Neat Festival. Mass Bolero in Nottingham. Just brilliant!

This is just fantastic! Very proud of all the many people who took part during neat14.

Watch and smile!

Loewenmouthy - a reflection. Notingham Playhouse. Neville Studio

Less of a review - more of a reflection.

I went to the neat14  Loewenmouthy poetry based event for a few reasons;

Being part of a twining event with two theatres in Karlsruhe has allowed me many opportunities to become friends with many people from this beautiful German city since I first went in 2006 and to share with them a mutual love of theatre. This is a practice that I love and has embedded itself deeper and deeper in my heart and soul as the years have gone by. I count the people of the Jakobus Theatre and Theater Die Kaeuze as some of my truest friends. So much so that I now go to perform on my own, separately to our biannual events, and I am going this December to perform a show partly in English and partly in German. Nervos? Ein bischen.

The mixed language in the poetry I heard in Loewenmouthy by young people from all countries, whether from Sara in the Lebenon or Iony Smallhorne's sympathetically done poetical video has given me renewed inspiration to continue with this and have new ideas for development. Thank you.

I went along to hear some German spoken and I did. This was by a young man called Alan Husakowski whose first language wasn't German. In fact my understanding is that when Deborah Stevenson of Mouthy Poets went to Germany he had spoken very little German and yet (on video) we have him expressing himself very well in both languages through poetry. Inspirational.

I came away from Loewenmouthy full of great admiration for the work of the two groups and the appreciative audience that both support and enhance the possibilities of language, that on a weekly basis encourage 15-30 year olds to create, learn writing skills, editing and develop event co-ordination skills. Anything that Mouthy Poets does to develop a passion for expression through vocabulary and allows young people to present their feelings poetically both live and through digital means should be championed. I loved the fact that the young men were actively encouraged to talk and present their feelings through their own poetry and was impressed with the depth of feelings from the young women from across the world. As for Deborah 'Debris' Stevenson. Superb! I will never see a Starbucks coffee cup in the same light again.

They talk about poetry 'speaking to your heart'. Joshua Judson, I was hearing every word of your poem below and I was with you every syllable. Excellent.

http://mouthypoets.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/joshua-judson-loewenmouthy-final-draft/

The Braunschweig group #Loewenmaul (Lion's Mouth) is a similar group in the German city we know as Brunswick. Their age group is 13-30 and together they speak more than five languages and come from more than five countries from around the world and now live in Braunschweig.

The laudable Loewenmouthy project was launched by Deborah Stevenson and Anne Hartmann at the State Theatre in Braunschweig in September 2013. Loewenmaul had their first show in March 2014 as part of an intercultural festival. We heard tonight that they are currently creating a book of stories for children in cooperation with a local organisation for political education.

Phil Lowe (or is that Loewe?)

Marta Górnicka - Magnificat - Chór Korbiet - Nottingham Playhouse - review

Chór Korbiet / The Chorus of Women/Magnificat.

A production of the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw

To quote the programme: “The Chorus of Women is a modern form of choral theatre. The libretto for the performance is a collage of cultural texts: the chorus mixes fragments of Antigone and works by the likes of Agamben, Barthes, Jelinek and Butler with colloquial speech, advertising slogans, recipes, computer sounds, film quotes and fairy tales.

A modern tragic chorus is composed of women of various professions and various ages. It undermines linguistic clichés and reveals the language in its ideological dimension: it speaks with the words of excluded texts.

The modern drama broke up the chorus, thus depriving itself of a certain dimension of the tragic. We must restore the chorus to the stage and find new forms of its theatrical presence; we have to restore women to the chorus. The chorus of women will shout, whisper and sing. It will treat words as music. It will change language into voice, it will initiate its subversive force.” Marta Górnicka.

In creating the work the chorus have researched and devised from three main subjects, memory, voice and gender. In memory they recall Polish songs, forgotten drama texts as well as songs from ancient dramas. In voice they searched for a sound or collection of sounds that are detached from the language such as in rhythms, echolalia or in a drone.

In the piece there are frequent uses of various forms of echolalia ( the meaningless repetition of another person's spoken words) and they formed a very powerful sound in chorus to the point where the sound appeared to be rippling in the air.

In gender they try to regain/create a woman's voice in culture and thus in The Chorus of Women/Magnificat we get a thrilling mix of whispering, keening, deliberately overdone sounds, song in unison, song lines from individuals, humour, swaying body rhythms whilst singing, a superbly sung (mainly in the very expressive Polish language) and wonderfully conducted piece. There are surtitles but I found myself soaking up the sound and enjoying the work aurally and found the concentrated body language used quite hypnotic. Sometimes the vocal and deeply focussed intensity is actually quiet scary in parts and that's partly what makes the drama of their work come alive. Everything is unexpected and has a focus like no other I seen. In fact I'd say to me as a seasoned reviewer and playgoer it was thrillingly unique and other-worldly. Another wonderful addition to the neat14 festival.

If you can get a ticket go see them tonight at Nottingham Playhouse. It will be an enriching hour very well spent in the dynamic company of the Chór Korbiet.

www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk

Box Office: 0115 9419419

The Second Minute at Nottingham Playhouse. A chat with the cast.

This afternoon I was given the opportunity to chat to actors Beatrice Comins, Rob Goll and Adam Horvath all of whom are currently appearing in Nottingham Playhouse's rural touring production of Andy Barrett's new play The Second Minute directed by Giles Croft. This play is part of Nottingham's fantastic European Arts Festival - neat14.
Jo McLeish of Nottingham Playhouse facilitated the meeting.

Phil: I wanted to talk to you about your experience as actors in a touring production of The Second Minute and I'm aware that you are going on from Nottinghamshire down to Cambridgeshire with the tour. Primarily I'm interested in your general experiences of being on tour with this play and about the practicalities of touring and whether audience members have approached you about the themes of the play and perhaps how it has touched them personally.

Beatrice: Yes, absolutely, that's the thing about doing this play at the moment and why we are doing it because it is so pertinent. People are coming with their own experience and expectations and then relating to the play beautifully. It's going down really really well. We get quite a few people who come up and they've got, not necessarily their 'own' experience of course, but it may be within their family, some kind of connection. Yesterday we were just over the border in Lancashire and there was a very elderly lady who'd come and she'd travelled some way to come and see the show and she'd come because she'd recognised that it was about the Sherwood Foresters and her Grandfather was a Sherwood Forester.

Not only was he a Sherwood Forester in the First World War but he'd actually had experiences that were quite similar to one of the original letters that we use in the play. He'd been seriously wounded and ended up in a shell hole and his arm was completely blown apart basically and he was left abandoned there for a considerable period of time and gangrene set in. However, he was there so long that it got fly-blown and the maggots ate the gangrene and the result of that was that he survived his terrible injury. He lost his arm and survived and ended up in a German prisoner of war camp. Because the play is based on real experience it resonates with everybody else's real experience as well.

Rob: In Tealby in Lincolnshire we had a Sherwood Forester who came to see it at the Tennyson D'Eyncourt Memeorial Hall. Was he called Desmond?

Beatrice: That's right. Desmond.

 

 

Rob: And he came along along with his cap badge. He said he could provide his cap badges and was almost fiercely proud of his regiment there and he was thanking us profusely for telling him things about the regiment that he didn't know before. It's incredible actually to meet people who are touched in ways we hadn't thought of before and for them to tell us about these very personal experiences of something they've done/ something they known. Andy Barrett the playwright has done the research and written it in the play and he's done this really well because you find that it is reaching out to the people to whom it concerns and they are saying “Yes that's right – that's how we feel about the regiment”. It's been great and in the small venues it's a very intimate piece. It's ideally suited to the village halls and small theatres. (laughs) If they're big enough! We've had some tight squeezes!

Phil: Are they all front facing as at the Derby Theatre Studio where you opened the play?

Beatrice: Yes we pretty much have to do that because we are so self contained. We take two lighting stands and we've got a very simple set up but that means there's very limited scope for where the lights go. Therefore it needs to be end on. We can't do it any other way than end on.

Rob: Last night, for example, our dressing room was a cupboard. (They all laugh) A luxurious cupboard but still a cupboard. In most of the venues the dressing facilities are elsewhere so we have to 'hide behind the set' virtually for the whole thing.

Adam: Sometimes we get chairs!

Beatrice: I had a chair offered me backstage the other day but then I'm all right because I’m on stage most of the time and so I get to sit on stage and don't mind what's back stage.

Phil: Do you get many people asking you about 'the book'?

In the play Rob's character talks about a book titled The Second Minute. It is a fictional book.

Beatrice: Yes!!! Yes!!! People keep wanting to buy the book! We've had so many people asking to buy the book and they are often shocked that it doesn't exist. There are 'other' books but not a 'Second Minute' book that everybody wants.

Adam: We had some people who came to see it and they said that they'd come to see it because of the book and they claimed they'd read the book. We thought 'have you?' There must be a similar book around. Lots of people have asked and they want to know where they can get a copy?

Beatrice: Yes they have.

Rob: The programme is rather nice because it has the facsimile letters in.

Beatrice: I wanted to say something earlier and that is related to people's personal experiences and as an actor performing this play it gives you a very easy direct line into maintaining truthfulness because you know it is so immediate to so many people. The subjects you are dealing with I mean and it really is a short-cut to trying to maintain a strong line with truthful emotions. It really keeps you grounded. And having things like knowing when you are performing – I never see them but - having the projections behind of photographs of the real individuals who appear in the letters. Knowing that's behind you when you are performing is actually quite a profound experience.

Rob: In these less formal spaces people don't tend to act like theatre audiences would and you can hear comments in response to various bits of the play like “Oh, what a shame!” They are reacting immediately.

Adam: Very in the moment. It's very touching.

Phil: That's great that they are so moved by it that they feel the need to say so out loud and to each other.

Rob: It's a shame that Ali's not here because she, as we're getting changed afterwards, she … hears the bulk of the audience reaction or the feedback about the people in the stories. Apparently, was it two days ago, in Oxfordshire, there was a whole family who were moved to tears at the end. They brought their children too. I see all this because I address the audience so much and there are varying degrees of engagement in their faces either listening to me or watching the projections or watching Bea (Beatrice). I see how fixed they are in it but also, the other day, up in Ellesmere Port we had a large GCSE school party in from Warrington I think. They had come quite some way to see this play.

Adam: About twenty miles I think.

Rob: That's right and it was the first time we had run it without the interval. So it was straight through – all ninety minutes - and they were sitting on uncomfortable squeaky chairs in a full theatre and it was quite warm as well...

Beatrice: Oh it was really warm.

Rob: Towards the end, quite off putting, someone left to go to the toilet and the kids at the front shushed them to be quiet in the middle of our final scene, but their own concentration held fast. Apart from the squeakiness of the seats they were completely focussed on the whole thing. Then we did a Q&A afterwards and the questions were good and this is year ten – fourteen and fifteen year old teens.

Beatrice: The kind of age that you think would be the hardest to play to and that is the really gratifying thing about the piece because it does work for the full cross section of the ages and demographics although our audiences tend to be quite a lot older and that's just inevitable in so many ways. I mean the nature of rural touring those audiences and the subject matter tends to appeal to an older audience. But, when we do get kids in its great because they are as equally involved as the older ones. We played another college in Lincolnshire and they were great as well and that was largely a student audience.

Phil: In practical terms do you all help set up the performance space on arriving at a venue?

Beatrice: Yes. There are only four of us on the road and out stage manager Ali Murray is in charge of everything and does a brilliant job. We unpack the van and build the set and the chaps do all the heavy stuff and I do the tweaking. (laughs) But it takes us about an hour or so to actually build the set but it has been very well designed for this kind of touring and they've really taken that on board beautifully so it is pretty straight forward. Ali does all the electrics and by the time the set is built she's usually ready to start focussing the lights. We need to be on stage for her to focus so we're in the right position. Actually that takes a fair bit of time. It probably takes as long to focus the lights and sort all that out as it does to do everything else.

Rob: It's because the lighting stands are placed in relation to the size of the venue and sometimes they're wide and sometimes they're deep and sometimes they're really really close. Sometimes we don't have the steel decks. In Chipping Norton the other day, for example, the stage was about six foot high with the audience low and a really characterful balcony. So we didn't have the steel decks because that would put us too high so we've got more space.

Beatrice: But these means, because we are used to stepping up all the timing of the piece can get thrown out if you are not careful..

Rob: At the Century Theatre in Coalville where the stage was lower and we didn't have the decks and the lighting was then hung on their rig so...

Beatrice: So we have to look at it and reposition ourselves on stage because sometimes the lighting is very sideways and so we are blocking each other so we do have to do have to look at it to make sure... it affects us significantly as to where we are on stage.

Phil: You wouldn't want to walk into that experience and think “there's 'something' wrong' and for that consciousness to throw you.

Beatrice: No, there's still, inevitably a sense of leaning backwards and forwards and thinking “Ah there's a big light blob on my face”. You still have to work around it.

Rob: We also have to watch that there are no bottoms in the projection either.

Rob went on to explain that the projections used in the piece are actually projected from a filing cabinet on set, not back projected as I thought when I saw and reviewed the show in Derby. He explained that if any body parts interrupt the line of projection you will have given away the trick so the actors have to be constantly aware of their position on stage. No random or rapid of hands or arms flung about.

I said that there was one thing that I did like and that was the visuals of the cascade of crosses/kisses that tumble down the screen at one point in the play.

Beatrice: Yes in the speech my character uses both words kisses and crosses and I'm sure that's quite deliberate. Plus the audience and particularly the children loved the projections because they were hand drawn and shaky and such. That was part of their charm. They were basic but actually that made them more effective. And I think for Sarah Lewis the designer her whole concept was that they were hand written letters and so she wanted very obviously hand drawn pictures in the projections but of course I never see them! I've always got my back to them so I never know when they are there.

Rob: Through the design process she did so much that were lost because of tweaks and cuts and I suppose we never got a chance to see them all and it was half way through the tour that I realised that there was a garden growing in one of them! I never even knew that went on!

Phil: Well that' s great. Thank you all very much for you time and al the best for the remainder of your tour and this afternoon and tonight in the Neville Studio at Nottingham Playhouse.

More touring dates and details HERE

Neat14. Gob Squad's Western Society. Review.

"No-one is who they are. They are talking to someone miles away."

Gob Squad have been devising, directing and performing together since 1994 working where theatre meets art, media and real life. Their latest show, Western Society was performed at Nottingham Contemporary Art Gallery as part of neat14. Their company, as a whole group, includes Simon Will, Sarah Thom and Sharon Smith, now professional performers and former graduates Nottingham Trent University Creative Arts BA Hons degree. The brilliant video and technical work is by another former graduate from the same degree course - Miles Chalcraft. Sound design was by Jeff McGrory with technical co-ordination and lighting design by Chris Umney.

For 'Western Society' Gob Squad take a short and potentially boring Youtube video of a family house party where the guests are filmed tightly clustered around a settee in particular modes and through this genesis expand the concept of personalities and their relationships and their deepest desires and fears. The four players arrive in a state of nudity, dress up in bling and glittery outfits, speak directly to the audience and to each other using their real names and take the audience on a journey where seven lucky members can actually participate with them on stage. They may be asked (through headphones) to dance like the Granny character, to eat cake, to change the music and therefore the tone of the piece, pretend to drink beer from a bottle or to kiss a member of the cast. And as the piece turns from fun to personal intensity they may even be asked to be Mum and Dad to one of the characters as she is asked deeply personal questions. None of this done to humiliate the participatory or non participatory audience members  but to empower them and take them beyond their normal role as a passive spectator. The packed audience at Nottingham Contemporary loved it and clearly Gob Squad have built up a fantastic reputation for inter-active and semi improvised work.

The piece includes characters based on 'given' names for the unknown figures that people the original video and they are 'next to remote',  'remote control man', 'granny', 'karaoke man', 'he dances with granny', 'cake lady', 'white cap boy' and 'girl with phone'. The four actors in this production for neat14 are Simon Will, Damian Rebgetz , Sarah Thom and Tatiana Saphir. All have an easy and funny repartee with the audience and a brave approach to devising and performance. Coming away from the production many of the audience chatted with the cast and the words 'clever and funny' were predominant in the conversations. Clever indeed.

For  twenty years Gob Squad have been searching for new ways to combine media and performance and the use of audio and video technology plays a prominent role in their work with the result that alienated forms of intimacy have become a central theme.

Review: The Second Minute. Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company.

Review: The Second Minute by Andy Barrett

Tour venue: Derby Theatre (Studio) May 3rd 2014

Andy Barrett's utterly engaging and emotionally compelling play, The Second Minute, is based on one Nottinghamshire soldier's letters from the trenches of The Great War to his mother in rural Nottinghamshire. And so it is regionally fitting that this piece is touring the East Midlands until 27^th May.

It is performed by three actors from the Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company and concerns a young man called Thomas Swann, an innkeeper's son in rural Nottinghamshire who enlists in the Sherwood Foresters regiment in 1914 to fight, like thousands of other young men, on the Western Front. Many like Thomas saw this as an adventure and believed that the war on foreign soil would be over as quick as it had began. To keep in touch with families and friends back home letters were sent to and from the trenches at a phenomenal rate. Written communication during this period was of paramount importance. In 1913 a small town could expect up to twelve postal deliveries a day and in the height of the war (1917) nineteen thousand mailbags crossed the channel daily.
 

Playwright Andy Barrett gained special permission to search archives of the Museum of the Mercian Regiment for letters of this nature to form the basis of this play and was struck by a collection of over a hundred letters, postcards and photographs to and from private Thomas Swann. Many of the letters of this time were censored and mention little of the horrors of war. The content was a very moving 'conversation' between mother and son across two totally different landscapes and lifestyles; one of boredom, war and chaos and the other of the practicalities of running a pub and of the local harvests. But both writers had one enduring key ingredient and that is a deep unequivocal love for the other and this is the key to Barrett's sometimes funny, always interesting and often heart breaking play.

Swann is played with understated conviction by Adam Horvath, one minute smart and proud in uniform and ready to do his duty, the next minute sitting filthy in the trenches drafting the next vital letter home. Horvath is a splendid young actor and runs through a range of emotions from cheery Tommy to that of anger, confusion and disillusionment at the unpredictability of a soldier in action.
 

The other two parts bring us up to the modern day. Researcher Laura (Beatrice Comins) becomes more and more drawn into the life of Thomas after a box of his letters are found and delivered to her desk. She makes the decision to read them one a day and in chronological order and in doing so forms her own special relationship with the young man she calls Tom. Comins' part is the heart of the play, the almost tangible link between the past and the present – a desperate reaching out to discover the man behind the words and her subtle shining eyes portrayal exudes the yearning for love necessary for the play to work.

Actor Rob Goll is sympathetic and often very funny as Laura's aide Alan and introduces himself as the author of a book called The Second Minute. Goll is just right as Alan – a likeable combination of easy going 'stand easy' and full of enthusiasm for the Boys Own language of the age surrounding World War One and the typical army slang of the era. He is also sombre and respectful of the sacrifices of the thousands of men who lost their lives during the hellish conflicts, especially of the Battle of the Somme. A beautifully measured performance.

In all, this intimate play on a simple set (Sarah Lewis) visually aided by back projected animations and period photographs and beautifully directed by Nottingham Playhouse's Artistic Director Giles Croft is a delightful and moving piece of theatre well worth seeing and written by Nottingham writer Andy Barrett.

Touring and production information can be found here.

The Second Minute is part of the Nottingham and European Arts and Theatre Festival - neat14

Theatre photography copyright Robert Day.