SIRO-A

Siro-A

Once upon a long ago in the faded ochre of a 1970s childhood I sat in the stalls of Edinburgh’s venerable Kings Theatre and saw my first instance of real magic – nothing to do with rabbits, or top hats, or cards, but the specific kind of magic that can only happen in a theatre. You know, that nameless thing that happens as a result of light and dark changing roles, of things not doing what you expect. The dizzy manifestation of dreams conjured between people who contrive to make something happen in a box. That thing. Rikki Fulton, in full panto dame finery (and there has never been finer) tipped Jack Milroy into an old style carriage pram and began steering the old contraption towards the back screen of the stage. Suddenly, with no intimation whatsoever, the theatre erupted with the sound of a pulsing, racing beat, and the back screen filled with a double speed movie of busy streets, into which the characters – Francie and Josie – seemed to be hurtling full pelt. With us as their passengers.

I am no longer that wee wide-eyed boy in the red plush stalls, and time and technology have moved on somewhat, but this afternoon I saw the signs of the magic, or bewitching, passing through to a new generation.

Siro-A (Japanese for white face) are a young, five strong ensemble comprising three dancers, a video artist and a DJ. What they provide is a tightly and wittily choreographed sequence of quick- fire dance and movement routines that make spectacular use of digital projection, lighting and software. The sheer inventiveness of the interplay between physical performance and digital projection is lightly worn and seldom laboured, with the result that the whole thing feels playful, open hearted and fresh.

The technology is cutting-edge contemporary, which is to say that at times it goes to great effort to appear retro. So there are plentiful references to 8-bit gaming and arcade music, whilst particular highlights for me include a lonely figure in a haunted house being toyed with by the huge white hands and leering Mephistophelean masked face of a phantom, and a dazzling finale piece deploying motorik rhythms, marching production lines of cloned bodies, repeating on themselves, folding upon one another, dissolving into streaming parallel bands of shifting light. It was like some crazed visualisation of the Futurist manifesto.

The handheld device generation will be familiar with all of the technology, of course, and its fair to say that at certain points during the show you may feel like you have been sucked through a screen and thrown directly into an iPad game, but in seeing what is possible when friends, ideas, skill, application and technology combine in a flash of inspiration – in short, magic – then this amounts to a show that will live long in their imagination and make them, maybe, just perhaps, look at their own gaming, their own street dancing, their own technology mash-ups and begin to think… What if?

Sam, my 11-year-old co-reviewer, and a boy for whom the act of writing anything more than his name provokes horror, outrage and, worst of all, boredom, furiously scribbled in the dark, turning frequently to make comments and ask questions. He assured me that they were using GoPro’s to capture video and that things wouldn’t break because he could see an Apple logo dimply glowing at the back of the stage.’If they had used Windows 10 it would have broken, Dad’.  He assured me that the quality of street dancing, and the back flips, was outstanding, and that he was already thinking of ways of how he could get a palette of lights to project onto white squares that he would fasten to his body. He reported that much of it made him dizzy, but in a good way, and that the use of classic games and sounds made the whole thing ‘epic’. On the way out I heard another slightly older child, when asked how many stars she would give it, said, ‘We don’t do stars now. That was Double Thumbs, and it was Awesome Possum’.

This energetic, inventive, warm-hearted slice of Techno-Vaudeville is ultimately about magic, and, I think, the awakening of possibilities in a new generation so please, take your young people. They will love it – and their open embrace of the spectacle will draw you in to a strangely familiar old spell of the stage.

 

 SIRO-A, presented at George Square Theatre throughout the Fringe, is reviewed by Michael Begg (49) and Sam Begg (11).

 

 

 

 

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About Michael Begg

Michael Begg is a musician and sound artist based in East Lothian, Scotland, from where he runs his label, Omnempathy, and studio, Captains Quarters. He collaborates regularly on theatre sound design, most notably in an ongoing relationship with with Moscow’s blackSKYwhite, and writes regularly on sound and theatre. This written work has appeared in The Scotsman, The Quietus, Paraphilia, Sound On Sound, Adverse Effect, and in translation for the Polish Soundscape Institute.