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.

Marc Brew Company: For Now, I am

The vast stage at Zoo Southside is covered by white silk, the outline of a lone body enveloped by it. Images of lapping water melt into the swathes of white. Is the body a corpse? Is it floating peacefully in the water? Coupled with the water’s sound and by delicate piano notes, it is mesmerising, lulling and haunting all at once. The body is that of Marc Brew, a dancer who woke up in a hospital bed paralysed following a car accident. The doctors told him he would never walk again. For Now, I am vividly depicts his story of rebuilding his body.

It is a painfully beautiful performance. The silk sheet is pulled to reveal Brew’s upper body fighting to move, valiantly driving forward. Andy Hammer’s lighting picks out the tiniest details within the vast setting – a finger twitching, darting eyes, the panicked breath of the man’s bare chest rising and falling. Brew’s detailed and subtle choreography draws us into his psyche. His muscles ripple as he pushes himself up and I find myself urging him on. Jamie Wardrop’s visuals of water and circular patterns gently echo the sinews of Brew’s body as he slides his body across the stage, wrapping himself in the swathes of silk and pushes himself onwards.

It’s a quietly grueling performance that never wallows in self-pity. Instead it is a passionately expressive experience that powerfully portrays the loneliness, struggles, and beauty of recovery and rediscovery.

NT Gent / Les Ballets C de la B: En Avant, Marche!

En Avant, Marche! had me at ‘Hello’. A portly, grey haired man shuffles onstage holding a portable CD player. He wanders offstage and pulls in an extension cable, plugs in his CD player, skips to the right track, takes a pair of cymbals, and prepares to join in at the right moment. The anticipation is immense. The gentle humour beautifully human. But it takes too long – he puts his cymbals down and skips through the track to hurry the process up. When he finally arrives at the right moment he lovingly beats his drum. The joy, passion, and pathos rings through those cymbals.

The entire performance hums with this humanity. The man, played with utter conviction by Wim Opbrouck, is ill. A white bandage below his neck means that he can no longer play the trombone; he can no longer march with his band. We follow Opbrouck as he summons musicians from a marching band to the stage to replay his beloved pieces of Beethoven, Verdi, and Strauss. But there are many empty chairs – the vacant lots of people who have already disappeared from the group. In a wonderful moment, all of the chairs become occupied by the fully-uniformed local Dalkeith and Monktonhall Brass Band. The thirty-strong band join with the company’s musicians, moving in slow motion through the maze of chairs to find their place. It’s like a sea of never-ending hope. And when they play it is sublime. Opbrouck races through them all after their first number, galvanized by the passionate playing. He asks a few of them what they do for a living – an IT consultant, a civil servant, a cake-maker and a solicitor all form part of this evening’s band; all coming together to give us this divine music, and give Opbrouck one final march.

Dancer Hendrik Lebon flings himself across the stage as he embodies the younger incarnation of Opbrouck’s aging character, with a passion and zest for life, love, and music that is utterly exhilarating. There is a thrilling sequence when he and drummer Witse Lemmons roll around on the stage, thrashing into each other but never stopping the rhythmical drumming, whether it’s on each others shoes, stray microphone stands, or the wooden floor. Two glamorous blonde women in their 60s portray Opbrouck’s lovers. Dressed in gold sequins their baton-twirling is magnificent (and again full of pathos). Their zest for life slowly gives way to their fear of losing him, their utter despair ringing through the auditorium just as vividly as a lone trumpet howling to the moon. Directors Frank Van Laeke and Alain Plaitel have taken the metaphor of a marching band as a community and created a moving and life-affirming performance that fizzes with heartbreaking moments and hilarious insights into a life passing by.

Chris Goode & Co: Stand

Chris Goode’s Stand is a very gentle call to arms. I left the Battersea Arts Centre with a mixture of powerful emotions, from feeling guilty about not going to the last march to save the NHS, excitement and trepidation about the potential of adopting a child, and a sinking feeling that we live in a culture that is actively set up to make it very difficult to stand up for what you think is right.

The production is an Oxford Playhouse commission for which Goode and his team interviewed a variety of Oxford residents about a time in their lives that they stood up for something they believed in. Six actors inhabit the words of six individuals for eighty minutes of warm storytelling that quietly gets under your skin. We meet a dynamic woman who works with refugees (Cathy Tyson is utterly compelling), a climate campaigner, a mother of an adopted daughter, a charming 82-year-old who has spent his life protesting against animal testing, an activist who campaigned to save the alternative community at Oxford’s Jericho boatyard and one of the founders of the Reclaim Shakespeare Company.

Naomi Dawson’s simple, elegant design sees each actor sitting on a high stool in front of a pale blue, curved backdrop, their scripted words on a music stand reminding us these are other people’s stories. Thankfully, Goode has the sense to avoid the shortcomings of many verbatim works that seem to be created for actors to showcase how many accents they can do, which often undermines or judges its subjects in an unsettling way. The company brings humanity, dignity and honesty to their interviewees. Their warmth recalls Goode’s own open and genuine performance style, and this is the key to the production working. The stories are of real people, living normal lives as well as making a stand in their own way. Nothing is shoved down our throats and we’re welcomed to quietly consider our own stories within this world that wants us all to conform.

Following its run at Battersea Arts Centre, Stand is touring to Mayfest, Pulse and other venues/festivals in the UK: http://chrisgoodeandcompany.co.uk/shows/stand/

Pina Bausch & Tanztheater Wuppertal: Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehort

Stepping into the surreal and beautiful world of Pina Bausch’s pieces is always a pleasure; an experience to be relished. Although for this latest foray into her back catalogue it is a dark world into which we’re plummeted. Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehort (On the Mountain a Cry was Heard) was created in 1984, and this is its first performance in the UK. It is designed with trademark boldness by long-term collaborator Peter Pabst who has blanketed the vast stage with thick soil. Through the earth, Bausch’s dancers flit between intimate moments of tenderness, outbreaks of violence, hilarious absurdities and frantic, messy, urgent movements.

The piece opens with the dancers, dressed as ever in gowns, heels and suits, skirting skittishly around the perimeter of the stage. Fear drives through the entire two and a half hours. The images are familiar yet strange. The piece is reigned over by a clown-like Michael Strecker dressed in tight red speedos and matching red plastic swimming hat. He smiles and wades through the soil, seemingly in control of the chaos that surrounds him. He calmly blows up balloons as they burst in his face, and lifts Ditta Miranda Jasjfi high into the air as if she is a feather. At one point he dresses his forearm as if it’s a sandwich – placing salami and cheese on it and offering it to the audience to eat.

In stark contrast to his composed sly smile, the rest of the company are frenzied. There is a recurring image of a man and a woman being violently chased down and forced to lock lips. Engulfed in a thick cloud of fog two women shriek as their hair is pulled by men. Topless women, attempting to cover themselves chase after the man who has stolen their dress. In one of the darkest moments a man drags woman after woman around the stage, screaming into their faces until they comply with his orders. His desires to rape and murder ferociously spill from his mouth.

Throughout the nightmarish visions there are moments of tenderness that cut through. An orchestra of senior musicians accompanies the image of a woman slapping herself but being interrupted by four men who enable her to float through the air. It’s a relief from the self-inflicted pain. A couple of older men step-ball-change to a Fred Astaire number, quietly in tune with each other. It doesn’t last long and Bausch propels us back to the ferocious gang-like chases as the lights fade. As Pina Bausch pieces go it’s certainly one of the darker ones, less laughs and less full-out choreographic sequences than her later work. Auf dem Gebirge paints a murky world of inequality, violence, and the horrors that live in our nightmares and, for many, their realities.

Compagnie 111 / Aurélien Bory / Kaori Ito: Plexus

Aurélien Bory is a regular at the London International Mime Festival, having astounded audiences with Plan B and Plus Au Moins Infini, amongst others. He creates fascinating performances that merge dance, circus, and large-scale installation type sets to awing affect. In this year’s offering, Plexus, he continues to dazzle.

The definition of the word ‘plexus’ is a network of nerves or vessels in the body or an intricate network or web-like formation. For his collaboration with dancer, choreographer, and videographer Kaori Ito, Bory has created a kind of giant puppet turned inside-out that creates infinitely intriguing imagesThe undoubted star of the show is this huge cube of hanging strings in which Ito’s body is enveloped. Over fifty-five minutes Ito goes from raging against the web that encases her, to being suspended, fifteen feet high in the air. She certainly gives Spiderman a run for his money – darting up, down, across. At one point she is draped in black and resembles a moth fluttering towards light, desperate to escape.

It’s a mesmerising performance that continually surprises. You’re never quite sure whether Ito is a woman in control of her destiny and her actions or whether she is being manipulated by an outside force. At times she forcefully stamps her feet as she thrashes through the surrounding forest of strings as if she is raging against the world. Her movements and breath are amplified to reverberate around the Sadler’s Wells auditorium, heightening the senses of entrapment, anger, pain, or effort.

The cube is lit magnificently by Arno Veyrat, so that at times Ito completely disappears before magically re-appearing in mid-air. Elsewhere the cube transforms into a video-game type sci-fi set, lime greens reflected onto each and every string.

As a whole, the piece is a mysterious one that gives no answers to its eager audience. It’s a spectacle, and in that respect is incredibly successful. I can’t help but wonder how much more could be achieved if Bory and Ito added narrative layers and a clearer emotional trajectory to their box of utterly unique theatrical tricks.

Total Theatre