Tag: Angela Carter

Wise Children

Large Theatres, Uncategorized

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By Angela Carter

Adapted and Directed by Emma Rice

An Old Vic and Wise Children production

Wise Children is the first production from Emma Rice’s new company, also named Wise Children. Eagerly awaited after her huge success at Kneehigh Theatre and her departure from Shakespeare’s Globe; this production packs a hefty punch of gleeful mischief and playful exuberance. A huge fan of Angela Carter’s magical realism, Rice clearly delights in bringing this sprawling tale to the stage. It is a love letter to the theatre, to family, to Shakespeare and to growing old disgracefully.

Just like the characters depicted on stage, the stage design and costumes are teaming with vivid colour and layers of detail. Designer Vicki Mortimer has created a magical world that centres around a delightfully retro caravan that encapsulates the life and the history of Nora and Dora Chance. Ever present and ever changing it is a treasure trove that excites and enthralls with each reveal. The costumes are beautifully detailed and bring alive not just a history of theatre on stage but a history of life running through two world wars.

The actors on stage act, sing, dance, play instruments and use puppetry with all the enthusiasm and flair one might expect of the vaudevillian theatre era they are celebrating. This is an incredibly talented and generous cast that look like they are having a blast onstage. The story has the characters aging through 100 years of this theatrical dynasty using a blend of puppetry to actors of different ages, sexes and ethnicities to represent all the twins. Playfully alluding to Shakespeare’s love of switching the sexes in so many roles, Rice also demonstrates that the ageing process comes to all of us and what we look like on the surface is eventually irrelevant in this carnival of life.

The choreography by Etta Murfitt blends slick dance routines with circus gymnastics while the sex scenes are an earthy mix of outrageous smut and joyous tenderness. The musical numbers range from Sinatra to The Andrews Sisters to Eddy Grant and Cyndi Lauper. Each track chosen, perfectly encapsulates a scene and its era. There are some beautiful vocals particularly on the more poignant numbers.

This sprawling tale flows like the champagne and stout so frequently imbibed as it moves north and south of The Thames and front and back of stage guzzling up life events both sublime and agonising. Carter and Rice are both true wise children as they share the capacity to capture tiny moments and shine a light on them that is both hyper real and magical.

At HOME 26 Feb – 2 March 2019

Images by Steve Tanner

TORO: Beauty and the Bull

Dance, Small Theatres

THE LOWRY

DeNada Dance Theatre

Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra

Dreamy and ethereal, Toro opens with a delicately beautiful girl lying on the Stage like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty while two brothers play Rock, Paper, Scissors. The traditional themes of fairy tales are subverted throughout this performance. The heroes and the monsters overlap, blur and change places. This opening scene is not that of a sleeping heroine about to be awoken with a kiss by a handsome Prince, but two brothers performing a perfunctory, machismo ritual to decide who gets first dibs on the young prostitute.

DeNada Dance Theatre are a young independent company who focus on exploring and subverting Hispanic and Latin culture. There is great theatricality in their work which looks and feels sumptuous and decadent. They use storytelling in dance to make bold political and social statements. In this piece they explore persecution and ostracism using fairytales focusing on themes of transformation. The lush, dreamlike imagery has elements of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, and the filmic feel of Guillamo del Toro or David Lynch. Toro includes fairy tales, circus sideshows, freak shows, animalistic orgies, vogue balls, monsters and beauties, poignant tenderness and brutal violence.

The performance has six dancers – four males and two females. Emma Walker and Marivi Da Silva are the Girl and the Bull, both performances are incredibly powerful and emotive. The scene where they unite in real tenderness and harmony is profoundly moving and deeply sensuous. The coming together of the dispossessed and “other” is truely beautiful. In this moment the Beast gets the real, red blooded woman whereas the men who are the real monsters of this piece have had nothing but a broken doll or marionette.

The four male dancers play a number of roles as the Brothers, as Matadors and as fantastical creatures – the Dragimals. In the machismo roles they are all rippling, twitching muscle and brutal intent. As the Dragimals they are all sinuous, luxuriating flesh and gleaming bodies. They are spectacular and animalistic moving harmoniously and curiously as at a great feast and celebratory orgy.

Warm, lush lighting and decadent costumes, a rich Hispanic soundtrack of pasodoble, mariachi, bull fight music and Unchained Melody to set off beautifully choreographed dance….I would watch this again in a heartbeat. Closing scenes show Jonathon Luke Baker portraying a mortally, wounded dragimal evoking Swan Lake, while the Girl is trapped struggling against the ties of patriarchal matrimony while her glorious Minotaur or She-Bull is dehorned and weakened. There is no Disney happy ending to this fairy tale yet this is still a powerful and uplifting tale of the transformative effect of love, tenderness and acceptance.

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