TaPestries, an annual event for The Arden School in Manchester, sees second year students on the Theatre and Performance course (hence the TaP) produce some original work as part of their course. This year, the students had been tasked with creating a new performance piece from 10 given stimuli. These stimuli were... a series of confessions, utter stillness, rhythm, chaos, the novel Brave New World, the music of Thievery Corporation, green, an accelerating repeated action, a pair of shoes must not leave the stage, something happens in reverse.
I had to ask my friend Mr Google about one of the above, having not a clue what they had written... and so if anyone else is in any doubt, The Thievery Corporation is the name of an American electronic music duo.
There are 23 students on this course and so it would have been impossible for them to have devised a show all together, and so two similar-sized groups were formed and they devised and rehearsed keeping their projects secret from each other. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the amount and nature of their stimuli, the two plays were actually very similar.
Last night, after coming home earlier than normal, as I had only a one-act play to review, I confess to watching television in bed! (may I be whipped to within an inch of my life!). Not only that but I watched a film which was utterly boring and without any real artsitic merit whatsoever. However, I say this simply because the film I watched was called Equilibrium. A film which was set in a non-specfic future dystopia where the idea of feeling and emotion had to be controlled and eradicated. I couldn't help but view these two performance pieces this evening as an unwitting response to that film.
Both plays [Brave New World: Part Two and The Glitch In The System] saw the cast identically dressed, suppressed and controlled from unseen masters, machine / automatom-like lifestyles where emotions and feelings either had to be identical (the first) or suppressed and eradicated (the second), a longing for something better / freer, a sense of nostalgia, an urge to break away from conformity, and yet a lack of understanding about what they were breaking away into, and a return to their known security. - oh, and they both had a pair of shoes on the stage!
'Brave New World Part Two' saw a group of citizens, all called X11, with bar codes on their necks, 'wake up', perform meaningless tasks, and then 'switch themselves off'. With each repeat something changed, mutated, and their lack of compliance and unease of being just a number became stronger; I was expecting a happy ending, but no such luck, in the end they went back to automatons with a long extended period of nothing before a slow blackout. The pair of shoes remained on stage. If I am being totally honest then there was one thing in this show which I didn't understand at all. X11s' actions were controlled and ordered by commands written on the screen behind them. One such command was "It is time for sema". I have no clue at all what that means.... perhaps I wasn't meant to!
In 'The Glitch In The System', a jumble of metal chairs greeted the audience and one by one these suppressed citizens arrived and nervously took the chairs eventually finding the rhythm and unison. Made-up to look much older than they were with grey hair spray and grey make-up especially around the eyes gave them all a very cold, metallic feel too. Half the group kept their boilersuits on, whilst half were able to show their colourful t-shirts underneath and an interesting ping-pong match between these two ensued. However, all too soon the system found the glitch, eradicated the error, and once again, they all went back to being the same and controlled again replacing the chairs into their jumble and exiting. The pair of shoes remained on the stage!
I enjoyed the original quotes from Alduous Huxley, and the way these quotes had been interpolated and manifested on stage; I enjoyed the visual metaphors at play in both pieces; I enjoyed the backwards recording of a speech to make it sound like a foreign language dictator; I enjoyed the lighting, especially in the second piece, and I enjoyed the choreography of both pieces; and all 23 performers were utterly committed to their tasks the entire time and should be commended for this. I did leave the theatre though feeling rather empty and unfulfilled by these two plays. Not because the actors had unimpressed [although my number one bugbear did come into play, when the actors spoke unamplified, and were inaudible and mumbling! For me there is no excuse for lack of clarity in diction or inability to project. Sadly, it is all too common in this style of theatre!] but because there was a lack of originality, a lack of resolution, and perhaps, due to the nature of both pieces, a lack of energy. Even the more upbeat sections of each play felt a little flat and uninspired, maybe understandably given the subject matter and style of presentation, but the whole didn't cover a large enough range of dynamics for me to truly engage with the scenarios; which were, as already stated, (un)surprisingly similar. The inability to eat a red apple is no different from not being able to enjoy the wearing of odd shoes.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 21/11/19
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