Author Archives: Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor

About Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor is one half of the Whalley Range All Stars – a street theatre company he formed with Sue Auty in 1982. www.wras.org.uk www.edwardtaylor.pictures

Makadam Kanibal, Le Cirque des Curiosités | Photo: Frédéric Frivaz

Winchester Hat Fair

Makadam Kanibal, Le Cirque des Curiosités | Photo: Frédéric Frivaz

Winchester Hat Fair (now in its 39th year) has always had its roots in street busking and performance art, from the likes of Forkbeard Fantasy to the late, great art nuisance Ian Hinchliffe. So it was good to return in 2013 to see that those traditions are still being adhered to, but that the developments in UK street arts over the last ten years have added some bigger, more technically complex shows into the mix.

If you want an example of a classic street clowning show then there really is none better than Fraser Hooper’s. He never rushes, his act retains a fresh quality to it (I’ve seen some of his routines and gags more than several times), and he has a winning way with an audience. He picks children from the audience to come up and assist him, and although they are often treated in an offhand manner there’s not a trace of weary cynicism in his act.

Makadam Kanibal from France presented a show, Le cirque des curiosités, which had its roots in circus routines but which was the polar opposite of Fraser Hooper. The set was a rough little Art Brut house made of driftwood and polythene with a chimney sticking out of the barely adequate roof. It was inhabited by a couple who were part Deliverance and part Tom Waits at his most hobo-esque.

There was juggling with axes, a soup ladle (rather than a sword) got swallowed, a shower was taken in an angle-grinder’s sparks, and the man knocked the woman up midway through so that the show could culminate in the birth of a pig-baby. The humour was rude, crude and it demonstrated how the French are pushing circus into places which aren’t about the performer’s need for an audience to like them. In fact, many disgruntled parents led their children off as the action unfolded.

Wet Picnic’s show The Lift, performed from a moving booth, presented a ‘This is Your Life’ moment for individual members of the public. It’s quite performer heavy (four if I counted correctly), and, though technically well realised, the balance between the individual experience of the person selected to go into the booth and what a larger audience gets to see isn’t there yet.

Pif Paf’s Something to Hold presented a dance/acrobatic piece based around a small scaffolding structure which acted as a crane and a pair of scales which could rotate. The performers climbed all over the structure and spun around and around on it, one performer counterbalancing the other. The narrative concerned an astronomer searching for reason and truth but being continually led astray by two anarchic spirits. In the end an equilibrium was achieved between the two opposites. Big themes, and in some ways it was a pity that the crane structure wasn’t bigger in order to emphasise this.

The horizontal bar rotating on an upright principle was also used by Ray Lee in his sound installation Chorus, but instead of two performers there were two speakers at the end of each bar. The bars were mounted onto four-metre-high tripods. There were about 12-15 of these structures which were put into play gradually by technicians who milled about throughout the concert. The music is electronically generated ambient sound, the rhythms of which subtly change over the 30 minutes. You walk amongst the tripods and the music acquires a rich spatial quality. The installation was on the Dean’s Garden of Winchester Cathedral, and in response to the location the rhythm and texture of the music suggested bell-ringing at times.

It’s a very simple idea, technically quite complex, and Lee makes the most of the limitations of the form to create a powerful sensation.

Ilotopie, Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie: Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie, Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie are one of France’s best funded outdoor theatre companies, and over the last fifteen years they have been working on spectacles that take place on water.

Tonight they are in Salford, on Manchester Ship Canal. Their backdrop is the Lowry Centre, while on the other side, behind the audience, is the BBC’s new northern HQ towers.

The show starts off in a very low-key fashion. A Fiat Tipo drives along the surface of the water and suddenly breaks down, plumes of smoke bursting out of its bonnet. The driver gets out to inspect the damage and then sits and waits for assistance to arrive. As he does so a street cleaner with a wheelie-bin drifts by and someone cycles past. Streetlights emerge from the water. This is the sort of scenario that IOU used to do expertly.

The driver’s hair catches on fire and what was a reasonably rational narrative gets invaded by a variety of characters straight from a film like Fellini’s Satyricon. Someone rows a huge bed into view which collides with the car, causing the duvet to split and release feathers en masse. A naked king parades up and down a barge. Timed to exploit the fading of the daylight, the scene on the water now resembles one of those royal pageants that Handel wrote the Water Music for: the boats are lit by fire and there’s a noticeable increase in the use of pyrotechnics.

The technology is quite cunning. Performers can steer the boats and their floating platforms without appearing to use their hands – I’d imagine there’s some sort of foot control like those used in Segways. The pyrotechnics (of which there are a lot) are all fired from eight floating buoys. I’d love to have seen how they packed so many rockets and gerbs into such a small space.

The show was extremely charming and well-staged, but at times seemed a hairsbreadth away from It’s a Knockout!, especially in the use of a broad pantomime performing style. The transformation of the normal into the fantastical could have been much more developed – the form of the show makes it very interesting for an audience to watch so they could have let the beginning slow burn a bit longer. The most arresting image when you arrived was a tree growing out of the water, but apart from being a tether for the bed it wasn’t used. The image of a clown cycling along clutching a bunch of coloured balloons was, quite frankly, beyond the pale.

Mayfield Depot, Manchester International Festival | Photo: Jan Chlebik

Tino Sehgal: This Variation

Mayfield Depot, Manchester International Festival | Photo: Jan Chlebik

Full marks to Manchester International Festival for discovering the Mayfield Depot and arranging for it to be used as a venue during the festival.

It’s a huge cavernous space with big sliding doors and big rooms off the central hall. At the far end is a blocked off room which the stewards ask you to go into. It’s pitch black in there save for the tiniest sliver of light filtering through the black-out. Cross-disciplinary artist Tino Sehgal – best known for his 2012 Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern ‘These Assocations’, for which he has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner prize – has put these unique qualities of the space to profound and unsettling use. Your first steps are cautious as you know that other people have gone into the room in front of you. As you tread carefully there’s the sound of singing accompanied by an electronic beat. It sounds recorded but you then start to discover that the singers – sampling various styles and musical quotations – are moving around the space giving the singing a shifting quality as different vocal parts come nearer or recede away from you.

After a while your eyes adjust to the light and you can see all the people who are in the room. The question now is who is a performer/singer and who is a member of the public? The role and experience of audience/participant is blurred. This combination of uncertainty with the experience of your eyes adjusting to be able to see in the dark was a strong, well realised moment.

After a while the singing stops and the performers start to speak or rather confess (reminiscent of the confessional form in a public space employed in ‘These Associations’), but for me the experience turns into something far less interesting and allusive.

The less said about Dan Graham’s Past Future Split Attention (which was on show in another space) the better. Was this really made in response to the space? Really? A small screen with a bench in front where you can sit and watch a video of two blokes having a banal conversation in front of a black curtain. The sound coming out the speakers was of poor quality and it was a massive waste of a fabulous opportunity.

 

For more from Manchester International Festival see Total Theatre’s reviews of Inne Goris’ double-bill  for children Once Upon a Story / Long Grass, Maxine Peake / Sarah Frankcom’s Shelleyan poetry protest The Masque of Anarchy, and Robert Del Naja and Adam Curtis’ sweeping, potentially radical Massive Attack v Adam Curtis.

Pickled Image: Wolf Tales ¦ Photo: Farrows Creative

Puppetship / Pickled Image: Sparkle / Wolf Tales

Pickled Image: Wolf Tales ¦ Photo: Farrows Creative

Puppetship’s Sparkle is a show for very young children, and in fact is not so much a show as an extremely well-managed environment which allows its audience to take in as much or as little as they like. A big white parasol covers the performance area and the audience (parents and their children) sit in a circle around the space.

The lighting and the gentle electronic music suggest a subterranean world which is populated by flashing night-lights, silky materials, kitchen utensils and feathers which can assemble themselves into undersea creatures at the hands of the two puppeteers before being left on the floor.

What’s most interesting to watch is the reaction of the young children. It doesn’t take long for them to relax and explore their surroundings, and the performing space thus becomes a mix of performers gently introducing new elements into the proceedings and small children confidently wandering around exploring the objects and materials on offer.  A tower made of plastic tumblers is a magnet for those who like to knock such things down just as a big metal bowl is perfect to put or throw things in. One small child stuck a flashing light in her mouth whilst another took advantage of the low lighting to make a dash for areas of the room behind the curtains.

Just as older children will discover the right amount of anarchy with which to fill a space, so their younger counterparts won’t notice certain effects but will instead explore a tiny detail to one side which has caught their attention. It is to the performers’ credit that this doesn’t derail proceedings. In fact this exploration of an environment becomes the point of the show.

In Pickled Image’s Wolf Tales, Red Riding the Musical is taking place behind the curtain and we, the audience are in a backstage dressing room listening to what’s happening onstage unseen. There’s some howling; it’s the end of a scene and the person whose dressing room we are in comes off stage to take a breather.

The occupant of the dressing  room is a wolf, a splendid full body sized puppet. The puppeteer in black bunraku-style hood and clothing stands behind the puppet. His right hand is in the head of the wolf, and his left arm is the left arm of the wolf; the creature’s feet are on metal plates attached to the shoes of the puppeteer. The wolf wears a Cruella Da Ville style fur coat which emphasises his acTOR-ish  nature. Welcoming us backstage he then regales us with the truth behind Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.

Soon it’s time for the wolf to go on-stage and his place is taken by Red Riding Hood’s grandmother – another full-sized puppet, this time in a wheelchair and sporting an extremely dyspeptic nature. She sets about undermining the wolf’s version of events.

Dik Downey is the puppeteer and proves himself to be a terrific performer. He inhabits both characters effortlessly and such is his skill  that you look at the puppets at all times rather than switch between them and the puppeteer. The jokes come thick and fast and his background in street theatre ensures that any interruptions from the audience are skilfully and amusingly dealt with. Thus the show feels like it’s designed especially for that audience in that space rather than something that is trotted out.

Wolf Tales is a lovely piece of rollicking entertainment.

Rossendale Puppet Festival featured twelve shows in a wide variety of puppet styles with events and workshops happening all over the building, in the garden, and on the road just outside the back gate. All this was programmed on a shoestring budget.

Somehow Horse + Bamboo manage to fit programming and organising this weekend-long puppet festival into their extremely busy touring schedule and for that we should be (if we are not already) extremely grateful.

www.pickledimage.co.uk / www.puppetshipcic.pbworks.com

Titled Productions, Seesaw ¦ Photo: Pari Naderi

Edward Taylor at this year’s Mintfest

A classic circus of (seeming) incompetence, a trampolining suicide bomber, and an abstract promenade dance for waterfronts – Edward Taylor at this year’s Mintfest

Billed as their latest performance, Circus Ronaldo’s Amortale, presented at this year’s Kendal Mintfest in the company’s own tent, was not so much new as a re-working of their classic Fili show with a new beginning and some extra bits. It doesn’t matter in the least as the company are such brilliant performers, their aesthetic is agreeably rough round the edges, and the experience of being crammed into a tent with 200 other people, almost on top of the performance, is so special. The show is a classic clown set-up with the boss trying to ensure a smooth operation whilst being undermined at all times by incompetent staff and a rogue performer with misshapen Pinocchio puppets to sell.

What makes the Ronaldos unique is their ability to incorporate very high quality circus skills within a theatre show in a throwaway style that masks the discipline that is needed to actually achieve such skills.

Compagnie In Extremiste’s Extrémité is a very different prospect, but exerts a similar charm. It hardly seems possible that you could make a comedy trampoline show about a suicide bomber and get the audience on your side as you attempt to blow yourself up, but Compagnie in Extremiste managed it with distinction. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show quite like it before.

A technician checks the set (a large trampoline next to a sandy coloured shack and in front of a tall flat wall covered in wanted posters) in a classically French shoulder-shrugging manner. When it’s all to his half-arsed satisfaction he leaves and a man dressed in a black djellaba appears. His face is on the wanted posters and he spends time getting rid of them, using the trampoline to help him get to the highest ones on the wall behind. Once this is done he sets about trying to blow himself up (and by implication the audience as well) with a stick of dynamite and a big red cartoon-style bomb.

Although not signposted as such this sequence is classic clowning with a variety of objects conspiring to make the job difficult for him. Lighters are borrowed from the public and children are hauled in from the audience to lift the bomb onto the trampoline. His demeanour is not friendly but is such that the audience can empathise with his travails. A sequence where he clambers through the audience with a blow torch which sporadically ignites is a health and safety officer’s worst nightmare.

Through more accident than design he succeeds in his quest offstage and reappears in white attempting to reach paradise. This involved using the trampoline to help him run higher and higher up the back wall which eventually falls forward and squashes him flat. A beautiful sequence which also illustrated the idiotic ideas which have been fed to real suicide bombers by those who have no intention of practising what they preach.

In another mode again Tilted Production’s Seasaw was a promenade dance piece set along the riverside. It used the landscape (park, lawn and churchyard) extremely effectively and showed a theatrical ability to place the audience exactly where it wanted them to be without the audience feeling that was the case.

There was a series of short dances based on watery themes in different spaces over the hour or so of the show, accompanied by mobile sound systems which played recognisable pieces of music. A picnic set to the Jaws theme music where human behaviour mixed with shark behaviour, a park-keeper with an unruly rubbish bag, dancers whose limbs were lengthened and bulked up by plastic bottles, seagull/dancers sliding around a wet polythene sheet and eventually being trapped in it, a dance on an iceberg, and another dance with rubber rings.

If I’ve made it sound like the piece has a message which they hit you over the head with then I’ve misrepresented my main impression, which was of an imaginatively weird and expressive dance where environmentalist themes were amongst many bobbing around on the surface. There was a lovely moment where a rope was put down on the ground to stop the audience in their tracks whilst the dancers floated away from us across the lawn in rubber rings.

If I had a criticism it would be that the piece is a bit too long – that eternal balance between content and abstraction.

SeasawExtrémité and Amortale were just three of more than 60 performances presented at Mintfest, and, to lapse into cliché, there was something for everyone in this year’s festival. Robust and immediate street theatre in the town centre, sideshows and more technically complex shows in the park, and a variety of site-specific events as well.

As a performer you used to look to France or Spain for those festivals where it seemed the whole town came out to celebrate. Over the last five years this feeling has travelled successfully over the Channel and there are now more and more UK festivals which are the equal of anything on the continent. The sun was out for once, but it was MintFest that lit up Kendal over the weekend.