Author Archives: Miriam (Mim) King

About Miriam (Mim) King

Miriam King is an Artist/Choreographer/Dancer/Live Artist/Filmmaker born in London , living in Brighton , working internationally. With an art school background, her professional performance career commenced in 1984. Moving from theatre through to dance, and to live art and film, her most significant training was with Anton Adasinsky's company DEREVO at their former studio in Leningrad, Russia in 1990. Miriam's work is influenced by Butoh dance. She has been creating her own unique performances since 1992, taking her to dance and live art festivals and artist-in-residences around the World. Her award winning dance film work has been shown at Lincoln Centre/ New York , Pompidou Centre/Paris, ICA/London, the Venice Biennial and at the Sydney Opera House, Australia and in every continent (excluding Antarctica ). Miriam has a continuing performance relationship with Gallery Kruh, Kostelec nad cernymi Lesy, nr Prague , Czech Republic which commenced in 1992 and an ongoing performance relationship with SoToDo Gallery , Berlin & the Congress of Visual and Performance Art.

Siro-A: Technodelic!

Before the performance begins a video camera pointed at the audience projects our waiting faces onto the screen, individuals singled out and video mapped onto the bodies of superheroes and samurai wrestlers. We laugh, we smile, we’re amused and enchanted. After this pre-show, it’s a helter-skelter freefall into an optic, joyful, fast-paced, pulsating arcade of visual conundrums. Technology is at the heart of it, with the video artist there on stage right next to the sound artist. At the forefront are four physically highly dexterous and precise performers. Bodies are clad either in white shiny suits or futuristic black ones with studs on the back. Sometimes there are simple (yet technically challenging) solos. With its jaw dropping optical illusions, and syncopated movement to electrobeat music, this technodelic show won the Spirit of the Fringe award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011.

Some of the performers’ movement is coordinated with projected symbols, video mapping or laser lights, while the simple set allows artists to disappear behind-screen to cast shadows and silhouettes. Real figures quickly become confused with projected video forms as they leap on, off and through the screen in a techno-beat Japanese Forkbeard Fantasy kind of way. A favourite section was a rainbow sequence where each sound had a physical movement, symbol and colour, while another was a sequence toward the end where a playful performer and pink ball seemingly came off the screen into real solidity. Siro-A’s Technodelic! presents one of the best ever uses of human form, vibrant movement, sound and video projection. Everything enhanced everything else; nothing was obsolete, nor was there an ill-timed moment.

This show has a full-on ‘genki feeling’. So concise, eye boggling, exhilarating, amazingly zestful, playful and cute.

www.siro-a.co.uk

Chris Goode and Company: The Forest & the Field

So, what are we all doing when we meet in a theatre space? In a kindly way, Chris Goode, asks us ‘Why have we come? What are we hoping for? What are we dreading?’, and then, cheekily, ‘Are these questions rhetorical?’. The Forest & the Field is a comfortably cosy, immersive piece of non-fiction storytelling. There’s even a ginger cat, Antonio, roaming and roving and relaxing, very at home in the earth-covered performance space. Chris, strolling occasionally from here to there, sitting amongst us, and the household lamps and pot plants, invites us, the audience, to look in toward the space, at each other and ourselves to consider what we seek in our trip to the theatre.

Chris Goode is at ease amongst the audience. His performance is part chat, part lecture, as he’s reading from notes in his lap and observing the space with us, watching and witnessing. Within that space and sometimes alongside us is Tom, an actor, who creates accompanying physical manifestations, improvised sets and scenes to Chris’ words. I pull a cracker with Tom, the actor, whilst the ginger cat circles the circumference of the performance space (is he looking for a way out?).

Using live demonstrations and ‘invisible’ video clips, and summoning up examples ranging from Shakespeare to Peter Brook, Chris suggests the theatre is like an island, the island of The Tempest. Scenes and examples are poured out and presented, erotema set for us to consider and then dissolved away. Are we in a temporary exile from our everyday lives? Is theatre a place where we can know what we are scared to know? Can theatre change the world? What is theatre now, if the way we experience the world now has changed? Antonio the ginger tom moves onto strewn pieces of paper and licks his balls. This cat is just being… he just… is. Which is the conclusion of The Forest & the Field… what if ‘What if?’ has become ‘What is?’. Can we just listen, to what is? Come out of the forest, and into the field to lie down and just… listen… to what… is?

The theme of what we want and why we’re there and what we can hope for is strong yet surprisingly simple. I’m amused and enchanted and feel enriched by the experience. Intellectually stimulating, Chris is with us, the audience, giving us his considered propositions, and we answer his questions within our own thoughts. We can sit back and wonder and witness. It’s like a philosophical inquest into what we want from theatre, aided and abetted by Toms’ theatrical examples, and once you accept this conceit The Forest & the Field is an engaging and endearing, friendly and thought-provoking essay turned into an excellently crafted, in the round theatre event with beautiful visual moments.

www.chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk

Derevo: Harlekin

Unlike most Derevo shows, Harlekin is not a large ensemble work, but it still has the chaotically creative inventiveness we have come to expect from the company, as well as the stunning visual imagery and blood-pumping soundscore composed by long-time collaborator Daniel Williams.

Anton Adasinsky’s Harlekin is more of a Petrushka type character, forever beguiled and tormented by his love for his Pieretta, played here by Elena Yarovaya. Harlekin is entranced, bewitched and eventually broken by his own ardour – by heartbreak and love’s disappointment. As a child, he begins his journey astride his hobby horse, grasping in earnest at Pieretta’s hat, pulling it off only to fall aghast at her howls. As they grow up, his interest is more impassioned, as in a shower scene where Harlekin is so besotted with his girl that he wills and twists himself into becoming her very shower, shower-head, water, the lot. He’s restless in his dreams, comforting himself by caressing a puppet doll of her, and there’s a wonderful scene where reflective light beams from a mirror set in her tiny face, expanding into an all encompassing radiance of light that pierces his dreaming darkness, slowly shifting and transmuting its shades and tones into a deep red – a glowing hazy mist of his restless passions.

Later Harlekin becomes a warrior with a sword, potent soundscapes accompanying treacherous twilight, echoes and footsteps of marching, visions of mists and menacing shadows. We also witness a wonderful ‘window scene’ where, watched over night after night by a waxing and waning moon, Harlekin and Pieretta proffer their goodnights from separate bedroom windowsills. There is a shy naivety to the scene until Pieretta is courted by another, and one evening produces a baby in her arms. The moment is represented so simply, yet with such consequence: Harlekin suffers the wound of this tragedy, whilst Pieretta becomes a drudge, washing clothes. He attempts once more to court and woo her, yet she literally mops the floor with his dreams, his simple wire-frame flowers and violin becoming just more household objects for her to carry out her chores. Even the crown that he gives to her is made into an iron to press another’s clothes. Finally he tears out his own heart, and gives it to her, yet she appears heartless, and, with some viciousness, chomps into it.

This story is both brutal and lyrical. Harlekin now has a gash where his heart was, and is sewn up by a perky nurse. He pulls himself back into life, is befriended by a monkey-mate, and thus endeavours to find a path out into the world. His doting Devoted Monkey tries hard to entertain Harlekin with cute antics – banging a drum, inconsequential hula-hooping, riding a tiny clown bike – yet the forlorn master cannot see beyond his lovelorn sorrow. Cages of hearts hang from the ceiling; it’s kaleidoscopic and nightmarish, picture-book and immediate. Harlekin becomes a hurdy-gurdy player with his faithful monkey-mate at his side, attempting to earn a living through thin singing and uncertain dance, yet the spectre of Pieretta continues to haunt him, drowning him in his lonely well of sorrow. At the end, Harlekin, in a narrow corridor of light, slow-footedly follows a tiny star, faithfully accompanied by monkey, who slumbers upon a drum laid atop a wooden cart that trundles along… There is a sense of the perpetual turning of time, and of the paths that we choose to follow, of emotions skewered by inner turmoils. With unquestionably astounding physical performances, it’s the soundscape and the small details that lace together this show – the descending stained -glass window, the waxing and waning moon, the picture-book cornerstones of images that frame these timeless scenes as they are etched deep into our imaginations.

When I first saw this show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2010, I was both disturbed and soothed, delighted and left with tender aches. I had felt shocked through by its raw storybook tragedy in the same way that I had felt ripped by the wild anarchy of Derevo’s Red Zone at the ICA back in 1989. I could barely leave my seat afterwards. Seeing Harlekin in 2010, I felt I had seen that one show, and needed to see nothing more for the rest of the festival, as everything would pale into insignificance against it… yet this time around Harlekin felt a milder experience. Unusually this Derevo show had a slower pace, a different, slightly staggered gear to its 2010 UK premiere. The overall production felt a bit jerky between some scene changes, yet all characters were completely engrossing, making me laugh and ache at their plight in equal measure… In Harlekin there were so many wonderful moments of complicity to savour – each one a reminder that a simple glance that can tell a complete story.

www.derevo.org

Let Slip: Machines for Living

Invoking the futuristic ambiance of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Machines for Living is a bright piece of theatre with an angular monochrome set and great costume designs. With strongly stylised performances, Let Slip, a company of four, welcome us into a gleaming mechanised age. The world is ‘plagued by eyes that do not see’, and its homes for heroes that are needed – architecture fit for man in this civilised age. The house needs to be designed as a machine for living. Via talk of Brutalism, Urbanism and Le Corbusier, we arrive at an architects conference and meet Wendy, a young swinging sixties architect with a passion for concrete (‘concrete is the future, the sky’s the limit, so get in it!’). She meets Roger, a bearded bungalow designer, converts him with her passion for a brave new world, and together they create plans to design ‘streets in the skies’, ultimately fulfilled by the opening of Graceful Towers, their utopian vision. Blue sky thinking for blue sky living, regeneration for a new generation – a city full of clean form.

Yet in reality, corners got cut, cheaper materials were used, windows were made smaller, lifts broke, and no one knew their neighbours. Five years later and there’s cockroaches, graffiti, damp and its attendant respiratory problems, broken heating and broken hearts.

Wendy and Roger were fabulously characterised, and I enjoyed the portrayal of Le Corbusier, and of Community, a woman who responds and shapeshifts according to her environment. She changes with the times, becoming a kind of consciousness for her surroundings.

As a Lecoq trained company Let Slip look good, move well, and create superb fast-moving characterisations. They get to grips with a tricky story – that of the hope for a new way of living gone wrong – grappling with where and how it went wrong, who was responsible, what ideals got corrupted and who got harmed. Were there good, civic intentions behind those tower blocks? Or was it all design for design’s sake? The show concludes with the sound of high rise air and a falling architect. Ending on colour, and future hopes and fresh ideas for the city of tomorrow, a lot is packed into this one hour. I’ve been entertained and had my thoughts provoked via clear-cut vivacious performances and through dialogue that’s both humorous and to the point.

La JohnJoseph: Boy in a Dress

Beautifully performed and pitched, Boy in a Dress is a fast-moving autobiographical show recounting ‘transdrogynous’ performer La JohnJoseph’s memories through direct address to the audience, songs and even a striptease. There’s dance and illustrative movement, humour and pathos. It all holds together superbly; you can taste the quality straight away. It’s colourful, lively, fast-paced and tender, the scripted dialogue delivered with an ease and slickness. Totally captured from the very beginning, I didn’t want to miss a single word or image. There’s a directness and earthiness to La JohnJoseph’s tales as we hear of his unstable Liverpool Catholic childhood, of his mother and her marriages, and how often he was left to hold the babies (he was one of eight children). We hear of his school days, and the sanctuary of public toilets, of his spell in downtown New York, of dressing up and club-going, and of his modelling days. In a New York club one day a queen sized him up and said, ‘You’re not a drag queen, you’re a boy in a dress.’

The set is a tumble of costumes and bits and bobs amid crates and a wardrobe. The latter is used to brilliant effect for the entrances, exits and visual revelations of fellow performer Erin Hutching, such as in a living image of the Virgin Mary, who emerges, holding the Sacred Heart, to look heavenward. The set also incorporates its own visual storytelling, reflecting the recounting of the horrors of desire, and of love yet to be found, written into the graffiti of male public toilets as if they were confessional booths. La JohnJoseph has a good resonant voice and the songs are luscious. There’s even a great dress made from paper aeroplanes!

La JohnJoseph is such a willowy yet sturdy personality. Boy in a Dress is sharp and hooks you on the precariousness of life and all its absurdity. We’re lifted up. You can have nothing and have what little you have taken away from you, and still go on. Happiness can leak out in the most gloomy of places. You can pick up those shattered fragments and make yourself a crown. All about being and becoming, it’s brave, robust, clear, celebratory and to the point.

Total Theatre