CLOSE UP Dramaturgy: editta braun company

The virtuoso concert pianist AyseDeniz performs hers and Thierry Zaboitzeffs compositions at the grand piano in in her peculiar, idiosyncratic way, inspired by Chopin and Rachmaninoff. 

Four dancers - bodies in concert - enter the stage, creating a physical dialogue with AyseDeniz's performance, thus embodying and externalising the interior sounds and texture of the music. 

Lemur-like creatures, distorted, constricted and oppressed, invade the concert pianist’s perfectly harmonic world. As if even the artificially encapsulated high culture, where the pursuit of perfection often doesn’t leave any room for doubts, could not escape from human thoughts and every day’s worries. 

Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a foreshadow of the desire for free moving appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

Fantastical lemur-like creatures - distorted, constricted and oppressed - invade the concert pianist’s perfect harmonic world, so that even the artificially encapsulated world of high culture, where the pursuit of perfection doesn’t leave any room for doubts, cannot escape from the tension of everyday cares and worries. Nightmarish realities and fears, but also a shadow of the desire for freedom, appear as incarnated thoughts and feelings. 

The five dancers’ moving bodies - sometimes individually, sometimes in pairs, sometimes a seemingly inextricable agglomeration of extremities - constitute and articulate the physicality and motivations of strange, otherworldly creatures. Are they the pianist’s alter egos or dark suppressed aspects of her soul? While she is playing, these beings become her fellow antagonists and collaborators. They are suffused by the dense, mighty live music and then are driven or tortured, hunted or released, by the sounds around them. They resist – and they react. 

What was the inspiration for this performance?
Very simple: I heard the pianist in the frame of a music-festival in Portugal and had images of a dance-piece happing around a grand piano, representing somehow the inner world of the pianist. Creatures enter her bubble, her closed world of classical music and cause some disorder ...

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
I work with the composer Thierry Zaboitzeff and the dancers since many years - so I had just to convince AyseDeniz. And she was curious enough to dare the adventure.

How did you become interested in making performance?
I guess, something pushes me since I can stand on my legs, means, since my childhood.

Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Yes. I always work with improvisation as starting point. But for CLOSE UP we had a special magic experience: After three days only we did an improvisation of 45 minutes, guided by me from outside, and not only the dancers improvised, but also AyseDeniz on themes of Thierry Zaboitzeff. This is very rare for a classical pianist.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
To get connected with own feelings, own memories, own phantasies, own ideas - triggered by our performance.

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

Daniel Carter Duo @ Counterflows

I have no mouth yet I must scream...

The human animal has been trapped for a long time. Whether this prison is the ruins of the modernist optimism, or the light shed by that big bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima revealed the exact dimensions of the cell is unclear: either way, ever since Beckett announced the condition of existential angst in Waiting for Godot, the theatre has been reminding humanity of its essential despair. Humans know that they are going to die, and the bit after birth is just a protracted slot in eternity's waiting room.

Future Ruins noticed that the illustrations on the walls of the prison look exactly like a frozen middle-class dinner party. Exterminating Angel - an Improvisation adapts a classic Maurice Maeterlink number about a bunch of blind people lost in the forest and Luis Bunuel's fascination with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and translates them into the polite language of the chattering classes. Meanwhile, Greyscale and Stellar Quines are touring the debut of Sylvia Dow, A Beginning, A Middle and An End. This time, the trap is being sprung on a couple, their children and a forest of advocado trees, which might represent a glimmer of hope.

Dow is bolder in naming Godot at the start of the action: her three characters prologue their lives in a limbo state, before building and deconstructing a life together, then sliding back into the limbo. Director Selma Dimitrijevic is fond of metaphysical theatre - her own script, A Prayer, is the most convincing description of faith written by an avowed atheist - and leaving the context of the character's vague allows an austere, but compassionate, meditation on the doubts and hopes of being alive.

Although Jack McNamara devised and directed Exterminating Angel, the cast of five are free to improvise around similar themes: that it ends in an updating of Plato's cave parable (the one person who braves leaving is tied up and silenced) reveals a serious, brutal intent. The palpable sense of threat that pervades the hour suggests, as in A Beginning, that society is breaking down. Unwilling to brave the outside world, they content themselves with small talk, until the paranoia inevitably cracks open a few nasty home truths.

A Beginning and Exterminating Angel share a fascination with the consequences of threat on individuals trying to hide their fears. The consequences are very difficult: for Dow, death appears as a reunion, and the references to Biblical stories and nature's indefatigable nurturing lend her impatient couple both m eaning and emotional depth. The aspiring dinner party guests over in Angel, however, can only reject any potential escape. Their loathing of each other, hidden behind games and a dishonest respect for emotional honesty, leaves them trapped in a hell made worse by their attempts to ameliorate their situation.

Of course, the themes of waiting and capture by circumstances are familiar: Beckett made a career from it, and Sartre's Huis Clos has the "hell is other people" bases covered. Dow does introduce a note of spiritual acceptance that softens the blow - the finale is a rather lovely folk song about the magic of advocado trees, and Future Ruins have a nastier after-taste: yet these themes are likely to remain popular. After all, the human animal has been trapped for a long time.

Vulnerable (Top Five)

Today, I am feeling vulnerable. Whenever I leave the office, I am surrounded by posters that are covered in stars. They feel like bullets, forged by critics but used by companies to shoot each other in the war for resources. I don't like it, I don't like reducing a critical opinion to a quotation, let alone the blank, unblinking sequence of stars. I'm a pretentious type, and I like to think that criticism is an art defined in much the same way as poetry. When when the precious words that a critic has forged into linked chains of meaning are deconstructed down to a signifier of cultural worth, I am unhappy.

How can I respond? How about a top five for feeling vulnerable? Works for me...

"This piece combines puppetry with physical theatre, so you've got human actors playing opposite puppet creatures," says Ailin Conant about her show The Fantasist. "I guess it's like some kind of Jacques Lecoq / Jim Henson mash-up."

The Fantasist appropriately expresses the bi-polar experience by juxtaposing two styles of theatre: modestly, Conant insists that the puppetry is something new for her: " I kind of fantasize about the conversations that "real" puppet companies might have in the rehearsal room: What puppeteer costuming will serve this puppet best?  An understated cap or full Bunraku black hoods?  In our rehearsal you're much more likely to hear something like, Is this hood-thingie keeping the focus off my face, or do I just look like a wanker?"

Fortunately, this endearing self-deprecation is backed up by a ken theatricality and an emphasis on using the approaches as means to end - her description of the mash up might suggest what is going on, but it does not prepare the audience for what has been touted by a Skinny reviewer as a highlight of the festival.

Underbelly, 3- 27 August

The critical world is going mad about The Shit, a late night burst of Italian outrage and disgust. Since it has a naked women ranting and howling and screaming - the words aren't so much about their meaning but the sound they make as they scatter and shatter and settle - this is more about vulnerability being portrayed on stage. I can't help but be reminded of some of Kathleen Hanna's (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) more challenging moments, and there is a huge poster of performer Silvia Gallerano outside Summerhall that is bracing and frightening in equal manner.

Summerhall, 3 -27 August

Songs of Lear is another Summerhall special, and another entry from Poland. It's surprising to see a company associated with a visceral theatre (Song of the Goat are another one of those central European companies who give equal weight to body and word) present what appears to be a choral concert: each episode is introduced by the director - he explains that this is not a version of Shakespeare's Lear but uses the text as "a landscape" and each scene is best read as a portrait - and the company begin in their sunday best black.

Despite the formal beginning, the forces within the text (the ingratitude of the child, the emotional violence of the father, the threat of insanity and the truth spoken as folly) gradually dominate the performers: snatches of esoteric instrumentation, invocations of Coptic song, stamping feet and an incredible, unexpected drum solo interpret the familiar story and tease out the despair and struggle that is lost in versions that rely on text and old school tricks like mere acting. 

By avoiding too much plot, the characters become the focus. Cordelia's lament gives depth to a character that Shakespeare couldn't be bothered to flesh out (she's a dull paragon of honesty in the original; here, she is the victim of her father's immaturity with a series of disappointments reaching back into childhood): Gloucester is less the doddering idiot than a thoughtful courtier, sensing the approaching storms. Lear himself is spoilt, absurd and, ultimately tragic.

The production consciously avoids much of traditional theatricality. The lighting is simply a wash of one colour, the costumes are formal wear, the only props are instruments, the script is broken apart and appears only as fragments within songs. Yet somehow Song of the Goat achieve that beautiful connection with the audience: the standing ovation is deserved and proves that total theatre - using all the tricks - is not necessarily the only way to fulfil the potential of the stage.

Summerhall, 13 - 25 August

Perhaps my vulnerability was caused by seeing Dusty Limit's show last night. When he proudly announced that he is dead inside, my own cavernous interior echoed his words. The Girl with No Heart seems to plug into my own concerns, yet when Sparkle and Dark decorated their venue with origami cranes, the effect was more one of beauty than misery.

The Girl goes back to the nuclear assault on Hiroshima- itself a reminder of how ultimately vulnerable the entire human species is - and has a staging made entirely of paper. Despite the immensity of the subject, they tell a parable rather than a tragedy, and locate the power to build or destroy in the imagination and emotions of a young child.

The paper cranes came about because there is a Japanese legend that to fold a thousand cranes will lead to the fulfilment of a wish. Let's hope the company don't waste that wish on longing for a five star rating...

Bedlam, 3 -24 August

Five Star Shows

Once upon a time, the quest was to find that Five Star Fringe show. Yesterday, an overheard conversation:

"It's a five star show... please take a flyer."
"Everything has five stars this year. That doesn't mean anything."

Be clear: it's over. The fascination with stars is the product of a community caught in a bubble. Star ratings only have meaning to performers and critics. Audiences no longer care.

The joy of this blog is that I never worked out a way of giving star ratings. I am going to introduce "the vile rating", which will be on an arbitrary scale, or the Fibonacci Sequence. Until I do, I am going to offer opinions and creative responses. I am going to assume that readers of this blog, if they are smart enough to be interested in the work I write about (I mean, there's not much observational comedy here), are smart enough to be able to understand how a review works and go some way towards figuring out whether they's agree with me.

In the meantime, here are five shows with a tangential relationship to the word, concept or object "star".

Miriam Margoyles is a TV star, but also a brilliant actor. She stole the show at The Citizens Theatre last year in Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and her Dickens' Women has had The Skinny reaching for superlatives. Now she is getting on, she has become a National Treasure (as The Skinny's writer Lorna Irvine suggested), and that allows her to carry on how she pleases. This is a one person show, and she switches characters, rescues Dickens from my memories of A Level English and reinvigorates his image as a writer who could capture a character in a few deft strokes, even before he gave them a silly, all-so-meaningful name.

Dickens' Women can be enjoyed as either a contemplation on the great novelist and his gender politics, or a show case for one of Britain's great talents.

Pleasance Courtyard, 8 -25 August

Translunar Paradise is more about the moon than the stars, but this is its third year at the Fringe and it has been instrumental in the growth of the  Lecoq style's popularity in Edinburgh. They use masks like they were puppets and director George Mann was inspired by both his personal experiences with grief and more literary sources.

"It was reading WB Yeats’ The Tower that hardened my resolve to actually write this play," he says. "‘That being dead, we rise, dream and so create, Translunar Paradise’. Yeats’ character, an old man embittered by loss, was the man I wanted to put on stage. I wanted to take this character (and in a way, myself) on a journey that would help him to look positively at life after death." After my fascination with suicide earlier this month, it's probably a good idea for me to see this.

Pleasance Dome, 4 -27 August

George Formby was once the highest paid film star in the UK: his cheeky chappie persona took the magic of the musical hall to the magic of the movies. All players of the tiny little four string special, from Tricity Vogue to that Ukulele Orchestra which turns up on the BBC Culture Show every six months owe Formby, although they pretend not to care. Luckily, his fans have a big gathering in Blackpool every year, and that comedian who likes football did a documentary about him.

This Formby is a one man star by a former star of Matthew Bourne's very important dance company: it's no surprise that when he does a tap dance half way through (he's enacting Formby's courtship of his future wife), he's spectacular. He's got the Formby strumming syncopation off pat, too - it's surprising how jazzy the northern japester could get. There is a lovely scene where his wife teaches him how to play off the beats, and Formby's sweetness is stamped through the middle of the performance, rather like the words in... oh, sorry... a piece of Blackpool rock.

Assembly, 3- 27 August

The company are called Drawn to Stars, so they win the next place on this list. In fact, their press release turned up as I was writing this. So, good work by somebody at their office.

The release starts off badly, because it mentions star ratings, but warms me up by the end when actor Aimee Corbett admits that she is a performance artist and went to Dartington, the sadly amalgamated college which was an English nursery for all sorts of interesting characters - Scottish Live Art Super Group Fish and Game began their careers as students there.

It gets even better when they explain that Now.Here is all about the two hundred mile hobby horse ride made by Corbett and Vanessa Hammick. They picked up a bunch of stories on the way and trained them into a theatrical celebration of "boundaries and borders, long time lovers, gun owners, grannies and angry young men." 

It gets to grips with the English character - appropriately enough in this year when patriotism has made a bit of a comeback. The press release claims it is "the British character" but, frankly, they need to watch their use of that word in Scotland.

Three Sisters, 3 -26 August

My final choice has the potential to be a five star show, at least to the Vile way of thing. LAN-T003 have come from Japan, Jishin uses choreography to explore the 2011 Japanese earthquake: an ephemeral art form to examine a natural force that embodies the Buddhist idea of impermanence in a physical, immersive and immense burst? I think I'll go and see that tonight, just before I take the stage as Criticulous at Summerhall...

Zoo Southside, 3 -27 August

Exterminating Angel

Is this blog reading like a nervous breakdown yet? I haven't even arrived in Edinburgh and I am already flapping like a critic who has a choice between an eight hour Shakespeare marathon or a burlesque study of "real gender politics." So I would like to reiterate that I write in persona, an exaggerated version of my true self, and all the sardonic quips hide a desperate individual who just wants to be loved.


I did spend most of today in Edinburgh, however. I am going to give a shout out to one show because they gave me flyers on The Royal Mile, but did it with a reluctance that suggested that they would rather be performing and did not want to intrude on my stroll around the city. 


And they have this splendid eulogy from Tim Crouch, who reinvented Maevolio out of Twelfth Night in such a way that I felt compassion for the old puritan bastard.

"Exterminating Angel is one of those works that I know will influence my future thought and practice. I am already stealing from it.  It is an endlessly thoughtful piece of theatre - sharply structured and also breathtakingly free. It plays effortlessly with form, slipping under an audience's skin. It is vicious and barbed in its satire, but it is also ingenuous in its formal experimentation and narrative drive. Above all, it is its own piece of work."


It's party time for a bunch of bohemian types, and how they love each other's banter. Then they find they are locked in the dining room. Horror, or hilarity, ensues: it is difficult to say, because the cast make it up afresh, every time they perform. This might make it tough to review (could be crap tonight, great tomorrow), but it does make it fascinating. It sounds like devising and directing mastermind Jack McNamara has found a way to make improvisation more than a mere excuse for crap comedians not to bother rehearsing.


Pleasance Courtyard, August 1 -27 

Venue: Gilded Balloon Teviot – Debating Hall

Dates: 1st – 26th August Dates not performing: 13th August

Weekday tickets: £11/ £10 Weekend tickets: £10 / £9

Times:  14:00 (15:00)

Box Office: 0131 622 6552 / online www.gildedballoon.co.uk

"Bound"

by Dylan Dougherty

Discover the greater freedom that exists only within bounds

Quinn is a curious young traveler.  He has come to America to reunite with his hobo father, Banjo, to ride the rails and feel the freedom of an antiquated American West.  Quinn and his father help a teenage runaway, Winifred, catch a boxcar out of Pocatello, Idaho bound for California’s sunshine...

When the boxcar door slams and locks, and a short supply of food and water threatens their lives, their grand visions of freedom are tested.  Trapped and stopped in a cold mountain pass, than can only wait and try to understand how they into their fix.  They bond, and discover the more sane and useful freedom that exists within bounds.  

Locked in the dark belly of a boxcar, bouncing down desolate train tracks in who-knows-where America, they have something. They have each other. They are bound together. The question is, can Quinn escape his freedom?

Set aboard a timeless symbol of freedom, this world premier drama tackles the modern cult of individualism and wonders what is it to be free.

The rhythm of the rails echo in live music.  “Bound” has the feel of a story told around a campfire, a magical Americana. 

Belgian director and installation artist Christoffel Hendrickx’s works include Bad End, EVAR and DeGrottenPrins.  American playwright Dylan Dougherty’s previous, The Montana Ranch, played at 59E59 in NYC and the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe to sold out audiences 

Bound brings together Hendrickx’s Antwerpian New Wave artistry and Dougherty’s unmistakably American script, based on his time riding freight trains, for a sensual, artistic and lyrical theatrical experience.  Bound is a truly international collaboration.  Noosfeer VZW is a nonprofit arts organization based in Antwerp.  

The music is arranged and performed by Dries Bongaerts, lead singer of new rising sun.  Art Direction by Maxim Meukens.

http://www.facebook.com/events/119992031476598/

http://www.noosfeer.org/bound.html 

trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hb8DCAcG-0&feature=youtu.be

“Bound” plays at 13.00 from 2-27 August (excluding 13 August)

For further information, images and interview availability, contact Elisabeth Cappon at ec@noosfeer.org, Maxim Meukens +32474 393181 (Belgian mobile, works in Scotland)

or the C press office at 0845 260 1060 or press@cvenues.com