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Riding High

Posted on July 22, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

Today’s post is born out of one those moments of revelation when you think ‘how did I miss that? How can I not have heard of that’. I am writing about the Bamana giant body puppets of Mali. If you have never heard of this tradition it is well worth looking at, because when I say big, I mean BIG!

I need to point out at this stage that in the Bambara language the same word is used for both ‘mask’ and ‘puppet’, since both serve the same function: to enable mythical and supernatural beings to be brought to life by hidden performers. I got a little confused at first, but I like the idea that there is no distinction between the two .

Below is a brief background, courtesy of Museum of African Art in New York, but first I suggest you watch this. The narration is in French (Mali was a French colony until 1960) and very accessible even with my poor school-boy ear.

At Arm’s Length: The Art of African Puppetry

The art of Malian puppet theatre, the Sogo bo (the animals come forth), practiced by the Bamana of Mali and originated by the fishing community of Bozo, dates back to pre-colonial Mali. Sogo bo, a performance of puppet and mask dances, tells stories of Malian tradition, imparting valuable lessons in morality while entertaining the audience.

Within the Sogo bo performance animals of the bush are paramount.The Bamana describe themselves as cultivators and hunting people, and it is therefore animals from the bush that predominate. The animal characters represent far more than their counterparts in the bush. They are the symbols, the tangible manifestation of the essential force of the animal. They are the imperial majesty of the buffalo or the conniving duplicity of the hare. The qualities are implied through the costume and the dance of the masker. The buffalo masker regally marches about, and the youthful spark of the hare can be seen in its quick, vigorous movements. The antelope can be seen striding grace-fully, and the baboon jumps about with vigor.

The Sogo bo masquerades are organized by the village youth associations, the kamalen- ton, and the subject matter most commonly dealt with is hunting and heroic behavior. The youth associations, in essence, own the masquerades. They organize the activities of the night, and it is their stories that the masquerades tell. Weeks prior to the fete, the youth organizations meet frequently, planning and choreographing the events of the masquer- ades. The youths of the kamalen-ton choose the cast of characters, the costumes, the stories, and the masks that will be used. They may choose to bring out and refurbish used masks or create new ones. Their mothers, wives, and sisters provide the textiles neces- sary for the costumes. Once the major planning is completed, the youth organizations split into smaller groups and work on the particular renovation or construction projects assigned to them. Throughout this process, the older men act as consultants, offering advice on the construction of the more intricate puppets.

The puppet masks of the Sogo bo are generally worn over the bodies of the performers (usually two men). The performer(s), surrounded by the wooden frame of their puppet masks, are hidden from view by straw and cloth which cover the frame.The head of the puppet is manipulatable , and from within, the performers move the puppet about in dance.

The Sogo bo performance takes place at night, and can carry on well into the early morning hours, consisting of more than twenty sets of dances. Called to the dance by the beat of the drums, the maskers, either individually or in small groups, dance in character. The large and powerful beasts lumber about slowly, majestically (the more powerful ones come out towards the end of the night), while the energy and spark of youth can be seen in the dance of the smaller animals. Each dance set lasts only five to ten minutes, and in between, the women’s chorus provide song (praise songs for the animals). The chorus, however, does not perform during the dance sets, the sets are without voice. It is the masks, the movement of the maskers, and the beat of the drums that tell the story.

Malian puppetry features maaniw, “little people” or puppets in human form. They range in size, from small hand-held rod puppets to almost 6-foot tall figures. Maaniw play an important role in initiation ceremonies and often appear at nighttime on the backs of kalaka (small stages in the form of a body). They often speak of the individual’s place in society and teach morals.

Though there are certain tenets that are retained in the storytelling, it is by no means a static tradition. Puppet plays that were once held only on specified days are now held on weekends, to accommodate the schedule of those who have left the village to make a living in bigger cities. Modern issues are dealt with, and the plays continue to reflect the lives and times of the Bamana.

Then I read about Yaya Coulibaly, 7th generation descendant of Mamari Biton Coulibaly (King of Segou region of Mali) who is the director of the Sogolon Puppet Troupe. After training at the National Institute of Arts in Bamako, Mali, and l’Institute International de la Marionette in France he mastered the traditional Malian arts of puppetry. It would seem he doesn’t rest with tradition either. Malian puppet performances are traditionally voiceless, but Yaya has chosen to integrate voice and performance. I realised I had heard of him before and then I remembered he had worked with Handspring Puppet Company, the people who created the horse puppets for War Horse. They collaborated on a piece call Tall Horse which blended two puppetry traditions: the Handspring work which is based in lifelike realism and the stylised, ritual based puppetry of West Africa. The play’s narrative is of a giraffe and its handler, Atir, sent as a gift from the Egyptian Pasha to the French King Charles X in 1827. Its journey took it via Alexandria and Marseilles, creating a sensation en route. Tall Horse premiered in Cape Town and then went on to tour the world. This blending of styles really appeals to me. I would have loved to have seen the play.

Many of you reading this will know of ISTA – the International Schools Theatre Association and they published a great article a few years ago by Laurie-Carroll Bérubé about her staging of Tall Horse which you can read here, Malian puppetry traditions.

Changing tack slight, as part of my research I came across this fascinating recording of Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler (Handspring’s founders) and others, talking about puppetry as a contemporary medium of communication and influence. Puppets and politics – fantastic! You will need a couple of hours, but it is really, really interesting and worthwhile.

I’ll finish with a few useful facts about Malian puppetry, taken from Bérubé’s article:

Boliw is the raw spiritual energy/ power contained within performance objects such as masks and puppets. It is believed that women possess boliw – because of their ability to give birth.

Castalet: the large body-puppet, which represents a gentle mythical beast. The body of the animal is a cloth and raffia-covered frame which conceals the puppeteer inside who dances, making the raffia skirt sway.

Merens habitables are the long- necked female characters of traditional Malian performance. Merens habitables are manipulated only by men and post-menopausal women because only they are able to control the boliw contained within the puppet.

Sogo Baw or Sogow (Big Beasts): these are large body-puppets (roughly 2 m long, 1.5 m high), generally representing bush, savannah or domesticated animals. Sogo baw can resemble mobile puppet theatres with small puppets on the larger animal’s back, manipulated from within.

Sogo Bo: the annual masquerade (the Animals come forth) held in June, just before the rains come to Mali’s Segou region

Critics In & Jury Out

Posted on July 20, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

So the previews are over and the critics have been in to see Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable. Now the fact that I am 9,500km away negates me seeing it so I have been avidly immersing myself (pun entirely intended) in the press and blogosphere.

It would seem the jury is out. The theatrical event of the summer or the most over-hyped show of the year (lets not forget that promotional interviews and teasers were out in March)?

I will share one thing with you and give you the links to the rest. Make your own mind up. Here is a conversation between Natasha Tripney, William Drew, Stewart Pringle and Lauren Mooney that was published in Exeunt yesterday.

The Drowned Man: Playing the Game

Natasha Tripney: There were several moments during The Drowned Man where I felt as if I was in my own private movie. The soundtrack helped I think, – the Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember’ plays in my head often enough anyway – those finger clicks kicking in as I opened a door. The lighting, crepuscular, twilit, also played a part as I picked my way through an indoor glade, the ground underfoot loamy, or found myself in a diner, all Formica and bourbon and bubble gum, James Ellroy, Carson McCullers and Edward Hopper. I loved that. I could have played there all day.

Compared to their last major London show – The Masque of the Red Death at BAC, which is the only other Punchdrunk piece I’ve experienced (I missed Faust, sadly) – I got a lot out ofThe Drowned Man. I saw more action, so to speak, followed a couple of characters around (though didn’t find their arcs compelling enough to stick with them for too long), had my hand-held and my face stroked by a sequin-bedecked woman in a Red Room. Beautiful as the design was, I found Masque a hugely frustrating experience. I spent so much of my time in there, standing in glorious but empty spaces, arriving at scenes just as they’d finished and the one time I was in the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time I clearly stood in the wrong ‘place’ and got (quite roughly) elbowed out of the way by one of the performers. This didn’t really endear me towards them as a company.

So despite the oven-like temperatures, I enjoyed a lot about the experience. Some of the design was truly spectacular – I particularly liked the shrines and the scarecrows – the level of detail was delicious and for the first time I can grasp why people might become frequent fliers, returning multiple times. I think it was Ian Shuttleworth who said, when discussingMasque, that in order to get the most out of it you have to be good at following cues, chasing voices. I struggled with that in Masque, but I guess here I played the game better. It’s just a shame it took one deeply frustrating experience for me to figure out how to do that. Had I paid the best part of £50 in order to learn those lessons, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feel quite so warmly towards it.

Stewart Pringle: Though I have some severe reservations on it as a piece of theatre, I had a pretty awesome time wandering around Temple Studios. I found the attention to detail just as arresting as I had in Masque, and the scale and scope even more breathtaking. I’ve read a few of the early blog reviews and I find it genuinely surprised that experiences like walking through a forest filled with camper-vans, sifting through the detritus of failed relationships in seedy hotel rooms and wandering through the back-lot Beamish of the street scene have been written off as if the show was just a few hours plodding around a dingy warehouse.

I saw far more action and far more actors than I did in Masque, but in a way I think that took me out of the experience rather than enhanced my immersion. Because the actors interact with the audience so rarely, and because I find the dancey stylings of Maxine Doyle so insufficient and unengaging, I had far more fun when I was exploring on my own. There was a bunch of letters in the sort of broken down house area that I read through in their entirety, tracing a relationship from first wobble to total collapse, and I found the experience far more moving than any amount of repetitive interpretive dance.

I’m with Tash on the soundtrack, too. In the main I found it really enhanced the atmosphere, even if its repetitions eventually began to blur everything into a single tone. Because it essentially cycled around, or seemed to, it added to the creeping sense of dramatic stasis that built towards the final hour. Its lack of syncronicity with the action of individual scenes also created the occasional daft moment, such as finding I myself watching a man putting his trousers on in the back-room of a seamstresses to soaring, cinematic strings. They were very nice trousers, I suppose.

William Drew: So I find the idea of “playing the game” of a Punchdrunk show really interesting. My interpretation of this, which may not be what you meant, Tasha, is how an audience member makes sense of all the stimuli they fill their shows with, so they weave together a narrative for themselves. Bearing in mind, the world does not react to you, in the sense of your actions affecting outcomes, I can see two ways you can do this. The first is to explore the environment, looking for letters, imagining what was there before, finding the space in the absences for your own imagination; the other is to look for performers, to watch them and to follow them through a space. Let’s call the first exploration and the second active spectatorship (while recognising the extent to which it is “active” might be problematic but that’ll do for now). From what I understand, Stewart preferred the exploration so actually found the number of opportunities for active spectatorship unhelpful, at best, and an irritant, at worst. Tasha, on the other hand, you seem to have attempting to engage with bothMasque and Drowned Man as an active spectator and this is something that you feel you “failed” at with Masque but did more successfully in Drowned Man.

It seemed to me that Drowned Man was heavily weighted towards active spectatorship. Perhaps there were more actors or maybe it was simply the case that people know to “play the game” of a Punchdrunk show better by now so you get what amounts to a fairly respectable fringe audience in dogged pursuit of almost every performer. Like Stewart, my favourite moments were the ones where I could be alone exploring the world that the company have created. There were still treasures to be found in doing that. My favourite moment of theDrowned Man was where I sat on the one free chair in an audience of scarecrows. The impression that I was on a film set meant that I was able to suspend my disbelief for long enough to feel as if the “man” in front of me might turn around any second. That was thrilling. Generally though, I didn’t find there were as many pay-offs from exploring as there were in Faust and this leads me back to the possibility that the weighting is built into this show by the company in response to how most audiences want to behave within the environment. They are “failing” fewer people who want to play in that way by making it easier to “play the game” successfully but, in doing so, are they losing a little of the openness that was part of the appeal of their earlier work?

Natasha Tripney: That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms. Looking back on it now, my favourite moments of Drowned Man were actually ones of exploration – finding intricate origami flowers in a series of filing drawer or discovering a hidden shrine made of delicate curls of cassette tape. Even my lovely Shangri-Las moment was one in which I was alone in a space. I found Doyle’s choreographic style – all that sweaty sexual intensity – very samey after a while and not particular engaging and, as you said, Stew, far too reliant on archetype. I felt no need to pursue any one performer for long, though I gather this is an approach which lots of people favour. I think what worked for me here was the ratio between the exploratory/active elements and maybe the fact that I didn’t put pressure on myself to chase the action or attempt to piece a plot together as I did inMasque and therefore was far better able to enjoy what I was experiencing rather than fret about what I wasn’t. I think that’s what I meant by playing the game.

Lauren Mooney: This was my first Punchdrunk, Tasha, and I found all the things you said about the unsatisfactory nature of your Masque experience really familiar. Basically, it does seem like there are two ways to approach a show like this – following the actors or exploring the world. Not having done anything like this before, I found myself a little paralysed by indecision, and so didn’t have a fully satisfactory experience of either.

As I think most of us have said, I was completely blown away by the level of detail and the sheer SIZE of the thing; I’d spoken to a couple of people about what to expect, but nothing, really, could have prepared me for it. There was a kind of dream logic to the whole place that I found genuinely disturbing – I can’t put my finger on it, it was just an atmosphere, something perhaps to do with not being able to hear the actors when they spoke and being able to, to some extent, do what you wanted (go through people’s papers, letters, diaries) in a way that would be impossible or sociopathic in real life.

That and the music creeped me out all the way from the top of my spine to the bottom, and made my wandering experiences less adventurous than they should have been. When I was alone in the basement and found a cell full of small blocks, I had a powerful sense that the door was going to shut behind me, and wanted to be back in the safety of a crowd; when I was in a crowd, I wanted to be back on my own again, experiencing that waking-dream sensation.

My instinct to follow the actors and scenes was almost entirely, I think, for me, the wrong one – but it took me a long time to realise that most of the scenes were similar, repetitive, plot-light… Too long really, as by the time I’d given up on them and dug into some proper exploring, it was time for the finale. I basically expected there to be more plot than there was? So I was constantly chasing other scenes, thinking I was missing something, that some important brilliant theatre was happening in another room just outside my reach – when of course it wasn’t.

This is why I agree with Stew’s comment that it isn’t maybe good theatre so much as an amazing experience. The things I liked about it, and I liked lots in spite of a few reservations, weren’t things I can recognise as being connected in any way to theatre, the way a beautiful script or a brilliant performance can move you – it was a different sensation being evoked completely differently. It was the mood in the place that I found most effective, partly thanks to the music and partly, I must say, the masks. I know they’re controversial and uncomfortable, and I wear glasses so I had them squished onto my face a bit, but bloody hell, for me they were so effective. It made the audience look like part of the set design, for one thing, when seeing someone pulling a face at an inopportune moment might really take you out of it. (I have a lot of thoughts on this but actually, as I’m the only person new to Punchdrunk, I imagine everyone else is so Over the masks…)

So having said all this, I completely buy into the idea of revisits – I enjoyed my experience but it was quite unsatisfactory, and only gets more so the more I talk to other people – which brings me to pricing, something Stew talks about in more depth in his review. Isn’t there a way they could, for instance, charge far less for a return visit? If I’d paid £40 for that I would’ve been so cross, because I felt like I did it all wrong; I think the ticket costs are extortionate in general but doubly so because, as has been said, a single visit can be so frustrating. If they MUST charge such a lot, can’t they at least have an option of, you know, paying £10, £15 for a return visit…? I don’t know.

Having said all that, a friend of mine who also went to The Drowned Man is a gamer and his experience of things was very different to mine…

William Drew: There are some connections with videogames, yes, but there are also very significant differences in that the piece is no way interactive. It is a cliché of lazy videogame narratives to use letters lying around to fill in backstory for those of us for whom that matters. Going back to my previous categorisations of the way to experience a Punchdrunk show, I am drawing partly on Bartle’s gamer psychology. One of the categories of gamer types is the Explorer. These kinds of things are littered throughout videogame worlds to appeal to Explorer types. Other types, such as the Killer, will ignore them because they, you know, want to kill people (frowned upon in a Punchdrunk show, I understand, almost as much as talking).

Similarly, you might see a couple of NPCs (Non-Player Characters) arguing about something in a videogame. That argument is likely to be significant, possibly not to the main narrative, but could generate a quest you might want to embark on or the information contained within it might be relevant to another quest. I’m talking principally about the RPG genre because they tend to be more open world. In an adventure game, things are more linear and that makes it easy for everything to be relevant. What the environment tends to provide in both of these genres of games though is exposition and this is essentially all that Punchdrunk are giving us here. I don’t necessarily mean this as a criticism but I think it’s important to point out the ways in which The Drowned Man is as unlike a game as it is a piece of traditional theatre. I think a serious gamer who went there expecting a game would be as disappointed/confused as a hardcore theatregoer who went expecting some theatre.

Lauren Mooney: William – I very much agree, though the thing I meant about the difference in our experiences was actually less of a comment on the action than on our reactions to it. Oddly, I bought into the reality of the world almost too much – I rarely read the letters or looked through the drawers, so convinced was I in the bloody silly fibre of my being that this was wrong – or if not wrong, certainly something I risked being caught in the middle of and shouted at for!

Whereas my friend, Liam, who creates and designs games, had no such qualms and riffled away to his heart’s content. He even told me he regretted not trying on the clothes in the costume rooms – trying them on, which would NEVER have occurred to me in a MILLION YEARS.

I do think being predisposed to it by gaming might make you better at ‘playing’ a Punchdrunk show, but no, it certainly is nothing like actual gaming. Several people I’ve spoken to, in fact, said they would have liked to be given some kind of task, a thing to achieve or attain – whereas the show as it stands is essentially the opposite of this, telling people to ‘just go and mill about’. Visitors risk being paralysed by choice and ending up like me, waddling about lost and peering in through windows, looking for the party…

I think you’re right when you say that as either a gaming or a purely theatrical experience,The Drowned Man absolutely disappoints. Though I was hugely excited about the whole thing for a few hours after I left, just because it was so mad and huge and beautiful to look at, that sensation seems to fade hugely the further I get from it. It really does seem to me that most of the things I enjoyed most were general Punchdrunk things, not specific to this show, that I loved because they were new to me – and so ultimately, it does kind of seem like Punchdrunk have a set bag of tricks they wheel out every time, that only really impress the first time you see them. Apart from this, the quality of your experience is characterised by how well you play the game and…luck.

And the critics said:

Paul Taylor in The Independent: For all its logistical flair the show is lacking in heart

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph: The masters of immersive theatre have returned with a show that will surely become a cult hit

Michael Billington in The Guardian: The choice of location is inspired

Sam Marlow, The Arts Desk: In their new show set in a seedy Hollywood outpost, Punchdrunk’s theatrical magic loses some of its allure

And in her blog for the Guardian, Lyn Gardner asks Does Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man live up to the hype?

Body Talk

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

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I thought a while before posting today. I read an article in the New York Times yesterday about a play touring in China. It is inspired by Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues which has become a cornerstone for a global movement to end violence against women and girls, V DAY. I only hesitated because the article is very frank, then decided that the power of theatre wins out against possible embarrassment. It is written by Didi Kirsten Tatlow:

Play Tests China’s Sexual Limits

BEIJING — There is a moment in the play “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” — a frank and funny exploration of feminism with Chinese characteristics — when the audience freezes in embarrassment. It is right after the actress Xiao Meili asks, “Do you masturbate?”

“It’s so hard getting people to answer that question!” Ms. Xiao, a 20-something with a razor-sharp black bob, exclaimed in an interview. “A lot of the time I had to answer myself,” she said of her scene, in which she plays a teacher.

During a recent performance in Beijing, Ms. Xiao paced in front of a white board demanding answers of her “students” — in reality a standing-room-only crowd of college-age women, some older women and several men. “A former professor of mine who attended told me she was terrified I’d ask her,” she said. Yet at one performance, “a woman yelled ‘Yes, it’s relaxing!”’ Ms. Xiao said, relishing the moment. “Totally spontaneous!”

Inspired by Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” with an English title that makes reference to the feminist classic “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — its Chinese title translates as “The Way of the Vagina” — the taboo-busting “Our Vaginas, Ourselves” was first staged in January at an L.G.B.T. center in Beijing before an audience of 50, said its producer, Ji Hang.

Written by four women, it is based on the life experiences of about a dozen contributors who gathered last autumn at Yiyuan Gongshe, a nongovernmental organization in Beijing, where they sat on cushions in a circle and talked.

“Writing this play was really just getting it down,” said Ai Ke, 29, one of the writers, who by day works for the publishing house of a major social science research institute.

It has been a hit. Since January, the amateur actresses and playwrights have performed it about 10 times in Beijing, Tianjin and Xiamen, to enthusiastic audiences numbering up to 150, who squeeze into small venues, sharing chairs and fanning themselves, as on a recent evening in the MOMA arts district of Beijing. But their performances have been limited in scale. The play has only been staged in unofficial venues because it was unlikely to get the necessary script approval from the authorities to show in official theaters, said Ms. Ji, the producer.

“We really want to enter the mainstream theater scene, but it’s impossible because the scripts would have to be censored,” she said. The subject matter is far too edgy to pass, she said.

While the play clearly owes a debt to Western feminism, what is striking — and exciting for the actresses and their audiences — is how thoroughly localized it is, with uniquely Chinese stories and a fast-paced style that at times recalls the xiangsheng, or crosstalk, of traditional Beijing humor, and rich, pun-laden language. Localization was crucial to the artists. “It’s so important to us I can’t even find the words to say it,” Ms. Ai said. “From the beginning we knew that was what we wanted.” The goal? Nothing less than to bring live, theatrical feminism — with its truths and relevance for hundreds of millions of people — to China. And to create an opportunity for personal transformation.

“It was important to us as a consciousness-raising exercise,” Ms. Ai said. “The personal transformation was No. 1.”

The localization is spelled out in the very first scene. “I’ll say it: vagina!” two actresses, called A and B, say in Mandarin, on a stage with minimal props. “I’ll say it in the Shanxi dialect: vagina,” B says. “In the Wenzhou dialect: vagina,” A says. Then it’s the Hubei dialect, and so on until they have uttered the word in 10 dialects, the audience reacting with delight to the shock of the familiar, yet rarely heard word, spoken in their hometown tongues.

Of the play’s 11 scenes, eight consist of original material, while two are Chinese translations of excerpts from Ms. Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” and one is from an earlier Chinese play inspired by the American play, Ms. Ji said. Humor figures highly, as in Ms. Xiao’s scene and another called “The First Night.” Six women identified by the letters A to F chat about how they lost their virginity. “After we got a room,” sighs E, using a Chinese euphemism for having sex, “he got a receipt,” indicating that the man planned to make the encounter tax-deductible. The audience erupted in laughter.

But there is also real tension, notably in scenes that focus on rape, health and abortion. In the final scene, “I Am an Intern in an OB-GYN Ward,” a medical student recounts her experiences at a hospital: An elderly woman embodying the Chinese cultural ideal of the selfless grandmother — who will not seek medical treatment for a gynecological problem — says, “Son, don’t spend the money on me. Spend it on my grandson to go to university.”

The student also describes helping at births; the horror of aborting fetuses because they are female; and young women coming for routine abortions, sometimes several a year. China has a high abortion rate, and as I gazed around the audience, all their laughter gone, I reflected that quite a few women there probably knew precisely what she was talking about.

In 2005 The Vagina Monologues was banned in Shanghai. In the same year it was also banned in Uganda.

The Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos

I have seen the play a couple of times and it is indeed a powerful piece. If you are interested you can read the original text here. A little bit of researching later, it became apparent to me just how widely the play has been performed – it has been translated into 22 languages (and counting). It has been running in India for 11 years. Following the awful Delhi rape case that made headlines across the world earlier in the year, it is not surprising that the play took on a greater importance, as this report, Vagina Monologues challenges India’s taboos, from the BBC highlights. Indeed following it, Eve Ensler went to India to support the movement there:

A report from zeenews.com, When art impacts life, makes interesting and thought provoking reading as does a review of the play from the Times of India. Mind you, it has been banned in certain parts of India, as it has, believe it or not, in certain American states.

I was surprised to read that it has been staged in a number of more liberal muslim countries – Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia, but is banned in Malaysia.

And the purpose of my post? Simply to highlight the power of theatre to challenge orthodoxy and repression across the world.

The Show Must Go On

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

We’ve all been there – props not in place, mics failing, even scenery falling over. I remember being a lighting operator on a show set in a women’s toilet, where half the cubicles collapsed mid-performance! Things do go wrong in theatre all the time.

In this episode from the BBC’s Essay series, artistic director Josie Rourke talks about why working in theatre isn’t always plain sailing; what happens when disaster strikes and things go wrong. She explores mistakes of many kinds, not just the obvious ones that make an audience laugh, but the deeper rooted ones that start in the rehearsal room. Real food for thought!

Essay: On Directing – Josie Rourke

On a more frivolous note, recently in a newly opened production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the glass elevator got stuck just before the finale, leaving actors stuck in mid-air. The show was halted for 6 minutes while the problem was solved and apparently the apologetic stage manager received a round of applause from the audience. This prompted Lyn Gardner to write in her Guardian blog a piece entitled

Prop flops: why I love it when things go wrong on stage

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s great glass elevator may be unreliable – but misfiring props and mistimed cues can enhance rather than wreck a performance

The great glass elevator in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane malfunctioned last week, leaving Douglas Hodge’s Willy Wonka and the child actor playing Charlie stranded – and the performance halted – while they were rescued. They were lucky: when a flying carpet misbehaved during a Californian production of Aladdin, it tipped off the actors and left them hanging by their safety harnesses.

Provided nobody gets hurt or is humiliated (I once saw a poor Juliet lose her knickers when the elastic snapped), I must confess to having a sneaking enjoyment for moments that go wrong in the theatre. Doors that refuse to open, sets that wobble and revolves that malfunction may be a producer’s nightmare, but they demand spontaneity of a kind too much theatre spends its time trying, and failing, to emulate.

When things don’t go according to plan, it reminds us that what we are seeing is live and the actors are human. I once saw a rather dull revival of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest during which the teapot handle came off as one of the actors was trying to pour the tea. The moment was galvanising for both actors and audience, and we all laughed a great deal more for the rest of the show. It made everyone relax.

Sound effects are particularly prone to mistiming: I’ve heard telephones ring long after they have been answered and heard gunshots after the actor has fallen to the ground in apparent agony.

None, though, has been as spectacular as the misfiring special effects during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII at the Globe in 1613, when a cannon was fired and a spark lodged in the thatch, causing the theatre to burn down.

The reality is that something often goes wrong during theatre shows, but it’s rare that the audience notices. It’s only when something goes badly awry with a big illusion such as the glass elevator in Charlie that we notice, or when the show doesn’t go on at all or has to be abandoned because of computer malfunction. Cancellation of a performance because of technical hitches can be really annoying for audiences (who can’t always return on another evening), but I reckon audiences are hugely sympathetic when a production has to be halted for a few minutes. Rather than detracting from their theatre experience, it often enhances it. Those who were at Charlie last Friday will be talking about it for years.

Gardner’s post in turn prompted the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) to confess a few of its own mishaps:

We do our best to make sure all our performances run smoothly, but live theatre does go wrong from time to time. Here are some examples…

One night our current production of Titus Andronicus came to a temporary halt when Saturnius (John Hopkins) remained naked in the bath which became stuck half way through the trap.

The Merry Wives of Windsor has a chequered history. Both our recent production and Merry Wives the Musical(2006), were each stopped three times, through difficulties with the set or audience illness. Stage Manager Robbie Cullen said: ‘On two preview performances, I had to pause Dame Judi Dench mid scene. The second time she said to me (and the audience) “Oh not you again!”’

The hydraulic leaning book cases on David Farr’s The Winter’s Tale (2009) decided to lean (and start tipping the odd book) a scene early on a New Year’s Day matinee at the Roundhouse.

During one performance of Twelfth Night last year the on-stage lift cut out as it was coming down, leaving Andrew Aguecheek, played by Bruce Mackinnon stuck in the open cage lift. He and fellow actors improvised (not in iambic pentameter) before stage managers had to temporarily stop the show, to much audience laughter, until the lift was fixed. Later in the same performance Aguecheeck seemed to forget where the front of the stage was and fell off it – he was startled but unhurt.

Unfortunately when shows are stopped, it is not always for mundane reasons. I remember going to see a production at the RSC of a play called Singer, by Peter Flannery, starring Antony Sher which was stopped after about 20 minutes because of a bomb scare and we were evacuated from the theatre. The similar thing happened to me when I happened to be in London two days after the 7/7 bombings in 2005 and two performances I was about to see were cancelled because members of the respective casts were stuck on the Underground following subsequent terrorist alerts.

It has to be said though that sometimes mistakes are tragic. In 1673, Molière, the French actor and playwright, died after being seized by a violent coughing fit while playing the title role in his own play, The Hypochondriac. In 2008 a german actor slit his throat on stage in Vienna when the prop knife for his suicide scene turned out to be a real one. Thankfully he survived. However, sadly only a few weeks ago a performer with Cirque Du Soleil in Las Vegas was killed during a performance of Ka.

Stringing Up Royalty

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

I have spent quite some time recently looking at puppetry as a world theatre form and I have some great things to share – very varied, from the ancient and traditional, to the contemporary and technological. I have always been fascinated by puppets, right from being very young and even now I have puppets in my house, collected from across the globe. There is something quite primal about the way they can be brought to life.

I am going to start with a puppet tradition that goes back at least 700 years. In Myanmar/Burma puppet plays have been performed since at least the 1400s. In the 1700s, the royal court began to formally sponsor and regulate the puppet theatre, causing it to quickly grow in prestige.

Htwe Oo Myanmar puppeteers perform a group dance of handmaiden puppets

The Burmese court was concerned with preserving the dignity of its members and marionettes were often used to preserve the esteem of a person who had erred. For instance, the emperor could reprimand his children or his wife in this way by asking the puppeteers to put on a parable correcting errant children or careless wives about their reckless ways. While the reprimand would be obvious to anyone who was “in the know” it would largely pass unheeded by the people looking on, something that had a great deal of value in a court that could, and did contain hundreds of people.

The Burmese marionettes also served as a conduit between the ruler and his subjects. Many times, people would ask the puppeteers to mention in a veiled fashion a current event or warning to the ruler. In this way, information could be transferred on without any disrespect. A marionette could say things that a human could never get away with.

In many ways, the Burmese marionette troupes replaced the actors of the time. It was considered a beheading offense to put your head above royalty, a fact which made standing on a stage difficult to say the least. Similarly, the laws of Burma were such that an actor could not wear full costumes if they were playing figures like royalty or holy men. While both of these facts would hamper the movement and stylings of a human actor, marionettes were not bound by such things and thrived in the vacuum.

In the 1800s, puppet theatre was considered the most highly developed of the entertainment arts, and was also the most popular. Though no longer as popular today, the tradition is still maintained by a small number of performing troupes.

A Burmese puppet troupe includes puppet handlers, vocalists, and musicians. Plays are based on Buddhist fables, historical legends, and folktales, among other stories. The shows are performed for adults and children together, and typically last all night.

The Burmese puppetry figures of “nat-ga-daw,” or the spiritual medium, at Khin Maung Htwe’s home theatre

The puppets themselves are marionettes, ranging in height from about one to three feet. Nearly all are stock figures, changing their names but keeping their characteristics for each play. Some of these puppet types have been standard for centuries—especially those developed from Buddhist fables, which probably formed the puppeteers’ first repertoire.

As Myanmar emerges from years of political and social isolation, it is not surprising that traditional puppet troupes are emerging as a potential tourist draw (as they are in other countries across the world). However, it is clear this is also being done by a drive to hold on to centuries of cultural tradition. Two companies that are particularly gaining a reputation are the Mandalay Puppet Theatre and Htwe Oo Myanmar. The website of the former is packed full of information from how to make your puppet (provided you are a master craftsperson) to how to manipulate them, to a description of all the puppet characters.

A transcript of this video can be found here.

On Saturday, The Irrawaddy published an article by Kyaw Phyotha about U Khin Maung Htwe who founded Htwe Oo Myanmar

Bringing Myanmar Puppetry Back to Life

YANGON — Sitting in his makeshift theater at his home near downtown Yangon, U Khin Maung Htwe is dreaming big.

“I want to have a museum or center focused on Myanmar puppetry,” he said, caressing a stringed wooden white horse, one of the figures from a set of 28 Myanmar marionettes.

As well as running a theater, U Khin Maung Htwe is director of the Yangon-based marionette troupe Htwe Oo Myanmar. “Here in Myanmar, there’s no place to go for anyone, both locals and foreigners, who want to learn about the arts,” he laments.

Khin Maung Htwe poses with puppet U Min Kyaw, one of the famous pantheon of 37 spirits, who is fond of drinking and merrymaking

When he established the troupe in 2006, the one-time sailor’s ambition was more humble: He wanted to showcase Myanmar’s traditional performing arts to tourists in a fitting environment.

“I did it because I wanted to see people enjoy our puppetry in the way it is supposed to be enjoyed,” he said, explaining that hotels and expensive restaurants offer so-called traditional puppet shows to attract foreigners. “They treat puppetry like a side-dish to tourism.”

After struggling for seven years to get his idea off the ground—including making 10 overseas trips, from Thailand to Austria—Htwe Oo Myanmar has gained popularity internationally. Visiting Europe, he says, opened his eyes to the importance of opening a center to preserve the art form.

“After visiting puppet museums [in Europe], I have a burning desire to have a center for teaching, preserving and showcasing our puppetry here,” he said. “It would be very convenient for us to pass the arts on to younger generations.”

Myanmar puppetry, known as Yoke Thay, has a long history dating back more than 500 years. In a similar fashion to other folk plays around the world, Yoke Thay functioned as both royal entertainment and mass media, spreading stories of current events.

But Myanmar’s tradition of puppetry is also unique.

“Our tradition is unlike any other puppetry from neighboring countries. Ours has its own unique styles in every respect, including the way to manipulate the puppets and their design,” said U Chit San Win, the author of “Yanae Myanma Yoke Thay Thabin” (“Myanmar Puppet Theater Today”). “In our Yoke Thay you can enjoy all the Myanmar arts, like dancing, music, sculpture, sequin embroidery and painting.”

The puppetry performance of ba-lu, or ogres

U Chit San Win says Yoke Thay is not on the verge of extinction due to a number of puppetry courses taught at universities. But in general, he says, the traditional arts are unfashionable.

“Young people find it very boring and difficult to understand because even today the Myanmar puppet performance is still very traditional and using old Myanmar [language],” he said. “This means Yoke Thay has seen a serious decline in local patronage and it survives on tourism.”

This could explain why Htwe Oo Myanmar has battled for years to recognition at home, even as it has found interest abroad. When Cyclone Nargis hit the Ayeyarwady Delta in 2008, causing tourist numbers to fall, the troupe was forced to move to U Khin Maung Htwe’s living room, now hastily converted into a stage when tourists arrive.

He said while neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam are attracting international visitors with their puppetry, the Myanmar government does little to promote its traditional performing arts, “because they are paranoid about being labeled a ‘puppet government,’” U Khin Maung Htwe said.

More than two years after Myanmar’s military junta handed over power to a nominally civilian government, many still wonder if the current administration isn’t just a puppet of former military strongman Snr-Gen Than Shwe.

“Instead of what they are doing now, the government should have more concrete plans for our Yoke Thay,” U Khin Maung Htwe suggested. He sees a puppet museum or center becoming a focal point for puppet masters in the country to collaborate with each other to preserve and promote the arts.

“It would help us generate ideas about how to breathe new life into our dying arts, too,” he added.

..

Heads Above Water

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

I make no apologies for a very ‘British’ post today. One of my favourite theatre companies, Punchdrunk (I’ve mentioned them here a few times before) are about to open a new show, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable.

My friend and colleague Sara saw their production of Faust and still rates it as one of the best pieces of theatre she has ever seen. In The Observer today Liz Hoggart writes a profile of Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s founder and artistic director.

Felix Barrett: the visionary who reinvented theatre

The founder of the Punchdrunk company has no time for stages or even seats. Their ‘immersive’ style has had huge influence in theatre and beyond. And their new show is their most ambitious yet

‘We’re trying to build a parallel universe,” explains Felix Barrett, founder and artistic director of Punchdrunk. “For a few hours inside the walls, you forget that it’s London 2013 and slip into this other place.”

An elfin 35-year-old, with long, straggly hair and beard, Barrett is the man who changed British theatre, when he set up Punchdrunk in 2000, pioneering a form of “immersive” or “promenade” theatre. Their latest show, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, a walk-through tour of a seedy 1960s film studio, opens to the critics this month.

The three-hour performance will play out over four floors of a former sorting office next to Paddington station, west London. Co-directed by Barrett and long-time associate Maxine Doyle, and inspired by Georg Büchner’s anti-war fable, Woyzeck, it’s their first major London show for six years, and biggest to date. It has, Barrett admits, the budget of a small film.

Punchdrunk want to take immersive theatre to a whole new level. A night in their company doesn’t involve a stage, a programme, an ice cream at the interval – or even a seat. They find empty buildings, fill them with richly detailed sets and performers and then set the audience loose – wearing masks. The thrill comes from not knowing what’s round the corner or how you’ll react when you find it. “In the theatre, you sit there closeted and you switch off part of your brain because you’re comfortable,” says Barrett. “If you’re uncomfortable, then suddenly you’re eager to receive.”

Even if you’ve never seen one of their wildly inventive shows, you will have felt their influence through advertising, music videos and festivals. Everyone these days wants to copy the Punchdrunk magic. The Drowned Man has already sold 50,000 tickets. For the next five months, a cast of 34 dancers and actors will lead 600 people a night around 200,000 sq ft of warehouse.

Arguably Punchdrunk attract people who would normally run a mile from high-concept theatre. Their influences come from B movies, computer gaming and gothic novels. “It’s theatre for people who like theatre but don’t particularly like theatres,” says Colin Robertson, TV editor of theSun, an early fan. “Punchdrunk is theatre for the warehouse party generation. It has that DIY, chaotic feel about it that is so far removed from traditional stuffy theatre.”

Punchdrunk’s promenade productions have included Faust (where audiences explored an east London tobacco warehouse filled with scenes from Goethe’s play), The Masque of the Red Death (based on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, staged in Battersea Arts Centre), andThe Duchess of Malfi (a collaboration with English National Opera in old pharmaceutical premises in Docklands). But it was their off-Broadway hitSleep No More – a spin on Macbeth that’s still packing audiences into a former warehouse in New York – that brought them celebrity attention.

The New York Times called it “a voyeur’s delight. Messes with your head as thoroughly as any artificial stimulant. Spectacular!” About 200,000 people have attended, including Justin Timberlake and Matt Damon. In many ways, Punchdrunk became the Banksy of the theatre world.

They’ve spawned countless imitators – from Secret Cinema and Gideon Reeling (Punchdrunk’s sister company) to You Me Bum Bum Train. Also, Rupert Goold’s Headlong company (Enron, The Effect) emerged at the same time.

Barrett founded Punchdrunk after studying drama at Exeter University. Dissatisfied with conventional venues, he fell in love with site-specific theatre. He staged an immersive take on the proto-expressionist masterpiece Woyzeck in an old Territorial Army barracks in Exeter as part of his theatre degree finals. The police turned up – “with dogs and everything,” he recalls fondly.

Paul Zivkovich and Kate Jackson in The Drowned Man A Hollywood Fable.

Along with Shunt, Punchdrunk led the charge for a wave of immersive, experiential theatre that aims to erase the fourth wall as much as possible. From the start, Barrett and his team knew how to create interventions on an outrageously grand scale with minimal resources, recalls David Benedict, London theatre critic for Variety. “Fringey sounds like they were a bit silly and small and fiddled around on the fringes. From the start, they were a bunch of people with quite a big idea and they pursued it with a) great imagination and b) rigour. They weren’t the first people to do site-specific, far from it, but they were the first to be bold enough to think big. The fact that they didn’t have any money released them in a weird way.”

The National’s director, Nicholas Hytner, was an early supporter. In 2005, he attended The Firebird Ball, inspired by Romeo and Juliet and Stravinsky’s The Firebird, in a disused south London factory. “I was suspicious when I was made to put on my white mask,” he says. “Maybe I was right to be. It turned out to represent the polar opposite of everything I’ve ever been able to do in the theatre and I was totally exhilarated – high on every moment of it.”

Hytner’s decision to have the National endorse the company led to their breakthrough show, 2006’s Faust, occupying five floors of a Wapping warehouse, and, a year later, The Masque of the Red Death.

It was this talent for getting into bed with very smart co-producers that set Punchdrunk apart, says Benedict. “It gave them the clout and the heft and the publicity. They never did upstairs rooms. When they did The Masque of The Red Death in 2007, they had the whole of the Battersea Arts Centre. And that was a very fashionable producing house because they’d already created mega-hit Jerry Springer: The Opera.”

In 2009, the Old Vic and Punchdrunk collaborated on a show in Tunnel 228 with contemporary artists underneath Waterloo station. It became more than a hit show, it became one of the “must-see” experiences in the capital.

Punchdrunk’s rise has coincided with audiences becoming much more adventurous over the past decade. It’s tricky to define cause and effect. Punchdrunk have driven the wish for something bold, but they also emerged at a time when audiences were tiring of sitting down in front of a proscenium arch before slipping out for the interval drink. And Punchdrunk became a byword for all that was different from that tradition.

Barrett gives little away about his personal life. We know he’s married to Kate, a media producer at the Tate, with a child. Although, touchingly, he reveals his company organised his “prenuptial bachelor party” (also known as a stag do) as a theatrical event, a journey that started with a key in the post and ended with 30 men in masks kidnapping him and forcing him to unlock a trunk full of his most embarrassing possessions. “It was the best show I’ve seen in the last 10 years,” says Barrett.

The darlings of British theatre have their critics, of course. TheGuardian‘s Michael Billington queried the “fairground shock tactics” of It Felt Like a Kiss (2009), their collaboration with documentary film-maker Adam Curtis, and musician Damon Albarn for the Manchester international festival, calling it “a real dog’s dinner of a show”. And theDaily Telegraph said of their 2010 foray into experimental opera, The Duchess of Malfi, that “the bag of tricks [was] looking increasingly jejune”.

Faust Punchdrunk 2006

“The trouble with a lot of site-specific theatre is it’s posh haunted house, with people rushing at you in corridors,” says Benedict. “When it works, you forget that, but it needs to be done with theatrical rigour.”

There have also been accusations of selling out. They have done corporate pieces for Stella Artois and W Hotels, while, at Sleep No More,tickets sell for $100, with programmes at $20. In London, with the National Theatre as co-producer, tickets for The Drowned Man are £39.50 to £47.50. Barrett claims sponsorship funds the experimentation, stressing that, as a charity, the company ploughs the money back. But they have, he concedes, paid attention to the bad press.

There is a sense that The Drowned Man needs to be a critical hit to restore some flagging confidence. Says Benedict: “The first time you go to a Punchdrunk show, it blows your head off, but the trouble is it’s a bit of a cliche if you’re relying on no one having seen it before. ”

In wider terms, perhaps we may see a return to straight theatre after a decade of playful deconstruction. Even if this happens, Punchdrunk will have made a fundamental mark – shaking up theatre and routine practice like none of their peers.

In another interview last week in The Independent entitled All the disused building’s a stage: Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man is their most ambitious show yet, Barrett talks to Alice Jones about why they keep pushing the boundaries.

The show is currently in preview so there are no official reviews. However here is one unofficial written by a member of a preview audience. The twittersphere likes it too!

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THE PUNCHDRUNK FILE (Courtesy of Liz Hoggart and The Observer)

Born Founded in 2000 by Felix Barrett. His regular collaborator is choreographer Maxine Doyle. They have come to be seen as the leading lights of a form of “immersive theatre”, where the audience is not seated but is freer to roam the performance site.

Best of times Their Hitchockian take on Macbeth, Sleep No More, staged off-Broadway in 2011, seduced Matt Damon, Natalie Portman and Justin Timberlake to join the masked revels.

Worst of times Punchdrunk’s involvement in the launch of a new lager and a Louis Vuitton shop in central London raised eyebrows. Directing the Colombian pop diva Shakira’s world tour was, Barrett admits, “a tough experience”.

What they say “We aim to provide the quality of the West End while avoiding packing the audiences in like sardines.”

What others say “Punchdrunk have provided some of my most exciting dramatic experiences over the past decade. We are delighted to be working with them again in London after a six-year gap while they wowed New York; I can’t wait to see their new theatrical adventure.” Nick Hytner

In The Dock

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

Following from my last post, the first thing I want to share today is another BBC Essay: On Directing, this time with director, Barlett Sher:

Essay: On Directing – Bartlett Sher

Sher is cut from a different cloth to Emma Rice. He is what I would call a ‘traditional’ director and plays a different role in the theatre world. He has some interesting things to say about the importance of getting transitions and transformation right in theatre as well as talking about the importance of rhythm in theatre making. However, there was a moment that surprised me. He talks about his role in theatre as an ‘interpretive’ art, unlike a visual artist because they start with a blank canvas. He seems to ignore all the new work being created by directors that don’t start with a script or a libretto. In a sense it links to my previous post McTheatre. I’m not saying for one moment that Sher is one of the Mega-musical mob, but he would have appeared to have missed what is going on around him – not everyone is re-staging South Pacific or Romeo and Juliet or classic American drama. Contemporary theatre directors are creating new work, challenging work, work that is alive. I think it is about taking risks and scaring yourself.

As a perfect example of what I mean is the Royal Court Theatre in the UK. They are renown for doing fantastic, unusual and innovative work. Their current season is called Open Court a six week festival of plays, ideas and events chosen and suggested by a group of over 140 writers.

Two of the things they are doing as part of Open Court particularly caught my attention. Firstly, their Surprise Theatre where every Monday and Tuesday nights there is a different surprise performance from a wide-ranging field of writers and theatre-makers; each creating a unique one-off performance, which remains a mystery to its audience right up until the lights go down. How’s that for risk taking by both the performers and the audience?! The performances are also being live-streamed!

Then there is PIIGS – New Short Plays. PIIGS stands for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain – all the European countries that have been hardest hit by the economic down-turn. The idea is that international writers join up with their British counterparts to create plays that explore what life is really like for those living in austerity. What a great idea!

This is what theatre should be about.

Telling Tales

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

One of the most engaging performance I have seen was given by a professional Jamaican storyteller. She was telling the tales of Anansi the Spider to over a hundred 5 and 6 year olds in a school hall. She was compelling to watch and I have never seen little children sit so still, for so long, utterly transfixed – as were the accompanying adults. I was reminded of this when I listened to this interview by theatre director, Emma Rice. She is currently Artistic Director of the international, UK-based theatre company Kneehigh.

Essay: On Directing – Emma Rice

In it, Rice explores the role of the director as storyteller, and elaborates on the undertaking that transforms a text into a fully fledged production. It is part of a series the BBC are broadcasting this week and I will share some of the others at a later date. For any of you yet to cut your teeth in a directorial role, it is a great listen. In an earlier interview with Dan Rubin, Rice said:

Theater is storytelling. Sometimes it becomes about lots of other things, but ultimately human beings like to come together and be told a story and to be transported. There’s something very simple about that notion. I think there are probably very few great stories, and the great stories have survived because they hit a fundamental human nerve. So Cinderella is a classic story because there aren’t many of us who, when we were young, didn’t feel unloved, didn’t feel ugly, and didn’t feel that the world was turned against us. So those stories are told for good reason. They speak to us on a very profound level.

This links nicely with an article by Swati Daftur that was published in The Hindu last weekend. The article, titled A Twist In The Tale, talks about the resurgence of professional storytelling in India and how it is no longer just a means of entertainment or passing on cultural heritage.

Storytelling is no longer just about entertaining children. It is now used, in different contexts, to teach and train grown-ups.

“Animals do not tell stories to each other. Humans do. That is how we make sense of the world. So storytelling is essential to being human. Everyone tells stories…We are just not aware of it”, says mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik.

Indians are big on stories. This is a land of myths and mythologies; of tales with pious men and brave gods; of stories with carefully masked do’s and don’ts; of tickling anecdotes and gruesome monsters. We have always loved a good story, and we’ve always had storytellers. But, from then to now, the face of storytelling and storytellers has morphed and evolved into something more commercial and professional, but also less localised and farther reaching than ever before.

In the face of rapid urbanisation, mushrooming malls and multiplexes, this ancient art form is somehow making rapid inroads. The Indian storytelling revival has come of age. Stories are no longer just what you hear on lazy afternoons at your grandmother’s house.

In the late 1960s, the Global Storytelling Revival began, with people trying to connect and associate with the past and the present. This involved finding and exploring heritage, identifying with one another and, of course, some good old-fashioned entertainment. Today, India has also joined the movement with its own personal rendition of the revival. With its already rich culture and heritage, and hundreds of traditional storytelling styles and traditions – villu pattu, bommalaatam, phad, chitrakatha and harikatha, to name just a few — the revival has brought together old forms and new applications to storytelling. Efforts made both by the government as well as NGOs, institutes, groups and private players have helped revive and transform storytelling.

Brought on by the revival is also a new and exciting phenomenon— that of professional storytellers. We are in an age where professional storytelling is a legitimate, accepted career choice. Today, there are institutes and colleges that will take you in and teach you to tell wonderful effective stories, and then send you off into the world to actually earn your livelihood by this art.

The Chennai-based World Storytelling Institute, co-founded by Eric Miller and Magdalene Jeyarathnam, is one such example. A veritable home for professional storytellers, the institute brings together threads of different storytelling techniques and styles. It makes use of both the digital as well as the traditional platforms. The institute holds workshops that use storytelling for therapy, healing, environmental issues, educational purposes and countless other projects. Its workshops play with different ideas and forms of storytelling. One striking example is of workshops dealing with animal stories where every animal featuring in a story is supposed to represent an aspect of the human personality (a fox and his cunning, a lion and his fairness, a horse and his loyalty). The institute also has sessions that specifically retell and discuss episodes from an epic. Every story has a purpose, and participants attending the workshop take away everything from management skills to moral lessons.

While The World Storytelling Institute uses both traditional and digital methods to practise and teach professional storytelling, Geetha Ramanujam’s Kathalaya, in Bangalore, keeps the art form free of digitalisation. Ramanujam, the Director of Kathalaya, believes that the storytelling baton has not yet been passed permanently from bards and folk artists to bloggers and the twitterverse. “It is possible for professional storytellers to stick to the traditional art form and still keep it interesting. When I make presentations myself, I don’t use power points and multimedia, but the reception has always been great. At Kathalaya, I’ve tried to make sure that we keep the old ways of storytelling alive. And it does work. We have hundreds of interested people approaching us for workshops in both personal and professional storytelling.”

Devdutt Pattanaik, Geetha Ramanujam, Jeeva Raghunathan, Eric Miller.

Together Geetha Ramanujam and Eric Miller have founded The Indian Storytelling Network, an online portal and confluence inspired by the International Storytelling Network based in Spain and marking the Indian chapter of the Global Storytelling Revival. The Network, in communication with other storytelling organisations around the world, facilitates and assists storytellers as well as festivals and conferences. Its goals focus on reviving and building upon the country’s storytelling traditions and acting as a bridge between performers, trainers and audience.

A professional storyteller has myriad options available to him/her today. The art form isn’t just a source of entertainment any more. From schools and colleges to multinational companies and NGOs, stories have found a place in previously unthinkable places. Management trainees, business experts and educational institutes are fast discovering the benefits of storytelling. “It’s always more interesting to learn something through a story instead of mugging up dry facts. And if it’s told in an interesting way, stories can stick with you longer than any academic or instructive lecture,” says Priyanjalee, a management trainee who has attended workshops organised by Kathalaya. Professional storytelling has indeed complemented learning in a number of contexts, both professional and social. With a little rearrangement, a makeover and a brand new outfit, storytelling isn’t just a way to pass the time of the day anymore. It’s a very useful tool with corporate, humanitarian, psychiatric and educational benefits. The opportunities, instead of shrinking, have exploded with this added qualification actually giving trained professionals a leg-up.

There are certain key requirements for a professional storyteller. The idea behind professional storytelling involves not only effective communication but also the need to engage, inspire and motivate the listener. The qualities at once help the audience as well as the storyteller become a better trainer, speaker and communicator. For example, in management storytelling workshops, the idea is for a leader to illustrate a better future for the company via stories that might not directly involve a corporate setting, but still includes lessons that benefit one in a corporate environment. One of the more popular stories that work in a corporate setting happens to be the simple, yet ingenious, fable of the hare and the tortoise.

After years of being recognised as a source of entertainment, storytelling is now being viewed as a powerful tool for change and the overall development of an individual’s personality, as well as an effective method to address social issues. At once informative, educational and entertaining, professional storytelling is becoming a regular feature at schools, as it is both effective and captures the interest of students, explaining concepts faster than regular textbooks might.

On storytelling’s modern-day reiteration, Jeeva Raghunath, a professional storyteller and one of the pioneers of the movement in Tamil Nadu, says, “What happened within four walls of a house first spread and became a community event. Then, when it turned professional, it became a trade. Now the demand has turned it into a contemporary skill that is required in many fields like therapy, corporate, education, communication, and presentation. Basically, with changing times, due to the lack of comprehension of the old art form, contemporary storytelling has indulged in taking storytelling to another level. Storytelling is turning into a rare but growing commodity and storytellers are becoming brands.”

Jeeva believes that adapting itself to changing mediums is a healthy trend. “Today’s contemporary telling is very different from the traditional styles. Similarly, the digital medium is yet another development; the only difference being the bonding that can happen only in live shows. This change is healthy but just lacks bonding and to a certain extent the stimulation of imagination”. Pattanaik, on the other hand, believes that while the medium might have changed, the human being has not. “I don’t see any real difference. If anything, now we have more versions of the same story and that confuses us. We wonder what is true,” he says.

Today, small and big institutes and groups of professional storytellers are reviving traditions that would otherwise have been long forgotten. For example, Dastangoi, the ancient Urdu storytelling tradition that involved oral narration, was revived by Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain in 2005 in the capital. Today, their performances showcasing dastans or fables of fantasy, adventure, intrigue, romance and seduction, have become popular and well appreciated across the country and abroad. Farooqui and Husain have also adapted modern issues and subjects into Dastangoi performances, and their Dastan-e-Sedition or the Tale of sedition was a tribute to Dr. Binayak Sen, conceived during the period of his incarceration and the public outcry against it. The performance was also a part of the Free Binayak Sen campaign held in New Delhi in April 2011.

Acoustic Traditional, founded by Salil Mukhia and Barkha Henry, is another non-profit organisation started to revive and promote storytelling traditions like oral storytelling and tribal folklore, especially of mountain and forest-based communities. Started as a classroom project in Nepal, the organisation is now based in Bangalore. The goal is to preserve the myths, legends and stories of tribal groups, as well as to use these to connect to mainstream communities. Acoustic Traditonals holds The Annual Festival of Indigenous Storytellers along with regular storytelling sessions and workshops.

There is a lot that a story can do. It can affect individuals, or masses. It can bring reform and it can bring joy. It can be used to manipulate public opinion and it can spread misinformation and terror. Clearly, that is a fair amount of responsibility for a storyteller to take on. “Today, storytelling is also used as propaganda to shape people’s political views, as advertising to shape buying behaviour. So what has changed is that we now have an agenda that drives our story. We don’t narrate it innocently, unaware of the underlying thoughts or agenda. It tells us that some products and some services are better than others; it tells us who our heroes should be and who our villains are; they essentially shape the mind of the person who is listening” says Pattanaik.

Whether they use traditional or modern methods; whether they make twitter or a stage their platform, professional storytellers have carved a space for themselves. Skills you couldn’t learn in the classroom, lessons that chapters in your books couldn’t teach you, stories can. Engineering students, children with special needs, prisoners; stories can touch everyone and anyone who is ready to listen, to see and understand.

McTheatre

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

I’ve been trying to write this post for a few days, but kept getting lost in what I was trying to say. Now I think I have it – my thoughts are now in order.

There is one theatrical tradition that is sure to polarize theatre folk, The Musical, or to give it its proper title, Musical Theatre. People tend to either love it or hate it. It’s looked down on because its ‘populist’ or its celebrated because it is popular and draws a wide audience. I was reminded of this recently by playwright Howard Brenton when asked in an interview which art form he didn’t relate to, he said

Musical theatre. I love opera – I’ve written a libretto – but I can’t bear show music. Every song sounds the same.

I have always tended to agree with him, but while I was thinking about this I began to question why there are some musicals I do like – Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jerry Springer the Opera, The Threepenny Opera, The Lion King and on film, Moulin Rouge. Now this is an eclectic, if not quite odd, mix and I am aware of that, so what is it that they do that draws me too them? Why these, when I know that there are musicals that I simply don’t like and think are utter garbage (the likes of Starlight Express, for example)? Then I listened to this interview with Robert Gordon, who is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths, University of London.

In it he reflects on the perception of musical theatre as pure entertainment and looks at key productions that have had significant political and social relevance across its history, from the 18th century production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera to new musical Mission Drift. It is well worth a listen. (Incidentally, Brecht and Weill based Threepenny Opera on Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Mission Drift is, and I quote, a pioneering journey west and east across the USA in search of the character of American capitalism).

So I went back to my list. Superstar was a first of its kind, one that embraced a popular musical idiom and appealed, therefore, to my generation. Jerry Springer is outrageous and challenged society’s religious norms (and I loved the howls of outrage it produced as well!). The Lion King is an easy one – the beautiful use of puppets was a first. The Threepenny Opera because again, it was the first of its kind, a socialist critique of a capitalist world and remains hauntingly relevant today. Moulin Rouge, ditto Superstar. That leaves me with Les Mis and I guess its appeal to me lies in its pure expansive theatricality – and I did see it in its original incarnation many years ago.

Be warned of the ‘interesting’ language in the video below!

All of this goes someway to help me understand my diffidence to musicals, but not all the way. Then it struck me that part of my issue is that they don’t tend into fit my modus operandi as a theatre teacher. You are all aware that I see theatre a tool of challenge, change and confrontation – it should make audiences think and reflect. Most musicals simply don’t do this, so in terms of my teaching life I have simply dismissed them. There is another point I’d like to make here, but it is irrelevant at the moment so I will leave for later.

But still I didn’t feel this gave me the full answer I was looking for. A little bit of research got me to look at the numbers of musicals on in London this summer (36) and New York (38). Astonishing! And this is just two cities. The spread of the ‘western’ musical across the globe seems relentless – I refer you back to an early post as a good example, The Gweilos Are Coming. If you compare the two listings you will the same shows again and again. I realised that this irritates me – where is the originality? On the other hand (with my global citizen hat on) why shouldn’t audiences in New York, London, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai and Sydney have access to these shows?

Then I read these two articles – Does the mega-musical boom mean theatre’s bust? and Some musical theatre is still on song – and it clicked! The final piece of the puzzle. The phrase McTheatre summed up what I don’t like about the modern mega-musical. It doesn’t matter where in the world you see one of the really big musicals it will look and sound exactly the same (unless you are seeing Cats in Beijing of course, where it will be sung in Chinese). Only the original staging is unique and truly creative – all the others are just a facsimile, a direct copy, that’s how it works! I am a believer in the global village, but this kind of globalisation which strips theatre of its creativity just seems wrong. As Robert Gordon says in his interview and Lyn Gardner in her articles, there are fantastic musical pieces of inspirational social commentary emerging, but they come from small, innovative companies, with small budgets, not the mega-theatrical corporations of Cameron Macintosh and Andrew Lloyd-Webber!

So there you have it. I have managed to explain to myself why I have problems with musicals and the answer is complex. You might not agree but let us beg to differ. However, if you really do like Starlight Express don’t ever speak to me again!

shop

By way of a post script to this post – I alluded to this earlier – I’d like to say something about the notion of the ‘school musical’. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, there is an expectation that a school will ‘do’ a musical. However, let me be frank here, it is not because they extend or deepen learning, it’s because they are good publicity vehicles for an institution. I don’t really have a problem with this as such (actually that’s a lie, but it is my job). What I do have a problem with is that they are exclusive and limiting. The pool of students who have the skills to perform in a musical is small and excludes a much wider range of students who are excellent actors, but can’t sing. They reduce opportunities for participation. That’s not to say I don’t celebrate the students that can perform in them, because I do, and am humbled by their skills. Our last musical outing was Little Shop of Horrors (pictured above) and it was superb. But, I want public performances to impact in the classroom/drama studio and for me, musicals just don’t do that.

Paper Cuts

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Theatre Room Asia

There is a history of shadow theatre right across the globe, stretching back centuries, as I have talked about here before. However, recently it has reached a mass audience in a new incarnation through the work of companies like Pilobolus – although I have to say, for me, once you get over the initial ‘wow’ factor it all becomes a little samey – having said that Pilobolus do some excellent other work too (see my previous post).

What I want to share today is the truely amazing work of Davy and Kirstin McGuire. Take a look:

Modern technology has just pushed the shadow play into a brand new era.

Icebook is their most famous piece to date and you can read about it’s making by clicking the image below:

They are about to open a new show called The Paper Architect which introduces live actors to the mix. Here is an interesting article/interview written by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian this week:

Pulp fiction: bringing pop-up paper theatre to life

Magical and exquisitely crafted, Kristin and Davy McGuire’s miniature model universe is full of visual wonders

Davy McGuire grew up as an only child. He lived in his imagination, warding off loneliness by building tiny houses for tiny imaginary people. Several decades on, he is still at it – but now he makes them with his wife, Kristin. Together, the McGuires construct worlds made entirely out of paper, which are then given life with the aid of projections, optical illusions and the intervention of actors.

“We never set out to work with paper,” says Kristin. “It just grew out of curiosity. We weren’t model-makers. I didn’t even know how to cut paper. We’ve just had to acquire the skills as we’ve gone along.”

The McGuires…..are just two of a modest but intriguing wave of artists exploring the creative possibilities of paper. They include Paper Cinema, who create exquisite DIY films from cornflake-packet cutouts and an overhead projector, and the visual artist Yuken Teruya, whose take on paper carrier bags can currently be seen in an exhibition called – what else? – Paper at London’s Saatchi Gallery.

Walk into the McGuires’ studio in Bristol, where they work in the company of their dog – called Cat, but of course – and you enter a world that feels like a last outpost of a 19th-century realm of illusion and magic. Illuminated paper butterflies dance in jam jars, a row of intricately detailed Edwardian houses complete with iron railings and washing lines recall a doll’s house, and a rural scene featuring pools and weeping trees sits waiting to come alive. All of it is made, by hand, entirely from paper. An exquisite birdcage smaller than my little finger represents hours of painstaking work for the couple, who met at college in the Netherlands, where Kristin, who trained as a dancer, cast Dartington College graduate Davy in one of her pieces.

“I kept asking her: now we have developed a professional relationship, can we have a private one too?” he smiles.

Both were interested in exploring the boundaries of performance (Kristin is a former national rhythmic gymnast), but neither imagined their lives would become so intricately bound up with wood pulp. One day in 2009, Kristin shone a light behind a pop-up book, and they began speculating whether it would be possible to turn a book into a theatre show. Even the Maguires aren’t entirely sure quite how they should describe what they do, which embraces installation, dioramas, music videos, animation and performance.

“Maybe you wouldn’t describe a lot of what we do as theatre, but it’s always got strong theatrical elements,” says Kristin. Their first pop-up theatre venture, The Icebook, was certainly different – a delicate fairytale that mixed paper and animation to such cunning effect that the experience was like falling headfirst into a pop-up story from childhood. The whole thing was so fragile, it felt like a dream.

The McGuires saw The Icebook as a miniature calling card, and were surprised when it became an international hit. “We thought of it as a try-out for a bigger show,” says Davy, “but people enjoyed its intimacy.” Kristin agrees: “When you start playing with scale, it makes people look in a new way. Their focus is different. They start seeing the detail and all the small moments in the story. In a digital world, there is something appealing about something which is hand-crafted. With CGI, you can just conjure up something so quickly and easily, but when it’s made by hand you can see beauty in the tiny imperfections.”

Davy nods. “People always ask how it’s done, but we don’t want to tell them. It’s not just for commercial reasons, but because we want to keep the element of magic and surprise.”

Nonetheless, despite the success of The Icebook, last Christmas the McGuires expanded their scale to create a stage version of Diana Wynne Jones’s children’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle at Southwark Playhouse. Undaunted by the worldwide success of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 animated film version, the McGuires set out to create their own take on the story of a young milliner called Sophie who must try to escape the curse put on her by a witch.

“It was a good experience, but a stressful one,” recalls Kristin of the show, which combined pre-recorded narration by Stephen Fry, live actors and a pop-up castle upon which was projected hundreds of images. The castle was acclaimed as a thing of visual wonder, but juggling all the different aspects of the production was a steep learning curve, and one that the McGuires were not keen to repeat too quickly.

As a result, The Paper Architect, supported by £37,000 from the prestigious Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, which aims to support theatremakers working in unusual and innovative ways, combines live action with animation. Once again it employs a tiny scale, this time to tell the story of a lonely elderly man who is about to be evicted from his studio, and who is wondering how life might have turned out differently – a melancholic piece that, the McGuires hope, combines reality and imagination in powerful ways.

“Perhaps that man could have been me,” says Davy, “if the lonely child had grown into a lonely old man. I know that character.” For all sorts of reasons, we should be glad he didn’t.

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Pulp fiction: bringing pop-up paper theatre to life