The Edge is a research and development collaborative performance project initiated by Transport Theatre, UK with Ranan, Calcutta with the central themes of climate change and migration as impulses. Funded by the British Council's 'Connections through Culture' programme, this year long performance collaboration project was launched in February 2011 with a series of Skype interactions including rehearsal and performance sharings between Douglas Rintoul and Vicky Long of Transport and Vikram Iyengar and Amlan Chaudhuri of Ranan.
This blog will carry regular updates from Amlan and Vikram over the next month.
The first phase comprised
- a performance created with the students of the Central School of Speech and Drama, London in February 2011 under the direction of Douglas Rintoul
- a presentation on the project as part of the British Council showcase at the Alchemy festival at South Bank, London on 19 April 2011. Ranan's Artistic Director, Vikram Iyengar was present via audio line, and two of Ranan's process videos responding to a shared source text were screened. Watch the videos here: Alchemy Sharing 1, Alchemy Sharing 2
The second phase
· 11 August to 13 September, 2011: Amlan Chaudhuri and Vikram Iyengar travel to the UK to work with Transport Theatre
Schedule
12 to 16 August: Edinburgh Fringe Festival attending workshops with Douglas Rintoul and viewing Elegy, Transport's new production
22 to 26 August: Workshops with performers at University Centre, Folkestone
30 August to 2 September: R&D with performers at the National Theatre Studio, London
3 to 4 September: Open Workshop at the University of Kent
This blog will carry regular updates from Amlan and Vikram over the next month.
THREE DAYS AT THE EDINBURGH FRINGE: AUGUST 2011
PART 1
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| a view of Edinburgh (photo: Amlan Chaudhuri) |
Edinburgh is – so I have been told – normally a quiet, peaceful, picturesque small city. Every August all that changes with the Edinburgh festivals. It’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s throbbing with energy, it changes from local to international overnight, it is THE place to be in the UK. Indeed, it seems that everyone who has any connection with performance in the UK moves up there for some part of the month – to perform, to watch, to be inspired, to revel, to celebrate, to learn, to exchange…
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| 'Underbelly' - one of the Fringe venues (photo: Amlan Chaudhuri) |
It is actually a festival of festivals. The Edinburgh International Festival is the mega one around which all the others gather – the Book Festival, the Film Festival, the Jazz Festival… - but by far the most well known across the board (and perhaps the most potentially exciting) is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The very nature of the fringe and its approach lies in the name itself: it places itself off-centre. It happens largely in unusual venues, in unusual ways, through unusual channels, with often unusual outcomes. It does not depend nor define itself by existing mega festival structures – financial, infrastructural, logistical, curatorial. It is strongly artist led, artist managed and artist funded. It’s a coming together of diverse people, a coming together of possibilities, a space where anything – good and bad – can happen. The only counterpart I can think of in my limited experience is the Durga Puja in Calcutta, though this is of course a socio-religious community created-led-managed activity. But if one sees artists and art enthusiasts – performers, directors, venue directors and programmers, art students and volunteers, and audience – as one large community, then this is the one parallel that comes to mind. There is of course a managing group which oversees all the festivals and the mind-boggling coordination and infrastructure that is necessary to make a success of this month crammed full with everything you can imagine (and many things you can’t), but they are – for all practical purposes – invisible. This complete absence of any apparent machinery only underlines for me how well oiled, efficient and alert the systems of functioning must be.
Two examples. The Fringe brochure looks (and unfortunately feels) like the Yellow Pages. Stuffed full of listings with brief descriptions, photographs and box ads, it is categorised into several sections – Comedy, Cabaret, Dance, Theatre, Music… Not to mention indexes by name of event or name of venue – the latter could be anything from an art gallery to a temporarily converted church, the laboratories of the university to a traditional theatre space. Just putting this directory together must have been a task that called for exceptional management and public relation skills. Move over corporate consultants: you want to know how to pull off the most complicated coordination and management, a theatre festival is where you go. The Edinburgh Fringe just takes it to an unbelievable extreme. Just wish the design was slightly more inspired though.
Secondly, the Fringe is run on the ground by an army of young volunteers from all over the world. Often drama students, they work as ushers, box office personnel, technical help … and possibly watch the shows for free. Where do they come from, who do they report to, how to they get assigned their very clearly defined jobs (they behave as if this is all they’ve ever done), where do they stay in a city which suddenly is full to the brim with visitors, how do monies and subsistence work...? I have no answers to these questions, but there is obviously a well thought through system that allows and encourages all this to happen.
WATCHING SHOWS AT THE EDINBURGH FRINGE
The problem with the Fringe is that there is TOO MUCH HAPPENING! How does one choose intelligently from a brochure that looks frighteningly like the Yellow Pages? Everything can’t be worth watching – in fact, everything isn’t. There is a lot of trash, but – how does one sort the grain from the chaff? And we had only two days! Thankfully, we were staying with Emma – a member of Transport – who had her ear to the ground and pulled together a short list of half a dozen things we should see in addition to Elegy, which was Transport’s show. We managed to see four out of them. Here’s a very brief response to each.
Dream Pill
(at an Underbelly venue)
Dream Pill had received very positive reviews, but also some uncertain ones. The play – only 30 minutes – came out of research into child trafficking with children from Nigeria, and the child pornography trade. I would give this production 2 – or maybe 2 ½ – stars (using a rating of a maximum of five stars), and this would be primarily for the premise and approach of the script. The whole situation is seen through the eyes of two 9-year old Nigerian girls who have been trafficked. Living in a small dark room (the space of the performance lent itself well to create this), they are still kids playing, giggling, teasing – their innocence of what they do attempting to underline the horror of it all. And what they describe in child-like language as games they are asked to play is actually quite graphic and deeply disturbing. Unfortunately, a major flaw in the production and the script too is that it’s too short. The two actresses – who are not bad at playing the young girls, by the way (not that they are actually that age!) – seem to rush through the production all the while being energetic, playful children, something which is sometimes overplayed. Of course, there are moments when they hear their ‘owner’ outside and back away silently, giving us glimpses into the sense of wrong and discomfort that must lie behind their innocence. But these are too few and far between. One is never hit with the full horror of the situation, not even when one of them – responding to a call – dresses up in a short, shiny frock with high heels and lipstick and leaves to attend to a client. The other offers to go in her place – something only a child would spontaneously do as a friend – but she replies, “No, he wants me”. A terribly adult reply from a child yet to meet puberty – but it’s the words that stayed with me, not the moment. And in theatre, it’s the resonance of the moment that matters. If it’s only the words that make theatre, we could all just read scripts and be done with it.
I Hope My Heart Goes First
(at a converted church venue the name of which I have forgotten. How I wish I could forget about the production too)
Half a star for this one (since none is not an option), but definitely NO stars for the critics and reviewers who created such a hype around it, making it sound like a dark horse hit. Devised by a popular Glasgow based youth theatre company, the production looked at aspects of the heart – physical, emotional, technical, medical and of course LOVE – with references and sources from (by their own admission) cheesy pop songs and other equally inane things. An inane source does not necessarily translate into an inane presentation – indeed, it can inspire the most profound commentary through parody, sarcasm, irony – all the tools which make the best comedy as opposed to the best jokes. But there was none of that – no insight, no attempt at it even (at least, none that I could see). Why people were raving and paying good money to go and see a bunch of adolescents singing Karaoke with uncoordinated and badly performed movements (I will not dignify that with the term dancing), silly repartee and general awkwardness all around is something I cannot fathom. And don’t wish too. Enough said!
The Wheel
(at the Traverse Theatre)
Watching this immediately after the one above was a study in contrasts. The script (and central character) reminded me strongly of Brecht’s Mother Courage. An impending wedding opens the play against a stark and violence ridden setting with exposed iron bars and crumbing walls – that in itself was a strong statement. But the script soon leaves the realistic tone it begins with and moves into a space where specifics of time, reality, space, character, belief blur in this almost epic-fable journey about the corruption of innocence that an atmosphere of war promotes. Nothing new to say actually, but the writing moves smoothly through boundaries of time and space with non-specific (yet identifiable) episodes and impacts of war across the world, across the last few centuries. One woman travels with a little girl in search of her father through this violent landscape, picking up two other children on the way – only to come full circle and have to start again. The plot pathway is sometimes difficult to swallow – but I feel that this is primarily because the performance style sticks to a highly realistic, naturalistic manner of acting, while the script itself is – if anything – surreal and dream-nightmare like. Some of the dialogue, acting and representation therefore seemed heavy-handed and ‘untrue’. The features of war – explosions, firing etc – were technically brilliant, but once again too ‘real’ perhaps for a script which demanded a far more imaginative and open approach to its staging. This was a National Theatre of Scotland production and it did win a Fringe First award from the Scotsman newspaper. But – as is the case with many ‘national’ theatres – I do feel they sometimes suffer from a style of playing which is a stamp. This often interferes with being true to the text which may be asking for quite a different treatment. It was, I must say, absorbing, but I – for one – was following the magic of the script rather than the magic of the performance.
The Table
(at the Pleasance Dome)
Four stars or higher for this delightful puppet performance. Created and performed by the Blind Summit company, the performance comprises three unrelated pieces – each one a gem combining astonishing skill and coordination, tongue-in-cheek humour and remarkable imagination. The first piece –after which the production is named – introduces us to a magnificently handled Bunraku puppet figure who promises (threatens) to perform the last twelve hours of Moses’ life on a table in real time. Thankfully, this never comes to pass since our puppet is easily distracted and garrulously communicative about things like the dimensions of the table – side to side, back to front, diagonal … And then a girl (an actual human being) suddenly appears at the table and appears not to notice him at all, no matter what he does. The rest of the piece plays with this absent relationship bringing together puppetry, movement, dialogue and pure creativity in marvellous and inspiring interplay. The second piece is played behind a series of three picture frames. Pairs of white hands and white masks of different shapes make whirlwind and ever-changing journeys behind these frames in a background and foreground which is otherwise totally black. Performed with split second precision to an accompanying music score, how the four puppeteers managed to create the ever-moving illusion of a processions of hands and faces in pitch black is a mystery which can only be illuminated by the fact of hours and hours of painstaking rehearsal. And nowhere was this better illustrated than in their last piece which used one brief case and a sheaf of A4 sheets to tell a whole story through cartoon sketched storyboard. Precision (once again performed exactly timed with the music as a whole and in parts), absolute coordination (not once did an unplanned gap appear between the separate sheets of paper as they were drawn form the brief case), skill, imagination, fun, play … everything that can make watching a performance piece both an elevating and humbling experience were out in force. And to add a bit of subtext to those of us who complain about the lack of resources and funding in theatre: how much does it take to procure a table, three picture frames, and a brief case of paper – all lit with flat light. Not much at all. But how much does it take to create a production such as this? A minefield of creativity and imagination, and a massive amount of downright hard work.
Apart from this, we saw Elegy twice. But I’ll dedicate separate space to that connecting it to the collaborative work between Transport and Ranan.
Visiting Scottish Dance Theatre, Dundee - 15 August 2011
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| Driving to Dundee |
Janet Smith and Amanda Chin of Scottish Dance Theatre had visited Ranan in October 2010 during their reconnoitre of India along with Nelson Fernandez. Janet – Artistic Director of SDT – had been the guest at one of Ranan’s adda sessions – a report and response by Lav Kanoi (Ranan repertory member) can be read here.
SDT were to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe the week after we left, so we drove up to Dundee where they are based to meet them in rehearsal. SDT is housed in the Dundee Repertory Theatre which is also home to an acting repertory of the same name as the theatre. Dundee is a small town which – like so many other small towns in the UK and across the world – prospered with local trade and as a port, and then declined with the advent of newer technologies. And like many other small towns in the UK, Dundee is trying to rejuvenate and regenerate itself at present. And input and support for the arts has formed a major part of how this is conceived. There are problems there as well – specially now with the economic downturn and huge and often illogical cuts in arts funding – but that’s another story.
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| Set building area at Dundee Rep |
The Dundee Repertory Theatre building is a self-contained space with its own well-equipped performance space, rehearsal studios, costume, set and technical departments and a strong Education department as well. The theatre receives public money of course, but what caught my eye as soon as we entered the foyer was a large plaque thanking both public, individual and private donors for their continued support.
SDT’s studio was on the top floor. Again, it is so difficult for us to imagine rehearsal spaces like that. A sprung wooden floor, very high ceiling, built in sound system, a rest area – not to mention dedicated dressing rooms and lounge outside of the space and an office space on a different floor. They had marked out the area of the venue they would be performing in in Edinburgh, and it was about a third of the floor space they actually had. They were having to re-imagine the ensemble pieces for this smaller space, while we – even at Ranan, lucky as we are to have our own space – are constantly creating work in a space smaller than we will perform in.
Speaking of space, one of the things that struck me was how detailed and measured their movements and positions were vis-à-vis one another. How far dancers were from one another, whether one could be seen from the corner of the eye of another… all contributed to making a piece. Yes, they have a large space and can afford to measure and work at that level of precision, but what struck me the most was the generosity of the ensemble among themselves, the eagerness to re-orient oneself to help a co-dancer. For Indian classical dancers trained in a solo tradition, there is a strong lesson here as we move more and more (for better or for worse) into the realm of choreography for a group of dancers.
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| SDT and Dundee Rep: the people |
SDT is a surprising international company. Among the 7-8 dancers we met, there were people from Britain, France Belgium, Spain and other places as well. And each of them wonderfully trained before joining SDT. We watched them rehearse sections of an ensemble piece and then a male and female version of an enchanting duet (the same choreography, but vastly different just because the gender changed). Personally, I feel that contemporary dance sometimes tends to become too abstruse and self-involved in its expression. But here was contemporary dance that had not only excellent technique, but communicated with me instantly, joyously, beautifully. It touched and moved us, and this was just an often interrupted rehearsal. It was really unfortunate that we couldn’t watch them in performance.
There is a possibility of SDT touring India with performances sometime in 2012, though the present recession climate has cast a cloud over so many plans and possibilities. But if they do, I would exhort everyone to go watch and interact with this wonderful company.
[all photographs are By Amlan Chaudhuri]
Article by Vikram Iyengar in e-Rang
In this article in the latest issue of e-Rang, Vikram Iyengar reflects on several avenues of public engagement with the arts in the UK. These experiences were all during the one month that Vikram and Amlan spent in the UK for The Edge project.
