“Mess” by Caroline Horton

at Warwick Arts Centre, Tuesday 8th May 2013

Around a third of the way through Caroline Horton’s Mess, I realised I’d seen the show during a Triggered scratch night at Warwick Arts Centre last year. The form, tone and set-up had felt familiar since the show started, but I just put that down to both seeing Horton’s You’re Not Like the Other Girl Chrissy two years back and the style just being, well, familiar. Then, however, it clicked, as I figured out that I had seen it before, albeit in a more basic form. Instantly, I remembered loving it back in early 2012. Which perhaps goes some way to explaining why I couldn’t bring myself to love it this time.

Similarly, I’d heard a lot of talk about Mess at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe,

“Still Life” by Sue MacLaine

at Warwick Arts Centre, Saturday 4th May 2013

I see theatre which actually teaches me something less frequently than I’d like. Sue MacLaine’s Still Life, however, managed to do so this weekend, taking me through two personal revelations.

Revelation No. 1: I Can’t Draw

Having entered Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery and positioned the drawing board, paper and pencils I’d been given, a feeling of dread snuck in. I remembered those horrible afternoons at school when, hour after hour, I failed to use the simple tools of a pencil and a pad to render anything remotely life-like. But a small part of me believed that, with the passage of time, I had become a better artist without knowing it. Then, as MacLaine (previously sat in a robe, smiling at us as we entered) bared all and took her first pose, my hopes were dashed. Attempting to create something vaguely artistic, I ended up drawing what looks like a bad Picasso parody (apologies for the quality of the photo).

“Major Tom” by Victoria Melody

at Warwick Arts Centre, Tuesday 30th April 2013

I’m not a dog person.

They come in many shapes and sizes, but as far as I can tell all of them are one or more of the following: smelly, lumbering, yappy, excitable, dirty, cheeky or needy. Give me a cat any day of the week.*

For an hour earlier, however, I fell in love with a basset hound, a certain Major Tom. Lolloping around the stage during Victoria Melody’s solo show, he becomes more than just a dog. He’s one of us, and serves as a symbol for all the stupid things to which we as a species subject ourselves. Especially beauty pageants.

“AMUSEMENTS”

at Warwick Arts Centre, Saturday 27th April 2013

“None of this is real, of course“

Last year, when I saw Fuel Theatre’s Ring, I complained that it felt like a case of form over content, and that Glen Neath’s text did not quite match up to the brilliance of David Rosenberg’s concept. Though I’d still broadly stand by that, Sleepwalk Collective’s AMUSEMENTS has cast some light on why perhaps it didn’t work, and it may now be useful to reconfigure my thoughts on the matter. Both pieces, you see, ask audiences to place earphones over their heads so that they may play with questions of experience and utilise all the tools of an immersive sound design, which is used successfully by both SC and Fuel. I think my problem, however, lies in the fact that by putting lots of people in a room and aurally shutting them off to the world around them, what both companies do is create an individualised experience which shuns – to an extent – the theatrical context in which it takes place.

“Bitch Boxer” Re-Review

at Warwick Arts Centre, Tuesday 23rd April 2013

In the black box setting of the Warwick Arts Centre Studio, certain moments in Charlotte Josephine’s Bitch Boxer get highlighted more than they did when performed in the Underbelly venue at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer. At one point, our protagonist scatters colourful notes across the floor. Later, she streams out a long red handwrap and allows it to float to the floor. In a more neutral, inherently ‘theatrical’ space such as this, then, these gestures take on more currency, serving to accentuate the craftsmanship and counter the moments of raw emotion.

Performed by Josephine herself, Bitch Boxer tells the story of young boxer Chloe and the way she deals with the death of her father.

“The Animals and Children Took to the Streets”

at Warwick Arts Centre, Thursday 14th February 2013

It’ll be a long time before I see projection used in theatre as brilliantly as this again. More than any other show I’ve seen, 1927′s The Animals and Children Took to the Streets blends projection and theatre seamlessly, merging the two so that they support and interact with one another to find a gorgeous halfway point as each uses the other to better tell the story. Paul Barritt’s animation is the star of the show, as the production plays out in front of us and we’re never quite sure where reality lies.

Suzanne Andrade’s script is written and narrated in the style of a children’s story, but the content is far darker than the tone would suggest. In a dark, poverty-stricken area of a city lies the Bayou Mansions, a tenement block into which Agnes Eaves and her daughter Evie move. Agnes’ landlord falls in love with her and worships her from afar. Alongside the central story however, is a story of rebellion and revolt, as the children living in the Bayou “take to the streets” to vent their frustration at the world around them.

There’s an elegant simplicity in the set-up of the show, with one large flat centre stage and two smaller ones either side, all of which have small windows. Onto these flats is projected any number of settings and images, so that within an instant we can travel from a dream-world to a back-alley. They act, then, as panels in a comic book, and the style of Barritt’s animation reflects this (with references to Soviet propaganda thrown in, too).

What’s most remarkable, however, is not the animation itself, but the way in which the actors interact with it. At one moment, the landlord sweeps a broom as dust appears on the screen with each brush, and at another a cigarette is held up while smoke is projected onto the image. With brilliant timing, Agnes Eaves (one of the performers) and Evie Eaves (an animation) mimic one another’s body language and walk along scenes together.

As far as I can tell, the only source of light in the show is the projectors. This makes the whole endeavour all the more impressive considering that, in order for this to work, body-sized ‘holes’ have to be cut out of each frame of animation so that bright, uniform colours can be added in to light up actors’ faces. To this end, actors wear white, expressionistic face make-up, which both allows emotion to be more keenly rendered and adds to the strange, other-worldly theatricality of the piece.

The three performers (Sue Abbleby, Lewis Barfoot and Eleanor Buchan) play a range of roles between them, and each character is larger than life, keeping in line with the comic-book feel of the show. Music by Lillian Henley plays throughout, suggesting moments of pathos or humour without overpowering the whole thing. There’s much to love and to say about The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, but it’s difficult to convey it’s captivating charm in writing. As far as I can tell, the production continues its tour into the summer. Just get a ticket.

“Would Be Nice Though…” by Odd Comic

at Warwick Arts Centre, Saturday 2nd February 2013

Last week, I wrote a piece considering the theatricality of past and current exhibitions in the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre. I wasn’t aware then that Would Be Nice Though… would play with and challenge the dynamics of the space in a similar fashion to what I discussed. The piece, which is a cross between immersive theatre and performance art (if there is indeed a line between the two), is a charmingly witty and playful consideration of that most horrible of  experiences, the job interview.

As we enter, we are asked to sit in the ‘waiting area’, joining other equally clueless looking potential interviewees. One of our number pipes up “I didn’t know what to wear”, sparking a debate about what we should wear to job interviews. Some of us chip in. She somewhat absurdly tells us about the ‘life-jacket’ she is wearing (it is in fact a waistcoat) before suggesting we should take a label from the table which shall henceforth be our name (mine is ‘Knuckle Cruncher’). This blend of surreal humour and broken barriers between audience and performer runs throughout Would Be Nice Though…, and is the cause of most of its charm.

I was particularly taken by the fact that, for around the first fifteen minutes, we all seemed to be working out who the performers were and who was a fellow audience member. Soon, however, it becomes clear that Holly Bodmer and Dot Howard are going to take us on a wild and wacky journey through a job interview process, including a presentation, some team-building games and pitches. Interestingly, however, after all this talk about job interviews, we never actually meet anyone from the ‘company’, and no one-on-one discussion is every forthcoming. It is forever beyond reach, never swimming into vision; this is a piece about everything leading up to and following a job interview, but not the thing itself.

It is testament to Bodmer and Howard’s skills as performers that we join with them on every step of this journey, guiding them around the gallery when covered in a postal bag or playing along with their use of bread rolls in ‘role-play’ (I’ve literally only just got that joke). They are our guides but they are also one of us, laughing at one another’s jokes, improvising with us and, if anything, acting more naturally than we are (is that possible? I don’t know. I think you get the point).

Knowingly or not, Odd Comic are here making a theatrical comment about precarity, focussing on a more and more troubled job market and the socio-economic conditions which are the cause and result of that. The surrealist humour, it could be suggested, comes from an inability to understand this muddled, confused world, as many find it increasingly more difficult to secure jobs even though a few live in the laps of luxury; when faced with this utterly illogical world order, perhaps pretending waistcoats are life-jackets is the only logical response.

“Ubu Roi” by Alfred Jarry

at Warwick Arts Centre, Thursday 31st January 2013

I’ve seen more eyes gouged out with a tablespoon in the past two weeks than I think I have in the entirety of my life. First came the extraordinary torture scene in Dennis Kelly’s Utopia on Channel 4 (“Curry powder. Sand. Bleach. Spoon”), followed by a similar sight in Declan Donnellan’s masterful stage production of Ubu Roi (though this incident was also caught on camera). Images and moments like this are discovered frequently in this take on Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play, which takes the original and ramps up the grotesque humour to extreme levels.

Jarry’s play of the rise and fall of a tyrant is here embedded by Donnellan within a middle class setting, where all the characters are played by six members of a dinner party. The dinner scenes in the original take place in a completely different reality, though the anger and emotion of the wider plot-line is clearly felt below the surface nonetheless. What we are watching, it comes to pass, is the inner imaginative workings of the hosts’ son. Lampshades become crowns, whisks sceptres and brushes swords as the fourteen year-old boy pictures these gruesome and dark scenes.

So while this production gets across the usual points about tyranny and despotism, we are also spun a story about the effects of child neglect and the power of imagination. The son is barely even looked at by the five adults around him, forcing him into this violent, absurd world where dozens are murdered unblinkingly and eyes are ripped from skulls using spoons.

The way this shift in focus is achieved is twofold. Predictably enough, whenever we see the son’s thoughts a shift in lighting occurs (smoothly achieved by Pascal Noël), tearing us from the stifling neutrality of suburbia to his crazed imaginings. More interestingly, however, is the way in which we experience these scenes; a lot of the time, the son holds a video camera, illuminating his subjects eerily and projecting them onto a back screen for our entertainment. The set-up for this in the first 10 minutes (when barely anyone is on stage) sees what is ostensibly a live video link of him wandering around his house, chatting to his parents and scrutinising objects which will later become props. Though this opening initially feels a little drawn-out, its necessity becomes clear later in the evening, for this has primed us to experience the play through his eyes.

It’s difficult to say whether or not these violent imaginings are the cause of neglect, but there is a small problem here. This is clearly a wonderfully created and playful (though violent) world, but if he were to have been less neglected by his parents then that would probably no longer be the case. Are we to conclude then, that neglect actually leads to what is desirable – that is, play and imagination?

This is only something which has dawned on me in the time between seeing the show and now, however, for whilst watching the show it’s nigh-on impossible not to be seduced by the sheer joy and playfulness of the whole thing. We are treated to slapstick humour, Python-esque sketches and toilet humour all presented in a way which makes it clear a lot of fun is being had. By the end of the play, the set is left cluttered, messy and broken, a sterilised nightmare turned into an untidy idyll.

The switches between these two styles are embodied seamlessly by the performers, who hop back-and-forth between manic leaders and well-to-do socialites, allowing a lot of comedy to be found. In one wonderful moment, Camille Cayol’s Mère Ubu enters to ask if “anyone is allergic to pine nuts” slap bang in the middle of a mad torture scene, forcing the lights to come up and the civilised chat to return for a split second before the door slams shut again. Christophe Grégoire’s Père Ubu is like a wound-up coil, slowly building up tension before exploding at moments of extreme anger. Xavier Boiffier’s jolly Bordure is also impressive, managing to elicit laughter just by smiling goofily.

The danger with this take on the text could have been that the points being made about imagination and the parent-child relationship stifled the tyrannical musings of the original text. By focussing on notions of play, however, Donnellan and his team allow the two themes to inform one another, pushing and pulling to create a complex web of power and play.

Oh, and I don’t think there’s anything funnier than a man hitting his head on a door-frame.

Visual Art and Theatre

Untitled #162  (Aeneas Wilder)

Workplace (Adel Abidin, Emily Jacir, João Onofre, Superflex, Pilvi Takala, John Wood and Paul Harrison)

As I wandered round Aeneas Wilder’s Untitled #162 in Warwick Art Centre’s Mead Gallery last October, a few words which Wilder was speaking from a screen nearby caught my attention: “this is theatre” he said of his work, before explaining the ways in which his Jenga-style structures are bound up with notions of performativity.

Continuing to walk around Wilder’s work, then, this phrase continued to play in my mind. I entered the structure, which consisted of two large spaces and a central corridor (see image below). I stood in the middle of the second ‘room’. I looked around.

But how exactly was this performance. No one, not even the two stewards sat in their chairs, was watching me. And yet I was having a dialogue with the piece itself which expanded out beyond the fragile walls and into the room beyond.

For if drama is all about the tension between two opposing ideas, Untitled #162 certainly fits the remit. Experiencing the piece, I constantly struggled not to throw my hand out and send the whole unglued, unsupported sculpture crashing to the floor. Like theatre, however, this brings out the best in us; throughout the entirety of its tenure in the Mead Gallery, the piece remained intact.

Pretty much everyone I chatted to about the piece commented on the mirror effect created by the angled at which the slats are placed; walking around the room, you become convinced that the opposite wall is reflecting what you see in front of you. What’s striking about this is that, though part of your brain tells you you’re seeing something reflected, your conscious self knows this can’t be the case because you can’t see your own body. This illusion also likens Untitled #162 to theatre, where we go to “see ourselves” reflected even though we are never able to discern ourself exactly represented on stage.

Famously, Wilder ends his exhibitions with a “kick-down”, during which an audience gathers to watch him literally kick down the structure, seeing the bricks come tumbling down in a final cacophony of noise and destruction. This final act is inherently performative and is as much part of the work as the material object in front of us (“If Aeneas Wilder kicks down Untitled #162 and no one is around to see it, has he actually destroyed anything?” etc). The whole piece is based around tensions of watching and being watched, creating and destroying, death and rebirth.

This term, the Mead Gallery is curating Workplace, which exists mainly as a series of video installations and short films poking fun at and interrogating the idea of a 9-5 office job. One sees two middle-aged men duelling using fluorescent lighting tubes, whilst in another an eagle sits perched on a desk.

More interesting, however, is the Arts Centre’s invitation on its website:

“During Workplace, the Mead Gallery is encouraging visitors to use the gallery as their own workplace, to have working (and non-working) lunches in there and to make use of desks and meeting spaces that may be booked in advance for free. This is a unique opportunity to become part of the art and escape your own workplace for a while.”

I’ve been to see the exhibit twice. The first time, late at night, the gallery was practically empty and I enjoyed a quiet coffee on my own whilst wandering around the chairs and tables set out for meetings. The second time, however, the exhibition was far busier, with groups sat in huddles chatting admin and a few people sat at computers tapping away. What struck me here was the theatricality of everything which was going on; large gestures were being made by those sat in groups, and one girl sat at a computer kept looking up to see who was watching. People were clearly acting up due to the ‘audience’ around them.

How much, then is this real life, and how much constitutes ‘art’ within the confines of the exhibition? Just as with Untitled #162, the space between what we can seriously count as ‘real’ and what is ‘fiction’. I’d suggest that nothing in this space can truly exist in reality, for though the policies or ideas being discussed by work groups may have some real-world effect, they are taking place within a space which encourages performance and necessitates the participant to think in a different way. The leader of each group has actively elected to ‘perform’ their meeting for the rest of us, turning their reality into our theatre.

Untitled #162 and Workplace are not, on the surface of things, pieces about performance. They are ‘about’ fragility and work respectively. But within each of these notions the artists have managed to sculpt troughs where the residues of theatre can exist. All it takes is a little imagination and they erupt into explorations of how we perform.

“My Stories, Your Emails” by Ursula Martinez

at Warwick Arts Centre, Wednesday 5th December 2012

I’m rather enjoying Warwick Arts Centre’s feminist scheduling at the moment. Last month we had Vincent Dance Company’s poetic Motherland, and before that Mike Bartlett’s postmodern Medea. Now we’re treated to Ursula Martinez’ performance piece which demonstrates that, for all its use as a force for progress, the internet is a strange world where sexism has once again become okay. I doubt these three shows were intended as a feminist triptych, but seeing the debate become a priority again is refreshing when so many morons believe we now have equality.

Martinez became an internet hit (apparently, I wasn’t aware of this until seeing the show) a few years ago, when her striptease-cum-illusion act went viral. The piece sees her undress whilst repeatedly making a small red handkerchief disappear and reappear until the final twist. Even standing alone it’s an incredibly smart piece, which manages to say something about reality, burlesque and the female form.

Our only encounter with the piece in My Stories, Your Emails comes at the half-way point as the infamous video is projected onto a screen. Before that, Martinez has simply stood at a podium for about twenty minutes and read us stories from her life. They range from the absurd (“When I was eight I fed Space Dust to a cat”) to the morbid (an admission that her grandfather was having an affair with his wife’s sister for the entirety of their marriage), and each is intricately crafted with a punchline, straddling the line between tweet and joke. They serve the purpose of giving us a little insight into the performer’s life, though we’re painfully aware that even after this soul-baring, we still no next-to-nothing of our guide; after these snippets and thoughts, it would be wrong to come to any sort of judgement.

It is terrifying, then, that so many people (all male bar one) thought it okay to make judgements about Martinez after seeing her video online. In the second half of the show she reads out a selection of emails from her “fans” around the world, most of whom assumed she was some kind of sadomasochistic who wanted to engage in “sexy chats” online. Images are included with all of them, with one, “Big Eric”, sending photos of his “19cm penis” accompanied by an explanation that it “makes [him] hard thinking about all those people” seeing it. It’s both hilarious and disconcerting in equal measure, for, through all the laughter, there is a growing questioning of how, in any conceivable universe, this could be considered okay. It defies logic.

Through these emails, we are allowed a deep insight into a certain type of masculine psyche which believes that because a woman has performed an entirely unsexual routine without clothes it is okay to send her suggestive emails. The anonymity and distance provided by the internet proves that sexism is still alive and well, meaning we have a long way to go before we can kill it. At the end of the show (and I hope none of the aforementioned male emailers read this, for they might get too excited), Martinez bares all in a final demonstration of the fact her nudity has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with her as an individual.

My Stories, Your Emails is a hybrid of stand-up comedy, memoir and theatre, and achieves a certain elegance in its simplicity. It delights throughout but hits out at some unbelievably sexist attitudes still present in the twenty-first century. These ideas are never explicitly raised by Martinez, but her bravura performance questions how other humans can be so utterly barbaric in their interactions with other humans.