God's Dramaturgy: Shotgun @ Edfringe 2017

Triumph of gender-blind casting in reimagining of ‘Godspell’.

Shotgun Theatre presents a new twist on Stephen Schwartz’s hit musical.

Venue: Greenside @ Nicolson Square (V209)

Address: 25 Nicolson Square, EH8 9BX

Previews: 4 - 6 August @ 6.30pm (Duration 2hrs)

Performances: 7 - 19 August (not 13th) @ 6.30pm (Duration 2hrs)

This August Shotgun Theatre are due to bring a gender-blind adaptation of ‘Godspell’ to the Edinburgh Fringe. In a bold move, the student theatre company have opted to cast a female actor to play the title role of Jesus.

Director, Joe Miller, and Assistant Director, Katherine Lea

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Our interpretation of Godspell focuses on the bringing together of a community through song and storytelling. We wanted to create a world that was as vibrant as the characters who inhabit it, letting their individual quirks and personalities shine through. Our set is minimalist in order to let the characters take precedence; filling the space with their dynamism and exuberance. 

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

Yes, definitely! We believe that performance either starts a discussion or contributes to conversations that have happened before. Godspell, although religious in nature, is fundamentally about human connection and experience: through audience addressal and thrust staging, we open up a forum of discussion as to how relationships can develop in a believable and sincere way regardless of background or upbringing. 

How did you become interested in making performance?

We both studied Drama at university and we are frequently captivated by the theatre’s ability to communicate and resonate with its audience. 

The sheer emotive power of the songs in Godspell capture the extremes of human emotion in a way that is accessible to absolutely everyone, regardless of their religion. It is this accessibility, this finding of a common ground that makes performance so powerful, and it is something we have tried to draw on throughout the performance and process. 

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

We have re-envisioned Godspell in a way that deviates from its obvious connections with religion, instead focusing on the notion of community and the way in which religion is just one method of bringing people together.  

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

Shotgun Theatre was initially established to broaden the opportunities available for those interested in musical theatre at the University of Exeter. We seek to create innovative and dynamic productions, and Godspell definitely fits the bill, with its gender-blind casting and creative storytelling. 

Our approach has enabled us to build an ensemble of incredibly talented individuals, prioritising their distinctive qualities over rigid character descriptions in order to create a truly unique and inclusive take on the musical. 

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

We’ve had previous audience members approach us after the show and tell us that they’re now considering religion, but we’re not looking to convert anyone! We hope that the audience will leave our show with a warm heart and an open mindedness; an understanding that no matter what our differences are, we can all be united by song, dance, and good company!  

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Audience experience has been at the forefront of our rehearsal process, and our main strategy consisted of creating a safe environment for these stories come to life. By giving our actors a fairly free rein over their characters, we have ensured that they are fun, likeable, and relatable. 

Considering the current political climate, we believe more than ever that relationships and community are at the heart of everything we do. Our production in particular shows that people from very different backgrounds are capable of coming together and changing their lives for the better.

Not just about faith, ‘Godspell’ is a vibrant and compelling musical about love, hope and finding friendship. Based on the Gospel of Matthew, the popular Broadway hit features chart topping by the composer of ‘Wicked’, Stephen Schwartz.

In a new twist to the popular family favourite, Shotgun have taken a unique approach to casting, completely ignoring the gender of the actors who auditioned. Rather than defining certain roles as ‘male’ or ‘female’, the team focused on creating a tight ensemble of actors regardless of how their roles were traditionally cast. As explained by the Assistant Director, Katherine Lea, “We had some incredible voices audition for us, and it would've been a terrible shame not to cast them simply because they were a certain gender. Instead of restricting ourselves, we decided to cast based on talent and suitability for each individual song.”

The approach to casting is most notable in the lead role of Jesus. Traditionally a male part, Shotgun have cast talented female actor Emily Lafoy to take on the character. This change is not just cosmetic. Originally written to suit a man’s voice, the melodies of the part are brought to the fore by Emily’s higher vocal range, giving the production a truly unique sound. Rosie Peters, the production’s vocal coach, explains “from a musical point of view, it could have been very risky casting a female, but Lafoy's soprano voice more than rose to the challenge. She has now made the role of Jesus completely her own.”

Blind Man's Dramaturgy: Guillaume Pige @ Edfringe 2015

Blind Man’s Song
After a sell-out run at the 2015 London International Mime Festival, Theatre Re presents a wordless tale about the power of imagination that blends together physical theatre, mime, sound, illusion and a beautifully lyrical live music score. 

As an old blind man takes unsteady steps around a room, a story of love, courage, hope and unquenchable vision unfolds. Blind Man’s Song is a tale about one man’s rage against his world of darkness. Inspired by the paintings of Magritte, the dead-end world of Beckett and interviews with blind and visually-impaired people, it witnesses the power of the body to communicate without words. 
Pleasance Dome (King Dome) from 6th August at 3:30pm.The Fringe

What inspired this production: did you begin with an idea or a script or an object?
Guillaume Pige: It all began with a painting by Renée Magritte

entitled The Lovers and a mystery: why do the lovers, in the act of kissing, have their faces veiled?

Some suggested that it was because they are concealing something about themselves and that was the start of a big debate on what it was that they were hiding from our view. 

But could we not imagine that the presence of the veil is there to lead the observer to a completely different world, a world above reality for instance (after all The Lovers is a surrealistic painting)?
In that world why could we not ask, what is the veil revealing rather than concealing? 

What is it revealing about the lovers; they have no face, no eyes, no nose, no ears not even a mouth and yet they are kissing. What does it say about that kiss?

So in a way this production started with an object or a mask (the veil) and a mystery.

Why bring your work to Edinburgh?
That is a very good question because sometimes one might think that all of this almost becomes a very expensive hobby!

But in fact it is not. 

We will be performing the show 25 times in a row for a wide variety of people and engage with audiences, professionals as well as with our peers. This, in itself, is already an invaluable experience and one of the best professional development opportunities.
We will meet and exchange with like-minded artists and theatre makers from across the UK and abroad. Future collaboration might emerge from these encounters.

We also hope to be able to tour Blind Man’s Song in 2016 and 2017 and start discussions with industry professionals and producers regarding the making of Theatre Re’s next project (in development in 2016).

What can the audience expect to see and feel - or even think - of your production?
Blind Man’s Song is a very visual and musical piece of theatre, and in that sense the piece triggers a wide range of different emotions, ideas and even memories. We almost try to reach to the level of the unconscious. 

I don’t have an exact description of what the show will trigger, but we promise to take the audience on a dreamlike journey travelling at the speed of memory to a place where some things become more visible in the dark.

The Dramaturgy Questions

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

In 2012 we took our production of The Gambler to the Fringe. It went down really well and there was one comment that came back a lot especially from industry professionals and fellow theatre makers; and it was that we would benefit from working with a dramaturg. 

But what is it that dramaturgs do? Especially since most of our work, does not start from a written text or a narrative and sometimes does not even include written text.

So without really knowing what to expect, I started collaborating with dramaturgs for the making of The Little Soldiers (EdFringe 2013) and Blind Man’s Song (EdFringe 2015).

It went extremely well and as a matter of fact I am already planning to collaborate with a dramaturg for the making of Theatre Re’s next piece.

What I have discovered is that, the role of the dramaturg seems to vary depending on the nature and the needs of the project, the dramaturg’s background and experience and the rest of the creative team. 

So far the dramaturgs that I have collaborated with have helped with the coherence and the accessibility of the work. They helped with all the background work before getting into the rehearsal room, the research, the forgotten stories and the myth that will (or not) nourish the work of the creative team at different stages (and especially when the team is stuck). 

They provided various sorts of raw material (paintings, sculptures, news, films, interviews, general knowledge et c.) that have later been used, processed and digested by the creative team. They helped with the framing of ideas and concepts at the beginning, during and at the end of the development period. They also helped with mapping out different routes, options and possibilities at key stages and facilitate the decision-making.

It almost feels like the dramaturg plays the role of a midwife, he or she is there to facilitate the birth. They are not the parents and they are not the doctors; they are the midwives.

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?
Etienne Decroux’s Corporeal Mime is at the basis of all the creative work of Theatre Re. I also really admire and feel very inspired by the work of Le Theatre de l’Ange Fou whose directors, Corinne Soum and Steven Wasson were the last assistants of Etienne Decroux and with whom I had the chance to train.

I look up to and am very influenced by the work and the teaching of Theatre Director Andrew Visnevski, who has been following and supporting my development for the past 8 years.

In terms of distant influences, through the reading of their books I feel very close and inspired by the work of actors and theatre directors such as Jean-Louis Barrault, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig and Jerzi Grotowski.

As for other artists outside of theatre practitioners (painters, sculptors, writers, poets, film makers, philosophers), I am curious of everything and everything can become an influence.

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?
I can only describe what I have done so far and how it worked. It will probably keep changing and evolving as I keep making work. I really believe that the subject matter or the theme of the project, or the limitations that we decided to play with, dictate the way I am going about doing things. 

Collaboration is definitely one of the key factors. I don’t do anything by myself, mostly because it is not much fun. Once I have an idea or am excited by something (and it does not take much) then I gather a team of collaborators from different background an expertise and I try to persuade them to join me on the adventure… and that is how it starts. 

In a way it is as if I was bringing a little bit of food, or the bare minimum if you like, and then we all cook together and the more people bring to the kitchen the better. I also try to engage with people who do not come from a theatre background, but who are experts in their field to join the creative team. For instance for The Gambler with worked with Gambler’s Anonymous; for Blind Man’s Song, we worked over a year with blind and partially sighted people.

All the collaborators are in the rehearsal room from day one, even if they are not directly involved with what we are working on at that particular moment. We often start by doing things, by moving, by playing and then little by little sequences or little scenarios start to emerge and then a theme, and then another, and another, and then we try to link it all and find hidden connections and transitions. Strangely enough it is usually in the transitions that the best bits emerge. We also play a lot with objects and try to find their inherent theatricality. These objects (boxing gloves, letters, a step ladder, a microphone, a moving light, a cable, a bed, a piano) somehow become central to each pieces.

One thing is for sure: it takes a very long time to make a show.

What do you feel the role of the audience is, in terms of making the meaning of your work? 
The audience is very important if not crucial because at the end of the day, it is all about communication. 

However, I tend to not think too much of the audience when we are making the piece. I try to make something that the creative team and myself will find beautiful, meaningful, and that we believe in, but I don’t worry too much about the audience at that stage. 
We test the work on a regular basis, so the audience is important but not to make the meaning of the show, just to check that what we do reaches them in the way that we intend to.

I also feel like a piece of work is never quite complete until we performed it in front of an audience for quite a long time. As if the last final tweaks could only be made live on stage and that is one of the most exciting part as it really shows that theatre has a life of its own.

Indiscriminate content production since 2010

Calum MacAskill
How Peas are Made
The alliance of agricultural multinationals and radical physical theatre performers has given the UK some of its most vibrant performances of the last ten years: MacAskill, until now better known for his adaptations of Faust and Pirates of the Caribbean – both one man shows that astounded audiences with his versatility and ready humour – now joins this veritable industry with a site-specific study of DNA, evolution and delicious meals.
The decision to take a working farm as venue is a brave one – when MacAskill climbs atop a threshing machine and bellows the show’s title at a vast uncaring barn, he highlights the intrinsic horror lurking behind both the blind idiot force of natural selection and playing about in what is, after all, just a big factory for food production.

Yet in these moments of bravado, MacAskill reveals a deeper truth. Existing in the modern world demands compromise, not least the willing forgetfulness of the processes that conspire to make us who we are.

Undoubtedly, this is his big break: the theme tune, that plays in the background as he leads the audience around the farm, has already gone viral online, and threatens to be the Christmas number one. It’s heartening that such a series look at man’s relationship to nature has become part of mainstream conversation.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010

Julia Bauer
I Done Broke It
Collecting Bauer’s photographs from the past year – during which she travelled across several countries, snapping landscapes and buildings as she moved – I Done Broke It evinces a fascination with the structures beneath structures and the raw materials that surround us, hidden in architecture and concrete. By finding those places where natural decay has set into objects – a broken table leg is surprisingly moving, a crack in a wall exposes the infinity of Blake’s leaf of grass – Bauer seeks to reveal those materials usually hidden by the facade.

The images – set up around the stage at Glasgow’s O2 Academy, an unpredictable choice of gallery – are overwhelming at first, a series of stunningly beautiful and colourful snapshots. Undoubtedly, prints of Bauer’s photography will be covering up the patches on student walls well into the next century: yet the irony is that this beauty speaks of her philosophical interests. In the gallery guide, she notes that she is not fascinated by the exterior, but the hard working materials inside. Her analogy of the duck, serene on the surface but with legs paddling furiously beneath, is apposite and profound. She introduces the viewer to a world beneath and beyond the apparent.

This dualism runs through the exhibition like an evocative crack, celebrating the unnoticed while drawing attention to her eye for specific detail: the very chemistry of concrete is rendered poetic. Elegant, emotional and intelligent, I Done Broke It announces the arrival of an important new artist on the international stage.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010

Steph Black
Frog Music
Frog Music is that rare thing, a piece of performance art that is both witty, intelligent and popular. Relying only on Black’s physical presence, with a little help from her exquisite use of raw materials, it combines a sternly political intention and a playful flirtation around danger. Despite only lasting three minutes, and performed in silence, it has the immediate impact of a summer chart-topper.
Throughout the performance, Black is balanced between a yearning for the extreme and a desire for stability. Taking a single news article as a foundation,  she uses movements gleaned from popular culture and eastern martial arts to comment on the emotional impact of the global media. The title, taking from her experience of listening to frogs in the darkness, belching around a swamp, hints at her message: the news itself is merely the meaningless commentary on events, relegated to the sidelines and failing to either enlighten or engage, leaving only the constant barrage of static.

It is clear that Black’s evolution as an artist is honing her longer, abstract explorations into shorter, more forceful and immediate pieces: Frog Music is still beautiful and elegiac, yet has a more focused political passion. Despite the lack of language, script or sound, she communicates her ideas directly, echoing familiar choreography while injecting humour into her taut physical essay. By creating a moment of silence, she answers the relentless assault of contemporary noise disguised as information.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010


Catherine and Lee
Wildernesses


Catherine and Lee, in their debut duo performance, ask hard questions about the lines between genres. At once a startling example of experimental musical theatre and a fine piece of autobiographical drama, it explores the city landscape as if it were a wilderness, challenging the traditional categorisations of performance and location. Wilderness may well be the world’s first site-specific street festival contemporary dance musical: it is certainly a bold statement of intent.

Starting with Catherine dancing alone – since Wilderness is part of Glasgow’s inaugural Festival of Busking, she uses the music floating across George Square from the various other artists. Suddenly, she drops the carefully choreographed tango, and moves instinctively with the melodies, shaking and twisting as if in the grip of an ecstatic trance. Lee provides a commentary on the dance, relating specific movements to the surrounding buildings. Advertising tends to provoke crouched, aggressive stances: the dreamy spires of late Victorian architecture inspire leaps and twirls that recall ballet.

Clearly influence by the freedom of contact improvisation and the serious monologues that came from the Glasgow Live Art Young team of the early 2000s, Catherine and Lee add a sensitive to both environment and music. If the underlying message is that the wilderness exists inside the urban, their versatility celebrates the freedom of the wild.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010

Katrin Turner
Two Hours and Counting
Turner’s debut long form feature film flatters to deceive. Coming on like a boys’ own adventure tale – the appearance of space pirates dressed in pig costumes has the tone of earnest fan fiction – it revels in the fundamental impossibility of the human understanding either destiny or the vast reaches of deep space. Nominally a science fiction epic, where the heroic captain chases a captured princess in the best Star Wars style, it gradually reveals its nihilistic philosophy, of a universe neither hostile nor even aware of the great human experiment.

Captain Morgan – a flawed hero, quick with the one liners and tart replies, but nursing a broken heart and gentle disposition – is revealed as a contemporary everyman, desperate to believe that his mission has a purpose. The plot – peppered with action sequences and loving depictions of planetary systems – is of secondary importance to the character’s journey, which moves from posing cynicism to sincere confusion. Turner’s use of the close up, catching the slightest frown or smile, makes the landscape of Morgan’s feature more expressive than the expensive and lavish long-shots of the Universe.

Having made her reputation with a series of shorts that unflinchingly captured theatrical performers talking about their craft, Turner may have seemed a strange choice to direct this summer blockbuster. Yet she carries off the drama with aplomb, while infusing the film with a distinctive intelligence and thoughtfulness.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010

Danielle Heath
First Album
Danielle Heath’s photography is reminiscent of family snaps – appropriately enough, given the title of this exhibition. Bodies float in and out of focus, awkward smiles and strained poses recall the way that a group photograph was, once upon a time, an essential ingredient of a night out. Spread out across the walls of The Arches’ basement, the collection is nostalgia and almost embarrassingly personal. Yet by elevating these snatched moments towards the status of art, Heath lends a nobility and poetry to the hidden history of family life.

What makes Heath’s collection stand out from a mundane session around the photo albums is the use of a sophisticated visual language of gesture and expression. Sometimes, the photographs are arranged in sequences that suggest a series of stills from a film: across the entire exhibition, clenched fists, raised forearms, twists of the body towards or away from the camera take on a symbolic meaning. That few of the people in the pictures actually touch one another gives the images an alienated, frustrated atmosphere: the single embrace – the last image of the exhibition – becomes a surprisingly triumphant presentation of connection and warmth.
Whether Heath was inspired by The Arches as a space – its oft-mentioned stone walls have overshadowed many productions and given them an unexpected sombre tome – or is allowing the venue to enhance these sweet images of disconnection is moot. The synthesis of content and gallery is as coherent as the gap between her style and message is startling. In a single exhibition, Heath deconstructs the way that the shining surface can hide the depth of feeling.

The VileArtsMercury

Indiscriminate content production since 2010


Rosie Reid
Swimming with Rosie

Rosie Reid’s first play for children may be a solo show that echoes her established series of intimate theatre pieces, but it is supported by a lavish production that gives her quirky autobiographical fables a more polished and family friendly veneer. Performed in a swimming pool, with the audience of under-fives sat, feet in the water, around the edge, she tells stories of swimming and - in the spectacular finale - becoming a champion board diver. Many of the stories have a clear moral, yet she never allows the message to overwhelm her cheery good humour.

From the very beginning, when she appears from the changing rooms in a glamorous 1940s’ bathing suit, Reid holds her audience rapt. There are occasional cheeky asides to the adults that do not detract from her direct communication with the children. Indeed, her tone of child-like wonder wins them over, without ever descending into simple childishness.

The bulk of her stories deal with her fascination with sea-creatures: when she ponders how a fish finger could swim (until her teens, she was convinced it was another sort of fish, like cod or a prawn), or acts out the moment when a large eagle splashed down next to her, she has the children giggling along with her. Her warm, comfortable style - she is never hurried, never worried - allows her to go into complex tales and their dire warnings without missing a beat.

Not only is this a fine lesson in water safety - the support of the Lifeguards Association makes perfect sense - it is a superb example of how a performer can flourish, even when she is literally out of her element.



Edward Crawley
Beats International

The cold, hard world of chemical science is not usually associated with the naked warmth of the human voice. Yet Crawley’s masterful encounter installation finds the embers of compassion in the coil of human DNA. Beginning the show encased in what appears to be a cage of twisted metal - later revealed as a flexible model of the human chromosome  - Crawley sings his way free of the wreckage and finally stands proud as an individual of considerable talent.

Recognising the intimate relationship between man and technology was Crawley’s first step. Previously, he has attempted to discover the ghost in the machine, by considering ways that choices could be made without the interference of a person. Now he goes further, and uses the chemistry of life itself as the blueprint for a solo, vocal performance. Working in full light, and making himself the centre of attention only adds to the humanity and humility of Beats International: against the austere majesty of the video projections, Crawley is almost vulnerable.

However, his plain chant is a testament to human resilience and the beauty of simplicity. Always aware of his audience, frequently picking out individual listeners for his attention, Crawley re-affirms the bond between an artist and his art in a manner that is romantic (in the philosophical sense). His intention, to wonder at the apparent random nature of DNA and its ability to nevertheless produce complicated and elegant forms, is eloquently expressed in his music. Emerging from stutters and moans, it slowly takes on a more recognisable form, first as melody, then as words.

Crawley may provoke questions about the evolution of language, and the importance of art and artistry in the development of even mundane communication. But perhaps more importantly, he has composed a love song to the humanity encoded in the chemistry.

Yes, it is Performance

an interview with Mr Criticulous

As he has commented himself, Mr Criticulous may not have any talent, but at least he was the first Performance critic. He’s been knocking around Glasgow for the past couple of years, generally making a fool of himself and trying to find ways to prove that the critic is as much of an artist as the poet, only in a different medium. With his distinctive smell and world-weary look, Criticulous is unwilling to speak to the press: “I am part of it, and my insanity doesn’t yet include talking to myself,” he insists. Yet we caught up with him in the street outside The Arches, where he was contesting a restraining order brought by the cast of River City.

What is a performance critic?
I like to think of the performance critic as a romantic hero: a man with compassion in his heart, a square jaw and a clear sight of the world’s inequalities. He is just another man on the street, you might walk past him without noticing, but he is preparing to change the world.
Is he always a man?
There is only ever one performance critic in a generation. And that’s me. Anyone else trying this on, and I’ll sue.
What does a performance critic do?
The thing is, it is only the critic who really understands art. I mean, the audience has some idea of what is going on, the academic a little less and the artist nothing. So the critic elucidates meaning. The performance critic does that through a performance - the clue’s in the name, thereby becoming an artist.
But the artist understands nothing...
And that is the first paradox. Next.