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.

Teatr Zar: Caesarean Section – Essays on Suicide

The audience is seated in traverse, on either side of the stage area. The performers are in the space – sitting, waiting – and a metronome is ticking loudly. The lights go out, and we are plunged into total darkness. The velvet softness of the dark is shattered by the harsh sound of glass breaking.

The lights come up to show a barefoot girl walking on a narrow slither of a path of shimmering shards of glass. There’s cello, accordion, drum; there’s Erik Satie played on the piano. And then there is voice! Polyphonic Corsican choral singing, woven through with Bulgarian, Chechen, Romanian and Icelandic songs – the live music and choral work combining with the intense physical performance to make for a full-blooded and visceral work. There are ten performers onstage, seven musicians and three physical actors/dancers, one male and two female. Yet there are no real divisions – all is physical, and all is resonant voice. There is a stamping dance that kicks into cackles, then everything slips and cascades into another confrontation. There is musical saw, clapping, a dance like a mating ritual, an embrace that produces a squirt of blood that splatters onto the floor, a knife plunged repeatedly into a wooden table top.

Caesarean Section – Essays on Suicide is a word-free piece about suicidal compulsion and the involuntary force that pulls us back from the brink, delving into deep dark places and questioning whether life is or is not worth living. At times you just want to close your eyes and feel the reverberations. It’s a show that charges through your very being.

There is a memorable scene of an older woman attempting to reach up towards the light, climbing towards the light and falling, and trying and failing and trying again. Voices rise to echo her ascension. She doesn’t make it, and lies broken between the upturned chair legs. This goes into a sequence with darkly funny skits on suicide: attempting to drown in a bath; having a go at gnawing at one’s wrists. A silent woman holds a watering can, a noose attaching her to a baby tree. All this to the accompaniment of silent film wonky piano music.

The leg of a chair is dragged through a stream of broken glass. The vocal performers are at this point so physical with their voices, they are almost singing through their arms, their fingertips. We are bathed in lamentation. The passionately raw movement comes across as wildly reckless – so close to the glass we can hardly look. We wince and almost don’t want to witness potent images of near self-destruction and self salvation, yet at the same time don’t want to look away.

We don’t leave depressed, yet rather coursed through with a sense of potency, of mortality, and of the vibrancy of life and human spirit. An extraordinarily potent work.

DO-Theatre: Hangman

To a soundscape of ominous music, a suited and bowler-hatted typist diligently sets to work. In the background, spelt out in large bold letters, the word H-A-N-G-M-A-N hangs proud. Mid-stage are three dozing suited characters, their heads heavy on a table. In a world of shadows and uncertainty, these dark clad clowns rouse and play out a perpetual game of crime and punishment whilst the fourth, set apart, oversees everything, types, observes, constructs and destructs. Newspapers are laid smooth on the floor; later, all tumbled and torn, they litter the place. The game is played out with deadly intent: within the hour, crimes are committed, bodies tumble, criminals are sentenced and the ‘guilty’ are executed. The puzzle is who is who, and which role is being played? What is the role of law? In this dancing dynamic of shifting conspiracies and interrelationships, we are plunged into the depths of dim-lit plots.

Immersing us in a shadowy world of newspaper sets and lightbulb pendulums shaded by semi-open books, Hangman is DO-Theatre doing what they do best. Through virtuoso performances, impeccably graceful, lyrical dance, and jerky puppet-like movement we witness a wonderfully fluid series of tabletop sequences, amid newspaper drapes that fold down into papery walls. We have gambling scenes, drinking scenes, spaghetti-eating scenes, hypnotic and intoxicating dance sequences. Newspaper floors scuffle up during a delicious sequence where two men in white shirts perform a spiralling floor dance, moody and sensual to the sound of sea and saxophone. Two lights are swung by the men, swinging above to cast both light and shadow, their lampshades open books with pages splayed. It’s as exuberantly snappy and jovial as it is beautiful, stylish and sinister. The last quiet scene of fine sand spilling down onto hat brims leaves us to ponder. No answers. No conclusions. An open book among scattered torn pages and the relentlessness of time and punishment.

www.dotheatre.com

Song of the Goat: Macbeth

Amidst the very misty, thick stage smoke I can just about find a seat. Before Song of the Goat’s Macbeth commences, director Grzegorz Bral addresses us with the invitation to ‘watch it with your ears’. Lights dim and when vision permits we see a semi-circle of performers bathed in muted half light, amber toned. Half seen, all heard. What follows is charged, potent, rawly tender, yet refined too in its anger and wailing grief.

Song of the Goat’s hypnotic and mesmerising retelling of Macbeth takes us in and out of focus, plunging together haunting polyphonic Corsican folk songs, chanting and poetry, pinned together by movement inspired by martial arts training – light-footed, swirling, turning, with much manipulation of wooden staffs, sticks, swords and canes that slice and swipe through the thickened air. A set of adjustable panels form and reform, and are turned, lifted and stacked by the performers at varying heights. There is candlelight, and the rich solo musician accompaniment of Rafal Habel’s kayagum, a Korean string instrument vibrant with its tremulous sound.

There are changes of height and pitch, pauses and poised moments, tensions raised through the voice, and through a conspiracy of rhythmic words, through rousing and emotive song, we are plunged into this emotive rhapsody on the theme of Macbeth.

After a short time you can only surrender up that which you know of the story and give yourself over to the pure, tender sound that transports you into the heart of the story – into its tragedy and all its fury. There’s a magic that happens within this alchemy of voice, movement and music. Just accept it, and see it with your ears, feel it in your fibres; the vision is there, swirling around in your marrow.

www.piesnkozla.pl

Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio: Detention

Hong Kong company Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio’s Detention is a non-verbal physical theatre piece and acrobatic comedy combining clowning, martial arts and percussion. The scene for the show is a high school class room, its blackboard chalked with the words ‘be a good student’. Enter, one a at a time, three mischievous, highly active teenage boys. They don’t want to sit still and write out their 1000 lines, so during the frequent moments when their strict, jaw-jutting teacher is absent, they mess about, drumming out rhythms with whatever comes to hand, monkeying around and ultimately haranguing and chasing and vying for the attentions of a sweetly cute female classmate who’s also been sent for lunchtime detention.

This is fast-moving cartoon-style comedy, all done with guttural sounds, grunts and sighs. A sensational moment happens when the haughty, short-tempered, reprimanding, sadistic schoolmistress (who’s also a bit of a glamour-puss when her sweetheart calls her on her mobile) erupts into her superhero alter-ego, pulling off her clothes and performing an exotic dance that includes walkovers and the splits in a shimmering shaking silver two-piece, causing all four students to faint. Later she is up a ladder, swinging off the ceiling’s ventilation fan. The end result is anarchy, the naughty students enraging their teacher and the cute girl joining in. Teacher ends up in the rubbish bin.

Detention is full of cacophony, frenzied action, mayhem, high-octane larking. The cast of five give a full-throttle performance, yet I found the storyline irritating – I didn’t like the larger of the boys trying any rouse he could to grab and kiss the overly cute, squealing school girl, yet I had to settle into the idea they were playing contemporary, almost manga-style, caricatures, and the cast are all great, multi-talented performers, the school mistress being played by a ‘Champion of World Women Model’. For the finale teacher gets a call at the end that perks her up, and, running off, waves goodbye to her four students who close the show by playing a traditional drum set.

www.tswtheatre.com

Antony and the Ohnos: A Celebration of Yoshito and Kazuo Ohno

As part of the Meltdown series at the Southbank Centre curated by Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), this was an evening dedicated to butoh legend Kazuo Ohno, who died, at the age of 103, in 2010. Along with Tatsumi Hijikata, Ohno is credited with developing the Japanese dance form of butoh. In A Celebration of Yoshito and Kazuo Ohno, a dance and music event, Antony shares the stage with Ohno’s son, Yoshito.

The evening opened with an appearance from performance artist Johanna Constantine as well as film and tape loops by William Basinski. (Johanna Constantine is a longstanding friend and Antony collaborator, having moved from California to New York with him in 1990. They established the Blacklips Performance Cult in downtown New York, and then were resident at the Pyramid Club between 1992 and 1995, where they performed theatrical extravaganzas that always climaxed in an Antony song. William Basinski is another NYC artist from that period.) The evening also screened excerpts from Chiakji Nagano’s 1973 film, Mr O’s Book of the Dead.

The performance begins with a black and white film of sky, with moving clouds, an intense full moon, and moody music. A white robed apparition appears at the front of the stage, veiled in netting, like a silvery carnival bride, a spectre, reminiscent of Lindsay Kemp circa 1978. After a few minutes in front of the film screen, the spectre waftily stalks off and returns in black shrouding/netting with a shiny black helmet, with rather automated movement, wobbling on high heels, and a lot of slow wafting up and down of arms. The figure wanders off again, the night sky video projection continues (I find the shakiness of the camera work annoying). The soundscape music changes, and the paint splattered figure of Johanna Constantine wafts back on, this time shroudless, to reveal red and black dripping body paint and a silver metal bikini, painted like a Mexican day of the dead skeleton. She may look great in photos or in close-up performance, yet the wandering on and off and costume changes felt very metered, and her presence didn’t carry that far past the first couple of rows.

The film changes to a close-up of skin and a hand placed on bark, fading then to clawing fingers on skin covered in clumpy earth. On the screen words form: ‘spirit manifests itself in every phenomena in the universe’, then ‘a night train through the stars is passing through your inner life’. These words, which are Kazou Ohno quotes, form and dissolve against still photographs of him. Then the screen raises to reveal a grand piano at which sits Antony, and the show begins. Yoshito Ohno enters dressed in white, holding aloft one red rose. The evening shifts into something extraordinary; Anthony’s voice and Ohno’s presence together are beautiful and melancholic, graceful and resonant. Between sections there is an enthusiastic and cheering audience. The evening features songs from Antony’s album The Crying Light, and when Anthony invites the audience to click their fingers in comes Ohno in white trousers, bare-chested and sporting a turquoise horse’s head, looking odd and sweet and funny, a bit like a Dr Seuss character.

In another section Yoshito Ohno comes on stage embracing a five foot long mirror and passes it behind Antony so that the audience can see the keyboards and the back of Antony’s head, and we see ourselves and the relfections of lights.

All in all there are five sections where Ohno enters mid song. It is both a concert and a dance performance, which presents a curious balance as these are songs with lyrics, and Ohno is kind of animating the stage. The songs are very much at the forefront. For example, when Antony sings the song ‘Another World’, which has the lyrics ‘gonna miss the birds, singing all their songs… gonna miss the wind, been kissing me so long’, Ohno, wearing a beautiful white feather hat, comes on holding a child’s handheld windmill, and runs silently in the space before disappearing off.

Toward the end there is video documentation of a company piece performed in a pig sty, dancers in wigs and dresses, camera zooming in and out, followed by a strange processional piece including a character wearing false Groucho-style nose and glasses and another character carrying a mirror. I am unsure how genuine these films were, and if perhaps they were recreations? A comment afterwards from someone who knows a lot about butoh indicated that the only genuine piece of footage was of Kazou Ohno lying on the pig sty floor suckling at a sow. Yet I took this footage to be the rarely seen 1973 film, Mr O’s Book of the Dead.

After this screening, the screen pulls across and Anthony sings ‘Wise Men Say Only Fools Rush In’. Ohno comes on to this final piece wearing a black gentleman’s suit, and seated and dancing in his hand is a small black-suited puppet of a man.

I felt a touch bothered by Johanna Constantine’s lengthy support appearance at the beginning and the sustained quality on such a large screen of some of the video images and footage. Yet this sound, song, visual, film, dance and concert event tribute to Kazuo Ohno left me with the feeling I had witnessed something extraordinary and tender – in Antony’s voice or the potent moments of his eye contact with and toward Ohno, or just in the rare, rare opportunity to witness Yoshito Ohno dance.

Total Theatre