BRAVE To 11 April

Glasgow

BRAVE
by Gerry Mulgrew and Gordon Dougall

Communicado/Sounds of Progress at The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow To 11 April 2002
8pm
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS 0142 429 0022
Review Timothy Ramsden 6 April

Resonant space, resonant material, giving voice to the victims of forgotten injustice.A fruitful relationship's grown up in recent years between new theatre and old industrial buildings. Glasgow lead the trend with the Tramway and now its old Fruitmarket in Albion Street, just north of the Trongate, has been taken over by performers plus video and music technology for this theatre piece based on the Cherokee Indians' experience up against White America.

Director Gerry Mulgrew's penchant for strong visual images, not to mention placing actors in perilous positions - walking a plank over a flaming cable-drum or flying through the air on ropes - is evident alongside video blizzards and scenes of Canadian troops marshalling indigenous peoples, projected, aptly, onto a huge dish-like surface.

This promenade show, which moves up and down the covered street comprising the venue, also makes use of several planks. Laid out flat they represent fencing, restrictions linked to the advance of the new civilisation, relentlessly restraining even a tribe, like the Cherokee, who aligned themselves closely to the newcomers' ways.

At times these planks, stuffed with books, define a legal or political chamber where speeches document legal argument – even if delivered with anachronistic microphones. Elsewhere they create a church choir-stall, its Christian hymn nudged out of line by the harmonies in the punctuating musical accompaniment.

Their counterpart are short sticks used both in a deer-hunt dance, and to develop rhythmic movement sections, offsetting the restrictions imposed upon the Cherokees. (Even the name Cherokee was imposed - the word doesn't exist in its own people's language. Their own name was 'Yunwiyu' – 'the real, or principled, people').

These people were eventually shoved many miles west of their homeland, on a 'Trail of Tears' symbolised in the shoes lined over our heads and eventually swung into action.

Music soaks through the piece, played and sung by members of Sounds of Progress. Though the members of this group all have disabilities, you'd be hard put to find evidence of it from their contribution to Brave.

Mulgrew and his team combine documentary theatre with striking, imaginative imagery, video actuality and scene-setting, plus a sound-score which intensifies atmosphere. The result's a bold, emotionally pulverising performance piece.

Performers:
Julie Austin, Jonathon Campbell, Jimmy Harrison, Beth Marshall, Fetcher Mathers, Keith McPherson, Craig Smith, Philippa Vafadari

Sign Language Interpreterts June Sherry, Wilma Watt
Musicians: Bob Brown, Claire Cunningham, Joseph Delaney, Elizabeth McGettigan, Anne-Marie Murray

Director: Gerry Mulgrew
Artist: Jacqueline Gunn
Lighting: Paul Sorley
Video: Rosie Gibson
Musical Director: Gordon Dougall
Costume: Liz Boulton

2002-04-10 01:00:17