Pony Pie
theatre/glasgowArchive for News & Updates
London International Mime Festival
I know there are cheap ways to get to London from Glasgow and if there was ever a time to find that way it’s this January for the London International Mime Festival running from the 13th to the 31st. Definitely one of the most appealing object manipulation-based performances will come from the Belgian company Mossoux-Bonte (count on those Belgians to have something radical up their sleeve!). Check out the duo’s profile on the festival’s site and Mossoux-Bonte’s own site here. I saw their “Twin Houses” at last year’s Manipulate Festival, a wonderful dance/puppet piece about identity and the confusions, illusions, and partnerships that go in to creating and destroying one’s sense of self. It was a yawn (apparently) for hard-nosed puppet theatre veterans, but as I come from a dramaturgical/Dramatic theatre background I thought it was provocative, beautiful, and completely professional. Looking forward to this festival!
“Hair I Am” at the CCA
Helen Cuinn has brought me onto her project as a dramaturg and it’s an honour to watch her new show “Hair I Am” open this week at the CCA. This is Glasgay Festival’s poster girl and rightly so – the performance takes a look at a “ginger bias” Cuinn both pokes fun at and explores with brevity that is punctuated with thoughtful sincerity. Music, dance, text, and video contribute to a dynamic performance from a dynamic performer. I cannot wait to see what audiences make of the characters and voices this satire features as Cuinn unpicks those prejudices based on qualities as arbitrary and culturally mediated as red hair.
Helen is performing at the CCA
4th and 5th of November at 7.30 pm
Call 0141 352 4900 for tickets
(£7 & £5 conc.)
The YelloWing ON TOUR
Fresh off the road from the start of touring “The YelloWing,” my collaboration with Julia Taudevin. We’ve had a great time meeting the crew at Edinburgh’s Storytelling Centre and Inverness’ Eden Court One Touch Theatre. Professional and hard working folks there made our start an easy one and gave us the confidence to produce two great performances in both venues! We have had an intense rehearsal process in the last weeks (hence ignoring the blog on pony-pie) but it’s all come together on the road and now we have a lot to look forward to when we pick up the tour again for Glasgow at the CCA on Sauchiehall St. Those performances will take place on the 13th through the 16th at 7.30 with a 1.30 matinee on the 16th. Tell your friends. Word is tickets are selling fast and we want to share the piece with you and your friends.
Also, on the 15th there is a talk back with Dee Heddon after the show, a brilliant scholar and writer of contemporary theatre practice. There may be other panelists but there is certainly be an interesting conversation with myself as Director of the piece and Julia. We had a chat after both shows this weekend and they were excellent. The venues being very different and being chaired by different folks these chats were incredibly different. But each time it came through that the piece successfully works to invite a narrative “reading” of the play and leaves enough room for personal interpre
tation that requires the audience to bring a part of themselves. This was our ambition with the piece because we knew making statements or declaring any one thing as “true” when it comes to mental health would be dangerous and irresponsible. So, we created this character, this scenario, and then a physical performance jeweled with question marks. The response was overwhelmingly honest and open with several people giving private anecdotes. Also, a great generalized chat about the politics of mental health. And most importantly, the importance of the Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. These people are playing the role of patron to artists who are talking about mental health in a serious and artistic way without financial incentives that colour the ways people talk about/label/condemn/romanticize mental health. We had nothing to gain but the spectator’s openness to the work.
See you in Glasgow! Also, please write to the Scottish Government to acknowledge and praise the work being done under the umbrella of the festival.
“The YelloWing”
Glasgow CCA
350 Sauchiehall St.
Oct. 13th to Oct. 16 at 7.30 pm (1.30 and 7.30 the 16th)
There will be a post-show chat on the 15th
Sacrificing in the Object in Postmodern Performance
Done!
Today at noon I will hand in my masters thesis, a paper that examines the emerging dramaturgical role of the performing object in postmodern performance. This study primarily draws on Baudrillard’s theories of the simulacra. I draw links from this and other ideas about postmodern subjectivity to developments in live performance in the twentieth and twenty-first century. My focus is the object’s role in emerging practices and how they facilitate larger projects that provoke, through their own “self-abolishment” critical spectatorship.
You can read that essay on Puppeturgy, a blog that I kept as a research tool during the process. I will continue to write Puppeturgy and compound the resources I have collected there including a bibliography and links to theatre and performance companies, artists, organizations and festivals. For people interested in the dramaturgical aspects of object-based performance, particularly emerging practices that draw on wide ranging sources and do not respect the convenient boundaries of culture or tradition, this might be an interesting resource and I have no doubt that the work I discuss here will draw on the work I see and discuss there and the ideas presented in that ongoing discussion.
I’m beginning to collate my drawings, brainstorms, and outlines for a big push this week before the first meeting with Simon Hart at Puppet Animation Scotland and Dominic Hill at the Traverse next Monday. More soon!
Project Announced for Fall 2009
Pony Pie has received a small grant to develope a new short piece of object-based theatre. The submission was accepted this month and work will begin in August on a piece exploring the shades of gray in our daily pornographic exposure and experience of violence. The piece will have its first performance at the end of November 2009 and will show again at Manipulate 2010, Puppet Animation Scotland’s annual visual theatre festival in Edinburgh. It’s an honor to be recognized by that great organization and the Traverse Theatre which is supporting the scheme. Stay tuned for more!
