Coriolanus

He he he – he said anus

By the way whatever did happen to Beavis and Butthead?

Anyway down to the matter at hand, which is, in the first instance, how to dress properly for the theatre. These people have the right idea (behind the lady with the fat arse):

He – in crisp shirt and smart blazer. She - in kimono, full obi sash, white ankle socks, and delicate slippers.

Obviously he could equally be sensible attired in kimono, sash etc.

Ah yes I was at the Barbican (along with many ladies of the Japanese diaspora, the majority of whom were splendidly turned out in extremely expensive designer clothing) for The Ninagawa Company’s production of Coriolanus. Three and a half hours of a Shakespeare play I am not familiar with, in Japanese, with (very fast) English surtitles (well strictly speaking side titles (note to self: must stop using so many brackets)). Bliss

As one would expect the stage was spectacular, dominated by monumental stone steps with a series of sliding screens at the top. Behind the shimmering metallic curtain lay…another curtain, which was mirrored, reflecting the audience back upon itself, and which would turn see-through depending on the lighting.

all the world's a stage - taken at half time
The play, set in Rome, was staged as a Samurai drama, which worked really well, not just because of the several battle scenes (which used most of the 40 plus cast with some great sword fighting action) but also because Coriolanus’ fatal flaw is his holding himself to an unrealistic idea of “nobility” (those Samurai were nothing if not beholden to codes of conduct).

In many ways this was a straight telling of the story; the costumes and stage-set worked with rather than re-wrote the original. Whether it was because I had to watch the play with one and a half eyes on the side titles, or, as I suspect, was much to do with the nature of the play, I couldn’t get that emotionally involved with the drama.

Coriolanus is a man who loves his mum, superbly played by Kayoko Shiraishi who stole the show in the climactic finale as she begs Coriolanus to desist from destroying Rome. Her acting was full of the precision and nuances of Noh theatre, with deliberate positioning of head, neck, hand and body.

Other highlights included a couple of excellent horses – initially so lifelike that I thought they were real, and the scene where Menenius, snubbed by Coriolanus, covers himself in his black cloak and slides down the stairs, as liquid as any of the spirits in Spirited Away.

All that was left was for the tumultuous final fight to the death, and a spectacular spray of blood as gory as any manga, and everyone toddled off to the tube happy.

The jasmine plant

Of all the strange impulse purchases, a jasmine plant! They were ill equipped to wrap it in the shop – a brown paper bag and some wrapping looped over the top and stapled to the bag was the best that they could do.

I managed to get the seat on the bus by the gantry area for wheelchairs and luggage or for just packing more people in.

The heady scent of jasmine filled the lower deck.

My plant was in constant peril as people crushed in. At times I sat with one arm high around the plant, the other on the bar in front of my seat. A schoolboy with a packed rucksack swung around towards me, but my defensive position allowed me to swat him away.

An elderly woman with dyed red-brown hair scraped back into a pony tale kept looking around, nose in the air, sniffing. Then I overheard her asking someone where we were. I was disappointed that she was sniffing for traces of our location rather than for the origin of the sensual scent emanating from my plant. I was ready to discuss my plant with her.

Even the woman I was sat next to showed no interest in my plant. Every five minutes or so she would flick her ‘phone open and listen into it, waiting for a message than never came.

I watched a feathery collection of spores (dandelion?) float over my left shoulder from behind me and swim in the stale-breathy currents around near where I sat. My hands being occupied, I was helpless; all I could do was to try and blow the spores away. They caught a drift towards a woman standing by the door and settled on the dark blue of her coat. They soon took flight again, gliding back towards the plant, before changing their mind and coming to a rest on the other sleeve of the blue coat.

Back home, I picked away at the staples and peeled off the wrapping, before leaning over and bringing the plant out of the brown paper bag. I placed it in a sheltered spot and took a deep breath of its dizzying, intoxicating perfume, drawing the scented air down through my lungs, into my midriff, and then down into my feet, into the very earth beneath me.

Delicate Jasmine petals
On a crowded bus
My arm protects you

The Wonderful World of Dissocia

Currently playing at the Royal Court, the Wonderful World of Dissocia really is a wonderful piece of theatre. It is a game of two halves. In the first, we see Lisa Jones (played by Christine Entwhisle) descend into psychosis, her inner mind made physical on stage, as she visits the land of Dissocia – it is a world of floor to ceiling carpet, a barrage of colour and noise and craziness – like Alice in Wonderland with sex and drugs says writer and director Anthony Neilson perhaps a little hopefully. The second part is very different, with Lisa drugged up and confined to hospital – the stage is shrunk in all directions, the colour scheme all white, the action slow, sketches of near nothingness, flickering in and out. This is as much a realisation of Lisa’s internal world as the first act. Particularly effective are the heightened sounds: of footsteps along the hospital corridor; of Lisa’s pills rattling in a little plastic cup. We learn that the psychogenic fugue state of the first act was the result of Lisa choosing not to take her medication. At the end, colour returns to the stage to leave us “in little doubt” (says the programme) that Lisa will return to Dissocia.

The bloke behind me found everything in the first act incredibly and irritatingly hilarious – he would laugh loudly and pompously for much longer than was necessary, often drowning out the actor’s next line. For me, the skill of the play was that for all the madcap fun of the first half, there was always a reminder of something perhaps sinister, certainly disturbing – it was all a bit too frenetic. Conversely, many in the audience grew restless and fidgety in the second act, but I found there to be a quiet, formalistic, minimalist beauty to the staging.

Nielson’s play veers close to a number of potential pitfalls – that it might glamorise or patronise mental illness, or that it might revert to cliché and dogma in questioning the treatment of the mentally ill and the behaviour of others to them. These are skilfully negotiated, not by avoiding them but by allowing complexity into the play – for example there is warmth and humanity to the hospital scenes despite the dramatisation of Lisa’s sense-deadening medication.

The genius to this play was that it was sufficiently open to allow one to extrapolate its themes to the wider question of the modern malaise – mental fracturedness as metaphor for societal brokenness – the boredom of everyday life that causes so many to seek their own kingdoms of Dissocia in the form of binges of drink and drugs and sexual debauchery. It exposes and manipulates an audience weaned on trite mock-surrealist comedy that finds hilarity in meaningless random associations, where mad and crazy are terms of endearment, an audience in need of constant sensation and stimulation, that have lost the ability to sit quietly and to concentrate on quiet things, that have lost the ability to think.

Chernobyl: the amazing truth. Did a UFO save half of Europe from nuclear disaster?

"Chernobyl: the amazing truth. Did a UFO save half of Europe from nuclear disaster?"

So says an e mail from my friends the Inner Potential Centre in Fulham advertising a talk by Richard Lawrence on the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster,"which many believe would have been far worse were it not for direct intervention by a UFO. Incredible though it may sound, this fact is supported by information released by the Russian newspaper Pravda, which revealed that hundreds of people witnessed a UFO over the faulty reactor on the very day of the accident. Richard will be talking about why he believes extraterrestrial intelligences saved Europe from what could have been unprecedented devastation, focusing on the information revealed through his remarkable spiritual teacher Dr George King, who claimed contact with beings from other worlds for over forty years."

I can't remember who it was who said that when the media put things in the form of a question (the "not the nine o clock news" book famously did this with the strapline "Is the Shah Really Dead?" on its cover) the answer, 9 times out of 10, is no.

The Secret Public

I was too young, fat, Mancunian, Jewish and heterosexual to have gone to the legendary nightclub Taboo, and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten past the bitchy doormen in the M&S slacks which counted for leisurewear in my schooldays, but the interesting thing for me is that I should have wanted to go – this, I thought, was what grown up life should be about – decadent, creative, bohemian, full of strange and wonderful people doing strange and wonderful things, a world of clubbing and clothes, piercings and tattoos, women with bobs and men with boobs. It felt like something important was happening, and 20 years on it still feels like something important did happen.

Last Days of the British Underground 1978 – 1988, an exhibition at the ICA, features all the usual and welcome suspects – including Michael Clark, Derek Jarman, Trojan, Charles Atlas, Gilbert And George, Mark E Smith and the Fall, Bodymap et al – a filigree spider's web of an artistic community where ideas, media, bodily fluids and artistic endeavours were freely swapped. And towering over and above all others remains the great mass of flesh that was Leigh Bowery.

What was going on was as much about lifestyle as art, lifestyle as performance, performance as art, and consequently the exhibition does not so much show much art (there being in truth little such art to show) but rather recordings of the art that was made – for example a film of Leigh Bowery’s performances at the d’Offay Gallery in 1988, in which Bowery does what he would have done anyway on a night out on the old town, namely wear outrageous clothes and pose and preen, gestures turned into art by sheer force of personality and will.

In another room sit rows of tvs (televisions not transvestites) showing films made at the time, the highlight being Charles Atlas’s film of Michael Clark and Company – “Because We Must” - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc2iY_SdAos&mode=related&search – a reminder of how exuberant and exciting Clark’s work was at this time, full of cheek and energy, sexy but strange, dark and sometimes menacing.

The exhibition programme suggests that this was the last group of artists to remain genuinely underground before the rise of the “consumer environment” and the “flattening of subcultural manifestations” but, albeit in an unintended way, these artists were the fathers of the modern condition – their concerns – fashion, lifestyle, style, individualism, narcism, live for the moment for tomorrow we die (which many did of course) – evolved into the concerns of the modern day consumer world – designer became brand became hundreds of people queuing round the block and fighting to get into Primark, men in skirts and make-up evolved into the billion pound men’s cosmetics industry, clubbing begat acid house begat mass uniformity of music and behaviour, decadence spread into the easy sex and drugs culture that exists in so much of Britain today (but sadly not Finchley). But one should not ignore the extraordinary conflagration of talent and originality that made this set of people so unique and this exhibition such an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

And it should not be forgotten that those who survived continue to make interesting work - Charles Atlas features regularly on this weblog, Michael Clark is in year 3 of his residency at the Barbican, and people are raving about the Fall’s current album.

Pictures of Taboo taken from http://www.geocities.com/bellkahn/menuleighbowery.html

CocoRosie

Adventures in CocoRosieland

Ahh and so it came to pass that the long awaited weekend finally arrived when the Casady sisters (Sierra and Bianca) would once again inveigle my mind body and spirit with readings from their latest dousing of the sacred feminine collective unconsciousness.

First a new album of kindertotenlieder, called The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn. Building on (Sierra’s spin off project) the Metallic Falcons’ Desert Donuts album (one of last year’s finest), The Adventures of… has a more open, outdoor texture, reflecting the psychogeography of its conception - a boat in the arctic circle, a farm in the south of France. The sound is less cluttered, and although there are some background colourings of animal noises and children’s toy instruments, they are used more sparingly than on previous albums. The dominating element is Sierra’s voice, which ranges from macabre operatics to pure tone angelic loveliness.

As Sierra says in Useless Magazine (because life is longer than you think) “I’ve used my voice to connect with the community around me to kind of feel out in which ways and with whom I’ve been connected in past lives and what is my karmic situation now.”

My karmic situation was in constant peril at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire for the sisters’ only UK appearance. The Bush was crowded, visibility was poor, but the sound was excellent. Fittingly the photos I took had a somewhat ghostly appearance, given that the sisters current talk is of “graveyard disco” and “Victorian hip-hop”. Sierra seemed to be summoning spirits direct from a Victorian table turning séance with Arthur Conan Doyle, whilst Bianca, in boyish military uniform with sexy slip underneath, teased the lust boys and girls at the front.

The highlights as always were “By your side”, the mystery happy dance-y song we now know to be called “Japan”, and the unbearably sexy cover of Kevin Lyttle’s Soca classic “Turn me on”. Every CocoRosie gig is different, and this one, in the spirit of the album, felt more acoustic, more classical, more spacious, more cerebral maybe and less purely emotional.

But whichever CocoRosie incarnate appear, it is always wonderful.

Much CocoRosie on youtube but there's a 6 part documentary starting at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjRZmpLs5EY&mode=related&search= and a lovely turn me on at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2hoP9CllbI

Jeppe Hein

My trip to the Barbican was not a complete write-off as it gave me another chance to see Jeppe Hein’s installation in the Curve Gallery. It is a fascinating piece. Entering the gallery triggers the movement of a large white ball, which commences a journey of wonderment around the space. Lifted by a pulley mechanism, the ball rolls along an overhead walkway which starts to twist and turn; at the far end of the gallery it rolls down a spiral path before its return journey. The return leg is where the magic happens – at one point the ball rolls along a see saw, which drops to stop the ball, before gravity takes over; elsewhere speed and vicious spin are injected so that the ball stops and rolls back up the ramp until gravity again takes over. The ball ends up back in a queue at the start.

Whilst I wasn’t convinced that the slides at the Tate really were “art”, I am equally convinced that this is. It’s my blog and I can be as subjective as I like, and if you don’t like it I can always take my ball home with me. Why I think its art is because of the mental stimulation of the piece. Whilst I watched the progress of my ball, the following went through my head.

Construction / engineering – what a remarkable mechanism this is, as intricate and balanced as any sculpture, and beautiful to watch.

Narrative – the ball’s journey had tension, drama, a sense of time and place, well paced, with twists and turns to keep you interested.

Sound – there was the clanking of the pulleys, the whirring of the ball when the centrifugal forces were applied, the restful clicking as the ball came to a rest nestling against the previous ball.

Fascination – the experience grew rather than diminished with a second viewing.

Go see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJmXw0pnOmU

Francoise Berlanger – Penthesilea - Barbican

Hmmm.

This was a dreadful piece of experimental theatre; self indulgent and showing contempt for the audience.

As we enter the theatre, the stage is swathed in dry ice, and ominous processed electronic drones fill the air. With the audience still taking their seats and the houselights up, a naked woman with a bow (but no arrow) roams the stage, occasionally confronting the audience. The naked woman is Francoise Berlanger and this is essentially a one woman show, backed by the two laptop musicians, and some paintings above the stage by Berlanger’s brother Marcel.

At some point the lights dim, the naked woman dons a black tuxedo jacket and rather nice long frilly black dress, and does her best to make the text completely incomprehensible. Randomly, words are screeched, squealed or shouted, in an array of weird accents. She particularly enjoys saying the word “horse” over and over again. A large section is in the German of the Von Kleist text that the performance is based on. All the while the electronic drones try their hardest to drown out the words.

All of this was quite deliberate, as became clear in the after-show talk. Berlanger said she was more interested in exploring how the words sounded than what the text meant. The talk was chaired by Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for the Guardian. Yes said Lyn it was almost as if it didn’t matter if you couldn’t follow the text. Well it did matter, because there was noting else going on on stage to tell the story. Lyn purred how the production seemed to be an all out assault on the audience, which it was – all around me people were suffering from the dry ice, menacing drones, and Berlanger’s incomprehensible howling. Lyn seemed to think this was a good thing. But it wasn’t. It was neither interesting nor original, nor did it in any way relate to the content of the play, which from what I can make out revolved around love and loss and killing what you most hold dear (by eating them apparently, from what Berlanger said, not that there was any evidence of this on stage).

Penthesilea is part of the Spill festival of experimental theatre, live art and performance. It is organised by director Robert Pacitti, frustrated at the lack of opportunities to stage experimental theatre in the capital. Yes well that is a moot point. Look at some of the things I have been to of late – Faust, Platonov, Yabbok, Doo Cot – all experimental, all good.

Lets compare with some of the other events at Spill (quotes being from the Spill brochure): Eve Bonneau “uses the body as live matter in constant transformation…with its flux/reflux of interior rhythms” – meaning she crawls about naked on the floor illuminating her body with a single lightbulb; Hancock and Kelly’s Tattoo during which Traci Kelly continues “to have the length of her back tattooed in a pattern drawn from the wallpaper of [collaborator] Richard Hancock’s childhood home”; Untitled (Syncope) where Kira O’Reilly “employs…biomedical and biotechnical practices to consider the body as material, site and metaphor in which narrative threads of the personal, sexual, social and political knot and unknot in shifting permutations” meaning she cuts herself on stage with a scalpel.

One word sums this up for me. Why. Why do it? Why go and watch it? And look at what is really going on. In these types of shows it is always women, never men, who find themselves parading naked and self harming – this is little more than cerebral lapdancing for students of Gender or Queer Studies.

That’s why you can’t get bookings Mr Pacitti, because these types of performance are not only terribly clichéd almost to the point of self-parody (and there is nothing contemporary or new about them even if the surface trappings of electronica or digital media are new) but because, when boiled down to it, they are not very good, and because to mask their not being very good, the performers go out of their way to alienate the audience. Contrast the wonder that was Faust (and every bit as experimental, by the way) which was all about the audience, bringing the audience into the show, with what Berlanger said about wanting to work in a very open space, so that it was very easy for the audience to leave if they wanted to.

Remind me again what the emperor's new clothes looked like.


The Spill website is at http://www.spillfestival.com/ and their blog is http://www.spilloverspill.blogspot.com/

the red death is coming

http://www.thereddeathiscoming.com/

I can barely wait.

contrary to what they say - tickets are already on sale to those who are on the national theatre or punchdrunk mailing list.

got mine.

Do they know it's Pesach?

Ah yes, another Pesach is upon is, and not just an excuse for me to dig out the picture of that stick of horseraddish Mother Grebson got last year, but also a time when traditionally many sungs are sung, including adaptations of well know tunes from the host culture. So here is my humble pascal offering...

It's Pesachtime,

there's no need to be afraid

At Pesachtime,

we let in crackers and we banish bread

And in our world of plastic

cutlery and cloths

Throw your arms around the world

at Pesachtime

But say a brocha,

pray for the other ones

At Pesachtime it's hard,

Cos it aint much fun

There's a world of constipation,

and it's a world of dread and pain

Where the only movement flowing

has the bitter sting of chrain

And all you ever wonder

Is will I crap again?

Well tonight thank God because

He'll help you poo.

And there won't be bread in Golders Green this Pesachtime

The greatest gift they'll get this year is cheese (Oooh)

But how much bloody cheese

Is it possible to fress?

Do they know it's Pesachtime at all?

Here's to you raise a glass for Elijah

Here's to you with your painful itchy bum

Do they know it's Pesachtime at all?

Feed them Matzo

Feed them Matzo

Feed them Matzo

Let them know it's Pesachtime again

Feed them Matzo

Let them know it's Pesachtime again

[then segue into…]

We are the Jews

We are the Children…

Where Am I?

Of course I might have been psychogenetically transmogrified onto a David Lynch movie, or spent just too long wrestling with the devil in Faust, but I am in fact, at Selfridges, in their amusing little display to mark the opening of the V&A's Surrealism exhibition.

Faust Part II

Sometimes it pays to be just a little bit obsessive-compulsive. I rumbled that returns were appearing occasionally on the National Theatre website, and after much hitting of refresh I scored another trip to Hell.

The second part of Goethe’s Faust is very different to the first – would my second trip to Wapping be so different? Well, in some ways, yes, and it was remarkable how many different scenes, or angles, I kept discovering – even after close to 6 hours inside this world I was finding new rooms and characters – but what the second visit shared with the first was the same extraordinary intensity. After two visits in three days, I felt like something had snapped in my brain, and I’m still not entirely sure I’ve recovered.

Early on in visit number two I found myself in a small room, alone with a woman knitting fishing nets. I was used to being close to, and yet invisible to, the actors, but, very slowly, she turned her face towards me, and started to tell me about the little boy who went to the moon. I think at some point she locked the door. The little boy didn’t like the moon so he went to the sun. Without seeming to, by some psychology trickery, she choreographed me into the position where I was backing up against a little built-in bench, which she pushed me down onto, and pinned me down. When the little boy got to the sun he yearned to go back to the earth. She took my mask off, and was holding my face. But the little boy realised the earth was just an upturned plant-pot. The woman said that when she first saw me she thought I was that little boy. She must have felt through my clothes how hard my heart was beating. Disempowered by the removal of my mask I could just about muster the neurological signals necessary to shake my head. Speaking was out of the question. She pulled out a little wooden box and opened it. She kissed me my face, and rubbed lavender oil around my mouth. She gave me a sweet, and begged me to be careful, then took my hand and led me out of the room. I wanted to thank her but was still unable to speak.

At various points later in the evening, as Mephistopheles and his dark witches brought chaos and terror, I would catch the smell of lavender and remember her plea.

Whatever game plan I may have had for the evening was out of the window, and, freed from worrying about catching the main scenes (as I had seen them first time around around) I was able to go with the flow a lot more. Sometimes I was minded of the scene in The Truman Show when Truman is sailing his boat and crashes into the horizon coloured wall- I felt I was close to the edges of the world but could never quite break out.

I found myself shadowing Gretchen (Sarah Labigne) for part of the evening and found in her performance real emotional depth in her transformation from innocent playful girl to the heartbreaking scene in the pine forests where her brother dies, and she inflicts an abortion on herself by running repeatedly into a wall. Such is the suspension of disbelief that it actually entered my head that I wanted to, that I should, stop her. You don’t get that sitting rattling your bangles behind the “fourth wall”.

Other memorable sequences included a terrific scene in the cinema where Mephistopheles and a flame haired girl were dancing in between the seats and the people trying to watch a Touch of Evil on the screen – legs, popcorn, hair, everything was flying, before the couple burst through a door I hadn’t noticed before and I realised that I had seen the end of this scene from a different angle. Another lovely moment was when I was having a crafty sip of water on the stairs and one of the “witches” came by and gave me a sneaky, ambiguous smile. I followed her (as you do) into a wonderful scene in a dingy bar where she danced along the bar top before lip synching Lynch style to a fifties heartbreaker, on a little stage, her face starkly lit. All the while one of the male actors was crying in the corner. As I watched him, he transformed from one character into another – all he seemed to do was remove his wig, yet his whole physiognomy and posture changed.

Behind the bar was the devil’s parlour chamber, where the original wager over Faust’s soul was made – red velvet curtains, a stuffed fox, a locked safe, and on the table, like a children’s game, was a floor plan with little figurines for each of the major characters. Such amazing attention to detail.

Oh yeah, and I got chased out of the beauty parlour by an angry beautician but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Anyway it's definitely finished now.

Would I have gone back again if I could have? You bet!