Knock Knock (Katie Shannon Williams)

Knock Knock showcases the working progress from Emma King and Catherine Elliot, with the support from Puppet Animation Scotland and the assistance of Physical Theatre Scotland. They share 4 short pieces which experiment with various puppetry styles and movement.

Opening with an audio of children laughing, an uneasy atmosphere is instantly created.  A young shadow puppet cries in fear as something scuttles behind the door until the performers contort their bodies. They rip the door away from the set which leads to the next piece.

This includes a baby that is dismantled in front of our eyes and as this innocent infant screams, the atmosphere becomes creepy and uncomfortable. This is lightened by two paper puppets. They were given comical personalities by the performers. By not using real words, just sounds, the audience was transported to this new little world.

The feature of the door allows the audience to question “what is behind the door?” It is the unknown that can scare us and it was apparent that this was one of the themes the company held strongly to.

Knock Knock concludes with a talk from King and Elliot. It was revealed that they want to develop it into a show for children. Yet they emphasise a thriller aspect in the project. This raises the question, is the production asking to go in another direction-possibly something too dark for children?

As a working progress, each piece looks promising. The enthusiasm that King and Elliot show proposes that it is going to be a promising time ahead.

Unchained by Paper Doll Militia (Review by Elliot Roberts)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katie Shannon Williams Talks Mr Carmen

Akhe: Mr Carmen

Inspired by Bizet’s iconic opera, Akhe: Engineering Theatre, share their visually stunning piece, Mr Carmen. Maksim Isaev and Pavel Semchenko duel with two words: Carmen and Jose.

Starting with just one spotlight on the two bearded men (one in skirt and tights); they cleverly make use of the space by transforming the stage with thin strings and boxes. They create a boxing ring out of their cat’s cradle like contraption, and then the fight of love begins.

 

The battle’s format is simple: the performers take turns at present their favoured name in increasingly spectacular ‘attacks’. Between cigars and many drinks, each attack attempts to best the previous round. Sometimes comical and consistently clever and beautiful, they find the most creative ways to produce the names, “Carmen” and “Jose”. From creating the words with cigar smoke, via lighting effects or  simply writing it on the floor with a wet cloth, the performers fight it out in the name of love.

The music aids the action by giving it emotion and allowing the story to be understood and a connection can be made more easily. By using a march beat and rows of feet drawn the on the set, a battle scene was put into place. The mutual obsession between Carmen and Jose heightens the tension and the duel becomes more aggressive. Jose’s knife stabs through the heart of Carmen. They then take a drink.

Akhe wonderfully re-create a classic story and manipulates the stage to produce, what seems to be, magic, while holding onto the essence of Bizet’s works. Mr Carmen is an unforgettable piece of visual theatre.

Avoiding Never by Searching For Always. (Holly Wedgwood)

Akhe’s Mr Carmen

Philippos Philippou on Ubu Roi

I  basically love the play.

When I started my masters at the University of Edinburgh, one of the books we studied was the Olga Taxidou’s Modernism and Performance: From Jarry to Brecht. I wondered, and I said to myself: “hmm: I know Brecht but who the hell is Jarry?” After all, I am a stage director, I have to know. That’s one of my obligations: to study, to learn, to experience new practises and theories on theatre.

What I am trying to say is that I am always curious and open to the new; I am questioning everything around me. So I went to the library, and literary I “sucked” the Ubu trilogy in a few hours. I was shocked when I discover that Alfred Jarry was 15 years old when he wrote the first draft of the play. He was just a child and he came to change the nature of theatre.

The play is very diverse and is loosely based on many classical theater plays. One can see Shakespeare’s Macbeth along with traces from Moliere and Racine. It is magical, based on slapstick humour, Grand Guignol fantasy and extreme imagination. It is a stream of images that achieved to shock and alienate the critics and the audience.

Moreover, I am fan of cartoons and animation. The play offers the chance for experimentation in its most extreme form; and for me this is what animation and visual theatre does as well. However, the play appeared at a time when Europe and France was overwhelmed by naturalism. During its dress rehearsal the play was interrupted several times. Supporters of Naturalism, artists and critics were swearing, throwing chairs etc, which made me think that there are two significant reasons to stage Ubu Roi nowadays: to see whether a play from one hundred years ago could still speak or even shock the audience today, as well as to find a new way to tell its story through the incorporation of puppets with new visual media.

So after I submitted my Master’s thesis on Ubu Roi, I decided to give it a try:  To experiment with the play/toy of a child in order to study classic theatre and New Media.

CEC company made their mark in Edinburgh at the 2014 Fringe: their Maria Addolorata was a wild, sexy duet that featured spirituality, sexuality and live beer drinking. They kick off manipulate 2015 with a visit to the Big Burns Supper, reprising Maria, before arriving at the Traverse with a new piece that takes Wagner’s final opera as a cue for a few thoughts on the tension between good and evil.

‘Wagner is very emotional and tragically ended,’ notes Carlo Massari, one of the two founders of CEC, ‘As usual, we want to ironically approach the universal dichotomy between good and evil.’ Tristissimo, the second chapter of their Trilogy of Pain is a duet that takes their mission to ‘pair down theatricality and bring truth to the stage’ and relates it to the legend of Tristan and Isolde.

‘We aim at finding rather a crude and straightforward language so that people can be shaken by it while recognising and acknowledging themselves as part of a humanity that belongs to them and that they belong to,’ Massari continues. Like Maria, Tristissimo is a duet, and is perhaps the most obviously dance based piece in the programme. Yet the dynamism of the choreography, and CEC’s insistence on chasing ‘truth’ on stage, ensures that it has more in common – at least emotionally –  with the rough energy of circus than traditional ballet or even contemporary.

 

‘Our dramaturgy stems from the body,’ Massari says. ‘It is based on physical relations and actions aimed at codifying feelings and stories of life and within our society.’ This approach is what lends their work a sense of veiled – or sometimes explicit – violence. The connection to Wagner’s vision – of total theatre, that attacks the audience through immensity and intensity – lies in the shared concern for grand themes and a theatre that is immediate and relevant. Massari’s vision for the company may lack the empire building fanaticism of Wagner (who had a special opera house built for his works), but refuses meek ambition.

‘Our new works are engendered by intuitions, by the desire to speak about something in particular like visions of today’s world, hope, or future pessimisms.’

 

Bestiaires (Phil Wilson)

It turns out Cupid is a comically jaded, peroxide blond. Contrary to many a sickly sweet painting, the god of desire comes swaddled in a dishevelled suit, a vibrant thatch of facial hair and punctuates his colloquy with animated nips from a poorly concealed half bottle.

But more importantly: his feet remain firmly on the ground, often in a bid to adroitly manipulate a slew of unnerving, inanimate foam deities.

If this is sounding anything akin to poorly formed negative criticism, then I apologise; it’s actually poorly formed positive criticism. Duda Paiva Company’s contemporary twist on Greek mythology (financial crises, throbbing underworld electro music and loaded six-shooters present and accounted for) is an enlivening feat of dedication, precision and intricate puppetry.

Amid farcical infatuations, flamboyant dialogue and enthralling dance, is a towering taste of the sinister: a complex sequence of physical surefootedness depicting, in her full serpentine splendour, Medusa (puppet) throttling the flailing Athena (living, breathing human) is a difficult image to brush aside.

This could be a result of the show’s mechanics appearing in such a transparent manner. Cupid spends a large portion of his performance elbow deep between Persephone’s breasts in order to contort her torso in such a way as to reject his advances. It’s quite a sight.

Such a sight, in fact, that the audience is invited on stage, post-performance, to inspect and claw at the prone puppets themselves. As such, I can now proudly state that I’ve playfully tickled the distended belly of Hades.

By its very nature, Bestiaires is a lesson in excited disarray – although masterful in its physicality, its facetious tone threatens to unravel some of the tightly choreographed atmosphere. A lengthy, blunt monologue on the versatility of the word ‘fuck’ (pondered by the jiggling head of Zeus) feels abjectly misplaced.

However, even this one, tepid, criticism becomes somewhat moot when the same musing cranium later regurgitates Athena moments before she flourishes into celestial dance.

Bestiaires is an indefatigable, cracked examination; not only of Greek mythology, but also of the intricacies of humanity through its fascination with lust, desire, power and brutality – albeit, by way of divine beings.

Technically mesmerising and relentlessly enjoyable, it’s a performance that’s difficult to forget, and all too easy to admire; if only for Cupid’s fully loaded Eastwood moment with his shooter..

 

 

My Top Five Manipulate Moments

Coming in at number five, we have the invitation by a bewigged Cupid to the audience to ‘come and have a feel of the puppets’ (Bestiares). Only moments earlier, when the performers took their bow, I turned to Elliot Roberts and asked ‘where are the other two?’ before realising that Hades and Persephone were, in fact, the foamy objects on the stage and not, in fact, real people.

At number four, it’s Paper Doll Militia’s name. Sure, they are great at the aerial action, swinging on silks and spinning through the air, but the mash-up of hardcore action and gentle childhood toy makes their name one of the most evocative tags since cabaret-punk or progressive rock. But unlike the latter, they delivered on the promise.

An odd entry at number three: not getting tickets to Grit. I might have been sorry to miss the show – a moving reflection on war and childhood, but it is wonderful that a Scottish based company are selling out at a festival that has plenty of international presence. 

In at two, there’s Lonely Bones in the Tilt your Thinking compilation of animated shorts. I have always wanted to know what would happen if Nick Cave made a feature with David Lynch, and Rosto’s disorientating journey through multiple animation techniques, leering ghosts and vague occultists felt like a jam between a group of surrealists and the cast of the grand guignol.

But coming out at the top of the charts, it has to be the monstrous moment of monolithic mayhem when Planet Luvos went underwater and the five dancers became twisted creatures with hands for legs and bottoms for eyes. Neither horrific nor soothing, the contortions went beyond being impressive to staking out new ground for manipulation of the human body.

Planet Luvos (review by Loic G. Lalande)

Blue, it’s going to be blue.

Black and blue of the still empty stage waiting for the last piece of the festival to unfold.

A pile of hundreds of little blue blocks, three blue buckets hanging to the ceiling high above, blue smoke.

Ding dong, welcome to Planet Luvos.

In 70 minutes, I am going to leave the theatre in a very curious state: bumpy emotions, strange feelings and the knowledge that this work is unique. Yes, find me another dance piece where the emphasis of the choreographer is strongly – and radically – on the backs, feet and bottoms of the performers’ body.

Good luck, the only reference I have for such a different work is by Les Gens d‘Uterpan company.

Planet Luvos features a cast of five female performers in a very strong and physically demanding work by Editta Braun company. Far beyond regular patterns of dance performances, a very precise choreography unfolds with a narrative, a purpose, a statement: this is a human devolution – from the absurdity and the slavery of the machine to the peace and unity of primitive states.

There are clearly two distinct parts in the piece. First: earthlings, boiler suits, dance movements and physicality subtly inviting to focus on irregular dancers’ body parts whilst keeping  within the canon of choreography with lines into spaces, geometric disposition of the dancers, and a quite common fluidity of movement and expression. Through an echo of Orwell’s 1984, the narrative drifts to mammals ape like vocabulary with the dancers hunting and gathering pieces of a painting, too small for such a large stage –  but I can still guess it’s some sort of a wave. Pleasant, but the strong impression from the start of the piece has faded slightly, until…

Now a pile of blue blocks is scattered all over the stage, in a feline circular move by a soloist. She dances in what the soundtrack strongly suggests is the sea. It’s a feature of Planet Luvos to have this very present soundtrack that stirs emotions and imagery, slightly too grossly at times and reducing the scope for imagination.

The four other bodies enter the back of the stage, in a staggering line of larvae slugging their way and shedding their skins. Part two has begun; visual, intense, imaginative and sensual floor work.

Only feet, legs, bottoms and backs of the bodies. The human specie has disappeared, literally. So have my regular patterns of thoughts. The imagination enters an aquatic inviting space with a succession of creatures highlighted by the shapes, the move or the line of a body part, the subtle, slow and calculated motions… A protean bestiary where the bold and the intense mix with peaceful and harmonious emotions. The discreet light work stresses the intention and the invitation back into a primitive, cellular state.

The piece ends, the three blue buckets are still hanging to the ceiling high above. I am hanging a bit as well, somewhere possibly higher and lighter.

Blue, it was going to be blue.

Planet Luvos is well worth visiting.