Placing Dan Canham and Augusto Corrieri’s work together on one bill was evidence of a canny bit of curating by The Nightingale’s Steve Brett: both artists are young men trained in contemporary dance who create performance works that sit somewhere within the dance, theatre and live art triangle – clever, entertaining and curious (in all senses of that word) works that show an obvious love of the trappings and traditions of ‘theatre’ whilst still exploring and usurping those traditions, each in a very different way…
Dan Canham first. His solo, 30 Cecil Street, was a great success at Edinburgh this summer – one of the must-see shows at the Forest Fringe that this reviewer sadly didn’t get to see! It’s a truly delightful piece, a kind of eulogy to an abandoned building and a conjuring of its ghosts. We start with an empty space; a reel-to-reel tape machine sat on a plain wooden table, downstage left; one chair; and the performer Dan Canham (whose previous work has included appearances with Punchdrunk, Kneehigh, and DV8), a charismatic presence onstage, even when he’s just standing still. The tape machine is switched on and we hear Irish voices talking, amidst the sounds of the clinking and clattering of a busy bar. As we strain to hear what’s being said, the sound switches from the small machine’s speaker to the main PA system, and we start to work out that there’s a conversation being had about a place of entertainment – reminiscences and reflections on performances over many years, and events and incidences onstage and off. We are in Limerick, and the story we are hearing is of the now derelict Theatre Royal.
As the voices murmur on, the performer recreates the rooms of the building as a (mostly) 2D architect’s model, using white masking tape on the black floor, with an occasional line taken onto a wall, or over the little wooden table, creating a surreal ‘almost-3D’ effect. It’s reminiscent of the minimalist marked-out set in Lars Von Trier’s film Dogville. When the space is mapped, Canham activates it with a series of gestural movement vignettes that are somehow both beautifully contained and gloriously expressive. At times, he looks terrifyingly young and vulnerable; at other times as old as the hills and twice as knowing.
In its conception and execution, there are parallels with Improbable Theatre’s first show 70 Hill Lane (in which a house and its occupants are conjured with little more than human voice and a roll of Sellotape), but 30 Cecil Street is its own good self – an evocative and soulful piece that, like one of those dreams that eludes you in the morning, evokes sensations that seem somehow just out of grasp, and stirs up emotions that you can’t quite place. Overwhelmingly, there’s an odd feeling of nostalgia for something that you never knew.
Playing with notions of the visible and the invisible, concealment and revelation, Augusto Corrieri’s Musical Pieces starts off-stage, with the sound of someone testing the mic with a little tap-tap of the hand and the obligatory ‘one two, one two’. When Corrieri appears, the sounds continue, but we never see him voice those words: he turns his back, or places an arm or a leg across his mouth as he moves through the space with the mic and its stand, often exiting through a door to the side of the stage and re-entering in all sorts of convoluted ways. The punchline comes when he faces us and we finally get to see his mouth as the words are spoken – but he’s throwing his voice so that his lips don’t move. Well, hardly move anyway… in a very human and endearing moment, he ‘corpses’, and the audience laughs heartily along with him.
His second short section also plays with the sound-and-vision relationship – this time by creating surreal contradictions between what we see visually and what we hear aurally. The shutters on a (real) window upstage are pulled back, and we hear the sound of a downpour, but can clearly see that there is no rain. A violin is taken out of its case, and placed on a chair – sitting there silently unbowed whilst the sound of strings soar through the space.
Both pieces are witty and thoughtful provocations that explore the play between the ‘real’ and the ‘pretend’ and show a fascination with the tricks and turns of theatrical tradition. As a kind of coda to the two pieces, Corrieri presents a deconstruction of the post-show talk, in which he interviews himself, using pre-recorded reflections on the nature of the work. It’s the weakest part of the evening: clever in a too-knowing way, and somehow squirmingly old-fashioned in its postmodern playfulness.
That aside, a truly entertaining evening from two talented and intelligent dance-theatre performers with something interesting to say for themselves, and the ability to communicate meaningfully with an audience.