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into and out of the body: The Vile Arts Radio Hour

Sometimes, it is as if I had a plan: this episode of the Vile Arts Radio Hour - with brief guest appearances from DJ Hush and dramaturg Elliot Roberts - features two interviews: one with Josh Payne, prepping for Out of the Body with Cryptic and another with Barry Esson, getting ready to drop Arika's own episode. 

Between my desperate plugs for my own Uncle Vanya: In Dub and thoughts on why ballet is better than ballroom, both Payne and Esson are articulate and intriguing - and the body, as the place where art happens, comes up frequently. But while Payne is trying to create an experience that gets away from earthly feelings - it sounds like some techno-magic will be happening in the CCA, Esson's selection for Arika is getting jiggy with it. 

Consequently, the soundtrack is a mash of electronica (courtesy of Payne), operatic subversion (M Lamar) and r'n'b (from the first lady of crump, Miss Prissy).

And the theme: essentialism, abstraction and the like. As usual...

http://subcity.org/shows/thevileartsradiohour/6a74b/?play

Sound and Vision

Why O Why (Trumpets and East Kilbride)

My enthusiasm for Cyptic might come from their history - I identify them as one of the key companies who emerged from the aftermath of 1990s' City of Culture - or their restless experimentation. They've got a couple of entries in the Fringe this year - Sven Werner and Robbie Thomson reprising their shows from Sonica - but are slipping in one Cryptic Night before August.

I am not sure whether Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride is a general cry of despair or merely a cheeky reference back to composer  J. Simon van der Walt's inspiration (a film selling the virtues of the New Town back in the 1970s).  Either way, van der Walt is digging deep into his past, reviving both memories of a glorious age that hasn't stood the test of time and a character who first appeared in another Cryptic action, Ted The Trumpet.

Ted the Trumpet is a sadly neglected pioneer of that quintessential 1970s sound, light music electronica. Combining the old fashioned taste for something stylish (unable to handle the complexity of jazz and finding the post-hippy mellow rock not soothing) and science fiction instrumentation (it requires a fixation on the future for a decade to allow Tangerine Dream to flourish), LME heralded the arrival of intelligent techno and ambient (made for people too mashed to make it to the rave in the late 1980s). 

J. Simon van der Walt takes up the story. 

‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride started life as a dream. This happens to me a lot: I’m a musician, after all, and I have dreams where I hear a piece of music. Quite often when I wake up I can remember at least some of it: I rush to write it down or even just sing it into my phone before it goes.

The piece I heard on this occasion – it was the morning of the 3 June 2012 – seemed to be for a rock band? Plus a section of orchestral French horns?'

'Made some notes, forgot about it. Couple of days later, aimlessly surfing around as you do, I stumbled upon this 1972 public information film about East Kilbride. Suddenly a whole chunk of memory descended upon me. I remembered the two different times in my life when I lived in East Kilbride, particularly a period in the eary 80s where I was busy dropping out of an ill-advised science degree at university, listening to a lot of Hawkwind, and teaching myself to play guitar. Suddenly, the dream made sense: I knew what I was listening to, I knew what it was all about.'

'And the Ted Edwards stuff? A misdirection, perhaps. Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards is a fictional alter ego of mine. He’s the person I would have liked to have been if I’d been born forty years earlier: he’s Raymond Scott, he’s Daphne Oram, he’s my dad’s golfing buddy who owned a radio shop, he’s Erik Satie. Or maybe he’s a complete unknown: he’s Ziggy Elman, he’s the guy who first came up with the npn-pnp astable multivibrator circuit, he’s some guy who’s into birdwatching.'

'He’s a useful vehicle: someone I can have in my show, someone who might have been in East Kilbride in 1972, might have played in a rock band, might have had a day job as a chemist at the National Engineering Laboratory. Someone who might, after all, be a composer. Kind of.'

CCA, Thu 4  2013  £5 

The Embassy New Great Britain

Last time out, Josh Armstrong transported Cryptic back to a Victorian tragedy, in a secular retelling of The Little Match Girl Passion. This time, he's jumping into a fantasy future, equal parts SNP dream (an independent Scotland, a retired monarchy, a flooded London) and Lovecraftian horror (that water level rise isn't just bothering London). And in typically Cryptic style, this isn't just about the drama: the audience is being invited to join the players for an evening in The Embassy of New Great Britain.

The evening is centred around the performance of NGB's theme tune - thankfully not by The Proclaimers or Chas'n'Dave - and it is an mordant number: Requiem for a World. This new commission from David Donaldson is scored for voice, quartet and electronics, an appropriately diminished ensemble against the usual anthem line-up of big orchestra and massed choirs. 

There's more than music: cocktails are promised and the New Great Britain has renounced the puritanism of its forebear and gone for a nation that "embraces the beauty of the individual... a body is not to be covered up but to be celebrated." Gender and sex boundaries have been broken and Mother Earth has replaced JHVH as the number one deity. 

This has had a impact on both diet (no more meat) and the nation's motto (“terre tournera sans nous”  “earth shifts without us.”). Technology has kept on moving though: all payments are made electronically. I'm not so sure about this other advance - "personal services are bought at the level of common goods." 

If anyone can make this utopia as ravishing as it claims, it is Armstrong. His Little Match Girl Passion integrated singing, dance and visual theatre into a satisfying whole without losing the bite of the text. Meanwhile, composer David Donaldson has just come off of working on The Great Gatsby, having previously produced the soundtrack for Ray.

For fans of Tramway in the early 2000s, the inclusion of Steve Dugardin (singing) is a nostalgic treat. Dugardin was last in Glasgow with Les Ballets C de la B - he took care of the vocal duties in Bâche, which was one of the pieces that inspired me to become a critic instead of a Latin teacher. 

Thu 2 – Sat 4 May 2013 // 8pm   CCA, Glasgow  

 

The Third Mind

Having a major festival of sound art obviously wasn't enough for Cryptic: they are back with their occasional invasion of the CCA, Cryptic Nights: this time, they've enlisted a composer and a visual artist,  Matthew Collings and Erik Parr, to have a crack at exploring algorithmic cinema through music, film. and live action.

Inevitably, I had to ask Collings what algorithmic cinema might be. "Imagine stepping into a cinema and seeing a film, you are presented with all these elements: scenes, music soundtrack, titles, individual shots, dialogue, et cetera," he explains.  "Only what you see is always going to be the same, that's the final cut - and there can be only one. But this is changing now with technology. Algorithmic cinema is cinema experienced through software, or an algorithm. "

In the wake of the Glasgow Film Festival, which celebrated films made by visual artists in the Entre Chien et Loup night out, new approaches to cinema are coming out of the celluloid closet. But Collings, however, says that the algorithmic cinema is closer to home. 

"When you watch the same movie on a DVD now you can select the individual scenes, watch the director's cut, see the out-takes, all thanks to a simple software program running from the DVD," he continues. "So we are already used to algorithmic cinema, although a very primitive form. With this project everything you see and hear is controlled dynamically by a special software system that we have built for the project."

The Third Mind has three performers: Collings, Christos Michalakos and Erik Parr, and is part interactive performance and part installation, "using sound and images to connect artists and audience through data exchange."

"We've tried to avoid having one aspect of the project direct it," Collings notes. "At times it makes sense for the music to lead or the visuals to lead, and depending on certain sections or approaches we end up working in a certain way. If the shoe fits..."

Yet for all the high technology, Collings sees the project very much in an old cinematic tradition. "Cinema was originally an extension from theater and vaudeville, which back then had improvisation and live musical performances," he says.  "Silent film showings often had live music. It was much more interactive in those days. So approaching this project in the digital medium has been a bridge, allowing us to regain that original vitality and unpredictability that was there in early and pre-cinema."


Performances: Wed 6 & Thu 7 March // 20:00 // £5 Installation: Thu 7 March // 12:00 – 18:00 // Free

 ccaglasgow.ticketsolve.com

Ecstatic Arc @ Tramway

Following on from Inducer - a Cryptic night collaboration that animated the broken husks of mechanical gods - Robbie Thomson's Ecstatic Arc rescues the tesla coil from scientific scrutiny for a study of the evolution of electricity. Sound-tracked by appropriately alien-sounding electronic music, although the climax features suspiciously old school beats, Thomson rotates a lighting scheme around various metal and electrical sculptures, before finally revealing his magnificent coil, sparking and cracking to life in bolts of purple energy.

Thomson's technique, of crafting suggestive objects from discarded or found materials, lend the performance the atmosphere of a modernist installation. Wires suggested out-dated satellites, the flash of small white lights illuminating patches of what appears to be a factory space. Beginning in darkness, and gradually revealing each of the pieces, Ecstatic Arc follow a clear narrative: a creation myth, as smaller flashes give way to the majestic finale.

Ecstatic Arc describes the development of electrical energy. From the tentative first movements - the tiny lights flickering, the music growling in fragmented menace - to the dramatic unveiling of the huge tesla coil, electricity is manifesting itself as light and sound. The almost timid introduction gives way to more recognisable shapes and more light: suspended from the ceiling, tangles of wires evoke antennae or the remains of a 1970s space programme. Even the coil itself has a certain nostalgia: massive, industrial, it is caged like a dangerous animal, a reminder of how raw electricity is dangerous as well as generous.

By moving from the tamed lights of the introduction towards the wild explosions of the coil, Thomson uncovers the journey of electricity from its brute creation to polite bringer of light and heat. The smell of ozone and the volume of the finale recast electricity, evoking the mad scientist of b-movies, the moment when Frankenstein gives life to his monster. The programme notes express Thomson's worry that electricity has become too distant, that the elegant computer interface hides its source of power, like the packaging of meat disguises the slaughter-house. Ecstatic Arc makes the electric fearsome again.

Sandglasses @ Tramway

It's unsurprising that Sandglasses evades easy description: a combination of intense sound and more reflective video projection, the experience of the work is more important than subsequent analysis. And for its talk of being based on an exploration of "the acoustic, visual and symbolic meanings of sand-timers," Sandglasses has little in common with programmatic compositions that try to evoke scenes or narratives. The scale of the performance - four cellist, encased in huge cylinders, surrounded by rotating and, at times, suffocating projections - and the gradual build in volume says very little about those small, quiet objects that sit on the table and count down to the perfect boiled egg.

Juste Janultyte's composition - essentially a microtonal drone that uses the full range of the cello's register, from harmonic squeak to full-bodied baritone - convinces as a classical analogue to the rock experimentation of bands like Earth, who throw the immensity of the metal riff into a deep freeze. Minimal, but not in the sense of Glass' repetitions, it allows the differences in the speed and attack of each cello to expose details of sound, unfamiliar harmonies and, as the volume increases, the power of amplified strings. It avoids traditional

In isolation, the music is an endurance test, a display of compositional bravura that relies on the skill of the four cellists of the Gaida Ensemble. The projections, although tending towards a genric presentation of distressed surfaces, the occasional magnified grain of sand or water dripping down an eroded metal, add a layer of disturbing decay, illustrating the sound on an impressive scale. Rotating around the cellists, encasing them then releasing them, it propels Sandglasses into a more sinister intensity.

Unfortunately, these gestures do not support the programme notes' insistence that this is in any way about sand-timers. The scale is too vast, the music too ferocious, more suited to the end of times than a short wait for dinner. Juste Janulyte is clearly fascinated by the way than sound and vision can be integrated, and creates an unholy, immersive spectacle. But until some description is found - the notes fall into that ugly language that has effectively undermined broader discussion of Live Art for the past thirty years - sonic art is going to struggle to convince that it has much to add beyond pure aesthetic experience.

Claudia Molitor: A Good Memory

Within the extensive programme of Sonica, Claudia Molitor stands out not only due to her background a composer - alongside a cohort of visual artists and musicians coming from an electronic tradition - but because the scale of her Remember Me is more modest than spectacular. "In a time when 'big', 'more', 'hi-...' are often considered better and more exciting," she says. "There is, for me, a desire to counterbalance this and focus on the smaller, the neglected, the less audible and visible." While she draws on the stories of opera - imagining a friendship between the classical tragic victims Dido and Eurydice - she has pinned her multi-media opera inside a desk, at Scotland Street School Museum.

"This piece tries to draw the listener-spectator into a sonic space where small sounds become big events, where the senses are heightened to hear what we might usually miss," Molitor continues. "I am fascinated with the way that we can occupy ourselves in a world with trials and tribulations and great big events and ideas (like in an opera) with only a pencil and paper, a made up song or a few toys when we are children." Taking her cue from this, Molitor condensed the grand themes into a tiny space. " So miniaturist on the surface yes, but still with all the big ideas and ideals!"

Remember Me also stands out in the festival programme as one of two pieces - the other is Bluebeard - that explicitly connects to opera, the original "total art" that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was seen as an integrative performance to include all of the other arts. There's a a clear line from that vision of opera to Cathie Boyd's vision for Sonica, although whereas last time, it ended up with Wagner, the scope of Cryptic's festival offers more intimate works with equally lofty ambitions.

Molitor expands. "Themes in opera are of course grand and big and tragic, they seem hyper-real, but then those themes touch all our lives, because essentially opera is always a reflection of the way society understands itself at any given time, in any given socio-political or cultural situation. It reflects on the way people relate to and interact with each other. Of course on the opera stage this is highly stylised, but then it is in my work too, but in a very different way." 

Yet the scale of Remember Me, and even the original inspiration - the gift of an antique from Molitor's grandmother - insist that this is a far more personal performance than a grand-standing comment on these socio-political situations. Her heroines may have been victims in their stories, but art has given them a grandeur and sympathy. "They are very different, but what they both have in common is that they are defined by very specific roles in their respective stories," she comments,

"In terms of music and opera I see a connection when looking at two arias: Dido's Lament in Purcell's opera is one of the most well known operatic arias where Dido laments her absent lover Aeneas, who is travelling the seas; Orpheus' lament for Eurydice, lost to him to the Underworld after she has been bitten by a snake, in Gluck's opera is a similarly celebrated aria," she adds. "These two laments to me highlight how the female voice in opera and, in turn, in society exists in relation to the male, rarely on its own terms. This is an important aspect of opera, where the most fantastical arias are often sung by the female voice, but that female element is more often than not the aspect that has unsettled the status quo, which by the end of the opera is re-established often by the death of the heroine." 

Like many a student reading The Aeneid at sixteen, realising how unfairly Dido is being treated both by the author Virgil and her lover Aeneas, Molitor hopes to save Dido. Unlike the student, however, she has not approached this by becoming a Latin teacher before realising his vocation was in criticism. "In a way, that's what Remember Me proposes, a construction of a space where this female voice can enter on her own terms... an alternative “ending” for Dido and Eurydice." 

Remember Me more than embodies Sonica's tagline of "sonic art for the visually minded": it speaks to wider concerns about both how performance is consumed, deliberately avoiding the fashion for the monumental - perhaps often visible in the work of Scottish theatre companies - while seriously considering the way that art can both reveal historical perspectives, in this case about women, and then address them and look towards change.  

Scotland Street School, 8, 14, 15 November. Various times

Sonica 001: Ecstatic Arc

What is it?
Ecstatic Art is a performance starring stuff found by Robbie Thomson, filled with recording devices. Previous Thomson "junk operas" have evoked mechanical gods, no longer worshipped by still reciting their mysteries, sinister and pathetic.

Who is the artist?
Robbie Thomson is a shy resident of Glasgow, who has been part of the Mighty 85a Collective, and he loves to bring dead machinery back to life. Idimov, his previous piece for Cryptic, clanked and gurgled towards a quiet apocalypse: his ability to reassemble detritus into huge, threatening music boxes embodies his interest in redefining music and its relationship to visual art. Certainly, Sonica's tagline ("sonic art for the visually minded") could be Thomson's own catch-phrase.

Why attend?
Thomson's genius is never to give too much away: there is always a narrative within his performances, but they are usually subtle enough to allow the audience to follow their own interpretations. The slightly fruity language used above to describe earlier works expresses Vile's readings, but not necessarily anyone else's understanding. They tend to be abstract in the good sense: rather than being about nothing in particular, Thomson's mash-ups of sound and vision are suggestive and, surprisingly given their emphasis on the mechanical, emotional.

What's the Unique Selling Point?
Thomson in Tramway: the new industrialist-conceptualist meets the classic Glasgow home of the avant-garde. Thomson has done plenty of work in the Glue Factory, which has a similar atmosphere to Tramway, and Ecstatic Arc looks like it will have the grandeur and intensity to match the legendary venue's own majesty.

When?
8- 11 November @ Tramway. It's an installation during the day, then becomes a performance at night...

Welcome to Edinburgh, Fringe Fans

It may just be wilful patriotism, yet I am tempted to make my annual Edinburgh Fringe Preview an all Scottish spectacular. I’m not ignoring international performance – if it says Belgian or Czech on the label, I’m first in the queue– but I’d like to remind the hoards of London-based performers and agents and PRs and promoters that wee Caledonia can do quite nicely without their annual invasion.

My inbox currently receives around twenty emails an hour, each containing dreams of success, arrogant claims about the future of theatre, promises of sex, alongside appeals for reviews. I haven’t been this popular since I logged into an adult chat site as “22-36-22DirtyBabe”.  I do love the Fringe – it is a rare chance to indulge my joy in unpopular, awkward theatre, and catch up with the latest excuses for on-stage nudity. However, there is something unsettling in the sheer amount of performance, most of which will end up seen by two men, a student critic and a bored technician. The only way to be successful in the Fringe is either to be an established comedian or own real estate.

That said, my nationalist inclinations allow me to concentrate on shows that I feel confident to support. The Tron showcased A Slow Air as part of Mayfesto, Cryptic’s Orlando got its premiere at Glasgay!, in the same week as Fish and Game heralded a new use for the iPad through Alma Mater. Even these three demonstrate how Scottish performance has diversified beyond the simple script as template: A Slow Air is a reassuringly intimate two-hander by Glasgow’s master of linguistic detail, David Harrower; Orlando follows Cryptic’s distinctive passion for music and technological experiment; Alma Mater is am ambiguous reflection on education and childhood that uses film to evoke ghostly presence. All of these shows share a fascination with the possibilities of self-conscious performance, tapping away at the inherent unreality of theatre.

Harrower deliberately disconnects his two actors, letting them describe their mutual love and hate directly to the audience. Although the two characters, a brother and sister, seem to be dwelling on a family argument, Harrower subtly weaves larger themes – the split between generations, the rivalry between East and West coasts, the mixed blessings of personal history, the redemption power of absurd conflicts – into their homely, defensive chatter. Without making huge statements, and capturing the nuance of sibling compassion, Harrower champions the traditional script as the blue-print for a moving, intimate performance.

Orlando is a far more expansive work, even if it is a solo for one actor. Originally staged with live music, it mixes Virginia Woolf’s magic realist story of an immortal transsexual, cutting edge computer graphics and an electronica soundtrack to remystify the text, revealing fragments of passion, beauty and insight within the century spanning narrative. It is exceptionally hi-tech for the Fringe, intensely serious and blinding in its neon beauty: Cryptic are as fascinated by the image as the word as the music, and while Orlando is familiar from the superb Sally Potter film, this version’s transformative, hallucinatory rhythms cuts to a mystical heart.

Fish and Game are “Scotland’s Live Art supergroup”: Alma Mater, ironically, is a video performance. Originally a site-specific “guide” to Glasgow’s Scotland Street school museum, it has been displaced to Remarkable Arts’ Edinburgh church venue. Refusing to fall for either clichés about the greatest days of your life, or school as bullying hell, Alma Mater is beautifully balanced between celebration and critique and uses the iPad as a tool to layer reality with a supernatural resonance.


 Witty and moving, it is a reminder that experimental theatre can bypass theatrical artifice for an immediate, compassionate, emotional hit.