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

Shortlisted!

So, where was I? Ah yes, autumn in Edinburgh – although these past few days it’s been almost like summer. There are cricket whites on the Meadows, and hippies blowing giant bubbles – but there’s also a rustling in the trees, and the odd leaf or two falling just as a warning. On the edge of the Meadows is a café with a board outside announcing: ‘Sun? Rain? Hail? Ice Cream!’ Can’t argue with that.

But for some of us, there’s no loitering in the park, it’s off to the theatre – 11am or earlier till 11pm or later, day in, day out. Not that I’m complaining, not really…

I think I reached my lowest point of tiredness and overload on the day I came back to Edinburgh after a long weekend ‘down south’ – having had a few days wearing a completely different hat as dramaturg on Ragroof Theatre’s Gloves On at the National Theatre’s Watch This Space festival, then a late night train back to the Burgh, this all leaving me more tired than I realised.

But I’ve rallied round, and this past week started with three days of fitting in as much as I could see, then a whopping six-hour Total Theatre Awards assessors’ shortlisting meeting on Wednesday eve.

Of course I can’t divulge what was said, only that it is a painful process; a democratic process involving twenty people inside the room, plus other outside advisers, and of course there are always personal favourites that don’t make it through…

The ‘ones that got away’ for me this year include Blind Summit’s The Table,Free Time Radical by Frequency D’Ici, Tim Crouch’s I Malvolio, Il Pixel Rosso’s And The Birds Fell From The Sky, New Art Club, and The Two Wrongies. Great shows from all of the above – so I would heartily recommend them, even though they didn’t make the shortlist. I also loved TEAM’s Mission Drift, and Dance Marathon, both of which closed early so couldn’t be judged.

So, that’s what’s not on the shortlist – what did make it through? It is a very interesting mix, reflecting the diversity of work that Total Theatre supports. There are just three categories: Emerging, Innovation, and Physical/Visual & Devised. Under Work by Emerging Artists/Companies there are two shows inspired by ‘feminist’ fairytales (Bluebeard and The Girl With Iron Claws) which take very different approaches to the telling, one with a vaudeville vibe and one in more traditional storytelling mode, but both using music and object animation in interesting ways; a quirky cabaret show (East End Cabaret); a devised piece set in a toilet, Sailing On, which I haven’t yet seen; and a gorgeous solo live art performance/multimedia piece, As the flames rose we danced to the sirens, the sirens (winner of best show at BE festival).

Under Physical/Visual & Devised Theatre, there are a good few circus or circus-theatre shows: a one-man equilibrist-meets-multimedia show, Leo; Circ La Putyka from the Czech Republic; and two shows from Scottish artists,Uncharted Waters, and Snails and Ketchup. Then, there’s a classic (and perfectly executed) ‘total theatre’ show by Told By An Idiot, The Dark Philosophers; a wild Kantor-esque music/visual theatre extravaganza that won my heart, Turandot; a completely different approach to the point where music meets theatre by site-specific gurus Grid Iron, What Remains which is a one-man piece by the company’s longterm associate, composer David Paul Jones; a beautifully crafted wordless mask theatre piece by Lecoq-trained Theatre Ad Infinitum, Translunar Paradise; and expert shadow puppetry from Canadian company Bunk Puppets in Swamp Juice. Also in the running are: a comedy dance show, The Ballet Ruse; a clown-comedy crossover, Dr Brown Decaves; and something that almost defies description – The Technodelic Comedy Show, a Japanese mime/animation played as a kind of live computer game, to give you some idea.

Over in Innovation, there’s a whole load of shows that are questioning the traditional definitions of theatre, pushing boundaries, and/or challenging form. These include the notorious Audience by Ontroerend Goed, which has managed to keep Edinburgh chattering for the past two weeks; and the overnight sensation, in both senses of that term, Hotel Medea. There are two pieces from artists based in, or heralding from, the Middle East – and both, in very different ways, question notions of personal freedom taken for granted in the West. White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is a play written for an actor who has not yet seen the script, and an audience invited to join the game; Maybe If You Choreograph Me… is intended for an audience of one – and is ‘for men only’.May I Have the Pleasure…? is the latest from the master of interactive theatre, Adrian Howells, who invites his audience to join him at a wedding reception;You Once Said Yes is interactive in a very different way, played out on the streets of Edinburgh (and sold out; I am still trying to get a ticket!). Also in this group are Orkestra del Sol’s Top Trumps, live music with a twist, and The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik, a very sweet solo show featuring puppetry and animation.

Additional to this rather long shortlist are some shows that opened late, and come highly recommended by members of the judging or advisory panels, so are also being considered for an Award. Working the Devil by Dog Kennel Hill Project will be considered in the Physical/Visual & Devised category. Then there are a whole swathe of extras under Innovation: The Animals and Children Took to the Streets by 1927 (previously seen by Total Theatre Magazine at BAC, a gorgeous interweaving of live action and animation); Quarantine’s Entitled; every minute, always by Melanie Wilson and Abigail Conway; The first moment I saw you I knew I could love you by Curious (a very clever and beautiful reflection on memory, ageing, and our relationship to our bodies and our health/sanity); 3rd Ring Out – The Emergency by Metis Arts (a global warming SF game played out in a shipping container); andWatch Me Fall by Action Hero.

Looking at the above lists, there are definitely some patterns to notice and comment on. The first is just how many of the shows above are being presented at Edinburgh’s brand new venue Summerhall, which has emerged as the epicentre of all things experimental. The Hotel Medea overnighter is played out here, as is As The Flames Rose…, as well as most of the ‘late additions’ above (opening shows in Edinburgh later because it is a British Council Showcase year, which means that a lot of the world’s bookers and producers are in town for the last week only). Summerhall is an artist-led venture, supported by both Battersea Arts Centre and the Demarco European Art Foundation, and is certainly the must-go venue of the 2011 Fringe. There is talk of Summerhall being made into a year-round artist-led centre for residencies and performances, but that is just speculation at the moment. If I learn more, I’ll report back.

Other venues or producing houses with two or more shortlisted shows are: Universal Arts at New Town Theatre; Remarkable Arts at St George’s West; Dancebase; Traverse Theatre; Zoo Venues; Underbelly; and Pleasance. Forest Fringe, Laughing Horse Free Fringe, C Venues, and Assembly at George Square come in with one each.

Other patterns? Lots of interactive/immersive work of all sorts on the Innovation shortlist, which reflects the trend in contemporary performance; the high number of circus shows on the Physical/Devised shortlist symptomatic of this as a growing artform; lots of puppetry and animation either shortlisted or seriously considered for shortlist; numerous shows that are sited outside of regular theatre spaces; a lot of work using spoken word in interesting ways (mediated and otherwise); a continuing interest in deconstructing classic fairytales witnessed in the shortlist and in numerous other shows considered for the Awards; a number of shows investigating flooding due to global warming; and many shows manifesting an interesting use of music, and/or with narratives driven by music.

So, there you have it: the shortlist. I’ve set myself the task of seeing all the shows on the list before the judging meeting on Thursday 25th – wish me luck!

Adrian Howells: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding

A swanky hotel room, tasteful decor, immaculately clean linen. A warm bathroom, a bath full of bubbles and rose petals, candles in glass jars. An assignation with a new lover? A weekend break to revive a tired marriage? No, a theatre show/event/experience (it’s hard to name it!); a one-on-one with Adrian Howells, one of two shows he is presenting at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011 as part of the British Council showcase (the other is his new work, May I Have the Pleasure…?).

You are invited into the room not by Adrian but by an assistant, who shows you where to get changed, and invites you to read a few lines about the show. You read that you can wear a swimsuit or be naked, your choice. That, regardless, your genitalia will not be touched. That you can speak, share thoughts and memories, or not – your choice. When you have undressed and donned a crisply laundered white robe, you knock on the bathroom door and Adrian invites you in. He helps you disrobe, takes you by the hand as you step into the water. He asks that you close your eyes, and immediately your other senses – touch, and smell, and hearing – are enhanced.

I feel an odd sensation on my face and chest, I’m expecting water but this is dry. My eyes open slightly for a second. Oh of course, rose petals falling! Then there is water, a gentle stream, then soap and the washcloth. Face, body, arms, legs. Ears. How odd to have your ears washed, I think. I just ignore mine most of the time, I say. Toes. I’m about to apologise for the chipped nail varnish, then decide that I don’t care. Nothing matters. ‘It’s all alright,’ says Adrian and I believe him. I’m washed, dried, wrapped in fluffy towels. I come to sit with him in an embrace, eyes closed, snuggled in. I hear the fan humming in the room, the cars outside, the hotel lift doors opening and closing. I say nothing, but the thoughts flow.

I remember washing my mother’s hair, a day or so before she died. She was off to hospital for a hip replacement, looking forward to being mobile again, and she hadn’t had time to go to the hairdresser’s, so I offered to wash her hair for the first and only time. It had felt strange: I remember thinking that this might be the first of many hair-washes, that as she got older and more infirm, I’d be doing this more often, but that’s not what happened – she didn’t get older, she died within hours of the operation.

I remember all the years of bathing children, and how when they were little all three of my sons would squash into the bath together. I remember their soft skin, their long girlish hair trailing in the water, and the damp little heads on my chest afterwards. I remember the shock when the eldest got to be eleven or twelve and started locking the bathroom door, shutting me out. These memories float by, but I say nothing.

Snuggling in feels easy, normal, familiar. The calmness and quiet feels unfamiliar; the lack of any sort of agenda, the freedom in being looked after, of surrendering any responsibility to ‘do’ and accept just ‘being’. I stop thinking.

The Pleasure of Being creates a space into which narrative can unfold. Everyone’s story will be different, defined by past experiences, associations, memories. The experience is facilitated by a theatre-maker who knows his stuff: we are in safe hands, boundaries between performer and audience held in a delicate balance. Despite the intimacy of the situation, our roles are clearly defined. The theatre is in the framing of this place, this time, as a shared experience. It happens, and then it’s gone. And it is, truly, a pleasure.

Tania El Khoury: Maybe if you choreograph me, you will feel better

Maybe if you choreograph me… starts at Forest Fringe cafe. The lone audience member is taken on a walk through the streets. Who is this person leading the way? Is she the artist? Has it started yet, you wonder, looking round at the busy, driven people scurrying by and the slow, dreamy people ambling along. You are led into a bookshop, up the stairs and into the Anatomy section. Behind a screen, by a large window, are two small tables holding papers, binoculars, a Dictaphone. You are placed facing the window and left. ‘You’ll know what to do,’ says the person who has led you there…

The performer, on the streets, wears wireless headphones. She’s dressed like any other young female in Edinburgh, nothing to make her stand out, but this is clearly her, you realise, as she walks back for a third time, awaiting a command to stop. The audience member, viewing here from a window at the top of the shop, speaks into a Dictaphone when asked to.

Live artist Tania El Khoury describes this work as ‘a relational piece that happens between one female performer and one male audience member’. (As a critic I’m allowed in as an honorary man.) Ostensibly, he dictates her every move. As the copy puts it: ‘He can choose to introduce himself to her or to remain anonymous. He can choose to follow a script or to improvise. Her choices, however, are less straightforward.’

Of course it is far less simple: she has sculpted and choreographed the work; she gives her viewer simple options of A and B responses. I feel, for the most part, that she is calling the shots. But I like the concept, enjoy the game. On herblog, Tania (I decide to name her Tania, then it becomes Tati as the show progresses – because I have a friend named Tania who gets called Tati) describes the work as ‘a shout against oppression’. The male viewer is a kind of everyman, an archetypal patriarch, representing all the world’s fathers, brothers, lawmakers, religious leaders, politicians. The men who dictate; and the men who rule by coercion. Tania is the archetypal female: the bride handed over, the girlfriend fought over, the sister whose honour is ‘protected’, the woman who isn’t allowed out of the house unaccompanied. All the women everywhere who have their choices dictated daily: wear a veil, dress smartly, wear heels, don’t wear heels, wear make-up, no make up, covered hair, big hair. It goes on and on, playing out differently from culture to culture. On one level, the piece references Tania’s cultural heritage as an Arab woman from Beirut, yet there are messages for all the men of the world about the control of women’s bodies, minds, souls.

So within the piece, the viewer is asked, from afar, to guide the performer’s actions: should she walk slowly or quickly? Should she cry or throw a hissy fit? Can she take a cigarette break now? He is asked to look at images and choose: how should a woman look? Like the glamorous, Westernised, Queen Rania of Jordan, or like the hijacker/freedom-fighter Leila Khaled, the so-called ‘poster girl of Palestinian militancy’? He is asked to read her a letter, a letter from him (archetypal/universal male) to her (in part universal woman, but with specific references to her biography written into the text).

Does it work? The ideas are bigger than the execution. There are times when I am speaking into the Dictaphone and the pre-recorded next request cuts in. There are physical moments that don’t synchronise as they should. As a long-term unreconstructed feminist, I find the sexual politics a little oversimplified. There are other levels it could go to. But I would rather, so much rather, a piece like this that is ambitious, thoughtful, challenging, interesting – if not quite there yet on execution – than something more polished with less to say.

Tania El Khoury is an artist whose work I will look out for in the future – I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from her…

www.taniaelkhoury.com

Doctor Brown: Becaves

An empty stage, house lights on full, three false starts, then a blast from Carmina Burana (aka the Old Spice ad music), and a great moving lump appears in the back-wall curtain, which is pulled this way and that, chairs and shoes and toilet rolls spilling out of the sides. The curtain is pulled down with a terrible clatter, and ‘Doctor Brown’ is thrown into the space. He’s dressed in an embroidered Chinese dressing gown, and is wearing one battered slipper. He has wild hair and a beard, and terribly compelling brown eyes that are almost snake-like, hooded. He stares at us with something that might be a smirk on his face, possibly a simper, his body not exactly contorted, but somehow misaligned, off-kilter. He adjusts his dressing gown slightly, tugging the front edges together. He looks as if he is about to start speaking, then changes his mind. He does this again. And again. And again. And again. The snake eyes wander round the room. By now almost everyone in the audience is laughing raucously. His eyes keep fixing onto one woman (seated next to me) who has an extraordinary, high-pitched laugh. This attention makes her laugh more, and makes everyone else laugh more. Ten minutes pass and nothing more has happened, but the atmosphere in the room is close to hysteria.

Doctor Brown Becaves is a comedy show, but it is physical comedy, delivered by a talented performer who trained with the legendary Philippe Gaulier, French master of dark and demented clowning. The classic Gaulier exercises, based on relentless repetition – repeat, repeat, and repeat until the audience gives in and laughs – are evident in his technique. What’s odd about it all is that the audience seem almost ahead of him; it’s a very knowing audience, and it feels as if most people in the room have seen his work before. So there’s no resistance to push against; everyone is putty in his hands.

With an audience already permanently convulsed in laughter, is there anywhere else to go? He moves off into a series of surreal physical/visual sketches. The odd-bod Chinese sub-theme running through the show is developed from a chopsticks gag, in which (inevitably) the inanimate objects fight back, to a mock Peking Opera skit, replete with plastic masks and torn paper parasol. An audience member is brought up to play the beloved. It’s amusing, but it feels like it could go further than it does.

Then there’s a costume change: from Oriental dressing gown to a blonde wig, frilly pink undies and a workwear green cotton apron, via a bending-over back view of bollocks dangling down, and apron strings pulled up between the cheeks. This gets one of the biggest laughs of the evening, but there again jiggling man-bits always do, it’s inevitable.

He then moves into the audience and stands next to the laughing girl, a notebook in hand. He stays there a long time. She laughs, and laughs some more, and so does everyone else. She thinks he wants her phone number; someone behind her twigs and offers an order for coffee to the ‘waitress’. Again, there could be more.

‘What do you want from me?’ He cries, just before the show ends. From this audience’s perspective, the answer seems to be ‘nothing more!’ An extraordinarily gifted performer, but I’d personally like to see him work outside the safety of the late-night comedy circuit. Apparently he also has a children’s show. Now, that might be very interesting!

Orkestra del Sol: Top Trumps

As we enter a very lively and packed Spiegeltent – one of a group of mobile venues that are in St George’s Square, the Assembly’s temporary home due to its usual HQ on George Street being requisitioned – we’re issued with Top Trumps cards. You remember those don’t you? Collector cards that pre-dated Pokemon and which usually featured things like racing cars and their attributes? My Orkestra del Sol Top Trumps card says: ‘Sincero Minimo – Soprano Saxophone’ who boasts a lung capacity of 8,500cc and ‘instrument length’ – no missus, please, no tittering – of 0.68m.

The band bounce onstage, a beaming posse of musicians male and female, clutching a motley assortment of brass and percussion instruments, and clad in fetching black and red outfits that range from the sporty to the smart to the eccentric to the downright loopy. There are hats aplenty! And off we go into a rip-roaring set that includes Gypsy jazz, waltzes, polkas, and other Balkan-ish beats.

The Top Trumps card idea is the theatrical throughline, in as much as there is one, with musicians competing against each other in the various rounds to establish who has the greatest lung capacity, speed, range, or instrument length (ooh there you go again, tittering…). It’s reminiscent of the mock-contests held by the likes of Fanfare Ciocarlia, who this year took on Boban Marcovic in the Balkan Brass Battle. All well and good, but I wonder where the audience’s cards come into all this, they don’t really get referenced much…

But Orkestra del Sol really come into their own when they abandon this funny little game and move into the territory they’ve made their own: really working the audience into participating in the dances. They get everyone joining in a simple routine, then manage very adeptly to get us all partnered up and waltzing. The whole place is heaving, and the band (on this their last night here in Edinburgh) get a rapturous round of applause. I’d say ‘standing ovation’ but we are all already standing – and most of us are dancing.

All jolly good fun, but I have a few reservations (purely from the ‘theatrical elements’ viewpoint, being as they were shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award in the Innovation category!)

The first reservation is that I feel that when it comes to embracing theatre within their work, the environment that works best for Orkestra del Sol is the street or park. I’ve seen them work their way through a crowd at numerous street arts festivals, and the way that they integrate the audience into fictional scenarios such as a wedding party waltz are absolutely beautiful, and far more genuinely theatrical than this rather corny Top Trumps game.

I’d also say that if we were really looking at musicians who are innovative in the integration of contemporary theatre/performance concepts into their work, then we have to hold up as examples such luminaries as Björk, Sufjan Stevens, Jonsi of Sigur Ros, or even the Dresden Dolls. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the band as failing to live up to a tag as ‘innovative theatre makers’ that they are perhaps not even interested in pursuing; but it was on that basis that I was there to see and to judge…

That said, if we are talking instead about a good night out dancing to cheery music played with passion and panache, well – Orkestra del Sol are absolutely fabulous! Long may their sousaphones sizzle!