Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel, Battersea Arts Centre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

web_Red-Like-Our-Room-Used-To-Feel_jpg_442x294_crop_upscale_q85

The intimate space of Ryan Van Winkle’s poetry performance, tucked away in a quiet corner of Battersea Arts Centre, is suffused with the warm glow of nostalgia. Photographs and souvenirs stud the walls and jostle on every surface, while a battered leather suitcase lies open on the floor, spilling keepsakes, and an old cassette player sits nestled at the back of a shelf. The taste of the past lies thick in the air, mingled with the faint aroma of woodsmoke from the fireplace. Memories breathe in the walls.

This is poetry given physical edges, an environment that seems to both birth and be born from the words. Van Winkle’s gentle, evocative piece is essentially a simple one-on-one poetry reading, yet to restrict it to that label feels inaccurate and dismissive. It begins unassumingly, as Ryan (it feels odd, given the intimacy, to keep referring to him by his last name) comes to greet me down in the BAC lobby, where I’m already settling into a state of mild bliss in my candy-striped armchair, grinning stupidly at the warmth and the hum of excited voices and the gorgeous neon sign left over from Tim Etchells’ last show. Ryan, a tad jittery with nervous energy, is attentively anxious to get my name right before he reels off a detailed description of how the show is going to work.

To condense and paraphrase Ryan’s charmingly precise account of the experience he has crafted, the sole audience member is led into the space (a cosy red bedroom draped in fairy lights and crammed with knick knacks), offered a cup of tea or a drop of port, and asked to pick one of four envelopes while Ryan switches on a CD soundtrack. In each of the envelopes is a selection of poems; Ryan then pulls a chair close and reads the poems from the chosen envelope, before quietly leaving to allow his guest to listen to the remainder of the CD and explore the room. The whole thing lasts a devastatingly brief, fleeting twenty minutes.

Oddly, given the state of heady captivation in which the performance held me, little of the content of Ryan’s poems stayed with me after leaving the room. Only torn-off scraps remain: geography, books, waves and sandcastles, love and loss. This is poetry made fluttering and ephemeral, rapidly dissipating into the warm air and attaching itself to objects and thoughts. Much of this is achieved by the gentle presence of Ryan himself, whose voice lulls and cradles, sending the mind on journeys.

Emerging from the gorgeous cocoon of the performance, I immediately wished that I had found the time during the feverish rush of Edinburgh to take a reviving step into Ryan’s room at Summerhall. In a ever faster spinning world, this space exhilaratingly offers us what we so frequently deny ourselves: the opportunity to stop, sit, absorb and dream. I was also struck by how the piece somehow manages to be both intensely personal and overwhelmingly generous. It as though, by indulging in this space of imagination and memory, Ryan offers us the room – in more than one way – to traverse our own imaginings and reminiscences.

When left alone, one object of the vast number collected around the room snatched particularly at my gaze: a postcard, emblazoned with the words “Nothing is not giving messages”. It is a statement that immediately invites multiple readings; it could mean that everything involuntarily emits messages, or that the definition of nothingness is the absence of messages, or even perhaps both. For me, it sits like a subtitle beneath the work, in which poetry and meaning live in more than just words, and which in its cluttered, soothing warmth seems firmly pitched against a void that is stripped of meaning, memories and messages.

One-on-one performances of Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel  are running at BAC between 18th-22nd December.

Everyday Maps for Everyday Use, Finborough Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

maps

Originally written for Time Out.

As cliché would have it, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. For Tom Morton-Smith, however, the alien is all relative. Tracing the cartography of modern sexual hang-ups, his new play asks where we draw the line between permissible fantasy and dangerous perversion – particularly in a hyper-sexualised culture in which, as one character puts it,’everyone has their kink’.

Through the central focus of Maggie, a teenage girl with an unhealthy fixation on tentacled Martians, Morton-Smith’s peculiar concoction throws together pornography and astronomy, HG Wells and explicit chatrooms. Just as Maggie’s best friend Kiph trusts that any fetish can be explained by Google, the point is made that almost every mutation of desire has a context in which it is normalised. Even Freud would have blushed.

But for all this airing of outlandish turn-ons, the play simultaneously recoils from the very taboos it is attempting to break. Despite an uncomfortable recurring fascination with schoolgirls, the issue of paedophilia is clumsily skated over, while the sexual acts themselves are often described with all the toe-curling awkwardness of the schoolyard.

Despite a compelling central performance from Skye Lourie as Maggie, Beckie Mills’s production struggles to tame this sprawling, confused tale. Like the aliens that have invaded Maggie’s sexual imagination, Morton-Smith is wrestling with too many limbs. As scene bleeds into scene and fantasy into fantasy, the overburdened end result is as numbing as the gratuitously sexualised media that lurks half-acknowledged in the background.

Going Dark, Young Vic Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Website-1

How often do we peer out at complete blackness? This was one of the first thoughts to strike me as the low-level lighting dimmed and the audience was tightly swaddled in darkness at the beginning of Sound&Fury’s latest atmospheric piece. The extent to which the Young Vic’s Maria space has been insulated against external light is astonishing, producing an odd dissociation from surroundings and fellow audience members as we are all plunged into the impenetrable dark. Atomised, we blink out into nothingness, eyes stubbornly seeking shapes that refuse to emerge from the featureless gloom.

In a modern world saturated with light pollution, where we are rarely far from the glowing rectangles of our phones, the simplicity of this utter darkness takes on a startling, almost radical character. It allows the piece to immediately grip us in its inky fist, as well as powerfully propelling us into the interior world of its protagonist. For astronomer Max, the world around him is going dark in more than one way. As the universe steadily expands, the stars with which he has entertained a lifelong affair are gradually losing one another’s light across the vast expanse of the universe, while on a miniature scale his own life is beginning to slip away from him as his sight deteriorates. Physics collides with philosophy and science becomes enmeshed with emotion.

This story of cosmos and crisis is told through the quietly compelling presence of lone actor John Mackay and the evocative, precisely executed audio and visual effects employed by Sound&Fury. Detailed soundscapes flood the darkness, transporting us to bustling train station or rain-sieged garden; the space morphs into a planetarium, its ceiling studded with thousands of pinpricks of light; a developing photograph becomes a canvas for projected memories. Light, when it breaks through the surrounding darkness, has the power to continually surprise, seductively yet elusively snatching at the corners of our attention in the same way as the stars that distantly blink down from the night sky.

For all that Sound&Fury’s technical trickery dazzles, however, it never overwhelms with its own showmanship. Instead, it supports the attractive tension at play in the piece between the intimate and the unimaginably vast, impressing us with wide blankets of stars before the next moment enclosing Mackay in a tiny pool of light. Both narrative and design stage this constricting process, this drawing in of one’s own personal world against the inconceivably huge backdrop of the universe, a process equally conjured by our own individual, insulating cocoons of darkness. That impossible smallness that is felt when contemplating the seemingly endless reaches of space is replicated here, but without undermining the small-scale tragedy of Max’s encroaching blindness.

Like the processes by which stars produce the stuff of existence, every element in Sound&Fury’s production is inextricably wedded to those around it. While Hattie Naylor’s text, for instance, is tender, moving and often poetic in its charting of Max’s loss of sight and the impact this has on his relationship with his young son, it cannot be divorced from the other production elements with which it is intertwined. The father son relationship is lent added poignancy by the physical absence of the son from the stage, simply conjured by a recorded voice; the snatches of astronomy lectures that punctuate the piece rely upon Dick Straker’s projections to produce meaning; the distinct scenes and words of the script are structurally dependent on the wordless interludes that separate them.

As our usual ways of visually experiencing theatre are frustrated or challenged, the aesthetic of the piece forces us to adapt and sharpen our other senses, mirroring the struggle that Max is in the midst of. Seeing, he explains to us, is just a matter of electrical impulses being received by the eye. It is only through the brain that this is translated into understanding, creating a perception of the world that conforms to what we have evolved to need; what we “see” is just a grainy, limited snapshot. Through an intimate focus, Going Dark invites us to accept the limits of our own perception while at the same time asking questions that imagine the much wider picture. The implication is that we, like Max, might need new ways of seeing.

Clod Ensemble’s Silver Swan, Tate Modern

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

silver_swan_hugo_glendinning_1

The vast, yawning space of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, a stunning canvas of grey, is as much of a challenge as it is a beauty. The last time I was in this cavernous room, it was filled with bodies scattering and swarming and rhythmically chanting, a blank surface across which Tino Sehgal’s captivating These Associations gently rippled. During my three separate visits to the piece, the space struck me as being perfect for performance work, gifted as it is with gorgeously haunting acoustics and an awesome (in its literal sense of awe-inducing) backdrop. It’s the most striking stage an artist could wish for.

Yet it is also so very big and so very beautiful that it is almost impossible for its contents to eclipse it, especially when those contents are small human blots on its monolithic landscape. This is the difficulty faced by Clod Ensemble’s Silver Swan, an elliptical fusion of song and movement originally created for a much smaller space. As I opened by acknowledging, it is easy to see why Clod Ensemble have been drawn to the Turbine Hall, if just for the acoustics alone. The rich texture of Paul Clark’s score, inspired by two 17th century songs by John Smith and William Lawes and sung unaccompanied by a group of female singers, ricochets off the walls in exquisite yet unnerving ways, its melodies hypnotic but slightly impenetrable to my untrained ears.

Untrained seems like a helpful word to pick up, as I felt throughout as though I was not quite versed in how to watch or listen to what Clod Ensemble presented us with. Described simply, Silver Swan consists of two short acts. The first of these involves just the unaccompanied singers, who seem to float down into the space garbed all in white, bell-shaped dresses. Invited to advance towards these ethereal, singing figures, the audience moves gradually forwards through the space until we are split into two groups for the second act. This section of the performance, which I viewed from the bridge above, brings the addition of grey-clad dancers into the space. These figures, dwarfed against the vastness of the Turbine Hall, feel their way around the walls and investigate the environment with their bodies, alternately running, stumbling and falling.

The overall result is entrancing yet numbing. Initial thoughts about the hopeful, thwarted efforts of humanity were prompted by the creeping progress of the figures below, crumpled one by one under the huge weight of air in the Turbine Hall, while the singing inevitably conjures the choral hymns of the church, with the hall standing in for a particularly large, echoing and bleak place of worship. Beyond this, however, I found myself a little stumped. Instead, lulled by the enigmatic beauty of the music and the movement and the space itself, I was transformed into an unusually passive viewer, letting the cumulative effect wash over me. It was an experience paradoxically both relaxing and frustrating.

This may well be my failure as a spectator, as I’m happy to acknowledge that neither classical music nor dance represent areas of great knowledge for me. I can’t help wondering, however, if Clod Ensemble’s piece, much as it attempts to engage with both space and audience, isn’t just a little too small for this huge challenge. Transfixed but not transported, I too felt small in the middle of the gaping space around me, a space that Silver Swan enters into mesmerising dialogue with but that it never entirely fills.

Image: Hugo Glendinning

DEFRAG_, Camden People’s Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

IMAGE_3282_landscape (2)

I have a confession to make: I hardly ever defragment my laptop hard drive. I know I should, as friends far more conversant in technology than I am repeatedly tell me. But, like that filing system I keep telling myself I’m going to install in my room, it seems like too much hassle, too much time. It’s a fitting metaphor for the endless mental stuff we accumulate, thoughts and facts and ideas all stuffed into dusty corners of our mind and left to languish there, victim to that “maybe tomorrow” attitude that always seems to attach itself to the task of organisation. The thought of sorting everything into neat little packages is appealing, but continually put off.

This is the metaphor that codes its way through DEFRAG_, Tom Lyall’s gently compelling love letter to artificial intelligence and one of a clutch of futuristic visions being presented at the Camden People’s Theatre as part of their Futureshock programme. Half lecture, half something else, Lyall’s solo show is continually surprising in its unapologetically geeky, dryly amusing intelligence. Starting with the appeal of the defrag – the seductive idea that you might be able to realign your thoughts and free up space elsewhere – Lyall’s protagonist is a broken, recovering individual, attempting to reassemble his identity in the same way that a computer retrieves scattered files. Until, that is, he discovers that there might be a computer that could do it all for him.

Both playing on and eschewing the dystopian fear of the computer as ultra-intelligent other, the relationship that DEFRAG_ nurtures with artificial intelligence is an altogether more affectionate one. Lyall speaks to anyone who has ever fallen a little bit in love with a lightning-fast operating system or sexy interface, acknowledging the strange allure of an intelligence governed by reason alone. How appealing to be able to make decisions uninfected by neuroses, to be able to organise thoughts into easily accessible files and folders. There is a sort of fear wrapped up in this too, as acknowledged through the interjecting narrative of a super-computer designed to beat its human competitors in the US gameshow Jeopardy – the fear that the computer might simply be better than we can ever aspire to be. The other can be as seductive as it is threatening.

The structure chosen by Lyall is one that neatly reflects this murky division between human and machine. He delivers the first half standing at a lectern, cultivating a genial mode of delivery that sits somewhere between lecture, confessional and storytelling, as he tells us about the gameshow storming super-computer Watson, his relationship with computers, and his growing mistrust of his own internal hard drive following a brain injury. But just as Lyall has lulled us into the rhythm of his narrative, it slides suddenly into sci-fi territory, a canny move that snags our attention as we find ourselves just as dislocated as Lyall’s imprisoned protagonist, with nothing to rely on but a disembodied electronic voice. The piece can thus seemingly be divided along clean lines into the corporeal and virtual, but it is never quite this simple.

No one trick geek, Lyall is as sensitive to the conventions and contrivances of theatre as he is to the jargon of computing. With the house lights still up, he gently mocks the art of representation by “acting” the drinking of a glass of water and acknowledges his artificial surroundings – “I see you’ve met the set” – while also drawing attention to the relationship between theatre and value. Are we getting what we’ve paid for? This is only loosely knitted to the main weave of what DEFRAG_ is doing, but when interrogated more closely, Lyall’s attention to the blurred line between the fake and the real seems ever more integral in its relationship to the content of the piece. The computer, after all, is just another imitation of human faculties.

While DEFRAG_ might fascinate and tickle the secret sci-fi fan in me, it is ultimately the human story weaved by Lyall that becomes the most engrossing. The fears he delicately touches upon, of losing memories or finding one’s sense of self unravelling, are ones that afflict us all. Storytelling is also cast in a central position within our relationship with artificial intelligence; as Lyall’s unnamed protagonist backs up his life onto a super hard drive, stories are passed from file to file in the same way they once travelled from mouth to mouth, the currency of our humanity deposited into a bank that might well have its own agendas. If our stories and memories can be appropriated, what remains to separate us from our machines?

There are no real answers, but that feels right. Because if there’s one thing that sets humans apart from our machine counterparts, it’s that ambiguous area of grey that renders the defiantly black and white process of the defrag impossible.

Image: Rachel Ferriman