Hannah Nicklin

Edinburgh: Last Days

An image of Third Angel’s Pills for Modern Living installation at Edgelands.

I find that I only really want to comment on a couple of the shows that I saw on day four and five, so I have decided to make a C-C-C-OMBO post. Followed by some very short reflections on Edgelands and Hitch.

Day the fourth

(g)host city - St. Antony’s by Kieran Hurley

(g)host city is an invisible festival without a venue. Or, rather, the city is the venue. A selection of audio pieces curated by Laura Cameron Lewis that you can download all of (7.99) or just  the ones you want to do (I downloaded Kieran’s from Bandcamp for £2). St. Antony’s plays out like you’ve found a phone fallen between some rocks in Holyrood Park. As if you picked it up and listened to the first voicemail by mistake and then slowly not been able to stop. I wonder if you could put the piece on a phone just like that? Be sent the location to a lost phone. Pick it up, listen. A small piece for a big place, this is one of my favourite experiences from the fringe. Not just for Kieran’s lovely ear for the idiosyncrasies of dialogue, or the gripping unfolding of increasingly tragic messages that are fated to never reach their receiver, but because Holyrood park, and Edinburgh, is fucking beautiful place. I enjoyed a moment of being embedded rather than transported in it.

2401 Objects - Analogue

Apart from the slightly disconcerting resemblance of one of the actors to a younger Hugh Laurie, I found plenty to enjoy in Analogue’s story of ‘the world’s most famous amnesiac patient’. It felt a lot more drama-y that Lecture Notes on a Death scene, and I don’t think it always benefited from that. (I’m very easily bored of ‘actor voice’, these days). But a really affecting story, told in quite a visually strong way; I liked very much the way the screen moved and wiped away scenes, like the dropping away of memories. I wanted the piece to be smaller though. It felt too big, the sense was of the wide world of scientific enquiry, when I think it should have been closer, more ‘in the head’ of Henry. The most powerful moment was the tying of it down to our bodies – the moment you’re asked to place your hands on your head. I felt like after acknowledging the audience so much at the beginning, it was strange to move into more conventional 4th wall stuff. A really interesting piece that I think could afford to be more tied down.

Day the fifth

The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley - Chris Goode.

Not sure where to start on this one. THERE WAS JUST TOO MUCH LOVELINESS. Chris is a master of theatrical storytelling, his gentle, open and warm manner fill the Baby Grand and a simple 3 chair set (with associated teenage paraphernalia) becomes the scene of a devastating fire, the threshold of a school’s changing rooms, the back seat of a car, the formica tables of a poor Spud-u-Like imitation. A story about a superhero and a sidekick. Continue reading…

Imagining Better Cities.

I actually didn’t have a proper title for my TEDxYork talk, but I reckon the name they gave the youtube entry does a pretty good job. Now available for viewing at your leisure: me, ranting about Art and the City:

Other Must Sees include Alan Lane, Dan Bye, Baba Israel, Alex Kelly, Tassos Stevens and many more. Go find them all over here

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…