I Am A Tree // Jamie Wood

I Am a Tree is not a return to nature as much as a reassertion that the separation between humans and other living things is not absolute, that the human body and its processes are as natural in their rhythms as the growth of a tree or the migrations of birds. It is a memory and a eulogy, to nomadism and to mortality and the fallibility of living things. Jamie Wood greets the audience by listening to their hearts, laying his head on their chests and expelling their worries like a cresting whale.

The show loosely follows the progress of Wood’s journey by foot from Coventry to South Wales, leaving his young baby and partner at home in order to reconnect to the wild. The story meanders like its protagonist, but like any journey the progress is more important than the destination. His walk is a peculiar kind of mindfulness exercise, a mental health time-out in a relentless period of change. Wood’s life at home haunts the piece, never really spoken of in detail but always lurking beyond the next hill. Questions of responsibility vie with a commitment to self-realisation. The comedy in his journey too is always on the verge of tipping into abstraction and doubt. Wood’s clowning and slapstick blurs into meditative tasks, an unlooping of bootlaces slowly moving from Chaplin to Mona Hatoum.

I Am a Tree also asks that the audience use their own bodies in service of the story, whether using a blowdart to pop the ‘weight of death’ that hangs above Wood’s head during a speech about his grandfather, or asking several spectators to move on stage as animals whilst he cradles another. Participants are gifted a vegetable reward for their efforts, hacked from a broccoli tree. A plant-based replacement for the energy they expel. These actions are measured by a slow drip of water from a red bladder that marks the duration of the show. These images remain, half remembered and fleeting, like moments from a walk.

-       Lewis Church

This diagnosis is based on a preview performance at Ovalhouse, London. I Am a Tree runs in Edinburgh at Assembly George Square from the 14-27th of August.

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Jamie Wood – I Am a Tree

What is Walking Meditation? – Wild Mind

Humans Need to Reconnect with Nature – Tree Hugger

Walking and Grief – The Globe and Mail

Parental Burnout – NYMag 

Charlie Chaplin Eat His Shoes - From The Gold Rush (1925)

Mona Hatoum – Performance Still (1985/1995)

Bechdel Testing Life

Bechdel Testing Life is a series of plays inspired by the Bechdel Test, which asks whether a film, play or television series features a conversation between at least two women, about something other than a man. The question is one of representation. But it also makes me wonder whether women share ideas in a different way when they are together. 

Kate Fox, in her essay Girl Talk, tells us that there are many studies which demonstrate that the ways genders bond are different. As she writes, ‘male bonding tends to be more formal and organized’, and also that ‘every known human society has some form of men-only clubs or associations, special (often secret) male-bonding organizations or institutions from which women are excluded’. The private interactions between women are similarly important and should be foregrounded as well.

Caitlin Moran points out that women have fears totally outside the male experience. No man can really get why women hesitate before walking home in the dark. Girls are raped, robbed, assaulted, as well as diminished and demeaned for no reason other than that they have a vagina. That is terrifying. As Moran writes

We're scared. We don't want to mention it, because it's kind of a bummer, chat-wise, and we'd really like to talk about stuff that makes us happy, like look at our daughters — and we can't help but think, ‘which one of us? And when?’ We walk down the street at night with our keys clutched between our fingers, as a weapon. We move in packs — because it's safer. We talk to each other for hours on the phone — to share knowledge. But we don't want to go on about it to you, because that would be morbid.

Communication between the sexes is certainly possible, and understanding knows no gender. But empathy might be a different, and more complicated, matter. 

-       Lynn Ruth Miller

This diagnosis is based on the performance Bechdel Testing Life at The Bunker, London. Bechdel Theatre are at the Fringe highlighting shows which pass the Bechdel Test. Check in with their work here.

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

The Bechdel Test - Dykes to Watch Out For

What Women Say to One Another - Huffington Post

Women in Conversation - Elite Daily

What Do Women Talk About Mostly? - Quora Topic

What Women Never Say to A Man - Caitlin Moran, Esquire

Girl Talk - Kate Fox

Hear Me Raw // LipSink Theatre

Hear Me Raw dissects the culture of ‘clean eating’ through a semi-fictionalised monologue based in the personal experience of its performer. Questioning the logic of whether raw smoothies and matcha provide any real solution to deeper emotional problems, Daniella Isaacs blends her real story of acute anxiety and distress with an imagined identity as a food blogger. As ‘Green Girl’, Isaacs evangelises about the need to remove dairy from your diet, replace caffeine and deny sugar, with all the zealotry of a convert. But the stability of this identity is disrupted by the interventions of concern from family, friends and clinical professionals. Isaacs’ clean eating obsession, watched over by the sinister figure of now-disgraced prophet Belle Gibson, grows into a recipe for distress, a diagnosis of Orthorexia Nervosa, and a familial rift.

Alongside its expose of the sometimes-worrying orthodoxy of clean eating adherents, and the modern obsession with demonstrable ‘wellness’, Hear Me Raw also reveals more general problems. Isaacs, graduating from drama school at the start of her story, embodies the anxieties of the modern twenty-something, particularly in the industries of theatre and performance. Her bullshit job typing up casting calls for ‘hot ex-girlfriends’ is a clear reference to the pressures of conforming to industry ideals, and to the unrealistic expectations for young performers that stifle the industry. Encouragingly, there seems to today be a greater awareness of the importance of diverse bodies in theatre, film and television, and a slowly building intolerance for retrograde casting practices. Here a young actor discusses the gulf between her expectation of fame and success and the realities of trying to get there, within the frame of a show that itself gestures towards that same frustrated expectation.

Isaacs suggests at the close that she had previously promised never to make an autobiographical show. Hear Me Raw is defiantly autobiographical, and is at its best when it abandons ‘acting’ in favour of personal testimony. Its central performance is not a dramatic role, but a sharing of a personal story, and a repudiation of the pressures that provoke the quarterlife crisis. 

- Lewis Church

This diagnosis is based on a preview performance at Hackney Showroom, London. Hear Me Raw runs throughout the Fringe at Underbelly George Square.

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Hear Me Raw

Orthorexia Nervosa

“Clean eating” How good is it for you? – BBC News

Belle Gibson Court Case – Guardian

The Quarterlife Crisis - Guardian

Lady Parts (Sexist Casting Calls)

Drama Graduates One Year On – The Stage

Touch // DryWrite

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

- Rebecca West

In her new play Touch, Vicky Jones explores what the fruits of feminism are, and questions who has the real power in a relationship. Dee, a 33-year-old single woman, has left a failed relationship in Wales to establish herself and make a life in London. She tries to connect with herself and build meaningful connections through a variety of online dating sites, but each liaison widens the gap between her expectations and reality.

Dee confronts Miles, an older man who is part of a group involved with S&M, and argues that he is trying to make her weak. ‘It’s no fun for me if you are weak’ he responds, because that is the game. We pretend we are strong to be mastered by another. Although Dee talks as if she is in control of each relationship, she is actually a victim of what her partners want from her. Eddie, the first man we meet on stage, tells her that ‘there are woman out there who are doing better than you at being a woman. Who enjoy being a woman. And who have their fucking shit together’. But getting her shit together is the very reason Dee rented her tiny bedsit in London.

The big question becomes one of what being a woman is supposed to be in this liberal, forward-thinking twenty-first century. As Elf Lyons writes:

You can’t use multiple relationships to fill the void and give you the gratification that you should be able to give yourself. More love doesn’t mean better love. If you are dating multiple people in order to enhance your self-worth, you end up feeling like out-of-date hummus, feeling jealous anytime anyone chooses to spend time with anyone else, resulting in you treating your partners badly and without respect. 

And this is exactly what happens not just to Dee, but to far too many single thirty-something women, with their biological clock ticking, their hormones buzzing and constant reminders that they are not cohabiting, reproducing, or being what they thought they would be at this stage of their lives. 

Some of the confusion rests with the new generation of men who support the concepts of feminism and yet do not know what is expected of them as partners. As Mark White writes in Psychology Today 

It is difficult for men, especially those of us who appreciate and embrace the importance of being respectful and considerate toward women, to balance those attitudes with the animalistic, non-rational expressions of passion and desire that women want from us.

That is the dilemma faced by singles today. We have commercialized sex to the point where partners are touted as objects to shop for on sites like Tinder or in pornography for momentary excitement and passion, but when it comes to the long haul we are at a loss. No one knows how to react. Just where is the line between subservience and co-operation, dominance and abusive control? 

-       Lynn Ruth Miller

Touch is at the Soho Theatre, London until August 26th 2017. A new production of DryWrite's  Fleabag is at Underbelly, George Square during the Fringe from 21st-27th August.

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Touch - Soho Theatre

Fleabag - Underbelly George Square

Why Men Find It So Hard to Understand What Women Want - Psychology Today

Women’s Attitudes Toward Sex - Huffington Post

Has Feminism Worked? - Telegraph

Elf Lyons - Polyamory: A New Way to Love

What Is the City But the People? // Clare McNulty

Manchester

Madchester

Womanchester

It has a good few names. Quite succinctly it is goosebumps. A frisson of fashion and fascination. Shudders of connectors and receptors. Born from changes and hormones.

Piccadilly Gardens grew a limb for MIF's opening ceremony. It was strong, white yellow and black, a suspended scaffolded catwalk bookended with gargantuan screens. Forcing us to face elevated people of hairs and muscles we wouldn't necessarily notice but need. 

Outcasts can find homes here and be heard. Happiness happens. Ageing graffiti is persistent proof on decayed tooth buildings. In love longing and loss, the people present made the same marks of defiance and delighted in difference. 

The community of Manchester is multicultural, multidimensional and multi-layered. Overhead city birds flew through bringing beats of Graham Massey, familiar yet distant and path-promising. The music drove the spirit. Instrumental expressions inspired individuality in absolute purity. Each person offered a preserved presence and prominent pride. Some were meditative and mindful. Moving with the same precision, simplicity, honesty and dignity of a Japanese Tea Ceremony. 

This misplaced MIF limb shone an examination light on the pulse of Manchester, linking lives and the humbling cure of courage people can bring. That's how the city sings its sounds. They echo against minimalist movement in a microcosm magnified. 

We are all blood cells moving through concrete capillaries, veins and arteries. The buildings house pains and electric brains. Without our power our city's complexion would wither to the wan of winter.  There would be no ideas. A computer not operated, not invented even.

We consider a baby's first breath. Nature and inherent beauty. A mother's love and another mother's duty.

Beautifully beaming brothers burst out. One romancing with adrenaline fuelled break-dancing. We all feel it. It happens again. We smile. We are related in bird skin. We rub our arms but we are not cold. In that collective moment we're reminding each other of our fragile mortality through silent screened stories and broken open emotion. Undoubtedly, those of us who were not elevated, were raised in other ways.  

A counterbalance of contemplation and cognition came curling round cogs of memory, giving mind to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. A medical tool based in subjectivity and judgement, stuck in me from my nursing history. The individuals we saw seemed to present in Maslow’s self-actualisation. It gave a great faith for fruitful futures in friendship. We surely shouldn't take our time or significant others for granted. That is a given. Each moment is a gift into learning about ourselves and others. Promoting our purpose. But entrenched medical models are archaic and here in Manchester we face forward. Or at least we try to. 

Ahead on my own path I look to a person lying on the floor. Amongst bags and cans and covers. Somewhere else on the scale of self-actualisation. I judge. I do not want to but I do. I've already assigned him a gender. I wonder about this life story. How he see's the city. How he saw the runway? I imagine his goosebumps are from other places. I hand him some money from a guilt-lined purse. 

- Clare McNulty

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Womanchester Poem - Ella Otomewo

Why Do We Get Goosebumps?

808 State – Pacific State

Baby Delivered Inside Amniotic Sac Takes First Breath

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - Simply Psychology

What Is the City but the People? // Ciaran Grace

What is the city but the people? This was the question posed by the opening performance of the 2017 Manchester International Festival. Inspired by an idea from contemporary artist Jeremy Deller, it reflects his desire for artworks that are ephemeral whilst also living on as a kind of “folk memory”. This juxtaposition of the humble and the mythic is at the heart of What is the City but the People?

The show consists of a catwalk of people from the city, a fashion show that is more about the models than their clothes. While the participants strut their stuff, enormous screens tell their life stories through twitter-esque sentences. The result is a deeply moving presentation of the tribe of Manchester; a city that is egalitarian, diverse and defiant. In the words of one participant interviewed on Radio 4’s Front Row, “even though we are different, we are all the same”. In the wake of the attack at the Manchester Arena in May, this attempt to define the city cannot help but feel intentional, or at least, tragically appropriate.

Jeremy Deller says the term “ordinary people” “sticks in his throat” because “everyone is extraordinary and a bit mad”. Participants were chosen for having done “normal but amazing things.” They are “normal” people – bakers, florists, ministers for transport -  but most have overcome amazing circumstances. Participants included those who had been homeless, a Syrian refugee and a grieving mother and daughter. The second participant to appear is also a mother – pregnant in the photos on the tv screens, but entering with the baby in her arms. Then there were lovers - Shakar and Shabnam Hussain, whose romance spans decades. Two brothers, Shaneer and Shaquille, often mistaken for twins, who were the breakdancing Romulus and Remus of the evening.

The show passes no judgment on the participants, but its emphasis on survivors can’t help but cast its characters in a heroic mould. The participants become exemplars or archetypes of human experience. Manchester in turn becomes a city of heroes. Whilst deeply moving, this is not without its problems. The participants who had been homeless, now have rooves over their heads, the criminals are now repentant. They are “reformed” somehow, presented as different from those who are currently homeless, many of whom joined the crowd to watch the show. When we tell the folk-tale of Manchester, which Manchester will we sing about? What happens to sufferers of homelessness and grief when we idolise those who overcome these things? (CG)

- Ciaran Grace

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Jeremy Deller

Jeremy Deller on Front Row

The bee as the symbol of the ideal society - Virgil, Georgics, 4.453-527

Social Facilitation

Cultural Survival

What Is the City but the People? // Hannah Ross

How to take a city, slice 100 people from the prism and get a cross-section suitable to be walked down a suspended catwalk whilst having their image displayed on towering screens in its centre? How to defend against those who are keen to whip out accusations of tokenism (as if representation is distasteful), without creating pastiched narratives about citizens as though they’re part of a saccharine version of Propp’s character theory? Post-election - mayoral and general - it feels apt to put a lens on at least a handful of local folk who make up the electorate, not only upon the renowned figures who feature in the festival.

Deller’s design is like a live art remodelling of Lowry’s 1954 ‘Piccadilly Gardens’, which hangs only a stone’s throw away on Manchester Art Gallery’s ground floor and similarly depicts a procession of people with an adjacent fountain in the very same location. Deller’s motifs of ordinariness and public space were, too, to be found in his 2009 MIF piece ‘Procession’. He must have maintained the same interest that he previously had in showcasing ‘The Big Issue sellers’ for, in the 2017 work, one such seller opens the work before us. It is static but for the flow of chosen ones along the elevated catwalk, oscillating between two screens that show pre-prepared shots of each person, plus snippets of candid biographies to boot. As the screens face each other, there's a sense of mise en abyme, mirrored further as people watch not only the procession but also the reactions and anticipations of one another in the Very Ordinary crowd. A foot before me stands Mancunian screen legend Julie Hesmondhalgh, later to be hugged by Boltonian wonder Maxine Peake in a Corbynista lock (a micro-spectacle of its own). The stage provides the expected unexpected - there's Bez, gently gyrating! There's that lovely woman who whizzed me around Bury North as we canvassed, and look, she’s got a baby with her!

There is one man in a wheelchair, a lady nearly a centenarian who has a walking aid. Walking, lingering, parading, protesting - as you ambulate through the vocabulary, words like these can become politically charged. What is it to march, or to stand up, and who can do this? What is ‘a movement’ in essence? The Manchester Activist Group take the spotlight and call protest ‘an expression of desire’. But when we think of a city full of people, celebrating a glorious exposure of variegated humans - can we talk about how this could remain inaccessible to some, with certain people’s experiences inexpressible (though, granted, the piece makes efforts to speak of homelessness, and MIF’s Festival in My House has gone some way to bringing events to a greater variety of areas)? About a recent public endorsement of forced institutionalisation, and the people whose city is often barred to them? Even with the inevitable and forgivable partiality that comes when trying to represent a large metropolis through a comparatively small set of individuals, we ought to keep stoking this discussion. The square flickers with pop-colour electronic posters asking the rhetorical title question of the show. May it be a city of people in their full variety, where resistance and optimism equitably uphold all. (HR)

- Hannah Ross

LINKS RELEVANT TO THIS DIAGNOSIS:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

Propp’s Character Theory

LS Lowry - Picadilly Gardens 

Jeremy Deller - Procession

Mise en Abyme - A Gallery curated by Fedebrique

MIF - Festival in my House

Election 2017 - Tory disability minister endorses forced institutionalisation

What Is the City but the People? // Amanda Dunlop

Piccadilly Gardens is sunny and crowded. Friends bump into each other and strangers talk for the first time. Above us is an 80-metre raised walkway, two giant projection screens and a stage. MIF17 opens with a single figure parading down the runway to the pounding beat of DJ Graham Massey and assorted local buskers and musicians. The same man closes the show. He is homeless and sells The Big Issue. 

In between, 149 other city dwellers strut their stuff. Dog walkers, lovers, drag artists, protesters and famous Mancunians. The taxi drivers who turned off their meters on the night of the recent bomb in the city. A brand-new baby and a Mancunian in her 100th year. Different cultures, creeds and social stratas. Manchester. This is an artistic statement that celebrates diversity and community.

Manchester is one of the most ethnically diverse districts in the country, and the only authority outside London with residents from each of the 90 detailed ethnic groups listed in the census. The city is growing rapidly, with the population is expected to exceed 550,000 by 2021. It is a city which prides itself on welcoming new people, but it is also a city with rapidly increasing numbers of rough sleepers, up 41% in the last year. Some of our newer residents struggle to find a home and have to be creative with hidden, disused spaces. Organisations such as Coffee for Craig, The Booth Centre and The Brick Project are all doing great work to address the problem. Andy Burnham recently pledged 15% of his salary as Lord Mayor to an appeal intended to end homelessness by 2020.

After the attack on 22nd May the city feels kinder and more empathetic. Manchester values call us to focus on what we have in common and how we all contribute to Manchester– those who are newly arrived and those who have always lived here. We should remember that taxi drivers of all religions turned their meters off and homeless men cradled injured children and carried them to safety.

Let’s hope that Deller’s vision on the walkway remind us all to be a little kinder and practice empathy. The walkway took several weeks to build but overnight it was removed after the ceremony. It could have been a great temporary roof for Manchester’s rough sleepers to rest under as well as walk over. (AD)

- Amanda Dunlop

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

MIF - What Is the City but the People?

Homelessness - Manchester Evening News

Coffee for Craig

The Booth Centre

The Brick Project

Andy Burnham Salary Donation - Guardian