I was delighted to make it down to the arches for a second viewing of Liz Aggiss and Joe Murray’s very wonderful film, Beach Party Animal, a documentary-cum-performance-to camera work commissioned by South East Dance which was showing right through the night.

Beach Party Animal is rather in the tradition of the City Symphony films of Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov – a very artful and cunning mix of staged set-pieces and real-life action, so deftly edited that unless you are in the know and spot the performers, it is hard to distinguish the plants from the real-live city folk, this being Brighton many of whom are of course completely bats and 24/7 performers anyway. And the plants – the likes of Tim Crouch as a wildman harpoonist, racing butt naked into the sea, and the Two Wrongies as girls who’ve had one over the odds and are trying to work their way through, over, and under promenade railings, bandstand, children’s paddling pool, and sea-groynes in killer heels and skirts showing what they had for breakfast, as my dear Irish mother would say – are in fact also genuine real-life loony Brighton city folk, so who knows how we distinguish the ‘real’ from the ‘fictional’ anyway.

Liz Aggiss and Joe Murray are both established film-makers, and a married couple – yet this is their first joint venture (to my knowledge, anyway). Her on-film choreographic talent for the artful arrangement of both objects and bodies has shown itself in many of her previous ‘dance screen’ works, many of which fall broadly into the Expressionist camp, often created with her regular collaborator, the composer and former Divas co-director, Billy Cowie. Here, in tandem with Joe Murray, she moves away from Expressionism into a crisper and sharper Hyperrealism. Aggiss and Murray apparently spent many, many weeks filming on Brighton beach at all hours of the day and night. Hours and hours of footage are distilled down into a 20-minute film that is an homage to the city that never sleeps (unless it’s face down on a sodden handbag, or comatose and sun-bleached like a beached whale on the pebbles). The camerawork is beautiful, with glorious shots of dozy carousel minders, screaming end-of-the-pier Big Wheel riders, and late-night barbecue lighters, and the soundtrack (by Alan Boorman) is a cleverly manipulated mix that adds to the hyper-real feel.

The choice to show the film on the beach – in the very site it was created – is a touch of genius. The wind ruffling the screen adds to the surreal nature of the viewing. And the odd parallels of real and filmed action are entertaining and occasionally disturbing – giving the whole experience an extra layer of meaning is the sight of the on-screen late-night revellers mirrored in the passing across the screen in real-time of another bunch of late-night revellers – creating a kind of two-mirrors-placed-facing-each-other eternal corridor of action. Oh that someone had filmed the film with the live interventions! An exhilarating end to my White Night.

Autumn Days

Hallowe’en already? It seems just the other day that I was reporting from the Edinburgh Fringe. Somehow we’ve crept into Autumn with me hardly noticing – perhaps because summer in Scotland felt so like autumn, but then in a reversal of the usual order we had summer in September and October this year!

Well, what can I say? Sorry for the long silence – but your editor hasn’t been idle, I have in the meantime edited our luscious and lovely print magazine, Total Theatre 23.3 Autumn 2011, available by subscription frominfo@totaltheatre.org.uk or from specialist bookshops such as the National Theatre Bookshop and Samuel French.

This autumn edition includes features on the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, on Proto-type Theater’s truly site-specific Fortnight at Mayfest, and on enterprising North London venue Jacksons Lane. The fantastic Mr John Fox is our Voices candidate; Total Theatre Award winner Adrian Howells is the subject of The Works; and there are reviews and reports from festivals galore – Edinburgh, Norfolk & Norwich, Brighton, Nottingham European Arts and Theatre (NEAT), and Birmingham’s BE. So, that’s the magazine, then… job done, plug over.

Meanwhile, out in the wider world, what’s been going down these past few months? First major event for me this autumn was the launch of a new artist-led festival, BR-116 – created by Anglo-Brazilian company Zecora Ura in collaboration with LIFT, and held in venues and public spaces across London. Collaborating venues included: Theatre Royal Stratford East, Arcola, Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Centre, and Trinity Buoy Wharf. The festival featured work presented by English and Brazilian artists, the latter roster including Flavio Rabelo with Take-Away, in which he sits slumped in flowing gown and mask on a pavement inviting passers-by to take him away for a walk and talk; and a very beautiful and delicate night-time garden piece by Olgas Lamas called Sirva-se. (‘Help yourself’ – do we detect a theme here?).

BR-116 also included a series of commissioned performance works for public spaces and public transport in London, and in a rather odd coincidence not one but two of the Total Theatre editorial team were, independently, recipients of commissions. Yours truly (under the auspices of my alter ego Dorothy’s Shoes) presented a piece called Behind the Moon, Beyond the Rain which took participants (and any unsuspecting members of the public who got embroiled) on a fairytale quest across the East End that involved singing on buses in Stratford, carnival dancing across a footbridge at West Ham, making paper boats to sail on the Thames towards the O2 (‘and they sailed in their boats across the water to the great palace from whence came the sounds of drums and trumpets making merry music’ – Grimms Fairy Tales), picnicking in an enchanted forest at East India Dock, and seeking out trolls under a rickety bridge in a Tidal Basin bird reserve. If you’re interested in learning more, seehttp://dorothysshoes1.blogspot.com/

Then came Alexander Roberts’ RageWalk London, in which participants wrote their rage onto pieces of paper in a burst of free writing, which they then carried close to their hearts as they walked through London’s streets and journeyed on buses and tubes carrying empty white placards. When Trafalgar Square was reached, they were invited to refer to the writings and pick a few key words or phrases to transfer to the placard, which was then held aloft from within a chalk circle drawn on the ground.

If you’d like to hear about Alex’s experience of making and presenting this piece, then see his article on that subject in the Winter 2011-2012 edition of Total Theatre Magazine (out in December). Alex has a longterm interested in work sited in public spaces, and as well as being an artist, theatre-maker and writer, is also a producer and festival director – having set up the Public Space Programme with an inaugural festival as part of ArtFart in Reykjavik. Is there no end to the boy’s talents?

Other work presented for this inaugural BR-116 included a trip on boat and train with MP3 text and music accompaniment, by Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciriaco, and the Nomad Café foraged food picnic on the DLR. This all came together with workshops by esteemed Brazilian companies LUME Teatro and Taanteatro, seminars, film presentations, and a version of Zecora Ura’s The Selfish Banquet, held at the Royal Festival Hall – guests at that included Pippa Bailey and Rupert Thomson from the new Summerhall venue/arts project in Edinburgh.

It takes the form of a feast of food and discussion in which people bring food to share, all of which is luxuriously heaped onto a main banquet table, then guests make themselves a plate of food and move from table to table, experiencing different discussion topics led by facilitators placed one to a table. A very lovely take on the ‘symposium’ – which literally means ‘with wine’, banqueting and earnest discussion being inextricably linked throughout history.

The next BR-116 will take place in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, January 2012.

Dan Canham: 30 Cecil Street / Augusto Corrieri: Musical Pieces

Placing Dan Canham and Augusto Corrieri’s work together on one bill was evidence of a canny bit of curating by The Nightingale’s Steve Brett: both artists are young men trained in contemporary dance who create performance works that sit somewhere within the dance, theatre and live art triangle – clever, entertaining and curious (in all senses of that word) works that show an obvious love of the trappings and traditions of ‘theatre’ whilst still exploring and usurping those traditions, each in a very different way…

Dan Canham first. His solo, 30 Cecil Street, was a great success at Edinburgh this summer – one of the must-see shows at the Forest Fringe that this reviewer sadly didn’t get to see! It’s a truly delightful piece, a kind of eulogy to an abandoned building and a conjuring of its ghosts. We start with an empty space; a reel-to-reel tape machine sat on a plain wooden table, downstage left; one chair; and the performer Dan Canham (whose previous work has included appearances with Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, and DV8), a charismatic presence onstage, even when he’s just standing still. The tape machine is switched on and we hear Irish voices talking, amidst the sounds of the clinking and clattering of a busy bar. As we strain to hear what’s being said, the sound switches from the small machine’s speaker to the main PA system, and we start to work out that there’s a conversation being had about a place of entertainment – reminiscences and reflections on performances over many years, and events and incidences onstage and off. We are in Limerick, and the story we are hearing is of the now derelict Theatre Royal.

As the voices murmur on, the performer recreates the rooms of the building as a (mostly) 2D architect’s model, using white masking tape on the black floor, with an occasional line taken onto a wall, or over the little wooden table, creating a surreal ‘almost-3D’ effect. It’s reminiscent of the minimalist marked-out set in Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville. When the space is mapped, Canham activates it with a series of gestural movement vignettes that are somehow both beautifully contained and gloriously expressive. At times, he looks terrifyingly young and vulnerable; at other times as old as the hills and twice as knowing.

In its conception and execution, there are parallels with Improbable Theatre’s first show 70 Hill Lane (in which a house and its occupants are conjured with little more than human voice and a roll of Sellotape), but 30 Cecil Street is its own good self – an evocative and soulful piece that, like one of those dreams that eludes you in the morning, evokes sensations that seem somehow just out of grasp, and stirs up emotions that you can’t quite place. Overwhelmingly, there’s an odd feeling of nostalgia for something that you never knew.

Playing with notions of the visible and the invisible, concealment and revelation, Augusto Corrieri’s Musical Pieces starts off-stage, with the sound of someone testing the mic with a little tap-tap of the hand and the obligatory ‘one two, one two’. When Corrieri appears, the sounds continue, but we never see him voice those words: he turns his back, or places an arm or a leg across his mouth as he moves through the space with the mic and its stand, often exiting through a door to the side of the stage and re-entering in all sorts of convoluted ways. The punchline comes when he faces us and we finally get to see his mouth as the words are spoken – but he’s throwing his voice so that his lips don’t move. Well, hardly move anyway… in a very human and endearing moment, he ‘corpses’, and the audience laughs heartily along with him.

His second short section also plays with the sound-and-vision relationship – this time by creating surreal contradictions between what we see visually and what we hear aurally. The shutters on a (real) window upstage are pulled back, and we hear the sound of a downpour, but can clearly see that there is no rain. A violin is taken out of its case, and placed on a chair – sitting there silently unbowed whilst the sound of strings soar through the space.

Both pieces are witty and thoughtful provocations that explore the play between the ‘real’ and the ‘pretend’ and show a fascination with the tricks and turns of theatrical tradition. As a kind of coda to the two pieces, Corrieri presents a deconstruction of the post-show talk, in which he interviews himself, using pre-recorded reflections on the nature of the work. It’s the weakest part of the evening: clever in a too-knowing way, and somehow squirmingly old-fashioned in its postmodern playfulness.

That aside, a truly entertaining evening from two talented and intelligent dance-theatre performers with something interesting to say for themselves, and the ability to communicate meaningfully with an audience.

www.stillhouse.co.uk / www.augustocorrieri.com

Handspring Puppet Company: Woyzeck on the Highveld

Handspring Puppet Company are best known in the UK for their key contribution to the multi-award-winning NT production War Horse. Their earlier production Woyzeck on the Highveld – here restaged by director Luc de Wit, produced by a international conglomerate of festivals, and presented here under the auspices of UK Arts International, Puppet Centre Trust and Barbican’s BITE (amongst others) – is a very different kettle of fish…

Georg Büchner’s unfinished drama dealing with the dehumanising effects of medical science and the military on a young man’s life is, in Woyzeck on the Highveld, transposed to South Africa in the 1950s, and specifically to the exploited and depressed mining communities of Johannesburg. Where War Horse is a ‘suitable for all the family’ war drama, dealing with ‘difficult’ subject matter in a way that celebrates the human spirit, creating an emotional response in the audience without dragging them down into the depths of despair, Woyceck on the Highveld is definitely adult fare, pushing deeply into a depression that envelops all in its dark cloud; exploring the murky territories of mental illness, medical abuse, sexual jealousy, misogynist murder, and the terrible way that men are used as fodder (for armies, by doctors, down mines).

The mood of the piece is oppressive, the story played out under low ‘straw and steel’ lighting, to a backdrop of monochrome film of intensely, almost angrily scratched illustrations of bleak landscapes. It is not easy viewing, although the horror is alleviated a little by the introduction of the delightfully larger-than-life character The Barker (Mncedisi Shabangu) as a boisterous guide to the story who, megaphone in hand like a fairground caller, steps outside of the action to reflect rather gleefully on the terrible events unfolding, adding a welcome dose of Brechtian alienation. And, as always, having terrible deeds enacted by puppets does also lend a sense of distance.

William Kentridge, the director of the original 1992 production of Woyceck on the Highveld, and the creator of the beautiful black-and-white etching/animation work that is key to the piece, apparently was enamoured of his collaborator Handspring’s work from the very first, commenting that ‘each day of rehearsal has brought revelations of the things that puppets can do better than their living counterparts. Try training a rhinoceros to write or an infant to fly on cue.’

A rhinoceros – a very lovely raw wood construction – does indeed write, and an infant fly, in scenes in which the puppets, puppeteers, and onscreen action are in beautiful harmony; and it is these scenes that I enjoy the most. The doctor’s control of Woyzceck’s eating habits is a key chapter in the dark story (he is at one point ordered to eat nothing but peas), and there’s a very wonderful supper scene that mixes live action (puppets and visible puppeteers) and animation most beautifully, with the stark emptiness of the real table before us, laid with a white cloth, an empty glass moved round with a despairing lunacy by Woyzeck, whilst the chaos of a messy feast and spilled drinks erupts onscreen.

Other scenes played out between the puppets, on a raised platform upstage, in which the puppeteers are not visible, I enjoy less, and feel a little distanced from (literally and metaphorically), although I readily admire the enormous skill behind the work.

If there is a criticism it is that the story is often told in a kind of ‘shorthand’ that I think would be hard to follow for anyone unfamiliar with the original. Although it could perhaps be argued that Woyzeck is so beloved of contemporary theatre-makers that it might be hard to find an audience member who hadn’t encountered some version of the tale in recent years…

So yes, a good solid production, with outstanding animation work from Kentridge, excellent puppetry (of course!), and a marvellous performance from The Barker – but, for me, the piece as a whole is lacking the wonderful energy of War Horse, created with Tom Morris, and missing the gorgeous intimacy of Handspring’s most recent UK work, Or You Could Kiss Me, created in collaboration with Neil Bartlett. I’m becoming very aware that Handspring’s work is defined by who the company collaborates with. It is of course no bad thing for companies to revisit old work and remount productions, but personally I’m more interested in the future, and really looking forward to seeing where they turn next!