Nora and Martyrs (RISE and Southside Fringe)

Eleanor Sikorski and Flora Wellesley Wesley are Nora, a contemporary dance duo. They perform the work of invited choreographers, using their bodies and training as a starting point.

Gustav and Jacob are The Creative Martyrs, a cabaret team. They perform their original songs, using their musical skills and voices as a starting point.

Despite coming from different performance cultures, both couples set their relationship to each other at the centre of their work. Evoking the theatrical tradition of the double-act (and alluding to Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Orville and Keith Harris, Plato and Aristotle, even if not literally), they perform the process of self-creation in the collaborative mode.

In Bloody Nora (choreographed by Liz Aggiss and, consequently, having more than a few references to old time London fun), Sikorski and Wesley battle each other like rappers, exaggerating and mocking each other's gestures and fumbling together identities that take in Max Wall and the techniques of Bausch's 'dance-theatre'.

In Funny Trap (written by The Martyrs but performed primarily by Jacob), a story of treachery and imprisonment provides a context for Jacob's paranoia: Gustav's only contribution is a voice from off-stage that reminds Jacob of his eternal sentence. Yet this single line is the spine of Jacob's character, a mixture of the fear-inspiring absent father and the threat of political power. 

Because of Aggiss' style, Bloody Nora is closer to The Martyrs' cabaret than most contemporary dance, and the sparring between the dancers parallels the arguments that run through many Martyr's routines. Beneath the content of specific works, the performance of both couples exposes the necessity of another in the building of personality.

More Paper Dramaturgy: Lesley Eadie @ Southside Fringe

A new play by award winning playwright Heloise Thual. A and E are playing in the garden that A changed into a graveyard for books. Unable to find her other brother’s (J’s) body, A is burying his books. A and E are playing games, taking on different roles: life and death, Greek tragedies, poetry. With a paper bag.  In a house controlled by the despotic and violent Auntie who has forbidden them to imagine, remember and read, A teaches her brother to resist. But the last book, J’s favourite, will change her beliefs, opening a world where a pragmatic mind struggles and where the limits between stories and memories collapse.  Directed by Lesley Eadie.

What was the inspiration for this performance?
The inspiration was the text itself and Heloise’s formidable ability to multi-layer her work. I love the way she plays with classic texts and mythology in her writing; always finding a way to make it relevant to society today or using it to make a social or political point in the piece.

I love the ‘mud’ imagery in the play. The characters are literally stuck. Stuck in a situation. Mentally, stuck in a moment. I also loved the imagery of birds; the thought of the papers (her memories) flying away and leaving ‘A’ and helping the characters to unstick themselves from the trials their lives have given them.

Originally I wanted the actors to construct an enormous birdcage around the action as they spoke; trapping themselves in the garden, becoming the memories as the horror of their situation overwhelmed them. The idea was to stage the play in the round and have the audience part of the garden, sitting on garden furniture or on the artificial grass itself. Let the audience feel the grass and mud on their feet: we all have memories we can’t escape and I wanted them to reflect on that as they encountered ‘A’ and ‘E’s predicament. 

Unfortunately we were not allowed to use the space in that way, so we compromised with the mud and the trees. Despina (Isaia - our head Designer) understood where my ideas were coming from and managed to do a marvelous job of creating the sensation of mud and isolation that was required within the set.

Overall I just wanted the performance to be seething with memory, with the angst felt by ‘A’ and many women before her, and with hope that you can escape from any situation regardless of how dark.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I knew Elaine’s (McKergow) work and on a first reading of the play could see her in the role of ‘A’. She has this presence about her; a strong, don’t mess with me attitude but she is also incredibly caring with those around her and meticulous with her roles. She is the embodiment of a strong Scottish woman: perfect for ‘A’, who is, as Heloise writes, “strong like mum”.

Filling the role of ‘E’ was trickier. He is an incredibly complex character; 2 in one really and we knew we had to find someone who had an instant sparky relationship with Elaine. As soon as Euan (Cuthbertson) started the scene in his audition we all (myself, Elaine and Heloise) knew he was the man for the job.

Heloise had worked with Jen (Martin – Sound Designer) and Despina before and I had worked with Oliver (Gorman – Lighting Designer) on a previous production at the Tron and loved his ‘lightscape’ creation so was eager to work with him again.


How did you become interested in making performance?
I’ve been interested in performing since I was a little kid, making up stories for family and dancing around whenever I could. At drama school I discovered writing and devising and have been in love with making new work ever since. 

Life got in the way for a while but in 2014 I started a new young company Urban Fairytale and have been making work solidly since then. The ethos of the company is to give young theatre makers a chance to get their feet on the professional stage. I work with a core of actors/performers and bring in other people when the script or performance piece requires it. I teach (Drama/ English) in a high school during the day and the bit I always liked best was the creation process, I thought I would use that as the basis for my company and get the young people to do what they like best – create theatre with a purpose and entertain and engage audiences. 

The idea behind the name of the company is to create/present stories from the city to people from the city by people from the city. We try to use public engagement in our devising process and try to bring theatre to spaces where people might not expect it – performing BOYS in a brewery being just one example.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
In rehearsal, I am definitely a collaborator. I love nothing better than everyone mucking in and having their say. I loved having Heloise in the room during Paper Bag rehearsals – it meant if you had a question about the writing or if I wasn’t sure about how much poetic license I had with an element of the play I could get the answer right there and then. Very liberating. The whole team we had around us were very flexible which was lovely.

Design wise it was thrilling having a tiny fledgling idea and watching the designers grow it into something exciting. Despina is a genius – we had a lot of issues through our way with regards to the space we could create and how we could use it. She took every setback with grace and turned it around into something usable and beautiful. 

She worked tirelessly for hours creating our ‘muck’ which looked spectacular under the lights. Oliver’s lighting design was stunning. I asked the poor guy to change the direction of the sun on stage and never to have the lights static so that we get the idea of the days constantly rolling by for the characters! He did a beautiful job of it. I hope people notice his ever changing lightscape – there is not one moment on stage when the lights are not fading into another state but it is so subtlety done, beautiful. Jen had a rare old time creating our drone and ‘storm of voices’. 

She wanted to create the grim dark noises out of something joyful so took a wedding crowd cheering reversed it and slowed it down to create our ‘auntie’. We saw the sound as another character in the piece, personifying the Creon character of auntie. In the Tron version of the show auntie was ever present in this new version at the baths she ebbs and flows throughout, almost as if she is coming into and out of the scene with the main actors.
Acting wise the guys worked tirelessly on their characters, constantly questioning their motivation and finding new information in their words. That is the beauty of Heloise’s writing there is always something to find. I like to give actors space to find their character and flexibility of movement on stage. I like them to listen to each other and both Elaine and Euan are fantastic listeners.

This was a very long winded way of saying... Yes, definitely.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
‘A’ is such a strong character, gathering her strength from sorrow. As a lifelong Glaswegian, I understand this mentality; having seen it in my family role models. One of my favourite comments from our Tron run was, “I didn’t know whether to hate ‘A’ or run onto the stage and save her”, that’s when I knew we had achieved an understanding of both her uncompromising strength and underlying vulnerability. I hope at least one member of our Govanhill audience feels this strongly about the characters and the play.

I also hope that they are captivated by the setting and situation. This play is a rollercoaster ride that doesn’t stop to let you breathe. It’s visceral. For me, the hour feels like it is over in a fraction of the time.



What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience? How did the composition of the music come about - was it part of the scripting or production process?

I’m lumping these questions together as one sort of answers the other. We saw ‘Auntie’ as a character. We wanted the audience to feel her there with them. That’s where the idea of the drone (sound) came in. The humming beneath the surface; the undercurrent of danger. Jen took this idea and created this uncomfortable sound in a very low register that we were able to put through subs to make the space vibrate. I really wanted it to be annoying, like white noise that gets under your skin. 

I wanted it to be part of the experience for the audience. I like to push elements of production in that way to see how the audience reacts to it. We had some people who raved about the unseen auntie character and for them it really enhanced the experience, others, however, found it grating. I loved that. I loved that it grated them, it was supposed to. 

For me, the noise annoying people means that the audience experience I wanted, succeeded. I know that may seem a little bit twisted, to be happy that people felt uncomfortable with ‘auntie’, but that was part of the experience we had designed for them and they got it.

The music composition was part of the production process in the initial version of the show but our revised idea makes it part of the script. We have weaved ‘auntie’ in and out of the scenes, building her part and making her move around the house that we don’t see. She is not so grating anymore – or she is but in a different way. If anything I think she is more foreboding now and hope that the audience sense her and are still horrified by her existence.

One element of musical composition which was always part of the script was the ‘storm of voices’. Heloise wrote this into the script from the beginning and wanted a build up of character voices almost like it was overwhelming ‘A’s mind. We decided we would add a different voice to represent the character of J (who is normally ‘played’ by Euan through ‘E’) to show her memory of her other brother. Danny Holmes plays this character in the voiceovers.

Why Antigone, why now?
There has been a real resurgence of Greek theatre in recent times so I am not surprised Heloise chose this play to produce. Antigone is a strong woman, who knows her mind and stands up for what she thinks is right. She’s a feminist. Who doesn’t love that in a character?

For me the lines which resonate for this play from Antigone come from Ismene,

“Our own death would be if we should go against Creon
And do what he has forbidden!
We are only women, We cannot fight with men, Antigone!”


Auntie is Heloise’s representation of Creon, this beast who controls their little world, and I see a lot of Ismene in the character of ‘E’, scared to go against the regime. ‘A’ is fighting everyone for the right to bury her brother regardless of how dysfunctional their relationship was. But she is strong (like mum), strong like women are, even although they aren’t often represented in that way.

The beauty in Heloise’s multi-layered writing lets us take a lesson from Antigone, from her strength and from the universal themes within it (freewill, determination, power, mortality) which are, as Heloise has so beautifully showcased, relevant and prevalent in today’s society.

KABAKUNST Dramaturgy: The Creative Martyrs @ Southside Fringe

KABAKUNST

presented by The CREATIVE MARTYRS as part of TheSouthside Fringe

Collaborative Kabarett with The Creative Martyrs, the itinerant musicians known as The Acquiescent Orchestra and the sublime performance talents of Calum MacAskill, Tom Harlow, Kim Khaos and John Celestus.

Plucked from the streets the audience have been detained in Govanhill Baths Temporary Administration Centre. They wait...  Amid the audience are a number of performers. A captive audience? Performers? Time? Well, it would be remiss not to take the opportunity for a little sing-song, a dance and some Kabarett!

Warmongering, surveillance and censorship: classic Creative Martyrs’ songs are given a whole new treatment with The Acquiescent Orchestra. Kabarett performance, dance, burlesque, sideshow and song are interwoven with The Martyrs narrative to create a unique theatrical experience.

With KABAKUNST The Martyrs turn their back on their usual intimate cabaret to work collaboratively in a large scale, site responsive Kabarett. KABAKUNST was first performed at the Hidden Doors Festival in Edinburgh in 2015 and has now been adapted to inhabit the atmospheric main pool space at Govanhill Baths.

“When The Martyrs sing of the joys of war profiteering, they are at once threatening and jolly.” The Skinny

Regular performers in Glasgow and Edinburgh and at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe since 2008 and nominated for the Time Out & Soho Theatre (TO&ST) Award for Cabaret in 2012, The Creative Martyrs present their unique brand of satirical Kabarett in both short guest sets and full theatrical pieces (Tales from a Cabaret, An Hour Long Sinister Wink, After the Apocalypse, Cabapocalypsaret, and their interactive children's show, FEZ!).  The Martyrs can be found playing in bars, clubs, theatres, yurts, festivals… and now swimming pools.

LISTING INFORMATION

Venue: Govanhill Baths, 99 Calder Street, Glasgow

Time: 9:30pm (90mins - no interval)

Dates: Thu 19^th & Fr 20^th May 2016

Tickets: £10

Box Office: southsidefringe.org.uk/events/kabakunst

What was the inspiration for this performance?

This performance, as with all of our work, is a combination of many different inspirations, as stock characters (characters? The Martyrs are real, we tell you...) the process is continuous, the inspiration and influences are conceptual, thematic, aesthetic and wide ranging. 

We have long wished to do a large-scale cabaret piece involving

other cabaret performers: other musicians and cabaret characters, burlesque dancers and side-show performers, and to place the show in a narrative context. (Our original plan was to perform the show in The Arches... ) 

Last year we fulfilled this wish when we performed KABAKUNST in Edinburgh at the Hidden Doors festival in a derelict industrial building. The space allowed us to create an atmosphere in which the audience were people surreptitiously attending a show by performers no longer allowed to play in normal venues, a secret place where people could temporarily escape oppression and laugh at those in power.

This year's show is a development from that performance. Also, we were inspired by the chance to perform in Govanhill Baths, an iconic building and another non-theatre 'found' space.



How did you go about gathering the team for it, especially the young comedian?

Over the years of performing in Cabaret nights and events we have established close relationships with our fellow cabaret artistes - the Cabaratti if you will - particularly in Glasgow where The Creative Martyrs currently reside. Hidden Doors festival in Edinburgh last year gave us the opportunity to devise and perform KABAKUNST and we asked various performers if they would like to be involved, thus the cast was formed. 

As for the young Comedian, we do not know him and wish he would leave us alone. 


How did you become interested in making performance?

The Creative Martyrs have been performing since 1883. We found ourselves on a stage - perhaps we were pushed on, perhaps we strided on purposefully, maybe we mistook it for a bar...
Since then we have been interested in making performance -  in order to sing songs, tell tales, satirise and reflect.  

We have been inspired by many of the cabaret acts we have met over the years and continue to hone our own act.

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

We create shows through a combination of writing, devising, improvisation and material generated during live performing, so in this way KABAKUNST was typical, but in an other sense not, because of the involvement and input of the other performers.

We have written the show and directed people to do certain things at certain times but also the other performers were free to interpret aspects of the production according to their perspective - musicians have come up with their own accompaniment to the songs; the dancers have created their own routines and the film-makers their own material in response to our music, concepts and ideas.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

An immersive cabaret experience - the feeling of actually being in the situation we present - of the baths being a temporary detention centre in an increasingly oppressive society but then finding themselves entertained by cabaret artistes who happen to be present...

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

From the moment the audience arrive they are made to feel they have been detained - various administrative duties are performed. The fact the audience will be in a disused swimming pool adds to this atmosphere. The audience also will not be seated in the usual way - adding to a discombobulating experience.

And we the performers will be interacting with and among the audience. And in time satirising the very situation we have theatrically created.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

We are particularly inspired by 1930s Weimar Republic cabaret but continue to develop our own take on cabaret, our own... schtick.

Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy for you in your work?

We are very interested in performing in and responding to different spaces - whether theatres, bars, fields, water-less swimming pools or abandoned warehouses - and shaping our performances and shows according to the particular space, and particular audience. 

We do not believe for example an abandoned warehouse should be then turned into a theatre - rather we prefer to perform in the space as it is (with some lights and technical aspects to enhance the show but in sympathy with the space).  


Thank you, and good night, for now...

Gustav and Jakob
The Creative Martyrs

Paper Dramaturgy: Heloise Thual @ Southside Fringe

The Paper Bag

Héloïse is a young playwright, writing both in French, her native language, and in English. She is particularly interested in tackling the issues regarding bisexuality, trans-sexuality and investigating the transgressive space between the archetypal notion of masculinity and femininity.

Her female characters are defined by what are seen as masculine attributes, their profession, their social and sexual behaviours. This aims to provoke the audience and engage them to rethink the relation between the natural dispositions of an individual and the cultural expectations attributed to him/her. 

Heloise started theatre as a performer in the semi-professional collaborative group ATRE connected to the Opera of Lyon. Having to edit a range of texts for the stage, she fell in love with playwriting and decided to come to Glasgow in order to follow a Masters in Playwriting.

As a young playwright, she is looking for a professional perspective on her work and detailed feedback to help her in her creative process. Having recently graduated from a Masters in Dramaturgy and Playwriting; she had the opportunity to meet different playwrights such as Sylvia Dow and Douglas Maxwell.

Héloïse is a recipient of Playwrights' Studio, Scotland's New Playwrights Awards 2015. 

What was the inspiration for this performance?

I researched during my Playwriting and Dramaturgy Masters adaptations and appropriations of Greek myths by female playwrights. During this research, I became fascinated by the staging of rituals, which most of the time are expressions of a trauma, on stage, two texts which particularly intrigued me were The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Mouthful Of Birds by Caryl Churchill and David Lane.  

I wanted to create a play staging a ritual and turned to my scrap yard, I found a diary reflecting my experience as an artistic leader in a workshop with teenagers from a rural high school about poetry and rural landscape and several pages were actually dedicated to Antigone, a myth I always affectionate. Those pages were under the clumsy title of “Antigone or the art of digging”.

The aim of my artistic workshops was for the teenagers to create books from organic material and carve the poetry into them, as the landscape was pretty muddy, we ended up making books from mud and carved their texts into it. This image printed deeply inside me and was my starting image crafting the play.

How did you go about gathering the team for it?

I have worked with Lesley Eadie the director, Despina Isaia the designer and Jen Martin the sound designer on small projects with no budget before. I knew they were all aware of my theatrical aesthetic and that they could do wonders with a limited budget.

Lesley is a theatre educator as well as a director and this project being my first production, I knew I needed someone with this pedagogical mind to help me find my marks. Lesley was patient and reassuring at the times I needed it the most and went head on into this challenge. 

Coming back to the “digging metaphor”, I think there was a lot to dig in and in the restricted time and with the limited production budget we had, I was genuinely impressed to see her working it all. I learned a lot coming into the rehearsal room and in order to improve as a writer I knew that was the thing I needed, being with the director and the actors, experiencing the production process from start to finish.

How did you become interested in making performance?

During my two years of Mentoring at the Playwright Studio, I had two rehearsed readings organised in order to present my work and get the audience feedback. Both were really valuable and help me develop my writing, only the script is still physically on the stage and that’s something which makes me nervous. The script is too present. 

I suppose this nervousness was the realisation that if the audience didn’t like the rehearsed reading, it was pretty much my fault as the aim of the process is for the writer to hear is work and evolves a lot around the writer. 

You can feel a bit lonely there… I was eager to see my work performed, see the writing take flesh and which physicality will arise from it. The collaborative process of the performance was really enjoyable, losing the ownership of my text gave me great satisfaction as director, actors and technicians were putting their own interpretations in the performance.

I felt more part of a whole which was nice.

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

This is a first for me so it is quite difficult to answer this question.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

I hope this is ok but I would like to quote the words of Mary Brennan who reviewed the show “First names would confer a degree of normalcy: nothing about this hour-long lurch into troubled psyches is normal. If, that is, A and E are telling the truth.” 

This distrust towards the two narrators was one of my aims writing it, I wanted to create a contrast between the physical conditions of the narrators, grounded in the mud and their voices which never settle. I have a strong interest in unreliable narrators in literature like in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Narrators who are unbiased, unbalanced and misinterpret the events.

A feeling of defiance towards what’s being told was something I hoped for.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience

experience?

I like theatre for its sensuality, there was a moment before reading the health and safety conditions when we were thinking of having the audience feet in the mud, emphasising this sensation of being stuck as the characters are stuck in a moment but also physically stuck to their performing environment.

Do you see your work within any particular tradition?

I am fascinated by the literary and performative work referring to the concept of ecriture feminine.  This idea of a fragmented and poetic style which allows some void to come in particularly influenced me, especially for this project.

After I am frequently asked the question if I consider myself as a French writer lost in Scotland or a Scottish writer with a terrific French accent, I think the answer is…neither of them. I am affectionate towards the Surrealist movement, writers like Robert Desnos and the Easter European Surrealist wave with authors like Bohumil Hrabal and Laslo Kraszahorkai.

How did the composition of the music come about - was it part of the scripting or production process?

The prologue and Epilogue of the play entitled “Storm of Voices” pushed us to develop a soundscape, I didn’t put clear indications in the text, and for the rest of the text but Lesley and Jen worked together on creating a soundscape which would be present for the whole performance.

Why Antigone, why now?

Antigone is my favourite Greek myth, I am still doing my own secret research and reading a lot of adaptations/ appropriations by various artists in various art fields.

As I was thinking of staging a ritual, Antigone’s tireless and irreverent digging which in most of the theatrical production happen off stage offered I thought a lot of performative possibilities. The play drifted progressively from the myth and got corrupted by my experience working with teenagers from difficult social background and their response to the artistic workshop I was leading. 

It was worrying to see how many of them have already this idea of “unbreakable social fate”, the myth of Antigone explores that idea of free will struggling against fate. The act of digging is an act of defiance against her condition and introducing those teenagers who strongly thought “art was not for them” to poetry was to a certain extent one as well.

I find it quite soul breaking to be honest it seems like one.

A new play by award winning playwright Heloise Thual. A and E are playing in the garden that A changed into a graveyard for books. Unable to find her other brother’s (J’s) body, A is burying his books. A and E are playing games, taking on different roles: life and death, Greek tragedies, poetry. With a paper bag.  In a house controlled by the despotic and violent Auntie who has forbidden them to imagine, remember and read, A teaches her brother to resist. But the last book, J’s favourite, will change her beliefs, opening a world where a pragmatic mind struggles and where the limits between stories and memories collapse.  Directed by Lesley Eadie.

21st Century Poe

Marty Ross is probably best known for his BBC radio plays - he has also been responsible for the scripts for audio versions of Doctor Who. Yet he also works in a live tradition: his versions of Edgar Allan Poe demonstrate his skill not only as an adaptor of classic texts, but as a story-teller.

Ross is presenting two of these shows - Falling for the Ushers, a witty update of Fall of the House of Usher that relocates the horror to the contemporary art world, and Heart Shaped Hole, which brings murder's guilt into the life of a Glaswegian junkie - as part of The Southside Fringe. Although he has taken previous solo shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, this is the first time that his pair of Poes have been bought to the city in which Ross grew up.

Perhaps because of his 'other life' as a playwright, Ross' vision of story-telling is not a simple, gentle chat. He plays multiple parts and, while he retains the Gothic atmospheres, he translates Poe's melodramas into a recognisable present. 

Using two conceptual artists as the victims in Falling for the Ushers lends a wry irony to the source story's brooding tragedy, and the junky protagonist of Heart Shaped Hole emphasises the timelessness of the subject matter: it is both a modern parable about guilt and a reassertion of a moral absolute (like, not killing people for fun or profit) without the trappings of its Victorian source.

In Ross' approach, story-telling is less a folk tradition than a modern monologue, with connections to (good) stand-up and character comedy, or the theatrical sophistication of The Woman in Black. It's a fine start to the Southside Fringe, recognising both the richness of the oral tradition and adding a determinedly contemporary sensitivity. 

21st Century Poe: Falling For The Ushers

•   Bungo Bar & Kitchen
 
•   Sat 9th May 2015
 
•   7:30pm - 12:00am

• #literature
 
• #performance art
 
• #theatre

Storyteller / playwright Marty Ross (BBC Radio; Doctor Who audio) updates Poe’s Fall Of The House Of Usher to Glasgow’s contemporary art scene in this vividly theatrical show, a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe & London Horror Festivals. “Ross has great aptitude for suspense & terror… a chilling conclusion” Scotsman

21st Century Poe: Heart Shaped Hole

•   Bungo Bar & Kitchen
 
•   Sun 10th May 2015
 
•   7:30pm - 12:00am

• #literature
 
• #performance art
 
• #theatre

In his second viscerally theatrical Poe show storyteller / playwright Marty Ross transfers The Tell-Tale Heart to modern Glasgow. Stanley tries to make a killing on the drug market. But what’s that sound he can’t get out of his head? “Insanely good storytelling… Trainspotting meets Gothic horror”