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Showing posts with label udderbelly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label udderbelly. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
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Circus is usually all about razzle-dazzle. Sequined costumes, rictus grins, glittery lipstick, flaming rings - stuff like that. Circa push against all that, their shows straddling contemporary dance and circus via sleek monochrome minimalism. Their latest at the South Bank's Udderbelly is Closer, which, as its name suggests, is all about intimacy and physical contact: the acrobatics of human interaction.
With front row seats I got to observe them at close range. Awe is all but inevitable on viewing intense feats of strength, balance and timing. To a classily refined indie-tinged soundtrack they tie themselves up in knots high above the hard floor, arrange themselves atop one another into living human sculptures and confidently stroll over each other's strong-as-steel bodies. Best of all, at close range you observe the tiny tics that others might miss: quickly fading crimson hand-prints on backs; eyes locked ahead in fierce concentration while subtly shifting your weight to maintain balance; or the exhalation after successfully enduring four people standing atop your body.
Simply performing feats like this is worthy of praise. The audience gasps and applauds with each triumphant moment, each of us marvelling at the dedication needed to tune the human body to such a high standard of excellence. Frankly, just watching attractive, incredibly fit people in skintight lycra flexing their muscles is far from the worst time you can have in London on a Tuesday night.
And yet I found myself surprisingly unmoved by Closer. At least for the first two thirds the performers appeared to have been instructed to display no personality or emotion. While that fits right in with the minimalist musical setlist and staging, it got a bit creepily cold-hearted. Despite obviously the five having perfect trust and synchronisation, I couldn't detect any camaraderie or even pleasure in their movements.
Staring into the blank, expressionless face of someone dangling, motionless, from a trapeze made me think of dolls, robots or puppets - presumably rather far from the intimacy they appear to be going for. The parade of hyper-taut flexing bodies eventually reminded me of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia; in which the muscled human form is fetishised by the fascist film-maker, linking her subjects to ancient Greek statuary.
Mercifully, things take a turn for the personable in the final couple of segments. Some audience interaction is pleasant and amusingly flirty, splashing a bit of much-needed comedy into affairs. Similarly, a spirited hula-hoop routine, while not exactly breaking new ground, is as good as any hoop routine I've seen previously. There's even a spot of karaoke where we're asked to sing along with The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony (though, confusingly this doesn't seem to actually go anywhere).
It feels a little churlish to criticise performers like this. They're close to the pinnacle of human physical perfection, their physiques the product of hours of pain, gallons of sweat and rivers of tears. Who can imagine what they've had to sacrifice to be able to entertain us like this? Even so, about two thirds of Closer left me cold - far from feeling closer I felt like the performers were consciously distancing themselves from the audience and from each other.
★★★
Circa: Closer is at the Udderbelly until 12th June 2016. Tickets here.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Thursday, April 30, 2015
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Most people dread getting dragged up on stage during a performance. Not me. Sure it's scary in that "I hope my flies aren't undone" sort of way, but not once have I ever regretted sitting on the front row. That said, I had some serious misgivings when a smiling performer extended his hand and hoisted me up onto the gym mat. A couple of minutes later I was lying flat on my back with an acrobat balanced on my outstretched palms.
The experience cut to the heart of A Simple Space. Being inches below a woman standing on her palms, an intense gaze burning a hole in the stage, veins wrapped around her muscles like steel cables and beads of sweat mazing their way down her face cements the effort, concentration and toll that these gymnastics take.
Composed of seven young acrobats from Australian company Gravity & Other Myths, the show makes an austere first impression. The set is a square mat with a couple of lights at each corner and the performers are clad in khaki and pastel tops, creating an effect not unlike being trapped in a GAP advert. We soon realise that everything that's not vital to the performance has been stripped away- the company even do their own lighting cues live on stage.
Minimalist it may be, but the aesthetic heightens the many feats we see before us. These range from human sculptures that bristle with limbs, to performers balancing in shaky human towers, being whirled around the stage by their wrists, leaping onto each other's backs or being gracefully tossed in parabolic arcs towards each other. This is standard acrobatics fare, but it's still thrilling as all hell. There's something adrenaline inducing in watching someone plummet towards the ground, only to be caught at the last moment and bounce up smiling, or the wobbly intensity of a man balancing three people on his head.
There's a bedrock of skill here that all but guarantees A Simple Space will entertain, but what's most interesting is where they deviate from expectations.The classical acrobat show is all tassled outfits, vaseline smiles, safety nets, circus lighting and glitter, shooting for the goal of showing the performer as an effortlessly graceful automaton, an image that this company are keen to subvert.
They achieve it by emphasising anatomical and emotional effort. Key to this is the obvious fatigue; the performers going red in the face as their muscles shiver n' shake under the strain. All this is accompanied by a symphony of grunts, groans and moans - leaving us in no doubt as to the effort going into every motion. Another deviation from the norm is baking in elements of failure. Many of the acts are competitions between the company - the most eyecatching a backflip contest. Stood in a row, they take turns backflipping to a rhythmic beat, eliminating a person when they fall to the group.
Paradoxically, the constant sight of failure makes the show that much more impressive. It drums into us the effort, training and skill needed to do even the simplest gymnastic action, as well as allowing us to empathise with what's going on before our eyes. It all feels extremely modern - the scuffed knees and bleeding feet in perfect sync with a contemporary YouTube/Vine fails orientated audience.
As far as an hour's entertainment on the South Bank goes it's totally worthwhile. Sure, there's not a huge amount of depth to it - but then you don't go to an acrobatic show expecting a life changing emotional experience. For what it is, it's superb; a thousand thumps, gasps and smiles combining into a straight-up fun tapestry of tumbling.
A Simple Space is at the Udderbelly, South Bank until 24th May. Tickets here.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Monday, June 11, 2012
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There is a strange casual sadism in watching an acrobatics show. One one hand you're impressed by feats of strength and agility, and on the other you're ghoulishly wondering if they're going to screw up and seriously injure themselves. Watching people hurt themselves in various ways is undoubtedly quite popular nowadays (and probably has been since the dawn of time). I'd imagine that any audience watching people performing dangerous feats is half wondering what would happen if they were to slip off a rope or crash into the audience. I suppose it is to 'Tumble Circus' credit that most of the enjoyment and suspense came from deeply hoping these nice people would survive their act with a full collection of teeth and no broken bones.
'Tumble Circus' is made up of two performers: Tina Machina, and Kenneth Fall. They're a modern, no frills kind of act: very stripped down and self-aware with a nice line in self-deprecating humour. This performance tells the story of the ups and downs in the 17 year relationship of the performers, as they fall in and out love and argue amongst each other. I don't know how much of it is true or not, the line between reality and fiction seems somewhat blurred. There are short spoken word sections which punctuate the various circus acts involving clubs, rope climbing, a trapeze, hula-hoops and an impressive range of acrobatics.
The stripped down and personal nature of the performance gives them a bit of a license to make mistakes and get away with it. There were quite a few screwups near the beginning of the performance involving dropped clubs and hula-hoops that Tina Machina couldn't quite flip off the floor. Perhaps this was intentional in order to build a genuine sense of danger for the acrobatics to come? Whether these were intentional mistakes or not, it certainly adds a bit of an uncomfortable air to proceedings. After all, if they keep dropping these clubs on the floor, how can we be sure that they are going to be able to catch each other when they're swinging high above the audience? I did enjoy the narrative of the performance, which grounded the personalities of the performers very effectively. Maybe the timing and pace could be a little faster, but I half suspect these moments of down time are to give the performers a chance to have a breather.
The common image of an acrobat troupe is sequined leotards, constant grins and a near total air of consummate professionalism. When watching a performance like that, you get a vicarious sense of danger, but with the understanding that it's not very likely to go wrong. The movements are practised and machinelike, with no room for error. In 'Tumble Circus' there is (at least the illusion) that things are somewhat looser and have more room for interpretation. The two performers, even as they place complete trust in each other act out little bickering sequences, hitting each other in the head with their shoes and refusing to extend a hand to pull the other up.
The fact that the glamour has almost entirely been stripped from the act makes the performers much easier for the audience to identify with. You start to think, 'if 'normal' people like this can pull off acrobatics feats, then maybe I could too'. It's a pretty nice message to give to an audience, and even though the illusion breaks very quickly once you start to consider the massive effort needed to train yourself to this level, it's fun to entertain the idea.
As the narrative proceeds, and the couple make up and break up, parts of the audience are sucked into the narrative. I had been assured there was no audience participation in the performance, but two members of the audience were picked on quite mercilessly. One woman was singled out for receiving a series of roses taken from the top of a rope. Receiving roses plucked from an acrobat's teeth seems like a quite flattering and nice experience. On the flip side, a man in the audience was quite meanly attacked for being 'old', 'grey' and 'over-the-hill'. This was the only sour note in the performance for me. It is a little jarring to hear these pleasant people repeatedly bully someone based on his appearance. They could have gotten away with maybe one jibe and kept me on side, but throughout the latter half of the show they kept picking on this one guy, who as far I could tell had done nothing to warrant being singled out. It's not like someone sitting in the audience has much of a chance to respond, and after all he has paid to get in, so I felt a bit sorry for him, whoever he was.
Apart from this slight hiccup though, the audience seemed to be having a great time, applauding at the right moments, and even engaging in an impromptu pillow fight when one was tossed into the audience.
The music used during the show also hit a sweet spot for me. Covers of what sounded like 'Today' by the Smashing Pumpkins and 'No Surprises' by Radiohead were played repeatedly as an instrumental soundtrack to proceedings, and to close the act, 'Cannonball' by the Breeders was played. They're good choices, and contemporary indie songs goes a little way to adding some kind of authenticity and emotional honesty to the act.
I think 'Tumble Circus' achieved what they set out to do, and at no point during the show was I bored. There is a slightly scrappy nature to the show, and a few more mistakes than you'd expect to see in an act like this, but then it's entirely possible they put those in to increase suspense. It's not exactly a world-shaking show, but it slotted very neatly into the kind of semi-subversive cabaret world that they're trying to establish in the Spiegeltent down at the Udderbelly.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
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Burlesque is a tricky one. On one hand I like the retro aesthetics, the playfulness, the subversion and satire. On the other hand, for all that is trumpeted about female empowerment it is still women taking their clothes off in front of a whooping crowd.
The London Wonderground is part of the ‘Udderbelly’ temporary area near the London Eye on the South Bank. It’s quite nice down there, at least on a Wednesday night anyway (I suspect it might be a bit more crowded on a Friday). The Wonderland area is decked out in wood in a sort of Americana themed way. Customers can sit in model dodgem cars, sipping their drinks from plastic cups surrounded by cheesecakey retro 50s pinup pictures. The stage area seems to be a cross between a circus tent and an old Western saloon. For a temporary setup it’s pretty impressive, although on a night like this, hot, sticky and humid. But, if you’re going to sit around watching girls dance about with very little on it seems strangely appropriate for it to be all steamy and hot under the collar.
I’ve been to a few burlesque shows before, but this was probably the most professional and elaborate. Of the two I’ve seen before, one took place in a working men’s club, and the other in a burlesque club called 'Volupte' in the City. This was more of a corporate, slick affair. This company, “the House of Burlesque” has toured the world, and won prizes at the Edinburgh Festival. Its members have performed with burlesque legend Dita von Teese. It is, as far as burlesque companies go, one of the big fish.
The individual performances were pretty varied. There was the expected 20s/30s style retro feather waving stripteases, but there were also circus acts involving ten hulahoops spun at once, a woman acrobatically swinging out over the audience, there were comedy numbers – a sort of quasi-mime strip, and a magic act. There is no denying that these women are talented. All of them were enjoyable to watch, and in all of the performances the personality (or the stage persona at any rate) of the performer was accentuated. I can’t deny that I was entertained the whole time.
But I find certain elements of burlesque problematic. From what I gather, feminist arguments for burlesque are along the lines that it is a celebration of the female body rather than an exploitation of it. The ‘tease’ subverts and satirises cultural expectations of how women ‘should’ act. Additionally, within burlesque a wide range of body types are celebrated and the stick-thin waifish body type prevalent in the media supposedly has little sway here: burlesque is portrayed as age and weight inclusive. The fact that burlesque is performed to the ‘male gaze’ does not, as such, imply that the woman is exploiting her body, rather that the performer is in control of the reactions of the audience. It is a way in which women can behave in an overtly aggressive and sexual manner in a public arena.
I can sympathise with nearly all these arguments. There is nothing remotely wrong with celebrating the female body. Societies that seek to repress female bodily imagery tend to be repressive theocracies. The fact that the current cultural model of attractiveness is the skinny waif is actively harmful in terms of encouraging eating disorders. Burlesque has its roots in satirising the behaviour of the upper-class, so it has a good pedigree in subversion. The creative director of ‘House of Burlesque”, Tempest Rose, says she “strongly believes in the empowerment of women worldwide to be free to express their creativity and personality without fear, judgment or oppression”. Who can argue with that?
Despite all this I can’t help but shake the feeling that burlesque does more reinforcing of gender roles than subverting them. The vast majority of performers at the Wonderground were slim and conventionally attractive. I think it is extremely telling that the only performer that didn’t do some kind of striptease was a woman of size, who kept her clothes on and did a mock magic comedy routine. Why is this? It seems to me that there is a very narrow line of between satirising the male gaze, and pandering to it. Even though the entire tone of the act is that the girls are in charge, they only have as much power as has been granted to them by their audience. How would the audience have reacted if the fat performer had been aggressively sexual towards them? I don’t know, because it didn’t happen. If it had happened that would have been genuinely subversive, and would have actually pushed some boundaries. It seems a bit shallow to promote diversity, and then have all of your stripteases being performed by women occupying a very narrow definition of conventional attractiveness.
It is interesting that the audience seemed to be fairly equally split along gender lines. It wasn’t even the case that the women were there with male companions – there were groups of women there together to watch it. I have never been to a dedicated strip club, but I’d hazard a guess that you don’t get too many groups of women in there. Burlesque has managed to gain a certain level of acceptability in society. When my colleagues at work asked me what I’d done with my night I didn’t feel any shame at all telling them I’d been to a burlesque show, and they took it in stride as if I’d been out to see a musical or concert. What if I’d told them I’d spent the night in a strip club? Would they have been so blasé? Why is one category of women taking their clothes off in public to music socially acceptable and one isn’t?
I suspect the acceptability of burlesque boils down to class. Burlesque is also something seen as being done “for fun”, while being straightforward stripping is something that society sees as shameful, as a last resort for purely economic reasons. Modern burlesque is safely middle-class, a way for people to dip their toe into the waters of experimental sexuality without immersing themselves in it or making any kind of commitment. It is possible to enjoy burlesque at an ironic distance. A pole-dancing club is more overtly sleazy, they don’t slather on the irony when it comes to the female body. In many ways it’s more honest in its titillation.
So I’m torn. On one hand I had a genuinely fun night watching talented girls performing highly skilled and imaginative acts. On the other hand, I find modern burlesque somewhat hypocritical in its philosophy. This performance did not practise what it preached. It offered a shrink-wrapped, easily consumable form of safe and socially acceptable transgression. It pushes far too weakly against mainstream gender roles. The burlesque philosophy of female empowerment via celebrating the physical body seems shallow and plays right into the patriarchal notion that the primary indicator of a woman’s worth is her appearance. Somehow, it feels like true empowerment should be based on character and personal achievements rather than getting a roomful of people to hoot and holler while nipple tassels are shaken.
I should add that I don't think it is impossible to put on a burlesque performance that is genuinely subversive and explores interesting themes, but this wasn't it.
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