- Venue
- Resistance Gallery
- Location
It is around 10.30 and the crowd is thinning. The first act on the third part of the bill is Rob Gawthrop, who is making weird, almost unbearable noise with amplified instrument bits and household objects. Some people drift away, while others stick around, shaking their heads in horror. One person has covered his ears completely. The lead singer of Radio Darling, the band on last, is doing some slightly torturous impromptu movements to the noise.
As soon as Gawthrop finishes, the compering stage manager dashes out the back to grab the next act. Ringing a school bell he heralds the arrival of a 7-foot accordion-playing bear and a morris dancer. As they wander through the space, the crowd is mesmerised. On stage they crank up an authentic rendition of a one-man morris dancer with a bear on accordion. A dog barks in time to the music. It feels amazing, in a pikey sort of way.
So it was last Thursday at the Great Orchidaceous Travesty, Maggie Tran’s indescribable ‘art-cabaret-sideshow’. It was a night you couldn’t explain to anyone – not even someone with a taste for experimental and unusual performance. It was – and I don’t say this lightly – quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
The night started well, or badly, depending on your point of view. My company Switch Performance supported Tran in developing and producing the show, so I was anxious when the band were still setting up five minutes before the doors opened. Even more so when they were still at it half an hour later, with most of the audience seated and waiting. The anally-retentive producer in me was squirming, but I knew that getting stressed would make no sense here. So I sat tight and let the mayhem unfold.
The stage manager asked me what to do and I suggested making the sound-check part of the show. He had a small semi-staged row with the band, who responded by telling the audience that they were doing a sound-check. “Tell us if it sounds shit,” the singer said as she launched into a respectable rendition of a song, getting a few toes tapping and raising a few smiles. When it was over they politely retreated and the night started in earnest.
First up was Graeme Walker, perfect as a nervous, inept stage manager whose been forced to introduce the acts. With the mike positioned so high he was forced to stretch up to talk into it, he ignored us while reading from his cue sheet. It was hard to make out what he was saying, forcing the audience to hush and strain to hear him. Somehow it set the mood beautifully; and in his own way he brought focus to the room like any good compere.
A series of acts arrived and performed. They ranged from the wonderful – Tom McDonnell’s comic songs were worth their weight in gold – through the sublime – Helen Schoene’s beautiful Rapunzel leant a magical quality to the proceedings – to the ridiculous – Cesabesa’s invisible tightrope routine has to be seen to be believed. The emphasis throughout was on the ad-hoc, the amateur and the weirdly off-centre: the genuinely peculiar emerging from the chaos of the mildly disorganised.
It sounds like a disaster but somehow it worked. Part of the reason for this is that the shambles was real. The Great O.T.’s not-very-goodness was almost entirely unaffected: Dave Elvis, a magnificently unironic 50-something Elvis impersonator and something of a local legend, was clearly still living the dream. His performance was one of the evening’s many highlights – funny, beautiful and strangely touching.
By contrast experimental jazz house band Hubert Spall and buddies were really good, holding the whole thing together even when it threatened to implode. They jammed together with ease, and always seemed to know when to strike up a spontaneous accompaniment to one of the acts or other.
It lasted hours. As time rolled on and the numbers dwindled I felt that we were stuck in a cabaret nightmare from which we couldn’t wake. But this was the point in a way: using the idea of cabaret as a starting-point, the night exposed the workings of Tran’s beautifully bizarre mind, with its neuroses, peculiarities, homespun hilarity and talentless shite spat out whole. In its way this was as raw and honest as Franko B’s blood trickling through the Turbine Hall or Bobby Baker exhibiting her mental illness drawings at the Wellcome Foundation.
And despite some clear misses, particularly in the second portion of the evening, this random ragbag held together to create a live event that was exquisite, frustrating, amazing, delightful and appalling by turns.
The Great Orchidaceous Travesty shares more with the fixed grimaces of a Forced Entertainment line-up than the polished tits and teeth of a West End musical. Even so, it is nothing like other capital-L capital-A Live Art I’ve seen. In fact it is nothing like anything I’ve seen anyone do in public, however much they claim to be authentic or non-performative. It takes guts to be so out there, even in private – but the fact that Tran puts this stuff into the public realm just proves what I already knew: that she is definitely one to watch. (With great difficulty).
Justin Allen
Monday 6th April 2009
