Woo- Hoo! Dramaturgy Time: Jonny Woo @ Edfringe 2015

TRANSFORMING THE FRINGE

TRANSFORMER – JONNY WOO

7-16 AUGUST, 20:45 (21:40), THE VOODOO ROOMS (VENUE 68)

Relax after a perfect day at the Fringe this year and let Jonny Woo transport you back to the 1970s New York City (velvet) underground.

Backed by a full rock band, Woo transforms himself into the iconic rock ‘n’ roll legend Lou Reed and plays his solo album, Transformer, including such unforgettable songs as Walk on the Wild Side, Perfect Day and Vicious.

Audiences can expect guest appearances from fellow superstars David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Candy Darling. This is your ticket into the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, where rock stars and drag queens drink and get high.



What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
I was prompted by Lou Reed's passing a few years back actually and felt inspired to do my live version of his album Transformer, the only one I know actually, but which I've had since my teens and one which I always loved for it's theatricality and easy rock tunes. 

It was just going to be 'Jonny does Transformer' but my research into his life led me to a book all about Max's Kansas city, a nightspot in NYC in the 70s which seemed to be an inspiration for the album, or much of it, so has become the glue in between the amazing songs

Where does your piece at the fringe fit with your usual work?
This is totally new for me, to work with a band. I was tired of creating pieces on my own essentially about myself and wanted to do something that came from an external inspiration. Most of my stuff has either used cabaret style or dance orientated music, this one is pure rock. 

Also channeling a character throughout is totally different for me and liberating in that I am confined by the character and don't need to call up 'Jonny' tricks to get reactions on stage.


What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?
I hope people are thrilled and lifted by the music. I think it will shock them a bit as our take on the album is actually a bit more punk than the original and is more like Lou's own Rock'n'Roll Animal version. 

I want people to be surprised at how amazing his music is and how enjoyable and how alive and contemporary his songs feel. I want people and hope people get a real sense of the time which concerns the show, 70s' NYC, the characters, the wildness and abandon and leave with this sense and maybe for one night feel they have permission to go a little bit crazy and be truly rock'n'roll. I want new audiences to to discover great songwriting, the old way!

The Dramaturgy Questions


How would you explain the relevance - or otherwise - of dramaturgy within your work? 

First of all let me understand what you mean by dramaturgy, I am taking it to mean how all the components come together to tell the story within the show. 

I worked early on in my career with a company who employed a dramaturg who kept and eye on how the narrative hung together in the show we were working on and how the cast as a whle work together at telling the story. I always actually try and keep and eye on this myself even if working in a more surreal or random way, i think it is important to let the audience feel they are on a journey and involved in some kind of narrative and even if seemingly disparate the parts of the production serve the greater whole.



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?
I suppose sometimes I can be a bit Brechtian in that I like the audience to see the workings of the theatricality and I like to present ideas in unusual ways so the audience can see an idea from a different viewpoint. to stop the audience becoming emotionally involved so they can consider the idea being presented.

I get inspired by dance a lot actually and will quote choreographers when creating big drag routines, no-one else may know who I am quoting or see a 'Forsythe' or 'Bausch' idea but I know it's there. 

Justin Bond is one of my earliest career inspirations and if you can call it a new tradition i think there is a lot of crossover in the alt/drag movement if you can call it that across the world.



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?

My process varies a lot. I have recently done a show with a direct Douglas Rintoul which had a very clear process of using interview as the starting point of cresting a script and then we looked at different ways of presenting something in the verbatim style to inform the narrative. doug worked very much as drmaturge here looking at how the scritp and the choices I made as the performer both informed the narrative and subject matter.




What do you feel the role of the critic is?
 In Edinburgh the critic gets you people into the theatre! It's not really a time where you can look at press criticisms and see them as objective point of views and consider whether to let them inform the development of the work. once you are on a roll in Edinburgh it's a risk to change your work.

So get ready to take a walk on the wild side and lose yourself in Reed’s dark take on glam rock, performed by a truly innovative talent of the cabaret scene.


The Voodoo Rooms is an award-winning bar & restaurant located in central Edinburgh which opened in November 2007 with the aim of further boosting the city's vibrant bar, restaurant entertainment scene.

The Voodoo Rooms,19a West Register Street, Edinburgh EH2 2AA.



 

Cabaret Time!

When George Bernard Shaw pronounced that "to kindle art to the whitest heat, there must always be some fanaticism behind it," he had been watching musical hall sketches. This makes me feel better about the post that I shall eventually write that claims Dusty Limits is more important than Shakespeare, and connects me to a tradition of theatre critics - GBS would later become an issue-obsessed playwright but started as a critic - who are fascinated by cabaret's potential.

Despite getting its own section in the Fringe programme only two years ago, cabaret is a well established rival to theatre and comedy in the battle for star ratings during the August bun fight. I am not convinced that the variety bills that are often the foundation of any consideration of cabaret have advanced much since 2010, when Vive Le Cabaret set up in the palatial Ghillie Dhu and celebrated its new found popularity and roots in the vintage fashion scene: it's too easy to see the same acts turning up at different nights, or comedians dominating the bill with extracts from their solo shows.

What the cabaret section has done is demonstrate that acts can stretch their material over an hour, giving room to their persona's development and forging an identity as coherent as any stand ups or, in the best cases, focussing their sketches and songs into a potent theatrical experience. Dusty Limits remains far ahead here, but Jonny Woo, best known for getting more facial expression out of a gorilla mask than most actors get out of their face, and Bourgeois and Maurice prove that the five minute slot is not necessarily the optimum for a cabaret routine.

Bourgeois and Maurice don't make it easy for the critic attempting to analyse them within a socio-political frame-work: calling the show Sugartits and explicitly stating in a recent interview that their songs weren't very political, they try to pretend that their intentions are more towards the party than the party line. Fortunately, Sugartits belies their modesty. While they might lack the concentration of Dusty Limits, they have a sardonic take on both Europe's financial woes and the British desire not to get involved and their smack down of Facebook ("makes me feel shit, sometimes") is nicely posed on the precipice between virtual confidence and the grim meat-hook realities of existence.

Bourgeois' effete, prancing personality revels in ignorance - he tries to understand cabaret by watching some film whose name he forgets, and concludes it is about funny haircuts, an American and Nazis - skewering the lazy acceptance of pre-consumed opinion and London's provincialism with glee. A supposedly improvised number satirises the ubiquity of high street chainstores, and mocks a Britain that is slowly losing regional identity: his banter with Maurice takes swipes at observational comedy and elegantly undercuts cabaret's own obsession with glamour.

The elephant in the room with cabaret is always Weimar. Thanks to its association with anti-Nazi politics in the 1930s, Weimar Cabaret is pretty much the gold standard of the form. Never mind that GBS was elated by catching Yvette Guibert, who sung songs that would not be out of place in the repertoire of cheeky Des O'Connor (the one who wrote Cheap Shite White Wine, not the perma-tanned TV host); mentioning Weimar brings out the serious.

And so Sugartits can take its place in that heritage. It shares the ambiguous sexuality, the disrespect for authority, the barbed comments from a character who goes on to undermine their own authority. The slippery nature of cabaret, in which everything is offered to burlesque parody and the fool speaks truth and idiocy in equal measure, lends it a carnivalesque splendour which might explain why the grander variety shows, like La Clique Royale incorporate circus inspired acrobatics.

There is also an indigenous British tradition of cabaret. This ended up in the variety show, which paraded its rotting corpse on British television until the 1990s. Its bad name comes from the preponderance of shit British comics who milked it and its inevitable association with light entertainment. Stripped of politics and counter-cultural energy, it descended into a vapid endorsement of establishment values and the threatening sexuality was soft-soaped into cheap showgirl vacuity.

It's odd to see East End Cabaret draw on this more mainstream tradition. Despite having a hermaphrodite on the piano, their charming and witty set is relatively mainstream, so long as songs about sex with corpses or sexual jealousy are taken as humour rather than barbed comments on human relationships. After last year, when their Free Fringe show was being touted by the Total Theatre Awards as a display of bravura, their talent appears to be directed towards easier targets.

The chemistry between Bernadette Byrne and Victor Victoria is evident and their appropriation of popular music, culture and song is sharp: Victor Victoria has a knack for comic parodies of almost familiar tunes and Byrne is a voracious sexual predator. But for a duo who once tried to seduce audiences into bed with the red, the political punch is missing. Victor Victoria is cast more as the cute side-kick, even when stalking Byrne or dismissing a rival's attractiveness.

Notoriously Kinky is a strong show, but panders too much to the audience: it is rarely bracing and even the climax, a medley of the songs they did not have time to include, is more about the wit and skill than the cutting comment. Of course, this assessment is based on insisting that cabaret must have a deeper purpose, the critic's vanity.

Support the Power of Woo Man

If I am honest, I only intended to leave the office for five minutes at around six. It's the back of midnight, and I have just returned. In the intervening period, I have encountered contemporary Indian dance (lyrical and enchanting, powerful and delicate), laughed along with an illustrated performance lecture that rages against ageism and ended up on stage, wearing a wig, pretending to be the Olympic Flame. People often ask me why I write so much. It's because things like this happen if I go outside.

I was lucky to get a ticket for Wendy Houston: she has worked with Time Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and Nigel Charnock (DV8), two artists who inspired men to take up the word in response to theatre. Her 50 Acts is a collection of "small dances and big ideas", raced through in under an hour and embracing eloquent poetry and cheeky choreography, sketched around a counter-blast against ageism but taking in the duplicity of politicians, the ferocity of the modern world, the troubles with radical performance and the difficulty of ending something, whether that be life or a show. And she throws in a few manifestos along the way.

Houston's dynamism - for a show about being old, there are plenty of high kicks, urgent pacing about and a rocking soundtrack - disguises the thoughtful core. It may seem scatter-shot, pot shots at health and safety bumping against moving interludes that evoke nursing homes and the indignity of slow death, but her vision is clear and her argument coherent. In a world obsessed with categorisation and speed of communication, the attack against the elderly's worth is not just youthful ignorance. It becomes, rather, the logical end point of the quest for speed and its cult of youth.

After a moment of poignancy at Houston's finale, I nipped off to see Jonny Woo. His solo show tells his life story - at least so far, as Woo is only in his fortieth year and frankly, looks great on it. His adventures in the worlds of Woolworths and New York clubbing are awarded equal attention, building his ambitions until he can finally fulfil his childhood ambition: to become Wonder Woman.

Woo alternates between songs and spoken word, all dressed in outrageous costumes - his poet, Spam Eyres, is a monstrous cross between homely old school variety and a sexual predator, and the things he does with boxing gloves do need to be witness. It's not until the final number, a fantasy on the Transvestite Olympics, that the audience participation gets going. And so my evening ended, shimmying and in a white wig.

Assembly, 1- 26 August

Enter the Woo Tang

The desire for experimentation has been a driving force behind much great art: when Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, his need to escape the tyranny of the stereotype inspired him to stretch the traditional blues sound over different time signatures: a similar anxiety encouraged Captain Beefheart to collide free jazz and the growl of psychedelic rock. The demands of form and the needle of ambition have often combined to push music and dance into startling new territories: it is only through the absolute awareness of a heritage that innovation is genuinely possible.

The selections in Jonny Woo's latest release speak of Woo's personal engagement with the history of drag: like Miles Davis, he has wallowed in his medium's traditions and, in flashes, can embody the best of the past. When he adorns himself in feathers and speaks of his time in NYC, his face pokes out of the decadent,  divine glamour and his voice conjures the painfully bored and eroded feeling of the morning after the week before. "Petrol and gin taste the same at this time in the morning..."

Yet it is in those numbers when he applies the drag blueprint to more ambitious settings - a celebration of the kitsch TV series Wonder Woman providing a frame for a fantasy on the transvestite Olympics, or a trip down memory lane and Rochester High Street to remember his disillusioned youth - that it become clear why members of serious Russian mime acts are watching this British artist who is often compared to Kenny Everett.

The comparisons to the late, great comedy broadcaster are inappropriate: it happens that Woo is sometimes a bearded men who does drag, and Everett's legacy, which ought to be in the imaginative use of radio, has been reduced to his characters on a TV sketch show. Woo has peers - Dusty Limits, although very different in intention, shares an interest in how age changes a performer's attitude - and ancestors: he jokes about British TV poet Pam Ayres, but her cheeky poetry is reflected in his persona as well as his parody; the flamboyant drag acts of the 1970s, although their glitz makes them the commercial, neutered version to Woo's taut, savage humour.

Woo is moving drag forward, shedding the self-conscious limitations of an art that has been preoccupied with the need to amuse. Perhaps that was a necessary period for drag, the anxiety about social status reflected in acts that pandered rather than provoked. Woo is always entertaining, although his celebration of the self is rooted in an undercurrent of serious formal and emotional experimentation.

Assembly Room. 3 -27 August