THEATRE PREVIEW
THE RIGHT SIZE .(/{(}/.) {1716'
A DARKLY COMIC TALE 0F NEIGHBOURS
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TEL: 031 226 5425 24 - 261a MARCH
"TRAVERSE"
22 March — 17 April
TRAVERSETHEATRE BROTHERS OF THUNDER
The Church struggles to remain relevant in a modern world. It juggles with internal conflict, forgiveness, betrayal 8. faith. Can the Church take the strain?
25 March - 16 April
TRAVERSETHEATRE THE HOPE SLIDE
lrene's obsessed:
With the death of her friends. With a fanatical religious sect. With a mountain collapsing. With her desire for anarchic rebellion & her search for hope.
TRAVERSE
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Phone Box Office for information, brochure and tickets 031 228 1404
Seasoned performers
The playwright, the composer, six dancers and their choreographer. It has that Peter Creenaway film title ring about it, but is in fact the roll-call of artistic collaborators involved in Dundee Repertory Dance Company’s controversial new production, Vinegar and Brown Paper.
Initially inspired by a series of workshops where the dancers revealed their own childhood experiences, this self-confessed abstract and rather impressionistic work evolves around the themes of childhood, the burdens that we carry around from our past and how we acknowledge and deal with these anxieties.
Working around this very personal framework was Cauld Blast Orchestra member and the Dance Company’s composer, lain Johnstone, who began the symbiotic process of composing the music in the same room at the same time as choreographer Tamara McClogg and company were making their first tentative moves. For Johnstone, the advantages of this method are manifold: ‘llot only does it stretch me as an artist but it is very truthful to the work you’re doing.’ Stressing the unique nature of the piece he continues, ‘The input of the dancers is vital for me. If it were a different set of dancers then it would be a different musical piece altogether.’
An occasional visitor to these proceedings was playwright John Harvey whose remit was, says Johnstone, ‘ostensibly to formalise our improvisation without giving
everything away.’ With the key word
.‘abstract’ in mind, Harvey managed to
loop together the dancers’ salient stories to fashion the spoken narratives featured, as well as write the lyrics for the ‘Michael llymanish’ songs, as Johnstone describes them. Despite very positive audience feedback, Vinegar does seem to have incurred the wrath of dance critics intent on slamming their World Dance copycat tactics. Johnstone is naturally keen to repudiate these murmurs. ‘This show is a culmination of everything the ensemble has worked for,’ he says. ‘lt’s a miracle of invention.’ indeed his considered advice to those who demur the more ‘abtruse’ aspects of the work is: ‘It should be like looking at a painting: sit back, enjoy it and only think about it afterwards.’ (Ann Donald) Vinegar and Brown Paper, Dundee Repertory Dance Company, St Brides Centre Thurs 7—Sat 9 April.
ALAN CRUMLISH
V NEW PLAY
‘It is always easy to play llazis, because everyone has some idea of themselves as a liazi if they are at all honest with themselves,’ says the Citizens’ Theatre artistic director, Robert David MacDonald. ‘Every liberal is a fascist for twenty minutes a week, usually when they are reading the Sunday papers.’
The liazi who MacDonald will be playing is Franz Stangl, the only Commandant of a liazi death camp ever to be brought to justice. In Duest Df Conscience is MacDonald’s adaptation of Bitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness; a series of interviews the journalist made with Stengl four years after he had been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Unlike Schindler’s List, which derives its tension from a theatrical representation of real occurences, the play is a series of reminiscences. This brings its own problems, according to MacDonald. ‘The progress from being
nothing, to being a liazi, to being in that particular section of liazidom, to being a leading figure of it is hard,’ he says. ‘You are not actually doing it, but you are describing it as it happened.’
The play is not sympathetic to Stangl, however. ‘What it is, is fair,’ explains MacDonald. ‘There are plenty of people who were put in his position, but simply did not act in that way. So it is not a situation of exonerating people, of exculpating people from individual and collective guilt. Sereny is saying that the politically correct revisionist attitude; that individuals do not make history but other forces are at work that make history, is simply not true. Individuals do condition history.’
As you read of Bosnia or Schindler or the Versailles war crimes trial of Paul Touvier in the Sunday papers, you would be forgiven your twenty minutes of hate. Yet even when Sereny interviewed Stengl he was being forgotten. Which is why this play about a man who shaped the deaths of the inmates of his concentration camp is important today. (Thom Dibdin)
In Duest Df Conscience, The Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow from Wed 6—Sat 23 April.
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Perth City Ballet brings a variety of work to Scotland
‘We had musicians. designers. painters and dancers.‘ remembers Diana Waldron of Perth City Ballet. ‘and we all wanted to do something but there was no outlet for allied artists. That was 32 years ago and it's been the same ever since.‘
Perth City Ballet (Australia‘s rather than our own) is without doubt Waldron’s baby. despite the fact that she started it when her own son was just six weeks old. So what keeps her going after all these years? ‘I suppose a terrible love of dance in whatever form,‘ she says. ‘Even when l was tiny i used to make up concerts. it‘s just what I do.‘ Waldron not only launched the company. which now tours worldwide. but choreographs. teaches and happily gives interviews when woken at 5am by embarrassed joumalists who can‘t work out the hour difference.
Perth City Ballet brings a variety of works to Scotland. Picnic (1/ Hanging Rm‘k is based on that part of the film where the girls are already at the picnic having a wonderful time until three of them go off to climb the rock, only to return as ghosts. ‘It has an extremely eerie. very mysterious. even quite heavy feeling about it.‘ says Waldron who uses both classical and modern dance vocabulary.
in complete contrast. 0n the Beach is an irreligious send-up. Virtually a mime, it plays with govemment health messages like ‘Quit Smoking‘ and ‘Safe Sex‘ written on the dancers‘ towels. But how do you communicate those ideas in dance? Simple. says Waldron. ‘You hold up the towel and that's enough.’
Finally Gun/cu. also choreographed by Waldron. is based on an Aboriginal legend in which two adolescents are promised to each other at birth. The girl is not happy and tries to avoid it. but is informed by her god that she must. and then violently thrown around in a lively pas-de-trois until she comes round to the idea. ‘We're not trying to say that this is only Aboriginal.‘ says Waldron. ‘this isjust boy meets girl.‘ (Tamsin Grainger)
Peri/r Cin Bullet. Edinburgh Play/muse. Tue 29 Mar—Sui 2 Apr.
42 The List 25 March—7 April I994