The Door Archives -

July 11, 2018

BREVIEW: BE FESTIVAL @ Birmingham REP 04.07.17

Words by Helen Knott / Pics courtesy of BE FESTIVAL

The backstage area of the REP is all abuzz, as audience members and performers mingle and grab drinks on another sultry evening in this most singular of summers. There’s a certain amount of trepidation as we file into The Studio.

BE FESTIVAL’s format of presenting four 30-minute shows of different genres and companies from around Europe means that you’re never quite sure what to expect. It’s safe to assume that this isn’t going to be a relaxing, safe evening watching some book-adaptation on the main stage; it’s going to be challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes difficult to watch.

Thankfully, tonight’s first performance eases us in gently. For me, contemporary dance is right up there with opera as one of the least accessible art forms. Quite often, I just don’t get it. The Czech Republic’s VerTeDance, clearly aware that this can be a barrier for potential audience members, have responded with Let’s Dance, a tongue-in-cheek ‘manual for anxious audiences’ of contemporary dance. The work’s director, Petra Tejnorová, stands at a lectern at the side of the stage, guiding the audience through warm-up techniques, the creative process and dance motifs while the dancers demonstrate… if I’m making that sound a little dry, then it certainly isn’t.

Each dancer steps up and describes an episode from their dancing journey, from the ludicrous (the disadvantages of being a female dancer with short hair) to the touching (the realisation for the male protagonist that he doesn’t have to dance in the hyper-masculine way of his native folk dances, if he doesn’t want to). VerTeDance won the 2015 BE FESTIVAL audience award, and after watching Let’s Dance it’s easy to imagine why; it is a funny, informative introduction to contemporary dance that never takes itself too seriously, while conveying a deep love of the form. I leave wanting to see the full version of the piece (tonight was just a 30 minute segment) and keen to give contemporary dance another go.

After a short break, it’s back into The Studio for Sister Sylvester’s Three Rooms, which links UK actor Kathryn Hamilton (who is here in Birmingham) with colleagues in Germany and Istanbul, over Skype. Hamilton opens the show by announcing, “On stage you can see the outline of the set for a play that we’re not going to perform tonight.”

Hearing that we’re missing out on something grabs the audience’s attention immediately. Hamilton explains that this autobiographical play, about two people fleeing war in Syria, can’t be performed because two of the actors are still unable to get visas to travel. Instead, we join the two through Skype. They show the audience their current homes and, with some visual trickery, perform a couple of scenes from the play.

At points in Three Rooms we get a rare insight into the domestic lives of individuals living through Europe’s border crisis, but on the whole it’s too unfocussed and disjointed, as Skype calls with absent friends can often feel. I’d like to understand more about the reality of the actors’ day-to-day lives spent waiting for something to happen, rather than watching them perform sections of the play, which lose their impact out of context. If the aim of the piece is to question how well technology can compensate for the physical absence of its actors, the answer is: not very well.

Next up, dinner. Having the chance to eat a meal on the REP’s main stage is a real treat, even if everything has overrun; it’s 9:30pm and I’m ravenously hungry. There’s barely enough time to shovel down the pork loin, rice and salad on offer before we’re called in to watch the next performance.

This time we’re in The Door, a smaller space, for F.O.M.O – Fear of Missing Out, by Spain’s Colectivo Fango. F.O.M.O describes the pangs of anxiety many of us feel when we see a social media post that suggests we’re missing out on something. The performance starts light-heartedly enough – a lively set of What’s App messages are projected onto the stage, then one of the piece’s female actors uses the front-facing camera on her phone to pose, pull faces and check her teeth. We start to get a hint that things aren’t quite as innocent as they seem when she starts pointing the phone between her legs… it’s uncomfortable to witness such a personal moment portrayed on stage.

Things quickly turn disturbing. Violent acts are portrayed against women, with continual filming through phone screens having a distancing effect on the perpetrators, distorting reality. In one harrowing segment, one of the female characters poses for social media photographs, before the poses become more and more frantic and out of control and she strips naked. All the while, the other performers count, slowly at first, before speeding up to the number 137, which is finally revealed as the number of Instagram followers she has.

Towards the end of the show things have reached crisis point. One of the characters confides that they know nothing about the war in Syria and asks the audience if any of us know anything either. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to be implicated in the violence being portrayed on stage. I’m sure many of us can see ourselves in the characters’ obsessions with digital communication and social media.

By this stage, things have massively overrun, so I don’t manage to see the final performance of the evening which is Control Freak by Cie. Kirkas – public transport just doesn’t run late enough. But BE FESTIVAL 2018 has offered plenty of food for thought. Let’s Dance encouraged me to open my mind to contemporary dance, and Three Rooms and F.O.M.O – Fear of Missing Out both suggested that technology, often heralded as an effective tool for breaking down geographical and political borders, can sometimes distance us from each other further.

It may have been, as suspected, challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes difficult to watch, but that’s exactly what the best art should do.

For more on BE FESTIVAL, visit www.befestival.org

For more from Birmingham REP, including full event listings and online ticket sales, visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk

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NOT NORMAL – NOT OK is a campaign to encourage safety and respect within live music venues, and to combat the culture of sexual assault and aggression – from dance floor to dressing room.

To sign up to NOT NORMAL – NOT OK, click here. To know more about the NOT NORMAL – NOT OK sticker campaign, click here.

January 28, 2018

BREVIEW: The Death Show @ REP 27.01.18

Words by Ed King / Pics by Graeme Braidwood

It’s probably just red car syndrome, but as I make my way to see The Death Show at Birmingham REP I find myself stuck in traffic and staring at a poster for The Maze Runner – Death Cure, before rolling adverts remind me that at dog tracks across the country ‘you bet, they die’. I squash two snails when I get off the bus.

I eventually arrive at the theatre (after taking my life in my hands traversing the Paradise Forum road works) and run into a friend who is taking her daughter to see Coco – Pixar’s latest big screen animation about the Mexican Day of the Dead festival. The closing words to last night’s Monty Python film continue to circle around the back of my head, as my friend’s daughter tells me about the “magical adventure of a boy who learns to be a musician from his dead ancestors,” a context she seems quite at peace with. My friend’s husband, a vicar, is busy with a funeral. Fate is laughing and apparently leading today; religion is missing in many corners of this theatre.

The Death Show is the culmination of years of research from ‘theatre makers’ and self confessed ‘thanatophobes’ Lucy Nicholls and Antonia Beck, after the duo turned their curiously macabre small talk into an original stage production. It’s a huge subject without an end, both literally and figuratively, and the challenge to anyone tackling this topic is the seesaw of content and context.

But this is theatre, and on entering The Door we are greeted by Nicholls and Beck dressed head to toe in respectful black – handing out tissues because “things can get a little sad and teary.” Centre stage there is a full sized coffin, with a coffin shaped ‘doorway’ stood upright and stage left. An order of service is handed to each audience member, with funeral favourite ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ playing through the house speakers as we take our seats. The Death Show is clearly a show about death. And, just as clearly, there is no escape from it.

The premise is a funeral to our hosts and the dearly departed, who refer to themselves in the third person, mourning “the death of Lucy and Antonia”. After a short hat picked declaration of what sent the pair to their graves (which if it isn’t set up, may indeed prove the existence of a divine being) we kick of as every funeral should, with legacy. Or the purported achievements that can more serve to make sense of a life, rather than accept the loss of one. And whilst matinee crowds are not the easiest to make laugh, by the time we are watching the superimposed faces of Nicholls and Beck on the Kardashian babies the healthy (no pun intended) afternoon audience is in comfortable good humour.

But the mood turns, as we become voyeurs to the emotions that compelled Nicholls and Beck to write The Death Show in the first place. Namely, the organ failing fear that there is nothing but void. Following their initial meeting, a careful balance of abject horror and camaraderie, Nicholls and Beck embark on a creative challenge to bring ‘death out of the shadows’ – researching their subject with hands on experiences, which in turn make up the segments of The Death Show.

The first step on their Arts Council funded path to enlightenment is with a pair of “angry” Australians, who seem intent to “excrete death” whilst enjoying “a good work out” and some loosened hamstrings. Perverse, but I can believe it’s happening somewhere. Next up is the equally obnoxious and “more feminine” spiritual self help group, where Nicholls and Beck are encouraged to “breath in through your lady mouths” before affecting the faux shamanic monikers you’d hear on a marketing department team training day. Or in Moseley.

Whilst the rib dig at Down Under gets a little farcical, and arguably a touch… achem, both group experiences are an engaging mirror to the absurdity that can surround ‘those that know’. Spirituality, for want of a better word, is often a blank cheque for idiots to enlist more idiots in an exercise of group narcissism; Nicholls and Beck respond with parody and a sharp exit, as their journey continues. Answer my question about Descartes or just fucking hug me please.

Then it’s onto the more serious endeavour of preparing a body – a duty Nicholls and Beck performed whilst shadowing an undertaker as part of their research. Mental note: when a funeral director asks for some clothes for your loved one to be dressed in, don’t forget the underwear. Finally, we walk though the somewhat failed attempt to engage with terminally ill patients at a hospice; a brutally important avenue of exploration, but one Nicholls and Beck candidly recognise didn’t go as they would have hoped – playfully and painfully displaying the chasm of this contact.

We wrap The Death Show to further honestly, namely that “we don’t have the answers… but we do have this rather wonderful dance” – as Nicholls and Beck display what makes their lives worth living, and in turn encourage us to say “cheers to the little things”. It’s a poignant summary, but one the writing and presentation have stayed true to across the narrative; an audience are not going to find the answers to life, death and everything at 2:30pm on a Saturday afternoon, just as the scriptwriters didn’t after years of research.

The point, I guess, is to be together whilst we work out what to do in the absence of any answers at all – and this is certainly where art can help us. Or, as The Death Show press release states, ‘to laugh, cry, stick two fingers up at the grim reaper and discover why talking about death is ultimately life affirming.’

Whilst some of us scream at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon, Nicholls and Beck took the challenge of turning their own self reflection into something to share – resulting in comedy, self deprecation, biological facts, and a Breakfast Club fist pump in the face of fear. The Death Show is a competent contribution to the bottomless pit conversation about our own mortality, delivered through a beautifully balanced story of hope, humour and fear. Plus it stands ram rod straight in the face of questions that can break a person in two – something, if nothing else, an audience member can take from this production that will hopefully help them with every day until their last.

Death terrifies me, to the point that I am obsessed with trying to unravel it, and I have long suspected that there is no amount of time, money or research that will bring about a collective understanding. ‘Like a room of blind people trying to explain the colour blue to each other’, is the line I land on. So, what am I doing on a Saturday afternoon in a room full of strangers? What are any of us doing here? Because what else can you do, especially when the sour mash has all dried up and there are no vocal chords left to tug.

The Death Show is also, quite simply, an extremely funny play. And if Christ, Brahma, Moses and whatever clandestine lizards there may be in The White House can’t give us any definitive proof, then that’s probably all we’ve got. Well, either that or insanity. Or song. Or even a little of all three, after all you know what they say. Some things in life are bad…

The Death Show

The Death Show tours across February, with dates in Leeds, London and Bristol – as presented by Outer Circle Arts. For direct event info, including full tour details and links to online ticket sales, visit www.thedeathshow.co.uk

For more from the Birmingham REP, including full production listings and online ticket sales, visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk

For more on Outer Circle Arts, visit www.outercirclearts.co.uk

For more from BrumYODO, visit www.brumyodo.org.uk

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018

BPREVIEW: The Death Show @ REP 26-27.01.18

Words by Ed King / Pics by Graeme Braidwood

Running from 26^th to 27^th January, Outer Circle Arts presents The Death Show – performed at Birmingham REP in The Door theatre space.

Tickets are priced at £14, with each evening performance scheduled for 8pm. There is a further matinee performance of The Death Show at 2:30pm on Saturday 27^th January, with a 30min panel discussion held after the performance with members of BrumYODO – ‘a community collective aiming to encourage open and honest conversations about death and dying.’

For direct event info on The Death Show at REP – including full programme times, venue details and online ticket sales, click here.

Created by Birmingham based ‘thanatophobes’ (Google it) and independent theatre makers, Lucy Nicholls and Antonia Beck, The Death Show ‘is a darkly comic journey of discovery and contemplation, exploring our universal relationships with death and dying’.

An original new production tackling the oldest subject known to humanity (…perhaps the second oldest, after sex) the creative duo spent time at local hospices – talking to both patients and practitioners, shadowing undertakers and training with celebrants. Coming ‘face to face’ with the subject of death, Nicholls and Beck then penned The Death Show – a stage play, written for two protagonists as they encourage an audience ‘to celebrate their own mortality. To laugh, cry, stick two fingers up at the grim reaper and discover why talking about death is ultimately life affirming.’

For a man who thinks about death all, the, freaking, time, this is a welcome addition to a conversation that is seldom had, yet seldom more important to have. After all, in the words of another curly haired obnoxious drunk, ‘no one here gets out alive’. And a bit of constructive criticism of how society can hide, especially from the inevitable, is rarely a bad thing.

However my fear (other than the Christian right controlling the afterlife) is that we get distracted by funerals. Death and the ceremony of remembering the dead are, to me, separate issues – both ones that need confidently addressing in modern times, but separate none the less. Telling people I want to be buried under a plum tree will not save my soul.

In 2018 – the year of whatever lord or secular crutch you so choose to cling to – we live in an age of tacit denial, sure, but also with the most advanced resources and references in recorded history. With the World Wide Web, never before has the human species been able to share stories and information with such a wide and easy reach.

Studies have been conducted across the globe into cardiac arrest, near death experiences and the transition of ‘alive’ to ‘dead’ – as we currently call the two states of being. Indeed, Dr Sam Parnia was the lead author on the AWARE study at the University of Southampton, which ran from 2008 to 2014 and ‘examined the broad range of mental experiences in relation to death’ from over 2000 patients in the UK, US and Austria. Every British tabloid has published stories on near death experiences, scientifically researched or otherwise, so every British tabloid reader is aware of the discussion. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on the ‘Afterlife’.

But art can so often be a healthier catalyst to conversation, especially when we try to address/understand the darker fringes or ‘taboo’ subjects of the human endevour. It allows us to take a more detached delve into frightening waters, with the hope of finding answers and perhaps even solace. And as questions go, it doesn’t get more visceral than ‘what happens when you die?’

How long was that panel discussion again…?

The Death Show

The Death Show runs at the Birmingham REP (The Door) from 26^th to 27^th January – as presented by Outer Circle Arts. For direct event info, including full programme times, venue details and online ticket sales, visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk/whats-on/the-death-show

For more on The Death Show, visit www.thedeathshow.co.uk

For more from the Birmingham REP, including full production listings and online ticket sales, visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk

For more on Outer Circle Arts, visit www.outercirclearts.co.uk

For more from BrumYODO, visit www.brumyodo.org.uk