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Locks, Crops and Two Smoking Hotcombs
The Holiday
The Corrupted Angel
Festival of Firsts
Lindbury Studio Theatre
Royal Opera House
Review by Jackie Fletcher
(2003)
For a week the Royal Opera House, in collaboration with the Helen Hamlyn
Trust, has opened up the Linbury Studio space to young, unrecognised
talent and audiences who would ordinarily never dream of getting into
a ROH show for a fiver. This is heralded as the first Festival of Firsts
and is a worthy initiative. There are seven performances spread over
the week with additional entertainment in the bar after the show.
Yesterday evening's performances were preceded by a series of short
speeches, courtesy of performance artist Ursula Martinez and her accomplices,
including the chairwoman of the local residents association, concerned
with the noise, litter and urine produced on her doorstep by patrons
of the Opera House, and a spokesperson, a clown, for a fund for distressed
former thespians. This was a tongue-in-cheek parody of the usual self-congratulatory
claptrap that accompanies High Art, high-profile events. It was very
amusing, but hardly qualifies as performance art: more like traditional
fringe theatre spoofing.
First up was a ten-minute piece from Wild Roots Collective, a new dance
company established under the leadership of Maria Ryan. The performers
blend movement with text and audience participation in a dance-theatre
piece of unusual subject matter: black women's hair. As the title indicates
(Locks, Crops and Two Smoking Hotcombs) it is a witty view of
an obsession, at times very funny, and is pleasingly performed by accomplished
dancers with potential for further development.
The star of the evening is Benji Reid. His 15-minute solo piece The
Holiday is a fine showcase for a talent that should go far. It is
original, verbally skilful, and his physicality, a type of abstract
mime of raw emotions and confused states of the mind, based on body-popping
techniques, is deliriously divine. This is a piece with a remarkable
blend of the hilariously funny and the seriously disturbing, welded
with pathos and seamlessly integrated with earnest poetic commentary.
Benji Reid is described in the flyer as a 'performance artist, stand-up
tragedian and body-popping comic', and this is apt. By the time you
read this, you will have missed this performance which is only staged
at this venue on 22nd and 23rd, but do not despair. He will be performing
a double bill of his pieces 13 mics: b like water, style for free
and The Pugilist at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, from 7-25
October.
The third piece, a full seventy minutes from Base Chorus, is the disappointment
of the evening. The Corrupted Angel, a basic thesis expertly
explored by Wim Wenders in his film Wings of Desire, promises
an 'innovative combination of text, physicality and exhilarating soundscape',
but fails to deliver. There is very little here that is innovative that
has not been tried out before with more originality and success. The
soundscape, composed Patrick Dineen, who doubled as writer, is, indeed,
good, but the cast are traditionally trained actors, with day jobs in
traditional theatre and TV, who are unconvincing as physical performers.
Do they tell them at acting school that the elderly hunch their shoulders
and walk with short, rapid, Chaplinesque steps? I've never seen a senior
citizen walk like that? Do little old ladies always clutch their hands
in front of them? Clichés! And there is so much excellent physical
theatre out there that unfavourable comparisons are inevitable.
The ROH and Helen Hamlyn Trust should be complimented on offering young
performers the opportunity to take a risk on a prestigious stage, even
if, as in The Corrupted Angel, further development is necessary.
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