Author Archives: Terry O'Donovan

About Terry O'Donovan

Terry is a performer and director. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Dante or Die and one quarter of new company Toot.

Cartoon de Salvo: Made Up

Cartoon de Salvo is celebrating fifteen years of ‘surreal, unpretentious, swashbuckling theatre’. This perfectly describes Hunting the Shark, an entirely improvised play created on the spot on 5 April 2012 as part of Made Up‘s run at the Soho Theatre. As the title suggests, Made Up will yield an entirely different tale each evening, inspired by an audience member’s randomly selected offering.

Artistic director Alex Murdoch performs with company co-director Brian Logan and associate artist Neil Haigh as sea-faring men, monkeys, limping Irish shark-hunters, and a castaway in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Armed with a harp, guitars, double-bass, violins and a SpongeBob SquarePants child-size drum kit, the improvised band The Adventurists both score and drive the atmosphere, as well as helping to create surprisingly effective songs.

Improvised shows have a habit of sliding into a stand-up / Whose Line is it Anyway? comedy schtick. Cartoon de Salvo purposefully set out to eschew this result, and with a title such as Hunting the Shark it’s a challenge. Haigh, Logan and Murdoch rapidly respond to each other’s offerings and, amidst some perfectly timed comedic lines, they gently weave a complex story of long-lost love, rivalry and regret over a slightly too long ninety minutes.

The challenge, and joy, of improvised work for an audience member is working out the story yourself, and the knowledge that the performers don’t know the answers. It creates a stirring liveness, and permits us to actively engage with the craft of the storytelling itself. I found myself creating twists and turns, trying to pin down who the shark should be, as we gently sailed towards the climax. It can also be a frustration. It’s difficult to truly empathise or invest in characters who are being created on the spot in a story that we are well aware does not yet have an ending. Cartoon de Salvo quietly manage to avoid this.

The company are incredibly generous performers, completely invested in supporting each other’s ideas and building upon the tiniest of details. The performers’ utter belief in their characters and their willingness to dive into darker and more abstract moments entirely make Made Up more than a night of amusing but forgettable play-acting. About a third of the way through, Haigh summoned a spotlight and began quietly singing ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’ whilst he mimed dressing and posing in front of an imagined mirror. Intimate, slightly sexual and intriguing, it became the crux of the plot, and elevated Cartoon de Salvo’s ‘making up’ high above the generic improv show. Here’s to another fifteen years of their swashbuckling.

www.cartoondesalvo.com

DV8: Can We Talk About This

DV8 is celebrating 25 years of groundbreaking physical theatre this year. Tucked inside a newspaper-size programme for Lloyd Newson’s latest production Can We Talk About This? is a lovingly created mini-brochure charting the company’s development. Images of men in suits, bold physical embraces, and a young Wendy Houston walking on wine glasses summon memories of a company whose work has pushed the boundaries of using dance to tell theatrical stories.

In recent years Newson has begun to use his visceral choreography to create a new style of verbatim theatre. The company’s last outing at the National Theatre, To Be Straight With You, tackled homophobia throughout the world.Can We Talk About This? makes no apology for talking about a touchy, and contentious, issue: multiculturalism in Britain and the dangers of political correctness.

The opening scene sees Hannes Langolf ask us to raise our hands if we feel morally superior to the Taliban (a question posed by Martin Amis). About 20% of people responded with arms in the air. Langolf slithers against a wall like a snake as he recounts the appalling regime of the Taliban and why it’s ridiculous that the Western world find it challenging to put their hand up to a question like this. Newson’s work challenges the notion that it is not racist to question the liberal fear of offending and its repercussions.

Over the next 80 minutes Newson’s ensemble of ten incredibly skilled (and ethnically diverse) dancers replay the words of real people whose lives are embroiled in these debates. The Bradford riots, campaigners for Muslim women’s rights, Sharia law, Salman Rushdie’s book burnings and the 2005 Danish ‘Muhammad cartoons’ are all tackled here head-on through replays of real interviews replayed by the cast, moments of news footage on three TV screens, and a gestural movement language that sometimes beautifully interprets a situation.

The most memorable of these moments is Joy Constantine delivering a speech by Labor politician Shirley Williams. Williams was the first politician to talk about forced marriages in the UK parliament and it was not a welcome topic of conversation. She performs this monologue sitting on the back of a man whilst drinking a cup of tea. As the speech continues she is ingeniously moved around his body, always looking ever so comfortable and sipping on her tea, even whilst horizontal.

Kim Jomi Fischer slides up and down the side of a wall whilst getting dressed, zipping up his trousers whilst standing on his head as he discusses the Danish cartoons; and Christina May dissects her almost naked body with a marker pen as she discusses her film about Muslim women’s submission to men. These moments simply and effectively unite Newson’s humane yet physically impressive choreography with the troubling stories being represented.

Can We Talk About This? undeniably raises an incredibly important debate, and shakes its audience to address to the ever-growing challenges the West faces in responding to extremism. As with many verbatim theatre productions however, Newson struggles to find a heart amongst the political debates, leaving the entire endeavour seeming cold and impersonal.

www.dv8.co.uk

Claudio Stellato: L’Autre

The auditorium is submerged into pitch black. We hear scratching sounds, pushing and pulling. A lone light slowly reveals a man (Claudio Stellato) with a small cabinet balancing perfectly on his upper back. Deep in concentration he edges further across a deep red that is folded in half. Suddenly, the carpet comes to life and flattens itself. The man lowers himself to the ground and then lays flat on the carpet, all the while keeping the cabinet perfectly balanced.

Having then squeezed himself into the cupboard, a large wardrobe-like structure seems to come to life emerging from the darkness, standing upright and opening and closing its door as if goading Stellato to reckon with it. Stellato gamely joins in, choosing his moment to leap upon the object and dive behind the door like a cat pouncing upon its prey. During the entire fifty-minute performance we are witness to this continued game of cat and mouse in which man and object seem to be struggling for power over one another.

The key to the performance is the magical element of each scenario. Stellato’s head appears in the top half of this wardrobe lit by a tiny LED light. Slowly, the wardrobe begins to tilt to the side completely out of his control. Later, the red carpet seems to breathe, scrunching itself up towards centre stage. This illusory power is the ‘other’ of the title of the piece. The playing space is surrounded by darkness in which another is surely at work pulling and pushing in marvellous silence? In a wonderfully understated coup de théâtre the darkness vanishes to reveal nothing but empty space and the theatre’s curtains hanging where I was imagining a team of stage managers scuttling about frantically making Stellato and his objects appear, disappear and float into space.

The final image of Stellato walking across the length of his wardrobe into the curtains is similarly magical: as he reaches the end of the wood his feet seem to float on thin air as he pads across the blackness and vanishes before our eyes. As the lights come up for his curtain call a second man is revealed. His collaborator Martin Firket, dressed in identical grey suit and beard, has indeed been masterminding the illusions in the darkness. It’s not an earth-shattering piece, but L’Autre is a quietly pleasing performance revelling in non-showy illusion and incredibly clever stagecraft.

www.l-autre.be

The Featherstonehaughs: Edits

Edits is the latest and last UK work from Lea Anderson’s all male company The Featherstonehaughs. Since forming the company in 1988, Anderson has built a reputation for diverse and playful dance works portraying men through unconventional imagery. The show has been touring alongside the excellentDraw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, yet unfortunately doesn’t do justice to the company as a final hurrah.

My heart went out to anyone who happened to arrive at the theatre with a headache. Steve Blake and Will Saunders’ blaring sound design consists of a frustrating mix of white noise, banging nails and infuriating electronic scratching. From time to time moments of relief arrive with the pair treating us to some live electric guitar and saxophone meanderings.

Anderson’s choreography for Edits consists of her six male dancers recreating literal interpretations of film takes, stripping away the narrative and focusing on the idea of the performers imagining that they are in a film. They are each dressed in glamorous dresses from different eras including a long, velvet green dress with red wig, a 20s era polka dot number and a bright yellow American diner uniform (with pigtails) from the 50s. Each of the dancers continually changes outfits on either side of the stage so that at times we have two or three versions of the same character. They float in and out of rectangular boxes, delineated on the floor by fluorescent pink and green tape, and behind hanging wooden frames reminiscent of television or cinema screens.

The movement is minimal yet incredibly precise. The most engaging moments of the ‘dance’ are those in which eyes light up and fingers move in minute detail. It’s the practical choreography of making the piece happen which is in fact more interesting than the repetitive and non-illuminating moments in the spotlight. Sally Powell’s striking and colourful costumes float by in the dim light around the main areas like a moving painting, as the dancers assist each other inventively into the boxes of light and to quickly change between costumes again and again. Overall, Edits never comes together to add up to a meaningful whole and instead becomes a tedious exercise of an idea.

After the company took their bows on the final performance to be seen here, we were treated to sister company The Cholmondeleys dancing to Nina Simone’s ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’. This piece of simple, gestural choreography was a complete delight and did in four minutes what Edits didn’t manage in 70 – allowed us to connect with the dancers, and to smile.

www.thecholmondeleys.org

Clod Ensemble: An Anatomie in Four Quarters

There aren’t many artistic directors of theatres with a capacity of 1500 seats who would commission a show for an audience of only 200. Yet that is exactly what Alistair Spalding of Sadler’s Wells has done for Clod Ensemble’s An Anatomie in Four Quarters, which although it doesn’t quite live up to its potential, nevertheless playfully explores the structure of watching live performance.

Beginning in the cheap seats of the second circle, a tall, thin woman dances alone on the vast and bare stage. As the lights fade on her, our attention is drawn to a couple a few rows ahead of us, whispering about the performance. Who are they? Why have they come to the theatre this evening? Why have we come to the theatre this evening, and how do our relationships and proximity to performances affect our experience Suddenly, the dancer who seemed so distant when onstage is repeating her fluid choreography ten rows in front of us. We can hear her breath and see her muscles flexing as she moves confidently through Suzy Wilson’s choreography.

It’s an exciting beginning, but director Suzy Wilson’s hour-long piece barely scratches the surface of the idea. Instead, the show is quite clinical and cold. We move from the second circle, to the first, to the stalls and ultimately the stage where we move amongst the dancers before sitting to face the seats in which we started watching. During each section twelve charismatic dancers repeat a vocabulary of phrases, which seem to explore human form – from all fours to sitting, standing, jumping, falling, to doing the splits. A live band of strings, bagpipes and drums switch from beautifully composed classical refrains to the shrieks of a rock band.

Weaved through the experience are the couple sitting in the second circle who remain watching from their seats throughout. It seems that they should connect the entire piece together. However, the woman recounts obscure poetry that never illuminates the choreography, music or space. The most stimulating moments are theatrical surprises such as a chorus of feet dancing above our heads amongst the lighting rig, and being allowed to sit right next to a bare-chested opera singer splayed out on a table with his eyes closed in the middle of the stalls as he serenades us. I hope there will be more of these moments when Clod take the show on the road in 2012.

Total Theatre