Derevo: Once

Once.

Once upon a time…

Once. But in another time, not this time. Another world, not this one. We have entered another world, another time. An ethereal world, outside the boundaries of space and time. (Ether is the substance that angels are made from…)

Once upon a time there was…

A pair of angels looking down upon a world. A tiny toy doll.

A cafe, with tables and chairs, and pictures of ships a-sailing. And a radio, pinned askew on a wall.

On the radio, a dancehall foxtrot.

In the cafe, which may well be the restaurant at the end of the universe, a waitress. A pretty doll-like girl in a little white dress and bunny ears, she trips merrily across the floor with her clickety-clackety high heels. She sits at a table and daydreams. She stands and tweaks her dress and ears. Someone who might be the janitor, someone of low status anyway, comes in pushing a broom across the floor, his vulture-like head jerking forwards, his tatty beige coat falling off his lanky frame – a downbeat clown, with big yellow shoes and a red nose. His heart is broken, that is obvious – he is wearing his heart on his sleeve. Enter the customer, a suave gentleman in a dapper black suit. He calls for the menu, he orders a fish. He’s obviously a fishy character…

These are our three main characters – or perhaps archetypes rather than characters is the better word, for we are in a world of fairy tales and dreams. The pretty ballerina, the princess, a version of Columbine; the heartbroken clown who wants to win her love; the suave dastardly villain who wants her too, and will fight him to the death for her love. Meanwhile, a very stupid cupid has come and gone – he seems too big for his own body, limbs akimbo like a young colt. He misses his target, fires offstage, breaks his arrows (and later his bow). He is useless.

The scene is set…

There follows a thrilling word-free montage of clever clowning sequences, eccentric and beautifully executed choreography, and gorgeous moving pictures – sometimes literally, as the painted storybook scenery seemingly shifts itself, or the wonky pictures on the walls slide away to reveal startled faces.

The fairy-tale and mythological references come thick and fast. Here, a leaping and dancing Sinbad the Sailor (or maybe it’s the Prince of Persia) with his sabre flashing and cutting the air; there, a kind of Trojan Horse, a giant head hiding two people inside it. The simple props are used with a child-like glee: a cardboard fish on a dish is thrown across the room; a piece of piping becomes a periscope; a head pokes through a cardboard box tied up with a bow.

The soundscape is an eclectic musical mix – a kind of jukebox of cultural dreams and memories. Waltzes and polkas. Distorted fairground organs. Mournful blues numbers, and a cheesy rendition of Brazil.

Music and physical action work together beautifully. There’s a gentle repeated waltz motif as the Girl and the Suitor face each other from either side of the stage, stepping forward and back in time; and a joyous polka as they dance around the room together, as the Clown looks on in anger and despair. The Clown, seized by a demented desire, plays out a totally stupid and funny heavy-metal cock-rock dance with a cardboard falling star.

Once is one of Derevo’s lighter and gentler pieces of work – although not without its dark and dangerous edges. An hour and a half skips by quickly – we lap it all up eagerly.

It is great to see Derevo, the Russian maestros of physical/visual theatre, back in the UK – and oh what a joy it is to see the company’s three founder members Anton Adasinsky (the heartbroken Clown), Elena Yarovaya (the lovely Girl) and Tanya Khabarova (the villainous Suitor) reunited on stage. All three give superb performances, working beautifully together. The trio of central performers are aided and abetted most ably by Aleksey Popov, Makhina Dzhurayeva and Aleksey Merkushev. The fabulous fairy-tale set is designed by Maxim Isaev.

Twenty years on, Once has an added poignancy – it is even more touching and funny and heartbreaking than it was 20 years ago. And with its universal theme of unrequited love and broken hearts, it is a timeless play that will never cease to entertain us and thrill us through and through. Love hurts, for sure.

Vic Llewellyn and Kid Carpet: The Castle Builder

Chewed bread sculpture, swanee whistles, upside down bicycles, Casio keyboards, record decks, cardboard constructions, dragons – and an out-of-breath middle-aged man with his trousers round his ankles. What more could you want of a Thursday lunchtime in Edinburgh?

The Castle Builder is a show celebrating outsider art and ‘otherness’ in art-making. The celebration is in the form of a performance-lecture, delivered by Desperate Man Vic Llewellyn, on notable outsider artists, this intercut with raucous, punky (in the Ian Dury sense of punky), shouty songs from Kid Carpet, accompanied by Vic. Meanwhile, Vic’s son is on stage behind a laptop managing the multimedia (and tootling on a trumpet occasionally), and there at the back is their guest artist of the day, Flick Ferdinando, who is banging and hammering and making something marvellous, which will be revealed later. Yes, it’s kind of chaotic, but very carefully organised chaos. And jolly good fun too!

Our outsider artists include a Norwegian inmate of a psychiatric unit who over five years builds a castle on a remote headland; a wonderful woman called Tressa Prisbrey, who built a ‘bottle village’ of shrines, walkways, sculptures, and buildings all made from recycled and discarded materials; a man who covers every surface in his home with mosaics of broken china; and the legendary bread chewer. Towards the end of the show, we are issued with slices of Hovis sliced white to make our own works of art.

Along the way, we meet (on screen) a line-up of architects sporting fancy-dress costumes that are facsimiles of the buildings they designed (the Empire State Building and all, I kid you not); and the Nazi’s ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition which could be viewed as a celebration of all things good in art (Kurt Schwitters, Dada, Outsider Art). Forming a link between the artists and their subject is the story of the Llewelyn family castle – a toy castle built by Vic’s dad for Vic’s son – and here it is, right here on stage! Vic as a veteran street theatre performer is also a bridge between the outsider artists and this theatre space: someone whose work has always sat outside of the usual, narrow definitions of ‘theatre’.

In its mesh of facts and musings about non-gallery art; its marvellous melee of found objects, treasured possessions, and ready-made art; its joyful, messy and exuberant performance mode; The Castle Builder is a wonderful advertisement for the DIY lo-fi ethos of Outsider Art. Behind all the fun and frolics is a serious message. Art is not just for galleries. Art is everywhere, and we are all artists.

Seize the moment, comrades! Make art not war!

Featured image by Jack Offord.

The Castle Builder is at Summerhall for the duration of the Edinburgh Fringe 2016. See www.edfringe.com to book tickets.

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Bucket List

Mexico: fiestas, salsa dancing in the street, big sombreros, jolly Mariachi bands, tasty enchilladas. Rewind. Mexico: women working 12-hour shifts in factories making parts for iPhones, fighting off the headache they get from not drinking water, because if they drink they need to pee, and if they leave their work station they are sacked. Police officers who pull 14-year-old girls into their police cars and take them to the woods to rape them. Mayors and company CEOs who claim to be saving the planet when in fact their actions are causing the local river to be so polluted that when a boy falls in trying to retrieve his football, he dies of arsenic poisoning 12 hours later.

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Bucket List is a beautiful, harrowing, thought-provoking piece of work: a hard-hitting socio-political drama about Mexican (and world) corruption and contamination, delivered by an all-female international ensemble whose physical acting skills are superb. And there’s great live music too!

Inspiration for the show came from Mexican performer and co-devisor Vicky Araico Casas, who Ad Infintum’s Nir Paldi mentored and directed in her solo work, Juana in a Million. For both of them, one show was obviously not enough… There is more to be said about Mexico.

Bucket List – the company’s eighth show, which follows on from previous successes Translunar Paradise, The Ballad of the Burning Star, and Light – is written and directed by Paldi; he and co-director George Mann alternating roles of director and dramaturg on each new production. As is their usual practice, inspired by their training with Jacques Lecoq, the show has been co-created with the ensemble, which includes aforementioned Vicky Araico Casas as the protagonist Mila, and the company’s associate artist/musical director Amy Nostbakken, who gives an astonishing and brilliant performance as The Man, morphing from corrupt cop, to mayor, to company CEO, to president of Mexico, to Bill Clinton himself – instigator of the notorious North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTE) that has proved to be the cause of so many problems for working-class Mexicans. These transformations of character are made elegantly and beautifully with a shift in body stance changing her instantly from one to the other, the donning of a cap or sash, or the clever and humorous use of props such as a moustache on a stick, adding weight to the transformation.

Also in the ensemble are other familiar faces, including Deborah Pugh, who has appeared in all of the company’s past four shows, giving a dynamic and vibrant performance as both Mila’s mother, and as her youth leader and mentor Jennifer, who encourages her to improve her chess game, with the carrot dangled of a trip to America. But all of the ensemble are superb, swapping roles with ease, forming a physical chorus to support whichever character is the lead in any given scene.

So many lovely things in this show to flag up: a great use of recurring movement motifs: for example, a choreography of factory women’s gestures with the hands; and the way tiny snatches of salsa dancing are used as a throughout. Chess is the central metaphor of the piece, as Mila seeks (or fantasises about seeking – the line between the real and the imagined is deliberately blurry) her revenge on the men who have ruined the lives of her relatives and friends, finding parallels between her chess tactics and what she feels needs to do out their in world. The show appears to have a linear narrative at the start, but the pattern of foreshadowing and flashback comes in early. Harrowing moments in the story are replayed in a pattern of intense repetition.

The scenography is simple but beautifully effective. A kind of abbattoir cum hospital operating room plastic strip-curtain at the rear; podiums for the two musicians on either side of the curtain/backdrop; and a good lighting design. It’s quite enough: the play resides, for the most part, in the bodies of the performers.

The tussle between fantasy and reality is dealt with very effectively. As time runs out for Mila, her imagined solutions to her need for revenge become more and more ludicrous and fantastical. As the play ends, there is a sting in the tail. We are not let off lightly; we are not allowed to leave the theatre revelling in her revenge. There is a torch that we must carry for her, if Mila can’t carry it herself…

Featured image by Alex Brenner.

Theatre Ad Infinitum: Bucket List is at PLeasance Dome, 3-29 August, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe 2016.

For further information or bookings, see www.edfringe.com

Ontroerend Goed: World Without Us

Imagine a time capsule, to be buried deep in the ground; or sent out into deep space, perhaps. What would you put in it? A snatch of Mozart? A dash of the Blues? Japanese Koto? Children’s drawings? Photos of works of art or architecture? Scientific formulae? Poetry? A letter from Albert Einstein? A letter from Jimmy Carter? Whatever you chose, you’d do so with the hope that someone would find it; that someone would thus remember you – or at least, remember us. Us. One of us. Someone like us. Someone on our planet in some future time. Someone on another planet, light years away. Whoever, wherever – you imagine, you hope, that there will be someone to remember, to acknowledge, perhaps even to understand. This is a record. Look, here are the instructions. How to play it. Scratch, scratch, scratch – that sound of a vinyl disc stuck on the last groove. Oh how quickly technology ages and dies…

In their latest show for the Edinburgh Fringe, World Without Us, Ontroerend Goed imagine another scenario. A world. Without us. The buried capsule is never dug up and discovered – it eventually, thousands of years later, is finally penetrated by the rain. The ink on the writing runs, the colours of the drawings merge, the paper becomes grey pulp.

We are taken to this point, this – I was going to say ‘worrying’ but is it? – point in time, a timeless time, with meticulous care. The storyteller, live on stage, and through mediated voiceover, delivers words that conjure powerful and poetic images with a beautiful attention to detail. We are invited to imagine this theatre space we are now in without us. We have all been spirited away (somehow, we don’t learn how, it’s not important). The lights go out, leaving just the emergency lighting. The laptop at the back runs out of power. A mobile phone in a handbag gives out its last teeny alarm bleep. It is colder in here without the people – each one of us gives out the same amount of heat as a light bulb, imagine that! We are invited to imagine a rat who finds a bag of crisps that provides a welcome feast. To imagine the spiders making webs in the roof space and the tiny microscopic creatures on the floor. Meanwhile, elsewhere in this people-less world, planes are flying their longest flights yet – almost 24 hours – before crashing into the deep oceans. Their black boxes emit a signal for 30 days, but after that – silence. Time, gentlemen please.

Time passes. Tick tock go the remaining clocks, until they wind down or their batteries run out. Not that this means anything without the timekeepers. Seconds, minutes, hours – they are our inventions. But the cycles of day and night, of sun and moon – they continue. Although inside the theatre, once even the longlife battery of the emergency light has given up, it is always night – at least, always night until the day / year / century comes when the roof collapses, the sunshine floods in startling the insects, and the encroaching forest reclaims the remains of the raked seats.

This world without us: is this a ‘good’ thing, or a ‘bad’ thing? The philosophical reflection at the heart of this piece suggests that in fact, without us, it is neither. No timekeepers, and no judges. The world without us is benign. Buildings or no buildings? Trees or no trees? It doesn’t matter. Plastic beads still waiting to decompose thousands of years later. Wills written but never read. Airplane windows that fishes swim through. Bears. Wolves. Cockroaches. Fires. Rivers. Snow. Rain. Scorched earth. Nothing but a compressed ball of particles. It isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just is. Pandas are long extinct, but there is no-one to care about the pandas, so it is not a bad thing, it is just – a thing. It is not down to us to ‘save the world’. The world without us is not ours to save. It’ll be whatever it is, without us.

A World Without Us is a brilliant conception – but more, it is realised in a beautiful form. Everything about this piece is fine-tuned, perfectly crafted. The scenography looks simple – which of course means it is cleverly and carefully constructed. A black stage with a monolith standing in the centre. Projected words and images, used sparsely at the beginning and end of the show. Lighting that frames or highlights the face or the hands of the sole performer (the brilliant Valentijn Dhaenens of SGaGeN on the day that I see the show – two actors are alternating for the Edinburgh Fringe run). The words shine and sparkle like fragments of broken glass, cutting through the gloom.

Words. Worlds. A world of words. Words are us. A world without us is, eventually, a world without words. And yet somewhere, out there, amongst the stars, the words still sing out…

Featured photo by Mirjam-Devriendt.

Ontroerend Goed: World Without Us is presented as part of the Big in Belgium season at Summerhall, 5-29 August, 11.30.

For this and all Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2016 shows , see www.edfringe.com

BRONKS: Us/Them

We live in a lovely town with parks and shops and very good schools. We have fathers who work hard as doctors and farmers and butchers, and we have pretty smiling mothers. Our school is School Number One – the biggest and best school in the town. We have a lovely big gymnasium – see here, I’m drawing it for you, in chalk on the ground. Here are the doors, and there are the emergency exits. Only two exits, so it is easy to barricade. And over here is the playground. And beyond, the forest. On the other side of the forest, across the border, is where ‘They’ live. ‘They’ don’t have fathers that work. There are lots of bad men there, paedophiles. Their mothers are not pretty and kind. Their mothers have dark moustaches. In our school, we have assembly, and we sing songs. The song we sing most is about a Wonderful New Future.’Wonderful new future, we run into your arms.’

But for these two children, our storytellers, there is no wonderful new future. There is instead a siege. 1,148 people, the majority children, are being held hostage in the gymnasium. No, wait – 1,146. No, now it is 1,139. Numbers. Statistics.

If it was a normal day, and not a siege day, first lesson would be mathematics. The boy starts in on complicated sums. The girl has five roubles in her piggy bank. Five roubles divided up amongst 35 terrorists is – well, not a lot. But maybe they don’t all want money, the children muse. Maybe some of them want ‘peace’. More sums. Oh and remember, the two women terrorists blew themselves up, so there are only 33 terrorists. More sums. Problem solving. Maybe the female terrorists would like my Barbie dolls, says the girl. No, says the boy, they are dead, remember? And the men terrorists won’t want Barbies.

Meanwhile, it is getting hotter and hotter. The children stand enmeshed in a carefully constructed web of string and balloons. They try hard to stand still with their hands in the air, as they’ve been told to do. They are not allowed to drink. Or to talk, Or to drink. Or to wriggle too much. Or to drink. Or to pick their noses. Or to drink. They are so so so hot and so so so thirsty. The are not allowed to wee. Or to poo. Yes we are, says the girl, correcting the boy. We are just not allowed to go to the toilet. Do you need to go yet, she asks him. He shakes his head vehemently, and bites his lip.

The beauty of this extraordinary piece of theatre is the way it captures the voice of the child, the thoughts and feelings and concerns of the child, so tenderly, so beautifully. The story is a desperately harrowing one – the story of the Beslan school siege, by a group of Chechen terrorists/freedom fighters (choose your epithet) – but amidst the horror is a gorgeous and heartbreaking portrait of what it is to be a child. The Us and Them of the title is of course the Us and Them of the Russians and the Chechens; but it is also the Us and Them of the classroom. The two young adult actors – Gytha Parmentier as the girl and Roman Van Houtven as the boy – really get under the skin of the pre-pubescent children that they play. The embarrassment. The teasing. The talking-over and interruptions of each other. The vying for space. The reluctance to strip down to your underwear in front of the opposite sex, even though you are at breaking point, all crammed together in this hot, airless gymnasium, guarded over by terrorists who have strung explosives all around you.

The story of the siege is told in words – mostly in storytelling mode, directly out to the audience, each ‘child’ modifying and correcting the other’s version of events. It is told through physical action and movement movements – some big and grandiose (a repeated fainting incident), and some tiny and beautifully exact (a tug on a skirt or shirt, a small wriggle to hold in the pee) And it is told through the creation of a stunning and ever-morphing stage picture created with chalked images, string lines, colourful anoraks pegged to a wall, and a great bunch of black balloons (which are, inevitably, exploded).

But who is telling the tale? Are they survivors? Are they ghosts in the space? I won’t reveal the ending – just say that like every other aspect of the dramaturgy and delivery of the piece, this is handled beautifully by writer/director Carly Wijs and by the two talented performers.

To deliver a story like this in a way that isn’t an assault on its audience; to find the subtleties in a tale full of the most vile and horrifying facts that a news story could contain; to take such material and make it into something heartbreaking yet soulful and full of human spirit – this is a real achievement.

Work of this quality and intelligence and tenderness reminds us that this is why we make theatre; this is why we watch theatre. And breathe…

BRONKS: Us/Them is presented as part of the Big in Belgium season at Summerhall, 5-29 August 10.00

For information or bookings for all shows at Edinburgh Fringe 2016, see www.edfringe.com

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