Circus and the Search for Home

Across the Barbican’s vast stage – right across, east to west – is a wall. It could be anywhere: Berlin pre-1989; the West Bank, anytime over the past 30 years. It could be now: Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary; the entrance to the Channel Tunnel at Calais. It’s perhaps 3 or 4 metres high, a mottled rusty-grey metal. Six figures, dressed in muted blues and greys, are dotted around the space in front of the wall, lit by a tunnel of light that casts them as puppets on a marionette stage. Or rabbits caught in the headlights. Or, indeed, fleeing people illuminated by searchlights. Over the next hour, the six acrobats – three men and three women – act out a painstaking choreography. They are caught in the wind, or perhaps the waves, tumbling and rolling across the stage in pairs, hanging on to each other in desperation. They are grouped backs-against-the-wall, staring out at us pleadingly. They form towers, or create tortuous hand-to-hand balancing poses as they scramble up and over each other, but without any of the usual ‘aids’ into those difficult positions: often, there is no prep, no jumps or braces, they just have to – get there, somehow. Even more unnerving, they often don’t make eye contact with each other, giving a terrifyingly tentative look to many of the moves.

It’s a very clever game to play: these are some of the top circus performers in the world, and often their director (Circa founder Yaron Lifschitz) has created scenes in which their safety nets are taken away. There are wobbles, and shakes, and trembles – but these aren’t faked, they come from the arduous situations that have been set up. This is circus, not theatre: everything you see is real.

Circa’s The Return is not exactly a ‘version of’ but a kind of poetic re-interpretation of Monteverdi’s opera Il Ritorno de L’Ulysses de Patria, bringing together the Circa acrobats and an ensemble of five musicians and singers. Monteverdi’s opera, and Circa’s show, are inspired by one of the oldest poems in Western literature – Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus (or Ulysses as the Romans renamed him) finds himself far from home, and cast adrift on a flimsy raft, tossed on rough seas, and washed ashore on a small Greek island. Yes, it is a story that has great contemporary relevance.

Circa: The Return

In the post-show discussion at the Barbican, where the show had its UK premiere as part of the London International Mime Festival, Yaron states with complete honesty that the current refugee crisis wasn’t the starting point for the show. It is, he says, a reflection on the core themes of the Odyssey – desire and absence – exploring the story of the 10-year separation of Odysseus from his wife Penelope, the tests that were placed on both of them, the desperate desire for re-unification, and (in Odysseus’ case) the longing to return home. Yet as the piece was being made, the constant, depressing news of Europe’s refugee crisis intruded upon the work. Yaron talks of the day that he, like so many of us, was stopped in his tracks by the image of a small Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, lying drowned on a Greek beach. As the creation process continued, the terrible photographic images (and the images conjured by the galling words of the news reports) that we have all been inundated with over the past year or two informed the development of the piece, which Yaron says has changed considerably since its first outing in their hometown of Brisbane, Australia.

For example, almost all the usual circus props have been discarded along the way – there is only one section with equipment, a scene in which the three women are each, independently, in their own space, working – one with straps, one hand-balancing, and one in a kind of cage-like metal cube serving as a type of static trapeze. Mostly, the cast are just there onstage together, telling stories through their bodies, without the equipment. But it is always circus that is the form doing the telling: ’I have only two rules. No acting. and no dancing,’ says Yaron.

So the six acrobats are not actors playing characters – there is no one Odysseus or one Penelope on stage, everyone is contributing to an abstracted reflection, a poetic expression in movement, of those key themes of desire and absence. And they are not trying to act out the feelings of being off-kilter, displaced, dispossessed – they are demonstrating that through the physical actions they have been directed to take. What we witness is a poignant portrayal of what it feels like to have everything cut from underneath you; to be cast adrift; to be displaced. Unlike Homer’s poem, there is no happy ending; no reuniting – we are left with an image that suggests that the uprooting, the moving on, the being pushed forward, is continuing, over and over and over again…

T1J: Les Inouis

Belgian-based Theatre d’un Jour’s Les Inouis (seen in the UK as a work-in-progress at the Edinburgh Fringe 2015, and probably returning in 2016) also reflects on the struggles of displaced people, but has a rather different starting point. Creator/director Patrick Masset was originally intending to make a biographical piece about his Belgian father, who had migrated to Canada many years earlier, having lived and worked in what was then the Belgian Congo in Africa. He had been intermittently filming his father talking about his life for about four years, and at one point his father started complaining about the ‘crazy migrants’ Canada was taking in. No amount of arguing on Patrick’s part could make his father see that he was a migrant who was now showing the same prejudice to new migrants that was perhaps shown to him when he arrived in Canada with no family and no friends. ‘It’s not the same’ his father argued stubbornly.

This set him thinking – and the nature of the piece changed, to become focused on the plight of refugees and migrants, past and present. ‘It is not the artist’s role to provide answers, but to ask questions’ says Patrick, when I speak to him towards the end of the Edinburgh run. At this point, the show had had a brief development time, pre-Edinburgh, working for a month with Belgian migrants on their stories. Patrick was now working on a plan to take a new, smaller version to small villages, performing in a truck, and engaging people in the question of how to view the migrant ‘problem’. This show is now touring, and is called Les Inouis 2, and it aims to show how the reality of the emigrants of yesterday echoes the prejudice experienced by the migrants of today. The word ‘inoui’, incidently, has no exact translation to English – the nearest is probably ‘the unheard’ or ‘the voiceless’.

Patrick believes passionately that circus – like physical theatre, puppetry, film, and music which are all also elements of his work – can be used as a tool to explore difficult questions. There are many ways to tell stories, so ‘why not speak with circus?’.

When I see the show, it is still very fresh and new, but brimming with startling images. It weaves the story of a nameless man washed up on a shore, imagined by the girl who finds his dying body, with a bigger story of migration and environmentalism. The famous bicycles of the Calais Jungle, a makeshift migrant city, are suggested by a unicyclist moving around the space at the start of the piece, as three washed-up bodies lie on the ‘beach’ next to two carved wooden dolphin.

The central puppet is a human-size figure that alternates cleverly with a real human playing the migrant on the shore. The simple but effective animation, with human interaction from behind the translucent material that forms the screen, is used to tell the story – from both a human and an animal perspective – of a journey across the ocean. The movement work is sound, with some strong acrobalance sections. There is a beautiful slack wire act on which a woman gives birth to a puppet baby – it fits very well into the piece, suggesting the shaky vulnerability of women migrants giving birth whilst in transit.

The piece also tells a story of a border crossing with a wagon filled with caged birds. The birds can’t cross, because they don’t have the right documents. Their carer opens the cages and they fly across the border – a beautiful and pertinent image of a world without borders.

Palestinian Circus Company: B-orders

Also presented at Edinburgh Fringe 2015 was Palestinian Circus Company’s B-Orders, which won a Total Theatre / Jacksons Lane Award for Circus. ‘Imagine a world without borders and a life without prejudice’ is its tagline. It is created and performed by Ashtar Muallem and Fadi Zmorrod, both totally engaging onstage.

The pair use dance, acrobatics, Chinese Pole and silks in the telling of their story of the desire to break free of the boundaries of nationality, gender, religion. Also object animation and manipulation: each has a pile of bricks that are used to build walls, and houses, and human figures; to throw and kick; and to use as stepping stones to walk over to each other. Their onstage relationship is beautiful, poignant. They are all things to each other: sibling, friend, alter-ego, lover.

Afterwards, I speak to Fadi Zmorrod about the making of the show. He and Ashtar (Ash) have known and worked with each other since they were 15, and part of a growing youth circus scene in their hometown of Birzeit, a Palestinian town north of Ramallah in the central West Bank. Training is not easy in Palestine, and he has luckily been able to exit the country to attend short courses in Belgian, French or Italian circus schools. There is also YouTube, and Fadi says that to a great extent he and Ash are ‘self-taught’. Things are often hard, but ‘we have a sense of humour,’ he says. B-orders was made in a five-month spell in 2015, with spells of work of two to three weeks, devising different sections and working with different circus trainers. Part of their process involved interviewing people, old and young, to ask about what bothered or restricted them; their experiences of provocation on the streets; and the things that block people’s freedom. The piece is political, but it isn’t agit-prop. There is no single message, and many of the issues of ‘freedom’ explored relate as much to gender within Palestinian/Arab culture as to the specificities of the West Bank. ’Palestine is a masculinist society’ says Fadi. ‘In the villages, a young woman will have to take orders from her little brother.’

What he wants do in the work is to ‘hold up a mirror so people can see themselves’. His is a long-term displaced nation with no signs of any resolution to the dilemma of being, essentially, a refugee in your own country.

What he hopes for – for himself, for his circus company and school, and for his country – is ‘Belonging. Togetherness. Having a space.’

Ultimately, all three circus shows reflected on here are about that: belonging, togetherness, having a space to call your own. In other words, coming home.

Circa’s The Return was presented at the Barbican Theatre as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016. The post-show discussion was chaired by Dorothy Max Prior on behalf of LIMF on 28 January 2016.

See Total Theatre’s review by Thomas Wilson, here. For more on Circa, and full details on The Return and all the other shows currently in repertoire, see http://circa.org.au/

T1J’s Les Inouis and the Palestine Circus Company’s B-orders were seen at Circus Hub at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015. Some of the material in this feature was taken from a previously published post on work seen at the Circus Hub, August 2015, for the Total Theatre Awards.

Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) is a cross-discipline company that makes works in many genres, under the artistic direction of Patrick Masset. In 2015, the company celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Currently touring shows include L’Enfant Qui, and Les Inouis 2. For more on Theatre d’un Jour (T1J) see: http://www.t1j.be/

The Palestinian Circus School / Palestinian Circus Company is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, established in 2006 and registered with the Palestinian Authority since February 2007. It teaches circus in Birzeit and in other cities like Jenin, Hebron, Ramallah and Al Fara refugee camp. http://www.palcircus.ps/

Urgent call: 23-year-old Mohammad Faisal Abu Sakha, who works with the Palestinian Circus School, was detained by the Israeli military, without charge or explanation, on 14 December 2015, as he was on his way from his parents’ home, in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin, to work at the Palestinian Circus School in Birzeit, near Ramallah. See Amnesty International’s campaign here: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-palestinian-circus-performer-held-israel

This feature is published as part of an ongoing collaboration between Total Theatre Magazine and The Ragroof Players related to the company’s research process for their site-responsive and community-specific show Bridges y Puentes. See http://www.ragroofplayers.co.uk/bridges-y-puentes.html Research material related to the project will be gathered on www.bridgesypuentes.com

Unicorn Theatre: Jeramee, Hartleby and Ooglemore

Classic clowning is joyfully brought to life at the Unicorn Theatre for Gary Owen’s Jeramee, Hartleby and Ooglemore. It’s interesting to see the piece in the same week that I finally caught Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott, his celebrated play that is enjoying a run at the National Theatre’s Temporary Space.

Whilst Iphigenia is a dense, fast-paced monologue filled with anger, pain, and a violent sadness, his collaboration with Tim Crouch at the Unicorn is perhaps the complete opposite. Instead of a tirade of words, we hear only the three words of the title – to denote happiness, anger, furious rage, and utter contentment. A reminder that only the important words need to be employed to illustrate meaning.

We sit looking at a beach (it soon transpires that we are sitting in the ocean) garlanded with festoon lights. Over the course of 50 minutes we witness an afternoon of sunshine through the eyes of toddler-like Hartleby and Ooglemore, as they squabble for ownership of a towel, have a lollipop stolen by a pesky seagull, and endure the pain of losing a giant bouncy ball. Jeramee is the ‘adult’ of the threesome, employed to feed, clothe and put an end to squabbles. Lily Arnold’s costume design channels Wes Anderson – bold patterns and vintage shapes (including a hilarious woolen all-in-one swimsuit for the bearded Ooglemore) that evoke warmth and an offbeat sensibility.

Crouch directs the piece to be assured, calm, and simple. He is not worried about racing through things, not worried about pandering to instantaneous laughs. Instead, the production celebrates the clown, performed skillfully by Amalia Vitale, Fionn Gill, and Dorian Simpson. Smiles come from the simple joy of hitting the bouncy ball back to Ooglemore from our seats; laughs come from the performers rolling down the tilted beach and almost colliding with the children, who squeal in delight. The piece is focused on what it’s like to be a three, four or five year old – the entire world revolving around them and their closest companions. I wish I could be that age again to watch this show – I’m pretty sure I’d be thinking, ‘Yes – that is exactly how it feels when Dad tells me I have to share my towel with by brother’. I would like to have seen certain sequences developed further. There seems to be the start of a more expansive physical comedy sequence involving getting stuck in a towel changing robe (a brilliant prop); and the final sequence set to Owen Crouch’s upbeat score could be a vibrantly uplifting choreographed dance.

The Unicorn staff enjoyed watching rehearsals so much that they’ve programmed two adult-only evening performances – with a band and a bar. Channel your three-year-old self, sit on your bottom and sunbathe with the charming Jeramee, Hartleby and Ooglemore!

I’m Hunt, She’s Darton

Tea for two? Lisa Wolfe finds the place where food meets art, at the Hunt & Darton Café

‘Regret nothing’ is a great life motto for some, but I still curse myself for leaving Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton’s SICK! Festival Café minutes too early one lunchtime in March 2014. My sister-in-law had just courageously selected ‘I Am The Buffet’ from the daily Set Menu, and soon found herself lying on the table being pelted with salad by merry, if bemused, customers. Sadly no photographs exist, but the scene haunts both her memory and my imagination. You don’t get that in your local Costly Coffee Shop – but there again, Hunt & Darton’s is no ordinary café…

During 2014 and 2015, Hunt & Darton Café set up shop in seven UK locations, supported by a Strategic Touring Grant from Arts Council England. To conclude the project, Hunt and Darton held a free Symposium to share their experience of the tour with others. Did they hold it in a café? No, demand required the grand theatre at Toynbee Studios, hosted by Arts Admin. In the course of three hours, with a break for tea and Tunnocks, the Symposium provided an illuminating overview of their work.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending Hunt & Darton Cafés in Brighton and Edinburgh, and was eager to discover more about how the project had developed, its artistic and social ethos, its impact, and what the future might hold for the company. On the Symposium menu were talks by contributing artists, collaborators and commissioners.

Hunt & Darton Cafe

Starters

Hunt and Darton opened the session showing images of venues that had hosted the Café – highlighting the consistent elements that each contained, customers, key events and some photographs of the food they served – before handing over to the invited speakers.

Documentation rarely looks so good. In essence, Hunt & Darton Café is, in their words: ‘An interactive performance/installation and fully-functioning pop-up café.’ The idea emerged at a camping retreat with fellow visual artists Rachel Dobbs and Hannah Jones of Low Profile, who have since made artworks for the café, and created the loyalty schemes, of which more later.

Idea in place, it was with the support of the first speaker, Anthony Roberts, director of Colchester Arts Centre, the Live Art East Collective, and the Escalator East initiative, that they launched the first Hunt & Darton Café at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (as part of Escalator East to Edinburgh), followed by subsequent visits to the Fringe and to other cities. Over time it developed from a café run by artists, to a café with a performance space and guest artist/waiters.

From the start, Hunt and Darton, who share a background in both visual arts and intermittent catering jobs, wanted the café to be somewhere that fulfilled a physical need – hunger, thirst, getting out of the rain, resting the feet – as well as a creative need they might not have known they had: a place where the public is invited to participate in or initiate a creative event, contribute to an artwork; to be performer or audience.

Hunt & Darton Cafe

Service Please

Customers’ expectations are challenged through the style of the service. Hunt and Darton present a dead-pan, slightly severe authority in their role as Café proprietors. This is no-nonsense service that somehow puts a customer at ease while instructing them, often quite firmly, on where to sit and what to do. The formal personalities of the staff contrasts with the novelty of their uniforms – pineapples on the head, bright ‘Lady Danger’ lipstick, fruit patterned aprons – and with the kitsch aesthetic of the Café design. Over the years, Hunt and Darton have trained other artists to be surrogate Hunt and Dartons, adopting their outward characteristics. Artists may go through an Academy process, which, rather like a franchise, allows Hunt and Darton some time off, and more importantly extends the experience for artists and customers alike.

The performance troupe Figs in Wigs are long-term Café associates. They demonstrated ‘Service at lightning speed, delivered at a snail’s pace’ – a fast and slow relay run with plate of peas as the baton. They then invited Hunt and Darton to try and beat the world pea-eating record (they failed).

Guest waiter Brian Lobel took this further in his performative contribution to the afternoon. He told us that his key interests were food and customer service and that, when performing his often highly personal work, he realised that most people were thinking about themselves. Brian finds this interesting rather than annoying; he is keen to hold the space for them. So for Hunt & Darton Café at SICK! Festival in Brighton, he offered customers an exchange, as demonstrated with an audience member, that could easily move you to tears. As someone who has participated in Brian’s work several times, I can appreciate how challenging this approach might be for a drop-in customer with a pot of tea and a crumpet, and also how life-changing and memorable.

Hunt & Darton Cafe

Doing the Business

Food is obviously integral to the Café and, in collaboration with chef and artist Max, the menu offers a brilliantly twisted range of things toasted, unduly elaborate cakes, and retro shop-bought snacks (such as the legendary Tunnocks Tea Cakes, or perhaps a Mr Kipling Fancy). Everything is tasty, tea is served in pots, and price points are fair.

There is Art on the menu too: Community Day, where customers sit with strangers, do jigsaws, share trifle; and Health and Safety day when hair nets and rubber gloves are obligatory.

So how can this model function in a commercial setting? Hunt & Darton Cafés distort and disrupt the normality of a café by placing equal value on the art ‘on sale’ as the food and drink. Figs in Wigs’ Rachel Porter read a paper entitled The Service Economy of Hunt & Darton Café’, which made interesting connections between how art functions within commercial enterprise, where the art or the performer is the commodity. Like Brian, she referenced the relationship between hospitality and performance; the Café brings art into a workplace, and makes a workplace an artistic happening. Initiatives like Open Barbers – a community interest company and regular pop-up at Duckie, and Say Cheese which delivered themed meals alongside a Martin Parr exhibition in March 2014, offer a similar bridge between commerce and art. Somewhere there is a wax sculpture made of my hair, courtesy of barber and sculptor Stuart McCaffer (Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe 2014, £10.) There are those, in government right now perhaps, who would be happy for all art to be commodified and price-tagged. But, as Jenny later explained, while the food part of the business might break even, the art has to be subsidised. To make this crystal clear, all transactions at the Café are chalked onto blackboards, by customers and staff; the profit and loss is transparent, the responsibility shared. We give and we receive.

Scottee at Hunt & Darton Cafe

Always Right

At the heart of the Hunt & Darton Cafe ethos is the audience-cum-customer. It’s all about us. This manifests most clearly in the loyalty scheme, outlined for us by Rachel Dobbs of Low Profile. It shares several characteristics with the familiar Nectar or Boots Loyalty Card, but in adopting the style of a name badge, simply saying LOYAL, it is also a conversation point and a badge of honour. Low Profile later created KEEN, a framed word-piece for anyone who travelled to several of the venues on tour. One proud couple visited four.

Daniel Pitts, arts producer at Cambridge Junction described how big an impression the Café had on the public in his region over three successive visits. In China, which Hunt & Darton Café visited courtesy of Forest Fringe and The British Council, people thoroughly enjoyed the disruption the Café brought to their lives. Forest Fringe’s Andy Field wondered if he was exporting something quintessentially British, and if so, what? He discovered that what the Hunt & Darton Café offers is not an obscure, nor fundamentally British commodity – it belongs to the space it visits.

You can see the happy faces of customers on countless Facebook pages and websites. It was down to performance artist Scottee, after the tea-break, to flip the coin. His learning, from two years on the road with the Café, was that England ‘was and always will be a poxy shithole.’ Scottee is furious that we, the public, allow this to be and do too little to incite change. He wants a revolution.

In the final artist’s presentation, Richard DeDomenici screens an ‘audio visual extravaganza’ of the life of the Café. It illustrates just how the Hunt & Darton Café has forced change, does shake things up, does cause people to reflect on their conduct and be part of a community, even if only for an hour over Sunday Lunch in a Sandwich (a famous Café dish that is is exactly what it says – a roast dinner sandwich).

If Richard’s films highlight the fun of the place, the final Q&A bangs home the broader issues.

From the outset, the artistic ambition matched the business ambition. The audience experience, whilst playful and original, has purpose – customers are complicit in the art. Aesthetic choices are not frivolous – pineapples don’t just sit well on the head and look good, they have long been a symbol of wealth and trade. The Cafés have given opportunities for artists to make new work and share it with a very different audience. Hunt and Darton have also learned a lot over the life of the project, enhancing their artistic practice, and have been astonished at the generosity and loyalty of customers. What happens next is for another chapter. Hunt & Darton Café will exist, but probably not as a touring construct. The need to create something new is pulling. If today we didn’t quite learn how to go about setting up something similar, our home-going Party Bag with tool-kit and starter ornament will help.

As Andy Field so rightly says, ‘silliness is not the opposite of seriousness.’ Hunt and Darton prove this perfectly with a throwaway final remark – ‘by the way, I’m Hunt, she’s Darton.’

Thanks ladies. We’ll remember that.

Hunt & Darton

The Hunt & Darton Café Symposium took place on Friday 5 February 2016 at Toynbee Studios, London, hosted by Arts Admin.

All images courtesy of Hunt & Darton.

Rhum and Clay Theatre Company & Beth Flintoff: Hardboiled

For fans of film noir, Hardboiled is a delight. Inspired by classic thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and, later, Chinatown, Hardboiled translates the essence of this brooding genre into the language of theatre with great style and inventiveness.

The story follows a young but determined private investigator, Sam Shadow, as he takes the case of the alluring Scarlett Addison, investigating the disappearance of her lover who, until recently, worked at her husband’s company, Addison Electric. Shadow uncovers a dastardly corporate conspiracy (loosely based on the Enron power outages scandal in 2000) and must untangle a web of lies and deceit to find out just what sort of private investigator he wants to be.

The production is a pleasing homage to the genre: the story a careful balance of conspiracy, action, and repressed emotion; the characters, all played by the four-strong cast, conveying every 1940s LA caricature and stereotype. The dialogue crackles with one-liners like ‘everybody’s a nobody,’ and ‘love makes monsters of us all’. It’s a veritable highlight reel of the genre’s best-loved tropes.

To those familiar enough with film noir, there are no real surprises to be found, nothing that can’t be guessed at ahead of time, but then, that’s not really the point. Never taking itself too seriously, the production allows the audience to relax and bask in its dim, atmospheric glow, enjoying the fun and satisfaction of identifying the references and clichés.

The most impressive element of Hardboiled is the way in which it conveys cinematic convention. This is a genre well-known for its flashbacks and exposition and as such the play makes creative use of vignettes, with characters frequently dropping in and out of their own narratives to act out past events and different lines of Sam’s enquiry. Close-ups and split screens are also inventively addressed. One client reviews photographs of his wife’s indiscretions and, perfectly coordinated with his gaze, the cast recreate the scenes in freeze-frame behind him. In a moment that proves a particular favourite with the audience, Sam is chased by an unknown car in the night, two sets of headlamps and two led lights moving across a map depicting a surprisingly tense chase scene, recalling a traditional editing technique, popular in the forties and still used in films today.

Most entertaining of these cinematic-theatrical crossovers were the play’s seamlessly choreographed montage sequences. As Sam solves cases, collects evidence or drinks himself into a stupor, the music rises, the set unfolds and reassembles around him, and an eclectic host of characters join and leave the fray. These moments are meticulously crafted and performed – it feels as though no movement or prop is wasted. With remarkable inventiveness these scenes bring to life every character and set piece you could hope for from a quintessential film noir.

Although perhaps most concerned with showcasing as many generic conventions as possible, strong performances from all the cast and a creative set, sound and light design make for a very satisfying production. Overall Hardboiled brings the classic formula back to life with an enjoyable modern, self-referential twist.

Akhe Theatre: Gobo. Digital Glossary

A number of complex creations of metal, wood, wire, and paper litter the dimly lit stage; an electric guitar is strummed by a plectrum wired to a glass bowl swinging on the end of a long string; various tables, a fish tank, screens, pulleys, trolleys, and ropes lie inert, like the abandoned, half-realised experiments of a mad Heath Robinson fixated scientist. Could that be the body of the scientist lying on the floor at the back of the stage?

At the signal of smoke and green lasers refracted through glass bowls and bounced from the back of spoons, an hour of manic visual and sonic invention ensues. Books catch fire, and are whipped into submission, toys are led to suicidal leaps from table tops, politicians blurt their rhetoric into full fish tanks of water, and the faded tokens of unrequited love are hung out on the line to dry.

Previous Total Theatre Award and Fringe First winners, St Petersburg’s Akhe make their second appearance at the Manipulate Festival with their self styled brand of ‘Optical, or Russian Engineering theatre’. It is challenging to articulate exactly what this genre comprises, but the earlier allusion to scientific experiment seems entirely relevant. In these seventeen vignettes the eponymous – though emphatically non-existent – Gobo has his soul picked apart by scientific and philosophical proposition, sculptural kinetic assemblages, and an empirically rigorous attention to craft and detail.

What prevents this from descending into a Pythonesque assemblage of surrealist skits, burping with colour and noise, is both the underlying sense that there is, in fact, a singular dramatic intent grumbling, groaning, and creaking underneath it all, and the echoes of Beckett’s appreciation of the thin, barely discernible divide between the tragic, the comic, and the absurd (I am assured, however, that Gobo and Godot are unrelated)

Akhe’s founders and two most long-standing members Maxim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko approach the various scenarios and their attendant constructions with a deft, light touch – never so manic as to slacken the narrative line into chaotic flapping, but not so precious as to exclude fun from the complex machinations they are working with. A thrillingly effective sound design from Andrey Sizintsev and Denis Kritsov – part sampled Russian folk, part dark, industrial ambient – helps to effectively snap the atmospheric changes from one scene to the next. (And one should also congratulate the Traverse for their in-house sound system which has impressed forcefully throughout this year’s Manipulate Festival.)

The third performer is technology itself. The multiple screens, mobile devices, and GoPro cameras play an active part in proceedings, presenting audiences with the relatively new challenge of deciding where exactly to place its focus: on the performers, on the screen, on the characters momentarily performed by wind-up toys?

This is the new technology theatre – reimagining space, reconfiguring time, and pulling focus through refracted lenses, glass, and mirrors. The emotional impact is often stirred by a balanced interplay between live performance, projected image, animated props, hi tech media capture tools, and audiovisual mash ups of all of the above. A knife approaches the pocket-sized black and white photograph of a failed love. We can see the photograph on the floor. We can see the hand holding the knife. Looking up, however, we can see on screens the creases on the tiny image, the glint of light on the very edge of the blade. A burning book hovers over the collapsed figure holding the knife. The blade draws perilously close to the painful memory. There is a thin, tight cord between the edge of the blade and the belly of the figure portrayed in the image. At the instant of committing to the blow the image recoils as the camera – cut free from its mooring –launches high into the air, and begins a slow metronomic rocking to and fro across the full breadth of the stage. It is a devastatingly effective emotional punch, absolutely theatrical, and impossible to conceive of with out this new palette of small, affordable high tech tools.

Akhe are piloting a singular course in visual theatre: one with broken borders and lost divisions between craft disciplines and expressive genres. It is a compelling journey, and we should be clamouring to demand their return to the UK as soon as possible.