- Venue
- Nottingham Playhouse
- Location
- East Midlands
The Cutting Room is currently collaborating with Nottingham Playhouse, responding to activities and events running throughout the city. Curators Jennifer Ross and Clare Harris are both graduates from Nottingham Trent University and maintain their interest within filmmaking whilst representing work from both established and unestablished artists. Events such as ‘Everyone has a different view,’ The Authentic Self,’ and ‘The Art of Storytelling,’ alongside various film screenings have explored their ideas about communicating and representing authentically. The result so far has been an array of fresh and rewarding films, performances and animations which have challenged our social stigmas and travelled to a variety of venues within the city of Nottingham.
To write solely about one event, I feel, would be an injustice to the curatorial skills of these two emerging artists, The questions their events pose to the audience have an interesting continuity whilst remaining invigorating and enticing to their audience. The programmes success, I feel is due to its varied audience. Rather than presenting works and questions to artists and their peers, Nottingham Playhouse theatre has opened The Cutting Room up to those viewing coinciding performances and dramatics. Presenting art within the theatre has an interesting effect, highlighting the per formative aspect which contemporary art contains within the modern day.
How can one remain authentic? Is this about the artists themselves remaining true to their practise, or about representing work which is valid in the theatre and the art world? Within ‘The art of Storytelling,’ the curators invited Daniel Marcus Clark, the Bricolage Dance Movement and Tamara Erde to demonstrate varied approaches to storytelling.
The evening begins with Daniel Marcus Clark’s ‘Earfilms.’ The artist unravels his woeful tales using a delightful self made language in which he uses various instruments, pre- recorded sound and live recordings to punctuate his rhythmic delivery. He opens windows into the lives of two separate families with the protagonist in each story being heavily flawed; one preoccupied with recording the trials and tribulations of his loved ones to the point of missing involvement within their lives. The other; cold, cruel, aggressive and heavily affected by a sore childhood, he proceeds to impose this suffering onto those around him.
Each story ends with redemption and leaves a lasting self questioning. I return again to authenticity; are those moments captured behind a lens, slim counterparts of the reality which passes him by? Are the stories themselves genuine, or are they fabrications? There is a particular moment within the delivery of a poignant conclusion where Clarks stalls, excusing himself for forgetting his lines. This however remains theatrical, and the repetition of lines could have been used to increase the tension of his story. I wonder again if this is authentic, or a method of holding the audience’s attention.
This is the beauty of storytelling, morals or messages embodied within fictional anecdotes. It is the journey which the narrator invites you to embark upon, which can be a totally different experience depending on the audience member. Clarks does this effectively. His change in tone and pitch hold the audience’s attention, and the use of instruments and recordings create a cinematic experience. ‘Earfilms,’ is a successful opener, reminiscent of experiencing an adult reading to a group of children but regaling us with satirical tales.
After breaking for a film screening, we return to watch the Bricolage Dance Movement. The group act out their story through movement and dance, an entirely different method of storytelling to that of Clark. Again the story is quite dark, showing a girl physically bound with rope to her partner’s foot, as he remains statuesque throughout the performance reading a book. Slowly, other members take the stage performing improvised dance, as the girl attempts to mimic the movements within her physical cocoon she becomes more and more agitated by her ‘tied up,’ state. She slowly breaks free, her movements begin to sync with the other dancers and she performs with a sense of desperation rather than enjoyment. Her escape feels unfortunate; she crawls back to her chain and wraps herself back up in the rope, returning to her place next to her partner.
The rope signifies personal afflictions; nervousness, insecurity and doubt. Our desire to shed these traits becomes a longing to shed a part of our self. Amongst the expressive dancers this feeling is enhanced, yet when she toys with this other personality, she is uncomfortable and pines for her true self. The use of dance to narrate the story captivates the audience. The sense of witnessing a live performance, reiterates the fact that we are sat within a theatre.
The evening draws to a close with Tamara Erde’s video installation and live performance. The feel is extremely melancholy, which has been building up through the acts during the evening. She has a sense of desperation to her work reminiscent of Bas Jan Aders, ‘In search of the miraculous.’ The screens that stand behind her play scenes of lonely seafronts and the title, ‘Soldiers Dream,’ conjures a sense of loss. She dramatically sips and spills her wine from the glass and stages fits on the floor.
The work is punctuated with sounds of Darwish reading, the effect is altogether more abstract than the previous two performances. I don’t gain a narrative from the work and question its believability, it often feels quite contrived. The piece is said to be a visual adaptation of Mahmoud Darwish poetry, rather than having the traditional stories beginning, middle and end, hers feels too open to interpretation and I struggle to attach a meaning or conclusive element to her piece.
The evening has presented itself within a fine array of mediums; sadly I couldn’t fully enjoy the film screenings, as the room they were displayed in was alive with chatter from the previous performances. This in itself showed how excited the audience had become but I would have preferred to have had the chance to watch these in another room, in silence, allowing myself time to fully engage with what I considered an important part of the night.
It was great to see the ignition of imagination being celebrated through such an interesting variety of work, imagination always works harder when viewing plays or hearing stories that it does when presented with a film. It is always exciting to see that element of control handed over to the audience and to allow them to forge their own backdrops for the story.
The art of storytelling is re-mouldable, varying from plays, print, song, dance and spoken word. It is an extremely interesting idea from a curational point of view; the changeability of one tale lies in its beholder. Styles of narration, language and delivery can ultimately twist the backbone of a story and turn it into a new creation.
‘The original idea of storytelling, the oral profession, goes back to antiquity – who knows how many Homers there were? We know that the oral tradition of telling stories from generation to generation, altering them developing them and changing them – is something which is central to our pleasure.’ Sir Peter Hall, The Need to Imagine
Upon retelling a story, our personality becomes entwined within the narrative and this is adapted each time the story is retold. The authenticity of a tale is not necessarily important, it is how the story engages it audience and ‘The Art of Storytelling,’ explores this successfully.
