Dramaturgical Loops: Sarah Bebe Holmes and Rain Anya

The performers envelop you into their otherworldly environment where gravity is more a suggestion than a law. LoopsEnd features Paper Doll Militia’s most edgy and dynamic short form works to date, retaining the dark and magical quality the company is most known for. 

Appealing to audiences of all ages and languages, the show has its foundations in universal human concepts, told with enticing visuals and non-verbal unfolding narrative. With a diverse use of mediums and aerial apparatus, the stage is continuously transformed.  A true journey of the human spirit, LoopsEnd shows us a mirror of our own experiences reminding us of our collective grit and strength.

Interview Questions answered collectively by Sarah Bebe Holmes and Rain Anya

What was the inspiration for this performance?
LoopsEnd is a journey told in three parts, one of them, Unchained, was performed at last year’s Manipulate.  This year we present to you the other two pieces; Unhinged XY and Ashes. Each was conceived in different ways.  

Ashes was born out of the rubble, literally.  Outside our old training space in Portobello, the buildings, one by one were being torn down as the industrial estate was being repurposed.  Ours was the last standing and as we went in to work on aerial everyday we passed by piles of rubble.  

The rubble represented what was, what is, what everything becomes, just a pile of Ashes.  We were inspired to explore our relationship to our impermanent physical world.  Society can become obsessed, or fearful, of the physical things around us, our possessions.   

The characters in the piece carry out these relationships with their aerial apparatus, ropes with bags of rubble and ash attached. We flung this rubble around our lone building in the exploration of what happens when you give weight to aerial.  

Unhinged XY has had a very long life.  This was originally a choreographic inquiry.  Parts of the choreography date back to Paper Doll Militia’s first show Rara Avis.  Over a decade of working together we keep re-investigating this piece.  Digging deeper into the characters and the story that lay inherently in the choreography.  

If you saw us at Manipulate 2014 you may recognize a few things. For this current instalment, we are working with the integration of movement, aerials, and animation. 

Over a cup of coffee and a book of poetry by Tim Burton, Paper Doll Militia was born. The child of four artists in Santa Fe, 
Paper Doll Militia has roots in circus, original music, puppetry, and dreamy, whimsical, dark storytelling.  Read The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and think of us in a cafe in the desert dreaming of circus with a story. That's who we were, that's who we are.

Paper Doll Militia on Mixcloud

Paper Doll Militia by Gareth K Vile on Mixcloud

Unchained @ Manipulate

Five Reasons Why Paper Doll Militia Will Rock You

1. They are called Paper Doll Militia
What's not to love in this name? They have been called the love-child of Tim Burton and Trent Reznor (by a critic with a greater gift than mine), and the name evokes whimsical fun and hardcore art action in three words. 

2. They did it last year
Their short piece at manipulate 2014 last year was an elegant spectacle of white silk and spiralling skills - an abstract, evocative and forceful display of strength. Both technically and emotionally powerful, it presented a duo who could use physical theatre as a medium for direct, stunning, self impression.

3. They've gone metal
This year's entry, Unchained, swaps the silks for chains, raising the game and bringing an uncompromising symbolism into the very apparatus that they use. With themes of oppression and betrayal, Unchained is a heavier outing (with a few industrial touches in the soundtrack).

4. It's not all circus
The Militia are as much about the choreography as the swinging about the rooftops: apart from taking on a serious subject - and refusing some dull rhetorical lecture on betrayal - they use the dark poetry of physical theatre to go beyond the tricks and go to work on the subject.

5. This one's ecriture feminine
That is: this is no narrative based story with an easy interpretation. It swings and soars, both literally and metaphorically, working with a non-linear approach and delving into symbolism, meaning and action through a variety of attacks. No simple answers, only the invitation for an audience to get thinking...

Manipulate 2015: an introduction

Although 'festival' has become a bit of a buzzword (it gets applied to anything that isn't a one-off event), manipulate has remained loyal to its possibilities as a celebration of a particular strand of performance, and advances the presence of 'visual art' within Scotland. Combining support for local and emerging artists, notably through the free Snapshots programme, and the presentation of internationally acclaimed artists, it encompasses both the eclecticism of the medium and the dynamic curatorial instinctives of artistic director Simon Hart.

Every year, manipulate inspires a discussion around the definition of visual art. Since this year's selections include choreography (The Dance of the Magnetic Ballerina), puppetry (Autumn Portraits) and circus (Unchained), Hart's definition refuses to draw clear limitation. The emphasis on the moving image as the carrier of information (moving, because it is theatre, and image rather than relying more on, say, script or music) becomes the chief characteristic, and one that allows the parallel programme of animated film to sit comfortably within the festival.

Manipulate manages to satisfy audiences unfamiliar with visual theatre (the quality of the photographs advertising each piece is likely to draw in new crowds) by offering an overview of the state of the art: equally, the programme's survey of international companies, and the workshops, brings new experiences for the veteran fan or artist. Unlike the Edinburgh Fringe, which is eclectic but lacks much curation, manipulate is a concentrated burst of specific performance. 

Visual Test

Those than can, create. Those that can't, critique. And those that can't critique, get a load of books from the University and play pick and mix with concepts and phrases.

In the conclusion to A History of European Puppetry (it's a big book, and I started at the end), Henryk Jurkowski ponders on how puppetry, having been consistently a folk-art form throughout human history, had become part of the high-art corpus following the modernist dream of 'total theatre.' From Wagner onwards, performers have fished for the show that contains aspects of all the arts, and puppetry got caught up in the trawl. Jurkowski is delighted that puppetry's place seems assured in the pantheon, but doubts a further taxonomy of puppetry is possible: logging all the different forms would involve assigning a genre to every production, since each one has its own style and characteristics.

He even gets a bit snotty about what would now be called 'object manipulation': having studied the history of the puppet, he remembers that they were once regarded as magical or holy objects: 'the puppet has lost its leading role,' he cries.

He does identify the same problem faced by the critic looking at manipulate, or the physical theatre section of the Edinburgh Fringe. While loose ideas of compositional style or content provide connections, finding a common aesthetic that binds, say Planet Luvos and the aerial arts of Paper Doll Militia. And unlike devised theatre, which has its own set of icons (Lecoq, Forced Entertainment, Bausch), there is no list of Important Artists who have defined the techniques and genres of visual theatre.

I battle with a definition of visual theatre every year: ranging from vague gestures towards 'theatre that is not on the radio' over to a more concrete 'theatre that uses the image as the point of conversation with the audience,' I never quite get to the magic of the genre. I accompany that essay with further mystical meditations on the status of puppetry in sacred art, tracing it through medieval liturgical theatre to Indian shadow story-telling. I detour into the idea of the actor or dancer as a puppet (a status that devised theatre has fought to undermine, by making the performer part of the creative process and not a mere pawn in the hands of the director).

Jurkowski gets away with it by stopping at some time around 1987: just before technology made all sorts of cross-platform multi-media possible, and before the post-modern really took hold and encouraged rejection of simple genres (and difficult language to explore them). I'm left pondering, in the vague hope that all these words and phrases might add up to something that moves me into the category of being able to critique.