Author Archives: Honour Bayes

Franko B: Because of Love – Volume 1 | Photo: Hugo Glendinning

Franko B: Because of Love – Volume 1

Franko B: Because of Love – Volume 1 | Photo: Hugo Glendinning

At first Franko B’s new work Because of Love – Volume 1 appears as resolutely non-theatrical as his previous offerings. Incorporating an uncompromisingly opaque mise-en-scene and sections of unblinking repetition that lead nowhere, it very politely puts both fingers up at the proscenium arch that surrounds it. Yet it also weaves a story through our subconscious through a highly crafted use of emotive projections, a rousing piano score, an animatronic dancing polar bear, a glitter ball, and the most effective use of Canidae heads since the bombastically theatrical Three Kingdoms.

During the first section even some ‘fans’ in the audience appear flummoxed by this new turn of direction from their hero and seem to lose interest. But, for all its unwillingness to explain itself, this is not a frustration I share, Franko B’s dignity as a performer holding my attention from the outset. He begins, against a slideshow of historical snapshots, by running through silent mantras and movements. Each pause and look at the audience, each jog or skip clearly mean something to him but there are no easy answers for us in these strangely mundane actions. But there is something hypnotic in the purpose he infuses into each position, and once again the body, in all its sweaty and panting glory, is at the centre of this holistic experience. Slowly it becomes more theatrical and the pared-down aesthetic and discordant soundscape explodes into visual and melodic splendour – with a witty song, a duet with a bear, and moments that would put Robert Wilson to shame.

Although captivating at first we are bemused by this overload of semiotics and the piece feels fractured and obtuse. But post show the experience has grown in my mind and the friction felt between the theatrical and non-theatrical elements has fused into a new appreciation for this piece. In my memory the silences that were flat have become charged and links have been made between the minimalism of the beginning and the florid nature of the end. Questions around the sentimentality of memory have been unavoidably confronted as my own memory performs such an act. This is a central concept to Because of Love – Volume 1 and as such makes me feel a part of Franko B’s explorations.

Inspired by experiences that have affected its performer, the piece nods to many artists opaquely – Rothko, Ron Athey, Dazuo Ohno, Raimund Hoghe, Anselm Kiefer. Some moments feel acutely personal to Franko B, while others appear more presentations of residual emotions left in him from these encounters. As such the composition of this theatrical collage is made up of a mixture of ‘organic’ and ‘man made’ emotion, meaning Because of Love – Volume 1 is both a revealing love song to, and a curated exhibition of, memory.

Throughout, Franko B dances between the objective and subjective delicately, creating a swirl of dissociative iconography that swims around your head before settling into melodic harmony. Do we romanticise our memories of cultural events? Because of Love – Volume 1 leads me to believe that we do and has encouraged me to interrogate if we should.

www.franko-b.com

Elevator Repair Service: Gatz ¦ Photo: Paula Court

Elevator Repair Service: Gatz

Elevator Repair Service: Gatz ¦ Photo: Paula Court

If I love a book I devour it as quickly as possible. I’ve spent days reading when I should be eating, sleeping or working. I don’t think I’m alone in this; it’s the absolute absorption in such occurrences that appeals to us, to be able to turn our backs on this world and leap into another. In such circumstances eight hours seems paltry. Even so I could not have expected the extraordinary adventure that Elevator Repair Service’s uncut version of The Great Gatsbyturned out to be.

Scott Shepherd is a white collar worker stuck in the tedious monotony that marks all dingy office environments. This one is particularly dank, with designer Louisa Thompson going out of her way to create a shabby counterpoint to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s glittering universe. Whilst waiting for his ancient computer to whir into life, Shepherd finds a thumbed copy of The Great Gatsby on his desk and begins to read. This action begins a transformation in both him and his co-workers, who gradually take on the roles in Fitzgerald’s book for a word-for-word retelling.

Elevator Repair Service cleverly set up and entwine two very separate worlds with subtle ease. Colleagues wonder what Shepherd is doing just as they are subconsciously syncing into the story; they pick up telephones on cue or interrupt our increasingly surprised narrator to speak for the characters that have possessed them. In the midst of all this Shepherd’s descriptive interludes slide into the dialogue as naturally as a bootlegger into 1920s high society. It’s sophisticated but ever so simple.

Even so I expect it to take me a while to sink into the rhythm of this performance, but from the off I am hooked. As the flash of a neighbour’s watch-face cheekily tells me the first section is almost up, I realise two hours have disappeared. After a discombobulating break in the outside world, I return to the darkened space and kick off my shoes, letting the warmth of Shepherd’s voice lull me back into a place of attentive meditation. How quickly the reality on stage has become mine. The childish nostalgia of being read to rushes over me. It’s been far too long since I allowed myself, or was offered, such a pleasure.

Alan Bennett once wrote: ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — that you’d thought special, particular to you… And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’ This is never more real than in Gatz, as Shepherd reaches out to us through Fitzgerald’s story. He holds us with a strong and safe grip as we navigate the psychological and social complexities of this brittle landscape.

Shepherd speaks almost continually throughout (he reads but, incredibly, knows the text off by heart); he is the doorway into this towering event, a trustworthy and accessible presence. As such it is not only his passionate and empathic performance as Nick that moves us, but also the amount that such a physical endeavour costs the actor. At the end of the eight hours you feel Shepherd has given a piece of himself (as Gatsby has done to those who betray him) and it’s a piece he will not get back.

It is half way through when you realise that Gatz is a truly unique theatrical event. This is a new form of performance, a hybrid of traditional storytelling and contemporary theatre. In many respects it surpasses both, a towering monument to oral narratives and the expressionistic possibilities of performance itself.

It does this by knitting together the potential of each. We are not only being told the story in a way that echoes cave men, Jesus and old wives, but also in a form that illuminates the themes within the book itself. With their gestic performances the cast are constantly playing with layers of characterisation and believability, in a move that mirrors the social roleplaying engaged in by Gatsby and his gang.

Jim Fletcher as Gatsby is truly remarkable because his heavy likeness and solemn persona are so anti what we believe the ‘Great’ man to be. At first he stands out like a sore thumb. This casting choice makes us behave as Tom and even Jordan and Daisy eventually do, seeing him as an oddity and judging accordingly. Fletcher’s inappropriateness is remarked upon in the audience just as Gatsby is whispered about. But Fletcher’s gentle performance wins our hearts even as Gatsby is losing the one he desperately longs for.

Throughout, the tone of John Collins’ direction echoes that of Nick’s narration. A playful and inquisitive opening underlines the comedy in Fitzgerald’s witty book, before becoming ever heavier and more poignant as Nick and Fitzgerald move onto more sombre judgments.

Gatz shines a light on Fitzgerald’s novel, highlighting overlooked passages and reigniting the more recognisable ones with a brilliance that is dazzling. In the final section, as Shepherd speaks Fitzgerald’s words on an almost empty stage, Gatsby’s loneliness is crystallised and a moment of genuine understanding passes through the room. It’s an emotional end to an epic journey that succeeds not only in stealing you away from this reality but in illuminating another with breathtaking clarity. If only all novels could be given this astonishing treatment.

www.elevator.org

Tanztheater Wuppertal / Pina Bausch: Nur Du (Only You) ¦ Bettina Stöß

Tanztheater Wuppertal / Pina Bausch: Nur Du (Only You)

Tanztheater Wuppertal / Pina Bausch: Nur Du (Only You) ¦ Bettina Stöß

This summer, as advertisements in the Tube trumpet, the world will come to London. For some theatregoers, the world will already have arrived, with the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s revival of their late, visionary choreographer Pina Bausch’s Global Cities, ten pieces of ‘dance-theatre’ inspired and commissioned by metropoli ranging from Rome to Hong Kong. The current revival is part of the London 2012 Festival and concludes the Cultural Olympiad. At the Barbican on 9 and 10 June, the 1996 Global Cities instalmentNur Du (Only You), was presented. Nur Du was researched in California, Arizona, and Texas, but according to the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s publicity, is Bausch’s ‘Los Angeles’ project. A thematically clear, technically impressive, whimsical work of art, bursting with Bausch’s trademark overcharged emotion,Nur Du demonstrates that the worlds of dance, theatre, and performance art have lost a treasure by Bausch’s untimely 2009 death. As a portrait of 1990s Los Angeles, however, Nur Du is far less of a triumph.

Admittedly, the neo-Expressionist Bausch has never claimed to hold a mirror up to nature. In Nur Du, the set, designed by frequent Tanztheater Wuppertal collaborator Peter Pabst, consists of an ultra-realistic three-dimensional representation of a stand of giant redwood trees, but the real landscape is that of the human psyche. Early in the piece, a blonde woman in a little black dress walks through the air, carefully, deliberately, always looking ahead, never down. The woman balances not upon a tightrope but the contracted biceps of a queue of men in baggy suits. As she progresses, the men behind her scramble to queue up at the front. Like an icon in a street festival, she is paraded across the stage. Only this woman’s beauty, her devotees suggest, could inspire such idolatry. Only her perseverance could bring her across the wilderness of the West to Los Angeles. Her arrival is therefore impressive, but she still appears tiny and insignificant in relation to the redwoods.

Nur Du innovatively explores this contradiction in the global image of California: its juxtaposition of rough, sublime, outsized, eternal nature with a culture in which people, and particularly women, are constrained to artificiality and ephemerality, where no woman can ever be too thin, sculpted, or synthesised. This point is made often wittily but somewhat repetitively in Bausch’s episodic drama. Suits in coke-bottle glasses stare voyeuristically at women in awards-ceremony gowns, smug expressions on their faces and unconcerned with their own appearance. A row of women sit holding their skirts up in box shapes, framing their bare legs for display. The same women flip their hair and their eyelashes for a bored, exasperated camp hairdresser clothed only in a loincloth of white mink, complete with the heads. Off to their left, a woman in a jilbab sits on the floor, refusing to participate in this ritual. A screaming fan in gaudy lingerie reacts hysterically to the possibility of an unidentified ‘he’ showing up, then is disappointed when he doesn’t –several times. Indicting the aesthetic cliches of classical ballet, passive women are carried about by judgemental men. Perhaps in retribution, a woman encloses her admirer’s head in a plastic bag, then slowly, deliberately, fills it with water. His features magnified, he sneaks offstage with her, breathing saved-up air, like a swimmer. Finding refuge in the ocean, another woman finds herself eyed from above by a giant puppet whale. Throughout all these episodes, the dancers execute the realistic yet frenetic movements and exaggerated, alternately ecstatic and tormented facial expressions long associated with Bausch and derived from the German Expressionist film and theatre of the 1920s and 30s.

Expressionism projects the characters’ psychological dramas upon the surrounding world, and in Nur Du, Bausch projects the drama of body image anxiety, celebrity culture, and the rat race upon the landscape of California. Only you, the Tanztheater seems to tell Los Angeles, are wholly consumed by these concerns. In 1996, body image was a daring theme for a choreographer to address, given its tyranny across the dance world. With that tyranny essentially unchanged since, the theme remains urgent.

It is Hollywood with which Nur Du is concerned, not, as the publicity claims, Los Angeles. On 29 April 1992, a group of white Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of the brutal beating of black citizen Rodney King, which act had been captured on videotape by a member of the public. The verdict catalysed the Los Angeles riots. This event redefined that city before a global television audience, ripping the lid off of Los Angeles’ resilient problems with institutionalised racism and vast economic disparity, and, by implication, America’s. During the riots Korean-American-owned shops were looted and gunfire was exchanged for reasons that continue to be the subject of debate. Today, the event is known in Korean as ‘Sa-I-Gu’, which translates as ‘4-29’. In experimental theatre, the zeitgeist of the riots was powerfully explored by the writer-actress Anna Deavere Smith in her solo show Twilight, Los Angeles: 1992 and in a number of other works. In Nur Du, this facet of Los Angeles takes a back seat to the shimmer of Hollywood.

There is some evidence that Bausch attempted, when devising Nur Du to examine the cultural makeup of the city. In one scene, a white male stylist dolls up a Black ingenue in a garish platinum wig; she appears to be sleepwalking. The soundtrack of mid-twentieth-century music includes non-white voices, including some Americans, such as Duke Ellington and Dinah Washington, as well as South American ballroom dance tunes and pathos-filled Indian flute music. According to the New York Times’s Ann Daly’s 1996 review, the New York premiere of Nur Du incorporated ‘prominent blackface’, which disappeared in the run’s second week. In Nur Du, the usually fearless Bausch seems to avoid Los Angeles’s complexities.

www.pina-bausch.de

Jean Abreu Dance: Inside

Jean Abreu Dance / 65daysofstatic: Inside

Jean Abreu Dance: Inside

Five athletic dancers scuttle and shift across a grey stage. Ticks and jerks punctuate their otherwise fluid movement, hands caress feet and bodies block one another. In Jean Abreu’s vision of prison an incarcerated man is akin to a butterfly pinned in a display box.

Inside is inspired by the idea that a society’s jails are a signifier of the society itself. Abreu’s diaphanous piece is a blurred reaction to questions of oppression, human rights and responsibility. By shifting away from direct representation, his choreography ducks the reality of these ideas; instead it settles on a brooding Dolce & Gabbana style violence that is polished and ‘sexy’.

At one point technique and ideology come together for a fierce emotional punch. A man is tossed over two others’ shoulders and dropped on his neck, elegantly crumpling down into a ball; a simple but deeply skilful moment that speaks powerfully of an absence of respect for those incarcerated. But this synergy between technique and meaning is palpably lacking elsewhere.

Providing a backdrop of arty testosterone-filled rock the band 65daysofstatic thrash away in the background. Waves of sound roll onto the stage and a sequence of bombastic musical climaxes divides the piece up into compartments of movement with the same arbitrary divisiveness as cell walls. Guitar strings double as prison bars in Dan Jones’ minimal set that evokes a bleak Blade Runner aesthetic but none of the claustrophobic atmosphere of being locked up.

This is an impressively virile performance with some real flashes of class. ButInside is also an annoyingly romanticised and even occasionally grating exploration of something one feels Abreu knows very little about.

www.jeanabreu.com

Belt Up: Outland

Belt Up: Outland

Belt Up: Outland

One of three shows Belt Up are presenting at this year’s Fringe, for Outland the company jumped headfirst down a rabbit hole into the wonderful world of Lewis Carroll. They surfaced, a little crumpled, to create a frantic three-hander vignette that feels a bit concertinaed but is never dull. In a cosy room encased with a wardrobe, dressing-up box, sofas and a number of cramped audience members perched on cushions, writer Dominic Allen takes us on a flight of fancy into Carroll’s brain, bleeding a number of stories into one new tale.

Lead by Sylvia and Bruno, the brother and sister at the heart of one of Carroll’slesser-known works, we are presented with a perspective on Carroll’s genius that posits that his flights of fancy stemmed from a form of epilepsy. The cast rush around literally flinging themselves from character to character being one moment the evil uncle, passionate tutor, lovelorn suitor or even jabberwocky. They move lightning fast, throwing on and off outfits like maniacs on speed. It’s impressive but also in this intimate space slightly bemusing.

Out of the steam it seems it’s all about growing up and the scary idea that dreaming may sometimes be OK. It takes itself too seriously at the end and some of the philosophising is trite but Outland is a sweet and inventive hour from this confident company.

www.beltuptheatre.com