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.

Tanztheater Wuppertal / Pina Bausch: Agua

I first saw Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof in the early 1980s, and, thirty years later, sat in the midst of an excited audience, here I am again to see a restaging of her 2001 work Agua. Spanning completely the rear of the stage there’s luscious verdant green projections of palm tree fronds rippling in sultry breezes. A couple are joined by a lady in a pearly white dress; she talks in French, the couple are slurping something… an orange? Agua starts with a surprising amount of humour. With tangerine dresses and pinks and swirling, it’s a delirious, hot-blooded holiday fantasy of Brazil, a flirty and frivolous paradise. Just when we’ve become used to the all-encompassing and -embracing video projections, suddenly the screens slowly raise up to ominously reveal the jungle, lurking and encroaching all the time behind those screens! Just when we’re registered its presence, down come the screens again and the stage is awash with dresses and projections of tree-tops and pools of water, whilst dancers with food tray hats parade and flaunt.

There are quiet scenes, comedy moments and humour aplenty, and wild scenes of tumbling and turning women at the centre of a dynamic delirium of cartwheeling orange, red, lemon, scarlet, and petal pink dresses. In one scene colour bleaches out to a white solo in a white dress on a white stage with white light, where hair has as much movement as do limbs; in another a woman in a red dress dances against a projection of the sea; in a third, twenty people are on stage, bare-chested men in micro skirts and high, high platform shoes holding the hands of tiny women.

It’s a long show; I was in my seat for three hours. The first half was bitty, the second half more fluid. Yet Agua is a wonderful animated holiday album that we can sit back and luxuriate in. There is barely one harrowing moment. Some of the scenes feel repetitive or redundant, yet one settles and luxuriates in the wafting drifting layers of tropical abandon… the sheer pleasurableness and colour washes over and through you, and the end is a joy of watery playfulness and exuberance: with Brazils’ vast and powerful Iguassu Falls as a backdrop, the dancers’ ecstasy is amplified, and a water-sodden cast spray water out their mouths; in wet dresses, dancers straddle white tables, revolving on them, hips both relaxed and in syncopated rhythm.

Agua is a gloriously indulgent evening, a saturated and flirty paradise, a languid, lush and lugubrious fantasy that concludes in a standing ovation. The man next to me almost clapped his hands off! Very much Pina’s ultimate feel good show – the audience are endlessly bathed in pleasure and leave with big smiles on their faces and in such a good mood!

www.pina-bausch.de

English National Ballet with Seven Sisters Group: Like a Fish Out of Water

On a wet Saturday afternoon I took myself off to see Like a Fish Out of Water, a site-specific performance at Hampton Lido that blended handheld video technology with live action. The project had also taken place earlier in the week at Uxbridge Lido and was developed by Seven Sisters Group in partnership with English National Ballet as part of the London 2012 Festival project SECRETS: Hidden London.

Under a canopy at the reception point I had a choice of sun visor or umbrella, and received an iPod with headphones. Following the instructions given to me by the cheery elderly lady’s voice, I entered the lido via its side gate and walked into the story of Like a Fish Out of Water‘s fictional heroine, Sub Marina, a woman who had visited and swum in the lido since childhood. Sub Marina narrated my meanderings, explorations and observations for the next 45 minutes, a constant aural companion to my adventure. On land she is ‘like a fish out of water’; it’s only submerged in the aqua world where her fantasies swim and her inner realms literally come to life!

It took me a while to coordinate sensing when to look at the iPod screen’s video and when to look at what was physically in front of me in the real world – yet what in the real world in front of me was real? Was the lifeguard a performer? Those kids squealing on the water slide – part of the performance or everyday kids larking at the poolside? On my handheld screen I see a ‘water baby’, a joyful girl smiling up at me from her watery playground. So, tentatively setting off on my solitary stroll into Sub Marina’s memories and adventures at this lido, I realised sooner or later that all the swimmers were not performers, they were genuine all-weather swimmers! I listened to Marina’s underwater reveries of childhood encounters with mermaids, sea witches and selkies. She shared with me her teenage years, her courting days, and her motherhood – right up to the present time.

One quiet highlight occurs when I’m guided by Sub Marina’s voice into an outdoor changing cubicle, and invited to lock myself in on my own. The cubicle provides a welcome solitary moment with just the smell of the pool, yet no sight nor sound of it, and there on my iPod’s screen is Sub Marina as a young wife – underwater, wearing a housecoat and standing at an ironing board, her husband reading the newspaper, a string of babies floating up. She has lost her liberty and wants to let herself out of her domestic shackles. The film shows her twisting and turning and eventually releasing herself back into the freedom of the watery world. I left my cubicle and a little later on encountered, amongst puddles and real-world wet deckchairs, Sub Marina at the poolside, watching her kids, feeling an ache for her waterborne days.

Like a Fish Out of Water is written beautifully. It’s an evocative, characterful and spirited piece that veers away from the melancholic by the inclusion of a much appreciated touch of sauce. As a young girl Marina didn’t know what ‘No Petting’ meant, yet when she reached teenage years she realised it had nothing to do with cats and dogs and budgerigars! Sub Marina recalls the male bathers of her earlier years, all arms and legs and ‘shivery bits’. Now no one looks at her – she could dive into the water stark naked with a blue feather up her bum and no one would notice. Currently, as a mature lady of leisure, she enjoys the view from the roof of the lido – some great sights! She remembers lads ‘adjusting’ themselves down below and giving her a wink, yet if she winked back now they’d think she was suffering a stroke! She whispers to me that she looks forward to the return of the Speedo…

All in all the piece is a treat. Once I got into the rhythm of looking at the handheld iPod that aided my navigation, and once I got the hang of dividing my attention between the miniature screen and what was there for real in the immediate world, I felt transported, enchanted, and had a giggle or two! Talk about my cup of tea, this was my glass of water for sure! In the first five minutes a very toned male dancer clad in a black selkie costume, all restricted, came bounding up to me and undulated at my feet. Moments later a cocky fellow came out of the changing cubicle displaying his muscles for my attention alone, all proud of his posing pouch, right there in front of me. Later, for my solitary attention, a young fellow in his bathing trunks reclined on a blanket under a tree, wistfully lying on his back with his hands behind his head. Very three-dimensional.

It was so special being close-up to the ballet dancers, and to see how they mingled and melded with the lido activities, yet came to the forefront during the narration. Seeing them right there in the flesh, with no stage and no lights, they still appeared appropriately ‘otherworldly’ as if, during my multi-sensory expedition into Sub Marina’s thoughts and recollections, they had slipped out and taken fleshy form before my very eyes.

The seamless shifting in and out of real and fantasy worlds was aided by a spot-on soundscape that mixed with the everyday sound of people enjoying the lido, their chatterings and splashes, and with the noise of the aeroplanes passing over. The timing of everything was perfect, like it was all happening just for me. I never once felt I was standing there waiting for something to happen.

At the end, the film on my iPod showed a beautiful underwater scene of a man in a white shirt embracing a mermaid in a red dress. The film ended and, back in the real world, six shrieking kids slid gleefully into the pool on waterslides. I left feeling the same sense of delight and surprise having abandoned myself to this lusciously vivid watery imagining.

Gob Squad / CAMPO: Before Your Very Eyes

In Before Your Very Eyes, for the first time in their seventeen year history, Gob Squad do not themselves appear onstage, but instead direct a group of 8-14 year-olds who they first met more than three years ago, using texts developed during improvisation and in collaboration with the performers. Before Your Very Eyes is the final part of the CAMPO trilogy of theatre works made with children for adult audiences. (The first part was Josse De Pauw’s üBUNG, and the second Tim Etchells’ That Night Follows Day).

Ladies and Gentlemen!
Gob Squad proudly present
a live show with real children.
A rare and magnificent
opportunity to witness seven lives
lived in fast forward…
Before Your Very Eyes!

On stage is a room bordered on all four sides by one-way glass, the rear wall mirrored and reflective. Inside this room are children: a girl on a two-seat sofa plaits another girl’s hair, a boy lies on the floor reading, three young people at a table play a card game while a TV showing a cartoon goes unobserved. The ambience is silent, like looking into an aquarium; the children are relaxing. Are they waiting? Filling time? They appear unselfconscious as they play, chat, chill. They’re comfortable. There are seven of them. We, the audience, feel uncomfortable with this imposed voyeurism.

Lights on the audience go down, lights come up brighter in the ‘aquarium’… we hear their voices. Belgian? Flemish? A child is blindfolded, they continue to play. A girl takes a microphone and states, ‘we are all speeding toward death, yet here we are alive’. There is wild dancing to a Queen track, Don’t Stop Me Now. All seven youngsters are introduced. Then an omnipotent voice commands: ‘Get on with it – GROW! Grow up!’

The children begin to dress up as they look toward their future adult selves, first becoming 19 year-olds. A screen shows prerecorded video of them as young boys and girls, talking of what they like and what they can do and what they’re good at, and their teenage selves look on with ridicule and embarrassment… There are questions from their younger selves about puberty, and from their adult selves scenes of sex on sofas and cigarettes and stuffing bras with tissue. They fast forward to middle-aged people, improvising party scenes, posing and composing their caricatures, projections of who they will be, reflections on their desires and failed expectations. What they can do becomes what might have been, acceptance of one’s lot – we witness these changes before our very eyes.

Adding wigs and glasses they become elderly. ‘I don’t care how I die, as we’re all going to die in a way we don’t want to.’ They want to get to the best bit, the dying scene… and there follows the most extraordinary death scene: they run on the spot, fast-forward, cartoon style, with grey wigs on, cushions up the jumper to give them big bellies, and then they drop off one by one, collapsing, dying by the wayside, in awkward positions, until just one, in her housecoat, is left running alone on the spot… ‘How does it feel to be the last one left?’ Asks the kindly omnipotent voice.

At times I don’t know if I’m in tears laughing or crying. It’s comedic, it’s awful, it’s tragic, yet it’s daft, it’s appalling – it is how it is, and how it is has something to do with the children play-acting being adults. In their portrayal of adults you can see an aspect of themselves as the adult they will be, bound with the adult they’re portraying; in that adult you can see the seed, the core of that adult as a child, can see that something is carried through, something that grows and ages and disintegrates along with all those hopes and dreams, and can see as well that there is something near-eternal that doesn’t age yet is cut to the quick at that moment of death, extinguished, in a dead person, a twisted corpse lying in an undignified position on the floor…

It’s been kids playing, acting stuff out in wonky wigs and drawn-on moustaches, yet it mangles your emotions right up. For the curtain call, the youngsters rapidly remove their wigs and make up and, stepping out from their glass-walled confine to heartfelt applause, come to stand in front of us for the first time, and there they are, kids, surprisingly young and fresh-faced. They’ve taken us on such a journey, we’re awash with astonishment.

www.gobsquad.com

Touched Theatre: Headcase

A bed, a bedside lamp, a goldfish (puppet) in a fish tank, and a projection on the bedroom curtains of a mouthless puppet girl, strolling, running, swimming, dancing, flying. A real girl storms into the space through the door, into her bedroom space, her sanctuary, her solitary world; she’s exhausted, she’s troubled, she’s puzzled and perplexed, she’s anxious. Doctors’ letters are pulled from her bag, she glances at them, crumples them and transforms them into friends and foes, dancing pages, papery grenades, a tumble of words and complications. Dancing wildly free of her black puppeteer clothes, the fish’s puppeteer becomes an animator of the room and the external voice of Cassie’s world… There’s rain on the curtains, which, when pulled open, reveal tree branches against a blue sky, a world away. Cassie reclines and a landscape is pegged onto her jeans… everything is grey and of slate tone, except for the orange goldfish and the verdant leaves and blue radiance of the sky beyond the raindrop dappled window, way way way beyond her reach.

Headcase is a visual and poetic story of one girl’s state of mind and degrees of mental health – how the world feels for her and how she vents it. It’s also a story of aloneness, and of a fragile yet powerful mind.

Through the wordless yet vivid and multifaceted portrayal of Cassie by Yael Karavan – who can say as much silent and still through her eyes as she can through her depth of movement vocabulary – and the luminous performance by Annie Brooks as the puppeteer and caring, nurturing, wellness aspect of Cassie, we are netted into a tempest of strange, palpably raw and heart-rendingly tender moments. With such skill and entrancing imagery we are completely drawn into Cassie’s perception and inner life. This is an extremely busy, at times scary and solitary world, yet full of quiet action, exquisite detail, and arriving at a final image of recovery that sees Cassie ready to literally go back out into the world and her life. It’s a very beautiful and moving show.

www.touchedtheatre.co.uk

Nova Pitch: If I Ruled the World

It’s 1pm, time to press Play on my MP3 player. The friendly voice in my ears asks if I’ve come alone? I am instructed to go sit in a quiet place on the Brighton station concourse, away from others, where I can notice the man with the newspaper, the woman sending a text, farewells and greetings, couples, groups and the solitary traveller – players paused between departing and arriving. I’m invited to explore and experiment, and to take time to simply notice the everyday, the mundane, the serendipitous moment, the precious instance, the beauty and the tat.

Nova Pitch’s twenty-minute interactive audio performance piece If I Ruled the World is an earful of lovely writing – clear and warm and engaging, with relevant moments of music. There’s enough time to pause, to ponder, to see and imagine. What stories are going on in the suspended pause between here and there, as we wait for life to move on? What happens in the moment, what do you notice, what do I notice? The florist. The person in the photo booth. Can you smell the coffee? All the action, all the players, are all around; and we are part of it ourselves. Amongst this hyper-real 360 degree film set is one performer – submerged within the everyday activities and places of this station concourse, so that I’m quite taken aback when she turns and I realise I’m now watching an actor. Through the headphones we hear her thoughts and drifting snatches of her story.

At the end, there is an act of public dancing, then the story concludes like a daydream. A bubble of my own imagination pops, and suddenly I’m snapped back into the everyday world. Yet haven’t I just been in the everyday world? I haven’t been in a theatre. I’ve been in a world within a world within a very public space that’s also private; in my own head, yet part of an experience shared with the other audience members. We have each been in our own story-engineered world, yet all intertwined; individual, yet on parallel journeys. An enrapturing, moving and extremely rich experience.

Total Theatre