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.

The New Wolsey Young Associates: Party Piece

The New Wolsey Young Associates are a fearsomely talented quartet who launch themselves headfirst into Party Piece: a messy, hilarious celebration of house parties – the mornings after and the life ahead for its hungover victims.

Jack, Lorna, Aidan and Steve fling themselves around in gay abandon as they recreate the heady hedonism of teenage drinking, vomiting and sexual awakenings. Each character regales us with an insight into their world with a brutally honest monologue delivered into a microphone (one of which protrudes from a toilet bowl). I don’t think I’ll ever erase the image of a young man finding a tick on the end of his penis from my mind! Rob Salmon’s script has a sharp, acid bite which speaks directly to teenagers and reminds anyone who has ever been one just how intense it felt when trying to break free, fall in love, not make mistakes and generally figure yourself out.

Stylistically, the piece is a cocktail of Skins, Forced Entertainment and stand-up comedy. Physically daring and expertly choreographed, the movement sequences are both funny and impressively athletic. In one sequence Lorna repeatedly vomits into the toilet bowl whilst one of the boys backflips on loop, another crashes into the sofa and the third downs an entire bottle of wine.

The group are charming and compelling performers. Movement and dialogue spills out of them as naturally as the used bottles and cans that spew out of a cupboard door at the top of the show. Performed at 10.30pm it’s a perfect late-night show – get a beer and head to Bedlam for a slice of thoughtful youthful abandon.

Akram Khan Company: Desh

Last summer Akram Khan’s fifty-strong ensemble wowed millions of people as part of Danny Boyle’s epic Olympic Opening Ceremony. Out on his own, Khan continues to delight, move and inspire with his first full-length solo piece,Desh. The piece, which explores Bangladesh and Khan’s relationship to the country of his parents’ origin, fuses Khan’s fluid movement with a pulsating musical score and achingly beautiful design from Tim Yip, who won an Oscar for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

A tiny tree centre-stage represents the country that Khan and his team of collaborators interrogate through poetic stories and re-creations of conversations with Khan’s parents. His father is cleverly portrayed by drawing eyebrows and a mouth on his bald head. Head down, hand on ‘chin’ Khan inhabits his father who is desperately trying to teach his young son the importance of his country’s language, traditions and customs. This moment underpins the entire piece, as Khan travels across lands and seas exploring his parent’s homeland.

As a performer Khan is mesmeric. His movement is fluid, incredibly precise and radiates confident energy. His choreography cleverly roots itself in a reality; with each movement his story gently unfolds and allows us to further invest in his world. In one sequence he tells a beautiful fairytale of a ‘magical kingdom where honeybees light up the earth and demon tigers save mangrove forests’. Khan’s hands spin wildly in the air in front of him as he dives into his story. Delicate, hand-drawn animation fills a transparent screen and Khan responds to the arrival of an elephant, climbs a giant tree and finds himself surrounded by a swarm of bees having dipped his hand in to taste the nectar. His hands spin wildly in the air in front of him, as he tries to wave away the bees.

As well as being an inspiring performer and choreographer, Khan is a master collaborator. Alongside the charming animations (by Yeast Culture), Tim Yip’s design complimented by Michael Hull’s bold lighting is wondrous. Yip’s sea of white strips of curtains drowning a lone Khan, then lifting him upside-down, floating, is spine-tingling. Writer Karthika Nair’s poetic language and storytelling helps to weave a poignant yet urgent narrative though the piece whilst Jocelyn Pook’s musical compositions perfectly evoke a country and man struggling with the modern and ancient living side by side. As a whole, Desh is a striking piece of work that deserves to be seen by as many millions across the globe as tuned into that Olympic Opening Ceremony.

Little Bulb Theatre: Orpheus

Cheeseboards, red wine and Edith Piaf. Even the bar staff gallantly attempt to speak French to you. The Battersea Arts Centre’s beautifully opulent Grand Hall has been transformed into a 1930s Parisian music hall for Little Bulb’s lovingly created version of the Orpheus myth. The company was inspired by the incredible guitar music of Django Reinhardt, and has dreamt up a play within a play wherein an ailing music hall manages to secure the star himself to perform as Orpheus in their musical telling of this dark love story.

Eugenie Pastor leads proceedings as the slightly geeky MC Yvette Pépin, who is obviously enamoured by her co-star Reinhardt. And so, along with her chorus of The Triplettes (three multi-talented musicians and singers), a pianist in tails, and ‘the strong hands of their actor stage hands’ the company embarks upon its dramatisation of the myth.

Hilarity quickly ensues. The ‘show’ is a mix of am-dram, faux-ballet leaps across the stage and melodramatic gesticulation performed to song and music. The much-lauded film The Artist has most certainly been an inspiration – the egotistical star, the perfectly nuanced hammy performances, constantly reminding us of the artifice of what we’re watching. There are anti War Horsepuppets that are fantastically funny, best of which is a giant snake on long sticks manipulated be The Triplettes.

It’s all wonderfully entertaining, but where the piece struggles is at the emotional crux of the tale. There needs to be a shift from tongue-in-cheek comedy to a moment when the story emotionally connects with the audience. It happens in The Artist when the sound breaks down for our hero, and we suddenly find ourselves rooting for him. The difficulty Little Bulb has on its hands is that they’ve created a wholly unlikeable character in Django Reinhardt, and so it is difficult to fall for his story of loss. Whilst his guitar playing is nothing less than fabulous, there is rather too much of it and we are never allowed past his self-important exterior. Pastor’s Pépin, on the other hand is wonderfully lovable. During an extended musical interlude of an interval, she throws herself wholeheartedly into a rendition of Edith Piaf’s Mon Dieu. It is heartbreaking. Elsewhere, the falsetto-voiced Tom Penn sings an enchanting plea to Hades, god of the underworld, to free Eurydice. This piece, an original composition by the company, is a revelation and the highlight of the night.

Indeed, it is the music that impresses the most. Alongside their original pieces, there are renditions of Bach, Prévert, Brahms and, bien sûr, Reinhardt himself. It is all a feast for the ears, made even more impressive when The Triplettes sing to us, their voices in perfect harmony. Little Bulb have, no doubt about it, a wonderful career ahead of them. Get down to Battersea to be put under their enchanting spell. And eat some cheese.

www.littlebulbtheatre.com

The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein: Splat!

My programme tells me that The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein ‘has been making vagina-based work since 2009 and dancey-dance work since 2003’. Opening this year’s SPILL Festival in London, Splat! sits very much in the ‘vagina-based work’ category. The piece is littered with references to popular and mainstream culture’s representation of desirable women. From a Baywatch style red swimsuit, to a ballerina’s pointe shoes, a horde of peroxide blonde wigs, and a bright pink princess dress with matching cone-shaped hat, Splat! delves into the lies that little girls (and of course, little boys) are sold through Western culture. At its best it’s a disquieting attack on the lies that Disney and our pop stars tell our children. At its worst it’s just another performance art piece that mildly amuses whilst trying to shock.

The piece opens with the image of a blonde wig sitting atop a watermelon. It floats mid-air before it’s dropped, splatted centre-stage. As Lauren chops dozens of tomatoes and drops them into an oversized cauldron, one of her minions (Pink Princess Krista Vuori) is told to tape it back together. Over a sprawling and messy ninety minutes, The Famous barks orders to her team of servant-like performers as they voyage through a twisted fairytale land of vomiting princesses, green-faced, blonde-wigged twins and scantily clad men who sit in the wings looking on throughout proceedings.

The piece is hooked on the dark tale of ‘Little Bitch’: a fairytale that begins with a little girl obediently washing, cleaning and cooking for her father in their woodland home and finishes with her sexually ravaging and being ravaged. Throughout the performance we’re presented with the contradictions that permeate our society’s presentation and expectations of women. So we get Lucy McCormick (co-founder of GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN) gyrating in a revealing bikini acting out a sexy death scene. The Famous nonchalantly bursts balloons of tomato juice all over herself by whacking them against a knife held to her groin before urinating on one of her minions, and, later, is strung up by her feet like a piece of meat and eats a hamburger.

With the addition of a photographer and live filming of the action, much of the piece ends up feeling like a conventional performance art piece that we can sit back and enjoy – we’ve seen a lot of this before. Although a sequence in which The Famous dons a pair of roller-skates and oversized Bambi headpiece whilst singing ‘A Whole New World’ from Aladdin is a highlight, it’s not until the final sequence that the piece emotionally connects. Swathed in a mane of blonde hair and clutching her taped together watermelon, The Famous sings along to Leona Lewis’ song ‘Happy’ on loop. Calling on her Woodland Friends, a chorus of bodies in various states of nudity arrive to bravely, hilariously and movingly dance their way through Leona’s song before firing rolls of toilet paper, like fireworks, onto her body. It’s funny and gentle, exhilarating and genuine; a thoughtful and memorable finale.

http://laurenbarri.blogspot.co.uk/

Zimmermann & de Perrot: Hans Was Heiri

We’re all in control of our lives. Right? We are entirely unique. Right? We know who we are and where we’re going. Right?

Told using dance, aerial work, live DJ-ing and an incredible central set piece, Hans Was Heiri reminds us that we are tiny little specks on this giant earth, not always in control. The world is turning and turning and we’re just getting by, framed by our own circumstances, relationships and priorities.

Zimmermann & de Perrot create absurd, surreal masterpieces of visual theatre. Hans Was Heiri is no exception. Opening with de Perrot himself creating infectious loops and rhythms on a turntable, the piece is a sprawling landscape of the messy lives we lead. Puppet versions of the performers we later meet edge onstage, disappearing and appearing behind black screens that are whisked on and offstage. Legs are arms, wigs fill in for real heads, and short wooden stilts fill in for limbs here and there. Quietly, magically, they become real people, styled in geek-chic pastels. It’s an amusing prologue to the central image of a giant box separated into four rooms.

This device becomes an incredibly impressive tool in which to hurl the seven strong cast literally upside down. As it slowly begins to rotate, the performers are forced to go with the flow. They walk themselves onto the ceiling, thump into the walls and cling onto the furniture to survive. Soon they begin to fall through doorways into each other’s spaces, hilariously colliding and grabbing onto whatever they can. The most memorable and moving sequence sees a long-limbed seductress almost fall to her death again and again as she flings herself off the edges of the box in a beautifully performed aerial routine.

The piece is a winning mix of slapstick, contemporary dance, aerial choreography and comedy. Slick, yet loose and fluid ensemble movement explores the idea of how we strive to be individual yet are so similar to one another. In one of the only text-driven moments, a Y-fronts wearing yogi leads a crash course in bikram yoga. Squished into a tiny room the seven scantily clad bodies hilariously attempt to achieve inner harmony before the world starts turning again and they are piled on top of one another, all legs and arms, hair and feet. Hans Was Heiri is a glorious achievement: philosophical, laugh-out-loud funny, sad, edgy and thoughtful all at once. Plus, it’s a consistently dazzling feast for the eyes and ears. What more can you ask for at the Mime Festival?

Total Theatre