Fatherland @ The Arches

It's tempting to describe any Nic Green performance as an event: after her Trilogy became a shining example of a new wave of feminist theatre that has emerged in the past five years, her influence on theatre in Glasgow - specifically on performance that tends towards live art - has been huge. Feminism, and redefining female nudity on stage, have been defining issues for much work that has come from the Royal Conservatoire, Green's alma mater and her approach, combining down-to-earth observations and an expansive, environment focussed philosophy is distinctive and accessible.

Certainly, this one-off presentation of Fatherland has attracted a large crowd and the enthusiastic applause reflects Green's popularity. 

However. Green does not seem to be chasing the grand statements that marked Trilogy: Fatherland is far more intimate, and short. With only a drum beat for backing - and a bagpipe solo in the finale - Green is alone on stage, in circle, reflecting on a single meeting with her biological father. She develops her fleeting memory of this experience into a wider meditation on Scotland (via a Scottish fling dance) as a fatherland, and evokes masculinity's tropes through a very smart suit and the chanting of the audience.

Green adapts the movements of the fling to her own body, building towards a finale that celebrates its energy power (arms held aloft, like The Monarch of the Glen's horns). Whether Green is evoking Scotland's landscape to become her father, or recognising that it has nurtured her as an artist in the way a father shapes a child, Fatherland  is a personal ritual, an artist testing what masculinity means for her - she removes the suit gradually, finding freedom from the constriction of shirt and trousers - and suggesting meaning in the traditional Scottish elements of dance and the whisky (free to the audience). 

The format, ironically, shies away from the big event or statement. Like Ron Athey, she confounds expectation and offers allusive references to grand ideas without settling on fixed meanings. For all the enthusiasm of the audience, it is an introduction to a conversation (designed to fit perfectly within a festival, short and pithy), to engage with other works, other ideas, a starting point rather than a conclusion.

Feminist Theatre in The Glasgow School XXIII (part1)

Pam Gems: 'I think the term 'feminist playwright is absolutely meaningless, because it implies polemic, and polemic is about changing things in a direct political way.'

Quoted in Goodman, Contemporary Feminist Theatres

The rise of 'feminist theatre' in Glasgow could be dated back to the first successes of Nic Green's Trilogy: a graduate of the RSC (then the RSAMD), Green developed the three hour long version over several years, incorporating community engagement, an idiosyncratic critique of Bloody Town Hall (a film in which a variety of feminist thinkers confront an increasingly defeated Norman Mailer) and an appeal to audiences to discover Herstory not History. 

Subsequent years have seen an influx of performers who explicitly identify as feminists, and make work that covers ground familiar from feminist writing ( Leyla Coll O'Reilly's What A Fanny, Jetson and Janssen's celebration of International Women's Day at Tramway and Nick Anderson's graduating piece which explored masculinity through a feminist lens). That many artists graduating from the RCS display an interest in feminism is unsurprising - Green has been a mentor on the course - and its emphasis on an individual creativity encourages engagement with a ideology that sees the personal as political.

Throw in various other apparently feminist productions - such as Dominic Hill's double bill of plays by Caryl Churchill (her very writing style has been described as a challenge to the patriarchal modes of theatre) and performers (Kate E, Deeming's current project is inspired by Virginia Woolf's dictum that an artist must have their own space) - and it seems easy to spot a feminist tradition in contemporary Glasgow performance.

Yet the picture is not that simple. Although Trilogy's impact is hard to overestimate, thanks to its incredible success and longevity, and Green's mentorship of  a subsequent generation of students, explicitly feminist theatre was being made in Glasgow before this year zero. Diane Torr, sometime member of live art supergroup Disband - other members included Barbara Kruger, Ingrid Sischy and Martha Wilson - has been furthering her work as a drag king since the turn of the millennium. 

The Edinburgh company Stella Quines had supported female writers, directors and performers from the 1990s, Alison Pebbles played Elizabeth in Communicado's Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), which Joyce MacMillan in The Scotsman described as having 'something more important to say... about womanhood and the nation': nearly twenty years later, she would team up with Deb Jones for a work-in-progress Cuff.

'Feminist theatre' has been in the Glasgow consciousness for a long time. The deeper challenge is whether lumping these diverse practitioners together does anything more than dilute the meaning of their individual works.

Nic Green takes a Walk @ Buzzcut

NTS Auteurs (Part Two)

Although the NTS' Auteurs season is a collaboration with The Arches - appropriately, given that all of the artists have a connection to what has become the home of experimental performance in Glasgow - the "theatre without walls" slogan has impacted the venue. The Behaviour strand has had a tendency to roam in the past - last year saw a visit to Kelvingrove and a trendy hairdressers in the West End - but only two of the auteurs are using The Arches as a base: Kieran Hurley is off to the Pearce Institute in Govan, Rob Drummond is nipping down to Tramway and Nic Green is keeping her destination quiet for the moment.

Site specific became a performance buzz-word a few years back - perhaps thanks to Minty Donald's scenographic fascination with location or David Leddy's interest in using unexpected parts of buildings - but The Arches has always added an element of itself to every production: between the sporadic trains passing above and the walls that evoke a medieval dungeon - never mind the smells of clubbing and drinking that linger into the following evening - The Arches likes to stamp productions with its distinctive presence. The decision of The Arches to encourage artists to perform beyond their walls is a natural extension.

Neither Nic Green nor Rob Drummond are especially dependent on their site to add drama: Green is comfortable touring her Trilogy through converted churches to London's Barbican complex, while Drummond is taking a trip across the Atlantic for Bullet Catch. Coming from very different backgrounds - Drummond a playwright, Green emerging from the live art scene centred around the former RSAMD (now the RCUS) - they have become ambassadors for the diversity and vitality of Scottish theatre.

Green's Shadowlands is, however, a site specific piece. Throughout her work, she has explored ideas ecological and feminist, articulating a consistent philosophy that is grounded in both. If Trilogy is recognised as an important feminist cycle, the manner of its devising, built around a community for each performance, revealed that Green's interest in ecosystems forms a crucial component of her art.

Her preoccupation with place - recently, Motherland and Fatherland asked questions about belonging, and video footage in Trilogy featured some smashing landscapes - naturally leads to site specific productions. That Shadowland is going to think about waste, and its environmental impact, adds purpose to the trip from The Arches.

Like the other artists in Auteurs, it is the importance of her presence that makes Green's performances unique. Her own academic interests in ecology and feminism are balanced by an insistence on her own experiences and belief - this is appropriate to her underlying philosophy, which refuses to deny the individual for abstract ideals and is shot through with a warm compassion. Her gentle yet firm vision guides her plays, and offers scope for discussion as well as serious analysis.

Rob Drummond is shaping up to be one of Scotland's most remarkable playwrights. He defied death in Bullet Catch. He wrote a play on the spot for Mr Write. He won a fight against a trained warrior in Wrestling. If his plays have a single theme, it is Drummond's own adventures into understanding the world through his desires.

The Riot of Spring is the second leg of Drummond's assault on audiences this Spring - Quiz Show  is the Traverse's main event this season. He has involved a musician and a dancer in this quest to consider Stravinsky and Nijinsky, who got together to irritate ballet audiences in 1913 with The Rite of Spring.

Drummond's reasons for the selection of this epoch changing moment are characteristically unpredictable: enchanted by the idea of artists making something original, he draws on the central myths of The Rite  and the rite within The Rite to link virgin sacrifices, insane artists and jigging tourists.

Old Thoughts on Nudity in Theatre - Still Vaguely Interesting, I am surprised to note

I did not understand quite why Anti-Christ upset cinephiles with its explicit violence and apparent misogyny. Anti-Christ is a movie, and protects its cast with the same trickery as TV does for Derren Brown and 1930s radio for ventriloquists. Hanging out on the cabaret and Live Art scenes, I regularly cheer along as real people pull things out of orifices, cut themselves, run about naked and drink blood. It’s a shame that The Daily Mail lacks an adventurous reporter: then they could have some real “BAN THIS FILTH” headlines. 

The place of nudity in live performance is contested. In Nic Green’s Trilogy, there is a great deal of female nudity that has worried some critics, especially in an avowedly feminist work. And in burlesque, does the majority presence of women as promoters and performers, audience and advocates really avoid the accusations of exploitation? Regulars at Tramway might be disappointed if they go home from a Belgian production without some flash of flesh, but does the status of art protect it from the censorship that governs other media? 

In Trilogy, the nudity is framed so that it deliberately anti-pornographic: similarly in burlesque, the stripping is justified by comedy and rhetoric of self-esteem and inclusion. These could be mere fig-leaves of distraction, hiding the more fundamental tensions that emerge when sexuality and society collide. 

Of course, these productions are aimed at adults, aside from the occasional absurd piece of programming as at Latitude, when Fancy Chance was booked into a daytime slot. It is telling, however, that Chance didn't perform her usual routines in front of the liberal parents and their untamed toddlers. And in London, burlesque nights are being expected to have the same licence as lap-dance clubs, a clear sign that for some bureaucrats, there is little difference. 

Inevitably, I defend the right of performers to undress, even cut themselves on stage. There might be the odd director or actor who is indulging their own exhibitionism, voyeurism or aggressive need to control, but to legislate against them is to exclude those who use nudity as a strategy to provoke and expose. 

At Itsy’s Kabaret, Empress Shah did two acts that could reasonably described as self-harm: pouring molten wax on her stomach and inject a syringe into her arm. Despite the polish and finesse, which distracted from the brutality of these actions, they were part of a serious and profound comment on the nature of passion. When she toasted the audience with her own blood in a champagne glass, it had the symbolic intensity of a nightmare, and nailed the self-destruction that lurks behind so much romanticism.  

Nic Green, on the other hand, takes any erotic bite out of nudity, celebrating the body as shameless: some of the scenes in Bloody Town Hall are all the more innocent because the actors are naked. And many burlesquers recapture a charming sensuality, removing striptease from harsh commercialism and re-inventing it as humorous and sincere. I wouldn’t defend nudity purely on the grounds of its lack of eroticism, however. Nightshade, a production by Victoria that paired strippers and contemporary choreographers encouraged a sexual response, which made the accompanying messages - which varied from critiquing the male gaze through to more direct associations of eroticism with vulnerability or exploitation -  more immediate.  

Theatre can’t use its isolation as an excuse: performance happens in, and impacts upon society. But frankly, when the internet has such an exotic selection of material, and my local newsagent has two rows of magazines that boast SEX HUNGRY BABES, attacking the liberal arts is always going to be a token gesture. Sexual content does have a habit of warping perspectives, which is why it is so valuable as a strategy but also why the debate around it is frequently ill-informed or self-justification masquerading as reason. The relationships between the body, sexuality, consumerism, feminism and social values are endlessly fascinating, and it seems utterly appropriate that performance wants to map them. It does a far better job of it than philosophy or tabloid editors.

The Fire Burns and Burns (Peter McMaster and Nic Green) @ The Arches

I am surprised at how little I worried about being naked with a group of strangers.

Nic Green's greatest hit was Trilogy - a tentative adventure into feminism in the post-ideological age - and featured large numbers of naked dancing women. Green's enthusiasm for breaking the fourth wall had led to a finale where female audience members were invited to join in a nude rendition of Jerusalem. The Fire teams her with partner Peter McMaster and revisits many of Trilogy's themes: community, inclusion, the personal as the political and, of course, people in the scud.

Taking the format of a mini-sweat lodge, The Fire is a step beyond even immersive theatre.It's a happening, a secular ritual. Fire is a repeated motif, much in the way that the host is used in Mass. It heats the hot stones, it is a metaphor for passion, it lights the candles that represent us as a community.

My own alienation is rarely a surprise to me.

The Fire Burns and Burns is barely concerned with any of the usual conventions of theatre. The quality of the script is irrelevant - although the song that McMaster and Green use to bid us farewell has a charming ambiguity. Their performances are merely explanations of the next step in the ritual. The event itself is merely a recreation of a spiritual initiation process. If I feel nothing - who is at fault?

Although I feel no shame at being naked, or being washed by the performers - I have done this sort of thing with Adrian Howells - I feel little else. No great revelations emerge: I am not challenged, I am not presented with an idea that I have never considered. I smile at other people in the group, but I have not shared anything with them.

Green and McMaster appear to be chasing some fine ideas: the rescue of ritual from the spiritual dustbin, the development of a theatre that allows the audience to find a personal response, a celebration  of the possibility of community. But The Fire fails to ignite my own sense of connection.

My passivity is a matter of concern to me.