Terni Performance Festival: Zilla!

Along with the mounting body of scientific data on climate change comes the implicit knowledge that the future contains more and more catastrophe. The way these catastrophes are narrated - mostly through media - is already corrupt, and with the pre-requisite that the first world dissociate itself from accountability for these events, it doesn't take a long stretch of the imagination to assume these narratives will become more and more pliable.

Just how we respond to these events is the focus of Zilla!, a part participatory work, part staged poem from writer Andy Field in collaboration with Ira Brand and Chritopher Brett Bailey. The play utilises a floating birds'-eye lens of cities in the world (for me reminiscent of Chris Thorpe's There has Possibly been an Incident, although the likeness is presumably accidental as it was first performed in 2011) zooming through different world cities as though from the perspective of Godzilla himself. One moment, we are in London with its Oxford street brands, the next in Berlin with its issues of gentrification, or perhaps in New Orleans.

By the time catastrophe strikes, we've got a sort of poetic portrait of the daily life of the global citizen. In a device I found fairly artificial, we are asked to put our Lego figures, personally selected from the floor at the beginning of the show, down on a map of the city that has been periodically sketched out by the actors. We do this only to see them callously stomped on by the two actors (Brand and Bailey) wearing giant fluffy animal slippers and to the tune of some pop song I can't remember (EDIT: We Gotta Get Out of this Place by The Animals), in a kind of mimicry of the fragile act of creation and the unfeeling swiftness of its destruction.

Terni Performance Festival: Hate Radio

Genocide can happen, it seems, remarkably quickly. Once you have your triggering event, the dominoes just fall. When race is used as a reason for hate and dehumanisation on a wide scale, all humanity seems to evaporate into so much pink mist.

Of course, the speed is a fiction. A given society can have its violent bed made long before the first shot is fired. The media's key causal relationship with horrific violence is clear and well-documented, which doesn't stop it being a breeding ground for new ethical vacuums, (yes, even in the West), or indeed, instances of genocide occurring.

Hate Radio, a production from the International Institute of Political Murder that has done the rounds in European festivals, documents explicitly this link between propaganda and genocide in one specific instance of recent history - the Rwandan genocide of 1994. This event saw race-based crimes against humanity that exhibit a shocking level of dehumanisation. Rape, murder, torture, and a particularly pathological fixation on, not just killing, but suffering are key narratives of that conflict. To fragile, western ears, it's a barrage of monstrousness that begs belief.

These stories are relayed to us by actors, appearing on screens and speaking through radio headsets allocated to each audience member, in the grueling first 15 minutes of Hate Radio. The dramaturgy here is carefully layered but does not spare us the violence of the stories, women offering themselves as sex slaves only to have their breasts cut off, children having limbs cut off, hiding in underground toilets for days, staying alive in the middle of a pile of massacred corpses. There appears no atrocity which could not occur in this space of madness.

Terni International Performing Arts Festival

On the 19th-23rd of September I will be corresponding from the Terni International Performing Arts Festival in Italy.

Details in English are scarce - so I'll have to leave a lot of my research until arrival.

Click here for the website (Italian)

At this rate I'll soon have more information about Italian theatre than I do about either German or Australian...

Edinburgh Fringe Wrap-up

If I felt more passionately about the Fringe, I would be happy to declare it as the worst place to make theatre.

Unfortunately, I feel so jaded and apathetic about the whole thing that it's difficult to muster the energy to attack it. It's such an overwhelming institution.

I'll limit myself to some simple expressions and observations.

It was disappointing to see how much the Fringe has not changed since 2006, when I was last here. Theatre certainly has. The hallmarks are still here - the little cliques, the networking, the audiences treating theatre as a supermarket, browsing around, ultimately making bad decisions based on the most trival justifications. It seemed like most audiences wanted to escape something which might be actual, real theatre.

I don't buy the argument that simply having so many people in the same place to watch theatre is enough to justify whatever. Rather, the screws appear to be being turned on artists more than ever. It was so terrifying to see young people there, joining the fray, as it were, handing out flyers, trying desperately to make their money back on their huge upfront investment, to pay back that loan they took from their parents, or that credit card debt.

Blind Hamlet

Regular readers will remember my beef with Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour's White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, a play whose popularity seemed based on its manipulation of the West's already misguided perception regarding Iran and a fairly flimsy gimmick.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was spectacularly successful, playing globally and on some big theatres. So what was said in that play, particularly about Iran, was important. But - that damage is done.

Soleimanpour's follow-up Blind Hamlet, playing a full Edinburgh Fringe run, will probably not be as successful - but it's in many ways a better play. The audience arrive to a stage manager setting up a mic next to a tape-recorder, and Soleimanpour's voice wafts out, explaining that he's losing his sight.

The play proceeds from this spectatorship of a machine into a series of theatre games, ringmastered by Soleimanpour via the tape-recorder, that are loosley related to Hamlet, using the audience as participants (in a reference to WR,RR). The games centre around the ideas of death and vision. It's revealing of an occasionally insightful, occasionally callous, reading of Hamlet - but it's one that's never without contemplation.

#flyerfreeday

My article about #flyerfreeday was published over at A Younger Theatre.

Will it take off? My pessimism about human nature says no. But I'm always ready to be surprised.

http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/guest-blog-edinburgh-flyer-free-on-sunday/

Stories about Love, Death, and a Rabbit

I've been interested lately in British politeness, especially within the context of Europe, as it seems to me the defining trait of the people on that group of islands. And it also seems to function a particular way, and with a particular (political) outcome. I'll confess that, at least for now, I'm not at all sure what that outcome is. A certain type of power, gained through excuse?

The irony is that within performance, this is something that's seldom examined. Much more popular in UK drama are the kinds of hard-hitting, abrupt violence, site-specific live art or experimental hybrid performance, or design-driven spectacle. 'Manners' is a term distinctly left for comedy.

I don't read Stories about Love, Death and a Rabbit as a comedy. It's funny, yes, if nothing else because of its familiarity, but there's certainly something else motivating the creation of this character. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly why the Dame Edna-esque Ms Samantha Mann, alter-ego of performer Charles Adrian Gillott, was created. Was she a mockery of British politeness? A satire on a kind of upper-class cliche that now surely exists only in the imagination? Or was it, as I read it, working towards something darker and more biting, like a terrible, violent underbelly. After all, not every old woman throws in lines like 'I'd better lighten the mood or you'll all go and throw yourselves in front of a bus'.