Monday 9 June 2014

Review - CRACKz performed by Grupo de Rua at Sadler's Wells - LIFT 2014




Composed as part of the LIFT Critical Writing workshops with Maddy Costa, via IdeasTap.  The rest of the group, and words on other exciting things, here: http://welcometodialogue.com/projects/liftideastap-critical-writing/


I read an article once discussing what an audience actually gets in return for their theatre ticket. A playwright was quoted in it, saying he made an active decision not to put 'silence' into his stage directions, because an audience is paying to hear words, not watch actors standing around on stage.

Interesting.

This came to mind while I was watching Grupo de Rua perform CRACKz as part of LIFT at Sadler's Wells. It is a dance piece, blending hip hop with contemporary dance to 'deconstruct' hip hop, to 'challenge the stereotype' and 'question the status of art in a digital era'. (Sounds like a pretty good funding application, right? Tick tick tick.) Regardless of what it was about, I was expecting to see some dance. Instead, the lights dimmed, the music started, and we waited in pitch black for something to happen....

And we waited...

And I listened to the music, great music, composed by the Vladislav Delay Quartet, with a gritty, dirty, humming undertone and a lilting jazz beat on top...

Until at last a spot of light fell upon a corner of the stage and dancers whirled into it, bent at the waist and spinning across the stage. They looked like insects, appearing and disappearing out of the ground. The lights dimmed. Another spot of light came up, and this little routine continued...

And continued...

And I wondered if the point was for us to get so bored of seeing the same thing over and over again that we, as an audience, became numb to it and achieved a heightened state of mind, within which we had a unanimous epiphany and recognised the deeper meaning of the piece.

For me, this didn't happen.

The movement changed. The dancers stood up, held out their arms Рbut dear god they were spinning again. This time faster, more stomach churning, and still with the same infuriating lights-up-lights-down routine. I was begging for them to stop spinning, stop stopping, and breathe into a neat little ensemble piece that would be slick and clever in the way that hip hop normally is. I know Bruno Beltṛo was seeking to deconstruct hip hop, but I didn't realise he was taking out what was fundamentally good about it.

To mark the end of this section, the music stopped, all of the lights came up and the dancers continued to dance, (as an ensemble, at last!) but the only sound was of their breath and their trainers squeaking on the stage floor. This made me feel weird, and a little insecure, in a really brilliant way. Where did the music go? Here, I did have a minor epiphany: "What is dance without music? This is clearly a deconstruction of hip hop. It's clearly challenging the stereotype. I wonder what the status of art is in a digital era?"

I'm being facetious. But apart from this moment, I just had no idea what was going on in the piece. There was a section in which the dancers were chasing each other with 'guns', another when they were all backed up against the wall, and many where they walked slowly – but purposefully – towards each other. But there wasn’t enough physical dialogue for me to find my own narrative. In duets there seemed to be a really powerful conversation happening between the dancers, charged with intent: I didn't know what that intent was, but I was desperate to see the conversation unfold.

At the end of the piece, after the curtain call, the music returned and we clapped along while the dancers freestyled. First thought? "Oh, this is cheesy." Second thought? "Oh, they can actually dance! That choreography did them a disservice." Third thought: "I am clapping along to the music while super-cool Brazilian street dancers stand on their heads. I have probably never felt more white/British/middle class in my life. Well done, Sadler's Wells. This is why I love you."

When I pay to see dance, I pay to see well-trained dancers do amazing things, to see a 'story' unfold and to feel/think slightly differently about how I move through life as a human being. CRACKz made me feel perhaps 50% of each thing, most of which was after the curtain call.

Monday 2 June 2014

Relentless Renaissance of Renaissance Plays


Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Renaissance plays.  I love the words, the characters, the stories, the heightened drama of it all.  And I rarely see a revival that I don’t enjoy.  But secretly, I’m not sure how I feel about how doggedly we insist on reproducing work from that era.  

The Globe and the RSC are excused, because Shakespeare and his contemporaries belong with these companies.They understand, for the most part, that if an audience has bought a ticket to see a Shakespeare play, that’s what they are expecting to see.  But it’s when companies produce work with a vaguely zeitgeist twist that I bristle, and retreat.

David Tennant as Hamlet, RSC 2008

So, where do we draw a line?  The moment in the 2008 RSC production of Hamlet when David Tennant/Edward Bennett flew off stage on a swivel chair was just about digestable.  But the sound of Ian Rickson’s production set in a mental hospital at the Young Vic in 2011 made me feel a little bit unwell.  I completely understand the impetus to retell the story in a way that contemporary audiences can connect with it, and actually, I delight in the new pockets of humour we find in the text.  But I always feel like there’s something a little perverse about manipulating a story from that era and transplanting it directly into our own. 

 It’s like eating someone else’s food without asking.

The way I see it, you have to go hard or go home.  If you want to swap all the genders around: great.  If you want to cast half the characters as penguins: excellent. (This doesn’t exist, but it definitely should.  Although, this does.)  It’s the niggling, subtle changes that bother me, because it makes me wonder: unless you’re doing something ground-breaking in terms of form and style, why on Earth do we need another production of Hamlet?  All we’re changing this autumn is which famous white middle class actor will take on the role next. (Sorry Benedict Cumberbatch – I think you’re sensational - it’s just unfortunate timing.)

It is for this reason that I delight in companies like Filter and Cheek by Jowl.  I saw Filter’s production – nay, total reinterpretation – of Twelfth Night in March, and it blew my mind.  They used an essence of the structure of Shakespeare’s play as a skeleton upon which to hang jazz music, dancing, pizza deliveries and audience participation that turned the comedy into a genuine 21st Century pant-wetter.  My cheeks hurt, and I guffawed without restraint.

In neat contrast is Cheek by Jowl’s retelling of John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which I recently sat at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton.  I dreaded the end, applauded meekly and left feeling a bit queasy, for all the right reasons.  It is loud, and bright, and devastating, and overwhelms its audience with movement sequences and a lot of half-naked bodies that brings out the effect this play would have had on its audience in the 17th Century, told in a physical language that we understand.  Cheek by Jowl have chosen to set the play entirely in Annabella’s bedroom, complete with a poster for True Blood on the black wall and a fluffy red diary in her underwear drawer.  This intimacy makes every scene feel increasingly like something we ought not to be privy to, but we are immersed, until the stomach-churning end.  To applaud felt very strange indeed. 

Cheek by Jowl, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore'

But what this production achieves best of all is that it never tries to be something it’s not: It knows that it is a play, and celebrates that fact with dance and music and fake blood.  To produce a classic text, we should either seek to emulate how it was originally played, or turn it on its head completely.  To immerse an audience in a production of a classic, then try to nod to contemporary issues like a quirky aside from the clown, is just confusing.  Give us all or nothing, please.