The Glasgow School X: The Three Festivals

Again, these were tentative notes...

The three theatre festivals represent different strands of performance. The youngest, Buzzcut, is entering its third year, having been instituted as a response to the absence of New Territories, a festival that programmed high quality experimental performance. Founded in 2012 by Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson, Buzzcut has a mission statement that emphasises the creation of new spaces for performance and bring new audiences to live art. For 2014, it runs between 23^rd and 27^th April in The Pierce Institute (Govan).

In past years, it featured a mixture of local and national artists working in similar territory to The National Review of Live Art, which was held in Glasgow until 2010. Unlike the NRLA, it does not pay its artists, and has an open application process. Although the majority of performances are live art solos, it has included musicians (Glasgow experimentalists In Posterface in 2013), video game competitions (Thom Scullion) and readings from poets.

In its first year, Buzzcut was advertised in The Arches' season as part of Behaviour: although this was never a formal connection – it was independently curated – it emphasises the programmes' shared aesthetic. In 2014, Behaviour runs from March until May: in previous years, it has picked up on successes from the Edinburgh Fringe, supported new performance from emerging artists through its Platform 18 fund, offered international names – Ann Liv Young has been a regular visitor - and a season of 'auteurs' from the National Theatre of Scotland.

Behaviour, previously known as The Arches Theatre Festival, is curated by Jackie Wylie with the intention 'to create a platform for the best Scottish work and put that beside companies with international status.'

Mayfesto was founded in 2010 by the artistic director of the Tron, Andy Arnold, to 'connect the city's strong political traditions with its love of theatre. Now in its fourth year, it runs from 6 -31 May in 2014 and has a theme of 'post-colonial theatre,' and presents work in association with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which is also based in Glasgow.

Previous years have seen new plays from Scottish authors, including David Greig and Cora Bissett: Andy Arnold has directed several productions and while there are two available spaces in the building (a main auditorium and a studio space), the emphasis has been on scripted theatre.

Each festival has its peculiarities, most notably in venue choice. Buzzcut has moved to the Pierce Institute in Govan, an area not known for theatre and recognised as needing regeneration. The Arches, a converted series of tunnels beneath a railway station in the city centre, is a multi-arts venue, featuring gigs and clubs alongside theatre. The Tron, meanwhile, is a traditional theatre space in the city centre.

The Problem of the Question

The framing of the question – whether 'Glaswegian festivals' share not just a geographical location but also an aesthetic sensibility – is deliberately problematic. Discussing cultural homogeneity relies on the assumption that a culture can be broadly defined: in Scottish Drama and the Popular Tradition, Elizabeth MacLennan claims that 'Scotland is distinguished by its socialist, egalitarian tradition, its Labour history, its cultural cohesion' (ed. Stevenson and Wallace, 1996: p180), a generalisation neither supported by evidence nor easy to prove. As Wolfgang Iser (ed. Counsell and Wolf, 2001: p180) reminds, the impossibility of determining objective truth ensures that all analysis becomes an analysis of perceptions. The interrogation of the festivals' takes on Glaswegian identity will be based on the assumption that there is no final definition, but a series of interpretations that inform the programming, performances and reception of the festivals.

Neighbourhood Forum @ Pearce Institute, Govan

Gary Gardiner and Murray Wason are both performers of integrity and charisma: Neighbourhood Forum, however, is designed to put them at the service of the audience, providing interludes and guidance to a series of discussions. Breaking the audience into groups, the format follows the break-out sessions of the workshop, with each session offering opportunities to discuss personal experiences of faceless bureaucracy.

Wason and Gardiner have, of course, built this format and present a splendid dance of frustration to illustrate the theme. They also put on a video of Govan in the olden days, which might have evoked the good old days of community or financial hardship, but comes across as a tokenistic gesture towards the venue and the local community.

However, the meat of the production does build a sense of community, first of all in the smaller groups and then, when Gardson (tm) do their dance, through the whole room. The room fills with frustration, anger - and a feeling that battling bureaucracy is a shared misery. The hints of triumph notwithstanding, the tone is sombre: the faceless machinery of banking and taxation have cost real people, in money and time and hope.

Smashing up the expected format of theatre - Gardson act little, and allow the audience to provide much of the content - gets closer to the intentions of the evening. People feel part of something bigger - a group of victims, maybe, and the suggestion by Wason that debt evolves into depression is felt, not just expressed. Resistance is encouraged, simply by the foregrounding of community and Neighbourhood Forum  is deceptively profound. Through a few easy steps, Gardson evoke the horror of being human in a world governed by mechanical formula, yet point towards the ways of escaping. 

Sister @ The Arches 2014

Somewhere inside Sister's meandering exploration of family relationships, sex work and lesbianism, there is a passionate, fiery and determined performance that blends these competing themes into a vigorous,intelligent provocation. It emerges when Roseana Cade suddenly performs a dance, equally aggressive and sensual, clad only in heavy boots. Glimpses appear on Roseanna's face when she listens to her sister's stories of work in pornographic movies. And the bold opening, when the sisters perform lap-dances on two members of the audience, suggests that Sister is consciously challenging stereotypes and expectations.

Yet in the gentle dialogues between the sisters, often addressed to the audience and frequently recalling childhood adventures, has a strangely non-committal tone. Amy Cade discusses a variety of pornographic scenes in a calm, almost wistful manner, while the tender scene when she cleans off her sister's stripper make-up takes them back to a tale of a youthful home theatre production.

The two women are naked for most of the piece, but the atmosphere is less erotically charged than melancholic: they share experiences, reflect on their different paths before wandering tamely offstage, having dismantled the stripper-pole. Throughout, they refuse to moralise - Amy notes it is possible to take a face-full of cum and still be a feminist, and Roseana comments that her identity is tied up in her feminism - or probe deeper into the problems or industry of sex work. It's tentative, suggestive, more concerned with presenting raw information from their lives that developing any theme or agenda.

The repeated projection of home videos is a constant reminder of how the two women grew up together - the last sequence crassly suggesting that the desire to dance around a pole might have been foreshadowed on one sunny afternoon - but adds limited depth.  When Roseana forces two crude stereotypes together (the sensual lap-dancer and the booted, shaven headed feminist) does the performance provoke.

There is clearly a personal journey on display, and the ease with which the women slip between discussing sex and family reveals their mutual empathy: the structure, however, is loose and prevents a profound impact. Sister lacks precision and focus, neutralising its potential. As part of Roseana Cade's emergence as an important artist, it is an intriguing and promising production, showing that she is capable of addressing tough subjects in an original manner.  

O'Connor and Theology

Martin O'Connor remains one of Scotland's most gifted writers. As he demonstrates in Theology part 2: A Govan of the Mind, he can polish Glaswegian dialect into evocative poetry without losing its essential roughness. His fierce wit and literary intelligence allows him to parody the mass and take on big issues, like sectarianism or urban decay: never slipping into sentimentality or impatient reformism, he imbues his scripts with compassion and dramatic tension.

Theology is a two part study of the 'place of religion in Glasgow today': in part 1, he cleverly recasts the Mass as a commentary on how Papal visits, the name of The Lord and cultural identity have gradually lost their spiritual dimension. The Pope is mistaken for a celebrity singer, football fans remember their allegiances only for fighting, and Jesus is called upon not in pious prayer but blasphemous desperation. By using a choir to sing his poems, O'Connor conjures the sanctity of the Mass alongside a lairy belligerence. When he takes to the pulpit to pray or read the Gospel, he reveals the fragmented, distorted remains of Christianity that inform and infect his understanding of daily life.

Turning tales of the apostles into stand-up routines, he connects to the proud tradition of Christian artists re-imagining The Bible in their own times: the tension between a secular outlook and spiritual longing is tantalising and tense. Yet O'Connor is quick to laugh, sending up the pomposity of religious moral teachings and his own doubts. It's only when he describes the detail of the Mass (in his normal voice), or tries to give a homily on recent newspaper articles that he slips out of character and loses focus.

Eventually, he sends the choir on their way, and goes solo in part 2. This is a soundscape with live poetry, a mash-up of O'Connor's previous work. He rattles out his 'greatest hits' - sketches of conversations or monologues that bring to life characters found around Govan - and offers a few thoughts on Govan's disintegration. Visually, this is weak (O'Connor is charismatic, but the lighting design here is poor, especially the attempt to have flashing lights at a dramatic moment), while Nichola Scrutton's sound design is an ambitious ambient yet engaging score that lends the words a dark subtext. Humour and tragedy are side by side.

Unfortunately, parts 1 and parts 2 do not enrich each other: part 2 may imitate the Novena, but lacks the spiritual investigation of part 1, feeling like a separate performance. The contrast between the community and the lone poet is too broad and the narrative arc lent by the Mass structure is squandered in part 2's more impressionistic selections.

Theology: part 1 is a profound commentary on how religion, although lost, remains influential and an occult aspect of human identity, stopping off to make swipes at its use as an excuse for Old Firm ruckus. The lightness of touch, and satirical bite, are O'Connor trademarks, and he twists dialect into eloquent forms. While part 2 contains adventurous use of sound and many excellent individual poems, its energy is too diffuse and distracts from O'Connor's skill.

Ban This Filth,Sister, JSA: A Dramaturg Writes

The influence of the cabaret format - a series of sketches moving towards a general analysis of a central theme - has been one of the more dynamic innovations in contemporary theatre. The Behaviour Festival provides plenty of examples (Job Seekers Anonymous, Ban This Filth, even Sister) - and it is ironic that artists from a literary (Alan Bissett) or live art tradition (the Cade sisters) are leading the trend, despite the health of Scottish cabaret.

The advantage is clear. Construction of a performance becomes a matter of stringing together a series of distinct episodes, allowing the creators to focus on their skill set (Bissett's superb parody of a big night out, JSA's sketches set in the dole office) and switching quickly between moods and styles (Sister flickered between the ambience of a lap-dancing club and a familial conversation). It also avoids the danger of presenting a single, dogmatic position. Sister and Ban This Filth both deal with the relationship between sex work and feminism, a topic that does not resolve into an easy conclusion.

Even the ambitious Cain's Book has a whiff of the cabaret. It is clearly an example of post-dramatic theatre (that is, a self-conscious performance that tends towards the cerebral rather than the emotional), but the jumps between the recitation of text, video footage, dancing girls and local rockers The Smack Wizards fit within the vaudeville format.

The other side of this influence is the danger of dilution. JSA is incisive when it comes to comparing the government's claims of a credit crunch against the ten million pound state funeral of Margaret Thatcher, but the patchwork quality of the structure distracted from the harsh political point-scoring. Equally, Sister has some brilliant interludes - in a stomping, sensuous dance, Rosana Cade sums up the conflict between a feminist resistance to sex-work and an acceptance of a woman's right to choose how she earns money - but often gets lost in memories of childhood.

There is a power in the loose format of cabaret, and The Creative Martyrs have been working out a way of

combining vaudeville with a theatrical consistency for years (and currently in Glasgow's Southside). There is also the possibility that these artists could be put together as part of a bill that takes their finest moments as self-contained and sharp routines. At the same time, in themselves, each performance has a habit of wandering and relying heavily on the charisma of the performers.

For all of these productions, the problem becomes one of structure. Rather than holding the attention, and following a clear narrative, they meander: Sister makes enough serious points in the first half an hour that the repeated flashbacks to the sister's childhoods become predictable and Cain's Book captures the ennui of the junkie at the cost of immediacy. Ban This Filth, which traces one man's battle with erotic capitalism, disappears into tales of the protagonist's youth which only tangentially connect to the main story.

On the other hand, this might be a problem of expectation... the episodic structure reflects the way that the internet works, the flicking and clicking between sites and tabs... a cyber-kinetic paddle through the shallows with breadth more important than depth... a set of specimens for further examination... less demanding... more allusive... playful... incomplete... until considered...