- Venue
- Nottingham Playhouse
- Location
The Art of Storytelling
The art of storytelling, a pastime revolutionised through the ages from word of mouth to the big screen. Stories are told in an infinite number of ways, whether it should be a twisted fable to profess morals or a bit of gossip heard at the local pub; some methods unappreciated and others lost.
Clare Harris and Jennifer Ross (co-curators of the Cutting Room) presented ‘The Art of Story Telling’, an evening of performance and film screenings, which took place at the Nottingham Playhouse on Wednesday the 24th of November. The show inspired by the pantomime production of ‘Mother Goose’ and Roundabout’s educational workshop ‘Under the Story Tree’, mingles a range of different approaches to story telling laid out in three performances separated by several film screenings.
Daniel Marcus Clark currently lives and works in the artistic hotbed of Brighton and has been developing sound-designed stories called ‘Earfilms’ since 1990. He also contributes to a very talented musical society called ‘One Taste Collective’.
He opened the show brilliantly, enveloping the audience in a poetic realm, manipulating a small orchestra of acoustic instruments and electronic enhancers to help convey dramatic tone and tense atmosphere. The narrative flows through an unsettling dynamic between three flatmates, one of which is an oppressor of the other two. The tale starts placidly enough and then quite quickly escalates with anger and the domestic dispute gets out of hand. The rhyme and rhythm, intertwined with the sounds helped beautifully to shape the scene that even sudden transitions in the narrative were easy to follow.
The artist seemed to falter during a climatic part of the story, seemingly losing the plot. I still debate whether his interruptive apology was in fact planned, because even though his tempo slowed and he didn’t rhyme, there was still the underlying beat. The mistake to me could’ve been intentional to smooth the tension and then rebuild the climax. Since I still debate the authenticity of his mistake, this demonstrates Clark’s remarkable talent at creating an imaginary world for the audience to escape and experience such a wonderful story.
The screenings, which had been promised to take place around the performances, were not well executed. Between the three acts, we were directed to a screening room, next to that of the performance room, which became more of a social hub to discuss the most recent performance. Only a small part of my attention was focused on the videos playing, irritating me because I wanted to appreciate them, but the conversing crowd made it difficult to hear and just had me feeling the films to be unnecessary in combination with the rest of the artistic happenings.
I enjoy all elements of dance, the moving and connecting with oneself and others, interpreting sound as a relating agent. , it’s a storyteller. The Bricolage Dance Movement danced a story with fluid movements in combination with strong, poignant juts and thrusts.
The scene opens with a young woman, tied up, sitting on a bench next to a man reading. As the music starts another character enters the scene and begins to dance.
The scene continues with three more dancers arriving and enticing the bound girl to free herself of her constrictions. The story reflects a relationship of sorts, trying to escape the confines and hindrances of conflict between two people. The girl, being ignored for the male’s pursuit of knowledge, seeks freedom. As the girl unties herself, the male companion who she is tied to leaves and she may frolic with her new cohort.
As she enjoys her liberty it dawns on her the pain arisen due to the absence of her old companion. She enjoys further the relation with the other characters, but decides to tie herself back up, retrieving the man and repositioning herself once more by his side. Although the performance demonstrates a brilliant bonding of reflecting and opposing between bodies, the expected intensity of the narrative was diminished somehow. The story appeals to me greatly but I found the modern dance in this instance leaving something to be desired, such as a push to make the entire telling extraordinary.
The third and final act, A Soldier’s Dream performed by the Israeli-French artist Tamara Erde, made very little sense to me, although I am sure there is some conceptual thinking beneath the extremely ambiguous performance.
It begins with artist sitting at a table with three glasses of water. The artist is twisted in her chair with her back to the audience, facing a screen where a video piece is to be projected.
As the music starts (a track especially composed by Thomas March) and the images project, the artist turns to the audience and we are met with a very lovely woman.
I can find it a tad distressing, the inability for performance artists to swallow what they put in their mouths. I’ve seen a man chew through a whole loaf of bread to unveil a small piccolo he ended up playing and a girl spit out a fish head. Neither of them swallowed for evident reasons, but Erde was unable to consume the water she gulped glutinously. The best I can come up with is the potential discomfort it could cause to her movements; contorted gestures to move around her setting, accessing her other objects: A large piece of fabric, wrapped up around three doll-sized, plastic white beds.
She moved back and forth placing them specifically around the floor in the centre of the stage. What were the reasons behind her delicate placing? Beats me.
Later I was to understand the combination of video installation and live performance to be a visual interpretation of the poems by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In a part of the performance, there was an audio recording of his work in collision with the rest of installation/performance.
I desperately wanted to understand and appreciate this final show of the evening but when confronted with a piece containing a multitude of possible interpretations, I find it harder to engage and lose interest, though always retain respect for the artist’s creativity.
I thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful ‘Earfilm’ from Daniel Marcus Clark, appreciated the gorgeous choregraphy from the Bricolage Dance Movement and was thoroughly bemused by the artist Tamara Erde.
All in all I found the evening amusing, confusing, creative and enlightening of different methods of storytelling and the range of art in show a well-executed and professional collection.
