Hannah Nicklin

Mapping the City

Warning, this post could be said to contain spoilers. If you intend to go see Mapping the City, don’t read this. In fact, don’t read anything about it, or talk to anyone, just go not knowing, like you do into each day.

A character watches himself speaking boldly about politics and love, knowing how much pain both will give him.

There are some moments in our lives that can seem more 3D, when the world seems to swing around us. The wave of nausea when you find out your partner has been cheating on you, the moment you smell the scent of someone you once loved, the first time you hold a child that belongs to you, or the moment that your car is hit by another. Time shifts in these moments, the air takes on a consistency like treacle or glue; you feel what a phenomenologist might call ‘the thickness of experience’, I think, when a thing like this happens to you.

The contents of couple’s hearts, as tall as a building, projected onto a wall several stories high behind them.

Mapping the City from the brilliant Slung Low is a piece performed by many performers across the city of Hull. Sometimes following mic’d up speakers, or being guided by workmen holding orange umbrellas, all the time hearing the sounds through a pair of headphones and transmitted to the small card-sized receiver worn around each audience member’s neck.

Like retracing your steps in a town you used to live. Remembered, alien.

A culture sunk in mediums that can be paused, rewound, fast forwarded, altered, cloned, undone, is a culture obsessed with the fake, ruled over by the repetition. What Mapping the City makes you to do is to reverse the question; is that fake? becomes is this part of it?, you don’t ask ‘is this a lie‘ but ‘is this this moment’s truth‘? The performance made you hyper-aware of every figure, each vehicle that sped past, the seemingly discarded object; all has relevance, all a reason.

Three people stood watching you, holding softly lit lanterns. Continue reading…

Mezze

Image shared by Third Angel on Flickr via a CC license

Every time I come to Leeds I’m more and more impressed with what the venues and companies here are doing. This Thursday it was the turn of the Mezze festival, from the brilliant team at the Leeds Met Gallery and Studio Theatre, hosted by and in the Northern Ballet building. A mini festival of participatory and intimate performance, Mezze was transforming and importing spaces in and around the venue, 3 of which I was able to get to see.

Running on Air was the first piece I saw/did, a piece from the comedian Laura Mugridge performed in her yellow WV T2 camper van, ‘Joni’. In a break from tradition I am going to try and describe a small performance I enjoyed without using the words ‘intimate’ and ‘gentle’; it was both these things, but they don’t do justice to the feeling that her storytelling imparts. Instead I would compare it very much to feeling of camping as a child. Quietly magical, slightly wild, with a feeling of ‘playing house’; made of plastic cups and tiny sinks and a tin opener that doesn’t quite work; everything a brightly coloured representative of real-life counterparts. Mugridge’s cried tears as Joni repeatedly breaks down fill glasses that become musical instruments, paper mâché hills stand in for the real thing, memories seep into the cracks and suddenly the driving wheel is a paper plate. A warmly told story about always being a bit lost, I left Running on Air feeling like Laura was one of my best friends. Which is a cheat-y way of saying ‘gentle’ and ‘intimate’.

Lecture Notes on a Death Scene was the second piece I took part in. A piece for one audience member by the emerging company Analogue, Lecture Notes was a more challenging piece to decipher (no bad thing). A story that traces it’s route like the tree branches of life it describes, occasionally letting you glimpse the paths that branch off, the versions of yourself that fall by the wayside. A piece about feeling lost, strangely visited, and bereaved by a version of yourself you maybe wish you were, played out using mirrors, angles, reflections and in a hoody that smelled like Boy. Continue reading…

Keep Breathing/Like You Were Before

I really love taking non-theatre-people to theatre. Not that there’s in essence ‘non-theatre-people’. There’s just a lot of people who don’t go see/do/to theatre. But hopefully you know what I mean; nothing in the world feels like theatre does, and it’s such a thrill to bring people to that.

I took an old school friend, and non-theatre-person to see the double bill of Keep Breathing/Like You Were Before at Stoke Newington International Airport (as part of the excellent London Word Festival) this Thursday. Two intimate, and at the same time widely reaching pieces, gentle, but at times painful. They did what theatre does best; make you remember yourself, and your body, your breath, and the people you’re made up of.

Like You Were Before by Debbie Pearson is a simple piece of storytelling about her moving from Toronto to the UK several years ago. Murmured words on video are played out in front of us, as Pearson traces herself, her movements, the gaps, the places where she used to be; physically, vocally, narratively. Following on video her last days in Toronto, Like You Were Before stumbles through an awkward dance, private conversations, a swig of vodka, details that only she could know. A gentle piece that focussed on the peculiar and inimitable relationship between female friends, conveyed with a sense of being let into a box full of memories, but with the holder’s occasionally snatching certain painful ones – as she fast forwarded, paused, and skipped sections – away. Simple, and everyday; in the best kind of way.

Keep Breathing is a new piece of work from Chris Goode. This (I believe) was the first outing of this work in progress commissioned by the Drum Theatre Plymouth about breath – and the things you can do and say with it. Simply begun as the question ‘say what you would like to say to the world, anything that you can say in one breath’ sent out to 6 people. Keep Breathing traced the journey of this question, through responses, conversations, meetings, and the questioner’s own thoughts, reactions, tellings. Held in a particularly conversational style – but supportively guided by the structure of the questions and Goode’s beautiful little linguistic refrains – Keep Breathing was a passionate tale about the things people put their breath to, and Goode’s realisation that much of his own work is scored by it. This realisation is made doubly poignant by revelations about his mother’s struggles with a respiratory illness.

As we were walking to the venue before the show, my engineering-PhD friend asked about theatre: ‘does it not feel, I don’t know, I don’t mean the word pointless, but to put all that work in, and then for it to end, finish, and there not be anything afterwards?’ I muttered something about life, and existence, and beauty not always being defined by usefulness.

My friend’s question was directly and indirectly answered by both Like You Were Before, and Keep Breathing. Debbie’s murmured traces connecting her past and present selves, Chris’ piece about life, death, and moments built of shared, collective breaths. Keep Breathing finished with an audience member (Debbie, in fact) blowing bubbles as Chris presented a spoken montage of the hour passed, as each image flashed before our ears, a bubble had a brief, beautiful little existence. “Breathe in, breathe out… It’s alright, isn’t it?”

I took an old school friend, and non-theatre-person to see the double bill of Keep Breathing/Like You Were Before at Stoke Newington International Airport (as part of the excellent London Word Festival) this Thursday. And I was proud to do so. They were perfect.

This cross between a blog post and a review is re-posted on the GoodReview site that I also write for sometimes. When I have the time. Which actually isn’t very often.

Disruptions in the Ordinary

This is a very quick post on thoughts bubbling around my mind following the amazing #thepassion last weekend – a three day secular reconstructed tale of the Passion, told by over 2000 performers/participants, that wove its way through the community and spaces of Port Talbot in Wales. I didn’t set out to – I didn’t even know about it before that weekend, but it seeped into my twitter feed not through agressive ‘amplification’ driven by any kind of ‘strategy’ (scare quotes ‘r’ us), but by the sheer force of people desperate to share. Desperate to share what, by all reports, was a life-changing and affirming piece of theatre. People tweeting, or posting on the Guardian’s review of it talked about the healing of a community, the putting to rest of bad dreams and memories, that it was ‘spectacular’, ‘breath-taking’, that it re-connected them with ‘the awe of humanity’ (comments here).

Truly radical theatre, I might term it.

If I had the time, this would be a proper blog post. As it is, it’s the fragments, images, quotes, ideas, that might have gone into something I could have spent some thought on. Maybe I’ll come back and fill in the gaps at some point.

“We live at a time when people increasingly express the feeling that the world outside our windows is a dangerous and fragmented place. Once upon a time people walked through the city and it gave them a chance to name places and make contact with each other. [...] humans need to mark their lives against real space and other people. When they cease to walk, the real spaces become less plausible then than the centralized reality of the media and are increasingly witnessed as a passing blur from a car window.” – Graeme Miller quoted in a piece by Carl Lavery on Linked

three hands, all helping him
(image posted with the kind permission of @angsy)

“Playfulness, disruption, gifts left for strangers, the sharing of visions, intelligent flash-mobbing, provocations at the tipping points of cities, making a scene so the city performs itself, misguided tours, wireless on-line technology – combining phone, movie, digital design, camera, editing desk and ipod – sending routes, signs and stories in waves across spreading networks of uncontrollable walking, maps of atmospheres and basins of attraction, and festivals celebrating the reflections in windows and the glints in pedestrians’ eyes – [...] extraordinary changes will begin with disruptions in the ordinary.” – A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture Wrights and Sites

Continue reading…