POP-UP Dramaturgy: Janis Claxton @ Edfringe 2016

POP-UP Duets (fragments of love) 

part of the 2016 Made in Scotland Showcase

National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, EH1 1JF (venue 179)

Aug 4, 5 (previews)

Aug 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 |  15.30hrs (16.20hrs) | FREE - non ticketed

Award-winning choreographer, Janis Claxton, draws on her signature trademark of bringing high quality dance to public spaces in her latest work POP-UP Duets (fragments of love). 

In partnership with National Museums Scotland and based around the theme of love, POP-UP Duets will be performed at the National Museum of Scotland in August as part of this year’s Made in Scotland showcase.

For a series of short, contemporary dance duets, Claxton has joined forces with the award-winning composer, Pippa Murphy and four world-class dancers - James Southward, Christina Liddell, Carlos J Martinez and Crystal Zillwood. The team also includes Clive Andrews (dramaturg) and Matthias Strahm (costume designer).

POP-UP Duets explore the interface of everyday gesture and action and detailed intricate partner dancing. Each duet will last five minutes and will ‘pop up’ throughout the Museum in various spaces. 

Renowned for bringing dance to public spaces and new audiences with a particular interest in the ‘accidental audience’, Claxton has created works for zoos (Enclosure 44 Humans), parks and museums and galleries (Chaos & Contingency). 

Credit: Roy Campbell-Moore

What was the inspiration for this performance?

I am interested in bringing dance dance to public places for unsuspecting audiences. I like to surprise audiences by bringing beautiful and high quality dance to them that is surrounded in love as we all need love in the world and in our lives and I wanted to do that through dance. 

I also wanted to find ways of creating really interesting partnering duets with material that evokes meaning and emotion rather than a series of lifts & tricks. 

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

I gathered the team through long term collaborators. I brought in Clive Andrews as dramaturg as I knew the dance piece needed some added acting skills and dramaturgy. I have worked with the composer Pippa Murphy on several occasions since 2006 and most recently on Scottish Opera's Anamchara for the 2014 Commonwealth Games where we made a love duet. 

One dancer from that project James Southward has worked with me since 2013 and the others have taken my classes and workshops and we share a mutual interest in each others work. I need to work with dancers who excite and interest me. The designer Matthias Strahm designed the costumes from Chaos & Contingency. I have a really awesome team. 

How did you become interested in making performance?

I don’t feel I ever became ‘interested’ in making performance but I was just born a dancing thing! I really believe that performance is about sharing and as far back as I can remember I started to share my dance - as a performer and as a teacher. 

Before the age of 3 I would beg to join my older sister's ballet class and on my 3rd birthday  I was finally allowed to start. I immediately ran to the front of the class and started leading it! I starred my own small dance school at the age of 14 with 30 students each weekend. I choreographed from a very early age and the only reason I wasn’t expelled from high school was because they needed me to choreograph the gymnasts routines and the school musicals! 

Which I did - to Patti Smith & Laurie Anderson confusing everyone. But the core of my dance, including choreography and performance is my teaching. That has always been my starting place for sharing the joy of it all. I always wanted others to experience the power and healing that I felt with dance. I spent many years teaching tens of thousands of folk in many countries. And I think this is what lead me to bring dance to public spaces and large audiences. 

I learned through my work with the Zoo (Enclosure Humans) and Chaos & Contingency that there is a very large audience of contemporary dance lovers who just don’t know it yet. They will likely never pay to go a theatre but they do love to experience dance as audience.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?

I have lots of different ways of making performance but with POP-UP Duets, I am working with some new processes of creating partner material between two dancers. Every duet will be totally unique and depends on the material and specific energy between the two dancers.  

The dramaturg's role becomes important to support the development and enhancement of the unique energy and ‘story' that each couple creates. For this work I am working more closely with a dramaturg than in the past and together we are finding ways to support the dancers development of emotional connections throughout the works. Loads of fun and challenges all round!

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I hope the audience will experience a sense of love - any aspect of it. I hope they have a visceral response to the work and enjoy the beauty, power and flow of the material and music. Pippa Murphy is composing the music alongside the creation of the duets. The dance and music are intricately entwined and this makes for a very strong and moving interdependancy between the visual & auditory realms. Some audience members  may be surprised at what we are doing in public. 

There are 4 dancers - two females and two males and we are creating work for every possible combination of the dancers. The audience will see duets between men and women as well as between two men and two women. The duets express love and romance and with the various couplings the work transcends the usual heteronormative narrative of typical dance duets. 

Also I want the audience to experience the three dimensionality of dance. We flatten dance in the proscenium arch format. I feel we watch enough flat screens in life these days and I want to bring back the three dimensions of the dance. For this work I am creating material that can be viewed from every direction. This is really exciting. I don’t know if I can ever create dance for one front again after this! 

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

I considered the idea that we will be dealing with a lot of audience who don't know about contemporary dance - what I call an unsuspecting audience who are not there specifically for our performance but stumble across it. The shortness of the duets addresses that. 

I have created works that will last for 5 minutes and giving audiences a chance to quickly receive the visual and aural information and an easy option to either say and watch more or move on in the museum. Making 9 short stand-alone duets is harder for me than I originally thought it would be - trying to make compact pieces that will keep the dynamics and the drama going. 

Dance is a visual art so having performances at a venue such as the National Museum of Scotland is good as we will attract people who are interested in looking at visual pieces of work. I want to open up people to the moving visual art of dance. 

By doing work in unusual spaces, sometimes our audiences don't realise that they are watching a performance until it is nearly half way through and often without realising they become part of the performance. The juxtaposition of the performance next to e.g someone reading a book is of value to the work and to audiences.

Another strategy is the use of gestural language - not in a making gesture dance way but everyday interactions that evolve into full blown choreographed partnering that still holds the intimacy and connection of the ‘normal’ interaction of a couple. I feel that audiences relate to what they can do, what is normal and I am working with taking this ‘normal’ beyond the everyday into gorgeous dancing and drawing the audiences into that experience. 

I sometimes feel dance alienates audiences with tricks and material that seems impossible and unachievable. My strategy is to draw audiences in and delight them. 

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

I see my work very much as contemporary dance but also site-based performance.

Janis Claxton (UK/AUS) is a Choreographer, Movement Director, Teacher and Producer based in Edinburgh where she is Artistic Director of the award-winning contemporary dance company - Janis Claxton Dance. Constantly winning plaudits on the basis of quality work, Claxton has been described by critics as “someone to look out for on the dance circuit” (Dance Europe) and “an intelligent dance maker she is” (The Scotsman). 

The company creates choreographed  works for touring in small to mid-scale venues and site-specific performances for unique spaces. She is currently Choreographer-in-Residence with Creative Edinburgh. 

From the Archives: Janis Claxton interview

Just before Chaos and Contingency took to the road, I watched a rehearsal from the roof at Dance Base. Afterwards, Janis Claxton  spoke to me about the work and her process.

Watching the rehearsal from the roof, two things struck me
immediately: the quality of movement portrayed by the dancers and the way that the very complex mathematical patterns played out so eloquently. Starting with the dancers first -  where did you find them?

They had the softness of tai chi movement and the understated yet confident precision of tango dancers...
I would say the dancers and I found each other - in places between Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland, England, Australia and China. They are a great team and the reason for the unique combination of both softness and precision is to do with training, and a specific kinaesthetic intelligence that I look for and nurture in dancers. 

I am committed to the premise that ease and precision don't have to be enemies and I think this is what you are hitting on in your observations. A lot of contemporary dance is very muscle bound and ridged and this is very popular in the UK. People have a tendency to see 'virtuosity' as legs and arms flinging everywhere with effort, but actually it takes a lot more kinaesthetic intelligence to combine ease and precision than to stick a leg up high in the air with tension. 

So I need to work with a certain kind of dancer who can handle tension and ease in the same muscle group, in the same moment. Chinese dancers have a natural predisposition towards this way of moving. In general their bodies are softer than Westerners and because of a very long and arduous training they can also do the tension. For me the exquisiteness is in the balance and in juxtaposing both. 

Watching that video of the performance on vimeo, I did love the costumes - it is a beautiful red. You are confident in using every aspect of dance to its full measure - the costume, the dance, the space itself. At what point does the costume design come in to the process?

The costume design was early on in the process. As the work is so much about design the costumes were really vital for this work. The designer Matthias Strahm came to watch our work in progress in April 2012 and we began discussions. We (the dancers included as I run a pretty democratic company) decided we wanted gender neutral, extremely elegant costumes to match the grand spaces. I think red was decided quite early although Matthias embellished this with the two tones which I love. 

A lot of measurements were emailed between China and the UK and the costumes were pretty much designed by Jan 21st when the Chinese dancers arrived. However Matthias (who used to be a dancer and really knows his stuff!) came to watch a lot of rehearsals to create the individual aspects for each dancer. The changes in each costume are very subtle but really make the difference. (Costuming also involved a lot of shopping in Beijing last summer with JCD female dancers which was fun to say the least!)

 And the music - I know that you have a strong relationship with the composer. How did you get him involved in this project - when does the music get composed - do you choreograph to it, or add it afterwards?
I first worked with Philip Pinsky on Grid Iron/Lung Has show Huxley's Lab in 2010. I then asked him to work on Humanimalia so this is our third project together and hopefully there will be many more as I love his music and he is great to work with. The wonderful thing with Philip and the way he works with us is that he is in the studio with us a most of the time. It's fantastic and we really interweave the process together as we go. He is right there composing and contributing his ideas as the dancers and I are creating the material. He is an integral part of this process and it really shows in the concurrent dynamics of the music and the dance.

I know that the performance doesn't require Higher mathematics, but I am intrigued to find out about some of the mathematical patterns you are using... are fractals and cellular automatons part of the inspiration for this?
Yes we are using mathematical structures, games and number patterns as inspiration for creating both material and especially structure. I have been inspired by Jon Conway's ''Game of Life'' which is a cellular automaton as well as Fractals, number palindromes and also some composition ideas inspired by Brian Eno. 

We have worked with 'chaos' and the idea that making a small change in a structure or material can yield wildly different results. We have also been strict about staying true to the original set of conditions as a premise for what constitutes chaos rather than just total messy change. Its been fun. But we could change the name of the work to Chaos and Counting!

I saw parallels with the way that the dance evolves and the sort

of patterns that come from this old internet programme which imitates the process of evolution. Was that a conscious choice - either the analogy with the computer programme of the theory of natural selection imposing complexity onto simple patterns?
I don't know what program you are talking about. But the week we began this research The New Scientist had a front page and article about Fractals and evolution! 

We were also working on all the Human Animal stuff so .. connections alert ....

Chaos and Contingency

Usually, dance that attempts to explain science is a disaster. The complexity of scientific knowledge is difficult enough to express through language. A single formula can represent a chapter's worth of assumptions. Movement is abstract. It can evoke multiple interpretations. While science is not uncomfortable with plurality, it is most powerful when clear.

Chaos and Contingency, however, uses the beauty of dance to illustrate a series of simple mathematical concepts. Although a palindrome is embedded into the choreography, and the elegance of the formations depend on precise numerical grouping, it is the elaboration on the basic idea of fractal patterning that is most obvious throughout. Fractals are most popular when reduced to psychedelic postcards. In Chaos, Janis Claxton reveals how these are generated.

The basic movement vocabulary is exact and not spectacular. In the Kelvingrove, viewed from above, the floor is divided into sections. The dancers move through these sections, marking out the stage's geography and blossoming into complex patterns. Yet the simple rules of the dance are always evident. Claxton simply allows the gentle stye to iterate its possibilities.

The style is sparse and caters little to gender difference. In place of flashy male leaps or subtle female nuances, the movement is almost restful and consistent. In measured display, the dancers plot the various patterns inspired by eight bodies in space. And while there is no traditional partner work, the integration of the company is complete.

Both male and female dancers have the gentle authority of tango experts. The occasional burst of solo activity is supported by a precision of group movement. More than an exercise in mathematical form, it does reveal how repetition can build complex narratives and evokes the subtle rise and fall of complex organisations. Without boasting of its intelligence or hooking abstract ideas onto a more personal story, Chaos and Contingency is a technical triumph.

Janis Claxton (part two)

Some fractals getting it on

When CP Snow deplored the gap between scientific and liberal arts education in The Two Cultures (1959), he suggested that the emphasis on Latin and Greek had left the British intelligentsia under-educated on the most basic scientific matters. The British state has spent the past fifty years trying to work out how to integrate science and humanities, managing to marginalise Classics but without making an appreciable difference to the division. Tim Minchin's Storm monologue hints that posh dinner parties are still cursed by a lack of even the most simple understanding of science.

The intrinsic problem might be that the timetable of school divides subjects up into categories: the strict division between geography and history is arbitrary, and it is the same physics that operates in the classroom and on the cricket pitch. And the opposition of art and science, rather like the one between religion and science, is based on dogmatic assumptions about the fundamental nature of the objects.

Fortunately, artists aren't so bothered by the division of knowledge. Although Janis Claxton has explained that an understanding of mathematics isn't essential to understand Chaos and Contingency, she acknowledges that numbers are one of the inspirations.

"We are using mathematical structures, games and number patterns as inspiration for creating both material and especially the structure," she says. "I have been inspired by Jon Conway's  Game of Life which is a cellular automaton." Conway's Life began as a board game, which needs no players, and explores the mechanism of evolution: through a series of simple rules, it follows the increasing complexity of selection processes. Chaos, designed to be viewed from all sides and above, reflects the patterning that computer versions of Life can reveal.

It isn't so much that it is necessary to understand cellular automaton to appreciate the choreography as that the choreography clarifies some of the ways the automaton operates. The dryness of the computer simulations of Life are replaced with something more visceral, more flowing, more vital.

Claxton adds that fractals were another influence: although these turned up in one of the films at Entre Chien et Loup during the Glasgow Film Festival, they are frequently portrayed as pretty visuals with a psychedelic flavour. Again, the choreography of Chaos illustrates their process, demonstrating how a simple form can be elaborated, by repetition, into something complex and profound.

It's unsurprising that Claxton also mentions Brian Eno: perhaps the most scientific of musicians in terms of process, he not only inspired a generation of electronic musicians but offers strategies for composition. The titular chaos of Claxton's choreography is not so much anarchic disorder but the working out of an idea to a point where it confuses human perception.

what happens if they keep doing it

"We have worked with 'chaos' and the idea that making a small change in a structure or material can yield wildly different results," says Claxton. "We have also been strict about staying true to the original set of conditions as a premise for what constitutes chaos rather than just total messy change. Its been fun. But we could change the name of the work to Chaos and Counting!"

Attempts to shoehorn scientific ideas into dance are not always executed with such precision - even the attempts by Wayne McGregor to get Darwin dancing lost the message within the movement. But by using Life and fractals as a foundation, Claxton moves closer to the application of a scientific method, so that the process becomes a form of experiment while the performance might be analogous to the results. 

Although these foundations appear very different to Claxton's best known works, which feed on her academic study of primates, there is a shared enthusiasm for using rigorous research to formulate the movement. Her own eclectic knowledge ensures that every production takes her in a different direction, although she can see the relationship between each piece.

"The week we began this research The New Scientist had a front page and article about Fractals and evolution.We were also working on all the Human Animal stuff so... connections alert!" she remembers.

Janis Claxton: Part One

Over the past decade, Janis Claxton has revealed an inquisitive approach to choreography that has propelled dance beyond its comfort zones and taken on serious subject matter, from her studies on primate behaviour - most famously placing her company within a pen at the zoo - to Chaos and Contingency's foundations in mathematical theory. However, she says that behind the different subjects, "the movement vocabulary is not actually that different to the basic style I have been playing with for a very long time." And although the superficial aspects may have changed - for the theatre, she has substituted the open spaces of Scotland's grand art galleries and museums - there is a continuity in her approach that goes back to her first choreography.

"The difference with this piece is that it is forty-five minutes of movement with eight glorious dancers: the material is a drawn from both my body and all of the dancers so there is more range of material than before," she continues. "And as this work is so much about movement itself, we had time to experiment and push the range some. But I wouldn't say the style is so divergent - just more developed and better and starting to get noticed for the virtuosity it contains!"

Although she is not impressed by my suggestion that the flowing movement of Chaos and Contingency is influenced by tai chi ("I think you (and others) are trying to gear me towards this Tai Chi/Chinese thing and some apparent major influence - but I'm not having it!"), Claxton's attitude towards international exchange is serious and integral to her practice. Rather than a gesture towards multiculturalism, Claxton has pursued eastern connections because of her own enthusiasms.

"I went to China because I resonated with the movement much more than I do in the UK. I went there so that I could work with dancers who could do my 'style.' So this is historical for me, not new," she says. "I have been studying/practicing/influenced by Eastern movement arts and culture for 30 years now - in both direct and indirect ways."

The molten techniques of Chaos and Contingency are difficult to resolve into a single influence: Claxton has developed a personal style that admits aspects from most traditions of modern dance. Yet this integration does reflect her eclectic evolution as a choreographer, and the east does figure in her past and present.

"When I was 18 I started working with Kai Tai Chan in his company The One Extra Dance Theatre in Sydney," she remembers. "The man was brilliant- a Chinese/Australian Architect and Choreographer and pioneer of dance theatre Down Under." Kai Tai Chan added a martial element to the usual practice. "We did Kung Fu as part of our training and that was it - I was hooked. I studied Kung Fu five days a week for four years in Sydney's China Town. I really wanted to be in Kung Fu films but I was NOT that good!" she laughs.

"It was difficult to go to China back then (early 1980s) so circumstances brought Japan into my life . I received a grant to study Butoh Dance there. I had realized that it was an (East) Asian sensibility about the body, movement and performance that fascinated me so Japan became home and I lived in Tokyo for four years."

It might be difficult to associate the raw physicality of Butoh with Claxton's current elegant production, but it offers a freedom of approach that is not usually found in the western traditions that have roots in ballet. Equally, Butoh insists on a precision and discipline that remains a strong feature in Chaos and Contingency.

In the last five years, China has been more open, especially to visiting artists - but while many of the exchanges could be characterised as opportunistic, Claxton's long term interest has made her exchanges a far more dynamic engagement.

"Nearly 30 years latter I finally got to China. My passion for the Far East is deep and I am really committed to China. It is the most amazing and infuriating place and I am a bit obsessed about the change that is happening as China 'takes over the world'. It is so important, sometimes underestimated, and we need cultural understanding between East and West - and we need it fast!"

"For me this starts in small ways - like my dancers being in China for three months in the studio everyday working with Chinese dancers and visa versa.  I am learning Chinese (slowly) and I read and engage in what is happening with China's expansion in the West. I am happy to dispel some Western myths about China at any chance. It is an amazing country with vast and rich cultural heritages. There are fifty six different ethnic groups and more than 100 languages! I will go on and on if anyone wants to have a beer and talk China! I love the place!"

Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 March 

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

in association with Tramway

Midday and 2pm 

FREE

Saturday 16 March 

Aberdeen Art Gallery

Presented by Citymoves Dance Agency as part of March Moves in association with Aberdeen Art Gallery

Midday and 2pm

FREE

Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 March

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh 

in association with Edinburgh International Science Festival and National Museums Scotland

1:00pm and 3:00pm 

FREE

RIP IT UP SEASON’S FINAL MONTH

 Since I am sitting in Tramway, using their internet connection and enjoying their coffee, I feel obliged to give a mention to the final month of their Rip It Up season. I have had my Young Critics at every event so far, and the fruits of their hard work will be revealed in the next publication of their magazine, Clingfilm. 

The first piece in March isn't even happening in Tramway. Although the main space here is my favourite venue in the world (with the possible exception of the amphitheatre at Ephesus, where I once performed an extract of Hippolytus  to a bemused audience of tourists), it makes perfect sense for Janis Claxton's Chaos and Contingency to be taking place at Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Claxton has previously used Edinburgh Zoo as a stage for her work, and while Chaos and Contingency does represent a different movement vocabulary to her recent studies based on primate behaviour, it is a fine example of how Claxton's choreography uses space as well as the body.

Using simple mathematical patterns to begin, Claxton builds up towards increasingly complex designs, which can be viewed from all sides (hence the use of the Kelvingrove, which allows the audience to stand on all sides). 

Since this is free, there is no excuse to miss this. Claxton regularly tours the world, and it would be a shame to miss this number, which is uncompromisingly experimental in form yet very easy on the eye. 

Equally free is the exhibition Space-Craft from Rachel Adams. This one is in T5 - the white space with the big window at the front - and Adams has promised she'll be mixing up science fiction (hence the name), classical sculptural motifs and decorative craft techniques (hence the name).

This looks like fun, right up until the press release mentions that these elements "brought together to create a temporal collapse." Which either means that T5 is going to be playing host to a black hole, which will devour most of Glasgow over the next six months, or that there will an interesting mixture of styles which come from diverse historical periods.  

Dance: Within This Dust and Chaos and Contingency

Within This Dust is an example of the kind of choreography that I warmly approve. Inspired by the events of 9/11 - in particular the photographs by Richard Drew of a man falling from the building and appearing to take flight - it is determined to engage with the wider world, and has moments of dance-theatre (half acting, half dancing) that are intense, immediate and moving.

Across three pieces, Within This Dust tries to make sense of the horror of 9/11

It's no accident that Dance Base booked Smallpetitklein into their Fringe programme in both 2011 and 2012: first of all for an extract, then a return gig for the complete trilogy. Like the press release says, it "touches the intellect as well as emotion." 

Dance can be a hard sell: as a critic who unashamedly loves the form, I wonder whether my enthusiasm is being flung into an abyss of disinterest and antagonism. I could try to throw around a few cliches - how everyone dances, that the unique quality of dance is to echo the metaphorical meanings of an event, and through choreography put individual experience into a broader context. Unfortunately, I am a critic, not an academic, and while I'll badger away at the more definitive meanings - mostly through slapping up 500 words on here, or slipping a throwaway line into a review - it is the practical experience of watching dance that has captivated me. 

It's unlikely that my writing about dance will persuade anyone. But the recent triple bill by Mark Brew at Tramway, or the erotic savagery of Por Sal Y Samba at manipulate, make explicit what I am struggling to explain. Dance can engage the intellect and the emotions in a similar way to theatre, but the emphasis on movement makes it all the more visceral.

Another Scottish company, Janis Claxton Dance, invited me into the studio last week to see a rehearsal of Chaos and Contingency. Standing on the rooftop, looking into the studio (the piece has been designed to be watched from multiple angles),  I quickly realised that Claxton's choreography here was a study in how the repetition of simple gestures can evolve into an unspeakably complex weaving of dancers around the space and each other. 

This simplicity is deceptive - all of the dancers are technically accomplished, including three whom Claxton brought across from China - and the basic vocabulary owes as much to the soft sway of Tai Chi as to the rigours of either classical or Cunningham traditions. Even in this early form, the use of numbers made Chaos and Contingency something between a meditation on mathematics and the kabbalistic meanings of numerology. 

Yet unlike reading a scientific text book, it was not baffling - it encouraged me to have another crack at those formulae that give me a headache - and unlike the usual esoteric mysticism, it wasn't soft headed junk. 

Within This Dust takes on a very different theme (death, despair et al), but it shares Chaos and Contingency's ability to translate ideas into the physical realm. In different ways, both pieces affirm my faith in dance as a medium: that they have such radically different subjects, and avoid sentimentality, and that their basic approaches to movement are so different. 

Somewhere between the two comes my enthusiasm for dance. It isn't difficult to define, although definitions are always contested and can be deconstructed (dance has been described as "bodies moving in space" in an attempt to include every possible genre of dance, leaving the definition so basic as to mean nothing): but it is difficult to express. Then again, that's the whole point. If Chaos and Contingency could be fully explained in verbal language, there would be no need for the choreography. 

Thank God language is a failure.

Within This Dust Tour Dates
Wed 13 February – Woodend Barn, Banchory
Fri 1 & Sat 2 March – Center for Performance Research, New York, USA
Sat 16 March – Eastgate Centre, Peebles
Tue 19 March – Gardyne Centre, Dundee
Fri 22 March – The Brunton, Musselburgh
Sat 23 March – Birnam Centre, Dunkeld
Wed 10 April – The Riverfront, Newport
Fri 12 April – Square Chapel, Halifax
Thu 18 April – The Palace Theatre, Kilmarnock
Wed 1 & Thu 2 May – Aberystwyth Arts Centre

Chaos and Contingency Tour Dates

Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 March
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
in association with Tramway
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 16 March
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Presented by Citymoves Dance Agency as part of March Moves in association with Aberdeen Art Gallery
Midday and 2pm
FREE

Saturday 23 & Sunday 24 March
National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
in association with Edinburgh International Science Festival and National Museums Scotland
1:00pm and 3:00pm
FREE

Top 3: Dance, Children, Animals

Having spent a week at manipulate and shouting about puppetry not being for children (an argument that both a puppet Hitler and To The End of Love made very clear), I'm going to see the musical Madagascar. It might not be cutting edge object manipulation, but I am pretty sure this one will have puppets that children will like.

It's a treat to go the SECC now and again, and sing along to Move It - most of my life is spent in analysis of serious art in underground bunkers. I love both types of theatre, and I am sure I'll end up deconstructing the narrative of the the adventures of Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe, Gloria the Hippo and the plotting penguins as they escape from their home at New York's Central Park Zoo.

8 - 10 March 2013, 6.30pm 
SECC Clyde Auditorium 

More traditionally my pace is Chaos and Contingency by Janis Claxton Dance. Claxton is well known for her ability to find new places for dance (apart from theatres, she has placed work in the zoo and public spaces), and this new choreography sees her working with an international cast and emergent mathematical patterns. Having seen a little of her rehearsal last week, I am expecting something lyrical and beautiful, and an intelligent and subtle display of simplicity evolving into complexity.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum,

Sat 2 & Sun 3 March

12 noon & 2pm (lasts 50 minutes)

Admission free

In direct contradiction of my usual interests, my next top tip is a Family Day. It's a Tramway, and is part of the Rip It Up season, which goes some way to assuage my sense that I ought to be supporting experimental art (Rip It Up is a season dedicated to emerging artists and new work). My prejudice against work aimed at families only comes from my own unwillingness to look after a child for an afternoon: I know that previous Family Days have included plenty of intriguing work, including a day inspired by John Cage, and that children's theatre can often out-experiment the most radical Live Artist.

This day has been programmed in association with Imaginate, who have been getting my attention lately because of the artists they have been supporting (some of the graduates from the Contemporary Performance Practice course at the RCS). Admittedly, I am way out of their suggested age range...

If I could go, I would like The Story Den: children  are invited to get lost in the world of traditional storytelling, in a purpose built den. They get to make their own mask, too. Then there is an intercative journey into Scotland's history, reminding me that when I studied history, interactivity meant rushing around a museum to get to the gift shop and buy a pen-knife. 

Tramway is even getting their visual art programme in on the action: Nick Evans Solar Eyes exhibition is a bit like a theme park from a lost civilisation, influenced by Egyptian and Mayan mythology. Fortunately, Evans took up the bright colours and geometric patterns of the latter rather than their unreliable calendar system.

Then the day ends with some Eilidh Macaskill of Fish & Game action. 

"Near & Far is an adventurous new piece for children exploring the distance between us all and the technologies that help us shrink our world and expand our horizons."

I'll be upstairs in the cafe, trying to work. I'd appreciate it if you could keep the noise down.

Venue: Tramway

Date: Sunday 17 February

Time: 12noon – 4pm

Price: FREE

Ages: 0-12