Let’s start with the beginning and work our way back; it’s a rainy afternoon in April; the clouds hang thick above the city, casting a concrete light all over town. You’re defiant of this urban lethargy; you’ve made your way to the Gate Theatre and are sat in the small black-box that hovers above the wave of noise drifting from the pub underneath.  What happens next?

“It’s like one of those evenings that you spend with someone, like an old friend or perhaps someone you just met. You take it in turns to play each other different tracks because you’re making a live mix-tape as you go along. You’re trying to excite each other and say this is something you might not have heard before, or if this is something you know, let’s listen to it together. That feeling of excitement, of discovering something new, something about the people you’re with, having a conversation around that and what it means… I wanted to create that atmosphere.”

Chris Thorpe is inadvertently weaving a history of the Forest Fringe within the line-up of the week he is curating at the Gate, shaped around a series of solo pieces he will be reading, sat on a chair in front of the audience with only a spotlight to make him visible and a mic to project his words. What he reads is different every night; it’s a combination of texts he has written for Forest Fringe over the years, a new piece he has written especially for the London residency, and text he is developing for multiple voices embodied by one. Thorpe’s work is focused around the act of speaking; the deliberate choice of reading rather than memorizing points towards the immediacy of the act. “It takes the focus away from the memory trick of knowing and learning. I want to take away the kind of tight rope walk that can distract when you’re watching someone speak a lot of text” he tells me; it’s not about watching someone perform a skill, but engaging with storytelling as a form of conversation. He isn’t sure what text will be read out on which evening; the specificity of that won’t mean anything to anyone else apart from himself.

Thorpe’s work returns to the idea of crafting words and building dense landscapes and narratives; the unexpectedness of his storytelling is juxtaposed with a variety of other works in rejection of any associations with showcases, a distinction which he has gone to great lengths to make. Lucy Ellinson, for example, is doing something she’s never done before: bringing heavy metal and politics together. Thorpe will be playing guitar. “I’ve consciously tried to curate it so there is a huge variety of work that reflects the scope of what Forest Fringe is trying to do, but also brings artists with a similar ethos who might be in the early days to make connections, so to widen everything out.”

So what you will be experiencing is a series of constructed happenings that take place in a certain order, to which everyone in the room will be participating.  “Forest Fringe is a coloniser; when it’s in a particular place it seems to be symbiotic to it, but it brings its own determination to create a certain kind of atmosphere and openness.”

Moment 2: On the edge, between the body and history

Performer and dancer Dan Canham was living in Limerick, Ireland on the West Coast a while back. It’s an evocative and dangerous city; a frontier town as far west as one can get. Looking out means following the sea all the way to Canada. “It’s on the edge of Europe and Ireland, it’s got a reputation for being poor and rough- which is true. It’s a run down, dead city, and I was living there and knew I wanted to make a piece about it, and didn’t know what that would be. I started looking at buildings, and found a theatre that was thriving in the 19^th century and was now boarded up. It grew to symbolize the rot at the heart of the city, and the idea that once cultural spaces start shutting down, things disappear quickly. It was a beautiful building, and I got the keys and we made a film in there  looking at the poetic history of the place, and eventually came back to that material with a live show.”

The shell of the show is the same in its London run that spearheads the second week of Forest Fringe’s residency. Because it’s a show about theatres, and it’s been performed in so many different spaces, remnants and sediments have found their place in the movement and tone of the piece. “I’ve absorbed fragments which influence how it is played”, Canham tells me. There’s a toying with expectation that comes from the framework of dance which Canham is engaging with, but the conversations emerging during the week are shaped by a variety of work.  If Thorpe’s week is loosely associated with impromptu narratives and extraordinary stories, from recounting a long bus journey to the most north-westerly point of the British mainland to a lecture performance inspired by daily ephemera or an incision into the world of pageants, Canham’s is underpinned by an inherent interest in theatrical spaces, punctured by documentaries, live gigs and talks.

“There’s a sense of engaging with theatre as you might with another live event, for example, a gig, and a journey away from formality that’s progressive as the night continues. Because I use dance as a tool, it’s part of my theatrical palette.  I try and stay away from the usual dance paradigm of extraordinary bodies doing extraordinary things; for me, it’s much more sculptural.”

What underpins Dan Canham’s work is an interest to respond to intangible elements of live performance in its natural state; elements like play, generosity and an openness to embrace the unknown. This an ethos which guides the artists involved in the micro-organism that is Forest Fringe. Being open to constructing a live encounter is a vulnerable position, one guided by a certain risk that is bound to celebrate the improbable and the spectacular. This is an endeavour both historical and contemporary. As Andy Field tells me, “we’re interested in what theatre can do, and not necessarily with a focus on the self-referential performance. It can mean doing things in a very straight way, playing with old formats or investigating new ones. It’s about not knowing the result.”

Moment 3: The Colonisers

I’m talking to Andy Field in a small cafe around the corner for Birmingham’s Art Museum; we’re discussing audiences and the positioning of theatre in a wider cultural apparatus where distribution is dominant. “Let’s acknowledge that we live in an age where a You Tube clip can be done in ten minutes and reach six million people in say, two months. Then the question that strikes me as most interesting about live performance- if we admit it’s never going to reach that many people, and that there are other ways to do that- is what’s important about being in a particular place and time.” In that sense, form is the most exciting thing, prompting an exploration of the immediacy and collectivity of the theatrical encounter. And the possibilities for conversation suddenly multiply.

To illustrate a point about audiences, Field draws me a diagram. There’s  an A4 white sheet of paper; half of it is then covered by another smaller sheet. On top of that there’s a coin. “You’ve got the whole world here”, he tells me pointing to the large sheet of paper “and within that people who know about and go to theatre here”, the smaller half that sits on top. “Within that, you might have people interested in experimental work, we’ll call it that for the time being”, he says pointing to the coin. “By the time you get there, your audience feels tiny not because it is, but because it’s a ghetto within a ghetto. There’s a potential for people to be fascinated by things that strike them as odd, and when you present your work in the context of a particular theatre ecology it might feel small, but it’s an interesting challenge to grow out of that.”

In the past three –five years, Forest Fringe have presented work across the map, from weekend-long residencies at the BAC to collaborations with Shunt, Latitude, where they are coming back this year with two evenings of theatrical parties, to a microfestival in Lisbon. “Things are shifting; it’s a moment of crisis and opportunity, and the societal modes we have at our disposal are changing. Networks are becoming important, and so is that fluidity. You can take a historic perspective and say that exciting things happen as a function of communities, out of the shared sense of moment and building upon each other’s ideas and practices.” Consequently it feels important for there to be structures in place that provide artists with opportunities to coalesce around an idea of space, but also allow for a sense of ownership that is beyond modes of presentation.

The non-institutional element of Forest Fringe is important. In its inception, and in its current proviso, it’s an artist-run collective. “It remains messy and transgressive enough that it feels retained by that group of artists to whom it belongs.” Field underlines that Forest Fringe started off in the context of Edinburgh not as a place but as an event, a point around which artists have located themselves. It’s a useful anchor, a locus of activity that also gives them freedom to be peripatetic. “After a point, an organization has its gravitational pool, you develop a centrifugal force which brings people together and it means artists inherently want to keep in touch. That is important because you know the moment at which you stop being useful; if the people don’t want it anymore then it falls apart.” Being displaced from its home in Edinburgh which is under threat of being bought over by Assembly, has given Forest Fringe more impetus to be nomadic. “It’s like that Woody Allen quote from Annie Hall. An organisation, much like a relationship, is a shark; it needs to keep moving otherwise it’s going to die. I don’t want Forest Fringe to be a dead shark.”

Afterthought: the day after

Thorpe points out that it’s important to be careful about “mythologizing something to the point where it feels exclusive. I don’t think Forest Fringe does that, it manages to keep a crucial openness.” There’s no lineage to trace on the work presented; Forest Fringe is an important cultural intervention because it’s constantly shape-shifting, curious about its future and keen to embrace new audiences and experiences whilst at the same time capitalizing on a formal play that attempts to return theatre to a meaningful live encounter sustainable outside commercial constraints and responsive to a changing context.

Hannah Arendt wrote that storytelling reveals meaning without committing to the error of defining it. This stands true for both the work that Forest Fringe makes visible, but also its structural framework. You can expect the unexpected; but there’s a more intricate cultural impetus behind that. There’s tenacity at play, in the way that Forest Fringe is a way to make visible a cross-section of theatre practice that can be both epic and intimate, challenging and subtle, whilst being resistant to the particularity of a context.

With the Gate residency, Thorpe, Field and Canham bring a changing hybrid to an institution that embraces international new writing. This is not necessarily resistant to the demands and expectations of that institution, but engages in a curatorial and formal dialogue that calls into question approaches to programming, but also exemplifies a way of introducing a series of questions into the framework of an evening. Curation as a form of distribution and presentation within the context of theatre and performance remains a process rather than a strategy. In that way, Forest Fringe feels like an open-ended conversation that wants to take a fraction of the future of a practice into its own hands.

Written for http://exeuntmagazine.com/author/diana-damian/.

We can think of performance as a frame for disclosure, as opposed to a space of representation. In cinema, we embody experience through the gaze, perceiving it as a unitary event mediated through the screen. This has certainly impacted on our understanding of spectatorship- we perceive the live encounter as external to us, despite its lack of containment. Just consider the extent to which practitioners have tried to challenge this boundary, and relocate us within the theatrical experience, as opposed to outside of it. Our relationship to performance is fragmented, displaced by collectivity and constrained by cultural assumptions. If, in Deleuze’s words, art “is not a matter or reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces”, why are we so concerned by labels as models of reduction of the experience of a performance? Does calling a piece of theatre ‘immersive’ suggest a particular mode of spectatorship? Liveness is not external, yet it seems that, in contemporary practice, the process of categorization of theatre and performance is constantly attempting to externalize and domesticate performance in all its manifestations.

The problem of labels and categories feels outdated at a time when hybrids provide far more space for discourse than the rigidity of traditional frameworks. This, in part, has to do with the fact that within contemporary culture, labels have come to limit our understandings of work instead of promote it, being the result of convoluted art histories and public misappropriations. Even more problematic is the fact that a significant area of contemporary performance culture is rendered literally invisible in the public realm simply due to the fact that discussions hide in various obscure sections of newspapers and blogs (inaccessible outside of specialized publications and niche sites), or are considered not relevant to aexisting frameworks.

If the art world has readily embraced live events, performance-based exhibitions, and interdisciplinary work, the theatre world has been far more reluctant to do so. The US has also been more open to these changes: publications like The Village Voice, New Yorker and even The New York Times attempt to cover a larger span of performance art in all its cross-disciplinary manifestations, and they dedicate a specific section of their publication for this purposes.

The question of just what distinguishes a work of theatre from a work of performance or the experimental from the avant-garde tends to get in the way of developing coherent ways of reading performance. Take, for example, the discussion stirred by Michael Billington’s recent overview of experimental theatre as part of his A-Z of Modern Drama. For one thing, the historical period being looked at is rendered unclear: Billington is providing a brief assessment of the contemporary experimental theatre landscape whilst referring precisely to modern readings of the field.

For Billington, experimental theatre has become apoliticized in contemporary culture: “what we are witnessing, I suspect, is the ‘institutionalisation’ of experiment in a way that minimises its threat.” He associates experimental theatre with developments in 20^thcentury performance culture that steered away from naturalism; his definition of what constitutes radical work, as that positioned outside of the ‘mainstream’, is problematic in relation to what’s going on in experimental theatre now. After all, we’re talking about a label whose meaning is displaced by contemporary associations and implications, not an immutable, quantified form of theatre. As Chris Goode explained in the comments that followed Billington’s piece: “how do we recognize the experimental, given that, (..) the very last thing ‘experimental’ can be is a description of a particular aesthetic.” Andy Field also responded by saying  that “talking of ‘experimental theatre’ is like trying to play a game in which everyone has their own very different set of rules and even the pitch itself is a palimpsest of contradictory markings.”

This isn’t merely a problem of definitions, it is a symptom of just how little attention mainstream criticism has paid to the development of performance as a field, and the implications this has on critical language itself. A similar problem was recently pointed out by Contemporary Performance Network pitching a discussion on exactly what industry giant Rose Lee Goldberg means when labelling Peforma11, a performance biennale she curates in New York, as “visual art performance”, a term eagerly appropriated by a New York Times journalist in her review of the biennale.

Indeed, what does visual art performance mean? For most people, absolutely nothing. That’s partly because it is a term attempting to displace authority into the hands of visual art, in regards to performance that is staged in galleries and museums. It’s both a sophism and a misrepresentation of performance in an attempt to carve out a clear context for discussion.  This brings forward the question of exactly how can we make a growing area of performance visible without being reductionist?

The main issue remains on how to question the constant interchangeability of terms like experimental, avant-garde, immersive, intimate etc; terms that only hold meaning in specific contexts and limit the possibilities of work to mean and exist in different contexts at the same time. It is impossible to ignore just how easy it is to kill off the discussion surrounding a production simply by the vagueness of its label. Antony Gormley and Hofesh Schechter’s piece Survivor which recently played at the Barbican Theatre was mostly reviewed in the Dance section of most newspapers, probably because Shechter is most known for his work as a choreographer. Yet the piece barely featured any dance. Likewise, where would you place, for example , Forest Fringe’s upcoming season of work at the Gate Theatre without denigrating the individual performances with some ill-informed label? Where would you put public projects such as Performance Matters?

Part of the problem I suspect lies with the lack of an appropriate language for theatre criticism to articulate discussions of these forms of work, which might explain why they are so absent from mainstream media. Perhaps there’s also the potency of discourses occurring within the fields themselves; for example, the brilliant work done by the Live Art Development Agency in attempting to publicize discourses on performance, collaborating with both artists and writers in thinking about appropriate methodologies (you can read their online publication In Time here ) .

Yet the discussion of genres, forms and categories should be one dominated by possibility and an openness to question contemporary understandings, seeking to recontextualize and challenge common doxa instead of supporting its vagueness.  If we consider work to not fit into standardized cultural frameworks, then we need to engage in a questioning of those frameworks.

In the past thirty years, the UK has seen a proliferation of performance through live events, exhibitions, festivals, community projects and interdisciplinary endeavours, formal collaborations that seek to relocate the performance paradigm in various sites whilst engaging in a wide range of cultural, social and economic dialogues.  Should we not try to venture outside common theatrical routes – and tropes – in order to render these manifestations more visible to the public?

Paper Cinema

BAC

Written for Exeunt

“Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. [...]Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them”  Homer’s Odyssey

There is something irrevocably ritualistic about Paper Cinema’s adaptation of Homer’s poem. It charts Odysseus’s epic journey home after the fall of Troy, across land and sea, through worlds both treacherous and vast. In its very form is inscribed a passion for oral storytelling, whose lyricism, irregularity and popular nature is translated into a multi-faceted experience. The focus on detail, the seeming lack of interest in linearity and the way they shift their gaze over different aspects of the story create a textured, nuanced and atmospheric production, one in keeping with the Odyssey’s own history. It is precisely the unevenness of Paper Cinema’s take on The Odyssey that makes it so engaging. In its use of visual language it manages to be both literary in its descriptiveness and theatrical in its form.

Paper Cinema tackle Homer’s epic through a combination of live drawing, image manipulation and a series of hand-made animations juxtaposed with live sound: both music and sound effects. The real-time nature of the piece means the audience are constantly engaged in the creative process as well as with the act of performance. The piece revolves around the screen on which the images are projected, yet the performers themselves are also on stage, framed by Michael Vale’s evocative set and Rob Walpole’s subtly atmospheric lighting, and the production works both as a piece of storytelling and as a piece of multimedia theatre, with considerable interaction between the stage and the screen.

If the narrative can feel, at times, patchy and uneven, this is countered by the immediacy of the experience and the atmosphere it creates. This is a piece that requires constant engagement from the viewer, one that creates a dialogue between its cinematic and theatrical languages. Caroline William’s understanding of the effects of movement in the manipulation of the images and Irena Stratieva and Nic Rawling’s precision allow them to convey nuances like depth and scale. At times this is to the detriment of the wider scope of the narrative, yet it is this focus on the minutiae of the story rather than its wider themes that also gives the piece its identity. This is certainly not an orthodox adaptation of Homer’s poem; it’s a production that focuses on the symbolism of journeying as a constant search for identity.

Their Odyssey specifically evades linear narrative in order to explore Homer’s poem in its cultural context, both current and historical. The piece takes the form of a journey, one not only of differing terrain, but of dreams and illusions too. The piece delves into the characters’ minds, into their nightmares, but it never gets too lost: it winks at the audience too, it cracks wise. It is most engaging when it remains confident in its aesthetic shifts, though at times it’s too reliant on the music to dictate its mood. The best moments are those of juxtaposition.

Paper Cinema’s Odyssey is a beautifully lyrical and human piece of storytelling; it delves in and out of its subject with skill and ease and a solid understanding of the relationship between the various theatrical languages at play. This is the company at its best: creating work that is explorative, atmospheric and vivid, translating the essence of a classical poem into a potent theatrical experience.

Roundhouse

Written for Exeunt

Staged as part of the London International Mime Festival, Fragments de Vie is a delicate performance piece that recalls a world forgotten by time, where natural elements – wood, fire, clay, earth – bring the protagonists – creatures constructed out of scraps of metal – to life. This is a folkloric world of labour, a Lilliputian world, more atmospheric than narrative-driven; it is a cabinet of curiosities that opens bit by bit, revealing the intricate mechanics of a beautifully constructed, if somewhat elusive, culture.

The piece is the result of a collaboration between three puppeteers, each with an expertise in a different area of work, be it dance or fine art, and this manifests itself in the performance which not only provides a powerful sensory experience through its smells, textures and aesthetic, but also in the way it makes interesting use of ritual. This is perhaps the most striking element of Fragments de Vie: the environment and language of the show are constructed through a series of rituals: be it the waiting in the anti-chamber to gaze at the puppets themselves, receiving a coin which then triggers the performance or the animation of each of the different moments of the show. There’s a curious focus on the rituals of labour in the piece: grain is being distributed, produced and transported, clothes are washed by the river, terrain is harvested; these are narratives stemming from the stories of the tools themselves, but given a new and intriguing life. The language of the show is constructed with a lot of attention for detail, and we’re engaged with this from the beginning. It’s as if our gaze participates in this process of animation, meeting every scene half-way.

The name of the company stands, in direct translation, for head of a pickaxe; indeed the characters in this cabinet all emerge out of old agricultural tools which puppeteer St Andre collected over the years. Considering their original function is respected in the design, and the making process is organic, not involving any welding or adhesive, these creatures hold their character in the delicate white clay face that St Andre has created. This means every protagonist has a strong sense of identity in its aesthetic and movement, thus able to convey not only age and gender, but also personality.

If, at times, the language of the show is too reliant on functionality of the objects, seldom making the internal logic of this world slightly flawed, this is certainly the danger of working with such specific objects within the constraints of their own world. The performance is, at times, too internalized, focused on the delicacy of its miniatures whilst forgetting the theatricality of its set-up. The puppeteers, dressed in full white like surgeons attempting to revive lost histories, are also our hosts, which mean we engage with their animation in different ways throughout the show. They dictate the spaces which we inhabit as audiences with surgical precision, but sometimes their involvement in this world remains unclear, particularly when they intervene directly in the workings of this cabinet of curiosities.

The piece is underpinned by a movement between the specific and the atmospheric,  recalling, as specified by St Andre herself, with the work of Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor. A theatre director and fine artist, Kantor was interested in conceptions of life onstage, often featuring actors and mannequins together, investigating the moment of death and its relationship to liveness. At times dark and indefinite, Fragments de Vie recalls the same interest in memory and plays with boundaries of liveness; after all, these objects are rescued from history in an attempt to bring them to life that can only be temporary. They are functional and human, dead and alive at the same time.

Fragments de Vie is a poetic and playful excursion into a folkloric world, recalling times past but also exploring our relationship to the natural, the essential and the memory of history itself. It is a magical world, if at times too internalized to communicate clearly, underpinned by a care for detail in both content and form, juggling the functionality with the delicacy of the objects and making the most of their relationship to the natural and the historical.

Written for Exeunt

Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari’s work in progress The Body contains an intriguing theatricality and a growing sense of unease underlined by a fragmented, episodic structure. It is intimate, funny and moving, but it also considers its form carefully, testing the boundaries of each scene in a quest for liveness and intimacy. The Body rests in a space that travels from eerie fictionality to emotional abstractions: it places the audience in a set of live encounters, each with a different politics of engagement yet all structured around different anatomies of the body.

The central concern of the piece is with modes of representation; it bravely dissects and fragments our relationship to the body as a visual and physical construct, but one mediated both by personal experience and external factors.  The intimacy of the performance space is toyed with, as the duo use its three-dimensionality to project and also create images, forcing us to see fractures of the body in an endless series of constructs: via memories, popular culture, scientific and emotional landscapes, fictional and abstract representations.

Barrett and Mari’s work is image-led, but it works with a distinctive aesthetic- they explore the meeting point between material and immaterial, but also dig deeper into the possibilities of the live moment. This performance uses a particular visual motif as emotional transaction: the doll, which from the onset gains a qualifier of unease. It’s such a static, lifeless object with the peculiar task of being a placeholder for a real person, or , in Nigel and Louise’s world, child. As such it’s a puppet waiting for its narrative, yet with a set of often disturbing (but humorous) features that give it a particular character from the onset- abstract, rather than physical, aural, rather than vocal.  Here the doll is at times object, character, case study and protagonist, but it’s also a mode for the audience to access the discourse on the body in the contexts which Nigel and Louise lay out.

The piece travels through a series of emotional landscapes; some of the scenes are reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer’s own experiments in materiality, placing dolls in juxtaposition with reality, but also playing on the show’s conceit at the same time. At others, we’re invited to consider our own relationship to identity and materiality, and at others we’re presented with explorations of different body parts, from the eyes and hands through to skin and bones.

Barrett and Mari’s work deliberately travels across disciplinary boundaries, and in this case, the accumulation of all the live encounters makes for a pensive, nuanced and insightful show that makes us reconsider how we perceive our body and our identity, but also links these emotions and thoughts into a relational landscape, juxtaposing them with memories both real and fictional. Just like the dolls, we are also objects and subjects in a performance. What Barrett and Mari manage to create is a landscape filled with atmosphere and perspective; they approach their subject matter with care and intelligence but also allow themselves to explore the nature of an event, to jump to conclusions and play with expectations.

At times, meaning feels imposed on certain scenes whose formal play doesn’t hold substance, and in that way, the audience is at times removed from the fragmented narrative. The sense of unease and the eeriness of the dolls is not always explored to its fullest; at times, you want them to make more of the creepiness of the dolls. Yet in every scene of The Body lies a theatrical potential, and it is particularly its fragmentariness, its use of props as characters and protagonists, but also our uneven relationship to the two performers that makes The Body a valuable exploration of perception in the context of our contemporary culture.

Almeida Theatre

Written for Exeunt

Director Bijan Sheibani has transported Lorca’s final play to modern day Iran. It’s an intriguing act of relocation. The political backdrop, with a Shah forced into exile amid brutally suppressed pro-democracy protests, is fittingly tumultuous given that Lorca would be killed in the Spanish Civil War only months after the play was completed. But Emily Mann’s new adaptation distinguishes itself in its evocative and poetic visual language rather than its socio-political commentary.

Lorca’s plays are defined by their desire to find duende - the soul of an experience – and by the way in which he explores the complex mechanics of domination through potent dualities: tradition and progress, the internal and the external, fragility and starkness. These dualities aren’t as overt in this version, but Mann’s adaptation has an atmospheric richness. Sheibani also introduces another stylistic layer – the Dashti song, a modal form of traditional Iranian music – that articulates the emotional life of the characters and the strength of will that feeds their passions.

Locked in the confines of a house with thick walls and covered windows at the peak of summer, Bernarda’s five daughters live in the shadow of their mother, a woman stiff as granite, cold and austere, tyrannical in her wish to preserve honour at any cost. Within the house, the daughters are subject to strong passions, desires and frustrations which sit in stark contrast with the stern sterility imposed by the mother.

Sheibani’s production manages to not only explore the quarrel between tradition and emancipation at the heart of this cross-section of Iranian women – the hijab is used both as a code and a symbol – but also to articulate Lorca’s metaphor of the house as a micro-community, with Bernarda as its figure of authority. Despite the precision of the direction, certain aspects of the play – particularly the more poetic, playful scenes – have been removed, which limits things both in terms of plot and scope; this is a production in need of strong dramaturgy. This cultural landscape could have been explored with more tenacity and detail and, at times, the production feels too constrained in its exploration of authority, too grounded in social realism to function on the poetic level that is so engrained in Lorca’s original.

It’s the aesthetics of the production that reclaims some of the play’s poetic nature; the end of every act takes the form of a photographic portrait. Visually dominated by black and white, these evoke the absent sense of duality: the struggle between good and evil, freedom and repression. The delicacy of these portraits is complimented by the sound that accompanies them. The production’s opening scene is one of its most powerful: a woman in a nightgown stands against a solid white wall, embracing the hijab as a flash bulb flares with the force of a thunderclap.

The performances are strong. Shohreh Aghdashloo, as Bernarda, is not so much imposing as immutable, dominating the space through her physical presence and the elegance of her mannerisms, bringing a level of complexity to an otherwise austere character. Hara Yannas makes a vigorous and energetic Adela, Amanda Hale is suitably tormented as Elmira and Jane Bertish gives a highly nuanced performance as Darya, Bernarda’s loyal servant.

This is, on many levels, a strong production and one that fully engages with Lorca’s theatricality. But in its pursuit of the socio-political, it sacrifices some of Lorca’s poetic muscularity and the specificity of its cultural landscape is ultimately limiting.

Written for Exeunt

Impermanence, the title of composer Othon’s recently released album, is defined as the property of not existing for indefinitely long durations. This is certainly true of the tonal explorations and atmospheric tensions of Othon’s music and Tomasini’s singing – together they carve out a landscape that travels from the baroque to the minimal, from the eerily atmospheric to the sensual, creating a space of suspension. For the duo, aesthetic considerations and the way the music is performed are as important as the music itself, and the liveness that defines their work translates into a complex theatricality, also reflected in their identities as artists.

Resting at the meeting point between performance and experimental music, Othon and singer/performer Tomasini bring pop to classical, romanticism to cabaret and highly refined classical musicianship with experiments in theatricality in what they call ‘death baroque’.

Produced by Natasha Davis, the launch of Impermanence took place as part Chelsea Theatre’s Sacred Festival 2011 and featured Laura Moody and Marc Almond.

DD: Your journeys into music and performance are rather unconventional and packed with learning experiences, but also a constant search for an artistic community and cultural context that can accommodate your identities as performers and musicians. Can you tell us about how you got to where you are now?

Othon: My musical education started at a really young age and by the time I was five I gave my first concert in Athens. I was introduced to the general director of the Hellenic Conservatoire soon after, who took me on as his personal student and generously  gave me pocket-money after each lesson, while refusing to take any payment! Subsequently, I became the protégé of the great Greek pianist and teacher, Maria Kanatsouli, who was to remain my tutor until I left Greece. Together we developed a really strong relationship and I underwent rigorous training- each lesson extended to three-four hours and I would often spend three hours each day practicing. I won national competitions, appeared on major TV channels and performed in a variety of concerts. At the prime age of sixteen I graduated with honours.

All these achievements did not mean much to me. I was expected to become a concert pianist and I was working hard, often out of habit and because of external pressure to do so. At the same time, the conservatism of the classical music world became increasingly apparent to me. I felt suppressed and I found this environment mediocre and hypocritical. My appearance became increasingly more “erratic”- I was one of the first youngsters in Athens to be covered in facial piercings, even when piercing studios were non-existent in the city. Clothes and hair were equally extravagant. This affected my relationship with the establishment, including my piano teacher.

All this made an escape from Greece look enticing; I came to England to study piano at the Royal College of Music, followed by studies at Birkbeck University and Trinity College. At Trinity I studied composition with some fantastic teachers like Andrew Poppy and Stephen Montague and won a scholarship and awards. The environment at Trinity was hugely inspiring and these years were pivotal to my development as an artist.

Tomasini: : I started as a cabaret entertainer on what is often described as ‘the wrong side of the tracks (southern Italian cabaret is closer to vaudeville than the British idea of cabaret). Soon after, via a fortuitous series of events, whilst still in my teens and with no formal training, I entered legitimate theatre through the main gates, working with some of my country’s top thespians. I wrote and performed my own (political/satirical) material in smoky nightclubs, whilst appearing in classics alongside established names of stage and screen. I attacked a bawdy song with the same dose of passion and commitment I poured into a Shakespeare sonnet. This became my personal leitmotiv. When I started creating my own shows in the UK, I was determined to devise a distinctive style that would be theatre and cabaret in equal measure.

I never searched for an artistic community and cultural context that could accommodate my identity, though. There have been times when I only aimed at bombarding people’s dogmas. I do my own thing, some people seem to like it and ask me to come and do it for (or with) them. This has taken me to avant-garde circuits, the West End, music, Hollywood, radio, classical and experimental theatre, puppetry, brothels, you name it…

DD: How do you define your individual styles?

O: PAN muzik or simply PAN. Pan means all in the Greek language and so, by using this term, I am lawfully entitled to use whatever style I want for any of my songs or musical works. Pan transcends all styles and limitations. Pan is also the Greek God of the wilderness and of revolt, of sexual pleasures and of human nature. I can relate perfectly to him.

T: The voices of all the ingénues I would love to be, the shenanigans of all the comedians I must have been, the fur coats I worship. I bring on stage an extension of myself and then bump and grind it. Sometimes it is a more quiet version of the ‘real’ me that gets up there: my performances with Othon & Tomasini are surely the most subdued thing I have ever done but even there you get glimpses of my past as a subversive clown.

DD: Where did the idea for Impermanence come from, Othon, and how do you see it in the wider timeline of your artistic development? What are some of its underlying themes?

O: I was doing a series of Tantric meditations in the nature of impermanence and that’s how the idea of the project came about. I had so many mixed feelings during that period: on one hand I was experiencing all the pain that comes from losing the things I loved most dearly and on the other I experienced the serenity that comes with the acceptance that this is the nature of life and “everything withers and everything dies”. Impermanence is mainly about overcoming and transforming.

DD: Theatricality is an important component of your work – how do you negotiate? What kind of theatricality are we talking about – is it a return to baroque, or a set of values to do with artistic identity in the public space?

O: There are theatrical elements for sure, but these elements come out effortlessly and organically through our complex personalities. In a sense, when we are on stage, we are hyper-real and a touch more expressive than we are in our daily lives. Ernesto for example IS Ernesto Tomasini on and offstage. It’s just that on stage he may wear stronger make-up than when he comes for a rehearsal, or be more of an entertainer, though I can assure you, he is equally intense during decadent chill-outs! I believe in the importance of being a performer on stage and all that this entails, in an old-fashioned sense perhaps.

T: It’s what I’ve done all my life. From my part there is absolutely no thinking behind it. I do what I can do and often I try new stuff, always keeping in mind the nature of the act. This seems to be working with what Othon does but we have never sat down and planned a specific “theatricality”. I would say it’s idiosyncratic!

DD: Let’s look to the people you perceive to be the movers and shakers of the classical fields that you’ve crossed with such deliberate verticality. Who do you think these people are? How do you believe a field of artistic practice can develop?

O: In order for an artistic practice to develop, there should be people who shake its very foundation; its written and unwritten laws and its dogmas. It is easy for artists to be ‘polite’, to do what is expected of them. This is the case especially with musicians and composers. Innovators are often celebrated during their later years or after their deaths, while during their lifetimes they live in poverty. Many of history’s greatest composers have indeed been great Lucifers (or light-bearers): from Mozart to Schönberg and from Eric Satie to Janis Christou. we lived and continue to live in the presence of their light!

T:The most influential mover and shaker in Othon & Tomasini’s life is definitely London. When I arrived, all I wanted was a room in Bloomsbury, with a view of the rooftops (crowded with chimney sweeps, of course) where I could consider myself at home. That’s exactly what I got and a lot more. London, with its secret hideaways and dramatic lights, has had a huge influence on these two Mediterranean boys and this boy in particular . After almost 20 years in the capital, it feels as if everything I do is an expression of my southern European upbringing, warped by exuberant amounts of tea. Othon and I are very particular about tea!

Among the many movers and shakers that have crossed my path I will mention one. He left us only last year and I don’t think he got the recognition that his talent surely deserved: Jack Birkett, also known as the Incredible Orlando. He went beyond innovation because no one else could do what he did. He was a galvanising actor, a heart-breaking singer and the only blind dancer that ever existed. The most beautifully eccentric theatrical bird of paradise that ever graced a stage. It is unsung heroes such as Jack who, through their uniquely daring perception of the world, push the arts forward in ways that affect me even more than the very well-known greatness of Giuseppe Verdi, Carmelo Bene, Ken Russell and the other giants I so much admire.

Ontroerend Goed
Soho Theatre

Written for British Theatre Guide

As we are taking our seats, a woman comes in centre stage to give us an informed overview of the general rules of theatrical conduct—from switching off our mobile phones to what we should do in case we want to leave the show or, even worse, come back in. “Yet this is interactive theatre” she tells us, “so you always have a choice”. As lights fade, a technician comes onstage with a camera, behind him a full height projection screen. We’re being filmed. And as we build a relationship with the camera—the protagonist, storyteller of this show—we enter in a conceit. This is not an experience reliant on surprise, but a carefully tailored one that embodies its interactivity in a proposition.

Given the controversy that has been imposed on it, Audience functions on a complex dramatic structure in which the actors—excellent in their duplicity and control—serve as guides to a game. The game is based on a binary—this is a piece of theatre, yet the audience is a real collective.

Audience is a show with a lot of composite parts: it challenges an audience to perform, it repeats instructions in surprisingly contradictory contexts, it simulates response, imbricates thoughts and forces responsibility. Simplicity of premise is not simplicity of thought—and Audience deserves credit for the way it translates its politics into theatrical mechanics. On the surface, it’s a cunning and at times overt game, yet in its structure it’s so self-aware that its constant winning in front of its provocations becomes highly expressive.

Audience is most powerful when it places something at stake—when the performance changes the context of our being there from a theatre audience to a political rally, for example, or when we’re surprised with a film of our entrance into the theatre. These subtle changes really transform our perspective of the collective we are part of, also placing these in a set of different narratives guided by both the camera and the actors.

Audience uses theatrical conventions to challenge social norms, and it does so in cunning manipulation that is laid out so transparently it constantly catches us off guard. It reflects not only on the fact that we are naturally selfish beings, but that we justify so much through false moralising. Ontroerend Goed challenges the assumption that a group has a coherent set of shared values, and proposes that in any encounter, the individual is absorbed by the group, and networked in the challenges of reactions to its context.

Audience is at times uneven and even timid. When we become spectators to a debate voicing our different thoughts on the ethics of a previous scene, we feel we’re part of a pretend discussion. At the same time, this is integral to the show—we feel more and more keen to discuss, and the opportunity is constantly removed. The lack of agency is challenging, but not always addressed in the best way. It is in the direct, live confrontations that the piece marks its most potent questions; at times it seems to get distracted by its own theatrical possibilities.

That being said, Audience provides many tools to reconsider and rethink our position as an individual in a series of politically, culturally, socially-mediated collectives. It is a highly expressive piece which never labels itself as controversial, and certainly doesn’t deserve the dismissive critical attention it’s received. Let’s not confuse our position towards the politics of the show with the quality of the show itself.

Sacred Season

Chelsea Theatre

Written for Exeunt

This new piece by Brazilian dance artist Thelma Bonavita, staged as part of Chelsea Theatre’s Sacred Festival, is both infectious and surreal. Eu Sou Uma Fruta Gogoia (or I am a Gogoia Fruit) reworks of elements of the Brazilian Tropicalia movement while exploring notions of cultural identity.

The Tropicalia movement had a significant effect on Brazilian culture in the 1960s. Bonavita points out its thirst for bringing different musical elements together as a reaction to the traditional forms of music that were dominant at the time. Tropicalia musicians combined rock, blues, folk and jazz from around the world with Latin American genres such as samba and bossa-nova to create a sound that represented freedom of expression. Given its universalism, this sound gained subversive cultural weight in the light of a repressive military dictatorship, and it is this which Bonavita is interested in.

The form of her performance reflects this eagerness to merge strands of popular culture together; Bonavita’s interest is less in the resulting aural collage and more in the use of the body to create an amalgam of images that explore contemporary Brazilian identity.

The show is divided into three parts, each taking its cues from the style of the Tropicalia movement. To the sounds of a Casio keyboard, with a range of wigs on her head, Bonavita addresses the audience.  ”You all right?” she asks. “Two plus two equals five.” The repetition of lines is structured and controlled; on top of this Bonavita introduces elements of Western popular culture, singing the lyrics from Queen’s ‘We are the Champions’ and smiling as she does so. It’s an awkwardly humorous scene that informs the tone of the whole performance.

For the second part of the show, she shuffles through a series of pre-recorded instructions and performs them in front of the audience. The props are carefully chosen: feathers, sparkles, wigs, plants, melons and other clichéd symbols of Brazilian identity. These are piled on top of each other in a seemingly random manner. Bonavita then leaps over the plants, sings a song, embodies a bird and repeats this sequence in various ways.

This is a reference to the avant-garde poetry movement poesia concreta that originated in Tropicalia and  which was less interested in content and far more in mixing forms to arrive at a new language. Through this surreal collection of jumps and songs, Bonavita aims to recreate this form of poetry through her own body. The result is both evocative and alienating, yet it is always underlined by a queasy humour. A wig flies around the performance space suspended by balloons, becoming a ‘character’ capable of interacting with both the audience and the performer.

It is the nature of the piece that clarity materializes in some images and not others. Formally, Bonavita’s show is very intriguing and successful in bringing contrasting popular culture elements together on stage. But there is an uncertain quality in Bonavita’s performance and she doesn’t always ground the work’s intentions. She doesn’t perform with the controlled grace of the trained dancer, nor does she allow for purely natural movements. When she embodies a bird, it’s neither fully a caricature nor a physical metaphor; an ambiguity that eventually becomes overwhelming. The subjectivity of the images is what makes them unclear.

Gogoia Fruit mixes personal and public politics, and Bonavita’s skill lies in allowing form and a carefully chosen set of props to create evocative images. In its trashy aesthetic and its constant invitation for the audience to interact, the piece asks potent questions about the way we construct cultural identities, and how we personally place ourselves in the resulting narrative.

Eat Your Heart Out

Riverside Studios
Written for Exeunt

Eat Your Hear Out’s first full-length show is an acute and sharp reflection on the contingencies of violence in our society. Violence is humorous and dark, cynical and positive, and behind these binaries it’s also a highly entertaining show that explores the full potential of popular forms such as cabaret and variety to critique and reflect.

Scottee and the rest of the misfits return to the stage shortly after their piece exploring the value of performance at Performance Matters’ Trashing Performance. As such, Violence is framed by Scottee’s deviant notion of ‘light art’, in which popular ‘light’ entertainment is paired up with ‘the discipline of live or performance art’; this isn’t a presumptive categorization, more a proposition for art that is acutely aware of both its value and lack of, one that is genuinely accessible and ‘the antidote to The X-Factor’.

On these terms, the production brings together a series of vignettes that explore different facets of violence: the social, the political, the personal and the public. Some more outspoken, others timid. Characters fight, there is virtual shooting, moments of operatic tragedy and some highly committed movement routines. And this wouldn’t be an EYHO show without a bit of glitter, a pair of red heels and a parade of surreal characters.

Violence is an underworld of curious explorations that delve into the different spaces where violence exists: the domestic, the public, the psychological and – in a more obtuse way – the virtual. We are greeted by a great video mash-up of the best and most illustrious Cameron speeches, walk in the steps of the young man who was murdered for the way he was walking, hear a letter of regret and listen to an intimate confession. In a mix of popular culture, recycled history and committed social critique, the show explores a variety of moments that paint an urban portrait of violence.  Underlying the show there’s also a potent exploration of sexuality and gender.

The most striking element of Violence is its distinct aesthetic, paired with its relentless quest to exhaust the meaning out of a moment. There’s rigour to the performance: all the members of the company wear the same black and white outfits and gothic make-up (reminiscent of Robert Wilson’s and Tom Waits’ The Black Rider) and the structure of the show, although seemingly loose, is very tightly constructed. Red is always the color that trashes the image – and it’s the deliberately obnoxious quality of these images that makes them work so well.

With such a committed and skilled company of performance artists – made up of Scottee, Dickie Beau, Myra Dubois, Miss Annabel Sings, Helen Noir, Masumi Tipsy, Nando Messias and Spencer Wood – every movement is a full physical and emotional commitment, and every gesture is carried accordingly, its meaning extended and flexed. Actions are repeated to the point of exhaustion, images are held and broken as we glide from the darkly serious to the humorously surreal.

It’s not always an even show, and sometimes scenes wander without arriving anywhere, but the variety of performers and the wide range of material is curated with skill, and makes for an atmospheric, curious and critical show. There’s a sense of urgency toViolence; its loud and scattergun attitude makes it easier for the audience to glide through and make of it what they will.