Editta Braun (Vile thinking... so avoid, eh?)

Previously at Manipulate...

Editta Braun Company presented the first two shows in their trilogy (Luvos and Planet Luvos). Braun's signature choreography stretches the human body into apparently impossible shapes, inverting the expected limitations of movement and conjuring other-worldly creatures and stories.

Meanwhile at The Vile Arts...

I have become obsessed with epistemology. I now think I know what it means: the theory of knowledge. And I think I know what that means too...

I'm imagining a pair of teachers. One of them cannot move, the other cannot speak. They both have a single piece of information to pass onto their student. Because of their limitations, however, they have to find different ways to communicate.

This isn't the whole story, but it suggests one aspect of epistemology. The silent teacher will most likely use some form of physical process to communicate. The immobile teacher will use words. 

Both of methods will communicate the same information, but filter it in different ways. 

Braun's choreography operates in a disruptive manner. The contortions of her dancers don't just challenge the every-day possibilities of movement: they challenge the standard physical presentation of the human body. The climax of Planet Luvos saw the arrival of what one of my students described as penis bum monsters. That really ought to attract an audience.

But this description does not quite grapple with the emotional experience of seeing Luvos. Okay, the trickery and acrobatics are cool, but something else happens. I think it is to do with muscle memory.

There is an epistemology of dance - as Fleur Darkin off Scottish Dance Theatre said in an interview with The List, dance can express feelings in a unique manner. It gets inside the body. Watching dance causes a different reaction to watching a play.

get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.


Just let yourself go 

Curation as Process etc

Today, I am pondering 'curation as an artistic process.' I noticed that Summerhall are advertising for an events coordinator, and wondered how this differed from an artistic director. I guess that the coordinator is a practical, hands-on type role, while the a.d. has a vision... one is a managerial role while the other is all about the leadership.

Recent years have seen the rise of the festival as an 'aesthetic unit': that is, an entire series of events linked and connected by a theme. The Tron's Mayfesto is coming back later this year - it began as a 'political' festival, although that definition has been stretched over time - and Buzzcut, now in its third year, has a clear identity as a place for emerging artists to experiment in the region between 'theatre' and 'performance.'

Manipulate is almost traditional in its emphasis on a festival as a place to explore a single genre - fortunately, the genre (visual theatre) is broad enough to include object manipulation, puppetry, physical theatre and even dance. There tends to be an assumption that manipulate is 'about' puppetry (probably because Puppet Animation Scotland are behind it), but the choices of Simon Hart, artistic director, are bounded only by imagination. It remains as one of the last great Scottish festivals that have an international pull and is determined to include challenging performance - although the Edinburgh International does a fair job (and I don't count the Fringe, since it lacks an overall curation).

Some part of the importance of manipulate comes from the influence it might have on Scottish artists: in Europe and beyond, theatre supports an industry of performers in more experimental practices, and the scale of companies like Editta Braun (Luvos) reveals that Germany, at least, can sustain intriguing work at a high level. While the National Theatre of Scotland is not afraid to play with form and format, and the Citizens is defining itself through radical imaginings of familiar stories, the larger independent companies tend to be in a script-based tradition.

Back in the days when the National Review of Live Art was still running, it was a truism to say that it was important not to pick and choose events, but dive in, almost at random. Manipulate and Buzzcut deserve the same advice - it might be the only way to work out how the curatorial process operates.

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.

Manipulate! 2014!

Being a former classicist, I am a traditionalist at heart. I may not have turkey at Christmas, and I saw the New Year with a copy of Simon Murray's book on Jacque Lecoq, but some things are sacred. So, when manipulate  starts gearing up, I feel it is time for the annual 'Puppets are not just for children' article.

There isn't much left for kids these days. Comic books, which taught me to read and have an idiosyncratic view of good and evil, have been occupied by adults. Not that they have had to be aimed at children - William Burroughs noted that the visual image, combined with words, was far more likely to engage and inform than any other mix of media (which is why they were used for propaganda in World War II. But sitting behind me in the office, half of big-hearted Black Hearted Press are prepping for their workshops at the CCA, and there's a 16 plus age warning on the session with writer John Farnam (author of Daily Mail favourite Royal Descent).

Manipulate has been making the point that puppetry is capable of addressing adult themes without slipping into XXX predictability. Last year, Neville Tranter took on Hitler and provided a meditation on the Fuhrer's last days that was terrifying in its portrayal of the monster as a human being. This year, Planet Luvos explores the idea of humanity's eventual demise, Grit thinks about the impact of war on children and Stephen Mottram's Seas of Organillo may be beautiful, but owe more to Freud and scientific theories than The Water Babies. It only remains for Vile to state the obvious, that manipulate has become one of the most important festivals in Scotland, providing international, exciting, experimental performance.

In the next episode, Vile asks 'what is visual theatre?'