Blastin' from the Past...

The Arches' artist in residence, Al Seed, is poised between horror and humour: his successful Festival piece, The Factory, exploited spiteful anxiety and apocalyptic slap-stick. In Hunger, he abandons black humour for physical savagery, evoking famine-starved bodies, mad scientists and the damned's foodless feasts. His emaciated body- and exquisite control of muscles that most performers don't even have - becomes a symbol of ravening anguish. 

Despite the inevitable knowing sniggers, Hunger is profoundly bleak, trapping Seed in a situation that cannot be resolved or ignored: it concludes with a shrug of indifference. Perhaps the Arches itself encourages Seed's journey into misery - this was the perfect match of venue and artist.

Another Arches' production dealt with the same combination of food, intimacy and terror from an accessible perspective. Pit features a mother cooking the final meal for her condemned son, blending hygiene advice with malnutrition and America's southern underclass. Again, the venue heightens the claustrophobia - actors walk around the audience, who are seated for a formal meal - while Megan Barker's script spirals mundane set-pieces into drug abuse and murder with shocking inevitability. Hunger is taut and vicious; Pit is compassionate and loose - at times meandering into vague commentary on deprivation but delivering a chilling conclusion. 

Over at Tramway, Need Company were providing a perfect example of the expansive end of physical theatre. Jokingly introduced as musical comedy, Isabella's Room matched contemporary dance, dirty blues and a mesmerising central performance from Viviane De Muyack. The heroine, a blind geriatric, looks back at her sexual adventures (promiscuity, adultery and incest), her childhood and her academic anthropology (living in a room filled with African artefacts, she visits the country once and briefly). 

Understated and eloquent, morally neutral yet sympathetic, this astonishing show follows the impact of deceit on a single life. A cast of eccentrics, a stage cluttered with a collection that most museums would envy, and an overview of European politics in the twentieth century are merged into a satisfying, gentle narrative, slipping between dance and song, monologue and dialogue. Isabella's Room is a triumph, owning a fluidity and subtle grace that builds to a celebratory finale.

While the Christmas period is usually bereft of challenging art - carol singers and family shows fill the listings, and the misery of Winterval consumerism undermines the need for Al Seed's meditations on mortality - Tramway has the Breathing Space Programme at the start of the month. Gilmore Hill has Firebox and Blaze - a collaboration between local street dancers, contemporary choreographers and electronic musician Magic Daddy on 10th December.

Back in Time: Live Art in Glasgow etc... 2006

The Arches' artist in residence, Al Seed, is poised between horror and humour: his successful Festival piece, The Factory, exploited spiteful anxiety and apocalyptic slap-stick. In Hunger, he abandons black humour for physical savagery, evoking famine-starved bodies, mad scientists and the damned's foodless feasts. His emaciated body- and exquisite control of muscles that most performers don't even have - becomes a symbol of ravening anguish. Despite the inevitable knowing sniggers, Hunger is profoundly bleak, trapping Seed in a situation that cannot be resolved or ignored: it concludes with a shrug of indifference. Perhaps the Arches itself encourages Seed's journey into misery - this was the perfect match of venue and artist.

Another Arches' production dealt with the same combination of food, intimacy and terror from an accessible perspective. Pit features a mother cooking the final meal for her condemned son, blending hygiene advice with malnutrition and America's southern underclass. Again, the venue heightens the claustrophobia - actors walk around the audience, who are seated for a formal meal - while Megan Barker's script spirals mundane set-pieces into drug abuse and murder with shocking inevitability. Hunger is taut and vicious; Pit is compassionate and loose - at times meandering into vague commentary on deprivation but delivering a chilling conclusion.

Over at Tramway, Need Company were providing a perfect example of the expansive end of physical theatre. Jokingly introduced as musical comedy, Isabella's Room matched contemporary dance, dirty blues and a mesmerising central performance from Viviane De Muyack. The heroine, a blind geriatric, looks back at her sexual adventures (promiscuity, adultery and incest), her childhood and her academic anthropology (living in a room filled with African artefacts, she visits the country once and briefly). Understated and eloquent, morally neutral yet sympathetic, this astonishing show follows the impact of deceit on a single life. A cast of eccentrics, a stage cluttered with a collection that most museums would envy, and an overview of European politics in the twentieth century are merged into a satisfying, gentle narrative, slipping between dance and song, monologue and dialogue. Isabella's Room is a triumph, owning a fluidity and subtle grace that builds to a celebratory finale.




While the Christmas period is usually bereft of challenging art - carol singers and family shows fill the listings, and the misery of Winterval consumerism undermines the need for Al Seed's meditations on mortality - Tramway has the Breathing Space Programme at the start of the month. Gilmore Hill has Firebox and Blaze - a collaboration between local street dancers, contemporary choreographers and electronic musician Magic Daddy on 10th December.

Music Theatre Magic Moments

As a prelude to this week's Cryptic production These Delicate Things, I am mulling over some magical musical moments. In our conversation about his show, Josh Armstrong was sceptical about my claims that 'post-visual theatre is the next vital wave of performance' and polite enough not to punch me for confusing musical theatre (jazz hand, jukebox selections, maudlin sentimentality and hands-in-the-air triumphalism) and music theatre (carrying a message through the relationship between music and... theatre, and no jazz hands). So here are a few moments from the past year that exemplify how music can carry the meaning in a theatrical context.

Al Seed moves against the jazz (Oog @ The Arches)
Although I have mentioned Guy Veale's soundscape before, the particular moment when he drops Jean Goldkette and his Orchestra (1920s jazz action) into the mix is a devastating juxtaposition of the music's sensual optimism and AL Seed's character's desperate situation. Crackling and distant, Goldkette may sing of love but within Seed's survivalist drama, it becomes a harbinger of decay and despair.

David Pollock and Sita Pieraccini get busy (Make a Hoo @ The Arches)
Sita Pieraccini mostly abandoned words for this physical drama, but Pollock's score gave the work a tight, oppress focus. By framing her movements within an oppressive mesh of urban sound.

Ballet in Real Time (Still It Remains @ Tramway)

credit: Andrew Ross

It is no great surprise that an evening with Scottish Ballet would feature music as an essential part of the proceedings, but James Cousins' choreography had an almost unfashionably intimate relationship with the Kronos Quartet's Mugam Beyati Shiraz. An all female quartet are relocated from the stage into an imaginary and desolate and arid plain through the Quartet's evocation of the Middle East - yet are saved from a mere orientalist fantasy through the stringent strings and movements. 

Right to Reply: Oog @ The Arches

Halloween Special: Al Seed's Oog @ The Arches