Theatre
PREVIEW NEW WORK ARCHES LIVE! Arches, Glasgow, Thu 17–Sat 26 Sep
As ever, this September’s Arches Live! festival has far too many acts to catalogue here. So too, there’s a great variety of approaches and forms to experience, but artistic director Jackie Wylie points us in the direction of some of the emerging threads. ‘The thing about this year in particular is that there’s an engagement with the world that is coming through non-traditional theatre makers,’ she says. ‘It’s coming from people from such areas as performance art. Every year with this programme we’ve pushed the boundaries a little more, and I wonder if that’s about consolidating a new identity, which is about risk-taking and bravery. Some of the performance makers are about finding a new type of politics.’
At least part of this year’s festival blurs the distinctions between performers and audiences. This is most strikingly exemplified by David Overend’s project, Midland Street. ‘The piece starts on Midland Street outside the Arches, at the queue for Death Disco,’ says Wylie. ‘It’s going to be impossible to tell
what’s the queue, what’s Midland Street and what’s the piece of theatre – the performance carries on in the club itself. It’s difficult sometimes to get the clubbers into the theatre, so here the theatre will be coming to the clubbers.’ There’s a similar audience-driven approach in Peter
McMaster’s House: ‘The audience go into the room, and it’s set up like a home, but a kind of junkyard home,’ says Wylie. ‘The audience is invited to smash the place up, and then rebuild something around the idea of hope. It’s a lovely way of making the audience a part of the creative process, and also asking them to make a gesture based on hope by the end.’
Personal politics are also to the fore in
autobiographical work Kate Baird’s Is it Because . . .? and Lucy Gaizely’s Eggshell’s Sweetheart. ‘This is about artists looking at themselves in order to understand the world around them,’ she says. ‘It’s almost like a game of how much you can reveal about yourself in order to help the audience learn new things about their own selves. Looking at the individual might be a bit more democratic and fun.’ (Steve Cramer)
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PREVIEW PHYSICAL THEATRE BRIGHT BLACK Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Tue 15–Sat 19 Sep
Unless something goes drastically wrong during the ‘sawing a lady in half’ trick, death and magic don’t usually mix. At Vox Motus, however, the art of illusion lies at the heart of all it does. And now, the Glasgow-based theatre company which wowed audiences with last year’s award-winning Slick, is tackling the complicated subject of grief. Co-created by Jamie Harrison and
Candice Edmunds, Bright Black centres on a woman struggling to cope with the sudden death of her fiancé. Lost inside the grieving process, she descends into a kind of underworld where nothing is as it seems.
‘The different ways that people deal
with death was the starting point for us,’ says Edmunds. ‘We were originally inspired by a friend of Jamie’s, whose fiancée died in tragic circumstances and her mother went on a round-the-world trip, which was very cathartic. So we decided to send our central character on a journey, but through a mythical landscape rather than the real world.’ Conscious that the production should
be moving but not relentlessly bleak, Vox Motus has balanced the heavy subject matter with some entertaining theatrical nuances.
‘Illusion has always found its way into our productions but this time we’re using it as a staging concept,’ says Edmunds. ‘We’ve created a void from which objects or characters can appear, and a gravity-defying environment seemed the perfect way to tell a story of grief which wasn’t morose. And because the illusion has the wow factor, it’s visually a real treat.’ (Kelly Apter)
PREVIEW MUSIC THEATRE CONFINED HUMAN CONDITION Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thu 17–Sat 19 Sep
Cathie Boyd’s Cryptic has long been associated with inventive, visually striking presentations of music. There’s often, as well, an exploratory and creative use of multimedia running through the work. But with this latest piece, the electronic visual effects are kept to a minimum – for good reasons, according to Boyd.The new work centres on two musical pieces, Alejandro Vinao’s The Baghdad Monologue, with an electro-acoustic score and singing by Scottish Soprano Francis M Lynch, and Phillip Neil Martin’s The Terror of Love, sung by Lore Lixenberg. Such is their effect that they require none of the usual projection. ‘I’m doing the whole piece through shadows,’ says Boyd. ‘I’ve returned to some really simple traditional theatre effects for this one. It’s the first time in 12 years that I’ve not used projection. The vocal sound is so fantastic that it’s already very multi-layered. I’ve done interactivity, projection, all of that, I really felt I could do this show without it.’
She adds: ‘The common denominator between the pieces is that these two women are both confined. In The Baghdad Monologue, in which the woman concerned is mourning her family and wants to leave, but can’t, because her dead son is buried in the garden, the confinement isn’t through choice. It’s a fantastic percussive, record-scratchy score, and Frances Lynch is speaking a lot of it – I’ve been working with her on her speaking voice for months.’ The second piece takes Saint Teresa of Avila as its starting point. ‘It’s a much more sexually charged piece, more liquid and sensual than the first, which is very solid and tangible,’ says Boyd. ‘This is a very private piece about her inner life.’ (Steve Cramer)
82 THE LIST 10–24 Sep 2009