Author Archives: Thomas JM Wilson

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About Thomas JM Wilson

Thomas JM Wilson has been writing for Total Theatre since 2001. His own performance work lies at the borders of dance and theatre, with a particular interest in solo performance. He is an Associate Artist of Gandini Juggling, working as Archivist and Publications Author. He also currently teaches on Rose Bruford's BA European Theatre Arts, and is a co-editor of the Training Grounds section of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.

Big in Belgium: MacBain. Photo by Sanne Peper

Dood Paard: MacBain

This offering, part of the Big in Belgium collection of works at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, collides Macbeth with the relationship between grunge superstar Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love-Cobain, deconstructing the lives that these two sets of tragic figures play(ed) out.

Taking the rough form of a triptych the piece lurches between three differing formats. It opens as a late night (drug-fuelled) chat show between dissolute rock stars, shifts into a fast-forward puppet version of Macbeth, before landing in a strange domestic hinterland where the Macbeths/Cobains await their fate. Gillis Beisheuval and Manja Topper, as Macbeth/Kurt and Lady Macbeth/Courtney respectively, boldly embody this strange fusion of classical and contemporary tragic figures.

This, though, is an uneven show, with the first section struggling to cohere and feeling rather pleased with itself. It remains for the puppet version of the original text to provide an anchor point around which the other two sections orbit, acting as a fulcrum that begins to lever open the deconstructed worlds. The puppetry itself is anarchic and playful, if something of a uneven change in tone, playing fast and loose with fragments of Shakespeare’s original to amusing effect. Ending with the murder of Banquo (by Macbeth – his closest friend), the puppet section also provides the premise for the final part of the triptych – the (two) couples passive and otherworldly isolation as their world crashes down around them.

If you come at MacBain with a detailed understanding of Macbeth there are some interesting subtleties in the way the rock-star conceit shapes and shifts the motivations of the characters. Particularly in the way in which Macbeth loses his own agency, becoming a kind of puppet of both Lady Macbeth and the wyrd sisters. More interestingly it also reframes the consequences of the Macbeths’ murder of King Duncan and with it the ‘murder’ of sleep. Instead of the play’s usual quickening charge towards tragedy and the Macbeth’s come-uppance, MacBain conceives it as a slow and disorientating slide into insomnia and paranoia. Often overlooked in favour of more bombastic expressions of madness in more conventional stagings of the play, the choice to gradually erode the Macbeths’ sanity because of their lack of sleep lends this work its strongest feature. In contrast, what it has to say about the Cobain/Love partnership is less clear, and feels a rather loaded interpretation of the ultimate death of Cobain by his own hand. At the core of this is the role that empathy might play out in tragedy. The Macbeths are perhaps two of the least sympathetic of Shakespeare’s characters, and somehow placing Cobain/Love in this light diminishes the theatrical value of their tragedy.

 

Abigail Conway: Time Lab

This delightful piece by Abigail Conway (one half of the company subject_to_change) isn’t really a show at all. Rather (developing one aspect of subject_to_change’s work) this is a participatory event, though to use the word ‘event’ suggests something grander and more ostentatious than the delicately poised understatement that is Time Lab.

Over the course of an hour, Conway invites her participants (six at a time) to take a watch (preferably one that they have brought with them – broken or unwanted), break it apart, and from the pieces construct a micro-sculpture. Conway proposes that the resulting object (through the provision of armatures) might take the form of a ring, a brooch, a pendant, or something else. In this act of audience creation the intricately functional is remade as the delicately beautiful.

The title Time Lab suggests that we are required to adopt something of a scientific mindset to the manipulation and arrangement of tiny components into an aesthetic object – a kind of inquisitive research into the mechanics of marking and dividing time. Whilst this is undoubtedly there in the tactile and dextrous demands made upon the participant, the focus and diligence needed to complete the task also serves a less tangible but no less concrete function –that of serving as a kind of meditative act, a zen-like uncovering of things that might normally be ignored in the onward flurry of our time-marked lives.

This stripping away begins with the focus needed to attend to the act of selection of the minute clockwork components, and then their placement into new relationships. This act requires a single-minded concentration married to a kind of attendant overview of the possibilities of the resulting sculptural arrangement. At once this is both a kind of zoning in and pulling back – a strange and deliciously oscillating experience. And, of course, it stills time. Because the choices to be made cry out for meaning, it also begins to distill these choices into almost ritual expressions of our relationship to time. Memories surface, fragments of experiences tick-tock back and forth, and points in life come into focus. TimeLab then is a kind of re-forging of the past and the present, such that time itself is shaped and bent, so that it is not just divided and marked, but actually captured in brass, steel and copper.

 

 

Dante or Die: Handle With Care

Dante or Die are a company whose modus operandi often leads them to craft work by responding to specific sites and the potential stories locked within them. Past shows have included I Do, in which a series of hotel bedrooms served as a location to explore the build up to a wedding. Handle with Care, their latest work, continues this approach by unpicking one of those hidden sites/features of contemporary life, the self-storage facility. In the era of austerity this premise brings into sharp focus the value that we place (or not) on the objects we collect through life. The company work to do this using the neat narrative device of hiding a different scene behind each locker door, revealed one by one as we are escorted through the building.

At the heart of this narrative is an episodic flight through the life of one woman, Zoe (played by two actors: Amy Dolan as the younger Zoe and Rachael Spence as the mature Zoe) – from a fond farewell to a younger brother as he sets off travelling to 30 years later when, faced with her own teenage daughter, she once again has to ‘let go’. The audience are led from locker to locker, dashing down cold and uniformly concrete corridors. Characters we know, or are yet to meet, whizz by or are seen in the distance – associating the maze-like quality of the storage building with that similar quality to the instinctive choices we make in life. In counterpoint to the darting world of Zoe, Terry O’Donovan as The Worker (from the storage unit) is a sedate and detached (but never cold) figure.

Strewn in corners, or propped up against the lockers, are different objects. Divorced from their original context, they seem to lie in a kind of suspended animation, waiting for their owner’s return. This attention to the use of objects is a central detail of the work, and certain key objects appear, disappear and then re-appear (a wooly toy elephant, a painting, the absent brother’s shirt). Sometimes these objects are important, at others they are quickly passed over, further underlying the contextual nature of their importance.

This crafting and framing of the objects is repeated in the ways in which each locker is dressed. This works best when the company either embraces a realistic simplicity (a character, their thoughts and their teddy bear) or when the locker is transformed into another time and place. This occurs most notably when one large walk-in locker becomes both a 1990s rave and a strange embodiment of maternity. With baby clothes suspended from the roof four giant rabbits dance with Zoe, a kind of trippy, slow-motion dance, as she morphs from young to mature. These kind of moments are richest, in that they skilfully blend narrative with a nuanced and detailed sense of the emotional and visceral transitions we make as we grow older – here, from the heady escapism of youth to the complex delights of parenthood.

Throughout, Handle with Care is deftly supported by a richly layered soundscore, comprising popular music from 1988 to the present day, the tracks mixed and distorted so that they evoke the spirit of the individual time periods whilst conjuring a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. During the transitions in the corridors they also serve to collide the past and the present, subtly transforming the concrete corridors into liminal spaces. Often the music plays from unpacked sources, a cloth handbag or a shoe box. Often these are carried by the performers – a mark of how we attach memories and importance not only to objects but also to more ephemeral, non-material things (such as music).

Where the production struggles is ensuring the ostensibly psychological narrative world carries as much resonance as the more poetic images and choreographic sequences. The brevity of the scenes and their necessarily compact structure means that the arc of the scenes often feels rather rushed, with the need for the text to deliver exposition getting in the way of the emotional world of the characters – with some lines serving as rather clunky signposts of the themes behind the work. This challenge is handled more successfully by the more mature performers (Spence and Stephen Harry as her husband Simon), who successfully find subtle variations in their physicality to find a journey through the text. However, the younger performs struggle in this regard – they seem to lack the resources (or perhaps are drawing on less compatible techniques) to activate the text in this context. This is a shame as there is a lot of heart and soul in the work they do.

Handle with Care explores the way in which we desperately try to fix the ephemerality of experience in the objects we choose to keep: a loved one’s shirt, a few photographs, a teddy bear, that unwanted present we don’t have the heart to chuck away. This is richly embodied in the best moments of this show, as the performers manage to pin down the emotional intensity of charged and transient moments in the lives of the characters: a surprise discovery of a long-forgotten object, or the moment when you can finally let-go of the ‘thing’ that has served as a reservoir for complexly entwined and unresolved emotions.

 

Oh Productions - Flat Pack

Oh! Productions: Flat Pack

Oh Productions - Flat PackJapanese director Ninagawa’s assertion that he is not interested in what’s new but what works might be a suitable reference point for this delicately witty and, by turns, tender offering by south coast outfit Oh! Productions. The premise is simple: newlyweds Sophie (Sophie Powell) and Olly (Oliver Harrison) have been gifted a flatpack house and we watch as they try to put it together (following the numbered order). Boxes open out to become windows, doors, and furniture – all the while Sophie and Olly gradually losing their control of the situation.

Flat Pack is clearly riffing with the silent films of the 1920s and 1930s – at times it is Buster Keaton, at others Laurel and Hardy – and each scene, or rather each skit, is constructed as a comic puzzle, neatly sequenced and directed by Steven Harper.

Alex Stanford’s live music is an integral part of this puzzle, with Stanford shifting between responding to the action and driving it forward. Entwined within Stanford’s music are small glimpses of classic children’s melodies (Puff the Magic Dragon and Let’s Go Fly a Kite amongst many others). This layering expands the world of the play, bringing in brief but rich associations to the action they accompany.

Puppet versions of Sophie and Olly also enrich the scope of the world, allowing the narrative to increase in scale (as Olly attempts to put the chimney on the roof) and to find fantastical moments (notably when a Mary Poppins-esque wind carries Sophie away over the heads of the audience). Some deft shadow puppetry is vital to bringing the drama to a head, as the poor newlyweds stare down an oncoming locomotive.

Powell is immensely charming and nuanced as Sophie, without becoming winsome or superficial. She articulates the joyful exuberance and flirtatious energy of the start of married life, whilst also giving us glimpses of the frustrations and tensions of adjusting to this new situation. As her new husband Oliver Harrison is a more naive presence (more Chaplin than Keaton, more Laurel than Hardy), but he is still warm and open – and particularly good in marshalling the youngest audience members in the moments of audience participation. When the action stills and the two have to just be together on stage they conjure a rich sense of their mutual attraction and ease in each other’s presence.

The most joyous aspects of Flat Pack are those moments when the light-hearted comic sketches smuggle into themselves moments of poetry. Casually, almost nonchalantly a wedding veil becomes the newlyweds’ curtains – the ritual costume of marriage ceremony transforming into a symbolic border between the outer world and the inner world of the marriage.  Or, more boldly, a chimney pot falls from the roof to be made into hat stand – the adaptive, make-do-and-mend spirit of a good marriage.

Like all the best silent films Flat Pack manages to be both funny and moving, prosaic, earthy and poetic.

Bartabas - Golgota - Photo by Nabil Boutros

Bartabas & Andrés Marín: Golgota

Bartabas - Golgota - Photo by Nabil BoutrosThis is my second meeting with the equestrian theatre of Bartabas and once again I find it a complex and challenging task to write about it, not least because Bartabas’s theatre-based work lies in a rather distinct category of his own.

Although Bartabas’s performances are built on the foundations of his deep partnership with horses, his theatre-performances are not what you could safely call circus. And although he often collaborates with dancers (and this work contains a good deal of flamenco), I hesitate to call this a dance. Perhaps then it is necessary to latch onto the fact that Golgota (called after the alternative name for Calvary) draws on the paintings of El Greco and the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, and to note that it has echoes of the work of Romeo Castelluci. Therefore it might be more accurate to call Golgota a series of ritualistic vignettes, or a series of moving paintings. Like the Stations of the Cross in Catholic churches, Golgota presents a series of images that draw on the journey of the Christ-figure towards his crucifixion.

Accompanying this journey is the music of another Spaniard, the 16th century composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. This takes the form of sparse, sacred music for various permutations of lute, counter-tenor, and cornet. These transcendent melodies serve to still time – to allow us to ‘sit’ into the images that Bartabas presents – as if held in suspension as the stage pictures slowly morph.

It is important to note that Bartabas’s theatre-based work always originates in his desire to collaborate with a specific artist. In this case it is his collaboration with the flamenco dancer and choreographer Andrés Marín. This is a particularly intriguing choice, not only because the stage floor is covered with rubber-chips and thus Marín is often denied flamenco’s characteristic driving rhythm of the feet, but more importantly because Marín’s explosive and dynamic dancing lies in direct counterpoint to the apparent contained and gentle movements that Bartabas finds with his horses. And it is with these horses that Marín must find an accord.

As with the presence of any animal on stage the hardest task for a human performer is to equal the animal’s degree of presence. In Golgota the solution has been to craft a world of magic and mystery, and for Marín to star as the grandmaster of these human rituals. Stripped to the waist his dancing conjures moments of religious excitation, of numinous transcendence: his limbs arc out into space, he strikes bold contrapposto poses, and leaps and spins with whip-like speed.

The dominant colour in Bartabas’s palette is black, or rather that hazy darkness that comes about when a theatre space is lit with simple and limited shafts of light. Through this chiaroscuro ride Bartabas and his horses, their slow and rhythmical gaits counterpointing Marín’s explosive speed.

The horses are stately, serene. If Marín is a kind of flagellant – his physical struggle taking him away from the earthly plane – then the horses are the embodiment of his detachment from the physical. Apparently ethereal but clearly tangible, they gently canter in wide circles, spin on the spot, or high-step their way around the space. Atop sits Bartabas – almost immobile, except for shifts of weight or the gentle sway of his legs. He is almost incidental in some moments (his face masked), and at others he strikes simple sculptural poses with his arms outstretched.

Drawing on the ceremonial processions of Seville’s Holy Week, these figures take on and put off items of clothing – a huge black conical hat and a bone-white ruff for example – transforming them into penitent-priests. Beguilingly, these priests move towards the conclusion, when Marín – having donned a pair of ‘shoes’ that transform his feet to equine hooves – struggles to ascend the ladder to take his place on the cross. Here he hangs – feet striking the cross’s base – an anti-rhythmic dance of his final surrender to the transcendent plane of the animal.

And this is how Bartabas’s work is best viewed – as an act of surrender to the transfixing delicacy of his equine partners. It is in their presence that it is possible to see the prize of faith – of leaving behind the pull of material plane. It is in their presence that it is also possible to see the folly of faith – that always the most transcendent act is the meeting with another living creature.