Blast Theory & Hydrocracker: Operation Black Antler

How far would you go to protect yourself, your family, your country? Does the end justify the means? If you are acting under orders, for the greater good, does that absolve you of any harm done to individuals along the way? Is it OK to be a whistleblower? Is it OK to spy on your friends and colleagues? Where, and to whom, do your loyalties lie?

I remember the childhood playground conundrum: if you had a loaded gun, your friends asked, and you were in a room with Hitler in 1939, would you pull the trigger. I always said ‘no’. I understood the logic of ‘yes’ but I believed that you must follow your own moral code regardless – and if you believe it is wrong to kill, it is always wrong to kill. Later, in adulthood, I’ve revisited that question many times. I think my answer would still be ‘no’. But I’m not so sure. Would you pull the trigger to save your children’s lives, say? Yes. Any mother would say yes. There are few moral absolutes.

The means-to-an-end question is at the heart of many works of literature and art. That exact scenario – shooting Hitler, changing history – is explored in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. The De Toro film Pan’s Labyrinth brought us the moral dilemma of people fighting fascism who find themselves behaving with the same cruelty. John le Carre wrote eloquently about the life of a spy, and the daily moral dilemmas of living a double life. The petty betrayals in his stories are always the most harrowing.

So, even if you wouldn’t kill, would you lie? How do you fancy yourself as an undercover agent? What, for example, if you were given the opportunity to undermine the activities of the far right? How far would you go? Can you make the grade?

Operation Black Antler is a – well, I was going to say site-responsive, but I think situation-responsive might be more accurate – show that explores the world of the undercover agent infiltrating a new right-wing organisation. It is participatory theatre to the max – and as such, is something of a Marmite show. You either throw yourself into the scenarios offered and enjoy it, or you sit on the sidelines feeling uncomfortable.

‘You’re very good at this,’ says the man I’m working with in my ‘unit’ of three. He’s our communications officer (or ‘on coms’ as our police handler Gemma would have it). Gemma’s a tough cookie, totally believable – I feel pretty nervous when she tests me on my cover story and breathe out when I pass the test. I’ve taken her advice: it’s easier to lie if you just distort the truth rather than invent something totally new. So I’m an English teacher who went to Teacher Training College in South London. Because 40 years ago, that was true, so it is easy to play the lie. I’m enjoying myself in my new identity. I’ve located the person I’m supposed to befriend, and it’s all going to plan. But the two people who make up the unit with me aren’t having fun. They don’t like role play. They want out. Perhaps, I think, this is a show that only appeals to actors. Professional liars. But no, in the debrief session at the end I meet fellow performers who felt slightly uncomfortable in their roles, and people who had never done a day’s acting in their life completely happy to throw themselves in head-first with great gusto.

Operation Black Antler aims to get its audience talking about the issues raised by such cases as Edward Snowden, the Wikileaks affair, and the recent terrible revelations that certain UK undercover policemen were ‘deep swimming’ so far in that they formed relationships with women they were spying on, even having babies with them to maintain their cover. In this aim it most certainly succeeds, judging by the animated conversations in the debrief session that ends the show.

It is a show that is hard to assess critically as each experience is an individual one, and so much depends on the audience member’s willingness (or otherwise) to engage with it all. I enjoyed the game, and got a lot out of the experience.

If I have a criticism, it is that the show is actually a little too safe, (for me personally, anyway). There was a moment when I found myself being recruited as a right-winger, and I feel I could have been grilled far more rigorously about my beliefs by the man I had been taken to. I believed in him as a character – he pitched it very nicely, reminding me of people I met when I was really and truly ‘infiltrating’ right-wing pubs in Thanet, as part of my research for a show about migration, during Farage’s election bid last year – an interesting coincidence. But I didn’t believe that he would accept my story and take me on board in his organisation so quickly. Not that I want to advocate that actors make audience members feel truly uncomfortable. But that edge could have been approached and played with, as it has been in previous Hydrocracker productions. I would also have liked more double-bluff along the way. Sometimes things felt a little too obvious and straightforward. Once I’d identified my target, she was exactly as the briefing had suggested, there were no hidden surprises in her story. I also felt I was ‘pulled out’ of the operation just as it was getting interesting.

Of course, I say all of this knowing how hard it is to get the balance right, especially in the opening weekend of a show with this many built-in complexities.

Operation Black Antler is an exciting and challenging new collaboration by two well-established Brighton companies with reputations for creating challenging off-site work. It draws on both their strengths – Blast Theory’s interest in work driven by an interaction with new technologies, placing the audience member at the heart of the action; Hydrocracker’s mission to create intensely political work in unusual spaces, using actors who interact with audience members. Deep swimming indeed… Dive in and you won’t be disappointed. Cower on the shore and you’ll never know the pleasures of swimming against the current.

Marc Rees: Digging for Shakespeare

Here’s flowers for you; hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram…

Digging for Shakespeare takes its audience on a journey that starts on a bus, proceeds through a park, wanders through a woodland, diverts into an industrial storage unit, and dallies amongst the dales of Hollingdean, which are populated with a fine array of allotments, many sporting a quaint wee shed flying an orange flag to signify that they are part of the game. Allusions to, quotes from, and ruminations upon Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and in particular his citing of flowers and herbs, crop up everywhere.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream features, of course: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows…’ is inscribed on a mirror placed inside a glasshouse, with a rather rude looking Puck – or perhaps it is another fairy – in the form of a knitted doll dangles above. These mirrors and knitted dolls (Welsh artist Annie Hardy is the doll knitter) are the uniting visual motifs of the concluding allotment section of the show – which is the section the audience have most obviously come for. People in sturdy walking shoes enjoy testing their own knowledge of herbs and/or of Shakespeare. Here’s one for starters: chamomile. Yes? No? It’s King Henry the Fourth, Part One (Act 2, Scene 4): ‘For though the chamomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’ People nod sagely.

It all concludes with a cuppa and a tea cake as audience members swap packets of seeds – artist Marc Rees is sowing a special memorial garden for the project: there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

This is all truly delightful – it’s what comes before that it less satisfactory. Because it takes a good 90 minutes to get to the allotments. Twenty minutes of this is bus journey – and yes, this is a good decision, as it gathers everyone together in one starting place, and establishes the herd mentality needed to get an audience through a lengthy outdoor promenade show. Welsh artist Marc Rees (who has a strong track-record in site-responsive performance) uses the time to tell us about himself – as we whizz past the University of Brighton, we learn that he is a graduate of the legendary Visual and Performing Arts course. He then switches mode, into character as a kind of tweed-wearing gentleman gardener, and hands out accolades for biggest marrow or sweetest smelling rose (ah, wherefore art thou Romeo…?)

When we disembark, we are taken to Hollingbury Copse, site of the now-demolished home of Shakespearean scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips. Who, I’m afraid, fails to really grab my interest, despite the fact that he is a genuine English eccentric. And off we trot, to the woods, via a row of splendid flint-stone cottages. Marc Rees, in tour guide mode, delivers mini lectures and homilies throughout the journey, cribbing from notes on postcards, which bothers me. Why didn’t he learn the lines? Is he playing a postmodern game? Any decent tour guide wouldn’t use notes that he squints at constantly; and delivery of Shakespeare’s lines, and his reflections on them, is often nervous and a little faltering. Perhaps – if it is not a deliberate ploy – this will change as the show settles in.

Costumed characters pop up along the way, including regular appearances by Haliwell-Phillips (danced very prettily by Guillermo Weickert Molina). The walk through the woods is enlivened by a lovely team of young people dressed in Green Man mode (the Theatre Workshop Youth Cast), who scamper and chant and call to each other with shrill sounds that echo the loud and insistent birdcall all around us. I’m very fond of this boisterous ensemble of living plants.

Then, a lengthy ‘lecture’ section inside a storage unit which fails to engage me at all. I learn lots of facts about James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips, who obsessively catalogued all Shakespeare’s work, Charles Nicholl’s tweedy lecture embellished with OHP photos projected onto a screen. But do I care? Not a lot. Perhaps I would in other circumstances.

It feels as if there are two shows here, battling with each other: the story of the Elizabethan garden and Shakespeare’s references to herbs and plants in his plays; and the story of the eccentric scholar, Halliwell-Phillips and his obsession with cataloguing Shakespeare’s work. Yes, it’s all about Shakespeare, perhaps that’s connection enough, and yes there are attempts at merging these two main threads, but they don’t really marry well. An awkward hybrid.

At last we are let out of that darned shed and set loose to roam amongst the Roedale allotments. With heigh! the doxy over the dale… We gather gardening tips on postcards, sniff the herbs, and read the accompanying quotes. It feels like the time spent in the allotments should be the heart of the work, and thus allocated more attention and resources. Lovely though the dolls are, a bit of live performance wouldn’t go amiss here.

But it is a beautiful sunny afternoon, and everyone is so totally happy to be out and about amongst the flowers and herbs viewing the allotments, that all gripes and grudges are quickly forgotten.

Digging for Shakespeare is a dramaturgical dog’s dinner – but one full of tasty titbits.

Bom-Bane Family Players: Bom-Banimals

Each stage of Jane Bom-Bane’s meticulously crafted promenade show is a dramatic reveal. It’s a journey through a house and a tale that gathers pace and impact as it travels, as the audience of six twists and turns down the narrow stairs of the ultimate ‘artist’s open house.’

Bom-Bane’s performance café is a Brighton institution in miniature, and previous Festival shows have been themed around palindromes (2015’s Saippuakivikauppias) and the city’s lost Wellesbourne river (in 2014).

Bom-Banimals, as you might expect, features creatures of the woods, trees, and undergrowth, but at heart is a very human story. ‘How can I match your triumphant call,’ sings Jane, ‘when I can’t find my voice at all?’

This is an immersive happening taken to extremes, from the soundtrack when you enter to the décor on the banisters, to the little nested quails eggs on the tables. It crams big ideas and big things into tiny spaces and for 45 minutes we are in a strange, magical world. And what’s that awful honking noise – is something in pain?

The animals’ songs are beautifully matched to character and vary in tone – some twinkle, some honk – accompanied by small instruments: ukulele, toy piano, penny whistle. Costumes and settings have a lovely hand-made aesthetic and a highly imaginative use of materials. There is puppetry, poetry, visual jokes, and transformations as the menagerie gathers together and with their help Jane finds her voice and her skin.

Lyrics (by Jane Bom-Bane and Eliza Skelton) are meaningful and clever, the performances beguiling and there is so much to look at that it seems to be over too quickly, rather like a fairground ride that whips you through a haunted house before you’ve had time to scream. I wanted to do it all again straight away.

Instead it’s meal-time which is always a treat here. Strange that most diners happily eat the animal option (did they learn nothing?). I have the veggie choice, a swan sculpted from filo pastry. There’s a meringue snail to follow.

Bom-Banimals is perhaps a touch lighter in content than previous Bom-Bane’s shows, but the effect is just as enchanting. We end feeling properly at home with the Bom-Bane Family Players (Jane Bom-Bane and Eliza Skelton are joined by Foz Foster, Kate Daisy Grant, Raven Kaliana, Jo McDonagh, Sebas Contreras, Kate Vaughan, and Tom Walker) and rather reluctant to leave.

Creative Acts

Beccy Smith sees Me, Mother at Circusfest, prompting a reflection on new adventures in motherhood and the arts

It was in a theatre that my experience of motherhood finally began, after two days solid of warm-up acts. An operating theatre, sure, but an environment whose concentrated gaze, lights, transformations and undeniable drama were qualities that felt recognisable, through the epidural haze, from my professional work. I’ve been a theatre maker for nearly 15 years and a mother for just one, yet it’s fascinating and challenging to discover just how mutually exclusive these creative acts, which share so much common ground, are seen to be. Culturally, I was struck after giving birth by the paucity of representation or discussion of this process and of the lived reality of motherhood in novels, film and the visual arts (an ellipsis that must contribute to some of the fascination exerted by shows like One Born Every Minute). In theatre, the challenges of creating work in this evening-centred industry are practical as well as cultural. Yet by missing out the experiences of mothers in the theatre, we are denying audiences as well as artists. There are a growing number of practitioners starting to focus on redressing the balance.

Matilda Leyser

Since 2014 when her son was two, aerialist and trapeze artist Matlida Leyser has been holding Open Space (following the Devoted and Disgruntled model, a company with whom she is associate director) meetings for mothers and carers of small children who are also attempting to sustain a creative practice. These go under the name Mothers who Make.

Issues arising at the meetings highlight both the very real practical (financial and time) issues in which this problem is steeped and the significant emotional issues faced by highly creative and competent people, mostly women, who face crises of meaning and identity when unable to pursue their established careers due to motherhood. Through the meetings, which initially ran over the course of a year hosted by BAC, a clear need was articulated whose momentum has followed through into satellite groups being set up in other cities around the country as well as the launch of a national campaign – Parents in Performing Arts [http://www.pipacampaign.com/] – launched last October. This initiative is supported by industry-wide partnerships and spearheaded by inclusive theatre company Prams in the Hall. So far it’s been a conversation and a campaign, but now Leyser has placed the subject creatively centrestage in the first stages of a new production called Me, Mother which brings these experiences vividly to life whilst itself acting as a demonstration of the rich contributions mothers (of course!) still have to offer the industry.

As a practice, circus feels like it sits (or flies? Swings!) at the more extreme end of antithesis with motherhood: at the form’s heart are physical feats which no pregnant woman would (we imagine) risk, and which no soft mother’s body could achieve. Yet of course circus artists get pregnant and of course, after becoming mothers, undergoing that great transformation, they remain themselves – practitioners who need to work and artists with the skill to express in this form.

Me, Mother: Marianna De Sanctis and her daughter Mae Lestage

In Me, Mother this dichotomy is placed at the core of the performance. Five circus performers, four of them mothers and the fifth with motherhood on her mind, share deeply personal stories, scientific and historic fact about birth and motherhood, whilst populating the compact stage of the Roundhouse Studio with an array of circus equipment and lo-fi performance (casual slack rope walks; exercise routines on the trapeze). The performance has been created after just a week working together in a room, sometime with their children present, and its contingent quality is reinforced by the scratch score created and mixed live by musician Elizabeth Westcott. The improvisatory elements of the show, which moves through a handwritten structure Leyser has pinned to the wall, also serves a dramaturgical point – mothering creativity is often snatched and solutions (in both art and parenting) determined by the available space and time, or made up on the spot. This kind of open dramaturgy, where artists support one another and reach mutual decisions live about what is to be shared and how, feels inclusive and non-hierachical. It is at its clearest in the opening sequence, where the performers vie to share illustrative stories about one another. Leyser and her company create a very warm, generous atmosphere in which their stories can be shared which create a community with the audience – they are there with us not for us.

There are times when this quality can also feel too loose. As seen on its opening night, there were moments of too much tentativeness which distracted – energy dropped. Moments of potential felt suddenly stifled by a lack of follow-through which limited some of the transformative possibilities of the inspiring acts and stories on display. The hour-long performance is prefaced with an installation sharing interviews recorded with these and other circus mothers about their experiences. It’s an inclusive opener to frame the field (and also to situate the performance in the context of the wider research project of which it forms part), but in juxtasposition with the show, it is a reminder of how statistics and anecdotes are no stand-in for the artistry and vulnerability of live performance. There are magic moments in this show, and they live largely in the powerfully crafted stories shared by some of the performers – of birth, of pregnancy and of returning to work. There’s still more to discover about how to incorporate this content to the circus forms its discusses rather than placing them alongside one another (hardly surprising after just a week’s work), but nevertheless, when the transformations occur the crafted storytelling of human experience holds us in a powerful moment of connection and in these moments we see how art paradoxically transcend the artist’s immediate circumstance as well as being viscerally empowered by it. Of course there are some battles for which we need politics – affordable childcare, the possibility for flexible working (although as I found out when producing the all-female team of Three Generations of Women recently, simply agreeing set finishing times, and sticking to them, made a world of difference) but, when it works, it is the art itself that offers everyone a deeper imaginative understanding of just why this is all worth fighting for.

Me, Mother: mother and baby rehearsals

Another artist interested in fully incorporating the experience of motherhood to creative practice is Duska Radosavljeviḉ through her Mums and Babies Ensemble – a manual for which was published with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) last year. The idea of the Ensemble is quietly revolutionary – to look for models that allow the incorporation of babies to the rehearsal room, not as problems to be solved but as creative contributors to a piece of work. The inclusive ethos underpinning the idea underpins a publication that aims to disseminate the practice by acting as template for other theatre parents to create their own versions of the experiment. Structured as a list of ingredient components, the books offers plenty of very straightforward, practical problem-solving devising suggestions (A table which illustrates, ’this is what you will plan to happen, and this is what is likely to actually happen,’ for example). This sort of approach begins to broaden out the publication’s relevance: here we find not only useful sensibility for the recreation of the process, but helpful attitudinal understanding about devising in general, and parenting too. And once again I am struck by the relevance and connectedness of parenthood and creativity. I now feel confident that my creative vision as a dramaturg and writer has expanded and nuanced as a result of the experience and continues to grow. I am more honest, more dynamic with my time. The question remains, though, will I be supported in the capacity to turn this new potential into work?

Of course the problems discussed here are not reserved for the theatre industry: parents of every ilk face profound challenges and difficult decisions about how to combine necessary work and/or meaningful careers when attempting to integrate with them raising children. Yet it is arguable that the representation of mothers as makers and the portrayal of the parenting experience within our cultural conversations is an essential step in making the case for the political work that needs to follow. Because when mothering and art are rendered mutually exclusive the vital realities of these experiences are made invisible; and what’s more, as well as undermining legions of inspiring and talented women, our cultural life becomes poorer and less representative by this exclusion.

MES: Me, Mother, directed by Matilda Leyser., was presented in Circusfest at Roundhouse, 21 April–23 April 2016. It was seen by Beccy Smith on 21 April 2016.

The Mums & Babies Ensemble: A Manual, written by Duška Radosavljević, Annie Rigby, Lena Šimić and babies Joakim, Nina and James, is published by the Institute for theArt and Practice of Dissent at Home, Liverpool, 2015, and can be purchased online from Unbound http://www.thisisunbound.co.uk/products/the-mums-and-babies-ensemble-a-manual

See also The Mother by Dorothy Max Prior, published on Total Theatre Explores: http://totaltheatre.org.uk/explores/reflections/mother.html

The Total Theatre Explores research project was undertaken between 2003-2005. The Explores legacy lives on in its dedicated website, hosted within the Total Theatre site, which is intended as a permanent resource set up to celebrate the work of women practitioners of physical and visual performance, give insight into a diverse range of working practices by women artists, and provide information of use to anyone interested in women working within physical and visual performance.

See www.totaltheatre.org.uk/explores

Protein Dance: May Contain Food

Protein Dance’s director Luca Silvestrini collaborates with musical director and performer Orlando Gough in a piece that seamlessly layers speech, movement, and a cappella singing into an all-encompassing spiritual experience. The all-singing, dancing, talking, and waiting ensemble of eight dash about our tables to serve the audience in a constantly churning kaleidoscope of floor patterns. Somewhat akin to the shapes plotted in Renaissance court dances, which sought to mirror the cosmos and find perfect harmony, the performers undulate and circle around side aisles of dining tables framing a central performance space. The studio is transformed into a dining room and then into a cathedral dedicated to the worship of food. Framed by a raised microwave at the altar and the kitchen clock at the opposite end, the acoustics tie this ethereal world together, bathing audiences in harmonies that make for tingling spines and dropped jaws.

The subject matter starts in the everyday: the routine and the habit of eating. It quickly descends into the depths of the social and emotional conditions that are so tightly interlaced around the act of eating. Sometimes dark and referencing horror, often sensually infused with tantalising text and innuendo, and consistently silly, each scene is abundant with content. The Meat Song sees performer Donna Lennard leaving a smear of blood along the shiny, white tiled wall as she sings with the purest of voices. Full of quips and quibbles from juices to pomegranates to marinating loins, the songs cover a myriad of topics. The lyrics highlight the muddle of mixed messages surrounding food, from health facts to cooking instructions and forbidden items to the notion of choice, demonstrating the contradicting information that influences our relationship with food today. Little ditties such as Don’t Eat That, Eat This, feeding like birds to feeding a child, all form content for speech, movement vocabulary, and narrative. The dance of the slaughter house begins with two female performers’ heads on plates. It becomes macabre with a clumsy, ungainly weighted plod carefully intertwined with a sense of noisy chaos, a subtle tension between compliance and panic, voice and movement.

As a miniature course is served up to each table of viewers, we are invited to enjoy a sensory experience by our waiters. Rolling a cherry tomato down your face before you pop it reveals flirtatious, sensual, and silly responses as audience members join their fellow diners in a joint eating exercise following simple instructions. Each micro-meal, revealed under a bright white spotlight as if beamed down from a deity, provokes taste, textures, and social metaphor. Unwitting diners close their eyes, count down their chews, and are given permission to swallow or feed their neighbours in a cacophony of innuendo and metaphor.

The scene where performers Martin George and Louise Sofield sit across from each other on a table for two exemplifies the form of the piece as a whole both in structure and beauty. The two central diners are encircled by a chorus of breaths, notes, and words. Their conversations, thoughts, and reactions both spoken and unspoken are sung or danced in stark juxtaposition with the couple’s static posture and stilted silences. The meal frames larger issues as tempo and text increase and repeat, erupting in climatic tableaus and one-liners. After sudden silence and stillness, the scene transforms to that of an elderly man being spoon-fed. Now caring and the end of life is the focus with guttural noises, hiccups, and a poignant kiss giving this simple moment both beauty and gravitas. This sort of detailed build and seamless transformation is what the piece does well and often.

A series of rituals highlight personal stories where food is consumed under emotive circumstances, taking the audience through compelling highs and lows. The constantly revolving content feels like an indulgence in sensory experiences and the pleasure and sparkle in the performers’ eyes as they busy themselves around their diners make performer-audience relationship feel powerfully intimate. Often sexual or sensual, the scene climaxes bring to mind the sense of ecstasy that Baroque artists strived to capture, such as Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa. This is reiterated by the spiritual references that are played upon throughout.

After the microwave dings and dessert is served, the piece ends with a prayer-like narration of a list of ingredients that it contains, deconstructing what has just occurred and clearing the plates ready for the next service. Senses heightened and appetites aroused for more, May Contain Food with its rich, fast moving text could easily be seen again. The acapella soundscape mastered by the ensemble is in constant transition meaning that voices move in and out of audience space and this ethereal surround-sound ties the work together. It may contain food but the product is far more than the sum of its parts.