Author Archives: Marigold Hughes

Sirqus Alfon: I am Somebody

Sirques Alfon channel the spirit of Mr Motivator – in a disco, with lasers, trapped in a computer game. On speed. A gloriously manic and resolutely bizarre celebration of life and individuality, I am Somebody is vastly entertaining and hugely engaging: a party that you don’t want to end and which you’re very happy to be at.

Martin Ostman, Erik Rosales and Hendrik Strindberg lead us down a rabbit hole and into a wonderland of music, rhythm, sound and light. Dressed in jazzy pastels, they begin by orchestrating vibrant songs of spiritual revolution, bopping along in rhythmic frenzy. Behind them is a screen and the performance partly exists in the world of computer graphics, taking its form and style from the realm of gaming and playing in the gap between the digital and the hyper-real. It is shiny and electric, but also very live and purely human.

Two of the performers take part in a boxing match set against the ubiquitous Japanese temple on the screen behind them. They fight against the frame of the screen, each hit producing ripples in the frame of the game. Their movements are strong, expertly choreographed, and precise. Recording one of the voices in the audience, another of the performers creates a live track in which this voice is mixed, integrated and given graphics; a bespoke creation, perhaps, for a karaoke parlour somewhere in Japan.

In another moment, a performer moves with strong, robotic grace – in synch with a soundtrack of clicks, whirrs and functionality. It is hugely skilful and completely mesmerising. A different sequence sees the performers toying and manipulating lasers with a level of unfeasible ease and hypnotic dexterity. A drummer builds an invisible drum kit, filling in the gaps in reality with his mimed strikes, hits and taps. Each and every sequence showcases an exceptional level of skill and pure, unbridled imagination.

They certainly are something, and somebody – then they pull out their selfie stick and we are all somebody too. They take selfies with us, teach us a variety of movements, which they – unknown to us – film. They show us back a sequence in which we are all moving in perfect time to the soundtrack, in block formation, our moves being mixed to the disco-electric tones of the track. We are now part of their screen and part of their world. It is a brilliant moment and every audience member watches themselves – and each other – with joyous revelation.

Brilliantly non-sensical and liberated from any narrative convention – or indeed any convention at all – Sirqus Alfon propel us through a world of the sublime and the fantastical, navigating us through their own world of positive affirmation and joy, with total physical mastery and prowess. Fresh, quirky and joyously anarchic.

Sirqus Alfon: I am Somebody is presented at the Edinburgh Fringe by Aurora Nova.

Rash Dash: Two Man Show

Three women gather. They sing in close harmony, shifting and sliding cadences of beauty. Their voices are female, they are female – it goes without saying. Such certainty is positively waiting to be challenged, and it is the very saying of it that it is in question: living, as we are, as part of ‘mankind’ – how can language ever be trusted?

Performers Helen Goalen, Abbi Greenland and musician Becky Wildie are presented as part goddess/part metallic vision of the future. Kicking off in the Neolithic period, they chart the history of the patriarchy – or the merciful lack thereof – beginning from women as revered goddess, and embedded as strong equals to men in hunter-gatherer societies, to controlled, inferior beings, dominated by the men who have promoted themselves to be authors of society. Complicated? Google it (their words, not mine).

Rash Dash have a palette of tools from which they deftly pull whatever will serve the story best. Witty words tumble into skillfully executed dance duos that smash the traditional dynamic of male and female dancers. Both women lift and are lifted, spinning and weaving in and around each other with choreographic finesse; strength and skill happily co-exist with grace and flow. In these halcyon Olympian days, the anatomy of female force should be a given, but ‘tis not always so. In a burst of tribal dance, they are bare-chested, free and forceful, celebrating their bodies and their nudity in a place between the masculine and feminine: female bodies dancing with a ‘male’ attitude, an attitude free from constraint, sexualisation and self-consciousness.

A scene begins. Both performers wear dresses, but their body language is at odds with their clothes and their relationship unclear. In the midst of the tension that hangs between them, we fumble for clues – ex-partners? Estranged friends? Sisters? One calls the other Dan and we learn they are brothers. John is caring for their elderly, demented father; Dan has been notable in his absence.

The women perform the men with complete credibility, highlighting gender for what it is: a part we have learnt to play really well. Men and women have been evolving for centuries, playing different parts at different times: casting is completely up for grabs. In another of these scenes, after the inevitable death of their father, the ‘brothers’ talk to each other in their pants, bare-chested: they are easy in the bodies as their male counterparts would be. Sharing their nudity with the same frankness as their opinions.

Helen Goalan – as herself – attempts to engage with her co-performer, but Abbi is still in role as John. A fraught conversation between Goalan and John ensues: they talk about what the show is, what it’s trying to do, what the faults are: John asks Goalan what ‘he’ should be, what she wants him to be, as a man. It’s all pretty meta – but it mocks itself, so we don’t need to. Instead we can focus on what this ‘woman-man’ wants to learn, how he wants to be seen, what he has to teach, how he navigates the maze of his masculinity.

Two Man Show is playful, sophisticated and important. It is superlatively engaging and constantly surprising: a quest for finding a language that the performers can trust to represent them, as women, in an age of men. A language that can speak for them and tell their story, a language between words and song, movement and performance, a language that lets men and women speak their truths – as humans, not as gendered constructs. Watching the quest unfold is thrilling. Helen Goalen and Abbi Greenland are completely at home in the merry anarchy they have created: skillful, funny and whip smart. If this could be what the next era of humanity looks like, then bring it on.

Third Angel: 600 people

Third Angel’s Alexander Kelly knows a lot about space, the history of the species, and a fair bit about aliens – exactly the sort of chap you would like to have on your side in a pub quiz. In this animated whirlwind of facts, figures and scientific know-how, Kelly conjures up the presence of Dr Simon Goodwin, an astrophysicist at Sheffield University, with whom he shares meetings and beers to discuss space, the universe and everything in between.

Is there anybody out there? Turns out that there isn’t. Dr Goodwin is sure – at least 95 % sure (100% when trying to achieve dramatic effect). There are a whole lot of questions and equations to back this up. In addition to the spaceships sent out – Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, bearing human offers of peace and friendship – to explore the galaxy, both of which have returned no evidence of extra-terrestrial life.

Kelly sits at a table with his cup of tea and three spherical, planet-like looking objects to illustrate and map out his galactic musings. He has a fiercely sharp grasp of the facts, his mind and mouth work at a breakneck speed, and the enthusiasm for his subject is contagious.

In a consideration of other beings in our solar system, we are brought back to our own species: the Homo Sapiens, one of seven human species and the only one that survived, although there is evidence of cross-pollination. Kelly shares the results of the DNA test that himself and Dr Goodwin did in a fit of scientific fervour; they are respectively 2.8 % and 3.1% Neanderthal. Apparently we all have a similar dose. That’s exciting. Possibly a bit more exotic than being a sixteenth Welsh.

We also learn that each of us are directly descended from one of 600 Homo Sapiens living in the rift valley hundreds of thousands of years ago. Only 600 people – an almost extinct species: an astonishing fact, and its magnitude is almost impossible to comprehend. The 100 or so people sitting in that room are the result of those 600 people – us, the thousands of folk sitting in various states of amusement, wonder, confusion and excitement in the numerous sites across the city, and beyond that, the population of the UK, then Europe, then the world. The mind zooms and boggles, then comes back to our fellow humans and to the invisible links we have to each and every one of them. It is a humbling, beautifully live and communal moment.

Whether or not aliens exist, the fact that we do is extraordinary enough. It makes you want to do something more than think about how much it is raining. Though the passion with which Kelly talks about his subject is engaging, the piece remains at a slight distance. The facts sometimes feel fairly impenetrable and the lecture-style delivery, whilst never dry, is occasionally slightly stilted. Nevertheless, we leave knowing more than we did when we arrived, with a fresh galactic twinkle in our eyes and over seven billion new relatives.

Lowri Evans: The Secret Life of You and Me

Lowri Evans has got a secret she can’t keep any longer: her life. Her secret life, no less. A scrapbook of memories; not only hers, but ours and everyone’s. A scrapbook that is already fading. All smiles and sparkles, Evans weaves us through threads of her childhood, of a long distance love affair between Brazil and Manchester, and of musings on being 30.

As a child, she is smoking twigs and dipping her toes into the boundless joy of making reverse-charge phone calls. As a lover, she is treading around the edges of countries and of a love that may never be. As a 30 year old (well, now a 31 year old, the piece was made last year), she is working out who to be. Snapped photos of her in a shopping centre flip through identities like outfits: a lycra-clad gym-goer who actually goes to the gym? A tailored nine-to-five-er? A wine-swigging, throwing-her-head-back in a cocktail bar kind of chic? A mother? A wife?

These glimpses come to us via sketches on acetate, projected photos on film and through Evans chatting to us. Narrating her life, she teeters on the edge of mischief. Brimming with warmth, she holds each moment with clarity and precision. As the gallery of her life fills up onstage – with musings from her notebook, a kind of operation-like wire loop game spelling “love”, and illuminated jars packed full of sand, illustrating the treasure of time – she is ever the charming curator.

Sharing this desire to make her mark on time’s shifting sands, Evans projects photos in which people have mapped the memories they are most afraid of losing onto steamed glass: long hot summer days, a first kiss, 40p bus fares. Yet even as they are written, these words have started to drip away, their content contorted and skewed.

The pages of her scrapbook fill up with lives lived and loves lost, with memories held and fading, with time slipping by, grain by grain. A real moment of tenderness arrives in the form of a recent phone conversation between Evans and her dad. Once again, she has reversed the charges. He says to her, “Is this an experiment? I know what you’re like.” They joke tenderly about the time she did it as a child; his chidings are now steeped in nostalgia, a hankering of what was and what is already passing, too quickly. It’s real and very sweet.

There are other touching moments and flashes of visual invention, but the secret life of her and us – perhaps inevitably – remains elusive. The feeling that this scrapbook has some pages missing is difficult to shake. The parts don’t quite match up and for all Evans’s charm, the piece takes on a brand of self-consciousness that it seems to work hard to shed. Evans, even as herself, feels like a staged character.

In part, this may be due to the fact the piece was created to mark Evans turning 30. Time’s sands have shifted and this is no longer real; the edges are already tinged with nostalgia. But maybe this is right where the secret lives exist, between us and each other. In the moments that, even as we live them, we are already afraid of losing; in the moments, and the lives, that we never really allow ourselves to know.

Simone Riccio: Nothing Moves If I Don’t Push It

Simone Riccio takes to the stage, dressed head to toe in smart-casual attire, with a peaked cap placed on his head at an enticingly jaunty angle. Then without rhyme or reason, he takes it all off to reveal another suit below. It’s a sign of things to come. He looks out at us for a while, says that he is going to tell us a story about his life and gives us a warning that he is a bit arrogant. Pride does certainly come before a fall and this piece is pretty much in free-fall descent from the off. Riccio sets up a series of moments and scenes that bear no meaningful relation to each other and that are neither interesting nor moving – however hard they are pushed.

His phone rings – it’s a friend of his; he takes the call and hangs up. It rings again, it’s his ‘Mama’ – he takes it, speaking and moving differently to the last call. It rings again – it’s a love interest, Lorena, and his stance and spirit changes again. It feels like he is moving towards something, developing motifs to be explored and evolved. But it’s promptly dropped and he moves onto the next thing. He is at a party, celebrating some unknown success with some shadowy dancing pals on the projection screen behind him, then he is ‘in jail’, undertaking some pretty precarious balances on a set of handbalancing canes, then he is singing a love song to no one in particular. In the offer of each moment, there is a glimmer of interest – what he was in jail for, even for five days, seems particularly intriguing – but he crushes it dead by moving on so swiftly and abruptly.

Riccio’s skills as a circus performer are sandwiched between these serial vignettes. Out of nowhere, a swing-pole comes from the wings, and though he displays impressive dexterity in working with it, it is without purpose. Watching his skilful mastery of the German wheel is absorbing, yet there is little connection between what he is doing physically and the story he is telling.

Fleetingly, his skills and his subject matter unite in the form of his juggling balls. Having told us that he ‘loves women’, these balls become the women in his life; he starts with one, then two, then three, giving them names, ‘Maria, Francesca, Lorena’, as he spins different patterns in the air and relates to them with alternating longing and sadness, replacing one with another until many more reign down on him, leading him to implore that they are ‘suffocating him’. Unsurprisingly, sympathy does not reign forth.

Threads of a story exist here and there – the longing of a soul for something and someone, the fight to get it, the barriers in the way and the pleasure of moving forwards – but the ends are frayed and they don’t tie together. In a festival known for its role as a showcase of the best of innovative visual theatre around the world, this is an example of some of the artform’s worst traits: self-indulgence, a lack of rigour and an absence of meaning. Hugely disappointing.

Total Theatre