ARTS ADMIN. To 30 June.

London

ARTS ADMIN SEASON
Toynbee Studios To 30 June 2007

Review: Timothy Ramsden various dates

From First Night to bun-fight, a season of discovery and delight.
A NEW KIND OF FESTIVAL

Just down Commercial Road from Christ Church Spitalfields (itself the centre of an annual June bloom of music) most of the month has seen a flowering of experimental performance from Arts Admin. Based at the Toynbee Studios (part of the same site as Toynbee Hall) this organisation provides space and time for artists to develop new work in theatre, dance, visual arts and performance.

Its theatre is delightfully traditional in essence but its raised stage projects forward, upsetting the womb-like red décor of an old cinema with its modern frankness. Other spaces come into play for some shows: an upstairs court-room and the café/bar otherwise filled with conversationally eager eaters and drinkers.

This is a Festival (though humbly naming itself a season) of work determined by individual artists, work free from bounds or expectations, making its own forms. Some of it’s accomplished, some most politely termed “in development”. But whatever the impact of specific shows, the overall variety, experiment and individuality – even on a thin sampling – makes for a festive sense.

PERFORMANCE ON PERFORMANCE

Forced Entertainment revived two theatre-related pieces. This company, which seems to understand every aspect of theatre apart from the concept of an interval, presented Dirty Work and the longer (1hr 55min; no interval) First Night.

They’re well-named. No-one is more uncompromising about the terms on which they perform than Tim Etchells’ Sheffield-based crew. Take them on their own terms or not at all. And these terms vary widely between shows from straight-talking to bursts of comedy or melodrama. But always assembled with a through-line, forever seeking assessment.

First Night looks likely to be a last night, if it ever gets on. On a bare stage eight performers gradually line-up. At least seven do; the 8th has his head in another actor’s arm-lock, wildly attempting to escape.

This cast is luridly dressed in parodies of the smart suits and elegant dresses plus high-heels of variety artistes. Make-up is exaggerated, with lurid green eyelids and ghastly smiles expressive as much of anger as greeting. These are smiles that often slip, in anger at other performers or at the whole notion of an audience.

The front-stage line up keeps dissolving as actors back away, breaking the group, as if they’ve suddenly recalled their next part of the performance. There is no ‘performance’ as such, but the show brilliantly evokes the sense of one, the twin-nature of ensemble and individual summed up in the brief messages spelled-out, a letter each, on cards the performers hold. And the one letter altering WE COME to WELCOME suggests the duality of performance: an act of self-expression imposed on a audience, yet also one “all for your delight”.

A CAFÉ ACT

Two works too from movement performer Wendy Houston. I missed Desert Island Discs (DID) but her Happy Hour made for a pleasant 40 minutes. Performed in the café and beginning behind its bar, Houston’s show develops through movement and speech from an opening energy and cheer.

Gradually she injects more troubled, depressive feelings from behind the social mask while exploring all the territory, collecting empties from tables, standing for self-examination against a wall or taking her emotional state into the adjacent corridor, the continuing movement glimpsed through a glass door panel.

Meanwhile her script (developed with Forced Entertainment boss Tim Etchells) assembles and reworks the language of drinking-places, including a sequence of hostile pub-clichés given new force by being made self-reflective in the first person: “Well, what am I looking at then?...Have I got a problem?...I know where I live”. It becomes a neatly-located piece of social Mask and Face theatre.

MY LIFE IN ART

‘Lecture theatres’ are common enough, and the season had two lively theatrical lectures, one from Bobby Baker, the other, more extended, from Fringe veteran Cindy Oswin. On the Fringe saw her occasionally aided by ex-Phantom Captain Neil Hornick as she covered 40 years of theatrical experiment.

Tired of rainy repertory, she advanced from Derby, where the sixties were just continuing the fifties to the radical decade in London, from plays of open pretence to work that seemed, as she said, to exist in the gap between theatre and life. Or death, as she arrived in London to happen on a People Show involving applications for suicide.

Oswin includes videos she’s made with her co-evals of the new theatre. She’s planning on more, but don’t wait. There’s the risk some of the present material may have to give way for the new and it’s all good stuff, including the priceless interview with the People Show’s one regular female member (now creating gardens) who gives an insight into the literal pains of performance.

GOING GLOBAL

Forkbeard Fantasy’s global warning show Invisible Bonfires is stylistically at the other end of the season, a fully-fledged company show. Yet there’s a sense it’s still being formed; by the time it returns to Toynbee Studios (19 November-2 December 2007. Tickets: 020 7650 2350) it could usefully have tightened in its running (2hr 10min including one interval), and might also have lost some of its excess material.

Its central characters, the Brittonioni Brothers, Chrissy and Timmy, are comically self-important intellectual-types. But long before the end the piece has self-indulgently overplayed their personae. There is, though, a fine moving horse. Aptly; while the words too often chug along, this is something where what you see is by far the best of what you get. The Lotus Pedals provide fine vocal and instrumental music, though the last, title song is didactically patronising.

The transformation of performers’ names in Invisible Bonfires (the core performers are Chris and Tim Britton) illustrates Cindy Oswin’s ‘gap’ point. As does Kazuko Hohki’s work-in-progress Kazuko’s Wuthering Heights, in which the performer tells us she is undertaking a pilgrimage to Bronteland, where present-day Haworth and the imagined world of Emily’s novel fuse.

Most piquant is the way Hohki plays off the novel’s consuming passions against her own reaction to an advance and her observations on Japanese women. But the singing’s weak, she needs a stronger co-performer, and some of the scenes don’t work even considered as deliberately invoking the horrors of student workshop impros. As a developing piece it needs a lot of work and has considerable progress to make. Audiences in London and South East England this autumn will be able check on the final form (www.kazukuhohki.com for info).

BAKER’S BRIEF TRIUMPH

Following this uncertain hour Bobby Baker’s Ballistic Buns should have seemed slight, a lecture-come-‘Durational Performance’ that’s an offshoot, a side-sliver, from her work on mental health as Creative Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.

But Baker enriches the show as it approaches its basic pun with knowing good-humour, while the story of her arms-manufacturing grandfather’s breakdown informs the irresponsibility of the final, ‘Durational’ 3min 47secs, where Bobby chucks buns at the audience against film of the Dam Busters raid, Eric Coates’ march twanging forth meanwhile as arranged for The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. It’s an always involving, eventually hilarious 25 minutes, enough to make anyone join Ban the Bun, but also a fine, fun conclusion to this pioneering Arts Admin season.

2007-07-01 10:02:44