performance ~ marks

performancemarks has moved to a new address

2011-03-06T13:04:00.001Z

I am at last re-activating this blog at it its new address: www.performancemarks.com.
Click on the title above to find my new home
And Thank You for your interest....
mark

'white man's burden' at edinburgh, 19th august

2009-08-04T19:31:00.011+01:00

our show will be at edinburgh for one performance only as part of the Critical Incident Edinburgh day of events...
1700-1800, wednesday 19th august
at The Melting Pot, 5 Rose Street, Edinburgh
for full programme information and booking:
http://www.thecriticalincident.com/index.html

see also: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=111212391924&ref=share

created by mark trezona & martyn duffy

performed by mark trezona with the audience

soundscape by martyn duffy

video artist ~ vivienne harris

photography ~ tanya harris

graphic design ~ sue ridge

‘Preface’ to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads with a Few Other Poems performed by martyn duffy

Lt Col Tim Collins’ Our Business Now Is North address to his troops performed by vivienne harris

Rudyard Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden performed by jasper harris and rosa harris

Mark Doty’s Citizens performed by mark trezona

Barack Obama’s 2009 Inauguration Address performed by himself

alchemy aspires to make rich experience out of the ingredients

of live performance & audience memory and imagination.

alchemy tries to make exceptional experience happen

in the space where performance and audience combine.

alchemy is the performance~making wing of

BridgeBuilders STG Ltd., who create learning that aims

to help build a world of happier people who thrive on change

and inspire the people around them.

Programme Notes from Critical Incident Brighton 2009

Yoko Ono’s 1965 action Cut Piece, in which she sat motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing, inspires this performance.

Our performance began as a protest against the collusion and lack of responsibility for the damage and destruction that continues to be perpetuated by white men in suits. Two hundred years ago William Wordsworth wrote his fears of a new urban, industrial society's mass media and mass culture threatening to blunt the human mind's "discriminatory powers" and to "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor”. And look at us now…But our ‘white man in a suit’ must also bear our own culpability:the ‘suit’ we are giving to the audience to cut is a presence caught inside the tensions of our time, between the generalised certainties of what our media and our own biases might have us believe and the more complex ambiguous personal realities of individual men, their intentions and their actions. For this reason we have set our re-imagining of Ono’s original performance standing, rather than sitting, and inside a soundscape of alpha-male voices: ~Barack Obama stepping up to the Presidency, ~the newly resigned Speaker of the House of Commons, ~bankers and Lords passing blame back and forth, ~Rudyard Kipling and Lt Col Tim Collins’ rallying calls to duty, ~ Mark Doty, a gay poet trying to live well through road rage in New York city. These voices have been chosen for their contemporary immediacy and contradictions: hope and catastrophe, new possibility and irredeemable ruin, wonder and terror.

What began with identity has become all about burden: the onerous burden on Barack Obama’s shoulders of all that responsibility and all our hopes, cut through with the loaded expectation to ‘stand up and be a man’; the weight of ‘America’ in our lives and of Doty’s held rage, cut through with the burdens of citizenship and the civil responsibilitywe all bear and the media bears as a public service; the oppressiveness / oppression of western male domination, still deadly in his smart 21st century suit of apparent liberalism,still owning and wielding and maintaining power, cut through with recognition that surface appearances must always be deceptive, and individual men can want and do good things.

To all of this -and all the other things a man in a suit can mean - we offer to the audience to cut.And it is their coming up on the stage that makes the performance itself, and determines how much this is a show of destruction and/or creation.In this performance we are asking: what happens when we offer a man in a suit to an audience to cut? The answers are up to the people in the room on the day...

brighton, 19th may 2009

5 ***** review of this performance from Chris Hislop, fringe review

http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3101.html

a huge thank you to our very creative audience for making this show with us such an exceptional experience.

we're looking for a way to make the show in london now - watch this space as they say...

footage of yoko ono's original 'cut piece' in a video presentation of her work

'gravity sucks' - simon faithfull @ bfi southbank gallery

2009-08-04T17:00:00.003+01:00

a completely delightful whimsical exhibition that reminded us of the same irrepressible will to flight that we saw in anca & alex's goldsmiths show.

*** Bobby Baker's Diary Drawings: mental illness and me, 1997-2008

2009-08-04T14:28:00.006+01:00

at Wellcome Collection

stunning wonderful potent enlightening rich funny appalling extraordinary exceptional exhibition

'jerusalem' by jez butterworth (w. mark rylance)

2009-07-31T14:19:00.005+01:00

JERWOOD THEATRE DOWNSTAIRS

The Royal Court Theatre presents...

Jerusalem

Written by Jez Butterworth

10 Jul - 15 Aug

"My dad said he jumped buses. Horseboxes. Jumped an aqueduct once. He was gonna jump Stonehenge but the council put a stop to it."

On St George's Day, the morning of the local county fair, Johnny Byron, local waster and modern day Pied Piper, is a wanted man. The council officials want to serve him an eviction notice, his children want their dad to take them to the fair, Troy Whitworth wants to give him a serious kicking and a motley crew of mates want his ample supply of drugs and alcohol.

Jez Butterworth's new play is a comic, contemporary vision of life in our green and pleasant land. His previous plays for the Royal Court include The Winterling, The Night Heron andMojo.

Director Ian Rickson
Designer Ultz
Lighting Mimi Jordan Sherin
Sound Ian Dickinson for Autograph
Composer Stephen Warbeck

Cast includes Jessica Barden, Tom Brooke, Greg Burridge, Lewis Coppen, Mackenzie Crook, Alan David, Aimeé-Ffion Edwards, Lenny Harvey, Gerard Horan, Danny Kirrane, Charlotte Mills, Lucy Montgomery, Sarah Moyle, Dan Poole, Harvey Robinson, Mark Rylance, Barry Sloane

Running time 3hrs 10mins approx, including 2 intervals

We walk in to see a fire curtain showing a faded grubby St George's cross.

A strip of real park turf along the front littered with beer cars Vodka bottles and plastic bags. A couple of stumps - an empty beer glass on one - and a tin water tank.

Or the left a pile of firewood - its neatness in incongruous contrast to the dirty mess around it. and beside it an abandoned old car seat

Vaughan Williams’ 'The Lark Ascending' swells and soars.

The smell of smoke.

15 year old Phaedre comes on dressed as a fairy and sings 2 verses of Jerusalem before being drowned out by loud pounding rock music

The Curtain rises on a party in full swing seen through strobe lighting.

Blackout

Lights up bright on two community liaison officers official in safety yellow waistcoats surveying the debris and then serving eviction notice from the Council on Rooster and his old silver metal Waterloo caravan. This despite the amplified dog noises Rooster is yelling through his loud hailer

From the first moment of his entrance we are held mesmerised watching him cast his spells over his court of motley youngsters left over from the party - and Ginger who has managed to miss it -and then the locals who are pulled in to his rubbishy drug & alcohol banked camp: the local professor who will wander through and enjoy the Fair day in their company tripping on the acid tabs they've slipped him; the landlord of Cooper 's pub festooned in full Morris Dancer bells and handkerchiefs for the village Fair and who needs to get high for the day to do it; the local bully boy looking for his missing daughter - the 15yr old Phaedre - and promising violence when he finds her.

And Rooster drinks and charms and swaggers and spins his yarns and weaves his magic on us all.

The second act reminds even move of a modern day Falstaff, enveloping his followers with tales of daring and fairytale and drugs and alcohol.

Then the arrival of a little boy Markey - Rooster's son - in place of the giant that might have been summoned by the drum - and his mother who is still caught in her appetite for Rooster and for his whizz despite now having a new man waiting.

Then the third act with the inevitable ostracising and street justice for Rooster before he is left to meet the official justice of the evicting bulldozer, bloodied, branded but defiantly unbowed.

The girls are vacuous and more thinly drawn than the boys and this is very much a play about men with no interest in the women beyond their relations with the main man Rooster and sometimes to other men. Ah me, it was ever thus but this is a frustrating weakness in a play called 'Jerusalem' and aspiring to give us an updated portrayal of England's pleasant pastures green turned unholy in small town small scale corruption. And while it is very funny, a number of the laughs sounded brutal to me - more the collusion of a mob at an easy weakling than the delighted sparkle of sprung enlightenment.

There is nothing especially new in this story. But it's enormous charisma and potency comes from the writing and performance of Johnny "Rooster" Byron. Mark Rylance shows us a man who is mesmerising complex funny frightened fantastical and fierce. He is Falstaff in all his vainglorious boasting, he is Don Juan purring the women into helpless devotion, he is Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the misunderstood outsider, the sensitive friend, the disgusting drunk, the mischievous prankster, the amoral dealer and the brawling thug.

And throughout this three+ hours the balance is held dangerously tight between a recognisably malevolent reality of small town low life and an heroic poetic sweep of the noble epic - pitching the misunderstood and much maligned hero against a world of contemporary monsters.

Great theatre.

So long as you don’t care about the invisibility of the women.

eonnagata

2009-06-26T09:50:00.006+01:00

conceived and performed by

Sylvie Guillem, Robert Lepage, Russell Maliphant

Sadlers Wells in association with Ex Machina & Sylvie Guillem

Lighting Designer ~ Michael Hulls

Costume Designer ~ Alexander McQueen

Sound Designer - Jean-Sebastien Cote

Due to phenomenal demand for tickets during its world premiere season at Sadler's Wells earlier in 2009, Eonnagata returns for a limited run.

This brand new Sadler's Wells production brings together three of the world's foremost creative minds: internationally acclaimed dancer Sylvie Guillem, world-renowned theatre-maker Robert Lepage and award-winning choreographer Russell Maliphant.

Eonnagata tells the story of the Chevalier d'Éon, Charles de Beaumont - diplomat, writer, swordsman and a member of the King's Secret, a network of spies under the control of Louis XV. De Beaumont was perhaps the first spy to use transvestitism in the furtherance of his duties and until the day he died his true gender was a source of constant speculation, even provoking public bets in the late 18th century.

"The alchemist of modern imagistic theatre, Robert Lepage is one of the most challenging and chimeric directors of our time" THE GUARDIAN

For this remarkable collaboration, Guillem, Lepage andMaliphant draw not only from their respective backgrounds, but also from the ancient Kabuki technique of Onnegata - in which male actors portray female roles in an extremely stylised fashion.

The elaborate costumes of Louis XV's court will be evoked by legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen, complemented by stunning lighting from Michael Hulls.

mostly dreadful - i haven't been so bored or cross in a theatre for a very long time.

1. Le Page swinging tin foil swords

2. Guillem telling us the whole Chevalier d'Eon story

3. Maliphant emerging from a giant geisha

4. Long boring bit skidding over tables to Bach

5. Fan dance with Empress of Russia with a large red fan and singing up from bass profundo to soprano shrilling

6. Fighting with a feather quill to a coarse poem & then writing with a sword to her mother then the old lady appears out of the table

7. Twirling sticks

8. Calico shadow show

9. Nice story from "Plarto who we call Plato" about original species with both genders two heads & double arms & legs til Zeus decides to literally cut us down to more manageable size - in half like an apple - and ever since we've been looking for our other half

10. Fighting with ring & stick

11. Short guillotine sequence with a skull head

12. Mirror tables including two tops with one mirrored bottom

13. Post-mortem under a swinging neon light

Lots of great ingredients that never quite manage to come together into anything very wonderful. The costumes are so exquisite and the lighting so visceral it often feels like watching an extra esoteric fashion show. The sound too is great and often dominant & rich enough to satisfy for itself.

there are moments that hold but the narrative interest is pierced by hearing the full story at the start, the spectacle of the scenography is insufficiently spectacular, and the performances are too often too lack-lustre and ordinary to hold so that I was actually bored through several sequences. And in the end it all just didn't add up to much more than very expensive looking flummery.

A sad story of how many talents can end up cancelling each other out.

'a little night music' (stephen sondheim) ~ meinier chocolate factory @ garrick theatre

2009-06-18T16:38:00.000+01:00

Clear clean simple and utterly engaging from the bare set with one chair we walk into see (echoed with outside chair at start of second half), the simple design ideas - black costumes, interiors in first half in town, white costumes and mostly outdoor scenes for second half in country. The show puts all its trust in its raw materials: the writing, the music (made by a tiny quintet), its songs and its actors. The sense of shadows and memory whispers through it with the quintet chorus of Missuses & Misters singing through the younger rememberances and providing a perpetual observation of the foolish love tangles of the protagonists (the programme notes point out the repeated use Sondheim has made of outside observation in his shows). So the words all arrive with an easy freshness and potency and - like the Jude Law Hamlet - gives us a world and its people who make complete sense - merely the slightest lift rather than any great leap of faith needed to enter here.

Maureen Lipman's grande old courtesan is a masterclass in less-is-more timing and energy: everything she says arrives in your lap for your enjoyment perfectly formed and still very much alive, and even the familiar lines sound newly spoken. Around her central imperious stillness, the rest of the company convince and pull us lightly through their stories, even though this is wholeheartedly theatrical: all the characters sing directly out to us (again in much the same form as the Hamlet soliloquies) and the period grandness and highly coloured romanticism of the story are all exquisitely shown so we are never being duped into thinking this is real life, but we are able to float easily inside it like we might through music - simultaneously conscious and unconscious of its artfulness.

It is funny and beautiful and poignant and wistful. And sweetly irrelevant except for two moments of great sadness in 'Every Day A Little Death' and 'Send In The Clowns' (which we understood literally for the first time: when there's been an accident at the circus like a fall from the trapeze, the clowns get sent on).

Lovely birthday treat.

'Kursk' (Sound&Fury) @ Young Vic

2009-06-18T13:38:00.006+01:00

A Young Vic and Fuel co-production, Sound&Fury's

Kursk

In collaboration with Bryony Lavery

Commissioned by the Junction, Cambridge

3 June - 27 June 2009

A powerful theatrical experience inspired by the Russian submarine disaster of August 2000.

A submarine is on patrol in the arctic. The crew sleep, eat, drill, long for word from home, and silently shadow their target. Their lives, at once extraordinary and mundane, are shattered by a global crisis from which uniquely personal stories emerge.

Cutting edge theatre company Sound&Fury (The Watery Part of the World) join Bryony Lavery (Frozen) to imagine the life of submariners, deep below the icy seas on the fraying front line of the cold war.

http://www.soundandfury.org.uk/

We walk in upstairs on to a metal walkway galley, looking down into low-light submarine spaces on raised platforms - (easily recognisable from films) - the technology of the bridge, the glowing screens of the control room, the captain's office, the mess, the head with a shower room and bunks. We have the choice of staying up and looking down on the action, or going down to experience it inside the space: after exploring downstairs we make the happy choice to watch from above and so avoid any of the claustrophobia panics i was steeling myself for.

We get a clearly told mostly unembellished telling of the sinking of the Kursk, Russia's state-of-the-art 21st century submarine from the viewpoint of a spying british sub crew who photograph her moments before the explosion that quickly sinks her. The secrecy of their presence prevents the captain from making any rescue attempt that would potentially set off an international furore. Inside this are the routines of submarine seamanship and the human back-stories of the crewmen.

There is much right with this show and it is pretty successful in its aim to avoid sensationalising the story - for me it was still over-acted and would have easily sustained a more neutral restrained portrayal of the men. This is banality made super-engaging because of the atmospheric danger of the space and the inherent suspense building out of the narrative of the mission. In fact the star of this show is the submarine environment and at every level: visually it is an easy leap of faith to believe we are inside the submarine; kinaesthetically we traded down a bit exchanging cramped and crowded disorientation for the air, distance and comfort of our upstairs position, which gave me the enjoyment of immersion simultaneously with awareness of being in a theatre. But it is the sound we are here for and the sonic dimension is the one that magics the space beyond the literal. I would have liked even more amplification to charge this up into an even more felt experience even at the expense of the accuracy Sound&Fury were wanting, and i would have liked a more constant sound so that even the silences were filled with the noise of submarine existence. But beyond these niggles there are some wonderful experiences inside this show. The atmospheric sounds are utterly convincing (to someone who can only imagine what a submarine is like from films) as are the dynamic sounds like the search (periscope) that we're pretty sure are on a soundscape the actors have had to learn to perform on cue to. The women's voices of wives and girlfriends arriving through the familygrams are scored together as music that counterpoints with the pop music loudspeakered into their before they are forced into stealth mission silence. It is the sounds that create the imagined real sense of the dives, the crash into a stray ship container, and the spooky threat of the unidentifiable tapping noise. All good and makes for highly believable and engaging docu-drama. The moments of exceptional experience come when the sounds are given centre stage: in a nearly complete blackout we hear sounds of water in an echoing chamber, people struggling to breathe, russian men talking - the sounds of the Kursk crewmen dying puts us inside this moment with them, first the emotions catch and tumble, then the mind whirls and stumbles, the breathing starts to race and just as I am feeling the panic of a breaching collision of sensations the lights return and the moment is left as an imprint. We could easily and potently sustained some time here in our own heads, watching the men routinely carry out their duties in a mute overlay of all that's been stopped in the Kursk. But the story in our sub continues and we are forced to surface to attend to the more immediate specifics of one man's tragedy - and in this we are given the space to bring our own sense in to mix with what we are watching.

This is a good show for us, and ready to be an exceptional one if it can have more development (although the men of Sound&Fury seem busy busy with other projects) now that its first five years of making have solved the problems of sightlines, design, soundscape and narrative accuracy. Waiting to be found now is the fine-tuning in the balance between elements to transcend a damn good docu-drama into a heightened theatre experience. For me the next work would be to tune down the acting into greyer performances, which the show can easily support, and tune up the sonics to make a more visceral experience.

Unless, of course, this is what the audience downstairs in the main submarine spaces are getting already, and we lost by swapping the intensity of being inside the story with the men for easier and more removed watching from above and outside?

Sound & Fury is directed by Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner and Dan Jones. It draws on the disciplines of theatre, Foley artistry, sound design, music and storytelling. Its key artistic interest is in developing the sound space of theatre and presenting new ways of experiencing theatre and stories by heightening the aural sense. To achieve these aims, Sound & Fury has, in the past, boldly immersed its audience in total darkness. This unique theatrical device combined with sophisticated surround sound design, imaginative acoustic devices, voice and subtle lighting effects creates a powerful new language for theatre which has gained the attention and interest of the media, critics and - most importantly - a new audience. Their work has been twice selected for an Arts Council UK tour billed as the future of British theatre and has been included by the British Council in its group of touring companies. The Guardian has described their performance style as: “Total theatre that doesn't just happen all around you, but that swallows you up completely ... you feel as if you are experiencing the whole thing through your skin.”

From The Times

June 1, 2009

Theatrical realism in Kursk

The sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk has inspired a bold experiment in theatrical realism

Jasper Rees

Theatre is capable of taking its audience more or less anywhere merely through word and action and the odd prop. Even for the most imagination-stretching of art forms, however, life on board a submarine might be deemed a bridge too far. It’s been memorably done on film — the one that submariners all swear by is Das Boot rather than The Hunt for Red October. But how can theatre fully convey the cabin fever, the mental bends, the chronic uncertainty of the submerged life at sea?

Audiences for a new play at the Young Vic will be taking what is perhaps the first, and certainly the most realistic, theatrical dive to the ocean depths. Kursk takes place in the Maria, the box-like studio space where, as closely as possible, the interior of a hunter-killer submarine has been replicated in pipes, platforms, wires and blinking lights. Authenticity will be conveyed above all in the disembodied roar and hiss, growls and grunts both made and heard by the gigantic listening device that is a sub.

The title of the play gives at least some of the story away. It tells of the horrific death in 2000 of 118 Russian seamen aboard a stricken nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea. The majority of them died soon after an on-board explosion, but 23 survived in an airtight part of the cabin for several days while President Putin refused to let Nato come to the rescue.

The argument of the play is that Nato was very much in a position to help. The Russian Navy was testing new weapons systems and showing them off to the Chinese. At least two US submarines are known to have been watching closely. The supposition of Kursk is that a British submarine is also in the neighbourhood, and it is the one that picks up the aural evidence of distress. But as its commander of this sub (on which the play is set) says: “We’re an attack vessel, not a f***ing lifeboat.”

Kursk is a collaboration between the theatre company Sound & Fury, which specialises in surround-sound designs of cinematic scope, and the playwright Bryony Lavery. They were first teamed four years ago by a funding initiative that pairs young companies with established writers. Staging a submarine drama appealed to all. For Lavery the lure was “the claustrophobia of the space”. For Dan Jones, of Sound & Fury, it was putting on stage “the extraordinary mind game of submarining combined with the absurdity of the submariner’s domestic life: making tea alongside a nuclear reactor”.

For a while they toyed with setting the drama on the Kursk itself. The most bizarre ideas for realising the human tragedy were tested and discarded: the Kursk as a nightmare vision of Chekhovian stasis; the disaster as dramatised by clowns. “It became clear that normal life at sea is so extraordinary,” explains Mark Espiner, of Sound & Fury, “that we were going to miss a trick if we didn’t actually use that as a benchmark against which to set the disaster. There was the potential for voyeurism. Also, how are you ever actually going to get the idea of what the last 23 survivors of the Kursk were dealing with?”

Had a wackier idea prevailed, it’s very unlikely that the production would have had such enthusiastic support from the Royal Navy. Among the play’s consultants is the chairman of the international submariners association, who happened to meet the Kursk’s crew in St Petersburg not long before she sailed. A former Polaris commander who now runs the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport also advised, as did an ex-coxswain who was serving at the time of the disaster.

One adviser even ended up in the cast. Ian Ashpitel is a submariner turned actor who to this day lists reading Morse code at 25 words a minute on his CV. As a radio operator on a submarine at the height of the Cold War, he is full of tales of every hue: from breaking through the ice to play cricket at the North Pole to sneaking into Murmansk harbour to spy on a new Soviet aircraft carrier from ten metres under its keel. It may seem a strange career leap, but not to Ashpitel. “You don’t see daylight for 12 weeks and start doing things like putting raincoats on and umbrellas up, pretending it’s a rainy day. ‘Morning, terrible weather.’ Silly stuff. Watching TV programmes that aren’t there.” So it was but a step into the rehearsal room.

As part of their preparation, a visit to HMS Devonport was laid on. Jones took along his microphone to capture authentic sounds, while the five actors had a go on a simulator that fakes the sensation of a 60 degree dive. They also went aboard a real sub to get a feel for the actual cramped space. “It was like the first time you go to New York,” Lavery says. “You’ve seen it on film. It’s strangely alike but completely different”. For Ashpitel it was an unwelcome trip down memory lane. “I hadn’t been down one for 28 years and after ten minutes I thought: ‘I’ve got to get out of here’.”

The idea is to reproduce that oppressive intimacy. It’s a promenade production, so the audience will be able to wander under the conning tower and loiter outside the karzi. By coincidence, a full house will tally numerically with the hundred-plus seamen aboard a nuclear sub. Naturally there’s no interval. It will be a unique mark of the play’s success if by the end they are all desperate to get out.

Kursk previews at the Young Vic, London SE1 (020-7922 7922), from Wed and opens on June 8

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. @ ICA

2009-06-17T15:06:00.004+01:00

ICA 17 Jun - 23 Aug 2009

http://www.ica.org.uk/Poor%20Old%20Tired%20Horse+19863.twl

Exhibiting artists: Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Anna Barham, Matthew Brannon, Henri Chopin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alasdair Gray, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Karl Holmqvist, Dom Sylvester Houédard, Janice Kerbel, Christopher Knowles, Ferdinand Kriwet,Liliane Lijn, Robert Smithson, Frances Stark and Sue Tompkins.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. takes an expansive look at text-based art practices, inspired by the concrete poetry movement of the 60s which explored both the literary and graphic potential of language.

The Scottish artist and writer Ian Hamilton Finlay was an important promoter of concrete poetry in Britain, and our exhibition takes its title from the periodical that he ran from 1962 to 1968. Other figures here linked with concrete poetry include Henri Chopin, Liliane Lijn, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Ferdinand Kriwet.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. allows the viewer to look afresh at a range of other text-based practices that originated in the 60s and 70s. Robert Smithson and Carl Andre are best known for their contributions to minimalist sculpture, and Vito Acconci for his performance work, but here they are represented by poetic and expressive works on paper. The exhibition also includes poems illuminated by Philip Guston and Alasdair Gray, typewriter works by outsider artist Christopher Knowles and a set of etchings by David Hockney inspired by Greek poet CP Cavafy.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. concludes with the work of a number of younger artists. Sue Tompkins, Janice Kerbel and Anna Barham are all represented by text-based pieces, including a film by Barham in which letters are assembled and disassembled by hand. Other artists explore the combination of text and image, including Matthew Brannon and Frances Stark, while Karl Holmqvist is represented by a wall of xeroxed poems and images from his Oneloveworld book. galleries: free: Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. is curated by Mark Sladen, ICA director of exhibitions. It is accompanied by issue two of Roland, the magazine of the ICA's visual art programme.

Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. features a number of special events including gallery talks and a night of experimental poetry. The second issue of Roland magazine is also now available in the gallery and online with a guide to the exhibition, essays and more. On this website you can find also guide a guide to the artists in P.O.T.H., a gallery of images from the exhibition and an annotated guide to further resources and websites.

Downstairs:

Visceral. Immersive. Falling inside the words. Looking for words inside words. circular words.

To know it is to cut it (or similar - need to check this on return visit)

The typewritten witness report of a shooting written in vertical jangled innocence until it messes itself in confession then returns to vertical re-attempt to make a steady story.

Upstairs:

Hockney's articulation of gay coupledom told through images. Posters being what they said - magnificent feats.

Performance poetry using voice to lay bare contemporary song lyrics - Grace Jones 'Capital Cannibal'.

Another typewritten text that made you feel your way inside to find its sense - literally going inside the story.

A picture made from a piece of Samuel Beckett writing about 'the soil of my father and my mother and my father's father and my mother's mother and my father's mother and my mother's father ...'

jude law as 'hamlet' - donmar west end at wyndam's

2009-06-02T00:16:00.004+01:00

Creative Team

Director: Michael Grandage
Designer: Christopher Oram
Lighting Designer: Neil Austin
Composer & Sound Designer: Adam Cork

Hamlet: Jude Law

Polonius: Ron Cook

Claudius: Kevin R. McNally

Gertrude: Penelope Wilton

very still & clean & clear putting all emphasis on language

jude law's Hamlet works as a character easy to feel sympathy with as he processes through depression ~ denial ~ fury ~ impetuous tenderness with his mother ~ to cool well-bred alpha-mastery. He is always credible but never dangerous.

Fresh insight comes in the 'get thee to nunnery'' scene when it suddenly seems obvious that he is saying to Ophelia everything he has repressed saying to his mother, and this makes his avowed love for Ophelia at her graveside more believable than usual.

Ron Cook's Polonius is fine. Penelope Wilton's Gertrude manages to shine through her horrible business woman's woman's suit costume. Kevin R. McNally's Claudius too is crafted with sureness. Sadly the younger leads are all thin, and most ruinously thin vocally. Ophelia's mad scene was too pretty and much much too prettily sung (Tara Fitzgerald is still the only actor i have been convinced by in this scene).

There is no ambiguity and no emotional force in this version and I drifted out a number of times - not so much from boredom as through distraction: the fullest experience this show gave me came from Shakespeare's words, here are given a full invigoration so that the vitality of the words and the images they conjure combined with the wide openness of the space design and the held still energy and focus in the performances kept making a head full of rich imaginings that took me away from what was happening on stage.

And what emerges above all else is the apparent straight-forwardness of Hamlet - the character makes perfect sense and it is hard after watching this show to remember why or how countless essays have been written about his bewildering complexities. In this end this reduces the play to a series of stills and a more prosaic domestic drama than it should be.

i will go back and watch again peter brook's 'hamlet' with adrian lester and try and figure out why the held energy in this startles and vibrates even out of the screen, whereas the apparently same kind of energy in this production arrives clear and fully formed and then evaporates almost without trace...

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso - Romeo Castellucci

2009-04-04T12:51:00.018+01:00

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

Romeo Castellucci

Societas Raffaello Sanzio

http://www.raffaellosanzio.org/

Spill Festival 2009

http://www.spillfestival.com/index.php?plid=4

at Barbican Theatre

Presented as three separate events – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, Romeo Castellucci has dismantled, exposed and transformed Dante’s epic text into a truly lived experience.
Using a profoundly visual style, Castellucci creates a deeply unsettling world forcing you into a hauntingly beautiful nightmare, engaging all your senses in an experience you are unlikely to forget. This is highly visceral theatre, full of provocative experiences not for the faint-hearted.

Inferno traditionally tells the epic tale of a struggle between heaven and hell, between God and the devil and between the living and the dead. Castellucci transports this story to the here and now, placing into question the future of humanity.

Depicting images of family life, Purgatorio is uncomfortably set in a fraught domestic space where the use of vivid imagination protects against a tormenting reality.
In an intimate installation, Paradiso creates the ultimate frame where small groups of viewers are sent on a journey to try and find paradise.
Credits:
Direction, set design, lighting and costumes by Romeo Castellucci
Original music by Scott Gibbons
Choreography by Cindy Van Acker and Romeo Castellucci

The work of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is considered by artists and audiences worldwide to be highly influential in contemporary performance. Having created a new non-narrative theatre, a visual language that directly challenges traditional forms, Castellucci’s visionary work is uncompromising and always surprising. Making impressive large-scale work that questions our entire human condition, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso has a company of over 60.

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has previously been presented in London as part of LIFT; Tragedia Endogonidia at Laban (2004), Genesi at Sadler’s Wells (2001) and Giulio Cesare at Southbank Centre (1999), also at Battersea Arts Centre withBuchettino (2001).

Having been performed as part of the Festival D’Avignon 2008, this is the UK premiere of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (bite09 SPILL Festival of Performance) and one of the few opportunities to see the complete trilogy performed together.

Inferno

"Inferno" with each of these digits displayed back-to-front

gatewaying out to us: it is us who are in this hell. each united

letter is spluttering white light and soundscape of electrical

shorting and buzzing is loud and abrasive.

throughout this piece the sound provides its centre moving

through dangerous electrical sounds and loud noises of

violence to choral sweetness.

one by one each of the "Inferno" units are removed leaving

only the framing " " which remain for the duration at each

side of the stage.

Romeo Castellucci comes on stage, announces who he is

and is dressed in protective soft armour as eight large

alsatian dogs are brought on and and chained across the

front of the stage. loud barking offstage and by the dogs

in front of us. one by one three dogs run on to the stage

an attack Romeo, holding on to him. we have to take the

image of aggression and animal attack while filtering out

the happy tail wagging by the dogs.

a large black cube slowing arrives in the centre of the stage,

a huge black sail billowing above it. the black drapes are

pulled up to reveal a cubed crèche of toddlers happily encased

and playing.

Andy Warhol walks slowly on with a polaroid, takes a picture of

us, turns to look at the children, turns back to us and slowly

falls in on himself.

The children are re-covered and removed, a shiny skull is left

behind which Andy Warhol takes and places beneath a huge

mirrored swinging wall, which lowers slowly on to break it like

a nut.

A boy with a basketball, each bounce amplified to terrifying

sounds, a sense of something else behind him

A great sea of people with their different coloured clothes

slowly pout across the stage, fall down and wash as one

mass backwards while differently aged individuals step

forward to hold the ball replacing the boy at the front. the

final older woman appears to greedily eat the ball

accompanied by sickening sounds of gluttonous eating.

And so it drifts through a series of images, always slowed

and certain and seemingly endless:

a series of loving tableaux replaced later by a series of

mimed throat slashings, the slow climb one by one on to

the returned black cube, then the arms spread wide in

some sort of universal supplication only to fall backwards,

again and again, backgrounded by a projected list of

Andy Warhol's works with their dates, a back projection

of the names of deceased members of Societas that

seemed sentimentally discordant with the rest of the piece,

a grand piano is set alight and we watch it burn

a white horse the arrives as the sea of people are rewound

slowly back from whence they came to then be poured

over with vivid red blood.

and then the return of Andy Warhol to take another

polaroid of us and then to disappear into the wreck of

a smashed car.

somehow while it is all interesting enough the

accumulative effect is of a scenographic hypermarket

with the chance to view what's hot in this season's range

- a bit too look at me look at me. but a treat for all

that to get theatre this different from our more

usual literary plays...

Purgatorio

Paradiso

after a long queue we are let in to the space to see a huge

dazzlingly white cube structure, a small entrance in one

corner into another smaller white light cubed space,

around black hole entrance into darkness. inside this final

space is first the sound of falling water and as eyes adjust

we can see we are in a larger black space with a waterfall

cascading down the back wall. there are other sounds too

and looking up we see the naked upper torso of a man at

the top of the waterfall apparently struggling - to free

himself? to communicate? - evidently unhappy and caught

in this perpetuity, and yet dangerously precarious suspended

above this black waterfall: misery in his stuckedness but were

he to get himself free the drop would destroy him.

this is an apparently small piece but absolutely perfectly formed

- the fusion of image and sound burn a permanent imprint so

that - unusually for me - i can still easily re-summon up the

remembered pictures days afterwards. this is a vision of life

ever after that is oppressive in its small stuck foreverness,

somehow all the more plausible for its absence of fire and

brimstone or colour and movement. a superbly realised perhaps

even heightened by our having to make a special trip to the

barbican and queue for some time for this 5minute moment.

*** Kinkan Shonen + Toki (Sankai Juku)

2009-03-22T22:24:00.006Z

19 November 2008

Kinkan Shonen (Kumquat Seed)

23 November 2008

Toki (Time)

Sankai Juku

Direction, Choreography and Design ~~~~~~~~~~ Ushio Amagatsu

Dancers

Ushio Amagatsu (toki)

Semimaru (toki)

Sho Takeuchi

Akhito Ichihara

Taiyo Tochiaki

Ichiro Haseqawa

Dai Matsuoka

Nobuyoshi Asai

Sadlers Wells

http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Sankai-Juku

A soldier - he comes towards us - salutes - eats sand - grins eats sand again - grins again - eats sand

Four men in long skirts and masks of artful disfigurement dance together - their hands are huge and sometimes claws - then they are entwined together almost loving - then they are a gyrating diagonal line - now they are still gyrating bare bottoms in our faces - sexy rude funny subversive

A man and a peacock locked together face to beak come towards us - slow - they are one entity - then they are two separates dancing together - then they are man and ornamental bird the cock perched on his back - then they are apart: the dancer sinuously moving the bird still and watching - he will stay present for the rest of the show

Then another three dancers arrive so we are given a couple a single man and a man and a peacock - near naked the couple show us fighters wrestlers determined and cruel then increasingly tender until they are lovers - the single two men find each other and become a couple - counterpointing fighting with the other couple's loving and vice versa

A dancer comes on squashed into a small box version of himself - his face widely pleased and comic

A near-naked man hangs upside down slowly turning from a golden kite triangle of against vivid blue….

intoxicating
mesmerising
transcendental
breathtaking
moving ….

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/SankaiJuku?authkey=Gv1sRgCKaouu-v1MK8-gE##

Faure' Requiem (Bradenburg Sinfonia & Whitehall Choir)

2009-03-21T09:18:00.003Z

Faure' Requiem at St Martin the Fields

wonderful treat in the newly refurbished st martin in the fields with its fabulous new window

as well as the requiem, the two other highlights were the Cantique de Jean Racine (Faure') and the Air (Andante religioso) from the Holberg Suite (Greig)

'madame de sade'

2009-03-17T00:04:00.006Z

Comtesse de Saint-Fond ~~~~~~~ Frances Barber

Baronesse de Simaine ~~~~~~~~~ Deborah Findlay

Charlotte ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jenny Galloway

Madame de Montreuil ~~~~~~~~~ Judi Dench

Anne ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Fiona Button

Renee, Madame de Sade ~~~~~~~ Rosamund Pike

Director ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Michale Grandage

Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Christopher Oram

Lighting Designer ~~~~~~~~~~~ Neil Austin

Composer & Sound Designer ~~~~ Adam Cork

Video Art & Projection Designer ~ Lorna Heavy

Act I

1772 The salon in Madame de Montreuil's house. Autumn.

Act 2

1778 The same. September.

Act 3

1790 The same. April, nine months sonce the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A difficult play - intellectual in its preponderance of words, ideas, argument - and wonderful for this, and for bringing us something non-naturalistic and this good in the west end. Annoying that a lot of the critics seem incapable of reviewing the actual piece rather than trotting out their different lists of what theatre should be as if a) their tastes are that authoritative and b) that theatre should be just one thing. (e.g. Susannah Clapp’s requirement for ‘fast pace’, and ‘women to be like women’ whatever that might mean.)

So this is an expressionist piece much closer to Brechtian theatre than the usual naturalistic fare. Played against an opulent gold-walled salon that shines and reflects wealth and purposelessness
Lighting, colours (browns to greens to icy metallic blues) and projections are used expressionistically. Played out between six articulate certain women who all arrive in impossibly ornate and heavy architectural concoctions to position themselves to present their views of the matter and who all easily breach the confines of their character types.

The women arrive and place themselves and are mostly still - Frances Barber's character getting the only real action from her whip play. All are strong and full in their characters, and listening to them reason and debate their different certainties from such fine actors who all bring such total presence makes the show compelling. And the substance of the piece is made stark and unremitting by the absolute absence of editorial comment - there are no easy indulgences of knowing who or what is right or wrong here: hear the arguments and make up your own mind. Listening to what is said in the onslaught of words is as problematic as the Marquis de Sade himself - overly ornamental sex & violations or philosophical testings on the nature of devotion? The inevitable decay of an aristocracy redolent with its own pointlessness or a new libertarian emancipation? Salacious gossip-mongering or high-minded argument?

This is a show of dense & relentless words counterbalanced by performances of crystal clarity and vibrating stillness masquerading as a richly made flummery of period opulence.

Mishima apparently wanted to make something that showed 'fire through ice', and to a greater extent this is what we get: the burning passions and pulsations of craving control are in every case perfectly glazed in icy stillness and religiously constructed manners.

And difficult in a personal sense perhaps in its investigation of a woman under the ruinous spell of a potently toxic man, not unlike a woman I know. And actually in this case (too?) it turns out not to be him she is so fettered to, but her own construction of him as a symbol of holiness which his actual presence could only shatter ...

cf. Chrstopher Harts's Sunday Times review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article5934217.ece

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/MadameDeSade?authkey=Gv1sRgCKr55vPEm6WJqgE#

'fall of the peacock throne' (wildbird)

2009-03-12T01:02:00.006Z

Wildbird presents
Fall of the Peacock Throne
by Chris Lee
Southwark Playhouse
http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/whatson_detail.php?record_number=114
March 5th 2009 - March 28th 2009
Show starts: 7.30pm
Running time: 100mins

Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross

Creative Team
Directed by - Chris Lee
Multimedia - Graeme Roger
Sound Design - Dave Martin
Lighting Design - Ali Ross
http://www.wildbird.org.uk/

Innovative new Highland theatre company, Wildbird, presents the world premiere of Fall of the Peacock Throne.
Raymond Chandler meets Greek tragedy in this political thriller charting the story of the 1953 Iranian coup alongside that of Alexander’s invasion of Persia in 333BC.
Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution the play depicts the moment when fledging Iranian democracy was strangled at birth in favour of British oil interests and US cold war strategy. This is one of the biggest skeletons in the western closet and the root cause of the so-called ‘war on terror’, a defining event that lies at the heart of western fear of the Islamic world.
Intimate in its design and execution, but epic in reach, Fall of the Peacock Throne tackles issues of conscience, empire, freedom, and power. This is a story everyone should know, whose timeless echoes thunder in our ears, demanding to be heard.
Wildbird are a new contemporary performance and multi arts company from Moray in the north east of Scotland. The artistic team was originally brought together to work on National Theatre of Scotland’s Crucible and Macbeth projects and formed Wildbird in 2006. Wildbird set out to make work that is epic, political and truly theatrical, tackling difficult and important subjects. Fall of the Peacock Throne is their second full length theatre production.

We walk into a hazy disorientating space cut through with laser beams. A projection says Tehran 1953 and when this simple sign is multiplied around the walls and the great vaulted brick ceiling we feel like we are not just getting information but inhabiting Tehran 1953. After this the film & lighting effects are more cosmetic diversions than integrated into the performance.

Athena arrives as the chorus - supplying narration, commentary and with us witness to the dual stories of opposing powers - FBI man Kermit Roosevelt vs. Mossadeq and Alexander vs. Darius in a much earlier coup. Athena is given power to apparently manipulate too - both by incitement to violent domination and in her apparent arrangements of battles. A pity then that the only female character has to be such a stereotypical sex symbol.

The play is mostly words and there are a lot of them. It seems amateur in the old fashioned sense of people doing it because they cared altho unfortunately the acting has too much of an amateurish quality and needed a much stronger performance style - more in the Brechtian mould and less or much better focused naturalism. But you sense great integrity in the writing- we trusted the material and the ethics that come with it. And it is most certainly a story that wants telling.

Playing it traverse does not harm it at all, but it didn’t add anything either: the adversarial tension of the two opposing forces wasn't revealed any more sharply in this stand-off spatial arrangement in the ways it was used so effectively in scotland thing and russian one.
The show remains Earthbound by perhaps too much stuff and too many words and probably too little distance by its writer to fully make the performance soar. But the material is good enough to easily imagine another director or company with greater objective distance giving it fuller flight.

Post Show Talk with Chris Lee
Script a combination of real stuff and stuff I've written
Also cf. 'Counter Coup' by Kermit Roosevelt

This coup was the first prototype american coup -there have been 36 since then

Iran was riddled with MI6 at this time, the British had only recently been kicked out

One of the things I wanted to explore living is Aberdeenshire where most families are employed by BP The most important thing I wanted you to get was that Mossadeq stayed true to his principles

For the last decade most plays seem to be about two people or stage talking about their feelings but I don’t get out to theatre much

I wanted to look at the idea of power - power as a moral force. But also about leadership. But also it’s about empire as well. And also to address the issue that our politicians stand up and say one thing but do another and lie about it.

Meant to make it feel like a film noi with Athena as femme fatale
The battle scene film from Cecil B de Mille's ‘Ten Commandments’

Inspiration was wanting to say something about the Iraq war. And I’ve known Ali since I was born and l wanted to honour that. Wrote the first bits in 2000. and its the 3Oth anniversary of the revolution this year. If you didn't know this story you could be fooled into fighting a war thinking it was ‘a just war’.

For these things to be done and then swept under the carpet isn't right so we need to tell stories about it.

Churchill’s memo to Eisenhower: ‘After we've got rid of Mossadeq I won't touch your oil in Saudi Arabia if you don't touch mine in Iraq’.
Mossadeq’s last speech 'They will say about me...’ are all things they did say about him in the commons.

'La Ronde' (The Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre of Tbilisi)

2009-01-03T12:56:00.003Z

'La Ronde'
by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Levan Tsuladze
In Georgian with a live English translation
The Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre of Tbilisi
at Arcola
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/?action=showtemplate&sid=327

Tsuladze last charmed London audiences with his production of Faust as part of the Gate Theatre’s East Meets West Festival in 2002. Here he makes a bold interpretation of Schniztler's classic, employing his particular brand of satirical humour and warmth to convey the absurd tragedy of an indulgence in loveless sexuality.
This production is the latest in a series of Georgian Theatrical pieces that have had enormous impact on British audiences. The Georgian tradition is renowned for its inventiveness and romanticism. In a reaction perhaps to the tumultuous history of Georgia from its recent confrontation with Russia to the civil war of the 90s, Soviet oppression and two hundred years of sitting at an important international crossroads, Georgians really do know how to find humour in our crazy capacity to needlessly and repeatedly inflict pain upon ourselves. Rarely bleak, this production exudes warmth and a profound sense of humanity and will amuse and delight in equal measure.

this was such a treat of pure joyous exquisitely crafted theatre by this expert Georgian company. the levels were too low to hear a lot of the the simultaneous translation being overdubbed in microphones by two voice actors sitting to one side and having their own little interplay, but the physical performances were so clear that it was easy to read what what happening in the dance from loveless coupling to the next. the period costumes looked especially lush and expensive in the knocked back (and knocked up) set which of black panels which would slide on a rail to reveal the bare and perfect essentials of a new scene, superbly illuminated: the rain for the prostitute and the soldier to play in, the set of doorways to view the parade of strolling people, the bath for the young gentleman and the maid, the enormous brass bed for the young gentleman and the wife, the chaise longue for the wife and the husband (with the soldier at their window), the artist's studio for the writer and the young miss, the dressing room for the actress and the count. and a motif of butterflies seen only by those in moments of feeling free and happy: the prostitute and the count in a great flock of them at the end.

my only gripe was the space - our first visit to Arcola and it's quite a schlep (home at 1am) and for this setting the sight lines were appalling so a lot of us sitting in the middle missed whole characters obscured by the central iron beam, and nothing was visible at ground level (and as this was a show about people having sex there was quite a lot of that!)

'August: Osage County' by Tracy Letts

2009-01-01T15:14:00.012Z

August: Osage County
National Theatre presents Steppenwolf’s production
http://www.steppenwolf.org/
by Tracy Letts
Broadway's biggest hit comes to London for 8 weeks only.

-->Cast credits:
Little Charles : Ian Barford
Steve Heidebrecht : Gary Cole
Violet Weston : Deanna Dunagan
Johnna Monevata : Kimberly Guerrero
Karen Weston : Mariann Mayberry
Barbara Fordham : Amy Morton
Ivy Weston : Sally Murphy
Charlie Aiken : Paul Vincent O'Connor
Bill Fordham : Jeff Perry
Jean Fordham : Molly Ranson
Mattie Fay Aiken : Rondi Reed
Beverly Weston : Chelcie Ross
Sheriff Deon Gilbeau : Troy West
Production credits:
Director: Anna D Shapiro
Set Designer: Todd Rosenthal
Costume Designer: Ana Kuzmanic
Lighting Designer: Ann G Wrightson
Music: David Singer
Fights: Chuck Coyl
Sound Designer: Richard Woodbury
at Lyttleton, RNT

When the large Weston family unexpectedly reunites in Oklahoma, after their father disappears, their home explodes in a maelstrom of repressed truths and unsettling secrets. This new play unflinchingly – and uproariously – exposes the dark side of the Midwestern American family.
The internationally renowned Steppenwolf Company, last seen at the National Theatre with The Grapes of Wrath, returns to London with this Broadway smash-hit production, winner of the 2008 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for Best Play.

this is is a difficult show and a difficult show for me to chronicle my experience of: there is much to admire and it is completely engaging from start to finish, and yet i hung back through most of it, held firmly in place as a witness rather than being drawn in to the action or stirred emotionally at all by these people and their crashing stories. It is like watching a world - a microcosm of america we suppose - collapse in on itself. and finding it has no substance at its centre to either smash itself against or rekindle itself from, we watch it simply disappear into its own vacuum with less and less debris left behind to show what was once there.
one by one we watch each of the family members bring their own self-consumed versions of unhappy self-righteousness rage into the this claustrophobic house to thrash and wail about. None of them are entirely unlikeable, all are recognisable to us from our television and film stories and the constant ghosts of williams, albee, o'neil. Their stories, as in most families, are inescapably woven together in an increasingly mucky soup of interdependencies and stored up wrongs. And in this play it is the women who are shown to be the matter: Violet the drug addled matriarch, brewing her spells of vicious poisons around the rest of the family; her sister, Mattie Fay, stewing her own guilty secret into an unreasonably but determined rage at her bumbling son; Barbara, number one daughter, hissing her fury and hurt at not being able to keep intact the better family life she had thought to have determined for herself; Ivy, number two daughter, screeching and stamping and screening her independence into the most unholy of alliances with Little Charles; Karen, number three daughter, festooning her west coast foolishness as ludicrously brittle and transparent drapery to her repetitive victimhood; and Barbara's daughter, Jean, stoned and precociously unaffected, even by her own near rape. even Johnna, hired to be of service to family by the checking-out patriarch, while fulfilling her function with charm and efficiency, is unable to raise her own needs as a person above her need for a job.

so far so not so good but in a good way.

and the world we are shown is one where there are no longer any moral consequences - whatever people do, whatever rules, codes, behavioural ethics are trashed and transgressed, the only consequences that register are the immediately personal. so, Violet's drug-taking is only 'wrong' in the consequential effects this has on her behaviour (it's a joke she is able to blackmail doctors into writing her prescriptions); Ivy's incest is only 'wrong' when it has to be faced up to in conversation; 14 year old Jean's dope smoking goes uncensored; Bill's adultery is only measured in terms of the hurt it makes to Barbara and Jean; Steve's sexual harassment of Jean is allowed to go unchecked by police or any other possibility of retribution. this is a world where behaviour exists beyond or outside any moral coding, held up for notice or judgement only when and in terms of its infringement on what other people want or are stopped from having.

still so far so good - both as portrayal of the domestic secular story in our post-modern western world, as much as a dystopic state of the nation view of america.

but in this dissolute decaying fizzing petri dish of a species gone beyond its purpose or possibilities, the women are treated to the basest of cheap jokes and stereotypes. in a household of highly-read highly-educated people, we get the ghastly old horrors of 'you look like a lesbian', a medley of vagina-word sniggers (from the daughters); and barely more than a brief interruption in proceedings in response to Jean's molestation by the seedy Steve. and this is wrong in a very bad way. because i think for this show to matter beyond the moment of its happening in the theatre, we need to accept that these women are their own constructions made of and from themselves. just as we need to see their world as the mutually dependent dysfunctional system they have created for themselves (cf. albee's george and martha; cf. dysfunctional relationships we have known and watched ...), so too do we need to believe these women are self-made and self-perpetuated. and i do not: they are men in women's clothing. i think both watching it and now thinking back on it, i cannot accept these women as anything other than a man's creation, his pieces in an elaborate domestic computer game, where all the characters are inevitably variations of the creator.

and this is misogynism in a most destructively veiled way.

above and beyond this, the best of the show is the staging together with the acting which is fierce and forced through with an absolute intensity of single mindedness, so that all the characters arrive onstage fully fleshed. they then disappear from our view without carrying with them a hint of future story to wonder about: again like a computer game, they are all only manifest while they are deployed as competitors in action before us.

'this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
not with a bang but a whimper' (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

Read an extract from the programme. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/42706/programme-extracts/programme-extract-for-emaugust-osage-countyem.html

Read in the Guardian how August: Osage County will be made into a film by the Weinstein brothers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/11/theatre-tracy-letts-august-osage-county-weinstein-company-broadway
Read Tracy Lett's interview in the Telegraph where he talks about his experience with August: Osage County. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3563234/August-Osage-County%2C-the-first-great-American-play-of-the-century.html

Twelfth Night ~ Donmar West End

2008-12-08T23:49:00.004Z

Twelfth Night

http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl84.html

nicely lit in summer at the seaside

as is often the case, the unholy mess of Toby, Mary, Aguecheek, Feste and Malvolio were the highlights

not sure why this production was made - nice and good and perfectly formed and pretty and clear and easy - a sort of posh panto for the season perhaps

***Audio Forensics @ I M T + Electra

2008-12-01T15:42:00.018Z

Audio Forensics
MA in Sound Arts graduate show
University of the Arts : London College of Communication
Venue: I M T,
Unit 2/210 Cambridge Heath Road,London, E2 9NQ

Contact: 020 8980 5475 (for booking)

Comprising of ambitious works by nine artists who employ sound as the principle media of their practice, Audio Forensics demonstrates the breadth of engagement with sound in the arts, and how it can be re-evaluated in the context of an increasingly noisy world.
Sound art encompasses a wide range of forms and concerns and has its precedence across many creative fields, yet, as these artists demonstrate, the acknowledgment of sound’s significance in the arts is becoming of greater importance as technologies develop, and as the public become ever more aware of the interactions between sound, space and artistic practice.
Audio Forensics provides an extraordinarily comprehensive inquiry into how sound, and its manipulation, influences our experience and understanding of our environment.Audio Forensics is an exhibition and symposium presenting the final work of the first MA Sound Arts graduates of London College of Communication. The groundbreaking work in the exhibition demonstrates the high level of critical debate in sonic disciplines fostered by the university’s Department of Sound Art and Design since 1998.
The exhibition is co-curated by Electra and IMT

Artists & Exhibits:

Libero Colimberti ~ Frame 2008
Short film (7mins)
A sound film installed in the bathroom and projected backwards through various reflections on to tiles, walls and ceiling showing a digital clock countdown from 7.00.00mins and subtitles of what is being heard - sometimes in the form of a script, as in (passerby) you won't kill yourself jumping from that height. The sound sweeps us through a huge narrative of a fight between two lovers with him on the ledge threatening suicide - gripping and for a time compelling in the possibility that we are about to actually hear someone die. Being locked away listening to this in the bathroom is perfect - simultaneously safely away from the conflict going on 'outside' and redolent with imagined self-violence - pills, drowning, razor blades, broken glass to cut with, slippery surfaces to fall from …

Jan Hendrickse ~ Harmonic Motion: Composition for Prepared Bass Guitar and Fans 2008
Prepared bass guitars and fans
Quirky and gentle and fun - i loved having to go 'looking' for its sound hidden within the sweep of sound i had already triggered from Dear Dust

Simone Izzi ~ The Emperor's Mind 2008
Mixed media installation http://www.simoneizzi.com/home.php

Nitin Lachhani ~ Bhagvapad 2008 Polymer rapid prototype 232mm x 350mm x 10mm; Gautam 2008 100% Dense titanium rapid prototype and vero white, 200mm x 200mm x 100mm; Brhaspati 2008 Glass, polyurethane resin, iron filings, 500mm x 500mm x 10mm

Luc Messinezis ~ Wunderkammer: The Sound Cabinet of Curiosities 2008
Sound installation http://www.artselector.com/collective/directory/audio/Sonologik/

Maria Papadomanolaki ~ Trajectory 2008
Performance; video documentation
An intriguing and captivating piece that we loved and that i’ll have to come back to write about when i have time:
audience in gallery – different people wearing headphones and microphone walking to gallery describing what they see and following text instructions from the gallery.

Vytis Puronas ~ Dear Dust 2008
Interactive video projection and sound http://www.superfield.org/
sound of breathing that for me was all about the sound of the sea and kinaesthetically worked its image of floating 'dust' and wind-blown hair watching it with the fan blowing the guitar sounds

Mark Shorey ~ 8.5 2008
Mixed media installation; video documentation
the image for the poster is from 8.5 and see his video documentaion on his website @ http://www.peace.talktalk.net/PEACE.html

Mark Peter Wright ~ A Quiet Reverie 2008
Headphone installation (18mins) http://www.a-quiet-reverie.blogspot.com/

http://www.myspace.com/handsofsand

The star of the show for us – an exceptional experience for all the fullness and its space it gives in the listening.
A table with four clear plastic 'coffins' each containing dried materials from the four ruined sites and perched up on soil from them - leaves feathers stone shell flowers berries cones - all dry and dead but still resonating with remembered-imagined life

The 18 min 'psycho phonography' moves and moves us through a fragile deeply felt sonic narrative that for me was an oscillation of flickering images, fleeing associations and pooled moments of intense presence. The sounds move through ‘stone’ ~ a sort echoed resonant cascade of resonating troubled air - or the noise of ‘dust’ banging (to steal language from another exhibit) - through ‘water’ ~ coming in soft rain which we can know and name but without losing any magic from this literal recognition and making its narrative of 'textured time' (to steal language again) ~ listening in to water moving and feeling both the heightened immediacy of each water soundfall and simultaneously the inexhaustible stretched out continuum of time beyond life, lives, living. Then 'wing' and the choral backchat of birdsong going abrasive and scarring and making me think of living systems of immortal species as the uncaring witnesses to human insubstantiality and transience. Then through 'blood' ~ a swelling of sound rushing throbbing bringing up a sonorously chiming alarm coming through a crackle of rainfall that I first took to be fire ~ and lastly 'mouth' ~ we hear an echo of monks chanting or perhaps just the endlessly repeated prayers echoing back to us from the stone and then a slow ebbing abandonment into pulsating absence.
And I hand over the headphones emotionally charged and emotionally changed.

extracted from Mark’s book of ‘A Quiet Reverie’
A quiet reverie investigates the ruined abbeys of North East England, and creates a sonic experience from the architecture, space, and surrounding natural environment.

The work extends the practice of phonography into a dynamic and acoustically creative portrayal of time and journey through space and site. I will use the term ‘psycho phonography’ to label my practice and define it as a perceptual appreciation of field recording rather than an ecological or documental one.

By relocating, transferring and manipulation recordings from the ruined abbeys, the work connects each location in a metaphorical and sonic chain. It explores sounds inherent ability to spill between time and sense and into other perceived realms and modes of perception and listening.

A Quiet Reverie is a psycho phonographic sound piece, a mode of of aural imaginary awakening.

extracted from Mark’s research poster
Research Conclusions:
* A subjective absence in the sound is necessary to encourage a deeper sonorous listener
* Do ruins contain traces of sonic past? As poetic & compositional tool yes. In places of ruin or abandonment a perpetual & psychological space exists for the listener to complete, the journey to complete this absence is the soundscape narrative
Essential Listening:
B J Nilsen, The short night
Chris Watson, Stepping into the dark
Hilgegarde Westerkamp, Transformations
Richard Skelton, Landings Steven Peters, Hereings

+ External Symposium:
Date: 30 NOVEMBER
Time: 15:00-18:00 RSVP
Symposium in which Steven Connor *, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck,
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/
and sound artist David Toop**, Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London and Senior Research Fellow at the Sound Arts & Design Department of the London College of Communication http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=112997086 address issues of sonic practice raised by Audio Forensics.
* see Steven's lecture @ http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/earroom/earroom.pdf
** replaced Ben Borthwick, Assistant Curator at Tate Modern

Steven Connor: Ear Room
Seated. Listening. In session. Seance.
Hearing seems different to sight and touch and taste and smell
Hear from where the sounds are rather than where we are – sound occupies & evacuates
Sound Space. We can hear textures qualities inside things
Ventriloquism - how fragile & volatile our sense of sound space is - when it really counts we are very poor at hearing well
Unlike vision not immediately intelligible – hearing asks questions – which we then often seek to answer by the eye
Cartesian Grid - pinpoint - the ideal of point of view. There can only be a corresponding point of audition in most optimistic sense. Lines or fields of sight. Ears far less able to pinpoint - sound and we are multiple positioned through them
‘I am All Ears’ – we hear through distribution not convergence. You cannot sleep on both ears at once. There is no listening post: listening is listing & leaning
And sounds don't stay still – the eye commands space – the ear occupies – the ear makes room
Ear Room title of this lecture
We use Germanic words for animals & Latin words for cooked equivalents
Germanic for body parts - Latin for ‘cooked body’ like ‘mortality’
Germanic for raw corporeal ‘thing’ and ‘feeling’ – Latin for ‘object’ & ‘sensation’
In the dual coding: Latin ‘space’ is for sound; Latin ‘room’ is for sight: What becomes of ‘auditory space’ when one translates it into ‘ear-room’?
Space ready for occupation, able to be modified, presents a vacancy, defined from the outside in. Room inhabited, defined from the inside out, can be easily co-joined 'leg-room'
No relation direct between sound & hearing: the ear comes & goes with what it's hearing. Sight however automatically makes what sees an ‘object’
John Hull writing about going blind in ‘Touching the Rock’ “When you are blind, a hand suddenly grabs you. A voice suddenly addresses you. There is no anticipation or preparation. There is no hiding round the corner. There is no lying low. I am grasped. I am greeted. I am passive in the presence of that which accosts me. I cannot escape it … For the blind person, people are in motion, they are temporal, they come and they go. They come out of nothing, they disappear”
For the eye there is always a scene, whether seen or unseen. For the ear there is either something audible or there is nothing – there is no place in which to repose.
We can hear textures tonalities tensions time - sound energies intensities
Tonic - muscle & musicality
Space is free; a room costs.
In gallery ear-space must accommodate within eye-space. Ear-Room is only what & when it is made, which is why it can so easily escape the gallery. Ear-Room insists on a blind here & now

David Toop
Sound is always in a state of becoming & disappearing - so perhaps my unpreparedness for this is good
Readings from my notebook beginning 6th august
Trip to Marfa Sessions, Texas made famous by Donald Judd
Space used to inter German soldiers in WWII - Chinati Foundation - space for work to be made in http://www.chinati.org/visit/missionhistory.php
Christina Kublish (?)- nothing to see - abandoned building to listen to sound in - 'memory room' closed factories abandoned farms - old barn with abandoned tools
Memory room with no clues - just sounds of digital production - up to listener to make own meaning

Silent but Poem by Sugasi (?) b. 1889 anti war imprisoned for being

Cormach McCarthy: The Road
“The blackness I awoke with on those nights ...

Dickens – “many people unhappy to spend night in church - because of the roaming wind …”

A musical instrument is a small room - sound can linger - dispersing into air

the Confessional - grille like amplifier to image-less ear – talking into ear of god

Kafka: “Everyone carries a room inside them ... rattling of mirrors”

In America the sound of the trains is so romantic, mythic but it wakes me in the night – both absorbing & irritant

a rich woman shows me her hearing implant – “it’s no good for listening to classical music but fine for experimental …”

Donald Judd - huge library with few music books except eg Glass. And bagpipes he learned to play. (And music collection)

Q&A
S - two poles sound is moving between - sound art is changing - we can capture & see sounds more easily now
D - previously sound recorded though text, oral tradition, painting, sculpture … very few writers on paintings refer to sound because outside their discipline? because the sound is no longer there? A difficulty of sound art having to squat in others’ rooms, houses. Best sound art when it completely accepts the contexts they move in with. How do you reveal the work to audience?

A(udience) - Idea frm Greek 'to see' - system of thought grown in sight not sound
S - But oral cultures are violent formulaic conservative very resistant to variation from norms - obedience comes from need to hear - change requires ability to put things down. Have just read a new dissertation on use of sound in torture
D – Should be wary of idealising silence – silence can easily make people uncomfortable - many examples of silence that is oppressive - censoring - power

A - In our culture do we (over)separate sound, sight & tactile sensing? - sound calls for use of memory
D - work with auditory artist - you work to her requirements.
A – reading Mark Cuzens - thought was born by Greeks when we could write and free brains for new thinking
S - animals are all memory - I look forward to not needing any memory.
A - Writing music has led to incredible architecture of sound - exact notation leads to conservativism vs. lack of notation leads to conservativism. Fixedness allows you to go somewhere else
S - writing preserves fantasy of permanence
A - Stanley Fish - always subjective - the work is made at moment of reading
(Me thought - sound must always be moving whereas sights can be more seemingly still - or we move - or what we're looking at moves)
D - does recording fix something that's not meant to be fixed? What sound does best is texture time rather than pure time - how would we know this without sound? In a film, sound is the plasma that holds things together. Beckett thought the silent film had demised too soon. We exist in space time
D – this idea is too much for me to grasp in one thought – need to separate each idea to get sense of space time.

see a blog review of this exhibition at http://www.fadwebsite.com/2008/11/26/audio-forensics-ambitious-works-by-nine-artists-who-employ-sound-to-open-at-imt/#more-2582

http://picasaweb.google.com/marktrezona/AudioForensics#

ferran adria' at qeh

2008-11-27T00:05:00.005Z

ferran adria'

from el bulli talking to jay rayner

QEH

chef as rock god

chef as artist

fab and fun

'don juan. who?' - athletes of the heart + mladinsko theatre

2008-11-22T15:13:00.008Z

ANNA FURSE Athletes of the Heart (UK) in co-production with

Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana (Slovenia)
DON JUAN. KDO?/Don Juan.WHO?
from cyber space to theatre space

http://www.athletesoftheheart.org/present.html

directed by Anna Furse

with Damjana Černe, Željko Hrs, Mare Mlačnik, Tanya Myers, Matej Recer, Giovanna Rogante, Marie-Gabrielle Rotie

at riverside studios

http://www.riversidestudios.co.uk/cgi-bin/page.pl?l=1223562661

FeEast - Festival of Central and Eastern European Arts at Riverside Studios

http://www.feeast.com/

This international company worked in a private ‘cyber studio’ for 18 months. Confessions of darkest dreams and desires then gave rise to a haunting work that pulsates with passionate physicality, bittersweet irony, 1000 feather pillows, a drag king and a man who cries at too much beauty. DON JUAN.WHO? is about men and women and why we still fight. It’s about seduction, love, sex, power, and the Man who never stays for breakfast. With over sixty million three hundred thousand web hits in his name, how come Don Juan still grips us?

A poetic, complex, simple, intelligently directed performance, bounding in
eroticism and desire… Don Juan. Who? is a unique piece. Marjana
Ravnjak TV SLOVENIA

Complex, complicated, and totally simple at the same time…very sincere, full of
passion and love...fascinating….More performances of this kind! Amelia Kraigher
VECER, Slovenia

An unusual, provocative performance that both avoids and employs
cliches. Gregor Butala DNEVNIK, Slovenia

The performance is even more provocative when it ventures into existential,
erotic, sexual extremes….a kind of melancholic aura..a kind of transcendental
dimension..reaches beyond the known, the verified and the
expected. Blaz Lukan DELO, Slovenia

Following sell-out performances at Mladinsko Theatre, Ljubljana and previews at the Shunt Vaults, the production is at Riverside Studios for 4 performances only as part of FeEast Festival 2008.

Post-show chaired by Nick Flood

Ensemble traditions

Tanya Myers
18months in cyber space
Sunday evening - every - turn up and improvise in cyber space -anonymity of being able to imagine I was a man

Zeljko Hrs
We were sure we know who wrote what lines and always we were wrong

Anna Furse
What really worked was setting a theme. Vomitic work - the process obliges you to work with interruption: there are sentences that have been written by more than one voice - ego-less creation

Giovanna Rogante
I had to learn to type

Anna Furse
Lost two who couldn't cope with process
We had to meet religiouly two hours every sunday - we had to do this to make the work - very dedicated work - this was a a deliberate strategy to try to respond to the new financial restriction on making work

T
We could pretend to be the boss

A
Then workshop
Then text
Then 3 and half months rehearsal
Then premiere

G
I am used to speaking english even with my mistakes - English is the language of the western world - when I speak a language I think that language

Z
All we wrote was in english and then translated most into slovenian

Marie-Gabrielle Rotie
I was not part of the writing and Anna gave me a lot of artistic freedom - everything i did was entirely responsive to the text using my own physical vocabularies

A
Alot of work taking a scrap of text an applying physical language we had made together - the structure came very late in process
We had reading list and films we watched etc
Someone wrote a wonderful parody of the byron don juan for us and this became a key reference - it's there in the work but even more its about the don juan in our minds

What is hell for you?
M
just an invention a special place we can go running off to - another woman
A
Men and women who still can't talk to each other - I don't subscribe to an idea of post-feminism - we haven't achieved what feminism reached for yet

What did you miss from this process?
A
Embarrassment -all the social issues that come up when people are in the same space together by being So well- masked you could become unmasked a lot- of nakedness

Would you do it again?

Yes but a lot of work involved

Don Juan. Who? as a performance.
Don Juan. Who? is a ‘timeless scenario where sexual politics are sweated out on a red carpet’ by an ensemble of seven and a supporting pillow-throwing chorus of several more. It begins with an evocation of Venus and Vulcan: from out of the darkness we see a welder, masked and stooped over the sparks of his work: Vulcan, god of fire and metalworking. We watch a naked man approaching from behind, embracing and undressing the welder, who naked is revealed to be a woman: Venus, unfaithful wife of Vulcan and goddess of love, beauty and fertility. ‘She downs her tools, reluctantly yields to him.’ And this non-verbal opening scene contains and signposts the potency, contradictions and deceptions that this theatre will show us: the story of relationships between men and women is never straightforward nor as obvious as our cliché’s and postmodern savoire faire may beguile us into believing. Don Juan. Who? animates an apparently archetypal Don Juan coupling, and the first words of spoken text - ‘ZELJKO: Seducer / DAMJANA: Seduced’ - establish an emphatic Male v. Female duality. But during the journey from the ‘Dressing Don Juan and his Prey for Seduction’ all the way through to ‘She and He After He Quit’, the simultaneously amplified inner monologues from the Chorus of ‘Her’s and ‘Him’s repeatedly confound the over-easy stereotypes of ‘Him, Tarzan; Her Jane’, and we cannot be sure the roles of ‘Seducer’ and ‘Seduced’ are cast and engendered in stone quite as given. In each of the four Seduction scenes, although we seem to be getting a pretty traditional Alpha male controlling the story and pulling the strings, it is ‘She’ who is actually the protagonist: in ‘Seduction 2’ and ‘Seduction 3’ it is she who makes the moves, and then in the first and last Seduction scenes, she is very much the writer of her own seduction story, almost irrespectively of what he actually does or doesn’t do.

Through its storytelling of this one tale we see and hear the many voices of women and men trying to make sense of how men and women can come together without fighting, what they love, what they want, what they don’t want, what drives them together, what drives them apart. And as might be expected in a show about Don Juan, it appears to be full of male and female archetypes and cliché’s. And the play is deliberately structured with heavy gender scorings, both in the language - ‘TANYA: She’s made of her childhood dreams that pull her on a lead like a dog. / MATEJ + ZELJKO: In the same way his dick does.’ - and performatively with the men’s team lining up around ‘Don Juan’ and the women around ‘Her’ from the start.

But, of course, to be interesting and new this play must, and does, show us that things cannot be what they initially seem or are expected to be from the Don Juan branding. This complexities illustrated in the symbolic opening are woven throughout and into this show, revealing the first appearances of superficial and almost careless familiarity to be a mirage of deeper patterns of much richer and contrary counterpoints and opposites: ‘She’ is not given the authority of a name, but this apparent disempowerment means also that she can never be fully pinned down (as well as giving the audience our ‘everywo(man)’ entry into the story); ‘She’ talks about appearance, ‘He’ talks strategy, but it is the women who continually provide the dynamic propulsion for the story and demand progress and action, the men’s talk being more fixed on results and outcomes whether actually realised or merely fantasised. And the voiced inner thoughts often let us in to hear the errors in supposed certainties, and test our own assumptions, such as ‘His’ sureness that ‘She’ is obsessed with ‘Him’, when in fact she is more often obsessed with ‘Herself’, and that being Don Juan is all about domination and conquests: and in ‘A Drag King Dong Juan’ we hear that ‘Her’ fantasy Don Juan is about being herself rather than conquests and being dominant: ‘GIOVANNA: I don’t want to feel I have to be bad to be Don Juan. I don’t want to kill anyone. / TANYA: no no no / GIOVANNA: I don’t want to control any body … I want this person to love me though.’

Textural analysis of this play brings constant surprises, such as finding in the seeming equal spread of ‘His’ and ‘Her’ words quite unequal preoccupations in that ‘His’ thoughts are spread between thinking about himself and projecting what he is sure ‘She’ is thinking, whereas ‘Her’ thoughts are almost entirely about ‘Herself’ and rarely does she talk out thoughts about him. In the final scene, ‘Friends Re-united.com’, we hear ‘Her’ finally get her happiness and her freedom when ‘He’ throws her out the window: ‘GIOVANNA: And I’m flying / TANYA: Flying / GIOVANNA: Flying / DMAJANA: Flying.’ And still in control of telling her own story.
It is only from the penultimate scene, voiced by ‘Dolores, Don Juan’s Faithful Steed: A Perspective’, that we get to hear anything that sounds possible long term, and a more lasting, mutually dependent and symbiotic relationship is imagined than any the Don Juan mythology leads us into: ‘… He loves me. We’re a team, a pas de deux. I love his jumping out of windows on to my back … I want sparks to fly from my hooves. I want to give Don Juan the world. Reader: I carried him.’

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/DonJuanWho#

*** 'drawing breath recycled' - jean fraser, sue ridge, rosa ainley, annie whitehead

2008-10-18T23:50:00.007+01:00

Drawing Breath Recycled
... maps and journeys .......
an exhibition about breathing with:
Jean Fraser

Rosa Ainley

Sue Ridge

http://www.sueridge.com/HOME.html
Herne Bay Junior School
Annie Whitehead

http://www.earthmusic.com/annie.htm

and
Betteshanger Brass Band

@ Horsebridge Galleries, Whitstabe
http://www.horsebridge-centre.org.uk/index.php?q=node/911
Curated by Jean Fraser
www.drawingbreath.org

An arts and health project about breath and breathing, the Drawing Breath project is based around a cycle ride during the summer of 2007 searching for oxygen on the Kent and East Sussex coast, and the conversations and conditions encountered on the way - a landscape adventure about survival and what remains possible as we grow older.

Featuring a life-size driftwood bicyle sculpture, a new brass band composition and new photographic work and maps of the journey, plus a sound piece about breath and vocalisation. A wall of air will be constructed by the audience during the exhibition.

Special thanks to the individuals and groups who contributed to the journey, including Canterbury & District Breathe Easy support group and the Eastern & Coastal Kent Respiratory team.

Artists and participants include: Rosa Ainley – multi-media practitioner Betteshanger Brass Band Jean Fraser – photographic artist Herne Bay Junior School pupils Sue Ridge – multi-media artist Annie Whitehead – jazz trombonist and composer Artists and participants include: Rosa Ainley – multi-media practitioner Betteshanger Brass Band Jean Fraser – photographic artist Herne Bay Junior School pupils Sue Ridge – multi-media artist Annie Whitehead – jazz trombonist and composer.

the experience of this show is all about listening and noticing - the overall effect is somehow still and resonantly present: jean fraser's potraits are all moments of people captured with an easy joyful glowing presence; sue ridge's maps make you stop and enjoy minute journey details and repetition, and her x-rays of jean’s lungs overlaid with the journey map outline and together with rosa ainley's sound piece – that has you empathetically holding your breath and aaahing into the air around you – suggests a simultaneous fragility alongside substantial strength and resilience; jean and her daughter’s video to play with annie whitehead’s music makes the movement of air mesmerising, and the driftwood bicycle made with year 5 at herne bay junior school is just magic.
there is nothing competitive or hard in this show. it does not boast endurance or mileage or impressive technology. neither does it pretend to find anything that isn’t already there waiting to be found and enjoyed and savoured, so that of brandishing it instead invites you to stop and look and look some more and listen and remember and smile and wonder a few ‘what if’s...’ and breathe a little slower, a little deeper.

life enhancing.

'aphasiadisiac' - ted stoffer, les ballets C de la B

2008-10-18T23:49:00.005+01:00

Aphasiadisiac
les ballets C de la B

http://www.lesballetscdela.be/
Ted Stoffer

Les Ballets C. de la B. return to Sadler’s Wells with Aphasiadisiac – the final instalment in a trilogy of work by guest choreographer Ted Stoffer. Based in Ghent, Belgium, Les Ballets C. de la B. is a collective of choreographers renowned for presenting powerful, theatrical performances of startling, anarchic beauty.

American-born Ted Stoffer, a former Rambert dancer and founder of Aphasia Dance Company, derived the title Aphasiadisiac from ‘aphasia’ (the inability to express or understand thought in spoken or written words) and ‘aphrodisiac’ (arousing the mood of sexual excitement). Focusing on issues of communication and human relationships and featuring a cast of five performers who each represent a member of his own family, Aphasiadisiac sees Ted Stoffer exploring the private languages and politics of love.

"Stoffer is a brave performer who bares both his body and his soul… a deeply
personal experience that reconnects you with your own humanity" THE STAGE

Set to a soundtrack of pop, classical and traditional Czech music, plus live drumming, and set within a full-size onstage brick house (complete with furnishings), this promises to be a truly remarkable experience from one of Flander’s most important contemporary dance companies Les Ballets C. de la B.

A Sadler's Wells co-production

Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadlers Wells

http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Ballet-C-de-la-B-Stoffer

Four people on stage building hollow four-sided towers with wooden bricks - some with words on them and of course I try and put these into meaningful clusters until I remember we are in the strange messed up dimension of aphasia and let the attempt go.
A fifth performer Pietrejan Vervondel arrives in business shirt and tie - there are two towers now each encasing a performer who have to climb their structure to get head & hands above it to catch the new bricks they are being thrown by ‘the businessman’ - the feels wonderfully dangerous and the audience are vocally excited as each new brick is thrown high and mostly caught with varying degrees of threat to the catcher and their tower remaining upright. How special and rare to have this real and live danger in a theatre.
We then see a hand from each performer reach out and across - but not connect - from their tower - and then she finds she can pass bricks from her tower to him to add to his.
Then we get a glorious aphasiac real estate presentation jumbled to be right at the edge of coherency - and how satisfying to be able to pull sense from this delightfully and wittily scrambled volley of words.

He breaks through the back wall.

He climbs the wall to a suspended drum kit, harnesses himself into the seat which he then releases forward - another moment of thrilling peril - and we get raucous surging music with accordion playing girl (Kristyna Lhotakova) in stocking feet and man and woman lying prone and stretched over brick stacks playing trumpet and horn. This makes the background sound for Stoffer's sinewy dislocated head lead movement that seems the physical mirror of the scrambled words - somehow finding a sense and coherency from inverted and inhumanised movements
We also get a number of contact improvisation duets that are fluidly satisfying to watch. And we get achingly intimate and recognisable words with movements from Mieke de Groot who we later see in a very funny duet mime with Yvan Auzely After they have been stripped of their instruments and left alone together by the double-banging drummers Vervondel & Lhotakova.
She then gives us the clearest monologue telling us how much she loves 'him' while he undulates, unfolds and curls under and through the chair and table, before the remaining tower is noisily toppled and cleared and the two of them show us their relationship via a set of tight and variously competing / cooperating dances.
The final sequence is a fast flowing sexy contact duet with Stoffer and Lhotakova joined throughout at the eye & cheek.
This show is packed with ideas and imagery and associations and virtuoso displays interspersed with sudden clear moments of absolute truth and recognition. It is far too clever to leave me more than momentarily absorbed inside it, but the richness of ideas - intellectual and performative - more than justifies this.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/Aphasiadisiac#

*** the two gentlemen of verona (nos do morro)

2008-10-17T11:08:00.007+01:00

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Nós do Morro

http://www.nosdomorro.com.br/eng/institucional.htm

The Pit

bite08

http://www.barbican.org.uk/news/artformnews/theatredance/nos-do-morro

The Barbican brings the Brazilian theatre company Nós do Morro to London for the first time with its production of Shakespeare’s comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona directed by Gutti Fraga. The production was originally commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of the Complete Works festival in 2006 where it received a one-off performance following collaboration with Cicely Berry and now comes to the capital for 11 performances. Switching effortlessly from comic to serious, the energetic young company infuse the text with song, movement and capoeira in a beautifully uncomplicated production. Location and mood are indicated through the use of the actors’ bodies and simple props take on a life of their own. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is performed in Portuguese with English surtitles. It is presented in association with People’s Palace Projects.

Nós do Morro (Portuguese for ‘us from the hillside’) was founded in 1986 by Fraga and is based in Vidigal, one of the toughest favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It provides young people from this disadvantaged community an opportunity to experience culture, art and citizenship through the theatre and visual arts. The company has achieved significant public recognition, won several awards and now runs a theatre and cultural centre. It aims to provide training in technical skills and creative work for theatre and cinema and many of its actors have appeared in TV series, soap operas and films including the 2002 award-winning City Of God.

Coinciding with the Barbican run of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Nós do Morro and Theatre Centre present an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest entitled Knock Against My Heart written by Oladipo Agboluaje and directed by Michael Judge. Knock Against My Heart tours the UK from 18 September – 20 November including a run at the Unicorn Theatre from 7 – 18 October.

http://www.theatre-centre.co.uk/index.php?plid=64

What a wonderful joyous funny warm experience was this!

The lights come up in one corner from a blackout to show a tightly clustered group of young performers singing - and instantly we know we are in the company of troubadour players about to make a show for us with just themselves, a few instruments and some motley scraps of cloth they will use for costumes and the many letters that feature through Shakespeare's story. This is his first play and - as with Chekhov's Ivanov - it's great to be able to see so many of the characters and ideas he will recreate again in his later plays: Julia who dresses as man - brilliantly achieved and utterly convincing as a disguise with a stretch of cloth over one eye so attention is grabbed by the disability rather than a sense of recognition - and heads off from Verona to Milan to teach her man how to love (As You Like It); there are balcony scenes (Romeo & Juliet), Julia lists her suitors for her maid to strip of their vanities with gleeful cruelty (The Merchant of Venice), and her initial dismissal of Proteus reminds of Kate and Beatrice; there's a there is even a Friar Laurence.

It is somehow an easy step to accept these young performers as the young lovers – they convey a freshness and vitality that exactly suits Shakespeare’s characters. And something i have never before seen so effectively achieved is the way all the performers step instantly in and away from their characters, so that even those playing leads manage to completely lose every hint of their characters to meld seamlessly into the ensemble. So I found I was even searching for actors who seemed to have disappeared in the chorus scenes, and conversely people I had barely noticed before would suddenly emerge as apparently unmissable large and dynamic presences when they stepped into an individual role.

The staging uses a variety of disciplined simplicity: performers bond together to make human architecture and furniture - seats, walls, doors, headless busts, a balcony, and a dangerous forest is conjured with lighting, a smoke machine and another length of cloth. We get a mimed slow motion duel or contest in the early scenes while Valentine & Proteus are all devoted and true friendship forever more that physically lays out everything the story of these two young Veronese gentlemen will unfold. And we get live music - instrumental and singing - to both move the story on, take us too new places (memorably from Verona to Milan), and to underscore or change the mood.

From start to finish this show vibrates with spirit and exuberance so you feel swept along and caught inside the performers’ zest and drive to bring their story, and yet for all their youthful energy there is nothing amateurish or unfinished and the moments of poignancy and realisation arrive with a crystalline focus that is deeply moving and utterly true. And then just as seamlessly the moment is gone, moved on and we are delighted and laughing again or surfing the story or beaming off the radiant music and movement.
And one more jewel I have to record for permanent remembrance: the performance of the dog is everything this show has encapsulated: truth, humour, discipline, spirit, delight, poignancy, immense fun and quiet understated sadness. Brilliant!
It ends with a final bright song, through which the players take their smiling bows, and then they again converge into their tight and tightly lit ensemble spot - all individuality again extinguished. Blackout and they are gone.

And i'm still glowing from the experience they made for us.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/TwoGentlemenOfVerona#

stalla duffy at cottlesloe

2008-10-17T11:07:00.005+01:00

Stella Duffy in conversation with Adjoa Andoh

In her new novel, The Room of Lost Things, writer and actor Stella Duffy paints a vivid picture of life in a South London dry-cleaning shop, where secrets and lies are revealed in its customers’ pockets.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/38100/platforms/stella-duffy.html

Another masterclass from stella - this time in how good a platform conversation can be
Two artists who cared about us and at the same time knew how to look utterly comfortable and at home on a borrowed set on a borrowed stage
Both women shine with charm and fizz with wit and energy. And each have a care for us: adjoa knowing and remembering to explain references when they arise (tv show 'the wire') and always repeating audience questions and so obviously listening in every moment; and stella too clarifying references (walter mosley) and blending her passions (craft rather than art, magic in the mistakes, the need to give a voice to white working class men as much as young british asian men, letting the story find itself) with real and practical advice (for getting published, for writing, for getting started).
i suspect if i hadn’t known stella already i’d have come away believing that i now did, as i came away feeling i’d met adjoa.
if only these two women would be watched and learned from!

p.s. The Room Of Lost Things is a brilliant read!

'Lunar Sea' (Momix)

2008-10-10T11:30:00.004+01:00

'Lunar Sea'

Momix

at Peacock Theatre

http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Momix-Lunar-Sea

American company Momix returns to the Peacock Theatre to delight audiences with artistic director Moses Pendleton’s fascinating other-worldly dance creation Lunar Sea. Step into another world where figures glow eerily as they float through the darkness – combining props, light and shadow, Momix’s Lunar Sea is a “black and white ballet” in which dancers in fluorescent costumes float and fly magically, unbound by the laws of gravity.
"A fine merger of illusion, suspense and comedy" THE GUARDIAN

Presented under black light and featuring projections and puppets by Michael Curry (part of the Lion King design team), Moses Pendleton’s surreal world of dance and optical illusion is an exceptionally inventive production that will enthral all ages.

http://www.mosespendleton.com/

Artistic Director ~ Moses Pendleton

with

Tsarra Bequette, Jennifer Chicheportiche, Joshua Christopher, Simona DiTucci, Jonathan Eden, Donatello Iacobellis, Robert Laqui, Danielle McFall, Sarah Nachbauer, Christopher Patterson, Cassandra Taylor

Lighting Design ~ Joshua Starbuck and Moses Pendleton

Costume Design ~ Phoebe Katzin, Moses Pendleton, Cynthia Quinn

Puppet Design ~ Michael Curry

Video Projection ~ Moses Pendleton

Video Editing ~ Woodrow F. Dick, III

What a cool show
This is a company who are completely sure about what they do how they do it and how they offer it to us in their audience They know when and how to dazzle us with quite awesome spectacle when to tease us a little and let us see their secrets and when - as with the curtain call - to confront us with their perfectly toned human strength, agility and acrobatic dancing

The first half is called the sea of tranquility and is full of whimsy and teasing and subterranean images floating and flying and dangling and dancing and whizzing and rolling through a kaleidoscope of superimposed images of lunar and interstellar spectrums

Favourite moments
The rolling jelly fish
The rotating legs
The seahorses

The second half is called the bay of Seething and is much hotter and brighter and sharper and dangerous and angular and starts with birds and then is more plants and insects fighting and feeding and crawling and flying
favourite moments:
The zipper insects
The six legged and the four legged spiders
The feathered mouths / wings / flower
The long-winged birds making a crazy waving angular line together
The ghosts that fly through
An easy a show to enjoy and smile through wonderful and surprising enough to hold us mostly captivated through its not quite 2 hours.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/LunarSeaMomix#

'In The Brown And Red Water' by Tarell Alvin McCraney

2008-10-07T23:00:00.010+01:00

In The Red and Brown Water

A fast and loose play

by Tarell Alvin McCraney

at Young Vic

http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on?action=details&id=2146

Direction - Walter Meierjohann
Design - Miriam Buether
Light - Jean Kalman
Music - Abram Wilson
Sound - Fergus O'Hare
Casting - Julia Horan CDG
Movement Direction - Ben Wright
Dialect Coach - Neil Swain
Assistant Direction - Patrice Etienne
Cast:
Adjoa Andoh
Camilla Beeput
Sheri-An Davis
John MacMillan
Cecilia Noble
Javone Prince
Paul Thornley
Ony Uhiara
Ashley Walters
Abram Wilson

I have a dream...

Martin Luther King

The sweltering heat of Louisiana.

Two guys, one girl

And a love so strong it drives you mad
Oya dreams of competing alongside star athletes. She never feels so right as when she’s burning up the track.
As a girl she must choose between her dream and caring for her mother.

As a woman, she’s torn between the man she lives with and the man she can’t live without.
It’s like I got more love in my hands

Than the world got air to breathe.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

We are the change that we seek.

Barack Obama

A new play by the ‘explosive’ Tarell Alvin McCraney whose The Brothers Size had Young Vic audiences on their feet.
With live music from New Orleans trumpeter and vocalist Abram Wilson.

Most of the space is flooded ankle deep
A piano and a drum. A blue plastic crate.
Around the outside motley chairs on a chipboard platform. And us. Audience also above looking down on the reflecting pool. And sitting waiting in an atmosphere of buzzing excitement - the is a large group here tonight that I think are people in Young Vic's facebook group - the bank of audience opposite are reflected in a gentle shiny shimmer.

The performers enter splashing through the water to make a circle - clocking us as they arrive. Oya in the centre. A hum of male voices over which the women's voices start the story chorus style:
"they say
"i heard
"she screamed
"she cried out
... (from memory and probably not accurate)

This is a story of ordinary / extraordinary black people making and living their lives. It includes Okun Size (from McCraney's previous play The Brothers Size) and his trademark storytelling techniques - characters saying their own stage directions, which give them moments of heightened self-awareness; use of song to both add texture and to move the story forward - and in this the New Orleans jazz man Abram Wilson is an integral part of the story - adding musical comment and dueting with Legba, Oya's wisecracking surrogate brother (also from The Brothers Size?).
As well as splash and reflective shine the water gives the place a complicated wrongness: it is both fluid and heavy, it both floats and holds down, it is playful and oppressive. And the performers inhabit and use it with apparent ease, sometimes explicitly for what it actually is, sometimes as if it wasn't there or its being there was the completely normal condition. And of course it has to make us think of New Orleans after the floods.

A problem with this play though is that the moment of greatest tension when Oya has to choose staying at home with her dying mother rather than take up a running scholarship happens early, and from then we watch life happen (literally) around her as she sinks into an increasingly angry realisation of 'this is all there is': her gentle but unfired relationship with Okun Size, her ungentle but haphazard and powerless relationship with the soldier, her inability to conceive while other's babies surround her. And so somehow her final violent act of defiance misses the shock and emotional punch it should have: dramatically it makes sense, visually it convinces, and yet it fails to hit the solar plexus. This might be because for the first time Oya is required to speak her dialogue from off-stage so we know to expect something and noticing this takes us out of the story flow and we are too primed for a theatrical effect; or perhaps it is that the company are still finding their orchestration with the audience and the right build of focus and varying intensities through to this coup de theatre; or it may be the moment needs to have something more arresting from lights and sound? I liked Oya enormously and felt for her throughout so i'm still puzzling about why her moment of greatest pain left me believing but unmoved.

Nevertheless this is again fine storytelling and again at the Young Vic it's a joy to be part of such a diverse, relaxed and spontaneously responsive audience.

McCraney again makes a play that is universal and resonant and enlightening in its themes of trying to make a life less ordinary from ordinary times and moments; and how to live true to your values in a post-modern disaffected world entirely uncaring, unnoticing and ungiving to any sacrifice however virtuous.

'40/60' (richard alston dance company)

2008-10-04T23:15:00.003+01:00

‘40/60’
Richard Alston Dance Company
Dance Umbrella 2008

at Sadlers Wells
http://www.theplace.org.uk/461/welcome/richard-alston-dance-company.html

‘Shuffle It Right’ ...
... Danced to Hoagy Carmichael is all liquid silk and easy charm. It's a delight to watch and I smiled all the way through until the final solo that has a heavier more world-weary feel. Jason Goddard especially is riveting - combing an impossibly easy flowing lightness with a relaxed smile.
This piece is the joyous highlight of my night.

‘The Men In My Life’ ...
... Is intended to display and impress, and this it certainly does. But the bitsy nature of this birthday concert of highlights cannot hope to accumulate any sustained effect: we watch, we enjoy, we applaud. It is what it is: a series of mostly solos duets made for specific dancers:
‘Water Music’ is court majestic
‘Strider’ - danced in silence - presents the men alone and twinned showing off all strength and hold and supple line
‘Petroushka’ is danced to Stravinsky intricate piano played by Jason Ridgeway and both performers are virtuoso - dressed in black and making dark movements
‘Rumours Visions’
‘Shimmer’
‘Dutiful Ducks’ - created originally for Michael Clark and danced with winning good humour by Jonathan Goddard - is quirky and beguiling danced to a brilliant percussive poem
‘Red Run’ is intimate duet with Pierre Tapon my other favourite dancer from the evening
'Fingerprint' gives Jonathan Goddard a more lyrical movement to use his liquid flow as more of molten flow
‘The Signal’ returns the mood to courtly elegance and formal pomp finally uniting all eight dancers in a short stately chorus line

‘Blow Over’ ...
... Is danced in monochrome black and silver to Phillip Glass in a piece that becomes increasingly exciting. Again Pierre Tapon holds the attention.

Martyn says he enjoyed it somewhat - but lots of flouncing and posing

It's an easy night watching beautiful perfect young men and women moving beautifully to a variety of mostly beautiful music in very tight beautiful and mostly tiny costumes: just what the ballet should be perhaps … It is also what it claims to be: joyous, uplifting and wonderfully rejeuvenating.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/4060RichardAlstonDanceCompany#

*** 'Hedda' - The Gate Theatre

2008-10-03T13:28:00.006+01:00

The Gate Theatre presents

World Premiere

'Hedda'

by Henrik Ibsen

Adapted by Lucy Kirkwood

Hedda, still mourning for the father she adored, returns from a six-month honeymoon with a man she no longer loves. The only way she can find passion and excitement is through the wilful damage of others. Trapped, dangerous and caught between the three men in her life; something in the end must give...
Director Carrie Cracknell

Designer Holly Waddington

Lighting Katharine Williams

Choreographer Temitope Ajose-Cutting

Sound Ed Lewis

Casting Lucy Bevan
Cast Cara Horgan - Hedda Gabler, Cath Whitefield - Julia Tesman, Tom Mison - George Tesman, Alice Patten - Thea Eldridge, Christopher Obi - Toby Brack, Adrian Bower - Eli Longford

http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/hedda.aspx

Everything about this show works

We walk in to our seats, past Hedda listlessly smoking, down the stairs and through the room of their new house.

The new version of this show places everything in the actual here-and-now: the house is in Notting Hill, the people are Oxford graduates, George and Hedda are returned from travels through Japan, it is early Autumn September...

The design works so intimately we feel as though we are in George and Hedda's flaking house amongst the packing boxes. It is easy to feel Hedda's sense of being trapped - she is the only character who never leaves the house. We see the the other characters though her eyes, but at the same time we are constantly looking for clues to understand her through these other people:

George puppy dog energies that in the end become steeled into his fierce morality reflect Hedda's amorality;

Thea's wispy fragility that becomes a fluid strength of purpose and focus reflects a vapid vacuousness in Hedda;

Eli's manic fire and violence that becomes a lurching blind hysteria shows Hedda off with a childish immaturity and spite - shot through with teenage melodrama reaching for effect rather than meaningful substance;

Julia's cloying lack of self esteem that shows off Hedda's cruelty in all its delicious malice;

and Toby's determined easy manipulation that makes Hedda's meddling look clumsy and amateur

From the first moment of this show we are held completely in this room with these people - and increasingly so with Hedda herself, who expertly never loses our sympathy. She dangles us brilliantly between being a woman of great mystery and woman of great hurt and vulnerability, seducing us into believing - along with Tesman, Longford and Brack - that we are the only one who can fully understand and therefore save her. It is a brilliant performance but one that relies totally on the same completeness from her fellow actors.

The new writing makes the play relevant and real without losing sacrificing anything from the original (i will look forward to reading this new text along with a previous translation). One of its triumphs is to make every word and every action unquestionably acceptable, although this is not a play where i felt every next moment is inevitable - it keeps a sense of possibility right though into the final moments of Hedda's response to being trapped under Brack's power, so that as well as believing that she has and would shoot herself, there is still the possibility that she never fully intended to die.

The use of contemporary music throughout added mood, texture and placement to 'reading' the play and its people - especially Hedda

I am also hugely curious to know what the writing process involved and to what extent the players received a near-finished text to bring to life or rather the text was made through a process of collaborative performance making.

absolutely the best experience i have had watching a classic play since 'Major Barbara'.

'in-i' - akram khan + juliette binoche

2008-09-16T12:47:00.004+01:00

in-i
by Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan

with

visual design by Anish Kapoorand

music composition by Philip Sheppard

lighting design by Michael Hulls

sound design by Nicolas Faure

If the Greeks had 14 words to describe different ways of loving, how many dare we experience?
A major new work of dance theatre created by one of the world’s leading dancer/choreographers, Akram Khan, and actress Juliette Binoche.
Throughout their careers, Binoche and Khan have both sought out surprising and daring collaborations. Akram Khan has always taken an inter-disciplinary approach to dance and his collaborators have included Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Antony Gormley and Nitin Sawhney (zero degrees), Sylvie Guillem (Sacred Monsters) and Hanif Kureishi.
Similarly, Juliette Binoche has made artistically challenging choices with directors such as Michael Haneke (Hidden) and Louis Malle (David Hare’s screenplay Damage), and has starred in award-winning films including The English Patient and Chocolat.Creating the environment for the duet is Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor.
in-i is a unique collaboration between three of today’s most exciting artists.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ini

http://www.akramkhancompany.net/

So seeing this the second time I now completely love it!
This time I am easily and fully immersed and this time what it is all seems so clear and evocative and resonant - like reading a novel except they are providing the sounds and pictures and we are making the story (whereas in a novel we make the sounds & pictures from the story the writer gives us). And watching this time it seems so obvious that they are bringing us a fictional story of the trajectory - the rise and clash and fall and remaking of a relationship that is raw from the scaring of past hurts - his from the Mullah as a boy, hers from (his?) violence and both from each other's fierceness.

So why was this second time such a richer experience for me?
A lot has to do with what I brought I think and at the preview show I limited my experience by expecting way too little perhaps: I forgot what a storyteller Akram's is, how his desire to tell a story is what propels and drives his shows, how much he wants to use sound and movement and rhythm to reach and communicate with us. At the preview I think I just sat and watched it as a display of a series of abstract skilfully made images, not looking for a complete narrative and so not seeing any. Then too I wonder if I let myself become distracted by their celebrity - I looked at this to see versions of Akram's Khan and Juliette Binoche when of course the point was to look past and through these 'names' to the people and their story they are making. (the exact opposite to the problem of trying to get 'visibility inside invisibility' cited today for new black performance of needing to become invisible from heightened visibility)
But I think too this show was more formed and performed: I suspect it needed audience responses to find its cadences and punctuation and energy flows to become a finished work. As well as the time and repetitions to transcend its parts and fly out from the performance space.

So 'in-i' now gives me an achingly recognisable series of moments layered into complex textures of personality clashes, dynamics of competing domination, funny awful mismatches of gender behaviours, soft intimate almost too private moments of connection, fighting currents of inner conflict as head wars with emotions, impulse jars against learned responses, past experience contaminates spontaneity. Moving & funny & personal & vivid & memorable.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/InI#

*** 'lypsynch' (robert lepage)

2008-09-13T23:19:00.008+01:00

Lipsynch
Robert Lepage

Directed and co-written by Robert Lepage
Produced by Ex machina/Théâtre sans Frontières
In association with Cultural Industry and Northern Stage
Co-produced by barbicanbite08, Cabildo Insular de Tenerife and Festival TransAmèriques, Montrèal

Written and performed by Rebecca Blankenship (Ada and others), Hans Piesbergen (Thomas and others), Sarah Kemp (Sarah and others), Rick Miller (Jeremy and others), Frédérike Bédard (Marie and others), John Cobb (Jackson and others), Carlos Belda (Sebastian and others), Lise Castonguay (Michelle and others), Nuria Garcia (Lupe and others),

and Written and Dramaturgy by Marie Gignac

This latest ensemble work from Robert Lepage and Ex Machina is an epic panorama linking nine lives spanning seven decades, and spinning stories that are surprising, funny and moving.
As we are taken on a nine-hour journey, we stop off between war-torn Vienna, pre-revolutionary Nicaragua and present day London, encountering people who have lost the power of speech and people for whom speech is the only lifeline.
A dubbing studio to the world of vocal forensics, Lipsynch follows a cluster of interwoven destinies, where each voice is searching for its own identity.
Performance time: 13:00 Running time: Approx 9 hrs/inc 4 intervals and 1 extended meal break
In English, French, German and Spanish with English surtitles.

http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=7477

Ada
Ada has a big voice. As a soprano. As a mother.
She comes out in concert black and sings Gorecki’s Symphony #3
a woman dies on a plane. her baby is left behind.
With the help of Thomas – a med student fan she happens upon in her trail to find our what has happened to this baby - Ada finds and adopts the baby
Jeremy & Ada move to London. Ada gives Jeremy singing lessons. Jeremy grows up to become a rock singer. Jeremy sings iron maiden’s ‘the number of the beast’ with his rock band.
Jeremy and his girlfriend travel on the Piccadilly line from Covent Garden. His girlfriend videos a sleazy man chasing a couple of women who could be prostitutes. Ada gets on. The girlfriend gets off. Thomas gets on and he and Ada recognise each other – he is living in London, working as a neurologist – as he gets off he asks Ada too call him.
Ada and Thomas get together. They propose a plan to move out to another flat leaving this one for Jeremy and his girlfriend - Jeremy rejects this saying instead he will go to San Francisco to study film.
On the plane he sings the Gorecki - partly in duet with Ada who moves slowly backwards past and away from him. His birth mother appears and walks across the length of the top of the plane towards him finally seeming to present the last part of his song

Thomas
We see a projection of a painting of Doubting Thomas with his finger testing Christ’s wound. Thomas is making a tribute speech about his professor mentor – a man who had been like a father to him and a man who kept belief in both god and science
Thomas tells Marie - his patient and a jazz singer from Montreal - that the surgery to remove her brain tumour may lead to aphasia - another doctor translates this into french for her. Thomas tells her that she may lose her speech but not her voice for a period of time afterwards – so she will still be able to sing but not make words.
Thomas is briefly haunted by the professor
We get a supersize close-up of the face of a dragged up actor miming the interview of an old English grand dame talking about her early training as a speech therapist in Exeter during the war – she keeps losing names. We learn that she helped Ada - now by her side - with a stammer as a child. Fabulously funny and interesting.
Thomas and his partner neurologist have a coffee together in a bizarre off-synch set that makes sensible a film image of them sitting across from each other over a table. She tells him about a quantum physics lecture where the scientists wonders if - as things go into a parallel world when they pass through a wormhole - whether maybe with Alzheimer’s thoughts slip through a similar ‘wormhole’ into another dimension of the brain. Thomas wonders if his memories of his professor appearing to him now as a ghost are going through a similar process.
Thomas & Ada meet at the Soho jazz club to hear the jazz singer sing a bravura version of ‘April In Paris’. It turns out Thomas is getting the shakes and drinking and his relationship with Ada is in trouble. Ada leaves. Thomas gets drunk. Sarah returns, asks him if she could die – she doesn't believe but had dropped to her knees and prayed that afternoon. We see a stunning projection of Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel ceiling painting of the creation, which closes up to just the image of God pointing in much the same way Doubting Thomas had been shown prodding christ’s wound, and then this image of god morphs smoothly into the shape and form of a human brain: God, Thomas tells us, like everything else is a creation of our brain ...
We see Maria's brain surgery: an image of the parts of her brain labelled with letters ‘because every brain is unique and it helps to find their way around it’; and then we see the picture drawings she has to name and hear her lose her words.

Sarah
We first have seen Sarah in the earlier scene on the tube: Jeremy’s girlfriend videoed her looking after her friend being harassed by a sleazy man. She is now in the old speech therapist’s kitchen, smoking and singing silently to ‘do you know the way to San José’’ on the radio. The old lady comes in in her motorised chair and changes the station to the news. Sarah takes her money from the bag that seems to live in the microwave and leaves. Ada arrives and gives the old lady a present.
the kitchen widens to contain a radio studio where we find Sarah, head-phoned up with a male escort, both are being interviewed about their experiences as sex workers: his is boastful and glamorous, hers is hurt and troubled – she has been abused as a child by her stepfather, she has overdosed to get away and into care, she has cut herself their to try and get away from the care worker who is abusing her, she goes from a massage parlour to a street prostitute to support her drug habit. She is not inarticulate but she is utterly out voiced by the male escort who steals the show.
As they are ushered out of the studio Sarah seems to recognise the BBC man who replaces them to read the news in smooth RP
The kitchen comes back together: Sarah back at her cleaning job with the old lady, gets some soup, heats in the microwave (taking the old lady’s bag out first), takes the soup to the old lady and finds she has died. Makes a phone call.
Outside she phones the BBC – asks for Anthony – changed his name – Tony Briggs – leaves her number saying his sister called.
Another radio studio: Tony is recording a story about Narcissus. Sarah arrives and is allowed into the studio …
Sarah and Ada
Tony at the police station

Jeremy
Jeremy in Nicaragua looking for info about his mother – a singer? a nanny?
Jeremy’s film
the launch dinner
blocking the singing lesson scene
the rushes
the singing teacher’s tearful close-up
sex discovered in the trailer and the german’s black eye
the singing teacher’s death scene and maria’s lost voice
Jeremy calls his mother asking if his mother was a prostitute

Marie
Sound technology – overlaying different vocal tracks using laptop – head still bandaged
Sound studio dubbing French onto Jeremy’s film: the singing teacher’s death scene. her first job. she gets the number from Sebastian for louise, who can read lips, to try and discover what her father is saying in old home movie film
Marie at home talking about medication and care for Michelle with her doctor. Louise arrives – translates what she can – banal stuff like “look at the camera” and “what do you think of my new car?” Marie trying to get back the lost memory of the sound of her father’s voice. Louise offers to stay and go through all the film. Marie leaves for her choir rehearsal
Foley studio putting in the sounds for the singing lesson of Jeremy’s film
Choir in the church. Michelle arrives
Sound studio with the voice artist trying out different ‘dad’ voices
Marie is persuaded to voice it and gets the sound of her father being in the room: “of course you will have our father’s voice” Michelle tells her

Jackson
in his French speaking car trying to cancel the rest of his tango lessons because his wife is leaving him
Tony has died under a train – suicide or pushed? a woman has been caught on camera rushing away from the Manchester train platform at Euston His greek secretary turns him down for tango partnering
Interviews voice artist colleagues about him
the police voice expert analyses Sarah’s answer machine message as someone from the north, top teeth that have been replaced, not too big, and with a minor sound that would depress its listeners. she turns Jackson down for tango partnering
Interviews Sebastian who knew Tony well – worked with all his projects, saw him a lot outside of work too. Demonstrates the Tony’s voice sections making rail announcements
Tony’s flat – loads of sleazy home-made porn films. Sebastian calls him to say he’s remembered Sarah’s visit to the studio.
the police voice expert ids the voice on the answer machine and in the BBC prostitute radio show as 100% the same
Tony finds Sarah working the street in Manchester. pretends a breakdown, asks about her, gets her confession: an accident when Tony came after her and found her at the station on her way back to Manchester, they tussle, he steps back, she runs

Sebastian
sound recording studio: Sebastian is conducting a choir of laughers as a background track for a Susan Sarandon movie we hear running. his phone – bad news
at the morgue in his canary islands home town – identified his father’s 4 days dead body – his father’s corpse farts
at his father’s place getting clothes – simon in the closet
the taped obituary announcement being taken round the streets – the neighbours have added their names in as family – S cuts and splices the cassette tape
the wake – body the wrong way round – dentures missing – simon brings in the aunts bearing gifts – Sebastian’s first tape machine and a tape of his father’s stand-up routine

Michelle
Constant noise like snow - whispers you can't ever quite catch - the voices - first as ghostly forms straining to break through the stretched membrane of your mind - then more distinct personalities: a priest, a little girl - beckoning - calling you out.
Michelle finally leaving the hospital - hiding her prescription - finding it to get her ticket out - packing her toys
Michelle at work in 'her' book shop - the first we are outside with her voices, the second inside with her warmth and intelligence and kindness - the book she lends to Guillaume - taking her pills
Michelle at home - a visit from Marie & Thomas - he is now a psychotherapist - she is fierce and eloquent in her rejection of going into another trial and Marie's smothering flattering love - he pleads innocence and instead announces that he & Marie are to marry - Guillaume arrives to return the book
The first in a revival of monday poetry evenings - a spanish poem - then Guillaume rapping with Shmo's beatbox accompaniment - then Michelle because she promised she would if he did - her poem 'and I do not die'. and I cry

Lupe
A cafe. Ada waiting. Jeremy arrives with his infant in a carry-cot: Ada's grandson. Ada gives Jeremy a video: this is your mother

A Nicaraguan cafe. Lupe waitressing. Her businessman uncle arrives with an unpleasant german and his 'wife' in a wheelchair. They sell the idea of lupe going with them to Hamburg to look after the wife and their two children. Out of lupe's earshot she is sold for $600.
A doctor's surgery: Lupe is getting a medical prior to travelling. We hear that her mother died when she was tiny and her father of a heart attack when she was ten. She has high blood pressure but is otherwise healthy. She is fifteen
The doctor taking her a blood while her uncle holds her hand morphs into the german restraining her while his 'wife' shoots her arm with drugs. Then she is raped
She is re-dressed in fuck--me clothes and lined up along a caged bar. In the background a film crew are seen away
Her pimp sets up a deal in a car with Tony Briggs - they drive to a bar and he selects Lupe
Lupe is driven to a hotel room where she meets a filmmaker who pays, says she wants to film her story and gives her her card.
In the car she hands over the money and gets her baby, who she clearly adores. A car accident

The film maker now back at home in montreal with the infant Jeremy. Ada arrives, comforts the crying Jeremy back to sleep, is given the tape of Lupe’s interview - just one of 400 hours of tape this woman has filmed of the voiceless prostitutes she has interviewed - and learns that Jeremy is to be put up for foster parents

Jeremy watches Lupe’s film which we see her tell live - arms back & up and helpless with live film of a man caressing his naked torso superimposed over her - then his and many other hands mauling
Ada returns in her black concert dress and sings again

Robert Lepage / Ex machina: http://www.robertlepage.com/

Theatre Sans Frontieres: http://www.tsf.org.uk/index.php

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/LipsynchRobertLepage

'356' (national theatre of scotland)

2008-09-12T17:37:00.006+01:00

365
Created by National Theatre of Scotland

NATIONAL THEATRE OF SCOTLAND AND EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL CO-PRODUCTION
Creative Team:
Written by David Harrower
Directed by Vicky Featherstone
Designed by Georgia McGuinness
Song by Paul Buchanan
Lighting by Colin Grenfell
Sound by Adrienne Quartly
Movement by Steven Hoggett

Cast includes:
Ryan Fletcher
Scott Fletcher
Siu Hun Li
Simone James
Marlene Madenge
Helen Mallon
John Paul McCue
Laura McMonagle
Ben Presley
Rebecca Smith
Ashley Smith
Gayle Telfer Stevens
Owen Whitelaw
Julie Wilson Nimmo

http://www.lyric.co.uk/pl352.html

'This examination of teenage lives as they break out into the adult world is an object lesson in the creative use of the stage.' Independent on Sunday
‘Stunning performances from a superb young cast… It is beautiful, haunting.’ **** The Scotsman‘

'One evocative coup de theatre after another.’ **** The Herald

J is 16. She has lived in care all her life. Tonight is her first night on her own - in a 'practice flat' set up to help her leave the care system. A gateway to the outside world it is a witness to countless hopes, fears and memories.
365 follows a group of young people who pass through the flat, taking their first faltering steps towards adulthood and independence.
The National Theatre of Scotland's Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone has created a powerfully visual piece of theatre, with choreography from Steven Hoggett (Frantic Assembly), songs from Paul Buchanan (The Blue Nile) and text by David Harrower, one of Britain's leading playwrights whose acclaimed work includes the Olivier award-winning Blackbird.
For everyone 16+ Contains strong language
Running Time 1 hours 55 mins (no interval)

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/365NationalTheatreOfScotland#

*** 'helium' (slung low)

2008-09-11T23:50:00.013+01:00

'helium'
slung low
at barbican
http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?id=7613

Bella’s grandfather keeps sending parcels to her. Inside each parcel is a helium balloon… This imaginative installation tells the story of Bella’s quest to discover her grandfather’s hidden past. From the inside of a Lancaster Bomber, to a magic show in 1920s London, we uncover the mysteries concealed by a series of helium balloons.Combining live and digital performance Helium investigates guilt, responsibility and the true meaning of ‘release’. As the performance unfolds in a series of boxes, each audience member has a short adventure of their own.

post script:

the day after seeing this show i open my the box and and take out the helium balloon. and with joy i discover that it is tied with a white ribbon to the storybook of the show. there is a programme inside too. and as i read the story with the remembered images from the show i do have a very special experience. and i am right that there is much density in this story and that i have absorbed only parts of it, and i love this company for anticipating this and giving me the story to find at home and discover fully ...

in the Pit foyer we're greeted by a couple of men in blue overalls from H Removals who check our names, give us a lollipop and a small card inviting us each to a birthday party, and a list of:
Things we'd like you to know;

- close all doors behind you.

- what you save with cheap boxes you'll pay for in breakages.

- that those ignore you aren't being rude it's just that they can't hear you.

- never pack explosives, combustibles, food of any kind, liquids or pets.

- always press the switch before going in. Once.

- pack all boxes to capacity.

- it's cracking to see you.

with love, H. Removals

and then one by one we are met by our H Removals guide, who sits us down and runs us through a very reassuring briefing about what to do and what to expect. Of course I knew when i booked this that i would quite probably be having to manage my bloody claustrophobia, and so it was as i was led from one small room to the next, and this was a lot easier than it might have been thanks to this expert guiding. At the same time the style and tone of this did make me feel like i was supposed to be 5 years old, which was a little unhelpful to my experience of the show. swings and roundabouts then, tricky to get right, and way better to overdo than underdo guiding as we know to our great cost, but perhaps they could relax a bit of the 'we soooo want you to have a great time' approach. a quibble.

so in the first room i am alone with Bella, who is on the phone to her family, in her recently deceased grandfather Max's room. We then hear through the radio Max in conversation with his gargoyle alter ego? twin? nemesis? satanic master? from them i learn that i am an eavesdropper and necessary to Bella being able to get the story of her grandfather's past. There is a strong sense of clues being laid down and a puzzle that i will have to try and solve. this room is intimate and the experience of being alone with a performer in a small room familiar for me after experiencing 'masque of the red death', but it's interesting to notice just how fast i have learned to become easy in this new audience~performance relationship and wonder how differently it plays with different individual audients.

my guide opens the door and - leaving Bella reading her grandfather's book - leads me out from this first room, hands me a box of popcorn, and steers me into a model movie theatre very reminiscent of the ones janet cardiff & george bure miller have made. A film is playing of 'the great Garibaldi or some such a magician, who appears shoots himself when his card guessing trick goes wrong, altho he reappears later saying something i don't remember (i've since re-seen it on the promo video and been reminded that he's saying "course it's frightening. that's the real trick: making what inside outside". meanwhile max and his gargoyle are back in conversation from the speaker box and talking about me and to me and this dominates my interest. There is a sense of more clues being laid out, and instructed to look up i find a joker playing card attached to the ceiling by a sign to 'take this card'. i do. the experience of this room is mostly confusing - maybe i haven't been concentrating enough or have become too distracted between film watching, conversation listening, popcorn munching and realising i can relax enough to know that my claustrophobia isn't getting the better of me. one of the things i do enjoy in all the rooms is that the time in each of them is long enough to get beyond the immediate novelty and begin to immerse in what is happening: in fact i could have enjoyed much longer (so it must have all been successful to have over-ridden my small space panic!)

so to the third room - the belly of a WWII bomber, with with one of the radio ops. this time i've been instructed to put on the headphones and to 'be brave'. the airman is trying to have a radio conversation with a friend called Duffy (martyn is convinced they used his name from the booking, and change it for each person, but i'm not so sure). the airman makes contact with Duffy, tells him that he's going to be a father, loses contact, and once again this is being over scored by the voices of Max and his gargoyle. then the floor falls open to show me film of a plane eye's view of the bombing of Dresden (martyn told me this - i wasn't clever enough to get this specific fact), and from this bombed and burning cathedral leaps into the foreground the gargoyle speaking directly up into our bomber but i'm so busy noticing effect of the trap door appears to have not worked smoothly and wondering if this is all i'm supposed to be being brave about and wishing it was just that bit more convincing that i don't remember what he says (but again from the promo video i've picked up the message "don't leave me behind"). i'm also still feeling under some pressure to solve a puzzle, pass a test, and perhaps this interferes with my focus, but again i think that given more time to become immersed and/or maybe less apparent density of information to be processed from Max and the gargoyle i could have quite fully entered into a belief of this world: there was so nearly the possibility of feeling i am in this bomber in radio silence with this airman whose friend has probably just been shot down.

'harrowing isn't it' says my guide as he takes me to the next room and i feel guilty because no it hadn't been really, although i think perhaps this comment was the key to release me from trying to solve the puzzle and licence me instead to simply bear witness, and this made the last two rooms easier to just be in. The penultimate 'box' is a hospital room, where i come face2face with the gargoyle, dressed as an orderly cleaning up the room, Max's voice as an image across the heart monitor screen. i think i missed important parts of the story in this room, except to pick up that because i - as the eavesdropper - was there still there listening then Bella was still turning the pages of the book in which she was learning this her grandfather's story, and that somehow during the bombing i'd just seen, Max and the gargoyle had become inextricably linked together, and that now that Max was dying the gargoyle was turning back into stone and suffering visibly as this happened. i don't know why Max laughs so maliciously while this happens, and somewhere too i am still bothering away trying to identify whose famous voice Max has (patrick stewart in fact - and a less famous voice would have saved me this distraction).

then the last room is a white space with a moving projection of cathedral arches and stained glass windows. this is the easiest room to just absorb the last of the story - a memory of Max's - that the gargoyle doesn't have because it was the one and only time time Max forgot him - of Bella letting go her helium balloon and it floating free. there is some association being made between the pages of the book of this story now heard and the helium balloons being set free and at last as Max fades away so too can the gargoyle and they can still together float free. and we watch a projection of Bella collecting her grandfather's snowscene and leaving his now packed away room for the last time, Max is finally released from his wartime guilt.

i am led out from the removal box rooms and on the way back to the foyer my guide gives me my own box with my name and inside my own white helium balloon, to go with my lollipop and my joker playing card. so it does nearly all fit: the birthday party was Bella's where she released her helium balloon, the lollipop i decide is simply a toy to help keep me and other anxious eavesdroppers calmed (and actually it works for this - the thought that i could suck it soothes despite the fact that i hate the things). the joker playing card and the suicidal magician remain an enigma for me i'm afraid.

this is a good-hearted and genuine show, warmed hugely by the care and thought that has obviously gone in to making it safe and accessible for us as individual audients travelling through new performance territories. and i love that this company is a diverse group of deliberately mixed artists and this fusion has gone into its devising and performance (just as we aspire so hopefully to do one day). it must be expensive to run because of its low audience numbers and high guiding team. it is limited by the low level of technology - the projections are not as good as we now see them in theatres and galleries, and the sound suffered for me because of the high high precision in janet cardiff & george bures miller's work.

and so from reading later i learn all the details that the above narrative of my experience has troubled over, missed or muddled:

~ the gargoyle is more precisely a grotesque - "a gargoyle spouts water".

~ 'the Great Capaldini''s show is a birthday treat for the eight year old Max, and he is the boy at the centre of the botched card trick. which in fact isn't botched at all but introduces us to Max's propensity to feel intense guilt: it is his fault the card trick has gone wrong. and the magician is not suicidal - this is simply part of the drama of the act.

~ the young airman is Max himself of course and the gargoyle chooses him to leap into from his burning cathedral in his burning city. and his friend Duffy is Duffy and not just Duffy for m duffy and me.

~ the restoration of the dresden cathedral brought no redemption for Max, it did not re-make the gargoyle's home nor offer any passing on for either of them.

~ we are invited to share this story. this is no longer just Max's story for Bella, but for us all to put our faces and names and memories and imaginings to: "just as Bella has my diary, you have what you have just experienced..."

"thank you for coming" the company write on the last page.
thank them for making such a special, wonderful and memorable experience.

but i look forward to what they make next ....
http://web.mac.com/slung.low/Slung_Low/slung_low_home.html

see also composer/sound artist Heather Fenoughty's blog about her making for this show:

www.heather-fenoughty.com/blog/2008/09/21/helium.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/Helium#

'fragments' by Samuel Beckett (Peter Brook)

2008-09-09T15:07:00.007+01:00

Fragments
Five short pieces by Samuel Beckett
A C.I.C.T./Theatre des Bouffes du Nord and Young Vic co-production

Direction Peter Brook
With the collaboration of Marie-Helene Estienne
Light Philippe Vialatte
Actors Kathryn Hunter Marcello Magni Khalifa Natour

at Young Vic

http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on?action=details&id=2021

Rough for Theatre I
'i'm unhappy.'
'why haven't you killed yourself?'
'i'm not unhappy enough yet.'

As the programme notes say, this short piece 'compresses Endgame to a fragment'. A man with one leg meets a blind beggar. For a bit it looks like they can come together as a co-dependent unit - Billy pushing the chair and providing company in return for canned food and shelter. But the Billy is too close and the other too vicious and they remain locked in their own perfect miseries

Rockaby
Kathryn Hunter is compelling and traumatic to watch as she delivers this intricate monologue that has all the raw loneliness of living alone gazing through windows possibly or possibly not with dementia but certainly beyond living well or easily: 'at the end of a long day she said to herself, who else?, time to stop, to and fro, up the stair, ....'
Shattering and wonderful.

Act Without Words II
Magni as the permanently furious clown and Natour as the perpetually happy one are very funny as they are each in turn prodded out of their white sacks by the great prodder from the sky to perform the rituals of their day. It finishes with Magni on his knees praying - for release? For a change? For anything?

Neither
Another solo with Hunter dressed the same so this feels like a continuation of 'Rockaby' - again she holds your attention interest breath even but it is so short I cannot remember anything from it beyond a woman walking with purpose purposelessly

Come and go
The last piece is a wonderful bit of perfectly timed and honed foolery: three old friends ludicrously over-dressed in hats, costume earrings & coats meet on a park bench and one by one whisper scandal about each other: 'does she know?' 'please god she isn't told!'
Delightful and hilarious.

Brook on Beckett:
'... When he discovered theatre it became a possibility to strive for unity, a unity in which image, sound, movement, rhythm, breath and silence all come together in a single rightness. This was the merciless demand he made on himself - an unattainable goal that fed his need for perfection. Thus he enters the rare passage that links the ancient Greek theatre through Shakespeare to the present day in an uncompromising celebration of one who looks truth in the face, unknown, terrible, amazing...'

channel 4 interview with Peter Brook about this show:

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/arts_entertainment/performing_arts/interview+peter+brook/2445767

theatre des bouffes du nord website:

http://www.bouffesdunord.com/

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/Fragments#

*** 'waves' (katie mitchell)

2008-09-06T16:29:00.005+01:00

'Waves'
A work devised by Katie Mitchell and the Company from the text of Virginia Woolf’s novel 'The Waves'

the Company:
: Kate Duchêne
: Anastasia Hille
: Kristin Hutchinson
: Sean Jackson
: Stephen Kennedy
: Liz Kettle
: Paul Ready
: Jonah Russell

Director: Katie Mitchell
Designer: Vicki Mortimer
Video Designer: Leo Warner
Lighting Designer: Paule Constable
Music: Paul Clark
Sound: Gareth Fry

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/waves

A tale of friendship, loss, identity and love, Waves is an exploration of human consciousness, tracing a band of friends from childhood to old age and death. The fragmented and dreamlike narrative of Virginia Woolf’s novel is exquisitely evoked using live film, sound and musicians.
Following a sell-out run in 2006, and prior to Broadway, a second chance to see the original National Theatre cast in this unique and acclaimed production.

Eight actors play the friends in 'The Waves' and a Reader who we take to be Virginia Woolf herself. The same actor always gives us the face of their character but they variously play different character's voices, hands, legs, feet ... And once each character's voice is established using the read narrative device of "... said Neville / Jinny / Susan / Bernard / Louis / Rhoda / Percival" the strong character acting helped vocally by distinct accents and intonation rhythms meant it was always clear who we are listening to.
This is everything '...some trace of her' was but for me even better and I can't decide whether this is because I am more familiar with the film -theatre -sound mixed live art form -certainly I felt much happier with the decisions I made about where to put my focus - or whether there is something more simple in the both the narrative line and the telling of this story that made it a much richer deeper and certainly more moving experience. The same delight and thrill I got from watching the fabulously sophisticated execution was still there, but this time I was a lot less the 'boy in a candy shop' trying hopelessly to make a grab for everything, and more the willing Alice happily jumping through the rabbit hole into this world and its people being made before us.

They give us many wonderfully evocative moments and the effect this time is so very close to reading a novel with flashes of imagery coming in and out of sudden focus. And a lot of the best moments come from patterns:
+ the shots of different faces at the train window going off to school- and then the knees coming home
+ the split-frame dinner to farewell Percival to India
+ the series of photos with Percival before he goes oft to India
+ the sequence of moments when each of the friends read the telegram telling of Percy’s death
+ the shoes walking over wet leaves during the final reunion

The film pictures made in this show seem a lot simpler than ‘… some trace of her' and are perhaps all the potent for me because of this - my brain is given more time to fully experience the moments being made because i am less frantically keeping up making sense and feeling wowed. This extra involvement is helped by a greater degree of directing our focus and less film: in ‘… some trace …’ the film images are constant and this means that it’s always up to you moment-by-moment to decide where you put your focus. And while I love the idea of this the activity of doing it - especially the first time - is unrelentingly busy; with less film in this show I am easier about putting my whole absorption in to the film images when we get them knowing there are other times for me to watch the live action. And the use of one long table and lighting and simple un-filmed props (such as the reader's cigarette and reading lamp) means that while it is always possible to watch the peripheral activity, I have a much cleaner sense of where the main focus is. And I think this gives me a deeper more emotional experience. Yes we are capable of taking in multi-layered information from an array of fields, but this leaves us no spare space or capacity to experience the inside of any moment and the experience remains intellectual only.

So for me this earlier and less sophisticated Katie Mitchell show using live theatre-film-sound is a near-perfect experience - moving and evocative, sensuously potent for the eyes and ears, emotionally resonant, and troubling and sexy and warm and familiar and richly richly experiential at every level.

http://picasaweb.google.com/marktrezona/WavesKatieMitchell#

'Crossings' by julie mcnamara

2008-09-03T22:53:00.005+01:00

'Crossings'
Work in progress
by julie mcnamara

Directed by Karena Johnson,

With Margo Virginia Cargill, Nadine Wild Palmer and Julie McNamara

BSL Interpreter: Hetty May Bailey

Set & Costume Design: Chris de Wilde

Visuals & Edit: Caglar Kimyoncu

Lighting: Gursen Houssein

Stage Assistants: Alan Clifton & Rory Campbell

http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29120330831&refurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.new.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fq%3Dnadine%2Bwild%2Bpalmer%26n%3D-1%26k%3D200000010%26sf%3Dr%26init%3Dq

It's high storm at Canning Dock. Shelley's on the run again. Baby Mother of a local gang, she's too long in the tooth for sound advice. Shelley finds shelter on an old ship and is transported by two powerful voices from the past calling her to a whole new set of possibilities. One is an escaped African woman from the notorious slave ship, The Zong, the other a man who isn’t all he appears to be.

Cochrane Theatre

The name says a great about this show:
Ships and people crossing the seas to and from Liverpool;
The stories of three women crossing -Shelley the young pregnant girl in contemporary Liverpool sheltering from the storm and hiding from her boyfriend pimp and his posse' in an old ship; Nzingah the woman who was pushed off the slave ship and left to drown who is full and warm with old wisdom and african pride; and Hegarty the Irish woman still trying to give her drowned brother a proper funeral after surviving the crossing to nz by dressing as a man after being raped and to avoid being thrown overboard with all the other women over 40.

The set is simple and very effective - the bow of a ship surrounded by beams suggesting both a skeleton and great strength. Plain canvas sails surround the prow and its slanted wooden deck, providing also a screen for projected images from Nzingah's & Hegarty's stories.

The first woman we meet emerges through the ship and out through images on the canvas back sail. She remains throughout signing and occasionally interacting with the players and there is potential for her to be an even stronger presence possibly visible only to Nzingah, who we don't have to know is blind.

This is the first time in front an audience for this show in development and it already feels very developed. It needs polishing and the technical side needs time to find its precision but its already compelling storytelling and rich with ideas. I'd love to hear what might come from more choral interweaving of the three distinctive accents: liverpool, african & irish. And it would be great if Shelley could also have a song - maybe a rap as she finds her strength to journey forward alone. And Cynthia suggested we see Nzingah come from an image on the back canvas. And Gareth suggested a constant underscore of water sounds [and apparently there is a composer who wants to write a score]. And I think there are some wonderful moments that would easily hold longer: the melodic drumming Nzingah makes with the beams - perhaps even getting a three [or even four] part version later with all the women; and Nzingah's tribal call.

All the women are strong and completely convincing in their characters: Nadine is wonderfully feisty and vulnerable and restless and uncomfortable; Margot is powerful and still and warm; and Julie is dynamic and fluid mercurial. I wonder how it would play if Nzingah & Hegarty used their storytelling more to empower and enliven Shelley rather than reliving again for themselves.
This is a great show that i'd love to see again after it's had more time to grow.

*** jay brannan @ komedia

2008-08-28T15:46:00.004+01:00

Jay Brannan @ Komedia
http://jaybrannan.com/index2.html

*** exceptional experience

What a wonderful treat
The man in person is about 10 times more wonderful than he is on an already much loved album - beguiling and charming and lightly ironic and warm and funny and conversational with a voice like honey and lyrics that can arrive like a perfectly remembered thought. Also fantastic to see his guitar playing - he seems to do very little with his left hand and yet out comes a lovely intricate melody of string sounds.
As well as the songs we know he sang a sensational version of Joni Mitchell's ‘All I Want’ and a sweetly complex new love song

Oh and of course he also just happens to be utterly beautiful
As new queer role models go i cannot think of a better man for the job

Supported by Bitch - who was also in 'shortbus'
http://www.bitchmusic.com/

Smart funny singer with strong line of anti-bush sentiments and impressive musicianship playing violin - she plays on jay's album - ukulele - making it sound cooler than I've ever heard it - and a pair of percussion balls she used with a number that used poetry to begin and bass guitar. Her sound sometimes reminds of Martha Wainright but in a good way. Intelligent spunky songs we liked enough to buy her album
A really great night out and easily worth the travel to brighton

'eating ice cream on gaza beach' by shelley silas @ soho theatre

2008-08-26T15:14:00.008+01:00

'eating ice cream on gaza beach'
written by shelley silas
directed by anna niland
designed by anthony lamble
lighting by david kidd
projection designer john lloyd fillington

original music by reem kelani

assistant director prasanna puwanarah

Adrian ~ Christopher Sheridan
Rami ~ Oliver Hawes
Maryam ~ Bathsheba Piepe
Muz ~ Ciaran Owens
Ameena ~ Parissa Barghchi
Danny ~ David Mumeni
Ruthie ~ Laura Kiman
Shai ~ Mark Weinman
Officers ~ Obi Iwumene, Zakarya Kaye, Andrew Kaye
Ensemble ~ Tanya Cubric, Elizabeth Henstridge, Daniella Isaacs, Tyan Jones

national youth theatre
Season 2008 - Worlds Apart: global stories and home truths
http://www.nyt.org.uk/
soho theatre
http://www.sohotheatre.com/fromhomepage/pl1524.html

It's sixty years since Israeli independence. Good news for some, not good for others. While one side celebrates, the other mourns.
It's a scorching day on Gaza beach. Again.
From the Babylonians to the Greeks, the Romans, the French, the British, and now the Americans, this narrow stretch of land has been picked over by divide-and-ruling invaders throughout the whole of recorded history. It is the people on the ground who pay the price. It is the people on the sand this play is about.

We come into the theatre to find the entire cast on stage - backs mostly turned to us - still ... As the lights dim one of the actors makes the Muslim call to prayer...
An ice cream van that's seen better days turns repeatedly to evoke a checkpoint, a couple of different bedrooms, and an army office as well as Gaza beach itself.
A screen above will show fairly literal images linked with the action including various shots of Gaza beach, snapshots of Danny and his girlfriend as a happy couple, an orange sunset that could equally be pollution, and a couple of banksy images - the starbucks tank and the baby flying with balloons to illustrate Maryam's final acceptance of her son's death.
Throughout a chorus of veiled women provide a vocal, percussive and silently mimed back-story to the action of the story we get to watch.

The triumph of this play - writing and performances - is in giving us recognisable people we get time and space to get to know and care about:
Adrian "as in Mole?" the brit on a gap year, wondering what it was like for his grandfather who once fought here and determined to not take sides;
Rami the christian ice cream seller who tries so hard to stay away from protests as his way of standing up for what he believes in and because he can't believe they can achieve anything;
Muz (with distracting irish accent) full of righteous fury and pent up fervour for action;
Danny the reluctant israeli soldier forced to finish his term of military service at a checkpoint.
And as a result of finding and being with these people we are drawn in to want to know and -understand more about what is happening here - the political situation for once does not overwhelm the human stories. But at the same time we are given the complex complicated mess of things - there is no hint or pretence here of anything like an answer - just people being people in their different ways and in response to the situations they find themselves in - and not all of these are made by the war.

Lines that resound and remain for me:
"this is it for the rest of my life this is all I've got" Muz
"which would you choose if you had to - england or israel - your physical or your spiritual home?"
"i’m not on either side i’m on both sides i’m on the third side" Adrian
"Not acting is a choice - it's not doing nothing." Rami

This is a brave play honestly performed. I liked a lot that none of the characters are as straight forward and predictable as we might expect them to be: Danny the soldier of conscience nevertheless follows his orders; Rami is pulled away from his determined decision not to act and his own sense of responsibility by his sense of responsibility in the heat of the moment; Adrian forgets his neutrality and rushes headlong into battle; Maryam wishes for peace also finds herself taking action and joining the protest. People behaving like people - except in this place people being people can get killed.
And the brilliance of Shelley's play is she has made a true modern day tragedy: its outcome is both unacceptable and unavoidable - we hate what happens while believing utterly in its happening because none of these characters can feasibly do other than they do.

I was also hugely impressed with the intelligent feisty-ness of the young cast and the creators articulating their process making and performing of this play during the post show discussion - neither belligerent or aggressive unlike a couple of the questioners nearly were – nor in any way submissive about their choices and what they are doing.

'Telling a story of Gaza without preaching it' - 'Eating Ice-cream on Gaza Beach' brings a range of Palestinian and Israeli opinion to London audiences. By Olivia Snaije Special to The Daily Star Wednesday, August 27, 2008
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=4&article_id=95435

*** "motherland" @ underbelly

2008-08-20T17:56:00.003+01:00

tuesday 19th august 2008

Edinburgh Festival: Motherland
@ underbelly

And another exceptional experience
Verbatim theatre made from interviews with mothers & partners from north east england of soldiers serving in iraq & afghanistan
Four actors play a dozen or more different women - sometimes falling into & out from each other, sometimes very focused, sometimes a solo voice, sometimes together as mother & daughter or friends so that we get depth as well as breadth. Performed with such truth & honesty that for the entire 1 hour 20 I never question or come out from feeling like I am listening to these women rather than the actors playing them.
Simply staged with a either canvas or plastic tarpaulin backcloth that held the projected names of the characters and as a closing film of soldiers morphing into a final image of a lace-curtained window looking out to a bit of tree. The women sit on shell boxes and the only other props are flowers that are snipped to fit a vase, framed photos of loved ones we never fully get to see, janice's file documenting her battle to find out the truth of her son's death, a mobile phone one of the women is using to text her just returned boyfriend, a microphone that is taken up twice by the women who have taken their grief into a public campaign.
The verbatim scripting give these stories the ring of truthful authenticity that this show accentuates and heightens rather than colours or distorts and the accumulative effect is of a group of smart articulate warm funny honest thinking and previously invisible and unheard women with a great deal of importance to say.
And emotionally it leaves me undone.

Special moments include:
+ the woman who holds the mike out to us in an eloquent undoing expression of helpfulnessless, voicelessness, powerlessness - and I know we are not intended to take it but at the same time I feel guilty & culpable for not reaching out to her;
+ all the stories of mothers finding out their child has been killed - one who has lost the daughter who had already had to bury two fiancés after road accidents and is now still locked in a bitter anger for all Iraqis, one a mother who persuaded the son who was killed 18 months after signing up to be a soldier rather than a footballer so as to have a longer career than 18months, and one who hears her son is dead from her daughter-in-law in a call to her mobile while she is alone on a bus, and who then learns that if she hadn't the phoned the base herself she would have had to find this out from the television because parents of married soldiers are not next of kin and currently are not included for a personal visit from service personnel.
Verbatim theatre at its absolute finest.

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/marktrezona/Motherland#

*** 66a Church Road - Daniel Kitson @ traverse

2008-08-18T09:10:00.001+01:00

*** exceptional experience
66a Church Road - Daniel Kitson
@ traverse

66a Church Road - a Lament Made of memories and kept in suitcases

Superlative wonderful Show fluent and funny and evocative warm and human -storytelling doesn't get any finer than this

We arrive down the treacherously Steeped Stairs of traverse one and get front row seats The Stage is set with an array of old fashioned Suitcases that immediately trigger us into stories of other times and people from our lives - even before the show begins we get to enjoy sweet forgotten memories

Daniel comes on in a brown Suit, takes off his jacket and rolls up his Shirt Sleeves He sits on a chair Surrounded by Suitcases and starts to tell us the story of his six year relationship with his flat in crystal palace Each chapter is punctuated with an audio playback of another related memory usually involving him in a relationship with his father trying to Sit with dignity on the blow- up chair, with one or several girls he is involved with, with himself. With his home And these moments are magically illustrated with a variety of models and projections Into and within the Suitcases _ a projection of a room The light Shining through the slatted blinds film of his Street, looking Out through his front door to new fallen Snow and a model of his entire 3 story flat Not all of these are fully visible even from the Front and after his curtain call he completely wins my heart by coming back to explain the idea for these models only came a month ago and long after this space was arranged - the traverse needing to be more organised than i am and they have tried unsuccessfully to make them visible in Such a large space. So they are all re-lit and people are invited to file past the Stage to see them on their way out and _ holy wow! - people are welcome to take photos. This man lives my manifesto.
And this is how he Starts his story - conjuring around the emotional resonances of 'home' _ a place we go hope to find but can never really seriously go looking for 'What are you looking for in a home?' Might be the question the estate agents ask but the answer is always '' it depends...'
We hear about john his long-suffering friend Who houses him while he looks for his home And we hear alot about his landlord who is very much the Villain of this story and the cause of Daniel's eventual break-up with and leaving of 66A Church Road
This performance is packed and textured with language and observations and humanity and Spirit and love and music - literally as well as in the sounds of the spoken written speech The breaks between chapters also allow a bit of Space for Some of our own memories and associations to puff and swirl and breathe the air a little.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller @ fruitmarket gallery

2008-08-18T08:57:00.001+01:00

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
@ fruitmarket gallery

Exceptional experience again!

Glorious experience with 'opera for a small room' in the dark - speakers arranged around the room

A new work - giving its name to this exhibition - the house of books with no windows is beautiful -inside and out

The Killing Machine is mostly just a curio this time - albeit an ingenious one - but still succeeds in giving me a little chill. And I am still unable to press the 'start' button.

The movie -name?- is rehoused into a small container toy theatre that 3 people can listen thru and Seems to combine both the opera diva and the film noir pieces from macba Barcelona

The Dark Pool is as rich and evocative and secretive and seductive as the first time _ although by this i was out of time and had to push through too quickly to get fully transported in C. saw this first and loved it- S. saw Opera with me and beamed as happily

And the fruitmarket gallery have made a video showing Janet and George talking about and making their work and this is fascinating - including the manequin with a head full of microphones to record sound as closely as we humans can hear it.

the Tiger Lilies' 7 Deadly Sins with Nathan Evans & Ophelia Bitz

2008-08-17T08:15:00.001+01:00

the Tiger Lilies' 7 Deadly Sins with Nathan Evans & Ophelia Bitz
@ The Famous Spiegeltent
edinburgh fringe festival

we queue as per usual to get into the venue in the Spiegel Garden - a carnival atmosphere the trees white with dappled spotlight and huge crowds including a long long line just to get into the area
The Famous SpiegeLten+ is like an old fashioned merrygo round with the horses removed to make boothed seating. a bar at the entrance this is going to be punk Kabaret.
On stage a drumset with a toilet for its seat, a piano, a microphone a slender cello and in a Corner a red and white Striped Punch & Judy tent
Enter Nathan- modern camp pretty and oozing confidence through flirting eyes. He gets us to call ''wake up mr punch" and amazingly to me the crowd obliges in full pantomime chorus and despite being called "boys and girls" Nathan then disappears into the tent to animate punch and 'jude' and a pig policeman and the devil with an enormous penis {to whack mr punch with}. This is classic punch the judy performed with all its traditional zest violence and offensiveness albeit this time with full uncensored swearing sex and class A drug taking. Consequently it leaves me cold

The Tiger Lilies are an exceptional band whose lead singer is ideally suited to kabaret, his face painted white with dark skull-like eyes. he plays piano, ukelele & accordian and in many ways this feels like his show with the rest there to provide a setting for him. His voice - often in falsetto - is rich and expressive. And the best of this show is his vocals The show involves a dirty and bleakly negative trawl through the 7 Deadly Sins and the finest moment for me is the haunting song for Sloth with pheremone and gayboy Sweetly melodic on the oboe and sexy in shirtless braces, tatoos and wings
Ophelia Bitz bringing On the Sin labels and Swinging her tits about - best is her Mrs Loveitt moment pouring gin from the bottle Wedged in her cleavage
The rest is too samey too Knowingly wanting to offend and too musical hall for me to really enjoy
The crowd on the other hard adored it

"self-accusation" by peter handke @ C socco

2008-08-15T01:29:00.002+01:00

unfinished posting
thursday 14th august 2008

"Self-Accusation"
by Peter Handke
Theatre du jour

Lots of words. A soundscape of moments from a life
An examination of small and large moments - good bad and neutral - listed through an entire life
Interpretative self- provocation coming from the ego or the id
A long poem performed sometimes vocally so as to present as music a choral piece, and sometimes as heavily {over}acted performance
It's best moments for me are in its vocal layering when there's enough neutrality to let me weave out from the density of the language and I found the heavy physical expressiveness of alot of it contaminated my experience. I also found the soundtrack mostly distracting - except the siren which made me reflect on the large and little consequences that might follow or flow from any of these listed moments.
The best of this for M was being able to chase and channel our own thoughts through the repetition and the rituals and the chanting. And he liked the individual performances they were each giving and the ways they actioned the many different moments.
Most of all it reaffirmed my huge interest in and admiration for handke's theatre and burned a wish to make something of his one day

Best Moments

It started with each performer with the same text mostly but not always out of synch so you received one as an echo of what was heard already but for each different & uniquely inflected and curved in & out
Then the back-to-back turning with the performer facing us miming the words the Other behind was voicing.
They start in grey then get red clothes and props from their suitcases to wear and brandish.

very accomplished difficult highly finessed performances that I just wanted to ring truer or at least leaving more for me to bring

"free outgoing" @ traverse

2008-08-15T00:58:00.002+01:00

unfinished posting
wednesday 13th august 2008

"Free Outgoing"
Royal Court Theatre presents
International Playwrights: A Genesis Project
at Traverse

Mother Son Daughter Chenai Tamil sex on the net seedy friend astute neighbour live on T.V.India
jackals at the door

"He's a tamil - he'll bear a grudge into his next life"

Seeing {only} what you go looking for

Sitting in the front and feeling like we're in the room with them

Terrific writing and rivetting central performance - all good performances

Traditional vs internet cultures

A world that is more recognisable than unfamiliar