Having spent the last three Arches Live! as a performer, I felt uncomfortable slipping back into my traditional role. My critiques will now be vulnerable to the traditional artist's retort - the critic is, indeed, the failed artist. Having had a crack at intimate theatre, the chat show and a post-modern version of the script (containing plenty about how much I love myself), I step back into the arena wondering whether I could have been more ambitious.
However, I am back on safe ground, and can begin with my annual appeal. Arches Live is not a festival that welcomes the classic review format. Even for those shows which deserve to be in the running for awards at the end of the season, a positive, star-rated review is not the point. The spirit of Arches Live is in experimentation, and it has a supportive audience, many of them fellow performers. It has the spirit of a graduate conference, in which researchers present a few findings.
Bearing this in mind, Adam
Scarborough was reporting on the thin line between student pranks (he had his haircut in the city centre), political engagement and the way that politics has become an aesthetic performance. Steve Slater (the father of Criticulous, although he denies it) nipped into outer space and an alternative reality. Opera
Breve took the logic of Scottish Opera's 5:15 programme to its logical conclusion.
Opera Breve's
One Day This Will Be Long Ago is a fifteen minute burst of serious singing sensuality. Although it reduces the operatic duet to a series of leading phrases, and never clarifies the relationship between the man and woman pacing around the kitchen table, it uses the intensity of the operatic voice (and the musicians behind the curtain) to marry the immediacy of live art and the technique of high art. The couple are clearly stuck in a moment that they can never escape - the fragmented memories are so mundane, they appear to hide all sorts of intense emotions. Intelligent and emotive,
One Day does set a high standard: live artists could think about how skilled technique can enhance intimacy between art and audience; opera could think about how a small scale makes those techniques more accessible.
Meanwhile,
Between Atoms and Stars is Steve Slater's return to performance after years of programming (at Tramway) and production management (for Untitled Projects). Slater allows his enthusiasm for space exploration and Joseph Beuys to meet, imagining a world where Beuys has Yuri Gagarin in the gallery alongside him. There's no urgency in the story - Slater slips between childhood memories and the alternative history that frees Gagarin from his untimely death - and sketches out space for future performances rather than establishes a clear purpose.
Sortition is Adam Scarborough's attempt to advocate the return of a more inclusive government. By the time he admits that he isn't sure that sortition is a good alternative to representative democracy, he has posed as a career politician - all hot air and speaking on behalf of the people - been challenged by his audience in an uncomfortable debate and rolled out a series of thoughts on how politics has been usurped by a particular class.
Like
Between Atoms, this comes across as a first draft. It comes back to the problem of Arches Live - which is also its point. Both Slater and Scarborough are taking the chance to try something new, and indulging personal interests, testing their shape for the stage. Yet both suffer from tentative structure and a lack of precision in their performance. It's clear that Scarborough is frustrated, for example, by the current state of the political system. Unfortunately, his projected solution does not reveal his reasons for his disappointment.
Certainly, these works point to interesting conversations and their weaknesses are more in specifics of performance than ambition or ideas. It is how these conversations are framed that is important - something I struggled to do in my own performances at previous festivals.
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