Feeding on Dramaturgy: Clout @ Edfringe 2015

The Fringe
What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
We began with a simple idea. Make a show about food. The show is called FEAST.


Why bring your work to Edinburgh?
In simple terms because it is the main launchpad for our kind of theatre. It is where opportunities and audiences are congregated to see some weird shit. It also functions as a kind of AGM for theatre practitioners as well as a chance to see other people's work, steal ideas, or get pissed off, both of which have their utility.

What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?See- Three dirty human bodies - Dancing with raw steaks - Live feed video of foodstuffs in compromising positions…

Three highly different styles Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner… what starts as almost a Butoh show ends up as something that resembles a Cronenberg film, via a carnivalesque passage of baroque indulgence. As for feel and think- this is unstable territory, as we are entering the quagmire of subjective individual experience. We can tell you why we want them to feel - hungry, disgusted, delighted, disgusted again, horny… 

Our work aims to go through the visceral (sometimes literally with offal in the offing) and if it ends up in the intellect, all the better. It is a show that is actually highly political in nature, because when talking about food you can't avoid it. It speaks of consumerism, our culpability in the planet's destruction. The dislocated relationship with nature that technology can induce… but as we work through abstraction people will read this in multiple ways, and that is the exciting part.

The Dramaturgy Questions

How would you explain the relevance - or otherwise - of dramaturgy within your work?
Like many words of a German extraction, dramaturgy ain't pretty - but it is useful. When I hear the word I feel like I am in a hospital bed waiting for surgery, there is something very clinical an slightly threatening about it. 

I suppose it is about order to some degree… with this show we began with a clear composition and then slotted the play and improvisation in, but previously we have played and improvised and then composed after, with our director Mine Cerci acting as a kind of crazed conducted shaking her baton at us while we scamper about trying to sew together a patchwork of ideas. 

This time however has been somewhat more measured, to some degree more like a writing process, but still with plenty of mess.

-- or did you mean Liturgy? we're not religious… Zymurgy? not into brewing - or endososcopy? (actual plays an important dramaturgical role within the piece)



What particular traditions and influences would you acknowledge on your work - have any particular artists, or genres inspired you and do you see yourself within their tradition?
Well obviously we all trained at Lecoq so that feeds into our work, and we would broadly define ourselves as 'physical theatre' even if that may be a vague and troublesome term. Theatre practitioners who influence our work include Tadeusz Kantor with his Theatre of Death, and Romeo Castellucci with his uncompromising and violent fusion of visual art and theatre.


In general though, we tend to talk about other art forms more- mostly film. Peter Greenaway is a big favourite and his films The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Drowning by Numbers influenced the piece with their lavish baroque. Also Jan Svankmajer with his short film Food which we even stole the triptych format for the piece Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. Svankmajer is obsessed with the sensory world and his films take you past the intellect and into a deeply sensory, carnal and unconscious world. As with Svankmajer I would say that we see ourselves to an extent as continuation of surrealism, but without a capital S, and it's important to not get too hooked up on traditions.


Do you have a particular process of making that you could describe - where it begins, how you develop it, and whether there is any collaboration in the process?
We work quite slowly. We start with an idea, discuss it, change it, and discuss some more. Then we get in a rehearsal room, try some stuff out, decide we didn't want to do that and change our idea. This time, as well as the usual team of three actors and a director, we have collaborated with a designer - Naomi Kuyck-Cohen - who is brilliant because she gets involved in the creation too. This would be terrible though, if she didn't have excellent taste and a great eye. She likes grotesque, nasty stuff like us. That helps.


We also work with our director by Skype… I guess that's kind of strange. She is Turkish and has been refused her visa several times to come to the UK. This makes for somewhat fragmented rehearsals, and has perhaps fed in to the last chapter of FEAST.


What do you feel the role of the audience is, in terms of making the meaning of your work?
Art is oblique… through a glass darkly.



Are there any questions that you feel I have missed out that would help me to understand how dramaturgy works for you?
Best thing… come see the show!



VENUE: ZOO Sanctuary

DATES: 7th-31st AUGUST (not 21)

TIME: 15.55 (1 Hour)

Tickets

Drawing on research and influences that vary from Czech animator Jan Svankmajer to 'feeder porn', the films of Peter Greenaway to Turkish communist hunger strikes and the holocaust, this is Clout's most extreme and without setting out to be so, political piece, taking an abstract yet cutting knife to modern barbarism and our dislocated relationship with food. This show also sees the first collaboration with designer and co-deviser Naomi Kuyck-Cohen, who brings her off kilter aesthetic and mutual taste for grotesquery to the piece (“I'm looking forward to the time when the theatre is populated by her designs” - Susannah Clapp, The Observer).

Director Mine Cerci said: “This is a show that indulges in needless excess. That is what humans do. We are interested in how we build our own prison, whether that is environmental destruction through over farming, health obsession or obesity. Through our work we push reality to its grotesque physical extreme. In the case of food wastage and human perversion, these are already so extreme in life that we have had to push far to distort the mirror.”

Clout Theatre returns to the Edinburgh Festival following two critically acclaimed, Total Theatre Award nominated shows The Various Lives of Infinite Nullity(2013) and How a Man Crumbled (2012). The company live and work in London and Istanbul, and with members from Scotland, Russia, France and Turkey, they make bold theatre for an international audience. Their shows blend absurdist humour, violence, mess, and visual poetry, and deal with the sublime and ridiculous in equal measure.

Their work is informed by their training at École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq and their mixed backgrounds varying from professional figure skating to the political sciences, Russian naturalistic acting to butoh.

Director Mine Cerci lives and works in Istanbul, she has an academic background having gained a Masters in Theatre Studies at La Sorbonne recently translated Jacques Lecoq's Le Crops Poetique into Turkish for the first time. 

Lecoq is not Mocked

The past couple of years at the Fringe have seen a resurgence of physical theatre companies winning awards and kicking it at the box office. I say resurgence, but physical theatre has been a Big Deal since the 1990s in the UK, when DV8 and Frantic Assembly renegotiated the relationship between words and movement.

The name that keeps coming up is Lecoq: Clout were trained there, Red Bastard references him and Gecko takes their cues from his school. By the time I get around to defining physical theatre, it'll have probably been replaced by another phrase (look at the fun I have trying to decide whether it ought to be 'live' or 'performance' art). Fortunately, I can get closer to determining what Lecoq signifies (because one of my lecturers wrote a book about it. Hopefully, they won't be scouring the net to find lazy critics ripping off their ideas).

Pinning down the nature of any school of theatre is notoriously hard: worse in the case of Lecoq, because he is a rare example of a teacher rather than a director. His name is known more for the pupils (Complicite et al) who have gone onto become champions of his approach - even though that approach is often explained in vague terms.

Simon Murray (Jacque Lecoq, Routledge) offers three qualities that are distinctive to the Lecoq technique: disponibilite, le jeu, complicite. He draws a line between the three: disponibilite is the openness of the performer that allows le jeu (play), which lead to the complicite between performers and between performers and audience. There's a lot more detail - my attempts to check the words' meanings in the dictionary wasn't that helpful - but these are the foundation of a Lecoq performance and the object of the training.

Inevitably, there's another aspect of the training that intrigues me: the auto-cours. In response to the 1968 riots in Paris, when his students demanded that they be allowed to teach themselves, Lecoq introduced this: an hour a day, making work for performance, in which the students taught each other. The shows are put on and assessed.

While the three qualities might be the object of the education, I admire the auto-cours as a transferable model of teaching. It's very clear how it works and, unlike the three qualities, doesn't allow for vague allusions to a metaphysical idea. It's simple. It combines the freedom of self-learning and the rigour of public assessment.

From now on, that's what I am going to think about when I hear Lecoq: a combination of freedom and rigour, the balance between teaching and autodidacticism. Oh yeah: and some cool clowning thrown in, hopefully with buffoons.

Radio Top Five (Guests we have loved)

The Subcity on the Fringe radio show is going great guns: pop over to the website to hear our latest interviews and idiosyncratic musical choices (for some reason, That's Life has been our theme tune this week). Yet certain shows have managed to impress us in ten minutes of live chat.

Guilt and Shame provide the perfect end to a day at the Fringe: Up All Night pits a gay virgin and a heterosexual slut up against one last Big Night Out in a late night comedy show at the Underbelly. Their musical selections speak of their enthusiasm for the populist disco (Daft Punk had us leaping around the studio) and their flyering technique has been honed into a quick soft sale that might be for their show or their own love lives. It might be comedy, but Up All Night uses those techniques of serious theatre that I love so much: written from experience, Guilt and Shame are a bit like their real life personalities, with added frustration.

Underbelly, 2 -26 August



Countryboy's Struggle is part of a hip hop movement that has recently become far more mainstream: theatre. Maxwell Golden, writer and performer, has worked with the London legend Jonzi D, and tells the story of a rural rapper hitting the big smoke. He threw down some rhymes live in the studio - switching styles and flows, revealing how disappointment is easy to find and the drive towards art often hides a sadness and failure to adjust.

Golden has been rocking Countryboy round the nation for a while, giving the production a polish that removes it from being just for hip hop heads: his shout outs to the other hip hop shows prove that he is still of the scene, but not stuck there.

Pleasance, 3 -27 August

If you have children, don't take them to Auntie Myra's Funshow. When she arrived and insisted that her introductory music should be The Boss, we realised that here was an act not in the habit of taking prisoners. Having teased taxi drivers on her way into the studio, she went off to her late night slot to attack decency and try and finish a few jokes.

Myra Dubois has developed her passive aggressive routine over the past few Fringes: once part of Scottee's crew of cabaret reprobates, she's gone solo to find a new audience for her northern, scathing wit. There's frightening puppets, dark snarking and a collision between gruff Northern Club and hip London scene.

Voodoo Room, 3- 27 August

I had a couple of Summerhall based companies in the studio later in the week. Clout are showing How A Man Crumbled in the afternoons, which comes from the writings of a man who hated children, despite surviving by writing stories for them. The absurdism of Krem's life is matched by the physical stylings of Clout, who allow a bunch of buffoons to foul up the play's attempts to reveal some kind of truth.

Summerhall, 3- 26 August

And since I haven't mentioned them for five minutes, let's hear it for Zar. Caesarian Sections is happening in a specially built black tent: their artistic director spoke movingly of his interest in ancient sounds, the connection between music and the human self, the hidden tragedies of recent history, before recalling Camus' thoughts on suicide. This is the  foundation for Caesarian Sections, that the thought of suicide offers the limits of human freedom and that to take life seriously is, at least once, to consider suicide. Cheerful as this sounds, it is wrapped in exquisite singing and the silence is as composed as the voices.

Summerhall, 13- 20 August

Respect Lecoq

A couple of years ago, I saw a Lecoq trained man do a storytelling version of The Odyssey. I'm pretty grumpy about storytelling when it gets into telling a big story - I really dislike those one man Lord of the Rings and Star Wars specials - as it ends up recounting a big load of plot and ignores the underlying themes and nuances which made it interesting in the first place.


So, for many years, I did not respect Lecoq. Then I saw the Red Bastard. He is a bouffon, and now I understand. Lecoq is one of the great strands of physical theatre, where every muscle is trained to perform. The Red Bastard managed to look like the devil and a strained chicken at the same time, and his brutal philosophy inspired me both to be more aggressive in my life (that lasted a week before it blew up in my face) and pay attention to the French school.


And my time has come. There is Lecoq all over the Fringe.


Tom Corradini is potentially in any real top five I come up with for Fringe 2012. Superheroes is about the link between childhood trauma and comic books. I am just worried that he has been reading my diary and has stolen my autobiography as the plot.


It's no accident that the press release mentions Marvel heroes: when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented the Marvel Universe (616, fact fans), they spent more time working on the character's backstories than the costumes. Not only does this explain why both the Hulk and The Thing run around in their skidders, it accounts for their popularity. A six year has a choice: a bright green raging monster, trapped by forces beyond their understanding, or a firm chinned alien in red, white and blue who barely breaks a sweat when saving the world. Which one reflects the experience of childhood the best?


Back to the act: 

Comedian, actor, writer and clown, Tom Corradini studied at the Atelier Teatro Fisico di Philip Radice (Lecoq method) in Turin, Italy. His likes include experimenting with every comical genre, being pushed by a troubled inner soul and being a funambolist suspended over the abyss.

For our delight, he will be connecting childhood pain and adult romantic problems, using the lives of the superheroes as object lessons. I hope he gets into Batman's philandering and Iron Man's alcoholism.

theSpace on North Bridge (V54), August 13 to 25 (not 19) - 16:35




Theatre Ad Infinitum have become Fringe regulars: Translunar Paradise has wowed Edinburgh for the past few years, and it is back again. Although the company get up to all sorts, including puppetry and masks, both director George Mann and performer Deborah Pugh did their time at Lecoq.

"The play’s about love, shared memory, loss and a relationship spanning 60 years told through the memories of an old widower, William," says Mann. "He has recently lost his wife and instead of moving on he gets lost in past memories.  The story follows William and Rose as they share wonderful memories together - from their courting days through to their last days together."

The originality of Translunar is in the way Ad Infinitum have used the language of movement and object manipulation. Mann adds. "

We break the traditional ‘mould’ of using mask - by combining it with puppetry: our masks are handheld.  It’s also one of a very few plays that attempts to communicate a story of complex themes and emotional content without text. For the first time we’re attempting a kind of ‘time travel’ through the use of masks, posture and movement.  One minute we’re young, the next we’re much older and we have to portray that in a split second using the masks and the way we stand and move.  There’s so much the body can and does say, but we seldom realise this."


In those last words, Mann gets to the nub of physical theatre: opening up the body as a tool of expression.

The Pleasance King Dome between 1 – 27 August at 5.25pm

Superbolt actually formed at Lecoq's school, and if their mix of dance, puppetry and text is not enough, they are rotating two plays at the Fringe. Centralia turns out to be about the 1960s, so I am saving that for another top five: but Piatto Finale concerns a piece of music that has never been heard, an opera house in Moscow and a crime comedy.

I guess that is something that made me worry about Lecoq - my original doubts were that it was too heavily based on clowning, and involved waving hands about the place like a French silent comedian. There is more to it than that, but it does hark back to old films and exaggerated performances. I think that is what has made it more accessible than other forms of physical theatre.

Zoo Venues, 4- 26 August, 10.20pm

 Having already done articles on Rhum and Clay and Clout, I feel that I can cheat. Here's Rhum and Clay talking about what makes Lecoq special.

"Lecoq inspires creativity. Its theatre is engaging and accessible; when done well it is absolutely captivating. Lecoq generates a community of artists with a shared language.  A testament to this is the amount of companies that have come out of the school.  From Complicite to last year’s hit company Theatre Ad Infinitum, success from Lecoq companies is carried by the quality of the work. It’s always our aim to create original theatre that meets those standards and creative values."

Bedlam, 9pm, 3-25 August (not 13^th, 20^th)

And the lad from Clout on the same question..

"A lot of people go to Lecoq, or LISPA or any of the other Lecoq based schools, because they crave a living theatre and are dis-engaged with a neck-up psychological acting style. Also for a lot of people we trained with the best show they have ever seen has been by a Lecoq trained company. For the Brits Complicité have had a great deal of influence. There are in fact 4 companies from our year alone at the Fringe this year: Rhum and Clay, Let Slip, Superbolt and us. As for the success of Lecoq trained companies, I think this comes from the fact that at the school you are always collaborating and creating together so when you leave, rather than waiting to get handed a job you simply say ‘let’s just keep going’. The highly critical nature of the teaching also plays a part. After that it is very difficult to kid yourself that what you’re doing is good if it isn’t. This being said success is never assured, especially in theatre, which is part of what makes it so exciting."
Summer Hall, 3.30pm, 3-26 August (not 17^th, 18^th)

Clout Theatre

Much of the excitement surrounding the second year of Fringe activity at Summerhall is centred on the programme: last year, the very presence of an idiosyncratic venue was enough, but this year, the team seem to have delivered a diverse, dynamic line-up. 

Clout Theatre is a a fine example of how Summerhall is attracting a more esoteric type of performance. This international physical theatre company has members from Russia, France, Turkey and Scotland,  performed in the Louvre Museum and the Istanbul Municipal Theatre. But most importantly, at least in terms of style, all of its  members trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

How A Man Crumbled promises three "bouffonesque" characters (roughly - nasty clowns) and a story that escapes the story-tellers. The Lecoq connection is important - "There are four companies from our year alone at the Fringe this year: Rhum and Clay, Let Slip, Superbolt and us," observes Co-Artistic DirectorGeorge Ramsay - not only in Clout's physicality, but in the willingness to slip outside of the usual theatrical cliches. With director Mine Çerçi known for interpreting Beckett, and a Russian former figure skater in the cast, Clout are hitting out into absurdist territory.

"The show is inspired by Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms," explains ramsay. "And his stories frequently end with ‘enough’ or ‘that’s enough of that’ or ‘and the neighbours all went out for lunch and got run over’. Abruptness is key to his work. He was a precursor to the Theatre of The Absurd."

If Absurdism was once the Shock of the New - when Beckett slapped a couple of vagrants on stage and had them ramble through an arid emotional landscape, the revolution that eventually became Live Art was heralded - it can be a little safe and predictable. For example, without disparaging Dominic Hill's excellent Beckett double-bill at Glasgow's Citizen's Theatre, it's clear that Hill could include these dramas of decay and death in a programme that is popular. But by investigating the lesser-known absurdists, and investing them with a new physicality, Clout are out-flanking mere surrealism.

"Khams was writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, about as absurd a time and place as you get!" laughs Ramsay. "Comparisons have been drawn between him and Beckett and Ionesco: I think Beckett is a great influence for us all and I hope we have captured something of his tragicomic spirit which exists also in Kharms." Yet Clout are adding to the intellectual pleasures of the absurd. "A lot of people go to Lecoq because they crave a living theatre and are dis-engaged with a neck-up psychological acting style."

The bouffon is one of Lecoq's gift to theatre, and the three characters in How A Man Crumbled are the key difference between a simple retelling and something more engrossing. Ramsay says that they don't help the drama along, but rather  "get distracted, tell other stories, fight, spit at each other, discuss Pushkin and Gogol and eat vegetables."  

3  - 26 August (not 18,19). Summerhall 15:30 (1  hour)