A rainbow of theatres

The brochure for the London International Mime Festival dropped on my doormat last week, as it has every year more or less since ‘I don’t know when’ – and, of course, I shall be going, as I have been for most years since.  As almost all of the programme will involve devised shows, you may wonder why I am so keen, given my recent diatribe on the limitations of devising. The clue is in the word ‘mime’. My focus has been text, because that is one of the things that interest me most about theatre. But LIMF reminds me, in case I had forgotten, that there isn’t one ‘theatre’: there is a rainbow of theatres.

Not that text and script are exclusive of each other; for example, my own company, The Rudes, are both a mime and a text based company. Mime isn’t about the lack of words, but the abundance and richness of physical movement. What the LIMF mainly programmes and embraces is non-verbal ‘theatre’. It reminds us, therefore, that theatre has a pallet from which we practitioners can choose. What I liked about Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ was just how rooted among the ancients it was. Among witch doctors and adepts of the tribe. It focused on the core process of theatre.

The Apache attached hooks to their bodies and, braced with leather thongs to their totems, wailed and danced into states of delirium. Northern folk listened to stories danced and sung by the shaman among yew groves thick with the vapours of hallucinatory taxus baccata berries. But that’s religion surely, you ask? Well! What’s the difference? Just think about it? The actor/priest/adept/ shaman takes up the empty space. The magical space. Start juggling, or playing, or dancing, or singing in the street and a magical space opens up where all but the witless will not walk. Weird! Try it. Then comes the initiate/votary/congregation/audience divided from the actor/shaman by this invisible barrier, or ‘fourth wall’. As we are drawn magically into the drama, it becomes an issue that: We might be absorbed by it. Will they come through to us? Will we become penitents? Will the wall disappear? Will it take over our minds? At our shows I often hear, ‘I’m not sitting near the front; they might pick on me!’ But they come: half exhilarated, half afraid. We, as audience members,  can sit back and keep it at a distance, or we can let it take over us, take us on a journey. There’s that business about breaking barriers again. The subject matter is: The world and all that walks in it. It is rehearsed for us and we are rehearsed in it – until, if it works for us and the journey takes place, we are somehow purged. This is theatre.

The actor/shaman’s palette, the intoxicating whole, is, in no particular order: the words, or vocal sounds, the music, the magical objects and the swaying of his body, all telling the story – what happens, what happened before, what happens next and how will it end? It is all fundamentally the same, except that practitioners focus on different things.

This year at the LIMF Phia Ménard will cause small plastic bags, kept afloat by currents of air, to dance to the music of Debussy and a storm of beautiful airborne demons will fly and float before our eyes.  Compagnie Philippe Genty will plunge us into ‘a world of dizzying dreams and beautiful landscapes’, with ‘breathtaking optical illusions and ever-changing stage pictures’ and ‘captivating fantasies’. And Gecko will bring us ‘a delicious world of warped imagery and beautiful music’ with ‘stunning design and unusual choreography’. And there will be clowns, and no doubt there will be grummelot, the clown’s glossolalia - sound that imitates speech, and sometimes just vocal noise, the physical manifestation of air through the throat. And there will be acrobatics, and female robots that do all the chores in a male fantasy world, and boxers, and giant puppets and jugglers. Well, all according to the brochure. As I quoted from T.S.Eliot last week, ‘Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same’. 

Is all this cutting edge? Well, I will make my mind up after I’ve seen it, but in a way it often is, because, while they are not pushing the boundaries of the spoken word (my own precious thing), they are trying and trying and trying to explore what can be said by doing without words. As the brochure says of Gecko, they seem ‘to have mastered a new form of communication in which sounds and movement convey meaning more effectively than words’. But... conversely maybe it can just as easily convey, and forgive my language, but you are grown up’s, just so much bollocks. Sometimes just doing anything different is mistaken for art. As Eliot said: Is the past changed by it and is it changed by the past? But I do always keep going back and usually am both elated and disappointed. But it is all about looking – and these artists are always looking. We can look and sometime we find and sometimes we don’t.  

I must finish with something closer to home, Ed Hall’s marvellous company Propellor’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. I saw them a couple of weeks ago. Their palette like our own is both about the words (always in their case Shakespeare’s) and the poetry of movement. Because they choose to play only with men you are forced to think about the movement of women. They don’t put on wigs or padded bras; they don’t pretend to be women. They are just men playing games with the familiar movement of women – and it is very funny. But all the movement is crafted with lovely detail, especially the ensemble work, the feet and hands always as studied as the head and shoulders. Two scenes stood out: The lovers’ enchantment sequence when they fling insults at each other in total abandon, possibly the funniest scene in Shakespeare, and the Pyramus and Thisbe sequence, which was so silly it had pretty well everyone guffawing like donkeys.

Have I found my cutting edge? No, not really. I thought the delivery of the words at time laboured and at best conventional – and it was a total mystery to me that the actor playing Hermia also played Snug the joiner, which meant that Hermia wasn’t present with Lysander to watch the rude mechanicals do their play. But does it matter that it wasn’t perfect and not cutting edge? It was such fun! And the movement like Henry Goodman’s in Arturo Ui a few weeks ago was so exhilarating.