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

Roland Schimmelpfennig: The Golden Dragon

‘Take care not to tread on the props,’ says the usher as we enter the space – an empty space save for a row of tawdry everyday objects and accessories placed at the front-row audience members’ feet. There’s a few plastic toys, a pair of spectacles, a walking stick, a wok. Some green Lycra leggings, a sparkly headband, a spanner. Enter five actors – young man, older man, young woman, older woman, man of indeterminate age. They pull down paper from four great rolls of newsprint, so the floor now has a crackly white carpet, and the show is on the road.

We are at The Golden Dragon, a Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese local restaurant anywhere in the world. We meet workers, customers, and occupants of the upstairs flats. Everyone is transient in one way or another: the migrant workers in the kitchen, the air stewardesses just back from a long-haul trip, the couple whose marriage is falling apart, the trafficked sex worker held in an upstairs flat who never sees the light of day. A thousand and one stories interweave – some heartbreaking, some mildly amusing. We are taken on a journey across the world and back again, it all circling round the extraction of a rotten tooth in the mouth of the young Chinese kitchen worker.

What at first seems to be a rather clichéd take on ‘poor theatre’– with characters, for example, denoting old age with the addition of a pair of spectacles and a shaking hand, or waving the wok around to express frying up a Pad Thai – turns into something more interesting as the play progresses: the instant costuming-up becomes more surreal, and the characterisation and storytelling ever more layered – as one example, those green leggings and the hen-party headband with the jangling silver-bobble ‘antennae’ turn the young man into The Cricket, in a little folk tale telling of the industrious Ant and the lazy Cricket, and this character in turn becomes the representation of the ‘vulgar, sexy, abused’ girl upstairs. Meanwhile, the carefully crafted ebbs and flows of the text draw us in, or pull us out, of each storyline.

In his notes in the introduction to the playscript, director Ramin Gray reflects that a British playwright would more than likely have been drawn to naturalism to tackle the subject of migration, but that Schimmelpfennig – a German – draws on his own nation’s Brechtian tradition in the creation of this cleverly multi-layered and ‘playful’ play.

Viewing The Golden Dragon provides an opportune reminder that many of the dramaturgical choices that we associate with devised theatre – the mixing of storytelling mode with dialogue, actors playing many different characters, the transposing of one character’s words to another, actors stepping in and out of the action whilst remaining visible onstage, the voicing of stage directions – can in fact be scripted in, as is the case in The Golden Dragon: the deconstruction of the text occurs within the text.

It’s a clever play, beautifully constructed – a play that has been ‘wrought’ well by the playwright. But more importantly it’s a moving piece of theatre; we travel readily on the journey offered.

Wired Aerial Theatre: As The World Tipped

Directed by Nigel Jamieson, Wired Aerial Theatre’s As the World Tipped is a large-scale outdoor spectacular that takes as its subject the Copenhagen Conference and the subsequent failure of world leaders to initiate any meaningful directive on climate change.

It starts well. A large, square white stage is occupied by scurrying suits who move from desk to desk, working their way through towers of paperwork. The soundtrack gives us voiceover samples of speeches and discussions from the conference: President Obama’s bland, placating reassurances pitted against the impassioned plea from President Mohamed Nasheen of the low-lying Republic of Maldives, who says, ‘If things go business-as-usual, we will not live, we will die. Our country will not exist.’

Then comes the expected grand theatrical moment (the big crane behind the set is a giveaway!), as the enormous stage slowly starts to tip, and everything begins to roll off – paper flying, desks crashing to the ground (well, not quite – they are rescued by roadies as they fall, which is a slight disappointment). The now-vertical stage is raised ever-higher, becoming a giant screen.

The next section is an exciting interweaving of live and filmed action that plays beautifully with the relationship between 2D and 3D. Harnessed performers race over a speeding walkway of words, words, words; zig and zag along the lines of a graph; leap from square to square on a chequerboard of TV monitors which morphs into cuboid twin towers from which the tiny human figures tumble.

But it’s all downhill from then on – in both subject matter and performance content. We are presented with documentary-style footage of a series of global disasters – drought, tsunami, bushfire, tornado, earthquake. As giant projections of sorrowful human faces of various ethnicities stare accusingly at us, or as the screen is engulfed in floodwater or fire, the now seemingly mouse-sized performers dangle on their harnesses squealing, or bounce off the screen in various enactments of running to escape, falling off the edge of the world, jumping into the abyss – or attempting to rescue others who are falling/running/jumping.

The harnessed performers know their stuff, the film footage is brilliantly edited, and the soundtrack is cleverly mixed – I appreciated the occasional touch of ironic humour, such as the inclusion of the Elizabeth Welsh classic ‘Stormy Weather‘. The play with scale is interesting: there is one particularly lovely moment where a dangling person is apparently dropped into the open palm of an onscreen sleeping child.

So a technically brilliant show; beautifully executed; an extraordinary opening. The first 20 minutes, taken alone, would qualify the show as one of the best ever large-scale pieces by a UK company. But for the most part, the second half of the show offers no more than a repetition of the polemical points made earlier in the piece: in essence, that climate change is bad and someone ought to do something about that. ‘Demand change now?’ Perhaps ‘Be the change you want to see’ would be a stronger message.

I’m reminded of the Richard Schechner quote, ‘life is raw, but art is cooked’. More cooking needed here, I feel…

www.wiredaerialtheatre.com

Pina – A Film for Pina Bausch

by Wim Wenders

Sep 2011

£8.99

Total Theatre Magazine doesn’t often review feature films – but Pina, Wim Wenders’ cinematic homage to the late great Pina Bausch, godmother of experimental dance theatre and director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, is no ordinary film. More than documentation, more than a tribute, it is an exploration of Bausch’s work that marries dance and film artfully and beautifully.

It was planned as a collaboration between these two extraordinary artists – an exploration of how dance-for-screen or dance-to-camera (pick your favourite label) could move out of the ‘experimental shorts’ ghetto and into mainstream cinema as a fulllength feature. Wenders’ wonderful Buena Vista Social Clubhad raised the benchmark for film that documented live performance, and Pina Bausch, his friend of more than two decades, saw him as the perfect collaborator. A plan was hatched to focus on a number of key Tanztheater Wuppertal works – including Café Mueller, Rites of Spring, and Kontakthof – and to make the film in 3D. Plans proceeded, then two days into the shoot Pina died. The film was at first abandoned, then resurrected, and what has been described as ‘the first 3D arthouse documentary’ eventually emerged.

The bereavement is raw and upfront. Interviews with longterm company members are transposed to voiceovers expressing shock or paying tribute, played over solemnly held shots of silent faces full of sorrow and confusion. The dance works are as cleverly filmed as you’d expect from Wenders: live footage of Pina herself performing in Café Mueller is weaved into footage from the most recent version of the show; and the editing cuts in the Kontakthofsections are a witty play on Bausch’s remaking and remodelling of this seminal work, shifting us from teens to elders and back again with giddying confusion. The 3D is hyped as a key element, and certainly in the big ensemble scenes ofRites of Spring the stage depth is captured very well, but it isn’t the most interesting aspect of the film. By far and away the best scenes are those shot on location in Wuppertal. Solo, or in extraordinary and poignant duets, the dancers (more often than not dressed in ’trademark’ Bausch evening wear) move into, through, over and along the landscape, taking in flyovers, el-trains, dual carriageways, parks, ponds, and hilltops in a series of eerily beautiful and surreal moments that are an homage both to Bausch’s choreography, and to the city to which she remained everloyal. Last word goes to Wenders: ‘Pina had trained her eyes to what the soul can teach us through the body.’ Whether you’re a longterm admirer or new to Bausch’s work – this is a film to be seen.

Key Concepts in Drama and Performance

by Kenneth Pickering

May 2010

£14.99

Aimed at undergraduates in drama, theatre or performing arts, Pickering’s Key Concepts describes itself as ‘an informative and accessible guide to the subject’. Each of the five chapters (textual concepts, performance concepts, production concepts, staging concepts, critical concepts) begins with a brief introduction to the concepts it embraces, followed by an alphabetical listing of those concepts. For the most part, it does its job nicely, and is a genuinely useful reference book. But it is sometimes hard to understand the entry allocations under the given chapter separations: what, for example, makes ‘carnival’ a performance concept, and therefore in chapter two,’ site-specific’ a production concept (chapter three) and ‘street theatre’ a staging concept (chapter four)? Why is absurdism in chapter one and surrealism in chapter four? Wouldn’t it be easier just to place everything alphabetically? And there is far too great an emphasis on playwright-led theatre for this to be a truly comprehensive reference work: the entry on ‘dramaturg’, for example, gives no indication of any potential role within physical, devised or visual theatre. But interesting and informative, so worth having on the bookshelf.

The Reluctant Escapologist – Adventures in Alternative Theatre

by Mike Bradwell

Jul 2010

£14.99

Mike Bradwell is a legendary figure, a mainstay of British counter-culture for over forty years. I first met him in 1975-76 when I was working at the ICA in London. I was assistant stage manager, and the ICA theatre regularly programmed the company he founded and directed for many years, Hull Truck Theatre Company. I also, in 1976, helped to programme an Ethnographic Film Festival at the ICA (this in the days when you didn’t need a degree in Arts Management to be let loose in a venue, and could multi-task), which featured new-kid-on-the-filmmakingblock Mike Leigh’s first feature Bleak Moments, in which Mike Bradwell played a transient South London guitarist, the lost and lonely Norman. To those of us ‘of a certain age’, the 70s punk ethos will always rule our souls. Mike Bradwell’s take on the ‘here’s three chords, now form a band’ line is thus: ‘Find a play. Squat a building. Steal a van. Now make a show.’ Well go on, what are you waiting for?

Of course the history of Hull Truck features heavily in Bradwell’s book, as does working with Mike Leigh (on stage, then on screen). But we are also treated to the onstage mass orgasms of The Living Theatre; eating fire with Bob Hoskins; and becoming an underwater escapologist (reluctantly – hence the book’s title) in the Ken Campbell Roadshow. Oh and then there was his proper job, running the Bush Theatre in West London for ten years – in which the theatrepunk renegade finds himself dealing with Health & Safety officers and funders galore. All this is interesting, but for this reviewer, the best bits are the tales from the early days: after all, who could resist a chapter entitled ‘Who Put the Cunt in Scunthorpe?’ especially when the opening line is ‘It was not easy to make revolutionary theatre in Scunthorpe in 1968.’

In his foreword, Mike Leigh recounts Bradwell’s attempt (before he’d even written the thing), to get a print-worthy quote for the book. ‘I wasn’t sure what would suit,’ says Leigh, ‘so he suggested “Buy this book. It is a work of genius. Laugh? I almost shat.” Well, I read it and it gave me diarrhoea.’ And what better endorsement could you ask for than that?