Review of "Bás Tongue"

Posted by Zara at 6:50 pm Performance Reviews, Reviews No Responses »
Sep 262011

Bás Tongue (Manchán Magan) directed by Willie White
@ Project Arts Centre, Sep 19th – 24th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

I’ve always been interested in languages, of almost any kind, but my self-discipline lacks the force of my enthusiasms, so I’m fluent in almost none of them. Sign Language, mathematics, !337$|)34\< (leetspeak), musical notation… all have known the ephemeral caress of my interest, but I can never seem to stick with anything. If you’re reading this, you probably have the same fascination. The arts are all about communication, about manipulating different forms of language to express an idea. If you care about the arts, you care about language. If you’ve ever come across some esoteric little nugget of text-speak or internet jargon – “ymmv” or “afaik” – and gathered it eagerly like a pearl, or if you’ve ever laughed with someone over bizarre local slang – like “tome” or “sips” or “bushing”* – then you know how magical language can be.

I really do not know why or how the magic got sucked out of the Irish language for most of us, but it happened. I don’t know what it is about our school system or the culture at large that is so hostile to it, but this play goes some way to undoing it.

Bás Tongue is written by Manchán Magan and directed by Willie White (until recently, Project Arts Centre’s artistic director, and now director & CEO of Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival).

A jaded scholar (Magan) attempts to deliver a lecture on Irish poetry, but he’s losing patience. The language he uses and describes seems dead in the water, its demise has long been foretold and few in the audience seems to understand a word he’s saying. He gets into a long, wide-ranging debate with a surtitle-operator (Roxanna Nic Liam) bubbling with a newfound love of the language, who rejects his pessimism and snobbery and insists that the language can and must be saved. As they argue back and forth, the most interesting dynamic that emerges is his ambivalence: he clearly loves the language, harbours a reverential awe of its history and idiosyncrasies, but he is protective of it to a fault, resisting those changes which offer its only hope for survival. He considers neologisms and Anglicisms as polluting toxins and the mangled Gaenglish occasionally used by young people as a weak substitute, an embarrassing desecration of the Mother tongue.

There’s a part of him that wants to let go of the language, give it a sort of Viking funeral and let it drift away, instead of allowing it to suffer what he regards as an undignified diminishing at the hands and clumsy tongues of young Anglophones like this girl, who has nothing like his fluency despite all her ardour. He questions her motives, sneers at her naïveté and mocks her idealism. She does rather have the wide-eyed, breathless enthusiasm of an 8-year-old who has found an injured rabbit on the side of the road and imagines she can nurse it back to health. When she talks about the bewildering richness of the Irish language, its monstrous vocabulary that has never yet come close to being fully recorded, the effect might perhaps be more depressing than inspiring: what hope is there that it can be saved? There’s simply too much. And so much has been lost already.

The play is written with wit and eloquence and has moments of profound sadness, particularly when it deals with the feeling of isolation that comes from linguistic barriers: from having not enough words, or the wrong ones. The writing pulls you in all directions, making persuasive arguments on both sides about the stakes and the challenges involved in reviving the Irish language.

Personally, I’ve come to the realisation that all we need to reclaim and re-energise the language is ourselves. We still have a collective identity as Irish people and we’ve stamped it all over the English language. No one speaks English the way the Irish do.

Take our innate sense of drama. Something is not merely “very”, it’s “fierce.” I’m fierce happy about this. Something is not merely bad, it’s “brutal.” If it’s good, it’s “deadly”, or it might even be “savage”. If it’s excellent, it’s “savage cabbage”. My little brother and I express this in Irish as “sabháiste cabáiste”, but unfortunately “sabháiste” is not a real Irish word – at least, not according to his school fóclóir. We tried translating it directly but the best we could do was “cabáiste bhrúidiúil” – brutal cabbage – which of course is not the same thing at all.

The point is, as long as we retain our sense of ourselves, the connection we have with our ancestors who spoke our strange bockety national tongue remains unbroken, despite the fact that we’re soaked in Béarla up to the eyeballs. At the moment we’re still predominantly using someone else’s language – which the play likens to wearing someone else’s knickers. But we still have our own voice.

This isn’t a proper review. I don’t think I could write one. I loved the show. I saw it twice. The second time, I brought my mother, a schoolteacher, in the hope of thereby infecting a classroom of kids with a newfound appreciation for the teanga. At the end of each performance, each member of the audience for Bás Tongue was handed an Irish word on a card, to keep and to treasure and to nurse as you would a seedling, to keep it alive and help it grow by sharing it with others. I went twice so I got two words. I gave one to my little brother. I hope he finds a way to connect with his national language. And I hope you do too.

* “tome” means “cool”, “sips” means “ugh, I am not in favour of this” and “bushing” means drinking outside, generally illegally, and possibly in a field or a graveyard somewhere.

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Review of "Eternal Rising Of The Sun"

Posted by Zara at 6:39 pm Performance Reviews, Reviews No Responses »
Sep 222011

Eternal Rising of the Sun, directed by Veronica Coburn (HotForTheatre)
@ Project Arts Centre, Sep 10th – 16th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

Amy Conroy in Eternal Rising of the Sun. (Photo by Emily Quinn, via Fringefest.com)

Eternal Rising of the Sun is a play about a woman called Gina. Gina’s story is not a happy one. A dysfunctional family, a drunken, abusive father, a mother who dies young; an unwanted pregnancy conceived in circumstances that we might euphemistically term “unsavoury” (it’s not made explicit, but the suggestion is rape); and a violent partner who takes no interest in the little girl except as another tool he can exploit to keep Gina in line. From the pressures of young motherhood and poisonous relationships, Gina’s only escape is her lifelong fascination with dance. But opportunities are few, she’s not a natural mover and her own self-loathing and embarrassment threaten to block even this private, precious outlet. She starts taking dance classes at the local community centre, and this tentative first step marks the beginning of a transformation.

 

Gina is played by Amy Conroy, whose performance is ruthless – utterly eerie in its authenticity. The outfit is a uniform of sorts: the ponytail; the hoops; the tracksuit; the runners that look like the International Space Station, an 80s notion of a futuristic aesthetic. You’ve got to have the attitude too, though: the coiled slouch, shrugging shoulders, the impression of chewing gum even when you’re not. Thanks to media stereotypes, you already have a hazy notion of who this girl is: fights, pills, broken home, it’s all here. All clichés intact. There’s much more to her than that, though.

Throughout the play, I spend the whole time silently begging this girl to take control of her life, which really just means trading her dependencies for more socially acceptable ones. I’m angry at myself for my arrogant and misplaced pity, my naivete in taking her to represent all women in similar situations. I’m also full of righteous feminist outrage. Men in general don’t come off well in this show. (They generally don’t in any depiction of the working classes.) Here, they’re black holes sucking in any glimmer of hope or autonomy or self-esteem. They dominate, abuse, defile and destroy. Relationships between women – between Gina and her friend, her mother, her daughter – are a refuge, but no salvation. They’re a source of comfort but devoid of power. Ultimately, it’s the non-threatening dance tutor Anton (and the sexless effigy of Michael Jackson) that catalyse Gina’s self-actualisation…or a less poxy word: Gina doesn’t go in much for “big words”. Still, the play is beautifully written, and there are some very funny lines, although with a lump still in your throat from the scene before it can be hard to laugh.

Thankfully, there’s no saccharine-sweet Deus Ex Machina, no Orphan Annie/Billy Elliot style miraculous deliverance. If there is a message, it’s simply this: change is really, really hard and you really have to work at it.

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Review of "Intimacy"

Posted by Zara at 5:43 pm Reviews No Responses »
Sep 222011

Intimacy, directed by Adriano Cortese (Ranters Theatre Company)

@ Project Arts Centre, Sep 12th – 16th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

A man leaves his Melbourne apartment one evening in search of nothing more or less than company. He manages to convince one stranger after another to sit and converse with him, sharing a little piece of themselves, while we the audience are offered the chance to watch the brief intersection of their respective worlds, like Venn diagrams, and speculate about the common ground. Who seeks out the company of strangers? Who would accept this man’s bizarre offer? Why is the idea of two people agreeing to sit and chat, without any pretext, inherently weird? Isn’t that sad, that we consider the idea of such a simple, human connection highly suspect?

Well, I do. I’m suspicious. I can’t explain it. I feel like the worst kind of voyeur, watching a peepshow at some sort of emotional brothel, where people go to make themselves vulnerable because they have no healthier outlet for their thoughts and feelings. I can’t relax, I can’t even laugh at the often tragicomic dialogue, because it feels so invasive. I’m totally hooked, though.

We’re introduced to a “bird-man”, somewhere between a performance artist and a Furry, who impersonates various birds in public places but hates to have his photograph taken. We meet a chronic insomniac, who for reasons I can’t justify I feel inclined to dismiss as an irritating hypochondriac. There’s a man who admits to obsessing about a fictitious woman, loosely based on a female acquaintance. There’s a girl who talks about robotic pets programmed to feign emotional dependence. The cast (Paul Lum, Beth Buchanan and Patrick Moffatt) are mercilessly convincing. The acting is flawless.

The dialogue is suitably awkward in places; there’s the familiar automatic validation we all offer when someone we don’t know confides something weird. (“Mmm. Really? Wow, that’s amazing.”) The atmosphere veers from nervous relief to dark tension, when the conversation stumbles into precarious territory. Certain questions that seem better left unasked hang in the air.

Initially, almost every character strikes you as basically normal; perhaps a touch eccentric. Then the context impresses itself again and you find yourself making unnecessarily harsh judgments about the sort of person who would conduct this experiment and the sort who’d participate. Suddenly, what might have seemed mere eccentricity seems a symptom of outright lunacy. They must be damaged, mustn’t they? If they feel the desire, the compulsion, to confess to strangers, something must be really wrong. They’re not thriving within society’s usual parameters. They’re like exotic flora, thermophiles, or bizarre algae, requiring adverse, perverse conditions to flourish. And if I can sympathise, what’s wrong with me?

None of the characters meet with rejection. Polite tolerance, at worst. At best, a superficial acceptance that doesn’t ring quite true. Certainly no one finds a soulmate here. But still, no rejection. No one recoils in horror, no one calls off the meeting. Why isn’t it a relief? What with all the unburdening, this theatre should feel like a safe space but I personally don’t feel like joining in. I mostly just feel deeply sad and slightly hopeless. Privileged at the same time, as if I’ve been secretly shown some sacred piece of knowledge, but it’s turned out not to be good news. But that’s just me. If this play is a portrait of the human condition, then for every viewer like me who left lamenting the fact that human beings are inherently deficient, there’s probably another more optimistic soul who experienced the same epiphany – we are all the same – as a revelatory sense of glorious unity, and greets every fellow traveller on the path of life with a “hail fellow well met”.

Intimacy is very funny, very touching, often unnerving, and beautifully performed, with intelligent, understated use of music and video that enhances but never overwhelms the production.

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In Rehearsal with Genesis Collective – Part 2

Posted by Zara at 8:10 am Blog No Responses »
Sep 182011

(Read Part 1 here.)

I pay another visit to Genesis Collective in the run-up to their new show, A Lost Opera. This time the choreographer, Deborah Hay, is in the studio, helping Cindy, Julie and Ella work through this extraordinary piece.

A Lost Opera

I sneak in and perch on a chair as they concentrate on their usual problem: how to create a dance that utterly confounds its audience, in the best way possible. As far as I can see, the process seems to be one of destruction as much as creation; they focus on breaking links, anticipating and thwarting any connections the audience might make, to the extent of trying to foil or even pre-empt emotional responses. They constantly revise their own movements, correcting certain behaviours if they think there’s a risk of being too predictable or too explicit. If, as a viewer, you think you know what’s about to happen, or if you think you’re being told what to feel, then you tend not to engage with a performance quite so fully, any more than a passenger on a car journey notices the route. The Genesis Collective want your full attention. They want you to be present in the moment.

The process of developing the piece seems to be about finding unfamiliar ways for the body to move in space. Now and again a pose or a gesture seems as though it’s about to lead somewhere specific, falling in line with patterns of movement I’ve seen in my own body or in other forms of dance, but my expectations are always defied. It’s like looking at a fractured image with the persistent belief that it will soon resolve itself, but thankfully, it never does. This is much more interesting.

Watching the dancers move with this strange, nervous energy, they seem like fox cubs emerging from a den for the first time, exhibiting something between confidence and reckless optimism – fearless only because they haven’t yet learned to be afraid. They stretch in search of ill-defined limits that they instinctively know are there but haven’t yet met. One sequence in particular is like watching someone discovering their body anew, half-remembering how to move. It’s as if the dancer’s confidence grows as she continually meets with little or no resistance. Every bizarre experiment turns out so well you begin to believe her body can do literally anything she wants it to. It wouldn’t surprise if she pushed her fist gently through a wall or detached a leg and held it aloft like an Olympic torch.

Sometimes their movements are brash and chaotic, sometimes they’re much more subtle: one woman stands near the edge of the room and her body seems to hum, like the glimmer of a distant star. Another ripples with something between a shimmy and a shudder. One staggers in from offstage, arms spilt and palms like warm bowls, a Christ-like vision of surrender. The longer she maintains this pose of exaggerated vulnerability the more unbearable it gets; I find myself curling defensively on her behalf. It’s moving and weirdly hilarious to watch.

There are many moments like this, when I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Their bodies form a strange tableau, beautiful and melancholy and absurd, with two figures upright on restless feet and one lying prone on the floor. Then the apparent absurdity flickers and they become mere shapes in space, odd and emotionless as cacti in the desert.

(A Lost Opera previews Tuesday 20th, tickets from the ABSOLUT Fringe website. Teaser video here.)

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Review of "Twenty Ten"

Posted by Zara at 7:32 am Blog, Performance Reviews No Responses »
Sep 182011

Twenty Ten directed by Grace Dyas and Doireann Coady (THEATREclub)

@Project Arts Centre, Sep 10th – 15th & Sep 17th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

 

THEATREclub

A script compiled of people’s anonymously submitted personal thoughts and reflections during 2010, should, you’d imagine, make for pretty grim reading. Admittedly, for most people it was a bad year. The show, however, is less bleak than you’d expect.
This might partly be because even expressions of grief or bitterness read as black humour when flanked by the cheerful or trivial. Items of shining sorrow rolling by on a conveyor belt of the mundane just seem absurd; a passing focal point, like the cuddly toy in The Generation Game, and you find yourself laughing at something that was probably written in sincerity and pain. More often than not, there isn’t time for it to sink in. Occasionally, however, the cast use some deliberate technique to slow everything down – staging an intervention to alter the atmosphere, if only for a moment, to force or allow reflection. A pause, a repetition, a tense silence, or some unexpected physical gesture breaks the momentum.

 

There’s quite a bit of falling over and flinging pennies around. People move to the front of the stage, climb on chairs, walk off and reappear from different doors. Now and again, these things can seem slightly gimmicky, as if their function is simply to make the show more obviously a theatrical production and less like a book reading, but most of the time they’re effective and useful for breaking up the torrential flow of information.

 

Short stories, expressions of loss, hard-earned advice, bursts of ecstasy, neurotic confessions, private fears and glimmers of madness rush together like some biblical flood that steadily fills the building, as a bell like the ‘ding’ of a rising elevator marks each day already swallowed. Submersive viewing.

 

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Review of "The Year of Magical Wanking"

Posted by Zara at 7:17 am Blog, Performance Reviews No Responses »
Sep 182011

The Year of Magical Wanking directed by Phillip MacMahon (Thisispopbaby)

@ Project Arts Centre, Sep 10th – 17th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

Neil Watkins

Neil Watkins. (Photo via Thisispopbaby.com)

The Year of Magical Wanking is a one-man play delivered in twelve episodes, like an AA recovery programme, separated only by brief blackouts – appropriate to this story of addiction. Alternately speaking as self-loathing queer, migraine sufferer, abuse survivor, demented leprechaun, drag-queen-of-the-harpies, and would-be Messiah, Neil Watkins spills his guts. Somehow he makes his extraordinary experiences easy to identify with, presenting in every scene a tumult of conflicting emotions and impulses so real that you cringe in recognition, even if you, personally, have never actually done anything morally questionable to the sleeping person of one of the Garda Síochána. Christ-like, you absorb his sins.

In Project Arts Centre’s Space Upstairs, a rectangle on the floor delineated by footlights and duct tape has become a safe space for Watkins to confess. You almost feel nervous for him when he treads beyond its confines. If he seems a little nervous himself at first, it’s understandable. It’s heavy going in places; parts of his tale are so raw, but when this bittersweet story finally comes full circle you leave the theatre feeling uplifted, like exiting a confession box. You can only hope he too finds absolution in the telling.

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Review of "Jumping Off The Earth"

Posted by Zara at 6:33 pm Performance Reviews, Reviews No Responses »
Sep 172011

Jumping Off The Earth, directed by José Miguel Jiménez (Rough Magic Theatre Company; SEEDS Programme)

@ Project Arts Centre Sep 10th – 17th 2011 (ABSOLUT Fringe)

 

The Project Arts Centre’s Space Upstairs, the stage is black, clean and shiny. Silvery step-ladders scattered across the stage and a vast lighting rig hanging low overhead are all reflected in the mirror-like floor, so that everything seems to be suspended in mid-air. Metal gleams in the darkness like satellites floating in deep space. Sitting in the front row is like leaning over a pool of black, still water. It feels like you might pitch forward into this strange, weightless world at any moment.

 

The play begins as three astronauts emerge slowly, one by one, from a cloud of dry ice. They are the sole crew-members on this mission and as they run through maintenance checks and squabble about procedure the power dynamics of the group emerge. Natasha is in control of the mission, but not of her barely suppressed infatuation with Yuri. Yuri shares her admiration of himself, but devotes much of his time to tormenting Boris. Boris, in turn, is alternately in love with Natasha and the stars, spending equal time bathing in the beauty and indifference of each. Space is a lonely place, and no one is finding much comfort on this ship.

 

This simple narrative plays out at first like any melodramatic soap. Think The Young and The Restless in space. It’s enjoyable in a totally unchallenging way. The dialogue is stilted, the accents are odd, the acting is slightly hammy. At first. Then the ship apparently strays into an asteroid belt, the antenna is destroyed, the crew lose communication with Earth, and everything starts to come apart at the seams.

 

Gradually, the characters seem to become unhinged. Perhaps they’re rationing and they’ve become delirious? A psychotic break due to stress? They’re evidently delusional. They imagine themselves outside the ship and inside at the same time, conversing across impossible distances, reliving childhood memories, and bickering and bilocating as a stream of consciousness unfolds like a shared hallucination. As a viewer, I start to feel a little unhinged myself. It’s dark now and it’s been dark for some time. Should the lights be out this long? Has something gone wrong? I start questioning everything about my own perception of the show. Did I miss something? Am I imagining subtle changes in their voices, their accents? Are the characters onstage falling away, or resolving? The acting has become alarmingly natural. Somehow the atmosphere has shifted to one of intimacy, an intimacy I was totally unready for.

 

Every good theatre piece has to have a strategy for making the audience forget about the essential absurdity of their situation – about the fact that they’re sitting in a room, waiting to be entertained by people they’ve basically just paid to lie to them. Suspension of disbelief, as it’s called. In Jumping Off The Earth, they pull you in by effectively dismantling the show in front of your eyes. It’s a brilliant piece of misdirection, a bait-and-switch technique. It’s gently done and it’s totally charming.

 

 

 

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In Rehearsal with Neil Watkins - "The Year of Magical Wanking"

Posted by Zara at 6:48 pm Blog No Responses »
Sep 092011

It’s open rehearsal night at a practice room in the TEAM building in Marlborough Place, tucked down an alley somewhere in that little pocket of Dublin near the Spire that seems to be teeming with theatres and studios and rehearsal spaces. Right about now, as ABSOLUT Fringe is gearing up, this jumble of old and new buildings is home to dozens of writers, actors, dancers, designers, visual artists, choreographers, producers and composers, slipping in and out, more or less unnoticed, like neurotic rabbits in a vast warren. In the middle of all this mostly invisible activity there’s a room, and in the middle of the room sits Neil Martin Watkins.

 

Neil has a confession to make.

 

The show is called The Year of Magical Wanking, which should give you an idea of what you’re in for, and it’s one of the highlights of this year’s ABSOLUT Fringe festival. It’s directed by Phillip McMahon, and produced by Jenny Jennings and Lara Hickey of  Thisispopbaby (currently part of Project Catalyst). It is road movie and tell-all autobiography and social satire all nailed to the same cross and it’s starting this weekend (preview show Friday September 9th).

a magical year

Neil Watkins' Year of Magical Wanking

The things Neil reveals range from touchingly sweet to eye-wateringly raw – confessions you thought you were ready for, but you’re not. There’s a piercing self-awareness throughout, and an unnerving commitment to the truth, or what feels like truth; like a Lucien Freud painting, no one comes out of this looking good. But likewise, it’s intensely powerful. The writing is lyrical, often beautiful, elegaic and witty. It has to be. There has to be some artistic merit to this kind of merciless confession, otherwise there’d be no difference between this hideous vulnerability and any other wince-inducing self-exposure, like a weirdo in a trenchcoat flashing kids in the park. The rhyme (the whole show is written in iambic pentameter) adds another comforting degree of distance, giving the whole piece a flow and an elegance that still doesn’t disguise the content any more than lipstick disguises the existence of a mouth.

 

The show follows Neil as he confronts personal demons and thoughts of suicide, indulges in messianic delusions, and grapples with his various addictions – sex, drugs and variants thereof. Anecdotes, vignettes, snippets of childhood memories and vivid sexual fantasies are stitched together into a Portrait of the Artist, right down to the internal battles with his alter-ego and drag persona, Heidi Konnt. You get a sense of how incredibly difficult this kind of brutal honesty must be to sustain, as Neil switches tack to make sure the audience doesn’t get too comfortable. Despite the sordid nature of the material, despite the melancholia and the squalor, Neil is immensely likable, which is an effect that he has to puncture to heighten the impact of the show. He is not in it to win your sympathy, because that wouldn’t be truthful. Through Heidi, he presents his shocking revelations through an unsympathetic character, and you see, perhaps, how he really sees himself.

 

There’s only time for a few questions, so I ask Neil if he finds it difficult to return again and again to the place he needs to be in psychologically for the show to work. “Well, the writing and the performance of it are different things,” he says. In fact, the show’s been written for long enough (it was first performed at Project Arts Centre last year) that he can treat it as he would any other script, and actually enjoy, as an actor, the challenge of rediscovering the work anew every time it’s performed. “It’s been really different every time.” Watching him rehearse, seeing him deliver a section of monologue twice but in two completely different ways, he seems to be enjoying it enormously. Reading the script, you mightn’t imagine the verse left much room to manoeuver, but with inflection, body language and timing alone Neil manages to completely alter the atmosphere of any given line. “You have to leave yourself open to instinct,” he says simply. “Transcend ego and intellect and go into a place where you’re free to make a fool of yourself.”

 

The Year of Magical Wanking is showing in Project Art Centre’s Space Upstairs from Saturday 10th – Saturday 17th September 2011. There’s a video teaser here and you can book tickets via the ABSOLUT Fringe website.

 

 

 

 

 

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In Rehearsal with Maurice Joseph Kelliher - "Criminal Queers" @ ABSOLUT Fringe

Posted by Zara at 3:08 pm Blog No Responses »
Sep 092011
Isabella, Olwen

Isabella Oberlander and Olwen Grindley rehearse Criminal Queers

Maurice Joseph Kelliher is working on a new show, Criminal Queers, which will be showing in Project Arts Centre as part of ABSOLUT Fringe this year. I meet Maurice for the first time in Le Bon Crubeen, on Talbot St., near DanceHouse where he has been rehearsing. He has a coffee and I order a glass of red wine and faintly regret it almost immediately because it’s only 3 in the afternoon and I’m supposed to be keeping this professional. Well, never mind. Almost instantly we fall into easy conversation about the idea of professionalism, about the business of art and the split personality a person has to cultivate in order to make interesting, considered work and then sell it successfully.

 

Maurice

Maurice Kelliher, director/choreographer of Criminal Queers

 

“Selling it” can involve anything from an artist’s statement to a press interview, a blurb in a programme to an application for funding. To be good at these things usually involves developing an ability to make logical, persuasive arguments supporting your artistic choices, when of course, in the studio, actually making those choices rarely involves much logic or reason. Choreographing a dance piece or painting on canvas or writing a script is not like compiling a mathematical proof. One thing doesn’t lead inexorably to the other, with no room for doubt. Most of the time you rely on your intuition and “that bit just feels right” is as good a justification as you’re ever going to get. Perhaps later, with hindsight, you might be able to see some causal relationships between your decisions, to spot the influences that fed certain processes, but in the moment of creation, as it were, it’s best to go with your instincts.

Isabella and Olwen

And for an audience, seeing work unfolding in front of their eyes, the same advice still stands. Especially for dance, which people often approach in the wrong way, nervously analysing every flexed heel and elbow for a trace of the logical investigation they assume underpins each motion.“We’re programmed to look for narrative,” Maurice concedes. “I’ve done it myself, sitting in the theatre, thinking: what does it mean, that meant something, she pushed her, what does that mean?” Even if you can’t turn that off, you just have to trust yourself – trust that you’re getting exactly what you’re meant to just by paying attention. “Most of our communication is non-verbal,” Maurice points out – we’re all already fluent in body language, so much so that it’s almost totally subconscious. Think about how your body behaves when you’re on the couch at home, watching Final Destination or something and snorting with laughter, and compare it to when you’re sitting at a Luas stop and there’s a creepy man scratching himself and barking at strangers. You can tell when someone is uncomfortable. You can tell when someone’s relaxed. If you’re apprehensive about dance because you think you won’t get it, you should give yourself more credit. You already know this stuff.

Of course, there are lots of different kinds of dance. Some of it does have a narrative, like traditional ballet, some of it is a physical response to music, some of it is simply meant to be beautiful. In Maurice’s case, “it’s never movement for movement’s sake,” he says. There is always content, and the challenge lies in finding the best means of expressing that content. He approaches this problem the way any artist should, questioning whether his preferred medium is the right one for this task and drawing on other disciplines for inspiration, exploring the best ways of presenting his ideas. He brings a wide variety of information into the studio to share with his dancers: images and video, photographs, paintings, film stills. Sometimes he works with them to generate their own imagery, making video diaries or shooting footage that will later inform the aesthetic or the atmosphere of a finished piece.

 

In this newest work, Criminal Queers, the theme is as the name implies: an investigation of the nature of queer identity and of criminality, and the overlap that has either been forced upon people by draconian laws or has emerged from some other internal or external pressures. When homosexuality is criminalised, people react in different ways. Some are open and defiant, others carry the secret of their innate guilt wordlessly, outlaws hiding in plain sight. Even when laws change, society takes a long time to catch up. The dynamics remain. In a broader way, the show also examines breaking taboos in general; how it feels to flout convention or to see norms being transgressed – social behaviours, gender stereotypes, conventions of dress – whether it’s by Oscar Wilde, sex workers or the Suffragettes. It’s an exploration of the psychology of “criminals” and how they’re created. It’s also about acknowledging the darker side of ourselves when we present ourselves for acceptance by the wider society; too often oppressed groups feel the need to offer a non-threatening, inoffensive version of their collective identity for appraisal, as if acceptance thereby gained would amount to true equality.

 

The range of imagery and influences that Maurice has drawn on to develop this piece is fantastically broad, from Christian iconography and images of St. Sebastian to movie soundtracks and fashion spreads. When I accompany Maurice to the rehearsal space, the dancers Isabella Oberlander and Olwen Grindley are trying on potential costumes, selected by Sinead Lawlor, the show’s costume designer. Olwen is slipping into a silvery evening gown that makes me think of Zelda Fitzgerald and Great Gatsby-style cocktail parties. Isabella is exquisitely androgynous in a crisp white shirt. What is startling, watching them practice in and out of costume, is just how much the clothing affects my reading of the dance. I feel like I should know better, like I should be able to see past the clothes. But somehow, when Isabella’s in a pinstripe suit, every “feminine” motion makes a statement. I read her movements as aggressive, domineering, or protective when moments before, they were nothing of the sort. Does she feel it, does putting on the suit affect the way her body moves or am I simply seeing my own notions of masculinity reflected back at me? When Olwen’s in that dress, her movements instantly acquire a sort of dangerous glamour – women in dresses like that don’t generally move this way, so freely, so powerfully, except maybe in the dramatic climax of the movie, where the party’s turned sour and they’ve had too much gin and they just don’t give a fuck any more.

killer heels

The cinematic feel of the show – and it’s still very much a work in progress – is something Maurice has considered at length. You’re unlikely to catch direct references to particular movies, but the atmosphere or aesthetic of scenes from, say, Psycho or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may have been channeled and sublimated into the show. He sometimes approaches direction as a film-maker might, devising strategies to replicate the effect of a close-up or a camera-pan in a live performance, concentrating the movement at a particular point in the stage or expanding the focus by filling the room with light, sound and activity.

Watching them rehearse, I’m looking to see how much of the proposed theme I can read in the work, at this very early stage in the process. As Maurice warns, it’s only day three, so right now “it’s still about finding the language, building a vocabulary” with which the dancers can tell a story. Already I can get a sense of some internal conflict. There seems to be two opposing forces pulling on any body at any moment. Sometimes the force of gravity seems to have suddenly tripled: knees buckle, vertebrae topple like Jenga blocks and they’re bent double. But a moment later and it looks they might need to be pinned down to keep them on this plane of existence, never mind the floor; arms flicker upwards like the vapour trail of a rocket, a throat arches towards the sky and you wouldn’t dare interfere if your life depended on it, you could get sliced in half by a long leg whipping in a lean arc.

Many of their motions are sweeping and fluid but it’s the little details that linger in the memory: the way a hand pulses on the end of an outflung arm, fingers uncurling in a brief contraction, or the way those fingers whisper a brief pattern on the breastbone, like a prayer or a mantra.

Many movements swing between defensive and assertive: hands curl in, arms encircle, embrace, holding bodies, holding nothing, holding air; then fly outwards, stretching into some imagined danger. What’s interesting to me is that I never read their movements as furtive. I never get the sense of someone accepting or believing in the immorality of their actions. If this is criminal behaviour, they’re not sorry. Not so far, anyway. There’s fear and defiance and a breathless kind of guilt, but nothing that reads as remorse.

Maurice, Isabella and Olwen; trying to find the right music

I think it’s going to be really, really interesting to see how the show pulls together, and if you’re interested too, then you should visit Maurice’s blog, watch the witty, hilarious and deeply troubling teaser trailer, and book your tickets here on the ABSOLUT Fringe website. There’s a preview in the Project Arts Centre’s Space Upstairs on Wednesday Sep 21st at 6pm (tickets only e8) and the show runs Sep 22nd-24th.

 

 

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In Rehearsal with THEATREclub

Posted by Zara at 10:08 am Uncategorized No Responses »
Sep 032011

Twenty Ten is a project that has been in the making since 2008. It was one of the first ideas that the members of THEATREclub came up with when they founded the company and it has finally come to fruition. It’s a hugely ambitious undertaking, which involved asking dozens of willing participants, on a daily basis, one simple question via email: What have you learned today? People could submit their response anonymously online, and a year’s worth of responses were compiled into a script that will now be performed over several days, from September 10 – 17th 2011, as part of ABSOLUT Fringe.

Grace Dyas, one of the founding members of THEATREclub (along with Shane Byrne and Doireann Coady), explains the process of editing the script. “The only criteria we used were: is it truthful, how well are they responding to the question, and would it harm or hinder anyone else to have it in the show?”

It seems that those who initially signed up to be part of the project, produced in assocation with Project Arts Centre, were people already on the THEATREclub mailing list, or were friends of the group on Facebook – in other words, there was already a relationship there. As word about the project spread, the number of participants grew. Every day, each of them would get a short, encouraging email reiterating the question and perhaps thanking them for their continued support or sharing some titbit about the company’s activities that week – a reminder that the contributions they were making were received and appreciated and that they weren’t just yelling down a well. A trust developed, and it means that this show really couldn’t have been made by anyone else. Even if someone else copied the idea, and had the determination to carry it off, it would be a completely different entity, not only because this work is so utterly of its time but because the relationship between the company and its public is rather special. There are direct references to this dynamic in the show: many of the respondents address THEATREclub directly, voicing their hopes and fears for the project, their nervousness about the exposure, debating questions of authorship and community and art itself.

Some of the cast of Twenty Ten. Photo via Fringefest.com

 

Shane, Barry, Lauren, Conor, Natalie and Louise are running through lines. And there are a hell of a lot of lines. Not only that, but there is nothing intuitive about the way one line follows another – this is not traditional dialogue, the only logic threading these snippets together is the chronology in which they were written. Now and again I get a clue as to how they’re pulling off this formidable feat of memory: when someone is struggling to remember a line, they mutter a series of a disparate words (that resemble nothing in the script) until at last they arrive triumphantly at the image they need, like someone kicking down a door. It seems the last word of the previous line is linked by some visual or verbal association to the first word of the next. “They’re calling them ‘connections’,” Grace smiles, and gives me an example that someone’s using, to link a bit about airports to one about unsociable drinking, and I’m left wondering if there’s a separate, tiny play happening inside the head of each of the actors in between every line in the script.

 

No wonder they look tired. The table is littered with plastic cups, mugs, 7up cans, tubes of vitamin supplements and general detritus. They might have been nesting here for days. I sit down at the end of a table next to Gabriel, stage-manager and keeper-of-the-script, and settle in to listen as an unending torrent of small, human dramas spills across the table. What have you learned today? The answers vary from the flippant to the kind of honesty that makes you flinch. The marathon nature of the show and its physical demands aside, it must be emotionally exhausting for the actors to perform this piece. The whole range of human experience is here. From simple aphorisms and trivial facts to rueful anecdotes about work and relationships, and the tone is constantly changing from joy to disgust to optimism til I feel I have some kind of empathy whiplash. I can’t digest it quickly enough. It’s a bit overwhelming.

 

I realise I’m trying too hard to linger on every image the readings conjure up. Every little vignette has some poignancy, some resonance I want to savour. Even when the line is quite sparse – an abrupt declaration of regret or expression of fear – it suggests a richer context and I’m wondering about the person who wrote it, the impetus that led someone to give these words up to be swallowed by a computer screen somewhere. It doesn’t take long, however, for me to let go of my own anxiety and begin to appreciate the bigger picture. To fail to take in the effect of the whole would be to miss the point entirely, like obsessing over the fate of individual figures in the Bayeux Tapestry but never standing back to look at the whole thing or what it represented.

 

For a start, it’s an incredibly rich historical document. More than any snapshot, any newspaper headline, any clip of footage that might be hauled out in the decades to come to illustrate the Irish people’s experience of 2010, this script encapsulates, in livid and loving detail, not only the surface tension of contemporary society, but the language, the slang, the technology, the trends and the prevailing mood. But it’s also a testament to the universality of human experience. It’s evident that what concerns us most now are the same things that always did and always will: love, friendships, fear, loneliness, and chronic self-doubt. It is a revelation to realise how many of us think we’re barely coping with the responsibility of just being a human being. So many people fret about being socially incompetent, about caring too much or too little about other people, about being stuck in a relationship or stuck not-in-one. It’s incredibly moving to see “everyone feeling the same thing at the same time,” as Grace puts it.

 

Another heartening reassurance is that this is still a country of writers. Many of the submissions are crafted with such eloquence, lyricism, bravery, wit and heartbreaking beauty that even here, in a rehearsal space on a Friday evening, as the actors rush through the lines, the words remain incredibly powerful. Grace and I speculate about whether THEATREclub were just incredibly fortunate in the sort of people that decided to take part or whether most people are simply far more articulate when given the space and time to write than we might be face to face. As Grace points out, the project took place over a whole year, which gave people lots of time to get comfortable and get in the habit of writing daily. Some people perhaps took most of the day to consider what they were going to write, “thinking: how am I gonna phrase this?”

And any single page of the resultant script is such a rich seam of imagery and ideas that it could form the basis of a play in itself, surely? “Oh yeah,” Grace answers, “but we were really not interested in changing it into anything other than a recital of what’s there.” Was she ever really disturbed or worried about anything that was confided by the participants, offering up secrets like pieces of flesh? She considers. “There was nothing too serious,” she says. “And I think people got what they needed just by taking part.” It’s not hard to imagine that even if what they were expressing was quite painful or shocking, the act of sharing it was probably cathartic in itself. To see that aim fully realised, when the whole thing goes public, book your tickets now for any of the 6pm stand-alone shows during the week starting Saturday Sep 10th, or for the omnibus edition on Saturday 17th, from 11am. Don’t miss it.

 

To read about what the company felt about working on the project, you can check out their blog, or for more details on the Project Arts Centre’s programme, click here.

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