Tanja Liedtke's Twelfth Floor

In a typically passionate manner Andy Field blooged recently over on the Guardian about the potency of dance. I've also been finding that some of the most memorable and exciting things I've seen recenly have been movement based - dance. I don't always write about them though, not here; I think I watch dance in a different way - or at least I tell myself I do, I suspect it's more to do with the worry that there is a particular way of writing and discussing dance and I might expose my gaping ignorance of such things more so than normal.

But. Anyway. The most recent thing I saw and enjoyed was Twelfth Floor, choreographed by Tanya Liedtke, a compelling, frequently amusing and ultimately rather disturbing hour of dance set in an unspecified institution.

The walls are painted a muddy mix of cream and green and the lone window is shuttered. Two men, clad in sloppy T shirts and track-suit bottoms, spar and play-fight while another chalks words onto the walls seemingly lost in a private world – it is possible to glimpse the word ‘escape’ among his scrawling.

A nurse-like figure escorts a fourth person into the room, a young woman. Though there are obvious parallels with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Liedtke’s piece does not mirror it too closely. Her nurse is not nearly as formidable as the Big Nurse of Ken Kesey’s novel. As danced by Amelia McQueen, she is a skittery, jittery thing in a pink uniform with neat little socks. Her movements are intricate yet jerky: robotic and repetitive. Her finger constantly jabs the air as if independent of the rest of her, seeking out transgressions, admonishing her charges.

The remaining characters sometimes stand up to her but at other times they cower in the corner, jiggling like pepper pots left on a washing machine during its spin cycle. A battle of wills plays out between them – inmates and nurse – and small victories are celebrated on either side. There is much humour in Liedtke’s work – especially during a well-timed sequence involving a revolving door and, later, when the inmates mock the nurse’s mannerisms – and at times it feels cartoonish, even approaches slapstick in places, but, always, there is this sense of tension just beneath the surface: the under-toad is lurking.

The piece makes clear that while it is possible to win in the short term, a certain status quo remains: there are lines that can’t be crossed and the consequences of attempting to do so are severe. The caged human has a capacity for aggression and violence and as the piece progresses the levity of earlier scenes is replaced with something much darker and more unsettling. The power games cease being games.

Though Twelfth Floor is walking on oft-visited ground and at times it tip toes fairly close to cliché, is in places formulaic, it manages, in the main, to remain fresh and exciting to watch. The production as a whole isn’t as successful as some of its individual moments, but there is much to revel in: Liedtke’s ability to convey character through movement, to build a rich and complex world, is considerable.

Knowing this, it's all too tempting to be side-tracked by Tanja Liedtke’s own poignant story (she had just been appointed Artistic Director of the Sydney Dance Company when she died in an accident in 2007 - this was her only full length piece) but the work stands on its terms and that is the important thing. However one can't quite escape the feeling that this is an early work - shot through with youth - and that hers was a talent that would have, given more time, matured and evolved and created even better things.

Circus Klezmer at the Purcell Room

The notice on the door of the Purcell Room warned that there would be 'audience participation.'

Now these are words that are guaranteed to make me feel apprehensive; the idea of being dragged on stage during a production and made to stand in front of a sea of eyes is really, really not one I relish.

But I needn’t have worried, for while a couple of people were indeed coaxed from their seats and made to participate, it was done in a very warm and entertaining way; the people they picked on were made to feel like the stars of the show, rather than the butt of a joke.

Part of the 2009 London International Mime Festival, Circus Klezmer is the work of a Spanish company of circus performers. The show is set in an Eastern European village in the early days of the 20th century. There is to be a wedding and the villagers are preparing themselves for it - and that’s all there is in terms of narrative. The village setting provides a backdrop to a string of near wordless scenes featuring acrobatics, juggling and physical comedy, all set to klezmer music played by onstage musicians.

Klezmer originated in such villages; it’s celebratory music, the stuff of weddings and feasts. This is music made for drinking and dancing; it’s riotous, uplifting and difficult to listen to without tapping your feet. Often people in the audience couldn’t resist clapping along, whether encouraged to or not.

Unlike some circus shows, this was not about grand spectacle or awe-inducing stunts, yet it was somehow even more delightful for its simplicity. And that’s not to say there wasn’t plenty of visually exciting business going on, for there was. In one scene the bride-to-be dangles from twin lengths of white cloth, twirling above the stage; in another the men of the village get drunk together, passing bottles and glasses between each other with dizzying speed; later, a married couple’s argument is played out as a kind of aggressive dance that involves them running at one another and latching together. And, in one of the funniest moments of the production, a shrewish neighbourhood woman (played by Cristina Sole) performs a fantastically un-erotic striptease, winking coquettishly at a chap in the audience as she awkwardly disrobes.

The production’s director, Adrian Schvarstein, plays the village idiot, in ragged trousers and a battered hat, a bumbling figure who flirts with women in the front row and manages to lose the wedding rings. His performance, as with the rest of the cast, is bang on, the comic timing immaculate, but it’s the gentle colouring in of character that gives the show its heart and binds everything together so successfully.

And what of the audience participation? Well, even as people were queuing to enter the theatre, the cast were wandering around, shaking hands and welcoming us, as you would guests at a wedding, as well as distributing sweets that would come in useful at the end. Later, once the show was underway, they did indeed pull a few people up on stage to assist in various scenes. One man had his low-riding trousers disapprovingly tugged up and another was handed a violin and made an impromptu extra member of the four-piece band. It was all good-humoured and the inclusion of the audience added to the celebratory feel of the piece.

This is a joyous bit of theatre, performed with energy and skill. The sets may be rickety and the company small, but it is gloriously good fun to watch.

Reviewed for musicOMH.

A Confusing Carmen

My week has continued in a pleasantly South Bank-y fashion. Not the National this time, but the Royal Festival Hall, where Jude Kelly is staging Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones as her big “hello, we’re open again,” show.

The results are muddled to say the least. For a start, the setting has been twiddled with: Hammerstein's original Broadway production relocated the Carmen story to a parachute factory in the US, but Kelly has uprooted it again, swapping this Deep South setting for a vaguely Cuban-looking backdrop. For, um, reasons that never become clear. All that this change of location achieves is that it makes the piece feel rather unanchored and uncertain of itself. The set is also an oddity, sitting awkwardly in the middle of the RFH stage, with the wooden back wall of the hall very visible behind it.

The amplification was all over the place too, making it hard to decipher a lot of dialogue, and, well, I could list more little niggly negatives, but actually the show wasn’t as unsatisfying as I’m making it sound. Though the first half is distinctly shaky, the production was far more cohesive and compelling after the interval. The orchestra were excellent (Kelly has plonked them in a pit in the centre of the stage with the action playing out both behind and in front of them) and there were some standout moments, most notably that of Beat Out Dat Rhythm On a Drum.

Performance-wise there are some excellent voices amongst the large cast. But it’s impossible not to notice that both Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi, as the volatile Carmen, and Andrew Clarke, as Joe, the man she seduces, are eclipsed in terms of charisma and presence by, respectively, Sherry Boone, who plays the heartbroken Cindy Lou, and Rodney Clarke, as the boxing champion Husky Miller. Indeed the only truly bravo-worthy episode of the evening was when Boone sang My Joe, a quiveringly beautiful lament to her one-time lover; it was a quite, quite wonderful moment.

Barbers and Baritones

Umbrella-less, I dashed through the rain last night over to the Royal Festival Hall. A ticket had tumbled into my lap for the production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, starring Bryn Terfel (who I gather is Big in Opera) as the Demon Barber. I’ve not been inside the RFH since they reopened the place after its lengthy refurbishment and I was surprised to see bits of scaffolding and carts of builders’ bits-and-pieces still tucked into corners. There was also a horrendous queue for the bar so I had to content myself with a coffee. I then took said coffee over to the window and watched the rain lash the Thames for a while as I waited for the show to start.

Given that this was billed as a concert production – a “semi-staging” – it was far more elaborate than I was expecting, with the performers all in costume (including the choir from the Guildford School of Acting Conservatoire, whose attire suggested that Victorian London was more heavily populated with Goths then I’d ever realised) and quite a few props. The musicians had been swept into one corner of the stage, allowing the action to play out in the remaining space. Terfel, who had played the role before in Chicago, was superb – a booming, damaged, dangerous man. And Maria Friedman was a delight as Mrs Lovett the pie-shop owner, bawdy and brash in her vile lace leggings. The blend of opera voices and those more suited to musical theatre worked surprisingly well.

I’m a bit of a Sondheim novice but I was gripped from start to finish, and I loved the way the absence of set allowed the story and the singing to speak for themselves, the way it left them nothing to hide behind. My friend Simon who knows far more about such things was muttering about amplification and acoustics, but I was too swept up in things to care about such subtleties.

A programme footnote proudly proclaims that the pies that appear in this production - and are eaten by a number of the actors during the performance - have been provided by the new branch of Canteen that’s just opened under the Royal Festival Hall. Given that the pies, at times, are said to contain fingernails, pussy-cats and actual bits of people, I’m not entirely convinced by the intelligence of this marketing strategy.