Snails and Ketchup

Ramesh Meyyappan is one of Scotland's most restless performance artists. A few years ago, he was content to be a successful physical theatre maker - his Gin and Tonic and Passing Trains revisited Dickens and won him a Best Actor Award in Singapore in 2007. Since then, he has become artist-in-residence with Solar Bear and added aerial antics to his repertoire - without losing a strong sense of his creative core.


"It is storytelling,"  Meyyappan insists.  "At the centre of the stories I aim to create interesting and engaging characters who drive the story forward.  My stage vocabulary is a visual one – I do communicate in a purely visual way – there is no spoken dialogue but there is a dialogue of a visual kind between the characters, that I always hope the audience engages with."


Snails and Ketchup - created through the Unlimited Commission (an aspect of the Cultural Olympiad that might convince me that the whole thing is more than just smoke to distract bohemians like me during the Summer of Sport and Monarchy) - combines the distinctive abstraction of physical theatre - there's an emphasis on the memorable image over straight narrative drive - and some dramatic aerial tricks. Meyyappan plays multiple roles, from a mother giving birth to a vicious bully in the clouds.

Taking on different roles makes sense of his eclectic approach to performance. "Being interested in a visual vocabulary that speaks to a wide range of individuals and audiences, I like to explore a host of visual forms," he continues. "This can be quite a challenge for audiences who prefer the spoken word in a performance but I always hope that they engage with the challenge."


Fortunately, Meyyappan isn't just about the techniques: there is a compassion in Snails that extends even to the bully. And despite some over-powering imagery - the post-natal mother is hardly a symbol of some benign maternal deity - Meyyappan is inspired by characterisation, not the spectacle.


"Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees was and continues to be the inspiration for Snails and Ketchup," he explains. "What interested me when reading this story was not the grand scale of the environment that the son was drawn to – in the trees. I was more interested in what drove him to make that choice – to withdraw from his family and live that existence." From here, Meyyappan designed the retelling of the novel to be "very much about the family dynamic – how it works and how it falls apart."


"I looked at creating four interesting family members – drawing some inspiration from the book, in particular their quirkiness – I used this then tried to make it darker and slightly more sinister, even giving the characters a ‘back story’ as way of showing their journey."


His aerial adventures emerged from the development of the boy's personality. "The newest form in the piece for me was the aerial work – this came about because of the boys decision to be in the trees – it seemed that if I wanted to explore this part of the story I had to get myself off the ground and moving comfortably in the air."


Snails and Ketchup is often at its most exciting when Mayyappan takes to the air - both carefree and theatrical, he uses the standard ropes and more complicated set pieces to describe a child escaping and confronting his own insecurity. His attention to detail belies his intention to create broad, stereotypical personae: in certain intimate moments, Meyyappan can paint evocative and symbolic scenes that recall allegorical art in their immediacy.