Performance

THE VIEW, COVE PARK, ARGYLL

KEITH BRUCE

GINGER Baker, eat your heart out. The Cream drummer’s epic solo excursions never enjoyed a context like the one The Phantom Band’s Iain Stewart performed in at the end of last week. For his audience it involved a charabanc journey from Glasgow’s CCA to the artists’ retreat on Cowal where Glasgow School of Art MFA graduate Rory Middleton had been resident. As the sun set, we stroll down into the forest towards Middleton’s installation, a construction designed to make you consider the sensory delights of the surroundings, and the marvellous ability of the human machine to pick them up.

A beautifully built frame, like an outsized piece of furniture in a Scandinavian design catalogue, isolates a section of the view through the trees to the loch. Instead of that slowly-dimming natural picture, however, a translucent image of a sun-dappled section of woodland is projected on to the backcloth. Facing it, Stewart waits, motionless, as a soundtrack builds from loudspeakers. Bird-calls and waterfalls overwhelm the ambience of live nature, eventually giving way to more abstract, man-made sound.

In time, Stewart begins to play on his compact kit and extra percussion, building from brushed cymbals to polyrhythmic virtuosity, using every element of the batterie. Crucially, watching from behind, we see every foot-stomp – just as The View asks its audience to think about the ingredients of the natural world, the workings of the drummer’s technique are visible in a way they are not in a band context.

WE ARE GOB SQUAD AND SO ARE YOU/MERMAID SHOW, THE ARCHES, GLASGOW

MARY BRENNAN

AUTHENTICITY was the watchword at Behaviour, the ongoing Arches festival of live performance, when arts collective Gob Squad led the audience on a shared pursuit of fact, fiction and the nature of identity that finished just in time for New York’s Ann Liv Young to put herself – and the performer/ audience relationship – on the line as she ripped the guts out of myths about mermaids.

Gob Squad are the less obviously unnerving. They know we hate audience participation yet onlookers somehow find themselves wearing headphones and following instructions, speaking text, engaging with strangers. As they ‘become Gob Squad’ intriguing truths about our everyday performances and role-playing emerge, albeit with humour. It’s a superbly crafted, complex piece of provocative strategy that sticks in the mind.

Cue Young: lolling in a paddling pool, bare-breasted, with a silvery mermaid’s tail and three sailor-suited assistants at her beck and call. Just about everyone, front rows especially, will get drenched. There will be strops – rehearsed? Real? – as Young demands technicians fulfil her exact demands. Finally the show will stop midaction, rather than end. But, and this is what makes her both icon and iconoclast, Young nails the mythic allure of the mermaid/ siren sex object: spitting stinking fish at it and us inbetween pop songs that ramp up the raunch factor Young astutely links to the sexualising of unavailable females, be they Disney cartoons, under-age starlets or mermaids. Fearsome stuff.

Dance

TIGHTROPE, TRAMWAY, GLASGOW

MARY BRENNAN

HIGH-FLYING, romantic, cheerfully daft and hugely entertaining – Tightrope was all that, and more. Indepen-dance, the Glasgowbased integrated company, has chalked up many challenges and successes over the years but this latest – in cahoots with London’s Amici Dance Theatre Company – took the group to new heights. Indeed one chap – usually performing in his wheelchair – found himself soaring like a bird as the band played music from Swan Lake. This, along with the spoof strongmen, prancing ponies and the comically-blind knifethrower, were just some of the spirited gambits Amici’s director Wolfgang Stange created for this truly inclusive Circus Amour.

And if the “plants” who heckled proved at odds with a genuinely enthusiastic audience, their input was a cogent reminder of how society still reacts negatively to many forms of disability. Such prejudice is, as the teams at Amici and Indepen-dance well know, just another challenge to overcome … like walking any kind of tightrope, taking risks, pushing yourself out of a comfort zone. For fans of Indepen-dance, it was uplifting to see familiar faces confidently showing off new skills. But this was only one aspect of Tightrope’s achievement. The music mix included superb opera singing while the calibre of choreography, costuming and comedy capers oozed professionalism and panache. In all, a great fun-filled family show the performers can be proud of.