Love, loss and the meaning of life
Watching Boaz Barkan perform is a bit like hearing a friend talk about a great party they attended but you didn’t. It’s engaging, fun to hear about, but leaves you wishing you’d experienced the real thing.
Israeli-born, Copenhagenbased choreographer Barkan is a mine of information about dance history. He sits on a chair chatting amiably about French choreographer Jerome Bel and American post-modern dance artist Yvonne Rainer, both known for their experimentation and rejection of mainstream dance culture.
But it’s his passion for the late Japanese performance artist Tatsumi Hijikata that really lights Barkan up. One of the founding fathers of Butoh, Hijikata caused quite a stir in the 1960s, particularly with his 1968 work Revolt of the Flesh, which Barkan partially re-creates here with the help of silent on-stage partner, Jørgen Callesen.
As Callesen moves, slowly, deliberately in the Butoh style, Barkan delivers a running (rather disparaging) commentary from the audience. What does it mean? What are the references? With a handful of Post-it notes, he attempts to clarify both. For those with a prior knowledge of dance and the wider culture that influences it, May I Speak About Dance? is witty, diverting and educational. For those without, finding a hook may prove challenging.
Jake Lambert: Little Lost Lad
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) A reflexive mickey-taker, Jake Lambert capably wrangles his quirks and insecurities into this light but solidly entertaining debut. Though small talk-averse, he’s witty chatting to the front row and has an Australian girlfriend struggling to socialise him.
Cursed with a photographic memory recalling what he ate on any given date, he exploits it for callback gags sprinkled liberally throughout this hour, at the heart of
Sparks
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) It’s 11:30am and, through a lilac haze, Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel pours out. It’s a fitting start for a two-woman musical that follows an exhilaratingly open young woman trying to find love and deal with loss in a city – London – where sex is as throwaway as Pret wrappers, dating requires apps, and conversations are all about me, me, me.
While writer/performer Jessica Butcher tells the story through narration – shifting between graphic, silly, profound and poetic observations on 20-something life – performer/ musician Anoushka Lucas tells the same story through original songs, from the upbeat to the baroque, elevating a
which is him living alone for the first time. Flaunting his freedom to amuse himself, crime is nevertheless quickly visited upon him. Here, as on every occasion, he’s an inveterate quipster, as inclined to joke with the police as he is to prank his family and friends.
He has particular fun corrupting his nieces, but there are some telling, throwaway gags about a difficult relationship with his parents, affording the show its title but skated over frustratingly quickly. His domestic fussiness has shades of Jon Richardson, no bad thing, save for occasional similarity of delivery. And he often caps a good line with “you’re welcome!” or “why not?” – a tic, once recognised, hard to ignore. Regardless, Lambert’s cheeky-but-vulnerable persona ingratiates, even if it’s no doubt maddening for his girlfriend.
Maisie Adam: Vague
Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) There’s no denying that Maisie Adam is phenomenal, delivering the accomplished Vague a mere year after winning the So You Think You’re Funny new act contest. piece that at times feels determined to provoke a “first world problems” response.
Both women play the same person, this upbeat Londoner who is trapped by childhood nostalgia and has (through Butcher’s performance, at least) a wired, wide-eyed unease – one that initially seems to come from spending too long waiting for interchangeable men to message her on social media but, it later becomes apparent, may be provoked by something else.
“I’m a feminist,” the young woman repeats, as she desperately tries to find some sort of “spark” – which she seems to define as a conventional relationship – with a man known simply as X, who neither she nor we ever learn much about.
Eventually we’re left with a somewhat tragic image of a woman trying to find love where there clearly is none, but also dealing with other
Stand-up has become her main priority she claims, and you believe her, so natural is her stage presence and the command she radiates from it.
Raised in rural Yorkshire but now residing in Brighton, her observations on the North-south divide are sharp and persuasive, while her experience as a taller-thanaverage woman give her further opportunity to mine a ready, self-deprecating wit. Her unique selling point however, is the epilepsy which began in her childhood, specifically juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, a relatively low-level condition that she wore as a badge of honour initially, milking it for special treatment and some entertaining memories of exams.
As she got older though, the attacks grew more serious. But as a committed, hardpartying “slave to the sesh”, she kept this from her parents, fearing missing out on normal teenage kicks.
Affording jeopardy and a compelling through-line to her tale, it’s possibly strung slightly too thinly to sustain an entire show. Still, she surrounds it with more relatable but original thoughts on adolescence, including a memorable physical display of Millennial computer gameinspired dancing. life traumas that can feel like they belong in a separate story. In the end, it’s not men but dancing that brings the woman the spark she craves – and we’re left to wonder whether it’s her or the world she inhabits that is out of touch with what life is, or should be, all about.