Most people, when prescribed masturbation, simply get on with the job in hand. Not so Phelim McDermot, co-artistic director of Improbable Theatre. Instead, a bout of prostratitis – inflammation of the prostrate causing pain during ejaculation – led McDermot to begin research into the great god Pan, the Greek deity of lust. After all, who else could he blame for such blocked pipes? Thus, donning horns, spiked chin and barbed nose – even, at one point, a four foot wicker phallus – he embodies the lascivious buck and proceeds to chase three nymphs around the stage like an antiquated version of Benny Hill.
However, though the programme notes protest otherwise, Panic is not about this satyric divinity. Rather, it is about McDermot himself. Indeed, he is on such personal and confessional form that you almost feel bound by audience-patient confidentially. In addition to his sexual health and history, McDermot guides us through his unrequited loves and mid-life crises before divulging the contents of his personal repository of self-help books, from ‘Household Management for Men’ to ‘Fondling Your Muse’. Alongside this revelation of fragile, fallible self, his manifestation as Pan epitomizes the urges of id and seems an act of ritual humiliation or self-flagellation, almost an exorcism of Freudian neurosis.
Rest assured that this is not to label the piece self-indulgent or merely for McDermot’s own cathartic benefit. Rather, he offers up the privacies of his own inner-life that we might gage something of our own. Or, at least, it seems that way. In fact, Panic is a teasing tangle of truths, half-truths and outright falsities and you’re never quite sure where McDermot ends and the constructed visions of Pan and man begin. Nonetheless, it’s done with such lightness and generosity that one can’t but feel convalescent about one’s own plain, old, un-airbrushed humanity.
With the stage of foreshortened floorboards cloaked in rustling brown paper, I was reminded of van Gogh’s self-portraits. Improbable find the same warmth and big-heartedness in volunteering personal shambles and dejection whilst always retaining control over the identity revealed.
At times, Panic feels burdened by an obligation to survey the figure of Pan independent of McDermot as contemporary vessel. The nymphs (Angela Clerkin, Matilda Leyser and Lucy Foster), for example, are crucial only in relation to McDermot – not least because, one is led to suspect, each has, at one point or other, been the object of his affections – but their individual inner-Pan monologues are unnecessary. Likewise, though no one does sumptuous simplicity better than Improbable, certain visual set-pieces seem superfluous in a patchwork structure that, while adding a piecemeal charm, serves mainly to dilute and muddy the primary thrust.
For all this Panic remains an intelligent, engaging and beautifully open gift of a show that works better as self-portrait than mind-map.
After twenty-five years of fiery protest against narrative, fracturing and fragmenting it through repetition, interruption and contradiction, Forced Entertainment have turned raconteurs to tell a single story from beginning to middle to end.
Ostensibly, Void Story follows a man and a woman as they take flight from an unknown danger through a dystopian world. Having been attacked in and turfed out of their flat, they travel through cities, suburbs and sewers encountering one improbable hazard after another.
This being Forced Entertainment, however, the storyline is treated with such attentive disdain that it becomes a weapon against itself. The flat linearity is so dominant that narrative reduces to a sequence of events churned through, spat out and forgotten. Though Tim Etchells’ forcefully meandering text begins at break-neck speed, by its end – a night spent waiting to hitch a ride; a week-long dance marathon – it has us trapped: boring us but refusing to let us get off.
Void Story exists as a collision of live radio play and crassly cinematic slideshow. As such, the narrative is carried by a cut and paste mosaic of its signifiers, whereby the combination of sound and projected image add up to understanding. When the two fail to translate, Etchells’ text steps in with blank explication, revelling in the stilted melodrama of its language.
The projected pictures are themselves cut and paste collages, giving a peculiarly fractious and anonymous feel to the fictional world. Here, the same faces reappear in a single crowd and buildings echo, rotate and repeat to become a city. The story’s characters are carelessly arranged amalgamations of several people, half-humans with dislocated features. Added to the intangible, untraceable geography and warped sense of time of Etchells’, the result is as disconcerting as it is disorientating.
Yet alongside the dislocation of fiction and realities, often even of sound and image, there is a sharp humour to Void Story. Etchells has clearly enjoyed spinning a yarn of indulgent possibilities – from bear attacks to haunted motels – and bastardized Hollywood cool, though the performance mode itself lacks the usual mischief of Forced Entertainment. This is, in part, due to the use of technology, which removes the personality and struggle from the creation of fiction.
Once again, one could level the accusation that Forced Entertainment have aimed too directly at failure – sculpting a narrative so intentionally inane and psychologically empty that it could do nothing but break, regardless of its presentation. Nonetheless, Void Story is a lushly macabre piece that makes a farce of storytelling.
Few social groups receive such gentle stigmatization as railway enthusiasts. Stereotypically, they are white men in their fifties or sixties, often found perched at the end of platforms, clutching notebooks and thermoflasks. Accordingly, Robin Deacon – a young, black, male artist blessed with intelligence, good-looks and eloquence – makes for an improbable champion.
Part performance-lecture, part multimedia reconstruction, Prototypes is a pleasingly scatty homage to a hobby. Alongside his father, Deacon waxes lyrical on all things railway before (re)presenting his childhood trainspotting habits in miniature on a sparsely furnished model train set. The result is tinged with the nostalgia of an outdated educational video and proves a quietly fascinating mixture of fumbling, futility and self-portraiture.
Deacon begins with a short documentary film that owes much to Louis Theroux, interviewing the populace of oddities at a model railway convention. Tucked half-unseen behind a stack of model boxes, he narrates an accompanying lecture – almost an anthropological study of the species – offering theories of dominion and nostalgia. These miniature engingeers dispute the importance of practicality and design, the need for realism over the urge for expressionism and whether the most-appropriate scale is four or two millimetres to the foot. We, still stuck with our scepticism, cannot but chuckle over such quarrels between opposing factions of a divided community, underlined by Deacon’s pitch-perfect combination of highbrow analysis and small-scale triviality.
Prototypes’ triumph, then, is to turn us all into railway enthusiasts, which it does by blurring our affections for content and presentational mode. Such is Deacon’s enthusiasm and charm that his locomotive affections prove infectious. On two screens, each announced by a clumsy scale played on a xylophone, there alternately appears a live feed of a segment of rail track in Southend and its diminutive replica onstage. Each time a train rushes across, whether distantly real or crassly approximated, we flicker with excitement, such that, by Deacon’s final slideshow of unused trains stacked up, ungainly and rusting in a mass grave of machinery, we feel a genuine pang of sadness.
Though his attempted reconstruction of the 1990 timetable could use more commitment and clarity, Deacon’s charmingly homespun piece contains much to stoke the thoughts. Rigously reflective in its handling of reconstruction as form, it thrives on its self-contained futility. Surprisingly personal and warmly tender, Prototypes is a coy and blurry essay on man and machine that will almost drive you to unearth your thermos.
Such is the force of Emma Rice’s contempt for Mozart’s Don Giovanni – here rechristened Don John – that he almost becomes a serial killer. In tandem with the late-seventies setting, Gisli Örn Gardarsson’s sexual predator bears resemblance to the Yorkshire Ripper, as he leaves a string of silently spread-eagled, even mangled, female bodies in his wake: First, the once-proud Elvira – now a waifish ghost in pursuit – then the vicar’s unsexed wife Anna and the bookish bride-to-be Zerlina. Indeed, the Polaroids of past victims exhumed for display seem a mass grave – the documentation of a life-time’s lechery.
Kneehigh relocate the fable to the “Breakdown Britain” of 1978, peppered with soup kitchens and union pickets, and, in doing so, they throw a punk amongst the pitmen in a clash of hedonistic individual and moralistic community. Swooping into a jaded small town – all rusty industrialism and dusty illuminations – to scavenge on its women, Don John is a man out only for his own ends while the rest of the world is on strike. As the town runs out of bedposts, he and his goblin-like manservant Nobby are tracked down by its pack of women intent on revenge.
If this discontented England survived on spirit, the same can be said of Kneehigh’s work, which is usually carried by its generosity, resourcefulness and vitality. However, in this case the budget is willing, but the spirit is not. While that is not to declare it entirely absent, Rice struggles to reconcile the grandly operatic with lowly simplicity. The resulting disjuncture stifles enjoyment of the undeniably striking visuals on show.
This has largely to do with Rice’s neglect of the community presented and, accordingly, the socio-political context. Beyond intermittent powercuts and miner musicians, she largely assumes our understanding of the historical connotations, focussing instead on general atmosphere and aesthetic. Here, the winter of discontent – its collective anger and will-power – is reduced to mere picket chic.
While Rice occasionally nails it, thanks largely to Vicki Mortimer’s grand design, which allows gloriously panoramic views and a strong sense of location, one is often left wishing that the tale was given the same attention as the atmosphere. The awkward text makes performers seem cack-mouthed and much of the humour remains plain. The main victim of this is Carl Grose, whose naive Alan is the human equivalent of condensed milk: clammy, infantile and too sweet to stomach. While Örn Gardarsson has imposing physical presence, he lacks the smooth allure of a true lothario. Unsurprisingly, given the piece’s overt feminism, the women fare better: Nina Dögg Filippusdóttir makes a sympathetic Anna and Patrycja Kujawska proves a quirky, zesty Zerlina.
For all its lush visuals and character acting (often with a capital ‘A’), Don John is not one of Kneehigh’s finest. It leaves you cursing rather than celebrating the company’s newfound riches. As Grose sings in his encore rendition of Billy Joel’s Just the Way You Are: “Only a fool takes things for granted.” Emma Rice and Kneehigh would do well to heed the warning.
Rarely have two pieces of theatre existed so tightly entwined as That Night Follows Day and Once and For All We’re Going to Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen. For the past six months they have been repeatedly conflated as part of a larger discussion about the role of children and young people in theatre. Lyn Gardner has blogged about it here and here, while Brian Logan wrote a terrific feature on the pair for The Times.
Though both are performed entirely and exclusively by people under the age of eighteen, neither fits the mould of “youth theatre” as we know it in Britain. For it is not simply the taking part that counts – i.e. as extra-curricular activity – but the process as a genuine collaboration towards a product. Indeed, both are products that reach far beyond mere parental pride: they are built entirely around their performers. These are not children playing amateurishly at and adrift in an adult art-form; they own that art-form. Rather than scaled-down shortcomings of adult performers – pale imitations of professionals, ill-fitting the demands of a text – the young performers are totally integral to the pieces. Neither could function if performed by adults. Moreover, both pieces exist in close proximity to one another formally and stylistically. That the two pieces should emerge entirely independently, not only at the same time, but from the same place (Ghent, Belgium) makes them the feature writer’s freebie.
Last week offered London audiences the unusual opportunity to see both pieces in quick succession. That Night Follows Day, a collaboration between Tim Etchells and Victoria, played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the SPILL Festival, while Ontroerend Goed (literally: Feel Estate) returned to the BAC with Once and For All....
On the criss-cross multi-coloured grid of a school gym, That Night Follows Day (TNFD) lines up sixteen Belgian children aged between eight and fourteen. They stand at the edge of the stage, arms dangling gawkily by their sides, addressing us with their eyes. Then they start to speak. They speak to us, at us and about us. Etchells’ text, characteristically inexuberant in its candidness, is a list of home-truths and half-truths about adult behaviour towards children. By turns accusatory and appreciative, spinning from melancholy to humour and back, it reflects us through their eyes:
“You feed us. You dress us. You choose clothes for us. You bathe us. You lay down the law. You sing to us. You watch us sleep. You make us promises and sometimes hope we will not remember them. You tell us stories you hope will frighten us, but not too much. You try to tell us about the world.”
Our words and actions bounce back at us like echoes, somehow ridiculous in this guise of objectivity. However, as a piece of text delivered, it stings even as it raises a smile. It blames us but it understands why we acted thus: that we could do no other; that all is done in reverend care of them; that we kill them with kindness. Yet the burning question remains: What gives us the right to impose our worldviews? How do we know? How did we even come to believe such things? Through this chorus of minors, we see ourselves but we also see how we became so and, in that, the real indictment is of the cycle of human behaviour unquestioningly accepted and inherited. TNFD seems a lament for what could have been had we not continually curtailed childish curiosity and stood in the way of possibilities, stamping on the what-ifs, why-nots and wouldn’t-if-be-greats.
Ontroerend Goed’s Once and For All... presents a similar parade, this time made up of Belgian teenagers between fourteen and eighteen. In some ways, it seems a sequel whereby placid acceptance has been supplanted by frustrated revolution.
On and around thirteen wooden chairs, mismatched and scarred, this chorus erupts into action. They flick one another with balloons, flirt, slap, nudge and wink. They scorch Barbies, snog, spit and skate. They whisper; they irritate; they observe; they hide; they go far, far too far. After about eight minutes of this, a buzzer sounds and they clear up. Then, they do it all again, exactly as before. This sequence of actions repeats in multiple styles – as ballet, as rave, as the remnants of a drug-fuelled party, as spoken text alone and entirely without performers. Each time, the soundtrack shifts – and it is this that truly draws you in – stoking up feelings of envy, of shared ebullience, of fear, of loathing, of nostalgia, of missed opportunities and of sympathy. Finally, after one of the most affecting and wholehearted texts I have heard in performance (see trailer), it doubles, even triples, in size. Plastic cups become water-cooler bottles, push-bikes become quad-bikes and commotion becomes complete, joyous pandemonium.
It is a piece that insists on tripping you up. Not once, but over and again. It forces you to look back and reconsider that which you have just seen. For while Once and For All... celebrates adolescence, it also fears for it. It revels in its recklessness and its uninhibited presence, without forgetting its insecurities and its anger; confirming clichés with one hand even as it bats them away with the other.
Curiously, both begin with offstage noise and unpeopled stages. TNFD transmits the generic sounds of a schoolyard over its speakers, while from the wings of Once and For All... scratched throats screech and balloons squeak. The effect is to conjure our own pre-existent idea of children as a starting point. We think of them as noisy inconviences, disturbances that have invaded our civilised leisure-time in a grown-up space where conventions rule and silence is golden. Yet, we are also confronted by our own willingness to group them together as an abstract idea according to age alone. Such presumptions then stand as precedent to be examined, shredded and subverted.
Indeed, when the performers traipse onto the stage – TNFD: with an attempted discipline; OAFA: untidily and unevenly – to form their respective line-ups, it is individuality that leaps to the fore. This is no surprise since, as form, the staged identity parade allows for, and even demands, comparison between performers, both as bodies presented and personalities revealed. Both casts are dressed to form a collage of colours – much like Castellucci’s masses in Inferno – that provides a certainty unity through divergence. They form a chorus of individuals; distinct yet bracketed together.
Though both casts contain the same mix of the plain, the slightly odd and the beautiful found amongst the everyday populace, as part of these collections they all seem somehow better-looking, somehow more perfect. Together, the children of TNFD – some squat, some gangly, most with clunky haircuts and asymmetrical features – seem cutesy and glowing, Aryan models of childhood, adorable for all their individual quirks and oddities. In Once and For All... the teenagers, as Iona Firouzabadi wrote for Culture Wars, “look like an ad campaign: they are uniformly thin, beautiful and well-groomed.” Except – when seen in isolation or offstage, when really examined and scrutinized – they don’t. In part, this beautification is due to the exoticism of their looks – all perfectly European – and also the transformative power of being onstage, being present and being framed. However, presented thus, the children and teenagers become objects of fascination. In addition to being particulars, both individuals and a group, they also stand in for (perhaps represent) children or teenagers as a whole, both as ‘species’ and as concept, and in this they are, in no uncertain terms, different from us, the watching adults. (Theron Smidt has written about this exquisitely here.) There is a certain element of transferral at play – we project this aesthetic appeal onto them on account of their energy and their youth. Youth presented onstage so directly cannot but take us back to our own younger days; it dredges up and makes us long for our own pasts. Our nostalgia, tinged with envy, somehow transforms their collective and individual appearance.
This element of nostalgia brings us on to the adult perspective contained within process. Being directed, written and sculpted by adult hands, both pieces have a level of consciousness about and distance from the subject of youth. Though this manifests itself differently in each piece, both Ethcells and Alexander Devrient have been accused of puppeteering rather than genuinely collaborating. TNFD places an adult’s script, albeit one written from a/the child’s perspective, into the mouths of children. Given that the text is entirely about the manipulation of children’s actions, thoughts and worldviews by adults, this adds further depth to the piece. Indeed, Etchells is too aware not to make use of it:
“You give us words to memorise. You make us stand in lines. You tell us that an actor is only a parrot saying words he cannot understand.”
“You tell us that sometimes things are not as simple as they seem.”
This layer is further heightened by the addition of surtitles, projected onto a blackboard above the stage, that translate the Dutch spoken by the children into English. For an English audience, meaning is further dislocated from the act of speaking. Equally, when they spring into action, they do not simply play, they embody an adult perspective on children’s play that seems somehow like an edited view of a generic playground. These children do not mean what they say and do. Instead, someone else means for them to say what they say and to do what they do. (For me, the most honest moment of TNFD is the final line of arms raised to acknowledge those involved offstage. Never has the expression meant so much.)
To a certain extent the same is true of Once and For All..., which also places a text written by an adult into the mouths of its performers, albeit more sporadically. As for their actions, Devrient insists the teenagers are the authors and he the editor. Arguably, however, it is in this very editing process that Once and For All’s meaning is fully created. The teenagers are told to play, to explore, to go too far when devising, from which the director harnesses actions and moments to shape into a whole that fits his own devices. Sure, the teenagers understand the piece and its aims, but they were not entirely complicit in its creation. Again, they act to convey the meaning of another.
Somehow this disruption of meaning and action adds the further problem of self-consciousness. Over the period of eight months in which I have seen Once And For All... three times, the teenagers have become more aware of their power over an audience. They have gained a higher degree of control over the piece: they understand how to manipulate it in relation to a reacting audience. They play moments for laughs, they use elements as direct confrontation. They seem to perform, even to act, where before they simply did and, in this, some of the piece’s power dissolves. The same can be noticed amongst the elder children of TNFD; fourteen year olds that have become aware of the piece’s workings to start to manipulate it for their own ends. With this in mind, I would suggest that manipulation is a key factor to the success of both, even that neither can function in the same way without some level of manipulation of their performers. Consciousness of self and of effect stifles the meaning of their actions.
Alongside this growth towards self-awareness is the presence of physical growth. Both pieces very consciously use a range of ages; they incorporate the crucial element of change in their view of childhood or adolescence. Thus, in TFND, there are a couple of breaking voices that could almost graduate to Once And For All..., which itself has hallmarks of childhood – braces and Barbies – in its midst. Furthermore, to see the pieces at different times is, thanks to the marks of time, a very different experience. These are pieces that can change quite shockingly as the performers seem entirely different. And, as pieces, they must reflect this. One girl in Once and For All... has gone from styling her Barbie to setting it alight – a direct rejection of her former, younger self. Indeed, arguably, the process of the piece has itself had a radical effect on those performers; it has allowed them, albeit sporadically, escape from the bounds they rail against. It has privileged them the treatment of adults, or perhaps, the teenagers that they long to be. Personally, in this, I find the teenager a more interesting species, for where the child sits between infant and adolescent, the teenager exists liminally between childhood and adulthood. They are neither one nor the other, yet – physically and mentally – they display qualities of both. The adolescent possesses a certain dynamic quality to the child’s more stagnant status.
This is, I think, reflected in the dimensionality of both pieces. While both TNFD and Once and For All... are structured around a central point allowing multiple permutations, the latter seems a denser mix. TNFD remains flat – a progression of time through, in the main part, a single game of language. Once and For All... has the same progression of one game, but within each segment there exist an array of mini-games. Each of the nine or ten recreations is itself packed with different elements and it is for precisely this reason that it can be re-watched and re-discovered. Each time I have seen it, I have become more conscious of the quieter moments that sit contented in the background. While the teenager as loud, as boisterous, as revolutionary steps to the front, behind it lurks a reflection of teenage sincerity and maturity, insecurity and care. For me, while both make their mark succinctly and effectively, it is this very dimensionality that make Once and For All... the more exciting viewing experience.
Edward Gant’s a showman. (He wears a showman’s hat.) He tells cor-blimey stories and he lives, well, a nomadic existence scouring the farthest corners of the globe for specimens of solitude.
Gant’s travelling show, presented in Neilson’s play more as historical reconstruction than fiction, has all the grandiose flourish of Victoriana: R’s roll on into infinity and velvet curtains swish open in revelation. Gasps are his currency and marvels his expertise. From the moment he appears, swelling into three dimensions as an image of Man made flesh, Gant never misses a trick – appearing from portraits and portals all the stage over, glossing everything with an opulent sentiment and absorbing mystique.
His tales of the lonesome are at once delightful and yet, in their representation by a small troupe of actors, retain the boisterous colour of the Beano. An acne-ridden Italian belle whose pustules sprout pearls is harvested rather than truly loved; a widowed aristocrat desperate to escape the haunting memories of his absent love erases the good with the bad; and an actor, drying onstage, is lost to a purgatory of discarded teddy-bears. Yet, Neilson infuses them with a refreshing hint of modernity, peppering them with crude asides and innuendo.
However, Neilson gets too clever in revealing a second layer of reality. As Gant’s show collapses in mutiny, it undermines itself. The supposedly real seems all the more false with its scripted spontaneity and assurances that this has never happened before. With this in mind, Neilson’s twist, which I shan’t reveal, doesn’t pack enough punch to pay truly off and leave us wondering into the night aghast.
Though it is played, directed and designed with gusto, cheek and charm by Headlong, Neilson’s play emerges adrift. Had he been content to offer Calvino-like moralistic morsels in context, it would have achieved far stronger results. Instead, he opts to hammer home the simultaneous powers and oddities of representation and, in doing so, saps it of its mystery.
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one. It is what is already there, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilence and apprehension; seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
From its very first image, Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno leaves us in no doubt as to our position as its subject. The word itself, a near-neon sign flickering and buzzing towards the back of the stage, acts as our collective title, framing us both as exhibit and accused. Where Sartre denounced other people as hell, Castellucci drop-kicks each one of us into that collective noun. We – all of us – are the inferno. Not some unknowable, ineffable elsewhere, but here, now, us: this blistering mass of body-heat blindly protesting the sanctity of life in the face of its squalidity.
The ninety minutes that follow, for all the scale and grandeur of the individual images contained, consist solely of bilious condemnation. Eloquent, bold and extraordinary bilious condemnation, but bilious condemnation nonetheless. True, Castellucci sets the mind whirring with dense ambiguity and inflicts a squirming revulsion with the sheer viscerality of his content, but, as a whole, the piece is so unswerving in its damnation that it lacks the development to engage a range of emotions. Watching Inferno a bit like receiving the hairdryer treatment from an opera singer: a bombard of beauty too intense to be appreciated.
However, you will struggle to find a more visually arresting string of images. You can almost feel them burning irrevocably onto your retina, like the startling flash of a Polaroid camera, even as you take them in.
Castellucci begins with an image of the classical underworld. He walks onto the now letterless, empty stage and announces himself, before dressing in a padded suit and allowing himself to be attacked by guard dogs. It is a curious mix of real and represented danger that almost serves as a marker for the contemptuous picture of human existence that follows.
Inside a glass box, children play with colourful balloons, unaware of the black, threatening world outside. Their sound is amplified and strangely disconcerting; their play increasingly destructive. Above them bulges a tumour of cloud. Into the dark storm steps the figure of Andy Warhol, oddly plasticized in his movements. As he snaps us with a Polaroid and enacts birth, pointing upwards with the accusatory finger of Death, Warhol seems the recurring surveyor of this Inferno; an anthropologist of Hell.
Castellucci’s other components are equally striking. A mechanical skeleton crawls across the stage. A skull is shattered. A white horse is splashed with stage blood. A grand piano burns. He marches an army of people, dressed in bright synthetic colours onto the stage. By turns, they seem an ocean, a pilgrimage and the tip of a queue stretching absently through the world in which the whole of humanity waits for their moment onstage.
Even their enactments of human kindness – caring hugs, passionate kisses, parental play and guidance – seem coated in slime, somehow containing traces of the repulsive. Even choice, a man’s head ticking between two women, becomes an endless, insoluble dilemma. Finally, they slit one another’s throats with murderous embraces in a vicious game of wink murder. There exist no innocent victims, only a last murder standing amidst his own ruins, searching for someone to end his existence. Finally, at the hands of a child, he turns to the audience, smiles and exits the inferno.
Castellucci’s piece is the antithesis of American Beauty’s plastic bag moment. Where the latter sees only beauty, he perceives horror. Inferno is a piece that never snaps or bites, never rages, riles or rallies. Instead, it quietly hollows, softly and slowly, as if imperceptibly gnawing out your insides: an acid that painlessly erodes and dissolves until nothing worthwhile remains.
What with the launch of the SPILL festival last week, it seems appropriate to flag up the accompanying blog - SPILL: Overspill. Its the brainchild of Open Dialogues as created by Mary Paterson and Rachel Lois Clapham and my good friend and Present Attempt collaborator, Alex Eisenberg, is writing for them throughout the month. It should throw up some interesting bits and bobs along the way and should be well worth a visit or six over the coming month.
On which note, I recently re-read Tim Etchells' Opening Polemic that kicked off SPILL 07 and cannot recommend it highly enough as a beautiful, honest, fragmented and fierce piece of performative text.
Ensconced in the cavernous Roundhouse is a giant spider of scaffolding that resembles a big-top after an arson attack. Within, nofitstate seem intent on the destruction of traditional circus in order that, phoenix-like, it might rise reborn from the ashes. In this, Tabú is a modified success – certainly, it presents a new perspective on the medium, but it fails to truly reignite.
Pitched in promenade, there is a quality of immersive street theatre about Tabú. When performers cascade over your head, you feel the rush of air; when they spin dizzyingly just in front of you, you become caught up in the rhythm, swaying on the spot. Up close, the feats on show appear magnified and infectious. However, from distance, it lacks the scale to really dazzle. Aside from the silhouetted crowds obscuring one’s view, the acts themselves often fall short of genuine gasp-factor.
That said, the shift away from demonstration and derring-do allows nofitstate’s breed of circus to function almost as performance installation. From the very first image – a field of horizontal bodies hanging from butchers’ hooks as if a human battery farm – Tabú’s component parts demand interpretation rather than astonished applause.
Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tabú takes its aim at individual fear and isolation, but seems to speak more about the evolution of society. What begins as a communal carnival, playing in amongst us with shared smiles and private jokes, becomes increasingly distant and out of reach. Where we walk into a bustling town-square populated by toy-box oddities of clowns and action-men, the place we leave is a towering metropolis that seems look down on us with menace and suspicion.
The rural simplicity of Tabú’s first half brings with it a playful exuberance. Men tumble past on spinning wheels as young girls, perched on a tightrope above, peer down on them flirtatiously. Together they swing from municipal trapezes and leap into one another’s arms in a free-flowing dance of warmth, courtship and community. After the interval, however, no such conviviality remains.
Instead, everything seems self-contained and self-involved. During a raggedly sexual stationary trapeze routine suggestive of a couple holed up in a hotel room and entangled in each other’s bodies, there appears a high-rise population dotted around the space. As they dance, swirl and clamber in isolated pockets of space, each seems unaware of the world beyond their own personal bubble. For its inhabitants that toss in breathless sleep and drown in its plugholes, this Escher-like city is an inescapable nightmare fraught with panic.
Even when the whole company comes together to spring tumultuously on a single trampoline, community is absent. They dart haphazardly as if trapped in a wind-tunnel or lottery-machine, each a commuter concerned only with his or her own journey.
Beyond its content, though, Tabú beautifully opens the circus event to include the mechanics that operate it. Tiny moments catch the attention: an empty trapeze, a discarded hat, a pair of shoes tucked for later. Equally, the human counter-balances scuttling over the scaffold become as pleasurable as the main acts. Across the two halves they shift from playful companions in a trust game to malevolent controlling forces.
Circus, for nofitstate, can be traced in anything and anything can be found in the acts of circus. While there are problems – individual acts, for all their diligent imagery, rarely seem complete and the recorded text of fears and dreams is irksomely over-poetic yet unrevelatory – Tabú lubricates an old medium, though more through the spectacles it prescribes its audience than those it contains inherently.
My latest post for the Guardian Blog - on the lack of support and opportunities available to young critics - has attracted some healthy debate. If I'm honest, I was expecting stones to fly my way. I imagined that it would be perceived as a tantrum, as a self-indulgent sulk, as a petulant youngster unwilling to struggle, but it seems that there is a degree of sympathy for the cause. Which is heartening.
