Author Archives: Geraldine Harris

Circa: Wunderkammer

Circa: Wunderkammer

Circa: Wunderkammer

Circa’s mission statement boldly claims that they have ‘created a boutique contemporary artform from the traditional languages of circus’, suggesting that contemporary circus prefers to preserve its traditional forms rather than seek new pathways or modernise its media. Their route to this ‘new frontier’ in circus arts is through a refocusing on the human body, which, they say, is ‘emotionally connected, spiritually resonant, and deeply affecting’. Cirque du Soleil this is not, but there are, these days, many companies who succeed in exploring a more ‘human’ ground somewhere between the sequins ‘n’ sawdust of the old and the polish and finesse of the ‘new’ circus. The Seven Fingers, Cirkus Cirkör, Cirque Éloize and the Thiérrée family, for example, have all demonstrated rethinkings of traditional circus disciplines, new combinations of art forms, and, frequently, a preoccupation with identity.

This is not to say that Circa’s work is not different. Wunderkammer does very literally focus on the human body. The overall impression of this seven-strong company is that they are very muscly indeed. The women are small, solid and rippling with power, the men poised, sculpted and graceful. Wearing matching spangly underwear, reminiscent of traditional circus costuming but unflatteringly accentuating every muscle, every solid line, the company are coldly lit by LED wands placed around the empty stage. The performance is incredibly athletic – the company endlessly balance, dance, throw and catch each other, climbing, swinging and moving amongst each other. They push themselves, performing carefully chaotic and haphazard-seeming routines that appear to be right on the edge of their abilities. This is not the gasp-a-minute, otherworldly fantasy of Cirque du Soleil – these are real, very physical bodies, right here now.

A possible drawback of playing in the Wales Millennium Centre and other large-scale venues is the vastness – there are several moments early on that are lost through a lack of intimacy. A girl with bright red lipstick, red hair and black and red bikini can move her mouth and eyebrows in such a way that they seem to be moving all over her face. A boy in pants and a penguin-like shirt-front stuffs an uninflated balloon up his nose. Even when the whole company get together and stuffs balloons up their noses, it’s difficult to react. The artists are too far away for us to connect with them and understand what’s going on. The loss of these few ‘intimate’ moments doesn’t help with my feeling that Circa are going out of their way to make their artists appear interchangeable, emotionless, sexless even. I start recognising them only by their hair. The occasional moments of humour – for example a female contortionist, who creates her own backing track by humming into a microphone held between her toes, which are suspended over her head – are entirely physical. A talented but unmemorable handbalancing artist performs on bricks: another artist moves each brick as she takes her hand from it; she is suspended for a moment, unable to go anywhere but where her uncommunicative colleague leads her. They don’t look at us, or each other, or express anything – their movements are neutral. This impersonality sits uneasily with the fact that it is created by such specific physical situations. I don’t get it.

Wunderkammer translates as Cabinet of Curiosities (where the Cabinet was a room of some kind – so the traditional cabinet of curiosities could be regarded as a physical collection of paraphernalia), an odd description for an unlocated show, performed as it is on this blank stage, leaving nothing behind. Though there are ‘freakshow’ type elements to the routines (à la La Clique), the expression of greater personality might help this make a real mark.Wunderkammer does showcase a great, and curious, range of acrobatic skills, with all the strength, bravery and daring that you’d expect in a traditional circus format, actually – but their choice not to replace the excised lustre of the traditional circus ring, the bright lights, the merry music, with an emotional connection, a spiritual resonance, left me without anything to connect with.

www.circa.org.au

The Devil’s Violin Company: A Love Like Salt ¦ Photo: Mark Simmons

The Devil’s Violin Company: A Love Like Salt

The Devil’s Violin Company: A Love Like Salt ¦ Photo: Mark Simmons

Paring live performance right back to its very core, The Devil’s Violin Company present us with a deep, dark evening of ancient stories. Tautly told and expert at drawing us in, the three rich tales are each interwoven with moreish, mesmerising live music that is as much a part of each story as its carefully chosen words.

Introducing the performance with a reminder of the story of Scheherezade and her 1001 nights of storytelling, her knack of leading the listener to the climax of the story and then leaving him hungry for more until the next night, the storyteller begins his first tale. This is ‘Once Upon a Time’ stuff, with princes and princesses, enchantments and apothecaries, knights, journeys, quests… and a happily ever after? We suspect not, as only a few moments into the first story, something devastating happens to the hero of the tale. Then, at the story’s climax, the storyteller leaves the story, and begins another, just as the wily Scheherezade did. The surprise is that we, like the Emperor, are completely beguiled.

The story matter is complex and twisting – fresh tellings of timeless folk stories, with recognisable characters and the sort of moral debates you can really get stuck into when gossiping over the proverbial garden fence. It is delicious and life-affirming to revisit well-known folktales. Knowing the traditions of Lear, Cordelia, and Cinderella, hearing snatches of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, Sir Gawain, Tristan, Odysseus, Faustus, you can think you’ll know what will happen next. You are reminded of times in your life when you’ve heard stories like these before; they are in the fabric of our growing up. They transport you to another world where people are caricatures or stock characters, and everyday objects are ciphers for emotion.

This Storyteller (Daniel Morden, with director Sally Cookson), with the boldness required by his ‘trade’, tells these stories as if they were his, appropriating the material as the teller of an urban legend will appropriate the lead character into his or her own extended family. He doesn’t interact with the three musicians – violinist, cellist and accordionist, but leaves time for their melodies to infuse the world he creates, marinating the tales with a salty, spicy concoction that seems to come itself from somewhere far away. A final dimension is added to this particular performance by a wonderful sign language interpreter, who shows that words aren’t always necessary when expressing tales of love and adventure.

The simplicity of A Love Like Salt’s presentation belies its intricacy, the careful structure of each narrative, its layering with melodies, its heartbeat-perfect timing. There may be no new stories, but The Devil’s Violin Company are not afraid of working hard to dress up some old ones, and the work has paid off.

www.fiddle.org.uk

Rannel: 2Deep

Rannel: 2Deep

Rannel: 2Deep

Matt and Joey are two child-adults who live together in a disco bunker underground. They’ve been here awhile, though not so long their spirits arereally getting low, and when they do feel down they cheer themselves up with a bit of hip-hop music on the turntable, maybe a synchronised dance routine. Occasionally they still try using their comms to contact Alpha 9, in case of rescue, and Matt has a little dictaphone that he speaks into, recording any changes in situation, which amounts to how the bunker’s systems are working – as the lights, air con and wall-mounted sound thingummies often seem to fail. If Joey’s in the tiny bathroom broom-cupboard (top half of sliding wall made of gauze so you can see what he’s up to), Matt might quietly record how annoying he is.

The bunker is a bizarre mix of Tomorrow’s World (mid to late 80s) and Ikea catalogue (section: teenager’s bedroom), with all sorts of little storage compartments for keeping things like toilet roll, roller skates and vinyl records.  Gizmos on the wall deliver their spaceman discs of dinner, regulate the air supply and stress levels, and one, when not being used to attempt to contact Alpha 9, doubles up as a cool little touchscreen looping machine for ad hoc bursts of DJing. The bunker is the tourbus, and Matt Bailey and Joey D were on tour for a very long time with their previous, first and highly acclaimed show Flhip Flhop.

I didn’t see Flhip Flhop so can’t compare the two. I imagine that they are rather similar – a loose narrative allowing the two to perform comedy set pieces, like the hilarious, grin-inducing ‘80s workout’ which is the highlight of the show. The puerile pair are a hugely likeable and uncomplicated double act, producing an hour of performance that is funny and easy to watch, enjoyable nonsense. Though the set pieces are not unexpected, the content is refreshingly unselfconscious. These guys are, happily, not concerned about whether their music tastes could be conceived as a tiny bit ‘old-school’, or whether they might, actually, be slightly larger than your average breakdancer. This pays off in their charming, smooth and assured delivery, which is mixed with a few early-tour nerves that will surely be ironed out before too long.

Occasionally, I wished for a bit more narrative about why Joey and Matt find themselves living in an anachronistic-futuristic shed buried underground, but really, it’s not necessary. This show would be gold (or at least, gold candyfloss) if only it had a few more of the tight, unusual comedy routines that Rannel do so well.

www.rannel.co.uk

Dom Coyote and Other Stories: The Raun Tree

Dom Coyote and Other Stories: The Raun Tree

Dom Coyote and Other Stories: The Raun Tree

I think it’s useful to start by saying that The Raun Tree is a music performance.  Now, I’m not a fan of categorising performance into genres – you risk reducing your audience and limiting expectations. Blurring the borders between genres and mixing disciplines so often has especially vivid results – sparking new associations by creating richly layered work with harmonies and contrasts that might not otherwise be achieved. But The Raun Tree is a haunting and beautifully delivered musical performance, rather than a piece of theatre.

Set amongst an artfully arranged forest of wooden A-frame ladders and other ‘found’ objects, with sun-like warm lighting, the band rarely step from their conventional musician spots. Michael Vale’s set is strangely deliberate – more a children’s playground than a wild forest – and it cries out to be climbed, swung from, danced between, hidden amongst. The drummer and bassist, both very talented, seem to do their best to ignore the ladders, and there are only a couple of times during the performance that leads Dom Coyote and sweet-voiced Emily Barker engage with their surroundings. The constantly warm lighting state is soothing, but frustration creeps in as the latent potential of the playground set goes unexplored.

Dom himself looks like another one of those Mumford boys, although I get the immediate impression that he’s for real and he probably wears the porkpie hat a lot, maybe even because it keeps his head warm. His voice draws you into another world and his simple, leftfield lyrics keep you there. A vague story unfolds, a first-person narrative about trying to get back to the ‘summer’, journeying through unfamiliar landscapes after going the wrong way out of the emblematic, beacon-like Raun Tree. It’s an intriguing narrative, with wistful undertones of shedding childhood, of discovering that the world is stranger and more dangerous than expected – and there are ecological messages of destruction and preservation there too.

The music itself creates the landscapes of the story – cleverly layered by looping, repetitions, voices, multi-instruments – although it felt oddly one-dimensional.  Like the lighting state, it is warm and soothing, it is heartfelt. Dom sings with an unwavering passion that doesn’t allow fear or relief or uncertainty in. Perhaps it is because the metres and metres of wire attached to all the musical instruments he plays is taped to the floor, or perhaps it is the fact that his audience is already waiting for him in a dark theatre space, but Dom does not seem to have the burning desire to paint a story required to qualify as a wandering troubadour with tales of the world. The Raun Tree is a lovely idea – both the concept of the album and the central idea of teaming musical performance with theatre set – but it is hugely under-explored to the detriment of its effect. This would be surprising performed in a conventional music venue but it’s not quite enough for a theatre.

www.domcoyote.net

Creation and The Factory: The Odyssey

Creation and The Factory: The Odyssey

Creation and The Factory: The Odyssey

When a performance begins with an actor explaining the concept of the show to the audience you know something different is about to happen. It could go either way…

Surrounded by words and texts in Blackwell’s sprawling bookshop, Creation Theatre present The Factory’s Odyssey. It is a new adventure for The Factory, and their second month with Creation at Blackwell’s, having performed their acclaimed and experimental Hamlet throughout March.

The actors hand a pot to the audience. In it are 24 shards of pottery, one for each of the books of the Odyssey. On each one is written a ‘task’ or an instruction to the actors about how to play that particular scene. At the beginning of each scene, an audience member takes a shard from the pot at random to dictate the way the next scene will be told. It’s informally explained, the lights are up, and everyone’s in jeans and t-shirts, playing with hoops and sticks. It’s a large cast of twelve, which is exactly half the company, with different actors making up the cast each night.

An enormous amount of work, and play, have gone into this project. Every one of the actors knows the 24 short books inside out – and they are all confident storytellers, good ensemble performers and resourceful improvisers. One of the scenes is told entirely in Ancient Greek (I went twice, and no, it wasn’t the same scene each time). One of the scenes calls audience members onto the stage to act as puppeteers for the actors. One is told in the dark (‘radio play’). Another has an audience member interviewing the characters onstage. Some of the tasks were different the second time I saw it – confirming that the performance was being constantly reviewed and refined.

At its heart, this is an exploration of storytelling, using the epic and archetypalOdyssey as a vehicle to facilitate the exploration. Sometimes the plot gets waylaid in favour of a storytelling idea, but conversely there are times when we are suddenly plunged far deeper into an element of the story than could be sustained with 24 switches in two and a half hours. The informal atmosphere onstage and the speedy ‘sketch-show’ skipping from book to book doesn’t often achieve the sense of dramatic gravity that you might hope for in theOdyssey, but it sure does deal with the meandering epicness of a 24 book story successfully.

This is a daring experiment, offering masses of thinking about storytelling through the ages; daring the audience to join in, to follow, but not being afraid to try something and fail. Watching performances fail is not what an audience is used to, and sometimes the audience was unengaged or even confused. A second viewing, recommended by the company to all audiences, found me more invested in the project, more likely to forgive ‘tasks’ that weren’t as successful, and more appreciative of those that really were.

www.creationtheatre.co.uk