Reflections on Arika, 85A

Three shows under consideration, each worthy of far more discussion and all having been previewed on The Vile Arts Radio Hour: 85a's masterful night of Svankmajer, an evening of ritual and psychogeography (both affiliated to the Glasgow Film Festival) and Episode 2 of Arika's exploration of "the experimental festival." They all share an interest in jumping across platforms (film meets visual art meets performance art, film meets music meets magick and music meets academia meets performance art meets nihilism respectively) and happened in a short time span (four days), thereby proving that Glasgow is still the Capital of Culture.

For Glasgow Film Festival 2012' "Crossing the line" program, 85A ecstatically present the work of genius Czech filmmaker, Jan Svankmajer, in all its demented glory! Each short film showcased this evening will be housed inside specially constructed theatres, coaxing his surreal imagery off the screen and into life before you!
Tailor-made installations, costumed performers, a cosy bar, all beckon you ‘down to the cellar’, and with the main cinema-space ultimately transforming into a thumping discothèque… a night at the megaplex, this is not! Přijít! Vidět! Slyšet!

85A are looking increasingly like the heirs to the great Glasgow Miracle - assuming that the anti-art law doesn't lead to a mass exodus of creatives to Berlin. A collective of talents based in the visual arts, 85A have been busy making films, building installations and events - including The Phantom Band's Christmas special at Stereo - and settled into The Glue Factory as a home. Svankmajer was a natural choice for them: surreal in his mixture of live action and animation, he gives personality and soul to inanimate objects without losing a dark, even sinister atmosphere. And while the film selections were imaginative and thrilling - his big hits like Alice were eschewed for a rounded retrospective - it was 85a's design of The Glue Factory that pulled away from the "night at the multiplex".

Crackin' and Strippin'

One of my fondest hopes for the burlesque and cabaret revival was that it would rejuvenate contemporary theatre. When acts like Dusty Limits – and many of the striptease artists coming out of the amateur scene – consciously evoke the Weimar Republic, they recognised that vaudeville was more than mere entertainment, and that parody could have a political, sharp edge.

You see, what I am doing here is showing my working. This an interview I did with Peter Scott-Presland for the article I intend to write about striptease.

Scott-Presland was very generous with his answers, and it seems a shame to just take the tiny bit that interested me (it is the stuff about hen parties being dirty). But by editing it for online, this counts as research for my article.

I also reckon the tag “male strippers” ought to have fooled a few readers into coming onto the blog. But read on... it gets really filthy.

But I am going to start with the Press Release, for background...

HOMO PROMOS PRESENTS

 “A CRACKING PIECE OF FRINGE THEATRE”

Strip Search – a solo performance piece for male stripper, by Peter Scott-Presland.  SQUADDIE is stripping tonight, in a B-list gay bar; he is also stripping his soul, to the bone.  As he slips back and forth between his real-time strip routine and memories of borstal, of tours in Iraq, and of surviving on the streets post-discharge from the Army, we get a moving and angry picture of a man trying to better himself in a life which gave him no lucky breaks, with ironic contrasts between the real-life soldier and the military fantasy of his entertainment.  Fantasy and reality combine in a savage climax.  This is a heavily revised version of a script first presented in 2010.

Venue 36, Theatre 2, the Space on North Bridge, Carlton Hotel, EH1 1SD.

Previews: Fri – Sat, 5th – 6th August;  Main run: Mon 8th  - Sat 20th Aug 9.05pm

Titus Rowe was Boyz Magazine Stripper of the Year 2009, but has also a parallel career as an actor and singer, having appeared in parts as diverse as the Pirate King in “Pirates of Penzance” and Dionysus in “The Bacchae”.  It was this range of skills which prompted Peter Scott-Presland to write Strip Search for Titus.

Peter Scott-Presland has won Edinburgh Fringe Firsts for “Woody Shavings” and “Sir Herbert Macrae – A Tribute”, as well as being nominated for Best Musical in the “Plays and Players” Awards and in the Canadian DORAs, for Dorothy’s Travels.  His musical La Ronde is currently on the shortlist for the 2011 “Offies”. 

Homo Promos has mounted over 20 plays and musicals since its inception in 1988.  It is the oldest gay theatre company in the UK.  It aims to present LGBT themes in an entertaining way which is also accessible to a diverse audience.  Out of the ghetto and onto the stage!

First of all - why did you use striptease as a central part of this performance?

It's a long story!  I was directing a show with the Company from Hell, and the only person in the cast who was reliable, friendly and talented was Titus Rowe; he let slip he actually earned his money as a male stripper.  From then on his life was made hell by a couple of the cast, who said he couldn't be a "real" actor because of this.  Now, I've always thought a lot of skill went into creating a strip act, and he was Boyz Stripper of the Year, so I thought "You c---ts, I'll show you", and devised a show which combined his talents, and blew out of the water the notion that a stripper couldn't be a real actor.

There are three reasons why strip is essential to this show.  Firstly, the guy is baring his soul to the audience, his struggle to make up for a shitty life - I won't give away all the plot -and so the physical strip is a metaphor for his psychological strip, the journey of discovery for the character and the audience.  Secondly, one of my main complaints about one-person plays where characters tell their life stories is that there is so little conflict in them; where's the classic drama structure of conflict and resolution acted out?  Putting in a real strip gives an additional dramatic tension - "will he or won't he?" - to the story.  Finally, as a gay man I've always been very anti-military and not very patriotic either, and so I was intrigued by the way military images are so much part of the sexual fantasies of many gay men.  This show plays on the gap between the reality and fantasy, in that the character has been a soldier in real life, and is playing out a military fantasy at the same time.

The play jumps between "light entertainment" - the striptease fantasy - and something much harder - the past of the main character. how far is this show a serious play about issues, or something lighter and funnier?

I think I've answered that to some extent.  Don't worry, there are quite a few good jokes in the script, but it is a serious play, and quite shocking and harrowing in places.  When we did previews, there was an element in the audience of gay men who came along to see a spectacularly good-looking hunk get his kit off, but by the time we got to the nitty-gritty, they were so into the story and the character that they were looking at his face, not his dick.  And that's how it should be.

How do you feel about the revival of striptease as an acceptable form of entertainment, through the burlesque revival and so on?

You have to separate gay male experience from heterosexual or lesbian experience here.  Stripping is dying on the gay scene.  Twenty years ago there were a dozen strippers making a good living from touring a well-established pub circuit.  The availability of sex and porn on the internet has changed all that.  For lesbians, girl-for-girl strippers are a way of asserting sexuality which for so long was assumed not to exist.  If you know dykes today, they are revelling in the power and freedom to pull - they're just as slutty as the boyz have always been!  The heterosexual burlesque revival is something else again - it involves camp and glamour and is very knowing and post-modern.  But again I think you have to separate young women - a lot of them drama students or ex-drama students - doing burlesque to an essentially theatrical audience, from the Eastern European girls working the Soho strip joints and the so-called "gentlemen's clubs" in a much harsher environment and driven by economic necessity.

Is there a particular aesthetic or social context to male striptease for gay audiences that is not present in heterosexual striptease?

People who strip for gay audiences as well as for hen nights tell me that gay audiences are much better behaved.  The hens are merciless, and much dirtier!  I think this is partly because gay strip nights are a regular weekly thing - Monday Karaoke, Tuesday Quiz, Wednesday Stripper - whereas a hen night is usually something special, a one-off, and much more an excuse for letting your hair down and letting off steam.  For gay men who follow strip nights there's more of an aesthetic, plus there's the aspirational aspect: I could have a body like that, if only I could get my lardarse down to the gym.  Our most appreciative audiences have been women and gay men.  I think straight men find male strippers threatening, though I can assure them that they won't get ravished in the third row in this show!

Vanishing - but where's the Point?

After the National Theatre of Scotland, and possibly The Oran Mor’s Play, Pie and Pint programme, Vanishing Point might be the most important theatre company in Scotland. Certainly, they are the most consistently experimental group working on a large scale: that I don’t particularly enjoy this outing doesn’t mean that I am ignoring their reach and worth.

Interiors was self-consciously a chamber piece, concentrating on a family reunion. Saturday Night revisits this intimate territory, narrowing down to a brief sequence in a couple’s life. Time is condensed, a technique familiar from Greek tragedy which confused Aristotle into presenting “the unity of time” as a feature of drama, so that significant events – moving in together, the joy of unexpected pregnancy, the rather brutal birth and the decay of affection – are bundled into a single evening. If the finale suggests that the action comes from the memories of a mysterious older woman – she holds the same cuddly toy that the young woman brings into the new house – Saturday Night refuses to admit easy interpretation. The slow intrusion of the uncanny, which climaxes in the invasion of a group of chimpanzees, suggests a horror story about the decline of civilisation. The petty problems of house-keeping, such as a leaking roof, are given an occult, sinister, symbolism. Even the intrusive neighbours seem to be more surreal than naturalistic obstacles to domestic bliss.

The underlying tension between the realism of the couple’s activities and the cosmic implications of the distractions does undermine the play’s immediacy. Coupled with the stunning set – Kai Fisher has repeated his trick from Interiors, of encasing a house in glass, creating a literal fourth wall between the audience and players. The emotional distance between the audience and actors is never resolved. Even the nudity and toilet scenes are given a sterility, and director Andrew Lenton is moving far away from the fashion for immersive theatre, with all its immediacy and complicity.

Pamela Carter’s script has her distinctive, disorientating atmosphere. Scenes and themes merge uncomfortably: the drama of a positive pregnancy test fades into a comic bathroom privacy turn. The distressing birth – a woman alone on the toilet floor – is played out next to the father’s joyful stoner session. Carter’s skill, even shorn of words, is the awkward juxtaposition, of using actors like dancers, shifting from one scene to the next without causality, without progress. It is disjointed, consciously, and unsettling.

Yet Vanishing Point never disappear into raw, aggressive surrealism. The tone is measured, incongruously, and warm. Perhaps this prevents the presence of hostile primates becoming too disturbing, or leaves the periodic intrusions of commentary from the television toothless.

This distance from the performance prevents any real compassion, or engagement, with the character’s dilemmas: in doing so, it recalls the shock tactics of 1960s theatre, without the brutal impact. Artaud, a key influence on The Theatre of Cruelty, advocated a theatre that reminds humanity of those forces beyond Mankind that control it: he also rejected the written word for a theatre of screaming. Without the screaming, Vanishing Point’s theatre is undeniably cruel and pictures a world where the human is no longer in control. Saturday Night is a puzzle, a theatre of death and dream that refuses to shock or scare, but meditates on the absurdity of existence. 

The Boy Looked at Johnny

Johnny Woo repeatedly reminds the audience that he is “alt. Drag perf. Art”. Whether this means pairing a beard and killer heels – simultaneously undermining the drag queen perfection, or adding a spoonful of surrealism to routines that increasingly abandon the traditional drag skills of impersonation for something more oblique and cutting, Woo is unafraid to risk amiability in a show that moves towards absurdism.

Woo’s power is based on the tension between drag and live art. The highly strung persona – he screams “don’t touch me” before dragging one audience member into a routine closer to a stag show – transcends the casual cattiness of more, ahem, mainstream drag, heading into neurosis and disorientation. And when Woo adds a social commentary, as in the aggressive techno encore, which challenges homophobic abuse, or in a waking dream of retail work, Woo marries the glamour of drag and the immediacy of performance art.

Managing to reference drag iconography – like Priscilla’s trailing dress – and wandering into more distressing territory – the wild night out he promises frequently turns into chaos, Woo is confident and capable of integrating minor problems into his act. The failure to finish one tongue twister becomes like the juggler who deliberately drops a ball: it’s hard to tell when Woo is undercutting polished professionalism or dealing with genuine miscues from the music maestro. After ten years in the business, Woo is collating various routines, a snapshot of a decade at the line between entertainment and more serious concerns. It’s a deadly combination, and no-one can get more sensuality and emotion from a gorilla mask and long legs than Johnny Woo. 

More Martyrs...

A good two years after the fuss about “the cabaret revival” has died down, a selection of artists are thinking about taking it to the next stage. Even Des O’Connor, who could happily work out the rest of his life seeking cheeky songs to high class variety audiences, has started on a more serious piece – his Once Bitten is a work-in-progress that plays with his jolly MC persona to explore a mid-life romantic crisis. And while Dusty Limits has been toying with audiences for a while – his persona was always hinting at a dark past and a path of decadent rebellion, the polemics of object manipulator Mat Ricardo against X-Factor and the trivialisation of entertainment into a circus of social Darwinism suggest that cabaret is becoming home to the political malcontent.

The current tour of Apocalypse by the Occasional Cabaret has seen some of the old hands getting back into the game: Occasional Cabaret is the latest incarnation of Benchtours, who can recall the vitality of Edinburgh’s Cafe Graffiti. The short revival of Wildcat and 7:84 in 2011’s Mayfesto added novelist and young spark Alan Bissett to their line-up, while dusting off their more satirical numbers. The National Theatre of Scotland is yet to fall for the vaudeville virus, but Scottish Opera made a successful alliance with burlesque juggernaut Club Noir at the 2010 Fringe. Add to this the natural sympathy between Scottish live art institution Mischief La Bas, and Dance Base’s support of Blonde Ambition’s narrative length burlesques – again hosted by O’Connor and starring Gypsy Charms, the mother of Scottish burlesque – and the vision of Linden Tree, to have cabaret taken as seriously as theatre – is already healthy.

The Creative Martyrs, formerly masters of the knowing routine, are undoubtedly Glasgow’s brightest hope for an integrated cabaret theatre. Tales from a Cabaret, despite being stuck in Fingers Piano Bar, has gathered support over two Fringes, and their recent version at The Art Club demonstrated how far the duo have come since their early days as a cheeky turn at The Rio Cafe’s Spangled.  Based on The Martyrs' mythical history, it concentrates on the tale of two turns in a fictional nation where decadent enthusiasm slowly gives way to  state-controlled art.

If the genius of The Martyrs is their fusion of some very experimental mime techniques, sinister story-telling and sarcastic sing-alongs , the strength of Tales comes from its ability to merge the bureaucratic horrors of Eastern communism with the shifting strategies of modern technology to control the market. The List begins as a charming parody of Facebook’s enthusiasm for collecting information, before slipping into a more oppressive atmosphere.

 The heroes of Tales, a dancer of ambiguous sexuality and an escape artist dragged deeper into government approved circles, are caught up in forces beyond their comprehension: Jakob and Gustav Martyr never lose their sardonic glee, even as they celebrate the coming end of individuality.

Their finale may offer a glimmer of hope, but The Martyrs’ vision of a society under total control is frightening and contains more satirical punch than anything from a major Scottish theatre company. Without ever reducing themselves to lazy, left-wing sloganeering, The Martyrs are a reminder of how entertainment can retain a sharp edge.