'Lunar Sea' (Momix)

'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#

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

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

timberlake wertenbaker and anna furse (national theatre new connections)

saturday 5th july 2008

national theatre new connections
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/newconnections

New Connections is a red-hot season of short new plays created by established writers and performed by young people.
High-profile writers including Mark Ravenhill, Abi Morgan, Jack Thorne and Bryony Lavery have written plays for this year’s festival.
The search for identity pulses through New Connections 2008: for acceptance and survival in modern Britain, for racial equality in 1960s South Africa, by deception in magical allotments, during white-out in a snow blizzard, through parenting, through faith, or by comic mistakes of social networking.

Arden City
by Timberlake Wertenbaker
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/Arden20City+36054.twl
Rosie and Sally are two cousins who escape from home after difficulties with Sally’s father. Rosie dresses as a boy for safety and the girls find their way to an allotment. Orlando, who also has to flee because his brother Oliver wants him killed, finds his way to the allotment with Adam, his younger friend.
A modern retelling of As You Like It: a story about love, identity and freedom.
Performed by Daydreamer Youth Theatre, Watford

static but often well delivered reading, stong textural script but unfortunately mostly wooden and often cheesey

The Peach Child
by Anna Furse and Little Angel Theatre
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/The20Peach20Child+36056.twl
An adaptation of a well-loved Japanese fairytale. One day, as the Old Woman washes kimonos in the river, a large peach floats by. She takes it to her husband for dinner. As he cuts into the flesh, a baby boy is born. They call him Momotaro – ‘peach child’ – and he brings joy to their lives. At the age of 15 the boy tells his adoptive parents that he has to leave them. Over the other side of the mountain dwells the evil Ogre who must be overcome.

Anna Furse, Artistic Director of Athletes of the Heart, was also Artistic Director for Paines Plough in the early 1990s and Bloodgroup in the 1980s. She is an award-winning director and writer of over 50 productions that have toured internationally, including Augustine (Big Hysteria) (Time Out Award for Writing and Directing), and Gorgeous. The Peach Child was originally written and directed for The Little Angel Theatre (Japan Festival and the National Children’s Theatre Festival 2001). She wrote and directed My Glass Body for BBC Radio 3. Current productions include Don Juan Who? (with Mladinsko, Ljubljana, touring the UK in association with FEEAST) and DUST, being researched in India on an ArtsAdmin Bursary.
Performed by Kennet School, Newbury

much more successful with the whole company (notably a school rather than youth drama group) involved in making the performance...

+ fab effects with newspapers making the set (screens, hillside, sea, boat) and costumes
+ great movements from live to puppetry into live or the two happening together so we got the peach child appearing as an infant and then (swiftly) growing up into a young man, the people leaving the house as tiny figures seen heading up the hillside, the bird who swoops in b4 being replaced with an actor …
+ live music throughout punctuating and adding dimension (harp and 2 horns)
+ use of silhouette and simple movement and to convey moments in the story and character (like the ogre)
+ terrific ensemble work to make the puppets work (3 boys manipulate the peach child infant and the set
huge amount of work that is much more engaging than the previous ‘straight play’ presentation. definitely a big hooray for what devised theatre can make possible with an amateur group

*** "running the silk road" (yellow earth theatre) @ barbican

wednesday 25th June 2008

"running the silk road"

yellow earth theatre

http://www.yellowearth.org/

at the pit, barbican

http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=6493

Wonderful special show that held me gripped thru every moment
A story told with such honesty and care and belief and humour - tackling the big issues of our times (global warming, china’s exploitation of planet + people, the difficulties of carrying a secular sensibility into fundamentally religious lands, living out multi-cultural relationships) in- ways that were recognisable and true without ever falling into stereotype or platitude or preaching
And unlike last night's “marguerite” this show gave us the personal story alongside he big story - played out as a battle between the gods for domination of the earth using Peking Opera forms. this was coupled this with the book Ken carries with him that lists the strange monsters and creatures - locusts, snakes, dragons, tiger-striped beasts - and what each of these bring with their appearance -deceit, drought, flood locusts -all presented as nightmares emanating out of Ken's fever.
And inside these global battles (which culminate in the earth’s near incineration under a sky of 10 suns that have to be systematically shot down by the archer god to bring us another chance for renewed survival) the personal story of 5 friends from very different backgrounds, all very recognisable as 21st century Londoners, is played out through the journey of Ken's sponsored run along the Silk Road and through the very different difficulties each new land brings

Very special and wonderful on very many levels.

And with a vastly smaller budget leaving “Marguerite” a long way behind

A cast of UK and Chinese performers weave together two theatrical traditions in this enthralling collaboration. In 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, a group of friends from London set off on an epic journey along the ancient Silk Road trading route to China. Armed only with good humour, they cross the isolated terrain of central Asia, carrying with them an alternative Olympic flame to represent the dangers of global warming. The story of their journey is interwoven with tales from Chinese mythology. Classical actors from Beijing Opera draw on the zaju theatre of the Jin Dynasty, using dance, acrobatics, comic patter and music.

Yellow Earth is an award-winning East Asian theatre company based in the UK. It produces intercultural work that crosses art forms, boundaries and languages. Recent productions have been presented in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chongqing, Northern Ireland, and as part of the RSC's Complete Works series in Stratford. Writer Paul Sirett works extensively for television, radio and film. His most recent production was the Olivier Award-nominated musical The Big Life, which premiered at Theatre Royal Stratford East and transferred to the West End.
Performance time: 19:45
Running time: 90 mins/no interval
In English and Mandarin with English subtitles

Reviews

‘Visually sparkling, morally robust and imaginatively adventurous.’ The Times on Play to Win

"The running battle between Shen Feng's God of Thunder and Yanzhong Huang's Queller of the Flood is an epic tussle of incredible agility, while the cast demonstrate sinuous expertise in the manipulation of various dragons, serpents and giant insects.” The Guardian

“An unusual and ambitious play… an exciting prospect for the audience” Liverpool Daily Post

‘…a show that lacks nothing in its inventiveness in blending East and West.’ Independent

'...delivered with such a touching sincerity...' Independent

"macunaima" (dende collective)

saturday 14th june 2008

macunaima
dende collective
http://www.dendecollective.org/

lyric first, lyric hammersmith
http://www.lyric.co.uk/pl337.html

Imagine a Brazilian Lewis Caroll on acid narrating an epic saga of a hero without morals…
Mario de Andrade wrote Macunaima, the hallmark of Brazilian literature, in the 1920's. Now Lyric favourites, Dende Collective (The Piranha Lounge, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Agreste) return with a new stage adaptation.

a posh dinner party
the guests arrive - they are avant garde society - artists and followers of 1920s brazillian modernism
one is mario the writer of the novel “macunaima”
he begins to tell his new story and little by little it comes alive and is acted out by the guests. the ‘garcon’ plays macnunaima interspersed with decadent scenes of excess by the guests -eating frogs, orgies of sex, smearing each other with muddy looking food, patronising enactments of tribal dancing …

the performance is includes a mix of physical theatre and puppetry

At the end of the post show discussion an audience member suggests that all of this story is happening in the head of mario and that he was a very difficult man with quite a fractured personality and maybe the dinner party could be aspects of what he sees and thinks brought to life as the story of macunaima

the main problem with the show as we saw it is that there is nothing driving it. the group want to solve the apparently immensely difficult challenge of bringing this novel into a performance. but I think this alone will not make a compelling show – it needs to be energised and focused and arranged around a particular perspective / story / person they want us to see and connect with.
also worth noting – the first people we meet we connect with strongly as an audience and use them as our way in to the show. thus they need to either be our connection with the story or at least translate the introduction to the character(s) who will be. one of my biggest confusion and irritation came from firstly disliking the dinner hostess intensely ( as we were intended to) and then losing my link into the play as it progressed. the other candidate – the garcon – who was much easier to like – became lost to me once he became macunaima and I ceased to have any way to continue to elate to him.

Since July 2006 we have been developing our Macunaíma cycle through a series of workshops and various months of intensive research in different fields and with different collaborators. Our aim is to investigate how to adapt this iconic Brazilian Modernist novel from the 1920s to a contemporary context involving different artists, institutions and artforms, and how to feed directly from our educational work into our artistic process.

Mário de Andrade’s seminal 1928 novel Macunaíma- o herói sem nenhum caráter is Brazil's greatest 20th century epic and a touchstone of the Brazilian Modernist movement. It was adapted into a film by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in 1969 and is seen as a satirical view on Brazilian society and morals.
We have been developing our Macunaíma cycle through a series of workshops and various months of intensive research in different fields and with different collaborators. The aim is to investigate how to adapt this iconic Brazilian Modernist novel from the 1920s to a contemporary context involving different artists, institutions and artforms, and how to feed directly from our educational work into our artistic process.

THE MACUNAÍMA CYCLE
R&D1...
August 2006: Outlining the Story. Festival Encuentros Latinoamericanos in Balham, South London
Three actors, One director and No props. We worked towards outlining this epic.

R&D2...
2- 7 April 2007 : Young People's Approach. Wilde Theatre, South Hill Park in Bracknell, Berkshire
Working with a group of young people aged 8 to 14 we presented The Adventures of Macunaíma through their perspectives on the epic, using different media, including digital animation and puppetry.

R&D3...
16 - 21 July 2007: Visuals: Puppetry. Incubate Season @The Little Angel Theatre in Islington, London
Our research continued, and it led us to working with puppetry through a collaboration with The Little Angel Theatre and the Brazilian visual artist Samuel Guimarães who flew from Brazil to work with us. We paired him with a British puppet maker, Andy Jones. They worked in transforming Guimarães' sculptures into puppets as a group of actors experimented with bringing them to life.

R&D4...
6 - 11 August 2007: Visuals: Digital Animation & Projections. South Hill Park in Bracknell, Berkshire.
Dende went high tech for the first time. We played with different ideas on how to use projections and digital animation to tell the story. At times we had five projectors working simultaneously!

R&D5...
8 December 2007: Writing and Sharing the Story. First Bites - Oval House, London
We bring together elements from the four previous R&D sessions and form a framework for future development.

The Next Stage... R&D6...
12, 13 and 14 June 2008 : Lyrics First - Lyric Hammersmith, London
We further develop the work and this time we are going to explore the historical context, the very exciting artists that under the banner of the Modernist movement revolucionised Brazilian Art forever. Why was Macunaíma writen and who really was the writer behind it?

André Pink, Dende's Artistic Director has created a site about THE MACUNAÍMA CYCLE. There you will find his personal blog and in-depth insight about how Dende makes work.
http://web.mac.com/apink1/Site/Home.html

The Story
Macunaíma, a native Brazilian from the Amazon, was born black and fully-grown amongst his red-skinned people, becomes white and blond and finally black again; his transformations symbolising all the races that constitute the Brazilian people. We follow the misadventures of Macunaíma from miraculous birth to death, especially as he chases after his lost amulet, given to him by the queen of the Amazons before she became a star. He takes us on fantastic journeys through rivers, jungles, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, all Brazil. With him we encounter a shrewd Peruvian entrepreneur (who in reality is a cannibal giant), collect swear words, sail with the Sun and discover how the Moon was created. Through it all, our scoundrel-hero remains staunchly irreverent and immoral, leaving his conscience behind when he could, a true champion of hedonistic carnal pleasures. Mário de Andrade weaves native Brazilian tales, myths and folklore from different regions with his own imagination and elements from European avant-garde to produce a unique novel that had an influential impact in Brazilian culture (Tropicalismo, Caetano Veloso, Cinema Novo, Hélio Oiticica etc).

The author
Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a scholar and essayist - he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology - his influence has reached far beyond Brazil. After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928.