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.

Adventures Off Broadway

January Blues? Not in New York says Terry O’Donovan, who is there to report on a flurry of festivals…

It’s January. The temperature is well below freezing, but that hasn’t stopped the international theatre-world from descending upon New York for a myriad of theatrical festivals, conferences and symposiums. Armed with a furry hat, leather gloves and a giant scarf I spent the first ten days of the year pounding the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, dodging the discarded Christmas trees to see what the city’s festivals have to offer. COIL Festival, Under The Radar, Prototype – where to start?

COIL Festival, in its 10th year is a benchmark for the experimental company and performance makers, spanning dance, improvisation and installation-performance; curated by PS122’s artistic director Vallejo Gantner. The TEAM, who regularly perform their unique brand of Americana on UK soil (former Total Theatre Award winners for Architecting), have revisited their 2012 show, RoosevElvis, for COIL 2015 at the Vineyard Theatre. It’s a charmingly painful show, with as many laughs as moments of bittersweet tenderness. Annie, a reclusive meat factory worker, played with tender restraint by Libby King, spends her time speaking to Elvis at home whilst drinking bottles of Bud. After a disastrous road-trip with potential lover Brenda (Kristen Sieh), she sets out on a quest to get herself to Graceland, during which time she is ‘joined’ by Franklin D Roosevelt (played by Sieh) and Elvis (played by King). The story, about this painfully shy woman, is small and gentle, but exists within a landscape of huge American ideologies. It questions how the American dream functions in 2015 for those people who feel dwarfed by those who do succeed. The performances are utterly joyous to watch, with both women’s physicality and vocals utterly riveting, hilarious and heartbreaking. Slick set design coupled with outstanding film work helps to create an arresting performance that is a challenging, intelligent yet accessible.

Faye Driscoll Thank You For Coming

A few blocks south, in an imposing church in the East Village called Danspace, Faye Driscoll invites us to take off our shoes and get cosy with her cast in Thank You for Coming. Some people get very cosy as her charming quintet of dancers entwine themselves amongst us, limbs getting into all sorts of orifices. One woman’s scarf ends up playing a role, someone else helps undress the men and pass them new items of costume. Thank You for Coming certainly makes you smile. The piece has three distinctive acts. The first, which takes place on a raised platform in the centre of the space sees the dancers desperately trying to stay connected to each other, whilst balancing in different positions, reaching out to audience members to hold onto. The second sees the ensemble perform a variety of scenarios through impressive and funny staccato movements. There are kisses and hugs, loves lost and won, rivalries, a slap on the face and the joy of human touch. Part silent-film, part wind-up toy, and performed to a soundtrack of our names being sung by Michael Kiley riffing on guitar, the sequence is unique and memorable. The cast chant our names, rejoicing in the mundanity of our lovely little lives. It’s a hopeful, celebratory piece that would make the hardest of hearts smile. The culmination of its three acts sees the company slowly create a huge collective experience with more than half the audience skipping together, revelling in a stage full of people of all shapes and sizes.

The Blind Date Project | Keiran Photography

The Blind Date Project is more incongruous within the COIL programme. Within a festival of cutting-edge dance, performance and installation, it feels like a stand-up comedy piece that would be more at home at as part of a comedy-improv framework. Arriving in the back room of Parkside Lounge – a dimly lit, rough-and-ready downtown bar – we are invited to watch a blind date between Australian performer Bojana Novakovic and a different actor every night. Actress Larisa Oleynik was onhand to belt out karaoke and awkwardly make conversation with Novakovic on the night I was there. Although an interesting set-up, the piece lacks a drive that sets it apart from a vaguely amusing cringy first date. Unlike Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, which also employs the use of a different actor for each performance, the inclusion of this new actor is never pushed beyond the gimmick. I longed for the piece to give us deeper insight into blind dates and the modern culture of Internet dating.

Compania Hiato | O Jardim

Under The Radar Festival has an impressively international programme, with work from Iran, Spain, Argentina, UK, Switzerland as well as homegrown talent. At another East Village performance institution, La Mama, Brazilian Compania Hiato’s O Jardim is a beautifully tender piece of work, which cleverly explores the futility of trying to frame our memories in order to remember them. A towering wall of cardboard boxes provides the backdrop for three generations of the same family’s story to be played out. Seated on three sides, each audience bank see each scene, whilst the other two are being performed to their respective groups. We hear echoes of the other scenes, but try desperately to focus on our specific scene, reading the Portuguese surtitles above the opposite bank of seats. Compania Hiato expertly use form to heighten the futility of the human need to connect and conclude. There are no easy answers, it is impossible to know what road a family’s trajectory will take, yet we are all drawn back to those things that connect us: a family garden (the title of the play), a tape left by your mother, a jumper that was given to you by your wife on the day you separated forever. We desperately try to connect these things, make sense of it all, in order to make sense of ourselves. What Compania Hiato creates wonderfully in O Jardim is a perfectly choreographed mess of a world in which we are desperately putting together the pieces. Performed with gut-wrenching precision and energy, the play is a revelation.

Under The Radar is curated by a team at The Public Theatre, a fascinating organisation that’s not afraid to mix Shakespeare with musicals and experimental performance. It plays host to director Daniel Fish who performs a new version of his 2012 production of A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which initially started life in Queens at The Chocolate Factory. The celebrated New York theatre director has taken recordings of the late David Foster-Wallace reading excerpts from some of his revered works, such as Consider the Lobster, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and from this has created a thoughtful piece with strong echoes of Forced Entertainment. Within a sea of tennis balls, four performers listen to Foster-Wallace’s voice through headphones and recount what they hear. Fish controls who hears what and when, so that at each performance the cast do not know exactly what pieces of text they will perform, or at what speed. This premise is an interesting way to try to achieve Fish’s objective of being utterly honest to the text so that the cast do not have any time to think about ‘acting’. In reality, it creates quite an odd performance style that can be frustrating rather than illuminating. When the only male performer, John Amir, races to keep up with the voice coming through his headphones he is obliged to speak so fast we have no chance to understand his frenzied utterings. When the text has room to breathe we’re allowed into Foster-Wallace’s wonderfully wry musings on cruise ships and a tennis player’s inane autobiography. The closing moments are the most poignant. A warm glow emanates from the pile of tennis balls as a performer voices the words of the writer’s widow, gently describing what he was like and how she will remember him.

Carmina Slovenica Toxic Psalms | Photo by Cory Weaver

Elsewhere in the city is Prototype, a festival for new opera-theatre and music-theatre, now in its third year. At St Ann’s Warehouse across the bridge in trendy cocktail-bar mecca Brooklyn, Carmina Slovenica (who are, unsurprisingly, from Slovenian) channel Samuel Beckett and Pina Bausch in Toxic Psalms: a dark vocal-choral performance that evokes concentration camps, unnerving violence towards women and human brutality. Performed by thirty-one young women dressed in decadent black gowns, the piece is littered with stunning images and incredible vocal harmonies. The chorus sings Eastern European medieval song as well as contemporary compositions, sometimes evocatively whispering them and at others shrieking with shrill cries evoking pain and fury. Using regimented gestural language throughout, the piece has a tendency to remain on one level and never quite emotionally moved me, despite its beauty. When the stage is littered in bright lemons and a sole woman arrives in a yellow dress it is a welcome jolt. Exquisitely lit by Andrej Hajdinjak, Toxic Psalms is a fascinating theatrical experience that continues to haunt long after the event.

These pieces are just for starters – you could see four shows a day and still not manage to catch everything. I didn’t even have the chance to catch companies such as Ockham’s Razor and Cirkus Cirkor at the Circus Now Festival. During my red eye back to Blighty, Taylor Mac is presenting A 24 Decade History with Under the Radar. The edibly brilliant performer is mashing up pop music from three decades, and the piece will eventually by 24 hours long – an hour for each decade. Let’s hope that version arrives on UK soil at some stage.

For now, I’m certainly in a New York State of mind. The festivals play host to a range of edgy performances that seem to be asking New Yorkers, and their visitors, to think twice about what they are seeing. In all of the pieces I saw, the space was completely changed – urging spectators to not get too comfortable, and to constantly question what’s being represented. What’s real and what’s not? The other defining themes are how the past is affecting the present: from Roosevelt and Elvis affecting a lost young woman in South Dakota, to a Brazilian woman desperately trying to understand and stay connected to her heritage, there seemed to be a preoccupation with placement in the world, and how that affects us emotionally. As I head back to London I wonder how the next year will pan out: what will I learn from my past, and how will the grand political and pop cultural events of the weeks and months to come affect me and my circle of friends and family in the decades to come? One thing I do hope is to be able book a flight back to New York for next January’s festivals… what a theatrically nutritious, if chilly, start to the year.

New York Festivals attended by Terry O’Donovan in January 2015:

COIL Festival 2015, an annual performance festival in its 10th year, ran at PS122 throughout January.

Established 11 years ago, the 2015 edition of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar, a festival tracking new theatre from around the world, ran 7–18 January 2015.

The third edition of Prototype opera and music-theatre festival ran 7–18 January 2015.

Gecko: Institute

Gecko are masters at the exquisite theatrical image. Over the past decade, with productions such as Missing (soon to be re-staged at Battersea Arts Centre) and The Race they have continued to grow bigger, bolder productions fusing physical storytelling with text and stunning stage pictures. Institute, which premiered at Derby Theatre last May, sees Amit Lahav’s company inhabit a surreal institution in which four men help, hurt, and hinder each other to overcome crippling memories.

Lahav plays Martin, who is pining for a lost love. Chris Evans is Daniel, an architect struggling to put pen to paper having collapsed under too much early expectation from parents and lovers. The men exist in an existential world of towering filing cabinets ruled by Louis (an eerily menacing Francois Testory), a middle-aged Frenchman who veers from violence to tenderness as he attempts to free the men of their demons. A fourth man (Ryan Perkins-Gangnes), who speaks only in German, assists Louis but has his own demons. Through clown-like mutterings, distinctively sharp dance sequences, and scenes of torture the men head deeper into their dark world.

The revelations in Institute are Lahav’s collaborations with his team. He has expertly interwoven design (with Rhys Jarman), lighting (with Chris Swain), music (Dave Price), and sound (Nathan Johnson) to create a fluid and surprisingly designed piece. The outside and inside world magically appear within the cabinets, light and sound shooting out from within a drawer. Repeatedly, whole tables and chairs slide out and disappear within an instant. Later on, a giant glass box glides out of a panel, trapping and framing characters. The combinations of expertly woven sound, light, and space are constantly exhilarating, propelling the men into their ever-desperate world of obsessions.

The physical language is also explosively visceral. Evans and Lahav fluidly whirl around each other, completing each other’s gestures or interrupting each other’s movements as if it was second nature. In one captivating sequence all four men hold hands in a circle and contort their bodies across the space, gently disappearing through the holes created by each other’s movements. It’s a tender moment suggesting the quartet desperately need to hold onto each other, that it is a caring environment in which they live rather than a pained one. Elsewhere, Lahav is manipulated by four large poles connected to his limbs and head, forcing him to face his demons. Reminiscent of James Thierrée it is as much disturbing as beautiful to watch.

Despite its beauty, intrigue, and humour Institute left me wanting more from each man’s story. How did they get here? Where will they go after the beautiful lights dim? Who is the haunted man continually falling to his death? Why did Margaret leave Martin? I suspect Lahav & co want to leave us asking these questions, want us to consider what institute we might end up in, and who will be there to care for, or torture us…

After the London International Mime Festival, Institute is also touring to:
Lighthouse, Poole – 23 & 24 Jan lighthousepoole.co.uk
Hall for Cornwall – 30 & 31 Jan www.hallforcornwall.co.uk

Forced Entertainment: The Possible Impossible House

How do you tell a story? What is the right answer? What’s the next thing that should happen? It’s subtle, but at the heart of Forced Entertainment’s first ever show for children, the company continues probing into what makes something entertaining. And, as ever, they don’t play down to their audience, challenging us to work hard with them.

It works. The crowd in the Barbican’s Pit Theatre were almost unanimously silent for the seventy minutes of serene storytelling. There was no gurning or high-pitched voices from performers Richard Lowdon and Cathy Noden (the cast rotate between five Forced Entertainment company members over the run). They are very much adults, Cathy dressed fashionably in a deep blue silk dress and Richard in green velvet jacket. There’s a hint of festiveness with a tinsel-like bow on the back of Cathy’s dress, and a deep red wall of curtains adorning the stage but if it’s a Christmas romp you’re after you’d better look elsewhere. Instead, Richard and Cathy tell us a tale of a little girl – well, actually a drawing of a little girl in a book – and her search for a spider throughout the rooms of the possible impossible house. The story itself is a simple tale of adventure. What Forced Entertainment cleverly offer is that we are the protagonist throughout the story. Richard tells us “You go through the corridors, and there you find a book, with a drawing of a little girl.” It is our very own escapade.

Cathy sits behind a table full of objects and a microphone, soundtracking the story by chomping on celery, laying her head on the Casio keyboard and shaking boxes of peas. The tale is beautifully animated by artist Vlatka Horvat and director Tim Etchells, a mixture of photographs and surreal hand-drawn animations projected onto large strips of cardboard boxes. There’s a rhinoceros, a donkey, a glorious ballroom, a band of soldiers practicing a dance routine, spooky corridors and a large hole – why would you put a hole in a story?! Cathy and Richard charmingly interrupt each other, questioning what will happen next, why that element of the story exists, interrogating its purpose.

But of course, anything can happen in any story… and that little nugget of possibility and impossibility are what make this show so relevant. In an age where two-year-olds can use iPads without thinking twice and we are encouraged to take the easy option, Forced Entertainment suggest that taking a bit more time, a bit of a risk, and potentially concentrating a little bit harder could indeed reap wonderful benefits. Who knows what story we could come up with? What an affirmative thought this festive season… I’m certain plenty of children who are lucky enough to enter the The Possible Impossible House will have some exciting, surreal stories of their own having been immersed in the Forced Entertainment world.

Miss Behave: Miss Behave’s Game Show

iPhone users and ‘Other’ phone users are separated upon entry into the ever enchanting Spiegeltent that has been packing them in on London’s Southbank all summer. Head-to-toe in gold sequins, Miss Behave charmingly barks orders at us, gently ribbing everyone and getting us in the mood for the conflict ahead.

Gameshow is an anarchic delight, pitting the audience against each other in what feels like a fight to the proverbial death. Miss Behave and her glamorous assistant Harriet (a bearded, red-lipsticked, short-shorts wearing Harry Clayton-Wright) deftly works everyone up as easily as tickling a five year old and stuffing their mouths with chocolate. Within about five minutes ‘iPhones’ and ‘The Others’ are jumping out of their seats, screaming answers and dancing in the aisles in an attempt to impress Miss Behave. She nonchalantly awards points for the most random of remarks, which at first causes outrage: ‘What can I say? The world is unfair.’ Cheating, thinking outside of the box and standing up for yourself is greatly encouraged. As the evening of silly games continues the competition spirals brilliantly out of control as people get ever braver. Poor Harriet had her shorts ripped to shreds as a man leapt onstage, grabbed her round the waist and attempting to get to what was scantily hidden by the skimpy fabric. Miss Behave simply laughed and drily awarded points to the iPhones’ score.

Miss Behave sprinkles the gameshow with guest acts for our viewing entertainment. Having been the MC for La Clique and La Soiree she certainly knows how to pick them. Kalki the Hula Girl is an impressively faux-drunken hula-hooper whilst Bruce Airhead getting himself into a giant green ball is an utterly surreal and madcapped act that needs to be seen by all. My jaw ached from laughing at Raymond and Mr Timpkins’s Out of the Box. I’ve tried to describe it, but on paper a cheesy-hit montage accompanied by words from said songs on piece of card sounds dreadfully dull. Not so! Who would have thought that putting the word ‘ME’ on a piece of cardboard in a corner and pointing at it whilst Michael Stipe sings ‘That’s me in the corner’ could be so devastatingly funny. I could watch them all night.

Gameshow is a simple premise, brilliantly executed. The entire performance is full of biting wit, perfect pop-culture quiz questions, littered with ridiculous and hilarious dancing from Harriet (undoubtedly the star of the show). As we violently threw neon balls at each other, we danced out of the Spiegeltent, shrieking the lyrics to Rihanna in search of more hedonistic Saturday night fun. Thanks team #MBGS.

The Testament of Mary

Colm Tóibín’s novella, on which this show is based, was published just a few months before this production debuted on Broadway. The show drew protests, angered thousands and closed early. Indeed it’s hard to imagine a performance depicting Mary the Mother of God as a cynic of Jesus’s power ever flourishing in the commercial land of razzmatazz.

The Testament of Mary is anything but showy. What could easily be an ego trip or a star vehicle for an actor is anything but. At the top of the show, audiences are invited onto the stage to wander through Tom Pye’s installation-like set. A live vulture wanders the stage; a symbol of menace and death’s triumph. Shaw sits encased in a glass box: the silent icon, the most respected female figure in Christianity. Pye’s simple, sparse design hints at a domestic world lost in the middle of nowhere, yet everywhere all at once. A copper tap holds water, tables and chairs scattered across the stage reflect the domesticity within epic events, an uprooted tree hangs in the air, its life having been ripped from the earth.

What we are presented with is Mary testifying to unseen interrogators, recounting her version of the last days of Christ. She questions the idea of her son’s power; describing drolly how peaky Lazarus looked after his supposed resurrection, and raising an eyebrow about turning water into wine. In Fiona Shaw’s hands, the solo performance is itself a testament to honest storytelling that resonates through restrained passion. Dressed in a simple black dress, often draped in scarves and cloaks, she is utterly herself yet embodies Mary as a mother, a wife, a woman.

Most painfully, she recounts in detail her son’s crucifixion. Tóibín cleverly asks us to re-imagine a story that saturates the popular imagination from a new angle. Imagine what it must feel like to witness your son be savagely hammered to a cross as much for people’s amusement as a warning. It humanizes the icon of Mary, and indeed ‘The Son of God’, and delicately calls into question how faith is developed, warped and invested in.

The piece is an enraging and thoughtful provocation; at once a furious account of how a mother lost her son to himself and the world, and a study of how mankind creates story, icons and belief.